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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations
The Graduate School
2007
Ready-Made Stories: The Rhetorical
Function of Myths and Lore Cycles as
Agents of Social Commentary
Tiffany Yecke Brooks
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THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
READY-MADE STORIES:
THE RHETORICAL FUNCTION OF MYTHS AND LORE CYCLES
AS AGENTS OF SOCIAL COMMENTARY
By
TIFFANY YECKE BROOKS
A dissertation submitted to the
Department of English
in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy.
Degree Awarded:
Spring Semester, 2007
Copyright © 2007
Tiffany Yecke Brooks
All Rights Reserved
The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Tiffany Yecke Brooks
defended on March 19, 2007.
____________________________
W.T. Lhamon
Professor Directing Dissertation
____________________________
Nicole Kelley
Outside Committee Member
____________________________
John Fenstermaker
Committee Member
____________________________
Nancy Warren
Committee Member
Approved:
_______________________________
Nancy Warren, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English
The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee
members.
ii
This is for my wonderful husband Aaron,
whose unwavering patience and support truly made this possible.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am grateful to my parents for their constant encouragement
and to all of the teachers and professors who have challenged and inspired me
to think differently, write better, and work harder.
You are all the giants who have supplied your shoulders and I cannot thank you enough.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract………………………………………………………………………….
vi
INTRODUCTION
Thrice-told tales: The Re-emergence of Myths and Lore Cycles ………..
1
PART ONE: THE GENESIS COMPLEX
1. “Eve” is not a palindrome:
The Myth of the Fallen Woman in Charlotte Brontё’s Jane Eyre…..
2. “Sin and Death for the Young Ones”:
Reconsidering the Myth of the American Eden
in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!............................................................
3. Capitalism’s Fortunate Son:
The Trope of Cain and Abel in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
And Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman………………………….
PART TWO: ADAPTATIONS AND NEGOTIATIONS
4. Cain, Caliban, and Crow: The Outcast Speaks .....................................
5. “You won’t recognize it/It’s a surprise hit”:
Jack Sheppard’s Slips, Slides, and Sidesteps
into and out of Popular Culture .........................................................
12
32
48
71
96
CONCLUSION
Dawkins, Duchamp, and the Persistence of Memories…………………
140
END NOTES…………… ...................................................................................
145
REFERENCES…………. ...................................................................................
155
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ..............................................................................
165
v
ABSTRACT
This study is a two-part examination into the various ways that English and American
cultures reclaim particular stories or images for the sake of social, political, or economic
commentary. I explore the manner in which maturing societies create transitional rhetorics by
reforming earlier myths and how specific stories, images, or icons function as “carriers” of
cultural themes, crucial values, memories, ideals, and anxieties.
The first section, entitled “The Genesis Complex,” examines three specific myths from
Genesis that modern authors purposefully refigured to shape issues in the current cultural
context. I introduce each textual theme by examining its reception history and the manner in
which interpretations have accumulated meaning from each myth. My primary discussions are
Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and the myth of the fallen woman; Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and
the myth of American Eden; and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Arthur Miller’s Death of a
Salesman paired with the myth of Cain and Abel as economic competitors.
The second section of Ready-Made Stories, entitled “Adaptations and Negotiations,”
examines two lore cycles – that is, iconographic elements or gestures that emerge and re-emerge
in certain contexts. The first is that of Cain, as we see bits of his character connected with
medieval monsters and the eventual invention of Shakespeare’s monster-man Caliban, as well as
Trans-Atlantic blackface performances in the nineteenth century. The second lore cycle we
examine is that of Jack Sheppard as he progresses from a proletariat hero to a popular character
of novel, stage, and modern music.
Ready-Made Stories thus scrutinizes the specifics of cultural adaptation and textual
evolution. These ready-made stories stand not as testaments to the archetypal memory of culture,
but as reminders of the inherent contradiction and backwards glances of cultural production. In
essence, we see both how and why very much of the old consciously and purposely sustains the
new.
vi
INTRODUCTION
Thrice-told tales:
The Re-emergence of Myths and Lore Cycles
“With both ready-made stories and his own inventions, the poet should lay out the general
structure and only then develop the sequence of episodes.” –Aristotle, The Poetics Book XVII1
“Ready-made stories” – the tales and the images that appear throughout the cultural
history of a people and are embedded on the collective consciousness – these are the stories that
help to define, identify, unite, and perpetuate the culture that preserves and transmits them.
Anthropologists and scholars of cultural studies have come to call these stories “organizing
myths,” for they are archetypal images that found a common experience. Most discussions of
myth are concerned with either how these organizing myths function as sign posts and boundary
markers in the formation of a collective identity, or with how the myth originated: Freudian
psychoanalysis, Jungian ideas of the collective unconscious or hero archetype, Campbellian
religious drives, comparative linguistics, and so forth. While both of these aspects of myth in
culture are essential to the field of myth theory, they do not focus this study. Rather, the goal
here is to explore the conscious and purposeful application of myths outside of their original
contexts as tellers deliberately assign them new meanings and, in some cases, as they evolve into
completely new forms.
This reforming of myths and mythic elements is a perennial act which has served to
record the history of such archetypal images because their changing receptions reflect the
cultural context of the people who composed them. As Pierre Bourdieu points out in Outline of a
Theory of Practice, the mere exposure of artists to such culturally-embedded concepts
necessarily directs subsequent cultural output. Inevitably, however, those concepts come to
accumulate meaning from prior uses of them in culture and can either expand their original
applications, narrow them, or change them completely. In Cultural Selection, Gary Taylor
makes the argument that:
All memory depends upon a system of representations; collective memory
depends upon a system of representatives who, in our attempts to abolish the
geographical and mental distance between the members of a social group, are
entrusted with the reproduction and circulation of representations. Collective
memory, then, the memory of culture, depends upon systems of representation
and systems of representatives. But those systems are never stable. They change,
too.2
1
The reception and incorporation of older stories and gestures is an intrinsic part of human
progress – the basis for the proverbial shoulders of those giants on which all of us, especially the
producers of cultural matter, stand. R.W.B. Lewis examines one particular facet of this
phenomenon in The American Adam, which he describes in the following passage:
Every culture seems, as it advances toward maturity, to produce its own
determining debate over the ideas that preoccupy it: salvation, the order of nature,
money, power, sex, the machine, and the like. The debate, indeed, may be said to
be the culture at least on its loftiest levels; for a culture achieves identity not so
much through the ascendancy of its peculiar and distinctive dialogue . . .
Intellectual history, properly conducted, exposes not only the dominant ideas of a
period, or of a nation, but more important, the dominant clashes over ideas . . .
For what is articulated during the years of debate is a comprehensive view
of life, in an ideal extension of its present possibilities. And while the vision may
be formulated in the orderly language of rational thought, it also finds its form in
a recurring pattern of images – ways of seeing and sensing experience – and in a
certain habitual story, assumed a dramatic design for the representative life . . .
The imagery and the story give direction and impetus to the intellectual
debate itself; and they may sometimes be detected, hidden within the argument,
charging the rational terms with unaccustomed energy. But the debate in turn can
contribute to the shaping of the story and when the results of rational inquiry are
transformed into conscious and coherent narrative by the best-attuned artists of
the time, the culture has finally yielded up its own special and identifying
“myth.”3
It is the cultural debate through images that this study seeks to explore: not what goes
into the creation of these identifying or organizational myths, but what allows them to maintain
their influence even if their relevance is being challenged. The inclusion of myths in these later
works is much more extensive than mere allusions to the story; rather, the story forms an
essential element of the structure of the narrative or the characterization of the figures. What
prompts cultural producers to turn almost inevitably to traditional, “ready-made” stories as a
means of argumentation? How is the language of mythic stories used by later authors as a tool
for social commentary?
Further complicating the debate is the fact that sometimes, it is not even an entire story
that is passed along, but simply a gesture; it is not a recognizable character that survives but
rather, specific traits. When the terms of a myth are still under negotiation within a culture that
is – consciously or unconsciously – perpetuating the elements separate from the whole, the term
“myth” or “archetype” seems inadequate. Here, the cultural memory does not preserve the unit
intact but rather, that later context selects a few threads that it revives in a new and contextually
2
unique manner. In Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop, W.T.
Lhamon dubs these wayward elements “lore cycles” because they tend to survive and develop in
the intangible ideas of a culture, and re-emerge newly-formed in radical, rebellious, and often
revolutionary cultural productions.
Taylor also recognizes the fact that human culture often seems to contain a number of
non-sequiturs: “Every human culture, after all, is a dynamic nonlinear system – a collection of
interrelated parts, never standing still, and never repeating itself exactly.”4 Philip Fisher
approaches the issue in a similar manner in his discussion of the shift he has dubbed “from myths
to rhetorics.” Here, he writes:
Myth is a fixed, satisfying, and stable story used again and again to normalize our
account of social life. By means of myth novelty is tamed by being seen as the
repetition or, at most, the variation, of a known and valued pattern. Even where
actual historical situations are found to fall short of myth or to lie in its aftermath,
the myth tames the variety of historical experience, giving it familiarity while
using it to reaffirm the culture’s long-standing interpretation of itself.
Rhetoric, on the other hand, is a tactic within the open questions of
culture. It reveals interests and exclusions. To look at rhetorics is to look at the
action potential of language and images, not just their power or contrivance to
move an audience but also the location of works, formulas, images, and
ideological units of meaning within politics. Rhetoric is the place where language
is engaged in cultural work, and such work can be done on, with, or in spite of
one or another social group. Rhetorics are plural because they are part of what is
uncertain or potential in culture. They are the servant of one or another politics of
experience.5
Fisher’s distinctions are significant because of their acknowledgement of the place of preexisting stories in the production of culture. The idea that myth functions as a kind of
domestication of the foreign by translating it to more familiar form is evident in the examination
of myths to follow. Where this study is inherently different, however, is in the treatment and
classification of the myths in question. While Fisher’s mythic concerns are focused upon the
function of myths as a belief system, I am interested in examining them at the point (or at least, a
point) where they simultaneously break free from being part of such an ideology and re-enter the
cultural dialogue as self-aware stories with a rhetorical purpose rather than representative modes
of thinking. Each of the works to be discussed in this study seeks not merely to explain a new
circumstance by connecting it with the past but rather, seeks to pass judgment upon specific
3
contemporary conditions by means of metaphor and/or analogy: for example, the eighteenth
century American frontier is to the emigrating European what Eden was to Adam.
Fisher’s theory of rhetorics is more pertinent to this study because of his interest in “the
location of works, formulas, images, and ideological units of meaning within politics.” These
elements form an independent lineage of cultural descendancy related to but necessarily distinct
from conventional mythic transmission. Their persistence is not typically carried in the
culturally dominant mores of art and literature of the politically powerful class that each
successive cultural movement inherits. Rather, because they do not conform to the organizing
myths of the hegemony, these traits tend to disseminate among the lower classes and reappear in
later folk beliefs, superstitions, traditions, and entertainments. Like spin-off television programs
that bring marginal characters to the forefront of their own series of misadventures, these lore
cycles (and they are often cyclical in their re-emergence) are individual traits and gestures
remembered and revived by a culture in new social, political, or historical contexts. This
recollection is not primarily due to the potency of their original source – that is usually long
since forgotten or rendered unrecognizable by the accumulating changes in meaning – but
because of the impact and relevancy of each element’s independent presence in a cultural setting.
The purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine succinctly the various ways that
people evoke both myths and lore cycles for a specific rhetorical purpose within a specific
cultural context. Three basic questions guide this discussion: First, what are the specific ways
in which myths and lore cycles are invoked as social commentary? Secondly, how does the
cultural context determine the shape that these stories and gestures assume? And finally, why
are these the cultural products that portend, contribute to, or simply survive the seismic upheaval
of political, economic, societal, and ideological shifts? The answers to the first two questions
will emerge in the discussion of each individual text; the answer to the final question should
become apparent after analyzing the study as a whole.
The Genesis Complex
The first section of the study is entitled “The Genesis Complex,” and it is here that we
will examine more closely the various ways in which ancient myths are evoked in modern
literature for political, social, or economic purposes. Within the first four chapters of Genesis,
4
there are a number of stories that have formed the basis for several of the most persistent
organizing myths in western culture, though each has enjoyed a very distinct reception history.
There are three distinct trends that emerge with the reception of each story, however; and it is
these patterns that we will explore for the sake of elucidating the general transference of myths in
literature.
An ancient myth that has remain constant: Eve as the Fallen Woman
Beginning with the figure of Eve, we will explore her representation and her story from
the ancient world forward to modern texts, with specific focus on the women’s suffrage
movement of the nineteenth century – perhaps the most significant challenge to the myth in its
history. Eve’s character, however, undergoes very little change up to this period as she is
presented and re-presented in various media throughout history. The masculine hegemony of
western political and religious systems that often condoned misogynistic policies as orthodoxy
turned to the story as a justification and means of maintaining the existing hierarchies of power.
It is important to stress, of course, that such evocations are rarely the result of individual
chauvinism but rather, evidence of the complex network of influences and cultural lenses of each
commentator’s own context – Bordieu’s theory of habitùs at its most basic. One scholar
describes the revealing nature of Eve’s historical reception thus:
A close look at the way that verse has been commented on, elaborated and
paraphrased in various authors down through the ages gives striking insight into
the process of interpretation. Inasmuch as interpretation always involves setting a
text into relation with the cultural background of the interpreter, such a close look
also furnishes information on the cultural backgrounds of the Christian
theologians who have done the interpreting.6
Significant a point as this is, however, our discussion seeks to elucidate the lifespan of
the myth itself more so than the psychological agendas of the authors who evoked it. For our
purposes here, it is the constancy of the myth that is so remarkable. The same arguments and
terminology regarding the same issue are used for more than two thousand years, and it is
precisely because the interpretation of the myth has changed so little despite its varying contexts
that it is able to be countered as effectively as it is in Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre, which stands
as the central text of this first chapter. As some myths are reformed by later cultures for
rhetorical purposes, there are others that remain virtually unchanged – a remarkable study in
5
longevity and testament to the pervasiveness of the myth and its significance in shaping Western
cultural thought.
An ancient myth newly applied: American Eden
Some myths make purposeful, self-aware changes in their application; such was the case
with the development of the American literary tradition. From some of the earliest texts
regarding the New World, there was a recognition of the proverbial clean slate offered up by the
American continent that was naturally identified with the pre-Lapsarian Paradise of JudeoChristian tradition. As each successive wave of writers and rhetoricians embraced the myth, they
further shaped the idealized American identity into a cultural casting of Adam and his manifest
destiny as steward of creation. Lewis notes that the acceptance of this trend was vast, situating it
as one of the most influential modes of thinking in the nineteenth century:
I am interested in the history of ideas and, especially, in the representative
imagery and anecdote that crystallizes whole clusters of ideas; my interest is
therefore limited to articulate thinkers and conscious artists. A century ago, the
image contrived to embody the most fruitful contemporary ideas was that of the
authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised
at the start of a new history.7
Yet as the ancient myth reformed itself for a new context, it also began to shift within
itself, changing not the original terms of its existence, but the newly-applied ones. While the
concept of Eden remained fixed, writers began to question its relationship to America and
Americans. Was it indeed an apt comparison? Was America an Eden that they had to seek in an
outdoors communion with nature, or within one’s own soul? Was the American agrarian a
blessed Adam committed to his stewardship, or a fallen Adam, living out his curse? And what of
the American city that was replicating the same social ills of industrialized Europe?
As Willa Cather brilliantly demonstrates in O Pioneers!, the evocation of this myth came
to be in dialogue with itself in American culture. As cultural producers consciously applied the
ancient myth to a new situation, it began a new cycle of change and adaptation so that the selfcontained debate became part of the myth itself.
6
An ancient myth gradually reformed: Cain and Abel
There are some myths that remain self-aware, but whose emphasis gradually shifts from
one aspect of the story to another in certain societal contexts. All elements remain in place, but
the meaning comes to take on a new or more specific significance. Such is the case with the
story of Cain and Abel. Long recognized as a story of fraternal rivalry – in the literal sense as
well as a symbolic one – the text is a testament to humanity’s acute awareness of the tensions
present in both the physical and spiritual realms.
One such tension that came to be of great importance in subsequent treatments of the
story is that of economic demands. In social contexts where reciprocal fealty was marked by the
offering of agricultural products or where religious tithing was demanded for the sake of the
community’s spiritual life, the figure of Cain began to take on a new significance: that of the
grudging giver. An understanding of such political situations is essential to the interpretation of
the story’s presentation in cultural productions. As one critic observes:
Ignorance of a work’s social milieu can lead us into two kinds of error: either we
remain blind to the possibly oblique commentary the poem, play or novel is
making on the contemporary world and concentrate entirely on its form, or we
ignore form altogether and reading imaginative literature as if it were a transcript
of actual social situations. We need to understand the economic, social and
political developments to which a writer has responded and which he has helped
to define before we can judge the degree to which he has exploited or distorted
those developments for his own aesthetic or tendentious purposes.8
It is with this significance – that is, Cain and Abel as players in an economic commentary
– that the story was addressed by two twentieth century American writers in their own statements
on war and post-war American capitalism. John Steinbeck reforms the story of Cain and Abel in
East of Eden as he considers the tension between fate and choice, undeserved love and misplaced
devotion; meanwhile, in Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller questions the pursuits of the modern
Cain who travels the world (or maybe just the city) seeking material gain rather than humble
fulfillment. As these texts explore the myth of Cain and Abel, we will come to see how their
interpretation of the myth as a whole is evidence of their own cultural values and anxieties over
economic dictates within their society.
7
Negotiations and Adaptations
The second part of the text seeks to explore an alternate facet to the reception of myths:
that of lore cycles. These cycles are stories that take on new forms depending upon the cultural
slot that they are filling; and yet it is erroneous to refer to them as “stories,” per se. They are not
preserved tales whose narrative elements re-emerge in later stories; neither are they characters
who form archetypal molds for subsequent figures. Rather, lore cycles are the continued
development of certain traits, gestures, symbols, or images that are readily observable in cultural
productions, but whose origins are much more obscure. The stories may be new or they may
have much older roots, but the elements have shifted and taken on new guises so that they are no
longer readily apparent as their original selves. Because they are occupying a previously
unoccupied cultural space that is now demanding representation (what Taylor would term a
“niche”), the reappearance of such cycles usually signals a shift in cultural ideas or portends a
growing undercurrent of social change.
A lore cycle from an ancient source: Cain
The varying figure of Cain is the first lore cycle we will examine. While most studies of
this character have looked at it in its archetypal context as in my previous section, it also has a
distinct life as a lore cycle – a feature that should help elucidate the difference between the two
branches of myth.
This chapter, “Cain, Caliban, and Crow: The Outcast Speaks,” examines how the story
of Cain has held the interest of religious scholars and cultural producers for centuries and as a
result, encountered change and re-figuration in different social contexts. Rabbinic traditions and
many early Christian writers assigned Cain demonic sympathies, if not parentage. The
ambiguity of the precise nature of his curse in biblical texts led to myriad independent traditions
of various afflictions. By the early Middle Ages, Cain’s lore cycle had shifted and re-formed
itself enough to establish his character in myriad different forms including any number of exotic,
speechless monster-creatures (including fetishized dark-skinned foreigners) who resided both
within and beyond the political boundaries of Europe.
After discussing the evolution of Cain’s traits into various cycles, the study will focus
upon Shakespeare’s treatment of many of these cultivated anxieties as they are present in The
Tempest through the character Caliban, and what the treatment of this character reveals about the
8
social context in which he was first brought to stage. In the figure of Shakespeare’s island
monster, we can clearly see a Cain figure who stands at a crucial junction – Caliban has
effectively blended the various fragmented representations of Cain that have been developing,
but also stands as the prism which once again scatters the elements of the character into myriad
directions.
One of the cycles that results, in part, as a shift from Caliban is the black-faced comedian
of the 1830s and 1840s Atlantic stage. Like his literary ancestors, the Jim Crow character is a
politically powerless entity under the command of a dominant presence. Nevertheless, he seizes
control of the action through his manipulation of the language of the ruling authority. Lhamon
discusses the Cain-Crow phenomenon in Raising Cain, but this study develops his theories by
closely examining the character of Ginger Blue in T.D. Rice’s play The Virginia Mummy and
how his personage exhibits the language-as-defiance pattern. Just as the doctor hopes to
resuscitate the monster-mummy, so too is the figure of Caliban (and ultimately, Cain) resurrected
as Ginger Blue-as-dummy-mummy controls the action on stage based upon his harnessing of
speech and subversive language.
A lore cycle from a modern source: Jack Sheppard
The figure of Jack Sheppard also illustrates the workings of a lore cycle. Literature
immortalized his story from almost the moment of his real-life demise in 1724. That same year,
Defoe published The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard; John Gay followed with
his operatic version (though the characters’ names are admittedly changed) in The Beggar’s
Opera in 1728 and Polly in 1729. Though the fascination with the figure of Jack never fully
waned, William Harrison Ainsworth re-stoked it in 1839 with his melodramatic novel Jack
Sheppard: A Romance. This text spawned dramatized spin-offs even before Ainsworth’s
installments were complete. The second chapter in this section will revolve around the
precursors and posterity of Jack Sheppard’s shifts, slides, and changes just outside of the
hegemonic sensibilities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The intense popularity of the character of Jack Sheppard, especially among the working
class, helped to create a kind of cultural revolution in which the preferences of the proletariat
functioned more as hegemonic forces than did the dictates of bourgeois society or the church. In
this chapter, we will explore how Ainsworth, specifically, played upon common mythic images
9
of the past to tap into a kind of collective memory from which he could launch his character,
fully-formed, into the current collective imagination. We will also examine the various ways in
which the lore cycle shifted in the following years and found itself a part of everything from
black-faced minstrel shows in 1850s America to socialist theatre in 1920s Germany and modern
popular music. The various lore cycles of Jack Sheppard function as testimony to a variety of
social changes ranging from the policies of the Corn Laws from 1815-1846, to issues of racial
tension and worker empowerment, and in our own time as an early establishment in popular
youth culture.
In the prologue to The Past is a Foreign Country, David Lowenthal explores the way that
re-evocations of the past can affect their reception in the future, writing:
Culture and circumstance shape their relative worth and specific form. But they
all stem from qualities felt to inhere uniquely in the past as distinct from the
present or the future: traits linked with antiquity, such as precedence,
primordiality, and ancientness; the sense of continuity and accretion engendered
by relic and memories and chronicles; and termination – the fact that the past is
over and hence can be summarized and summed up as the present cannot.9
By evoking the past, whether through complete stories or individual elements, authors are
inevitably tapping into a set of images and associations. Sometimes the re-presentation is
intentional, reflecting a specific and deliberate choice on the part of the author to address an
element of a common cultural history. Sometimes authors extend tradition, unaware of the
lineage, but merely conscious of the impact that certain shapes, signs, and symbols can have.
What unites these actions of cultural production is a recognition of the power of remembered and
transmitted elements of a common past, a shared repertoire of images that persist not just
because they meant something in their original context, but because of their innate irony. They
are simultaneously malleable and constant, these myths and lore cycles, these ready-made stories
– and this inherent tension is what keeps them at the forefront of the social, political, and cultural
imagination.
10
PART ONE:
THE GENESIS COMPLEX
11
CHAPTER ONE
“Eve” is Not a Palindrome:
Reversing the Myth of the Fallen Woman in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Then the Lord God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make
him a helper as his partner."
. . . So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then
he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the
Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the
man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken." Therefore a
man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one
flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God
had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree
in the garden’?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the
trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is
in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ " But the
serpent said to the woman, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of
it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight
to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its
fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he
ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked . . .
[The Lord] said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the
tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" The man said, "The woman whom
you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate." Then the Lord
God said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" The woman said, "The
serpent tricked me, and I ate.”
. . . To the woman [God] said, "I will greatly increase your pangs in
childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for
your husband, and he shall rule over you."
And to the man he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and
have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your
life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of
the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the
ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living.
12
Genesis 2:18-3:201
Reception History of Eve
A comprehensive examination of Eve’s historical reception is a logistical impossibility.
From the earliest times in the Christian era, Eve has been singled out as an example of female
treachery and a reason for feminine submission. Though there are a number of early female
martyrs, and canonical evidence of women leaders in early churches, the explicit stance on
female leadership by the composers of the Christian Bible is that it is unnatural and displeasing
to God. The author of I Timothy, traditionally deemed as the apostle Paul, writes one of the
most damning passages regarding a woman’s place in the church: “Let a women learn in silence
with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep
silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was
deceived and became a transgressor.”2
This absolute stance was also the belief of many of the early church theologians. In the
late second century, Tertullian wrote De Cultu Feminarum (On Female Fashion), a two-volume
work that opens with a telling reminder to his female readership. He warns, “You are the devil’s
gateway” and states that it was Eve’s transgression that introduced sin into the world and
therefore, woman’s fault that Christ had to be crucified.3 Though Tertullian eventually founded
a heterodox sect, his earlier writings remained hugely influential in developing later Christian
philosophy and liturgical doctrines.
In the late fourth century, Ambrose of Milan made clear his regard for woman’s place in
the created order when he wrote: “The male endures your defects and your feminine levities . . .
Adam was deceived by Eve, not Eve by Adam. It is right that he whom the woman enticed to do
wrong should assume the office of guide, lest he fall once more because of feminine instability.”4
A generation later, Augustine of Hippo likewise took a condemnatory stance towards
women in the model of Eve throughout his writings. As theologian Kim Power summarizes in
her exhaustive study of Augustine’s views of women, “Eve then stands for the independent,
decision-making, sexual woman, who threatens the submissive model of Mary, and reminds
humankind that it is mortal.” She later adds, remarking upon Augustine’s strict views on male
dominance in the household, that “The corollary of this was the control of female assertiveness
through the discourse of Eve’s pride. Any woman who exercised authority, who asserted any
claim to autonomy, was vulnerable to condemnation as proud, [and] therefore insubordinate.”5
13
Modern theological apologist Elaine Pagels writes in her study on early Christian gender
relations, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, that Augustine’s ultimate stance was understood by
subsequent scholars to mean that:
Being closely connected with bodily passion, woman, although created to be
man’s helper, became his temptress and led him into disaster. The Genesis
account describes the result: God himself reinforced the husband’s authority over
his wife, placing divine sanction upon the social, legal, and economic machinery
of male domination.6
In fact, many (if not most) of the early Christian theologians offer harsh condemnation of
Eve while lessening their censure of Adam or even excusing him altogether as a misled or henpecked husband. As Jean Higgins writes in précis of the Church Fathers’ spiritual treatises,
character studies, and scriptural commentaries:
We have seen that Eve tempted, beguiled, lured, corrupted, persuaded, taught,
counseled, suggested, urged, used wicked persuasion, led into wrongdoing,
proved herself an enemy, used guile and cozening, tears and lamentations, to
prevail upon Adam, had no rest until she got her husband banished and thus
became “the first temptress.”7
Augustine was also instrumental in developing the doctrines of Original Sin (the belief
that all humanity is innately depraved because of the sin of Adam and Eve) and predestination
(the assertion that certain souls are preordained by God to be called away from the fallen state of
man to a life of salvation through Christ). As these ideas became firmly entrenched in Christian
theology, they added to the perceived significance of Eve’s act of disobedience. The first sin not
only caused the man and woman to be banished from Eden but permanently and irrevocably
removed all subsequent men and women from the presence of God. Though the son of Mary
would eventually reverse this blanket condemnation and offer reconciliation between God and
man, it was woman who necessitated Christ’s appearance because it was woman who brought
damnation upon the human race.
The medieval mystery plays offer similarly-toned condemnations of Eve’s actions. In the
York Fall of Man, Adam cries, “A! Eve, thou art to blame./To this enticed thou me;/Me shames
with my lyghame,/ . . . This werke, Eve, hast thou wrought,/And made this bad bargaine.” He
then blames Eve again in presence of God, who responds in kind: “Say, Eve, why hast thou garte
thy mate/Ete fruit I bad[e] thee shuld hinge stille,/And comaunded non of it to take?”8
14
In the Harrowing of Hell scenes, Eve is also often reminded of her actions and her
punishment, despite Christ’s liberating seizure of their souls. Her first line in the Wakefield play
emphasizes her subordination as she appeals to, “Adam, my husband heynd.” Later, the author
makes a pun upon Eve’s sin of biting the fruit, as she says to Jesus, “Lord, we were worthy more
tormentys to tast.” 9 Even in her holy acquittal through Christ, Eve is mindful of her
transgressions and their repercussions.
In 1558, the Scottish Calvinist John Knox published a work entitled The First Blast of the
Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Composed largely in reaction to
Elizabeth’s coronation, the text is a harsh condemnation of all women who would seek social or
political power or any individual authority. He summarizes God’s judgment of women thus:
As God shuld say: forasmuich as thou hast abused they former condition, and
because thy free will hath brought thy selfe and mankind into: the bondage of
Satan, I therefore will bring the in bondage to man. For where before, thy
obedience shuld haue bene voluntarie, noew it shall be by constraint and by
necessitie: and that because thou hast deceiued thy man, thou shalt thefore be no
longer maistresse ouer thine own appetites, over thine owne will nore desires. For
in the there is nether reason nor discretion, whiche be able to moderate they
affections, and therefore they shall, be subject to the desire of they man. He shall
be Lord and gouernour, not onlie over they bodie, but euen ouer thy appetites and
will. This sentence, I say, did God pronounce against Heua, and her daughters, as
the rest of the Scriptures doth euidentlie witnesse. So that no woman can euer
presume to reigne aboue man, but the same she must nedes do in despite, of God,
and in contempt of his punishment and maledictjon.10
Knox also praised the stance of several of the early church fathers, including Chrysostom,
Augustine, and Tertuillian, for whom he had special praise. He relies heavily upon Tertullian’s
arguments in De Cultu Feminarum, reiterating:
By these and many other graue sentences, and quicke interrogations, did this
godlie writer labour to bring euerie woman in contemplation of her selfe, to the
end that euerie one depelie weying, what sentence God had pronounced against
the hole race and doughters of Heua, might not onely learne daily to humble and
subiect them selues in the presence of God, but also that they shulde auoide and
abhorre what soeuer thing might exalte them or puffe them vp in pride, or that
might be occasion, that they shuld forget the curse and malediction of God. And
what, I pray you, is more able to cause woman to forget her owne condition, then
if she be lifted vp in authoritie aboue man? It is a thingverie difficile to a man,
(be he neuer so constant) promoted to honors, not to be tickled some what with
pride (for the winde of vaine glorie doth easelie carie vp the drie dust of the
earth). But as for woman, it is no more possible, that she being set aloft in
authoritie aboue man, shall resist the motions of pride, then it is able to the
15
weake reed, or to the turning wethercocke, not to bowe or turne at the
vehemencie of the vnconstant wind. And therfore the same writer expreslie
forbiddeth all woman to intremedle with the office of man.11
The rhetoric of Knox is extreme, but the ideas he recorded were not atypical. Regiment
stands as an accurate, if concentrated, compendium on the prevailing attitudes towards Eve and
all women as they were to be viewed in a God-fearing society and by the British churches. Free
will was not a human right to be entrusted to women as the result would be inevitable failure and
the further sin and degeneration of mankind.
A less severe but hardly less liberating interpretation of Eve’s character appears in what
is arguably the most notable and influential literary manifestation of Eve’s plight during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Milton’s 1674 epic poem Paradise Lost. Here, the narrator
describes the first woman as she confronts her temptation as “much deceav’d, much failing,
hapless;”12 and though Adam discerns God’s commands more wisely, he willingly sins so as to
enter into exile with his wife rather than to be separated from her. “She gave him of that fair
enticing Fruit/With liberal hand: he scrupl’d not to eat/Against his better knowledge,no
deceav’d/But fondly overcome with Femal charm.”13 The idea that Adam deliberately disobeyed
God in order not to be separated from his help-mete was a common one in medieval theology,
but as Higgins writes, “Milton is probably the best-known exponent of this view of the heroic
Adam.”14 In this almost chivalric interpretation of the Biblical story, Adam chooses to leave
Paradise in the first act of human leadership as he sacrifices his own proximity to God in order
that he may remain with his disobedient wife.
It is in these ways that Eve was firmly ensconced in the pious English imagination but
there have always been, of course, women who have sought to defy these societal and religious
restrictions. The late Middle Ages was an especially prolific period, as a large number of female
spiritualists such as Birgitta of Sweden, Julian of Norwich, and Catherine of Sienna came
forward publicly with their insights, visions, and instruction. In 1405, Christine de Pizan,
daughter of an Italian scholar and raised in the court of Charles V of France, wrote The Book of
the City of Ladies, in which she presents an allegorical vision of heaven – a paradise constructed
and inhabited solely by women. Translated to English in 1521, this work offers a fascinating
16
look at medieval feminist thought. As if in anticipation of objections to the challenges she poses
to patriarchal theology, Pizan includes the following justification of women in her first chapter:
And if anyone would say that man was banished because of lady Eve, I tell you
that he gained more through Mary than he lost through Eve when humanity was
conjoined to the Godhead, which would never have taken place if Eve’s misdeed
had not occurred. Thus man and woman should be glad for this sin, through
which such an honor came about.15
This passage, which clearly espouses the Aquinian notion of the felix culpa, or “happy fault” –
the belief that the introduction of sin into the world was a fortunate occurrence because it
allowed for man’s reconciliation with God – does so with explicit attention given to women’s
role in the redemption. Though it was a common philosophy to venerate Mary as the antithesis
of Eve, Pizan’s charge that “man and woman” alike should view Eve with thankfulness stands as
an unusual assertion, though logical extension, of such a philosophy.
When translations of Pizan’s work, as well as those of other female continental mystics
reached England, their reception was mixed but their influence was notable, especially in major
transit and commerce centers such as Lynn. Here, where the wool trade resulted in regular
contact with continental ideas, movements, and texts, religious dissention and heterodox
denominations began to develop. Around 1430, The Book of Margery Kempe was composed and
recounted the mystic experiences of this middle-class housewife and mother of fourteen as she
vocalized during mass and challenged the authority of a number of clergymen in the church at
Lynn. As the aptly-named Lynn Stanley writes in her introduction to the work:
Margery’s disengagement from conventional female roles and duties – and
consequently her daring rejection of the values of her fellow townspersons – is a
response to her growing commitment to her spiritual vocation. Her attempt to
gain personal, financial, and spiritual autonomy is a tale of radical reversal . . .
Margery does what few are able finally to do, and the fact that she does so as a
woman enhances the force of her story – she breaks away.16
These vocal women of the middle ages were just part of a growing tradition of female
dissenters whose voices would become increasingly louder in the following centuries. In 1589, a
pamphlet entitled Her Protection for Women circulated throughout England and its title page
attributed the work to “Jane Anger, Gentlewoman at London.” Certainly a pseudonym, Jane
Anger took full advantage of her unknown identity to assert extreme views on the political,
social, and religious treatment of her sex. “Fie on the faleshood of men,” she writes in her
17
introduction, “whose minds so oft a maddening, a whole tongues can not so soon be wagging,
but the fall a tattling. Was there ever any so abused, so slandered, so railed upon, so wickedly
handled undeservedly, as are we women.” As the text goes on, it reveals a classical education
and training in rhetoric as Anger structures her arguments around mythology and philosophy. In
one particular passage, where she turns to the biblical argument for women’s subjugation, she
asserts:
The creation of man and woman at the first, he being formed In principio of dross
and filthy clay, did so remain until God saw that in him his workmanship was
good, and therefore by the transformation of the dust which was loathsome unto
flesh, it became purtified [sic]. Then lacking a help for him, GOD making
woman of man’s flesh, that she might be purer then [sic] he, does evidently show,
how far we women are more excellent then men . . . A woman was the first that
believed, and a woman like wife the first that reverd of him.17
In 1617, two similar pamphlets appeared in London, both written in response to The
Arraignment of Women, a condemnatory piece intended to satirize the character of the
contemporary woman. Published in 1615 under the pseudonym “Thomas Tell-Troth,” it was
actually the handiwork of Joseph Swetnam, an English fencing master, and used the traditional
arguments from Genesis to assert the inferiority of the female gender. Employing such terms as
“necessary evils” when describing women, The Arraignment of Women quickly gained
popularity throughout Britain and the continent.
The female response to this work was venomous. Rachel Speght’s pamphlet included the
subtitle: “an Apologeticall Answere to that Irreligious and Illiterate pamphlet made by Io. Sw
and by him Intitled, The Arrangement of Women.” In her work, Speght counters Swetnam’s
arguments from Genesis by asserting that “we shall find the offence of Adam and Eve almost to
parallel” and blames Adam for not asserting the authority he proudly claims over Eve’s actions.
She further insists:
For man was created of the dust of the earth, but woman was made of part of a
man, after he was a living soule: yet was shee not produced from Adams foote, to
be his too low inferiour; nor from his dead to be his superiour, but from his side,
nreare his heart, to be his equall; that is where he is Lord, she may be Lady: and
therefore saith God concerning man and woman jointly, Let them rule over the
fish of the Sea, and over the foules of the Heaven, and over every beast that
moveth upon the earth: By which words, he makes their authority equal, and all
creatures to be in subjection unto them both.18
18
Esther Sowernam’s pamphlet took a similar stance against Swetnam’s writings, but in a
more pugnacious manner, evident from her title: Ester hath hang’d Haman: Or An answer to a
lewd Pamphlet entitled The Arraignment of Women. With the arraignment of lewd, idle,
forward, and unconstant men, and Husbands. The first two chapters of her work are devoted
entirely to refuting the as-goes-Eve-so-go-all-women argument. She insists that any corruption
present in the female character is a direct result of her having been formed from the body of man.
“Woman was made of a crooked rib, so she is crooked of conditions. Joseph Swetnam was made
as from Adam of clay and dust, so he is of a durty [sic] and muddy disposition: The inferences
are both alike in either . . . That which giveth quality to a thing, doth more abound in that
quality.” She goes on to argue, “yet Adam was not so absolutely perfect, but that in the sight of
God, he wanted a Helper” and adds that Eve was “assaulted with a Serpent of the masculine
gender.”19
Social Setting of Brontё’s World
In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published her now-famous feminist manifesto, A
Vindication on the Rights of Women. In the second chapter, she lays forth the following
statement against the contemporary argument for women’s necessary submission and
relinquishing of free will:
Probably the prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man, may have taken
its rise from Moses's poetical story; yet, as very few it is presumed, who have
bestowed any serious thought on the subject, ever supposed that Eve was, literally
speaking, one of Adam's ribs, the deduction must be allowed to fall to the ground;
or, only be so far admitted as it proves that man, from the remotest antiquity,
found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his
invention to show that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke; because
she as well as the brute creation, was created to do his pleasure.20
The main source of Wollstonecraft’s frustration was discrepancy between the availability and
quality of male versus female education in Britain at the time, and that such a distinction was
forcing women into roles dictated by the blind adherence to tradition rather than reason. The text
was widely received by the early proponents of women’s rights in the nineteenth century, but
faced opposition in its own day.
Wollstonecraft’s writings prompted a great deal of discussion, but it was not until almost
forty years later that the first notable action in the British Women’s Suffrage movement took
19
place. A Brief Review of the Women’s Suffrage Movement Since Its Beginning in 1832, a booklet
published in London in 1911, notes: “In 1832, Mary Smith of Stramore, Yorkshire, petitioned
Parliament for a measure of Women’s Suffrage.” During that same year, the text points out,
“the word ‘male’ introduced into the Reform Act (before ‘person’) restricted the Parliamentary
franchise to men, and debarred women from its use.”21 The issue of gender, which had long
been a topic of debate in some circles and a mere curiosity in most others, was beginning to rise
in prominence, urgency, and recognition.
As the Industrial Revolution continued to change the population patterns of Britain as
more and more rural families moved from the country to urban manufacturing centers, so too did
the demographic of the workplace begin to change. No longer were women contained within the
domestic sphere. They were now beginning to turn to factory work, which drew them out of the
traditional shelter of the home or away from the family fields. As the division of labor along
gender lines began to blur, there rose a sense of indignity at the continued devaluation of a
woman’s labor and soon, the demand of equal work for equal pay began to be heard among the
working classes.
The women’s rights movement was not especially organized at first. Unions were still a
relatively new creation and the presence of women in such groups was especially novel. But the
sheer number of women in the industrial workforce could not be ignored and the advocates for
social justice knew that labor unions offered the power of numbers to the movement. By the late
1860s, Women’s Suffrage Societies existed in most of the United Kingdom’s largest cities and
petition drives among various labor groups bolstered the numbers of suffrage supporters even
more. It was the goal of these groups not only to establish voting rights and fairer employment
conditions for women, but also to do away with the very cultural traditions that heretofore had
justified such a segregation of rights along gender lines.
The Reverend Charles Kingsley of London, author of the classic children’s novel The
Water-Babies, published a treatise on the subject in 1869, entitled “Women and Politics.” In this
article he insisted that it is necessary to shed the social restraints inflicted upon women in the
name of Eve, as such repressions are man-made theological perversions of the message of the
Bible. He writes:
Truly ‘the whirligig of Time brings round its revenges.’ To this point the reason
of civilised nations has come or at least is coming fast, after some fifteen hundred
years of unreason, and of a literature of un-reason, which discoursed gravely and
20
learnedly of nuns and witches, hysteria and madness, persecution and torture, and,
like a madman in his dreams, built up by irrefragable logic a whole inverted
pyramid of seeming truth upon a single false presmiss. To this it has come, after
long centuries in which woman was regarded by celibate theologians as the
‘noxious animal,’ the temptress, the source of earthly misery, which derived – at
least in one case – from ‘femina’ from ‘fe’ faith, and ‘minus’ less, because
women had less faith than men; which represented them as of more violent and
unbridled animal passions; which explained learnedly why they were more
tempted than men to heresy and witchcraft, and more subject (those especially
who had beautiful hair) to the attacks of demons; and, in a word, regarded them as
a necessary evil, to be tolerated, despised, repressed, and if possible shut up in
nunneries.22
Rev. Kingsley succinctly (though not undramatically) summarized the reigning argument
for female submission in political, social, and religious circles. The sentiment of “Look to Eve!”
was the fundamental tool in refuting any public assertions of leadership, authority, or judgment
that stemmed from women and it was this rhetorical structure against which the suffragists had to
contend. It was also in this political context – situated between Mary Wollstonecraft and the rise
of the suffragists – that Charlotte Brontё composed her proto-feminist novel Jane Eyre in 1847.
The Novel
The hegemonic portrayal of Eve throughout the Victorian era was the traditional image of
her as a deceiver whose very nature betrayed her into making a poor choice that would seal the
destiny of all women as subservient, dependent, and not to be trusted with their own lives. As
one scholar notes, for centuries the figure of Eve functioned in English society “symbolizing the
disastrous consequences of female weakness and justifying women’s inferiority and
subordination”23 – a notion that was necessarily coming into question with the assumption of the
throne by a female heir in 1837. Though Victoria was not a supporter of the women’s rights
movements, her mere figure and presence in British government offered enough of a challenge to
the traditional order to inspire many to act.
Charlotte Brontë also was hardly an outspoken feminist, but a reading of her work within
its social context reveals a quiet yet forceful expression of religious and political arguments for
the moral authority of women. She puts the Eve trope to work in Jane Eyre, first by seeking to
argue against the belief of predestination advocated so strongly by the nineteenth-century
Anglican church. She deliberately approaches the trope from the angle of humanity’s own role
21
in individual salvation; specifically, she explores how the will of woman can save rather than
condemn her. This situates Brontë’s work within one of the great religious and philosophical
debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – free will versus predestination – and
subsequently leads to her ultimate purpose for the use of the myth: a reversal of the traditional
presentation of Eve. Her goal is to posit the assertion that women are not necessarily the fallen
daughters of a fallen mother, and if left to their own judgment, can make sound moral decisions
even when the men around them cannot.
Such an idea was revolutionary but not unheard of in early Victorian England. In 1840, a
radical reform paper that eventually reached a subscription of almost 400,000 began circulating.
It was called The New Moral Jerusalem and its Socialist founder, Robert Owen, was a firm
believer in dispelling the idea of the “Fallen Daughters of Eve” by granting women the right to
choose freely for their own lives. Only in this way, he felt, could a moral order be re-established
in the world.24 Brontë was certainly not an active socialist, but the cultural context in which Jane
Eyre was composed had definitely been primed for such a reading of the Eden myth. The
mindset Brontë was seeking to change was two-fold: that predestination trumps free will, and
that predestination is the fate of a fallen world thanks to one woman’s irresponsible choice.
It is necessary to begin first with the Calvinist idea of humanity’s inherent fallibility, as
evidenced by the conduct of Adam and Eve in the garden. Religious historian Gregory I.
Molvias writes of the theological debate regarding the exact nature of free will that erupted in the
eighteenth century and carried on through the nineteenth. He notes:
the language of natural rights was largely dominated by the idea of free will, and
the typical assertion when speaking of natural rights was that God created man
with reason and free will. But what was meant by ‘free will’? It was meant that
man had been created free to act according to his will, or that man’s will was free
in the sense that its resolutions were not determined by God or any cause
extraneous to the agent of “self.”25
This belief was by no means universal and was, in fact, considered sinfully humanistic in some
Anglican circles. Growing up as the child of a clergyman, Brontё was certainly aware of this
ideological conflict and prominently features in Jane Eyre two devout Calvinists who seem to
hold this view: Brocklehurst and St. John Rivers. These two men both offer Jane a “choice,” but
present the matter in such a way that her only option is obedience. Brocklehurst has already
determined that Jane shall attend Lowood and subjects her to a series of questions merely to
22
ascertain whether her character and theology are in agreement with his own grim and fatalistic
ones. He inquires:
“Do you know where the wicked go after death?”
“They go to hell,” was my ready and orthodox answer.
“And what is hell? Can you tell me that?”
“A pit full of fire.”
“And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there forever?”
I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable:
“I must keep in good health, and not die.”
“How can you keep in good health? Children younger than you die daily.
I buried a little child five years old on a day or two since, – a good little child,
whose soul is now in heaven. It is to be feared the same could not be said of you,
were you to be called hence.”26
Even Jane’s honest response to her Biblical reading choices is deemed unacceptable, as
Brocklehurst tells her that her lack of interest in the Psalms, “‘proves you have a wicked heart;
and you must pray to God to change it: to give you a new and clean one: to take away your heart
of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’”27 Jane’s free will is clearly discounted and disallowed
by Brocklehurst’s perverted interpretation of religion. Like the literal advocates of
predestination, Brocklehurst believes that there is only one path towards salvation and Jane’s
reckless behavior clearly demonstrates that she has not been called to it.
A similar rejection of free will is evidenced in the character of St. John. To him, belief in
the right to choose one’s own path is the lowest form of a subservient existence; submission to a
predetermined destiny is the only true freedom. He remarks on the change in his mental anguish
following his acceptance of the fate laid out for him: “‘From that moment my state of mind
changed; the fetters dissolved and dropped from every faculty, leaving nothing of bondage but its
galling soreness.’” When he preaches, Jane notes that “[t]hroughout there was a strange
bitterness; and absences of consolatory gentleness: stern allusions to Calvinistic doctrines –
election, predestination, reprobation – were frequent; and each reference to these points sounded
like a sentence pronounced for doom.” St. John believes staunchly in the predestination not only
of his own soul’s path, but also that of others’, such as when he asks Jane to accompany him to
India as his wife:
“And what does your heart say?” demanded St. John.
“My heart is mute, – my heart is mute,” I answered, struck and thrilled.
“Then I must speak for it,” continued the deep, relentless voice . . .
23
But I was not apostle,– I could not behold the herald,– I could not receive
his call…
He continued: – “God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife . . .
You were formed for labor, not for love. A missionary’s wife you must – shall
be. You shall be mine: I claim you.”28
The notion of a free will is reprehensible and utterly unacceptable to St. John. He rejects even
Jane’s assertion that, “I am ready to go to India if I may go free.”29 It is not a choice he has set
before her; it is an artificial destiny he has created and now insists that she accept in order to
maintain a place in his life.
These scenes contrast greatly with the moments of genuine choice when Jane asserts her
own free will to act. One of the most notable features of her character is her independence and
assertive control of her own life, despite the more passive beliefs of those around her. As one
scholar notes, “Jane Eyre appears to be a bildungsroman . . . Jane Eyre can be regarded as a selfmade woman who shapes her destiny through individual industry, a rise that is set against the
backdrop of genteel families whose fortunes are in decline.”30 Her first major choice comes
when the kind Mr. Lloyd asks if she would like to go and live with other relations and further, if
she would like to attend school. Though she answers negatively to the first inquiry in fear that
she would be forced upon poor, unkind peasants, she answers in the affirmative to the second
question, which serves as the impetus for her departure from Gateshead. In this scene, Brontë
subtly employs Biblical language to evoke images of Eden. When a sympathetic apothecary
asks the cause of Jane’s illness:
“She had a fall,” said Bessie, again putting in her word.
“Fall! Why that is like a baby again! Can’t she manage to walk at her age?
She must be eight or nine years old.”
“I was knocked down,” was the blunt explanation jerked out of me by
another pang of mortified pride: “but that did not make me ill.”
Here, the “fall” is clearly not the source of Jane’s affliction and indeed, the blame is not hers.
Rather, she was a passive agent unfairly accused of a crime she did not commit. Though
passionate and unrestrained, Jane is not an inherently bad child and when presented with the
opportunity to make a choice, she opts for the course that “implied a long journey, an entire
separation from Gateshead, and entrance into a new life.” Unlike the traditional Eve, Jane’s
choice results in a voluntary and welcome escape, not banishment, which is made possible by a
“fall” that was not her fault.31
24
As an adult, Jane is obviously aware of her autonomy to choose, as she asserts quite
forcefully when Rochester tries to detain her from leaving for Ireland before she is made aware
of his love for her. She insists: “‘I am a free human being with an independent will; which I now
exert to leave you.’” The symbolic significance of her forceful statement is emphasized by the
setting of the scene: a garden tableau imbued with Edenic imagery. Immediately after Jane’s
pronouncement that “alas! never had I loved him so well” she describes her walk in Rochester’s
orchard of which “[n]o nook in the grounds [was] more sheltered and more Eden-like; it was full
of trees, it bloomed with flowers.” Shortly after, when Rochester introduces the idea of
marriage, the two are seated beneath a chestnut tree in that same orchard, clearly a link to the
Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. There, Jane’s soon-to-be-fiancé remarks, “‘I
sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you – especially when you are near me, as now; it
is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar
string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame.’” An obvious reference to the
creation of Eve from Adam’s rib from Genesis 2:21, the allusions continue as Rochester later
remarks how one of his first impressions of Jane was that her smile seemed to say: “‘I have a
rosy sky, and a green flowery Eden in my brain.’”32
As Jane asks questions about Rochester’s past he cries, “‘for God’s sake, don’t desire a
useless burden! Don’t long for poison – don’t turn a down right Eve on my hands!” and indeed,
Jane asserts her free will in a manner opposite of Eve – rather than partake of that alluring thing
which she knows to be wrong, she fights the temptation and rejects the sin by fleeing the estate
and the presence of Rochester. Jane denies her desires as she instead asserts her moral
determination against Rochester’s pleas:
“It would be wicked not to love me.”
“It would be to obey you.”
“ . . . Then you condemn me to live wretched, and to die accursed?” His
voice rose.
“I advise you to live sinless, and I wish you to die tranquil.”
“Then you snatch love and innocence from me? You fling me back on
lust for a passion – a vice for an occupation?”
“Mr. Rochester, I no more assign this fate to you than I grasp at it myself.
We were born to strive and endure – you as well as I: do so.”33
Here, Brontë is flinging the Eden trope back on those who believe its message is one of
unavoidable sin spearheaded by the easily-corruptible woman. Jane is not cast out of the garden;
25
rather, she imposes on herself a voluntary exile that strips her bare of all physical and emotional
comforts for the singular purpose of shunning evil. The irony of this act, however, is that Janeas-Eve is not leaving paradise behind but rather, is leaving the already fallen world for an
eventual re-admittance into a true paradise. The name of Rochester’s estate, Thornfield, seems
to be a reference to Adam’s curse, which states: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through
painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you
and you will eat the plants of the field.”34 The decayed state of the mansion, which Jane’s
naivety does not permit her to see, further emphasizes this point. “You cannot discern that the
gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs,” Rochester tells her. “That the marble is sordid
slate, and the polished woods mere refused chips and scaly bark. Now here (he pointed to the
leafy enclosure we had entered) all is real, sweet, and pure.” And like Adam, Rochester too is
eventually driven out of his home; Rochester, however, has not been forced into a troubled,
mortal world but rather, is granted respite from it. When Jane is finally reunited with her lover,
he is residing at “[t]he manor house of Ferndean,” a name that features a lush, living plant of a
garden rather than a sharp and choking one of a wild field. The myth of the fallen woman has, in
fact, been reversed. Here with Rochester in their rustic, pastoral estate, Jane confides to her
reader: “No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his
bone, and flesh of his flesh,”35 clearly echoing Adam’s contented sigh: “This at last is bone of
my bones/and flesh of my flesh;/ this one shall be called Woman.”36
Even the ending of the novel exhibits the contrast between the fallen world Jane has left
behind and the pure one that she has finally reached. The novel ultimately closes on St. John’s
words, and his impending death.37 Jane and Rochester, however, live happily on. This is the
final reminder to the reader of what has just happened – the curse of man’s mortality has been
reversed for Jane. Unlike Adam and Eve, who are denied eternal life as a result of Eve’s sin,38
Jane and Rochester are still living at the end of the novel because of Jane’s choices and only St.
John with his looming mortality is living in the shadow of fallen man’s curse. The trope of Eden
has been reversed and Jane has exonerated women by proving that the story of Eve is not the
same for every woman. Some of her sex, if left to their own devices, can actually choose not
only wisely but better than the men around them. Through her crafting of language and image,
Brontë is arguing that women must be allowed free will rather than being subjected to the
destinies laid out for them by a patriarchal order who misinterpret a patriarchal God.
26
Victorian scholar Micæl M. Clarke argues that “by incorporating elements of allegory
and the Bible, Bronte deploys elements of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, such as its
thorough and perceptive analysis of moral judgment and freedom of will and its inclusion of the
supernatural as an active form in human life.” This assertion certainly seems true by the manner
in which she presents the trope of Eden and the ramifications – good or bad – of a choice freely
made. Problematic, however, is Clarke’s following statement: “Brontë adhered to the
Anglicanism that her father, Patrick, preached in St. Michael’s Church, next door to their home
in Haworth, but her work demonstrates considerable ambivalence regarding Christianity’s
cultural legacy in reference to women.”39 Clearly, this is the exact opposite of what Brontё has
done – she has not embraced the concept of predestination as the only true way to conduct one’s
life, submitting fully to the dictates of supernatural guidance; and certainly, she is not ambivalent
towards traditional female roles as assigned by Western Christianity. It is true that Jane is
serving the needs of her husband at the end of the novel, but this is an act willingly performed,
not dutifully demanded. By presenting the story of Eve backwards – that is, Jane in a fallen
world and making a series of choices that eventually lead her into, rather than out, of a life in
paradise, Brontë is seeking to dispel the traditional myth of Eve and prove that women are
responsible agents of free will. The desire to punish all women for Eve’s actions has robbed the
world of centuries of female contributions. What Brontё proposes is that there is nothing to fear
when Eve speaks her mind for she has shown herself to be in possession of discernment and
wisdom as well as devotion and loyalty. As Jane reminds Rochester, “‘We stood at God’s feet,
equal – as we are!’”40
The motif of Jane-as-Eve is bolstered, too, by the presence of a Bertha as a Lilith figure.
Originally a malevolent night-spirit in Ancient Near Eastern mythology, the character of Lilith
has a rich textual tradition in Jewish writing. She was greatly developed by medieval writers
into the first wife of Adam who flew out of Paradise after refusing to submit to her husband, and
came to be regarded as a demon who preyed upon male babies and innocent solitary sleepers.
The traditions and legends of Lilith as a night-devil in female form are evidenced in a number of
early sources, including The Alphabet of ben Sira, a Jewish text dating between the eighth and
eleventh centuries C.E., and the Zohar, a twelfth-century C.E. Jewish mystical work purporting
27
to date from the Roman persecution, and which greatly influenced the Kabbalah in the fifteenth
century.
The Christian interest in the story seems to have developed much later – perhaps after the
seventeenth century, when Johannes Buxtorf, a German Rabbi and Hebraic scholar compiled the
Lexicon Chaldaicum, Talmudicum, et Rabbinicum that was posthumously published by his son.
This voluminous work, which chronicled the important writings of Jewish history, incorporated
the Jewish traditions regarding the figure of Lilith, and helped to gain her notoriety in the
Christian European imagination – an interest that flourished in Britain during the nineteenth
century when she was featured in a number of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and even found a
prominent place in mythopoeic literature, such as Scottish writer George MacDonald’s wildly
popular 1895 novel which bore her name.
The rise of scholarly interest in folktales and traditional stories – a movement influenced
perhaps mostly notably by the Grimm Brothers’ publication of Kinder- und Hausmarchen
(Children’s and Household Tales) in 1812 (with subsequent volumes following in later years) –
was certainly on the rise in the first part of the nineteenth century. As academic curiosity in
vernacular legends grew, so too did the influence such stories had on cultural output. “It has
been suggested on several occasions,” Howard Schwartz writes in Lilith’s Cave: Jewish Tales of
the Supernatural, “that the Golem-cycle of legends may have inspired Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein . . . since all indications are that the stories in Suppurim are based on authentic folk
sources, there is every reason to assume that an oral version of this tale . . . was current at the
time Mary Shelley wrote her famous novel – and probably a century or two before then.”41 The
developing interest in these folk-legends, and especially the intrigue surrounding the enigmatic
figure of Lilith, was sure to have been of interest to Brontё, who has long been noted for the use
of folklore in her writing.
Jane herself is enchanted by the “old fairytales and older ballads”42 told by her nursemaid
at Gateshead and recalls them often as an adult. When she first encounters Rochester, she says
she “remembered certain of Bessie’s tales wherein figured a North-of-England spirit, called a
‘Gytrash.’”43 Jane admits fear of “imps”44 and also seems to have had an other-worldly aura
about her, as Rochester often repeatedly refers to Jane as a “spirit” or “sprite,”45 “changeling,”46
“fairy” or by a traditional fairy’s name,47 “elf” or “elfish,”48 and even “a fairy, and come from
Elf-land.”49 Jane, in turn, jests back at Rochester with further folklore evocations, pronouncing,
28
“You talk of my being a fairy; but I am sure, you are more like a brownie.”50 Brontë even allows
her narrator to allude to eastern mythology, when she refers to Blanche as a “Peri”51 a fairyfigure of Persian legends. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to suggest that Brontë could have had
another folk-tradition in mind when she wrote the figure of Rochester’s violent, hidden first wife.
The physical resemblance between the two characters is notable: Lilith is traditionally
depicted as a dark-featured, likely because of her association with the night; Bertha is of mixed
African and European ancestry and her physical description is a reflection of the dominant Anglo
attitudes towards racial physiognomy and miscegenation – she is dark-complected and bears
striking features. It is undeniable, however, that the behavior of the two women is certainly
parallel. Like Lilith, Bertha’s violent exploits always occur during the night: her efforts to burn
Rochester in his bed, her attack upon Mason, and her romp among Jane’s wedding trousseau.
Preceding Jane’s most personal encounter with Bertha, she has the second visitation of the dream
in which she must struggle to protect an infant. In this second version of the dream, however,
she is not able to protect her charge and just as the dream ends, “the child rolled from my knee.”
What has caused Jane to awake is the presence of Bertha Mason in her chambers – the
malevolent night-demon has come to threaten the new wife and her children. This visit has been
foreshadowed, however. As Jane suffers her unjust punishment as a child in the Red Room of
Gateshead, she has a vision from what she imagines is a supernatural creature:
Shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head tried to look boldly round the
dark room: at this moment a light gleamed on the wall. Was it, I asked myself, a
ray from the moon penetrating some aperture in the blind? No, moonlight was
still, and this stirred; while I gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over
my head . . . prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were my
agitation, I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some coming vision
from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my
ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings: something seemed near me; I was
oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down – I uttered a wild, involuntary cry.52
As the authors of the quintessential work on feminist literary criticism, Madwoman in the
Attic (named, of course, in honor of Bertha Mason), note: “that Charlotte Bronte quite
consciously intended the incident in the red-room to serve as a paradigm for the larger plot of her
novel is clear not only from its position in the narrative but also from Jane’s own recollection of
the experience at crucial moments throughout the book.”53 Just as the Lilith of Jewish legends
preyed upon the souls of children and the sexual vulnerabilities of solitary adults by flying into
29
their rooms and suffocating them in their sleep, so too is Jane pursued by a demonic figure,
whether it be physically (as she later perceives with Bertha) or just within her own mind.
The “rushing wings” and suffocation that Jane senses prefigure not only her later
experience with her own Lilith figure, but also add to the overall horror of Lilith’s place in the
cultural imagination the West. Lilith’s wings and her shape-shifting ability have long caused her
to be associated with another frightening personage of legend. Throughout Jewish folklore she is
depicted as a night-predator who often drinks the blood of her victims, a quality also granted to
her in MacDonald’s text. Howard Schwartz, echoing numerous anthropologists and literary
historians, makes note of several traditional Lilith stories throughout Europe and the Middle East
that correspond so closely with later blood-sucking figures that, “it can be speculated that the
Lilith legend may have given birth to the vampire myth.”54 It comes as no surprise, then, that
Jane compares her unwelcome midnight visitor to “the foul German spectre – the Vampyre” and
Bertha ascribes to this appellation by biting her brother in her attack upon him at Thornfield.
Addressing the assembled group of Rochester, Jane, and the doctor, Mason announces, “‘She
sucked the blood: she said she’d drain my heart.’”55
This first wife of Rochester is also foil to Jane on both a literal level as well as a symbolic
one: Bertha-as-Lilith serves to illustrate the dangers of unwise and uncontrolled behavior. Jane
struggles continually throughout the novel to rein in her temper and check her impulsive nature,
an effort which ultimately wins her the moral vindication she has sought. Through these women,
the reader is reminded that with power comes responsibility. Eve has been absolved, but she
must maintain the vigilance over her conduct and her life that centuries of patriarchal order have
insisted she is incapable of doing. As one scholar notes, “Eve and Lilith form a continuum . . .
There is little doubt that the obsession with Lilith, from earliest antiquity to the twentieth
century, is a projection of human fears and desires. She is as much a state of mind as she is a
demon.”56
Conclusion
The myth of the fallen woman is one of the most influential organizing myths in western
history, and the world over. As the women’s suffrage movement sought to vocalize its beliefs, it
logically turned to what it viewed as the root of the problem – the traditional portrayal of the
30
archetypal woman. In order to reverse the centuries of arguments, customs, laws, and beliefs
that had accumulated around this myth, it would be necessary not only to attack it for its flaws
but to prove its error by demonstrating a better reading of the story.
It is this alternative that Jane Eyre offers through the subtle crafting of the plot and
details, and the not-so-subtle crafting of the language and characters. Jane’s vindication from
Brocklehurst’s public pillory of her character is set right by Miss Temple; Brocklehurst’s
arrogant hypocrisy is contrasted by the true Christian humility of Helen Burns; Jane’s own moral
conviction and self-denial in the face of temptation are what set her apart from Rochester; her
resistance to manipulation and coercion separate her from St. John. Throughout the novel it is
women who demonstrate wisdom, temperance, and moral rectitude and women whose choices
and actions are clearly those in the right. The daughters of Eve have demonstrated that the true
curse of woman is the unfair judgment of their own intellect, abilities, and character.
The one exception, of course, is Bertha but it is she who stands as the exception that
proves the rule. Bertha is a woman who must be restrained because she is unwilling and unable
to function in normal human society; Jane is a woman who must be granted personal freedom
because she is more capable of moral judgment than are the men around her. Bertha, like Lilith,
must live outside society because of her untempered passion and rage. Jane, however, is
calculated and acts with wisdom as she reverses the myth of the fallen woman. Lilith never eats
from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil but Eve does. Bertha belongs to a world apart
from the domesticated English ideal and Jane employs the inherent knowledge of Eve to invert
the myth of the fallen woman and exonerate her gender from the restraints of its societal
sentence.
31
CHAPTER TWO
“Sin and Death for the Young Ones”:
Reconsidering the Myth of the American Eden in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!
And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man
whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree
that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of
the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flows out of
Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches.
The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of
Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx
stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows
around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows
east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man
and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
And the Lord God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the
garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in
the day that you eat of it you shall die."
. . . Then the Lord God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, knowing
good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of
life, and eat, and live forever"— therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the
garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man;
and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming
and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.
Genesis 2:8-17, 3:22-24
Reception History of the American Eden
That American literature has often rallied around the theme of the land as a second Eden is
hardly a new contention; in fact, it’s hardly a contention at all, but rather, a simple statement of readily
observable fact. Environmental law professor Eric T. Freyfogle makes the point that the traditional
America-as-Eden portrayals took one of two paths: America was either a virgin paradise with “lush,
fertile land, wonderfully designed and so abundant in its yield” or America was “the wilderness where
Adam and Eve were banished when they misbehaved. This wilderness had much potential to it, but the
colonists needed to transform it with their labors, taming and controlling it, before the land would be
habitable.”1 As another scholar has pointed out, from “the fallen wisdom of Adam’s disillusionment
[that] inspired the deeper ironies of Melville and Hawthorne” to “the primitive America of Adamic
innocence [that] inspired the optimistic realism of Emerson and Whitman” to “the modern literature of
32
industrialism and internationalism, exemplified by Faulkner and Hemingway, [there] has developed this
ironic wisdom of the fallen Adam.”2
Because the trope of the American Eden is so firmly a part of the organizing myth of the country,
it is almost impossible to say anything new about the subject. Even more difficult, perhaps, is an
original examination of how the concept developed and manifested itself in various literary and
philosophical movements. It is this very conundrum, however, that will prove the assertion to follow:
that an ancient myth, newly applied to a specific context and readily accepted in its new circumstances,
can reach a point of saturation so that it actually begins to carry on a dialogue or debate with its own
metaphors and terms of expression.
The Potential
From the earliest accounts of the New World, it was supposed to be a place of wonder
that would serve as a pristine, primitive sanctuary from Europe’s increasingly industrial
development and oppressive political structure. And of course, it was viewed as an untapped
quarry of resources, all waiting to be discovered, uncovered, and shipped back to Europe for the
betterment of mankind’s existence. Even the appellation of “New World” reflects the novelty
and freshness with which this previously unknown continent was regarded.
In 1689, English philosopher John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government,
which would prove to have incredible ramifications on British colonial history. Long before
these works inspired the American revolutionaries, however, they also made significant
contributions to the American mythology. Many of Locke’s observations about the colonial
continent are tied to Genesis imagery. In his second treatise, Locke writes about the missing
simplicity of contemporary British property rights, praising the minimalism that new life in the
colonies provided: “For supposing a Man, or Family, in the state they were at first, peopling of
the World by the Children of Adam, or Noah; let him plant in some in-land, vacant places of
America.” As his discussion continues, he makes the assertion, “Thus in the beginning all the
World was America.”3 The new continent was unquestionably held up as a paragon of natural
virtue and unspoiled opportunity in Locke’s model for effective governmental rule; and this
image of the new paradise would only grow as the settlement and discovery increased on its
shores.
33
Nearly a century later, another work was published that echoed many of the same ideals.
In 1782, Letters from an American Farmer by the French-born settler Hector St. John de
Crèvecouer appeared as a series of collected dispatches describing the new continent. While he
does acknowledge the failures and short-comings of the land and its people – his ninth letter
describes a slave market in Charleston, South Carolina with unmistakable disdain for the practice
– nevertheless, Crèvecouer praises his adopted homeland with a distinct sense of purity and
tremendous potential. He describes the metamorphosis each settler undergoes as he or she
becomes a part of the landscape, writing:
He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and
manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new
government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by
being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all
nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one
day cause great changes in the world . . . The American is a new man, who acts
upon new principles; he must entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From
voluntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed
to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.—This is an
American.4
And this new creature, this American, can expect to find a completely foreign mode of life, but
one that captures the spirit of freedom that has so long been oppressed by European
establishments:
He is arrived on a new continent; a modern society offers itself to his
contemplation, different from what he has hitherto seen. It is not composed, as in
Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and a herd of people who have
nothing. Here are no aristocratic families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no
ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one; no
great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The
rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe.
Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the earth . . . We have no princes,
for whom we toil, starve, and bleed; we are the most perfect society now existing
in the world.5
The American continent was clearly viewed as a clean slate, a place for second chances and new
beginnings – and not just for individuals, but for the entirety of the human race. The metaphorical apple
was placed back on the tree and the serpent was unwound from the trunk. This time, it was supposed,
humanity just might get it right.
34
The Realization
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was apparent that the Eden designation
would stick. David W. Noble writes in The Eternal and the New World Garden that:
In the history of America’s popular imaginations, the precise coming of this
heaven on earth has a political date – 1828. It is the election of Andrew Jackson
that symbolizes the triumph of democracy and the common man. And with this
end of America’s relationship to the European past. The human condition of
mankind, it is proclaimed, hitherto always tragic or comic, has given way to an
earthly millennium of perfect harmony in the New World Garden.6
Even if there was a tangible break with the European past, however, the cultural
vibrations of Europe could still be felt on the American continent, and their current literary
movement had certainly helped to prime American authors for this glorious praise of the natural
condition of man and his surroundings. Noble notes further:
In the new American nation the romanticism of the developing bourgeoisie, the
myth of the self-made man, came to be accepted as the reality rather than the
dream of human existence. It was proclaimed, in the United States of 1830, that
every man had transcended the human condition to achieve perfect harmony with
redemptive nature. Ironically, it was the thrust of romantic ideology in Europe
which made possible this concept of American exceptionalism.7
These lingering cultural vibrations were problematic for Hawthorne, however, who took
a slightly divergent interpretation of the myth. To him, the story of the New World Eden was a
tragic tale precisely because it looked to the past for inspiration rather than to the future for hope.
Matthiessen observes rightly that “Hawthorne seldom portrayed his characters in a state of grace,
since he was too thoroughly aware of how the heart as well as the head could perversely go
astray.”8 Instead, he strategically placed his characters in moments of crisis, when a choice must
be made. Lewis observes that the forest for Hawthorne was not a natural paradise but rather, “It
was the ambiguous setting of moral choice, the scene of reversal and discovery in his
characteristic drama. The forest was the pivot in Hawthorne’s grand recurring pattern of escape
and return.”9 Indeed, as Lewis elaborates, it is the forest where Dimmesdale and Hester finally
speak freely of their love; it is also the forest where Young Goodman Brown must make his
choice of immortal allegiance. Hawthorne’s Adam is not the man basking in the eternal sunshine
of a benevolent God; rather, he is the Adam, fruit in hand, weighing his options.
In The House of the Seven Gables we see that Hawthorne is acutely aware of the pressing
question of time: what is man’s responsibility to time and can he break out of the pattern of
35
repeated oppression represented by the cyclical hands of “the great world-clock of Time” that
“still keeps its beat” even if human hands neglect to wind their own instruments?10 “Clifford . . .
wants to make that leap from memory to hope,” Lewis writes, “his Adamic ambition is an
ingredient in the novel.”11 In fact, is it not until Clifford and Hephzibah run away to the train
headed west that they finally feel a sense of freedom and liberation, short-lived though that sense
may be. Hawthorne’s belief, it seems, is that the American Eden must be sought in what lies
ahead. In the prologue to that novel, Hawthorne writes:
The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in
the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away
from us. It is a legend prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance,
down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its
legendary mist, which the reader, according to his pleasure, may either disregard,
or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the characters and events for the
sake of a picturesque effect.12
More American authors, however, fully embraced this “legendary mist” and the prospect
of being the stewards of a great new paradise, and their cultural productions reflected this
attitude. In 1834, William Cullen Bryant reflected upon the prairies he had seen on his travels to
Illinois, and opened his tribute to them with the lines: “These are the Gardens of the Desert,
these/The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,/And fresh as the young earth, ere man had
sinned.”13
But it was not right for the land to exist in this Edenic state without an Adam to declare
mastery over it. Therefore, we see in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper a celebration of
American purity in the unblemished landscape of both earth and soul. Lewis succinctly notes,
“If there was a fictional Adam here unambiguously treated – celebrated in his very Adamism – it
was the hero of Cooper’s The Deerslayer: a self-reliant young man who does seem to have
sprung from nowhere and whose characteristic post, to employ Tocqueville’s words, was the
solitary stance in the presence of Nature and God.”14
The full realization of America as Eden and the American as Adam, however, emerges
with the Transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideals inspired the next generation of
American authors to realize the self-reliant Adam within, necessarily divorcing themselves from
unnecessary social and political restraints, and returning instead to nature as the source of moral
and behavioral dictates, and personal communion with God. In 1836, he wrote in Nature:
36
In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what
period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth . . . In the
woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in
life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot
repair. Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and
uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes . . . The currents of the
Universal Being circulate through me.”15
It was Emerson’s disciple Walt Whitman who declared Americans the “Children of
Adam,” praising the free spirits of the growing continent in his collection of the same name in
1860. His poetry explored the reawakening of the human spirit in the brilliant newness of
America with an exuberance that is only possible for one who truly believes himself present in a
garden of rapturous joy. Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, and in it Whitman included the
poem “Ages and Ages, Returning at Intervals” in which he declares himself the: “chanter of
Adamic songs,/Through the new garden, the West.”16 Matthiessen remarks that Whitman:
believed that the fresh opportunities for the English tongue in America were
immense, offering themselves in the whole range of American Facts. His poems,
by cleaving to these facts, could thereby release ‘new potentialities’ of expression
for our native character . . . He there reveals the joy of the child or the primitive
poet in just naming things . . . Whitman’s excitement carries weight because he
realized that a man cannot use words unless he has experienced the facts that they
express, unless he has grasped them with this senses.17
While Whitman was busy sounding his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world,”18
Henry David Thoreau was examining the practical side of Emerson’s philosophies of
existentialism and developing his own notions of modern man’s place in time. He writes in the
first chapter of Walden: “We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay in all the
worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!”19
In perhaps his most commonly-quoted passage from Walden, we see Thoreau seeking the
Eden he has been promised but feels he has yet to realize. “I went to the woods because I wished
to live deliberately,” he writes:
to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover I had not lived . . . to drive life into a
corner, and reduce it to the lowest terms, and, if proved to be mean, why then to
get the whole and genuine meanness out of it, and publish its meanness to the
world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion.20
37
Clearly, the existentialist paradise that comes from moral clarity and self-reliance is the virgin
territory in which he finds himself a pioneer. Such an existence is achievable, but it must be
actively pursued. And this enlightenment is not one that comes from eating of the forbidden
fruit; rather, it stems from the rejection of the temptations of institutionalized authority.
Failure
As America emerged from the War Between the States, the American Eden and its
idealistic steward took on a new dimension. No longer was the American the uncorrupted child
of the New World; now, he represented the fallen ideal, the corruptible man, the failed perfection
– he was sinful Adam on a blighted earth. Mark Twain recognized, as Noble notes, that:
[t]he faith of the people of the United States is redemption by nature and focused
on the valley of democracy as the citadel of the American Garden. And at the
heart of the valley was the river, the Mississippi. Escaping from the land which
failed him, Twain fled to the river to find surcease from the discordant rhythms of
progress. Although ambitious men changed its banks, the river itself could not be
altered. Here was a symbol of nature that flowed with an everlasting sameness,
where man’s dream of innocence could find constant renewal and confirmation.
Here was Twain’s last chance to provide immortality for the American Adam.21
When Huck and Jim float down the Mississippi and through various cross-sections of
American life, they are seeking refuge from their own unfortunate circumstances. But there was
no refuge to be found among the cities and towns of middle America, and Huck chooses his own
expulsion from a state of grace when he decides to keep Jim’s whereabouts a secret. Like Adam
hiding from God in Genesis 3:8, Huck attempts to hide Jim from the view of his legal owners.
He describes his defiant act: “I took [the letter] up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling,
because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of
holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I'll go to hell’ – and tore it up.”22
Likewise, Huck is rejecting the boyhood naïveté that he lost along the river and that Tom’s reappearance represents. His choice at the end of the novel, when he writes, “I reckon I got to light
out for the Territory ahead of the rest,”23 demonstrates that he is still cognizant of the promise of
the American continent, but it is elusive, and one must actively search for it.
The Americans of Henry James also represented this failed experiment when they
exposed themselves to the sin and scandals of the Old World. The reader traces the corrupting
38
power of European sensibilities on Daisy Miller and Lewis Lambert Strether, while Chad
Newsome is seeking a way out of his corruption; Isabel Archer’s morally bankrupt compatriots
abroad destroyed her own ambitions and goals. James’ model is the American Adam and
American Eve in moral decline; once they leave their wonderfully naive garden, they become
vulnerable to the sin of humanity. This was the manner in which many Americans at home
viewed the expatriates in Paris, London, and Geneva. As Bill Gorton would quip via
Hemingway’s pen thirty years later in The Sun Also Rises: “You're an expatriate. You've lost
touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink
yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working.
You're an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”24
The American and his continent were no longer infallible, but the traces that were left
from the fostering of such a vision were indelible, and the promise of America and its proverbial
Dream were firmly entrenched in the national psyche and identity. And even though the fall is as
much a part of the Eden myth as is the innocence, there is present in the writing of the later
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an apparent disappointment at the failed second chance.
Social Setting of Cather’s World
In 1893, at the American Historical Society meeting in that great city of the plains,
Chicago, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his study “The Significance of the Frontier in
American History.” Based upon his studies of current population trends and land usage, he
famously declared that the western frontier was “closed.”25 Horace Greeley’s oft-repeated
admonition of “Go West, young man and grow up with the country” no longer held the promise
for American youths that it once did. The westward expansion that had driven the settlement of
the United States had, for all intents and purposes, died. There was nothing left to explore; there
was no terra incognita to discover. Kurtz notes the inherent conflict present in the Old World
and New World economic structures and futures. “Ironically,” he writes, “although it had been
industrialization that had freed the individual from feudal, agrarian social and economic
structures, the American image of freedom was a predominately agrarian vision. The hero of the
New World was the self-reliant individual, carving a personal niche out of the wilderness.”26
The problem, of course, is that the wilderness will ultimately be tamed and as had become
apparent with the 1890 census, the great American Garden was settled.
39
As the nineteenth century came to a close, the surge into industrialism was inevitable. As
the railroads increased, so too did opportunities for manufactured goods to traverse the continent.
Even the rural farms of the prairies and isolated mountain homestead towns could order goods
from Montgomery Ward or the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. But even while America was
making the inevitable move towards modernity, it was nevertheless maintaining its identity as
the land of new beginnings. Through the words of Emma Lazarus, the Statue of Liberty boasts,
“I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”27 As waves of immigrants – an estimated 10,121,940
between 1905 and 1914 alone (almost double the number of the previous ten years)28 – continued
to pour through American ports and into the American cities and countryside, there was a
persistent hope that the continent still offered fresh starts, the promise of second chances, and the
opportunity for a man to realize his full potential without the Old World constraints of lingering
memories, restrictive traditions, or prejudiced history. There was a hope, but America was no
longer new and her histories were already being written.
The Novel
The notion of an American Eden persisted well into the twentieth century. Fitzgerald
writes of “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes – a fresh, green breast of
the new world”29 – though Eden had passed away from the East it was still existent, perhaps, as
one moved inland from the coast; Hemingway’s Nick Adams finally reclaims his humanity in the
Michigan wilds. As part of such a tradition and context, it hardly seems remarkable, then, that
Willa Cather employs Edenic imagery in her 1913 novel O Pioneers!
In their study of Cather’s writing, entitled “Willa Cather’s Novels of the Frontier: A
Study in Thematic Symbolism,” Edward and Lillian Bloom write that “Willa Cather writes
purposefully in all her novels of the frontier, directing her talents in each to the exposition of one
lofty theme and always arriving . . . at her ultimate moralistic goal.” This “moralistic goal” is
more than just didactic sermonizing, however; it is often a story of universal importance and
application. As the Blooms further note:
Cather is interested primarily in the broad outline of human destiny, not in the motivation
of individual quirks and foibles. Her people and places are mainly convenient vehicles
for ideas . . . The idea is the thing, and once the reader has grasped the intellectual motif,
all the other elements fall into readily perceivable patterns. 30
40
It is Cather’s particular use of one such pattern with which this study is primarily concerned: the
portrayal of Emil as an Adam in the garden of moral conflict. What is striking about Cather’s use
of Eden imagery, however, is that she breaks from both earlier traditions and does not connect it
with her novel’s central narrative – that is, man’s battle against and life on the frontier farm.
Cather’s Adam-figure is not Alexandra as one might suppose, though she is the story’s
protagonist and the most dedicated worker of the land. Rather, Cather concentrates her Genesis
allusions on the sub-plot story of Emil and Marie, consequently casting Emil as the new
manifestation of the Adam archetype in a story whose ending has been doomed since the
beginning of time.
The novel’s opening scene depicts a five-year-old Emil, crying over the flight of his
kitten up the telegraph pole. Though a seemingly unimportant image at first, it later becomes
clear that as Emil takes on the role of Adam, this first introduction to his character is an allusion
to Adam’s first responsibility in the Garden: stewardship of the animals.31 Following this scene,
Alexandra sees her brother “sitting on a step of the staircase that led up to the clothing and carpet
department. He was playing with a little Bohemian girl, Marie Tovesky.” This is Emil’s (and
the reader’s) first introduction to the girl who will later be of such significance and already there
is foreshadowing of the outcome of their relationship. First, it is said of Emil that “[h]is black
cloth coat was much too big for him and made him look like a little old man” and of Marie that
“her poke bonnet, gave her the look of a quaint little woman.” Just as Adam and Eve lost their
chance at a perpetually innocent existence and faced death as a consequence for their sin, too do
Emil and Marie exhibit the progression of age even as they are the youngest characters in the
novel. Further, the location of Emil and Marie’s first exchange is symbolic: “the step of the
staircase that led up to the clothing and carpet department.” 32 The immediate action of Adam
and Eve after they have eaten of the forbidden fruit is to become aware of their nakedness and
attempt to make clothing to cover it.33 Obviously, at five and seven years old respectively, Emil
and Marie have not yet succumbed to temptation, but this meeting is the first of many that
ultimately lead to their destruction – thus it is the first “step of the staircase that led up” to their
own realization of sin. This imagery is evoked again later, when the two grown lovers speak
openly of their love for the first time and Marie is said to have “sat down on the top step” of the
stile. 34 The climb begun as children is completed in adulthood.
41
Following their first meeting, the reader’s next encounter of Emil and Marie in one
another’s company is roughly sixteen years later. Though the two friends have interacted before
the narrative resumes, this is the first time the story depicts them together since their first
meeting in town as children. Again, amongst Edenic imagery the ultimate outcome of their
relationship is foreshadowed. The scene takes place on a June morning in a peaceful, outdoor
setting which is, ironically, a cemetery. Even as the young adults converse, Emil is cutting down
the tall grass from around the graves. He states, “‘Alexandra sent me to mow our lot, but I’ve
done half a dozen others, you see.’”35 Here among the gravestones is a reminder of the
transience of life that accompanied the initial sin of man.36 It is significant, too, that Emil is
employing a “scythe,” the traditional symbol of Death as a reaper – a visual reminder of human
mortality. The description of Marie also heightens the Edenic imagery: “Emil mowed vigorously
and Marie sat sunning herself”37 as is the typical behavior of a snake. This is not to imply that
Marie is an evil figure– quite the contrary, in fact. What she does symbolize, however, is
temptation.
The two are encountered together again several days later, this time in the pasture of
Frank and Marie’s farm and again there is a somber reminder of mortality. Emil has just shot
five ducks and retrieves them for Marie who first laughs at the excitement of it but then:
[a]s she stood looking down at them, her face changed . . . “They were having
such a good time, and we’ve spoiled it for them . . . Ivar’s right about wild things.
They’re too happy to kill. You can tell just how they felt when they flew up.
They were scared, but they didn’t really think anything bad could hurt them.”
The role of the ducks in this scene is two-fold in that they not only provide another example of
death-in-life, but they also function as symbols of Emil and Marie precariously poised between
purity and forbidden knowledge and soon to share an identical fate with the wild ducks, too
involved in the bliss of their companionship to “think anything bad could hurt them.”38
The next time Emil and Marie meet is again in a pastoral scene. In what is widely
recognized as the most overtly Edenic scene in the novel, the reader finds the couple conversing
in the orchard. Marie has come “to pick cherries” and laughingly remarks to Emil, “I’ll call you
if I see a snake.” As the two young people talk about the indigenous religions of their
homelands, they unwittingly allude to serpent’s presentation of the fruit to Eve:
42
“Emil,” she said suddenly – he was mowing quietly about under the tree so as
not to disturb her – “what religion did the Swedes have away back, before they
were Christians?”
Emil paused and straightened his back. “I don’t know. About like the
Germans’, wasn’t it?”
Marie went on as if she had not heard him. “The Bohemians, you know, were
tree worshipers before the missionaries came, Father says the people in the
mountains still do queer things, sometimes – they believe that trees bring good or
bad luck.”
Emil looked superior. “Do they? Well, which are the lucky trees? I’d like to
know.”
“I don’t know all of them, but I know the lindens are. The old people in the
mountains plant lindens to purify the forest, and to do away with the spells that
come from the old trees they say have lasted from heathen times. I’m a good
Catholic, but I think I could get along with caring for trees, if I hadn’t anything
else . . . I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live
than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I
sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I just
begin where I left off.”
Emil had nothing to say to this. He reached up among the branches and began
to pick the sweet, insipid fruit.39
Again, though the conversation is devoted to the subject of nature, the rhetorical intent of the
words is not only to draw a connection with Adam’s post-fall curse to work the land but also to
draw attention to the temptation facing the lovers in this seeming paradise. The highly sensual
language of fortune, religion, and “insipid” fruit, along with the allusion to trees having
knowledge, is instead intended to steer the reader’s awareness towards the moral crisis Emil-asAdam faces and the physical hardships of fallen-Adam-as-agrarian that already surround them.
The only time that this pattern of meeting in the outdoors is broken is at the Catholic
carnival, the site of Emil and Marie’s first kiss. Though this turning point seems to break with
the pattern of Edenic imagery, it still maintains an important thread. First, it is a forbidden action
on hallowed ground – that is, within the church building itself. Secondly, it involves the
elimination of all light – the prank that the French boys plan so as to have a moment to kiss their
girls, and in which Emil is a participant, as he is asked by Amédée to blow out Marie’s candle
when the switchboard is unplugged. This scene clearly plays on essential symbolic imagery
from Genesis chapter one – not only is God’s separation of the light from the dark in verse three
a physical parting, it is a metaphor for the division of good and evil. Here, as Emil willingly
43
extinguishes the final bit of light from the church, the separation of the permitted from the
forbidden in his own life comes crashing down:
[E]very one looked toward the red blur that Marie’s candle made in the dark.
Immediately that, too, was gone. Little shrieks and currents of soft laughter ran
up and down the dark hall. Marie started up, – directly into Emil’s arms. In the
same instant she felt his lips. The veil that had hung uncertainly between them for
so long was dissolved.40
The staircase towards sin and consequential mortality has almost been scaled. Now that the
unspoken line of physical affection has been transgressed between Emil and Marie, there remains
only their final encounter again in the Shabata’s orchard for the story of man’s fall to fully play
itself out.
Again, a scene of death contrasted with life frames the encounter between Emil and
Marie. In the Mass that marks both the first communion of one hundred children as well as
ushering in the funerary proceedings for Amédée, Emil take notice of Marie’s absence, and in an
epiphany “felt as if a clear light broke upon his mind, and with it a conviction that good was,
after all, stronger than evil, and that good was possible to men. He seemed to discover that there
was a kind of rapture in which he could love forever without faltering and without sin.” In this
brief moment of liberation and transcendence, Emil realizes “[h]e coveted nothing that was
Frank Shabata’s” and rides forth from the church feeling powerful, invincible, and not afraid of
anything:
As he rode past the graveyard he looked at the brown hole in the earth where
Amédée was to lie, and felt no sorrow. That, too was beautiful, that simple
doorway to forgetfulness. The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that
brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death. It is the old and poor and the
maimed who shirk from that brown hole; its wooers are found among the young,
the passionate, the gallant-hearted. It was not until he had passed the graveyard
that Emil realized where he was going.
In this rush of pride and self-determinism that has seized Emil, he hurries to find Marie, who is
“lying on her side under the white mulberry tree.” Disregarding what they know to be sin, the
two lovers finally partake in that final temptation that has lured them since either one can
remember.41
It is in the narration of Frank’s discovery and shooting of the pair, however, that the Eden
imagery is truly at its height: “He peered again through the hedge, at the two dark figures under
the tree. They had fallen a little apart from each other, and were perfectly still.” Not only are the
44
figures now described as “dark,” a symbol already shown to be of moral significance, but
Cather’s choice of words, that the two lovers “had fallen,” is a final acknowledgement of the
story that was spinning towards its tragic end throughout the narrative. Ivar announces the news
to Alexandra as “‘[i]t has fallen! Sin and death for the young ones! God have mercy upon us!’”
The temptation and fall of man have occurred again, even to the special brother, chosen and set
apart by Alexandra to be the heir and fortunate son spared bondage to the land. As Carl
Linstrum remarks much earlier in the story: “‘Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human
stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before;
like larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over thousands of years.’”42
The story of O Pioneers! is undeniably of the American Eden tradition, but it is not of the
same strain as so many others before and after it. By shifting the primary focus of the Eden myth
from man’s struggle with the land to man’s struggle with himself, Cather has succeeded in
reminding her readers of two essential truths. The first is that the promise of a paradise to be
realized once again is not in the earth itself, but in the souls of the men and women who work it.
She is focused on the timelessness of the struggles of man’s quest for dominion over his
environment and himself. As the Blooms note: “Cather searches beyond contemporary society.
Instead, she examines man’s trials in other eras.”43 In so doing, she is able to present her story –
and America’s – as part of the timeless continuation of the human story. After all, as Cather tells
us, “the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”44 Secondly, and
more significantly, we see that the elements of the Eden story were all in place from the
beginning. Emil and Marie never had a chance to break free from the patterns of mankind’s
history, even in the New World.
Regarding her inclusion of the word “Pioneer” in the novel’s title, Robert H. Footman
notes in “The Genius of Willa Cather” that “[w]ords today are having so many new authorities
delegated to them and as a result are acquiring such new values, that she has to pick her way
cautiously in her effort to preserve her own valuation.”45 So, too, does it seem that Cather sought
to reclaim the image of the American Eden from those who would assign it “new authorities” by
focusing on the newness of the land instead of on the souls of the people. Cather recognized that
the American tragedy was not that the Second Eden experiment had failed, but that it had never
even had a chance, despite the best efforts of all of the would-be Adams. As Alexandra says to
45
Carl in the final scene of the novel, “You remember what you once said about the graveyard, and
the old story writing itself over? Only it is we who write it, and with the best we have.”46
Conclusion
In 1964, Leo Marx would observe this trend in his aptly-titled The Machine in the
Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. He concludes:
The power of these fables to move us derives from the magnitude of the protean
conflict figured by the machine’s increasing domination of the visible world.
This recurrent metaphor of contradiction makes vivid, as no other figure does, the
bearing of public events on private lives. It discloses that our inherited symbols
of order and beauty have been divested of meaning, It compels us to recognize
that the aspirations once represented by the symbol of an ideal landscape have
not, and probably cannot, be embodied in our traditional institutions . . . The
resolutions of our pastoral fables are unsatisfactory because the old symbol of
reconciliation is obsolete.47
As the American myth grew with such tremendous alacrity in the virgin soil of a new
democracy, it became the victim of its own success. The trope became so prevalent in its various
manifestations, that it actually triggered a resistance to its notions and an eventual rejection of its
boasts. The progression of such a fall is evident, as we have seen; and the development of the
myth was one that was perhaps too blinded by its hubris to consider the whole extent of the
analogy: in the end, Adam dies.
While some authors approached the metaphor with caution and others with
disappointment, the fact remains that whatever aspirations the American Edenists may have held,
the story of Eden is essentially and fundamentally a story of failure. So widely applied, the myth
ultimately lost its own inherent significance and the symbols were essentially rendered impotent
as each author read a new significance into the shared myth that they all still held as static. The
reception history of the American Eden myth functions, in many ways, as a microcosm for
broader mythic change: A story or character is introduced, assigned cultural significance, and
perpetuated as source of identity and inspiration. As social circumstances change, so too does
the myth’s significance. When the change occurs very rapidly and with such broad divergence in
interpretation, however, the myth can lose its unifying nature and stand instead as testament to
the disjointed fragments of a misunderstood ideal.
46
Cather’s interpretation of the trope in O Pioneers! is clearly in response to this variance
and ultimate breakdown in meaning. The culminating lesson is not that man could somehow get
it right this time with the wisdom of the ages on his side. Instead, the moral of Cather’s Eden
story is that human history is cyclical and myths can only carry meaning so far as they
acknowledge that reality. As T. S. Eliot would write in 1940, in his opening line of “East Coker”
in the Four Quartets: “In my beginning is my end.”48
47
CHAPTER THREE
Capitalism’s Fortunate Sons:
The Trope of Cain and Abel in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying,
“I have produced a man with the help of the LORD.” Next she bore his brother
Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground. In the
course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground
and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. And
the LORD had regard for Abel and his offerings, but for Cain and his offering he
had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. The LORD
said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you
do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the
door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.”
Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they
were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. Then the
LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am
I my brother’s keeper?” And the LORD said, ‘What have you done? Listen; your
brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground. And now you are cursed
from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from
your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength;
you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” Cain said to the LORD, “My
punishment is more than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the
soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and wanderer on
the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” Then the LORD said to him,
“Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And the LORD
put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Then
Cain went away from the presence of the LORD, and settled in the land of Nod,
east of Eden.
Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a
city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch.
Genesis 4:1-17
Reception History of Cain and Abel
Gary Taylor asserts that just like in the natural world, the continued existence of cultural
productions is also largely dictated by their adaptability: “The more interpretations, the more
likely that some will seem particularly relevant and important to the unpredicatable changing
cultures of the future. The more variously interpretatable a work is the more adaptable it is – and
the more likely to survive.”1
In 1906, esteemed medieval scholar and eventual MLA president Oliver F. Emerson
published a comprehensive study that illustrates this claim by tracing the literary development of
48
particular persistence: Cain. Despite its unassuming title, “Legends of Cain, Especially in Old
and Middle English,” Emerson tracked the changes of this intriguing character of western
mythology by examining apocryphal Christian writings, Rabbinic literature, and a variety of
Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and continental texts. He notes in his opening remarks that while
“a few scattered notes on Cain in our literature” had been published in years past, his belief was
that “there was still room for a somewhat more thorough investigation of the subject.”2
The story of the brothers is an intriguing one but the textual story provides only a limited
number of details. For that reason – or perhaps, despite that obstacle – numerous oral traditions
developed first among the Jewish people and later among Christian and Muslim adherents to
explain elements of the story that the biblical text omits. Four in particular stand out as the most
popular subject of later texts: 1) the brothers’ motives for the sacrifices; 2) the act of the murder;
3) Cain’s wandering and subsequent city-building following the exile from his family; and 4) the
nature of his curse and mark.
This chapter will examine the first three of these themes. (The fourth is explored in
chapter five.) Each concept has developed over a series of centuries through religious texts and
popular folk-versions of the story, until their images have become part of the iconography of the
story. And though the story has had myriad thematic developments and traditions with which it
has become associated, few seem as persistent in their cultural reception and transmission as the
issue of economic struggles and tributary rejection by the dominant system of power.
The Sacrifice
This tension was noted as early as the first century C.E., when the Jewish philosopher
Philo composed his exegesis of the Tanakh account of the story. Though he does include some
of these extra-textual traditions among his interpretive assumptions – that Cain delayed in
making his offering to God, waiting several days after Abel’s initial sacrifice, before he brought
some of his own produce3 – Philo’s primary concern is not to retell the story but to interpret its
metaphorical applications. He argues, for example, that Abel demonstrated a reliance on God
because his livelihood of shepherding left him utterly dependent upon the blessings of good
grazing and ample water, and at the mercy of punishments of predators or harsh weather that
may find his flock. Cain, on the other hand, showed a lack of faith in God’s provenance because
he manipulated the soil to his own intentions rather than merely tending that which was already
49
available to him.4 The violence of Cain, therefore, extends from the envy born from his selfish,
self-centered nature – a trait which Philo considers central to the man’s character.5
It is this arrogance towards the benevolent nature of God that Philo then extends beyond
the story in order to make commentary upon the humanists of the ancient world. He condemns
Protagoras, who believed “that the human mind is the measure of all things” as “being a
descendant of the folly of Cain.”6 He writes shortly afterwards, “They therefore who say that all
thinking, and feeling, and speaking, are the free gifts of their own soul, utter an impious and
ungodly opinion, and deserve to be classed among the race of Cain.”7 The value of the story for
Philo came not from its place in the religious history of his people but rather, from its rhetorical
properties in practical application.
Later in the first century C.E., the Hellenized Jewish apologist Flavius Josephus again
revisited the story of the two feuding brothers in his Antiquities of the Jews. Josephus offers no
real commentary on the story but does take pains to point out that Cain was not wholly evil.
Rather, according to Josephus’ reading, Cain was merely intent upon obtaining things – be they
tangible (such as land), or intangible, (such as divine favor).8 The finer arguments of Philo’s
treatise are not present in Josephus’ account. Josephus’ concern is on recounting the organizing
myths of Jewish religion and people, though with a passing warning against the perils of greed
inserted for good measure.
The early Christian reception of the story is similar. Ambrose dealt with the story in his
treatise Cain and Abel, arguing that economic motivations caused Cain to withhold the first fruits
from sacrifice.9 He also drew symbolic importance from the story elsewhere in his writings. In
On The Holy Spirit, he urges Christians to practice their faith with pure motives, noting that both
the sacrifice of Cain and the kiss of Judas were ostensibly pious acts.10 A generous attitude in
sacrifice and tithing, it seems, is the ideal of Ambrose; anything less is akin to the self-serving
desires to withhold a few sheaves of wheat from the Lord or to gain thirty pieces of silver by
selling his Son.
The medieval mystery plays of the English cycle also made much of the economic
concerns of Cain’s theology. The N-Town Banns, which served as an advertisement for and
preview of the coming cycle, cast the show as a lesson in tithing. The word appears three times
in the thirteen lines pertaining to the play about the feuding brothers, and the Cain and Abel
50
section concludes with the pronouncement: “Of trewe tithing this may wel be/Example to every
man.”11 According to the characterization of the N-Town Cain and Abel, Cain is a materialist
who is more concerned with amassing wealth than showing gratitude for it and he advises his
brother to embrace a similar mindset. Cain takes a similar tone in the Chester Creation where, as
the appropriately-named John Gardner points out in his study of these plays, “Cain’s purpose is
impure: He will sacrifice in order to get God to send more.”12 The Cain of the York cycle
grudgingly offers his sacrifice, complaining about the lack of thrift and not desiring to waste the
effort of one’s work in a burnt offering.
It is the Wakefield Killing of Abel that most fully develops the idea of Cain as a shrewd
businessman. Cain complains that the sacrifice will take him away from his work, saying to
Abel incredulously: “Shuld I leife my plogh & all thing/And go with the[e] to make offering? /
Nay, thou findys me not so mad!” Later he remarks on the fact that giving the choice sheaves of
his crop to God could potentially leave him in want, stating: “For, had I giffen away my
goode/then myght I go with a ryffen hood;/And it is better hold that I have/then go from doore to
doore and crave.”13 Gardner argues that the economic tone of the play reveals it to be a
commentary upon medieval feudalism “both here on earth and in heaven,” where Cain is the
unwilling worker and ungrateful vassal.14 Cain’s complaints center around the question of debt –
he owes nothing to God because: “Yit boroed I never a farthing / Of him” and firmly asserts:
“My winningys ar bot meyn.” 15 This theme, as Gardner rightly points out, makes the play “not
only religious but also – and profoundly – social.”16
Early modern sermonizers continued to point to Cain’s actions as economically driven,
be they an avaricious attitude toward tithing or a profit-driven blindness from God’s saving
mercy. In 1562, Thomas Paynell published a work on the epistles of Paul in which he makes
note in Chapter Five: “By fayeth Abell offered vnto God a more plenteous sacrifices then Cain.”
A similar sentiment is expressed in George Carleton’s treatise upon tithing, published in 1606:
It is expressly noted in the text, that Abel offered the best of his flock, de
primogenitis, & pinguissimis, the first, fairest, and fattest, which shewed the
sinceritie of his heart. In Cain no such thing is noted, but the contrary vnderstood,
whether Cain did offer one tenth of the profit of his ground, and Abel the tenth of
his sheepe, that question I moue not here, there is nothing expressly eyther for it,
or against it; but out of these words this I obserue. First, that to offer to God of
such goods as God doth blesse men withal, was from the beginning accounted a
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part of the seruice of God, for Cain and Abel both offered, knowing it was looked
for at their hands. Secondly, it is hence manifest that they who offer their goods
to God, may not offer the worst . . . [for] they who serue not God with the best of
their goods, are found to be followers of Cain.17
One moralizer took particular issue with Cain’s city building and subsequent commerce,
using it as an example to warn other souls away from vain, earthly distractions that may hinder
true repentance. Writing in 1672, he insists:
Many, because they have been troubled in conscience for their sins, think well of
their case; miserably mistaking conviction for conversion, With these, Cain
might have passed for a Convert, who run up and down the world, like a man
distracted under the rage of a guilty conscience, till with building and business he
had word in away.18
Through the elaborations in antiquity, the vernacular fleshing out of the characters in
medieval performance, and the moral reasoning of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the
connection of Cain with self-serving labor and material collection was established as a fixed part
of the western lore regarding the ancient figure.
The Murder
The possessive nature of Cain was central not only to his treatment of the sacrifice, but
also to his motives in committing fratricide. Driven by envy stoked by God’s favor of Abel’s
burnt offerings, Cain kills his brother in a jealous rage – a heinous act elaborated upon and
sensationalized in later accounts of the story and a standard metaphor for rivalries and blood
feuds in other contexts.
One work, which some scholars date to as early as the first century B.C.E., began to
receive broader reception in late antiquity and early middle ages. The text was called Vita Adae
et Evae (The Life of Adam and Eve) and seems to be Jewish in origin, though later versions show
evidence of later Christian additions. It is a collection that incorporated a number of traditional
stories involving the first family, including the story of Cain and Abel.
In the Vita, whose stylized presentation proved highly influential in later medieval
depictions of the story, one startling detail is included that cast the murder of Abel in an even
more sinister light: Eve’s dream of Cain drinking and regurgitating the blood of his brother.19
This image may echo the divine charge in the biblical text in Genesis 4:11, which states: “[Y]our
52
brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground,
which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand,” may have given
rise to the occasional medieval depiction of Cain biting his brother to death.20 In the Vita, the
murder is not only pejorated by its cannibalistic overtones, but it also plays upon a literal
interpretation of Cain as one who seeks to consume, be it in the hoarding of a sacrifice or the
drinking of his brother’s blood.
One of the most common medieval twists upon the story is Cain’s use of an ass’ jawbone
as the murder weapon, a tradition of uncertain origin that began to emerge in the British Isles in
the eleventh century, and spread quickly to the continent. The most obvious possible source is
the story of Samson slaying the Philistines with the same sort of found weapon, as is told in the
book of Judges. As a number of scholars have pointed out, however, there seem to be no other
parallel elements to link the stories thematically and thereby justify the transposing of the later
tradition onto the earlier one. Noted art historian Meyer Schapiro presents a number of possible
sources, including the oral theme of Eve’s dream in the Vita and also the ubiquitous Hell-mouth
of medieval demonic iconography. He also makes the point that the choice of a jawbone as a
weapon might not have been a choice at all but rather, a misinterpretation by one artist of a
drawing depicting Cain, as a farmer, wielding a sickle.21
Schapiro lends little credence to this last scenario, but it does introduce an intriguing
notion: the idea of the weapon as having a connection to the brothers’ professions. Possibly, the
tradition of the jawbone appeared as a kind of ironic statement to Cain’s sense of justice: killing
his brother with part of the very sacrifice that won God’s favor for Abel. It makes an interesting
economic commentary, too, that the tools of one’s livelihood are truly his means of survival in
the realm of competition. The choice of a remnant of a sacrificial burnt offering gives the crime
that much more of a sinister slant, as well – Cain chose to use something consecrated as a vehicle
of evil.
Whatever the means of murder, the story is inherently one of perceived competition and
the struggle between two opposed ways of life under the same system. In his Freudian
exploration of rivalries entitled “Fratricide and Fraternity,” Donald Clark Hodges points out that
“the struggle between Cain and Abel reflects the conflict between pastoral nomads and sedentary
agriculturalists, which is key to much of the history of the ancient Middle East.”22 Indeed, the
conflict between the shepherding god, Dumuzi and the farming god, Enkindu was a central story
53
in Sumerian mythology and the very nature of the rivalry was obviously a universal one and
certainly not contained to the lore of the ancient Near East.
Three millennia later, the competing ways of life between the rancher and the farmer
was recognized as one of the fiercest conflicts in the settlement of the American continent. The
establishment of land claims in grazing land and the erection of barbed wire fences around crops
was blamed for the decline of the livestock market and free-range cattle drives in the 1880s. The
rivalry between these two competing groups is illustrated in the Rogers and Hammerstein
musical Oklahoma! In the playful song “The Farmer and the Cowman,” each group vents its
frustrations with the other in a musical feud. The following exchange highlights the conflict
between the sedentary ways of the men who work the earth and the free-spirited ramblings of the
men who drive the livestock:
Chorus: Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends.
All: One man likes to push a plough,
The other likes to chase a cow.
But that's no reason why they can't be friends
...
Territory folks should stick together;
Territory folks should all be pals.23
Though more a display of friendly banter between neighbors than an actual debate on the
issue, “The Farmer and the Cowman” encapsulates the inherent conflict between two of the
organizing myths of the burgeoning American economy: the gentleman farmer and the freerange cowboy. The battle for resources and for a way of life is a universal one inherent in human
biology.
Two thousand years prior to Rogers and Hammerstein, Philo also recognized a universal
theme regarding human rivalry. He calls his reader’s attention to the archetypal antipathy that is
a focal part of the Cain and Abel saga, pointing out that whether the competition is friendly (such
as a sporting meet) or unfriendly (such as a war), the realization of competitive acts nearly
always takes place outdoors, in a field of some kind. The nature of the land, he argues (that is,
the platform for competition) is what truly sparks the inherent rivalry between men rather than
any misanthropic feelings harbored against another human being.24
This is also the view espoused in Darwinism – that the scramble for resources (and
ultimately, survival), is the true catalyst for all real and symbolic competition. In the case of
Cain and Abel, the field of competition was, quite literally, the field of production marked by an
54
altar. That the offering of one figure should receive favor without explanation, generates in the
other figure a sense of threat, and the “flight or fight” response is triggered. In animals, such a
reaction stems from a survival instinct. This is true for humans, as well; additionally, however,
human emotion can also elicit feelings of inadequacy, failure, or jealousy that can also trip the
switch and generate a violent reaction to a perceived rivalry.
A Life after Death
In a fit punishment for viewing his brother as a competitive entity rather than as a human
life, God banishes Cain from the presence of his family and presumably, the whole of the human
race. It is in this state of exile that the biblical account gives us our last tantalizing glimpse at the
dynamic life of Cain and in this passage, we see his attempt to establish a human community,
thus recreating a personal order out of his isolated chaos. In Genesis 4:15-17, the text states that
Cain must leave Eden for the Land of Nod, and that he later builds a city and names it after his
son Enoch – a passage that encapsulates the paradox of Cain. He is simultaneously a wanderer
outside the fold of his family and the father of communal living and therefore, civilization.
Augustine relied heavily on the trope of Cain and Abel in Book XV of City of God.
Here, he asserts that Abel’s pleasing sacrifice was evidence of his citizenship in God’s heavenly
city, while the rejection of Cain’s (and Cain’s subsequent violence) betrayed his allegiance to the
earthly realm, or the “city of men.” He considered the literal importance of Cain’s biblical credit
as a city-builder, as well. In chapter eight of the same book, Augustine justifies the establishment
of a city so early in human history by noting the exceptionally long lives and remarkably prolific
progeny-making abilities of the antediluvian men, noting that the exponential nature of human
reproduction would have quickly necessitated the need for a communal center amongst a people
who had rejected a more nomadic life.25 This particular aspect of Cain’s story proved to be
especially significant to later cultural theorists.
In his article “The Myth of Cain: Fratricide, City Building, and Politics,” George M.
Schulman notes important links between the urban tradition of Cain and the development of
modern political theory. He gives special attention to the development of American urbanity,
applying the myth of the two brothers to the sentiment first articulated for the field of American
studies in Philip Fisher’s Hard Facts that: “In America the first losers are the nomadic natives
whom white men call ‘our red brothers’ as they dispossess and slaughter them. America, the
55
proverbial ‘city of the hill,’ the modernizing nation par excellence, is built by Cains on the
graves of Abels.” The caveat that Schulman then makes to this statement is significant, however.
He notes that:
The fratricide makes possible the expansion of the market and the growth of cities
on the coast. In a modernizing country, who Abel is shifts with the development
of productive forces and classes, but always Cain is the exemplar of a
modernizing class against what is represented by Abel . . . Whether as a ruling
class or immigrant builders, Cain represents the historical process of
modernization that destroys the traditional world and creates the city.26
The American city, therefore, is an entity of this same tradition – a concentrated nucleus
of commerce and exchange built out of the unorganized wilderness to combat the inherent
human dread of isolation. With the tradition of the American Eden firmly ensconced in the
mythology of the continent, the emergence of industrial urban centers in the eastern forests,
Midwestern prairies, and Pacific mountains showed that the mark of Cain was not only fixed
upon his brow, but also upon the face of the land.
The Social Context of Steinbeck’s Text
These varying motifs form a significant economic tradition for the story; in modern
terms, Cain is the prototype for the profit-driven, competition-savvy, urban capitalist. God’s
reasoning to Cain, “If you do well, will you not be accepted?”27 echoes ironically in the ear of
free-market economists – there is no guarantee of success, no promise that the market will treat
all offerings with favor.
In American Literature and Social Change, Michael Spindler makes note of how
economic shifts are reflected in the literature of their era. He cites numerous economic studies
on patterns of manufacturing and purchasing among the American public, and divides the
economic history of the country into two phases: production-oriented and consumption-oriented.
The two world wars mark the most significant changes in economic attitudes, with the first war
issuing in the consumption-oriented phase and the second war solidifying its place developing it
into full-blown consumerism. Spindler notes:
H.T. Oshima has shown that in the American economy of the post-First World
War period producer or fixed-asset production ceased to dominate the total
production of durables and structures, and was replaced as the leading
characteristic of the economy by the formation of consumer assets, that is, the
purchasing of dwellings and durables by households corresponding respectively
56
to the purchase of factories and machinery by business. In his conclusions he
propounded the view that this development of the consumer sector was “a natural
outcome of the maturation of the business sector of the capitalist economy.”28
War was not the only aspect of social change that spurred on such a shift, however.
Certain well-timed industrial innovations, such as Ford’s introduction of the assembly line in
automobile manufacturing in 1914 greatly increased output, decreased cost, and made a previous
luxury far more-accessible to the average person. As Spindler points out, the changes in the
automobile industry (as it could now justly be termed) was a catalyst for a major shift, since it
sparked an across-the-board increase in demand for “capital goods such as steel and heavy
machinery and [promised] rich possibilities for capital absorption.”29
This new-found factory efficiency gave America the edge it needed to enjoy an industrial
explosion when war broke out in Europe. Though the country remained politically neutral for
several more years, its production sympathies were certainly aligned with the British and French.
Between 1914 and 1915, for example, the dollar amount of foreign exports jumped from
$34,895,123 to $52,410,857. As the war progressed, the imports to allied nations continued to
rise, while imports to Germany and Austria-Hungary tapered drastically. By the end of the war in
1918, the amount of American foreign exports was up to $81,059,314 annually.30 American
industrialization was an unquestioned beneficiary of the war as the national production and
exportation continued to develop.
The gain was not all to be had in the manufacturing sector, either. Both private and
government-sponsored purchasing agents poured into America from Britain, seeking to buy
anything from grain to vegetables to meat in order to provide rations for troops. The demand, of
course, drove the prices up as American farmers found a new market desirous of large quantities.
The politically savvy anticipated such a buying trend, and made speculative investments as well
as handsome profits. There was criticism among some camps for this corporate and individual
war-time profiteering, but as the American government was not yet involved in the conflict, most
people regarded these actions merely as business ventures.
With America’s entrance into the conflict in 1917, however, the market was facing
another set of demands. This was to be the first large-scale foreign war for the United States –
the Spanish-American War had been fought much closer to home than France, and was far more
limited in its troop engagement. As recruiting stations and draft boards sprang up around the
57
country, so too did the country’s own demand for a non-perishable, easily transported food
supply. Agricultural centers with a favorable climate and extended growing season were
especially well-positioned to meet this demand. Even California could enter the fray because of
the efficiency of the transcontinental rail system, which could move a shipment of freight from
the edge of the Pacific to the docks of the Atlantic (and from there, onto to Europe) in less than a
week. The shifts in agricultural production markedly changed the west coast, including the
Salinas Valley, Steinbeck’s own beloved home.
The dramatic (and rather sudden) upswing in the American economy had another effect
on the national psyche – the conflict of socialist labor parties and capitalist business owners that
was sweeping Europe was threatening to make in-roads in the United States, as well. Those
individuals who had profited during the war years, according to the argument, had only done so
on the backs of the common worker and why should one man prosper while another starves?
The result of this unsettlement was a series of violent strikes and socialist demands, more
ideologically and politically forceful than those that had occurred at the close of the nineteenth
century.
In 1919, nearly one fifth of American workers were striking in protest of the economic
injustice that free market policies seemed to perpetuate.31 The shift in America’s economic
orientation was a change that sparked the fear of rejection under the capitalist system.
The Novel
In 1952, John Steinbeck released a quasi-autobiographical novel which narrated an
imagined history of his hometown, and in which a young Steinbeck himself appears as a minor
character. East of Eden, whose title makes clear its intentions to stand as a re-figuration of the
story of Cain, traces the movements of a family from immediately after the Civil War to their
settlement in the Salinas Valley at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is here that the lives
of the aptly-named twins, Aaron (Aron) and Caleb (Cal), and their father Adam Trask, weave
into the American narrative of growth and struggle, and culminate in the cultural upheaval of the
First World War.
The story the novel tells, as the narrator insists throughout the text, is not a new one. The
emotional realities are an inherent part of human nature and the ancient ties are part of a
memory-based inheritance genetically imprinted upon the human psyche. When the book’s
homegrown philosopher, Samuel Hamilton, arrives at the farm (at the summons of the Trask
58
family servant, Lee) to assist the abandoned Adam with the naming of his sons, he makes the
wry suggestion of naming them after the Bible’s first sons, Cain and Abel:
Adam said, “No, we can’t do that.”
‘I know we can’t. That would be tempting whatever fate there is. But
isn’t it odd that Cain is maybe the best-known name in the world and as far as I
know only one man has ever borne it?”
Lee said, “Maybe that’s why the name never changed its emphasis.”32
The discussion centers around the ancient brothers because the three men cannot seem to
reconcile the obsession of the human race with such a violent and terrible story. Adam,
emerging from his depression and engaging actively in conversation for the first time in a year
voices his own frustration with the story: “I remember being a little outraged at God. Both Cain
and Abel gave what they had, and God accepted Abel and rejected Cain . . . Why did God
condemn Cain? That’s an injustice.”33 The men can find no motivation for God’s actions in the
biblical text, and Lee makes the following observation about the story’s appeal through the
universal frustration of perceived rejection:
“Of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the
hearer he will not listen. And here I make a rule – a great and lasting story is
about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting – only
the deeply personal and familiar.”
Samuel said, “Apply that to the Cain-Abel story.”
And Adam said, “I didn’t kill my brother – “Suddenly he stopped and his
mind went reeling back in time.
“I think I can,” Lee answered Samuel. “I think this is the best-known
story in the world because it is everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of
the human soul. I’m feeling my way now – don’t jump on me if I’m not clear.
The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell
he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection.
And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge
for the rejection, and with the crime, guilt – and there is the story of mankind. I
think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is.
Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself there would not
be many jails. It is all there – the start, the beginning. One child, refused the love
he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; another steals so that money
will make him loved; and a third conquers the world – and always the guilt and
revenge and more guilt. The human is the only guilty animal. Now wait!
Therefore I think this old and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the
soul – the secret, rejected, guilty soul. Mr. Trask, you said you did not kill your
brother and then you remembered something. I don’t want to know what it was,
but was it very far apart from Cain and Abel?”34
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The motif of acceptance versus rejection comes to fruition in the lives of the twins at
climax of the novel, when Cal proudly presents to Adam the forty thousand dollars he has saved
through poker bets and savvy investments. He expects his father to be thrilled that the family
fortune, which was lost in a bad business venture, can now be restored. Instead, Adam is
repelled by the offer, since most of it resulted from war-time profiteering in vegetable sales. He
tells his son:
“I don’t want it ever. I would have been so happy if you could have given me –
well, what you’re brother has – pride in the thing he’s doing, gladness in his
progress. Money, even clean money, doesn’t stack up with that . . . Have I made
you angry, son? Don’t be angry. If you want to give me a present – give me a
good life. That would be something I could value.”
In Steinbeck’s story, the murder of Abel is less direct than the biblical account – Cal
reveals to his seminarian brother that their mother Kate is the madam of a local cat house. This
action prompts Aron, out of shame and disgust, to enlist in the army and head to his death on the
front lines of Europe. In the days following Aron’s secret enlistment, Adam asks Cal why his
brother has not been home; Cal replies in the timeless words of Cain: “How do I know? . . . Am I
supposed to look after him?” It is only after this exchange that Cal then makes his burnt
offering, as “he lifted one of the crisp bills, creased it down the middle so that it made an angle,
and then he scratched a match under his desk and lighted the bill. The heavy paper curled and
blackened, the flame ran upward . . . He stripped odd another bill and lightened it.”35 Rejected
by his father for a reason he cannot comprehend and tormented by the jealousy and hatred he
does not wish to feel against his brother, Cal must face the same emotional punishment of Cain.
The difference is that Cal has no Land of Nod into which he can retreat.
America is already east of Eden – the territory of the rejected and the criminal, the
ambitious and the industrious builder of cities. And for those who came to America and still
sought to wander, they had a whole continent before them in which to do so, until they hit
California and ran out of land. The Cains of Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley have no retreat save for
their own souls and their continued struggles in the world. Adam’s final word of “Timshel”
reiterates in Hebrew the theme of the novel and the imperative of God to Cain that though “sin is
lurking at the door . . . you must master it.”36 The men and women of America’s post-World
War One society were faced with this same challenge – how to master the workings of a system
that surrounds and dominates them, yet seems set against them.
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The Social Context of Miller’s Text
A generation after America’s first major shift from a production to consumption-based
economy, Steinbeck was able to reflect on the change, and detect in it the ancient strains of
humanity’s own labor against the seemingly-fickle dominant powers. His hindsight was
probably triggered, at least in part, by the final vaulting into what Spindler terms the
“consumption-oriented phase of the American economy.”37
In the years immediately following the Second World War, a new social awareness of
economic confidence had spread among the American middle class, and that class was growing.
Close to sixty percent of the American population now fell under this classification, and the
average household income grew by nearly 300% from the beginning of the war to 1955. In The
American Century, Harold Evans notes these statistics as part of the dramatic upswing of
American fortunes and adds, “America, with 6 percent of the world’s population was consuming
one third of the world’s goods and services. But at that same time 6 percent was making no less
than two thirds of the world’s manufactures.”38
In 1947, former Navy Seabee and veteran of the Pacific theatre Bill Levitt launched the
first of the building projects that were to bear his name, build his fortune, and change the face of
the American landscape. Each home promised 800 square feet of living space, modern
appliances like refrigerators and washing machines, and the comfortable lifestyle of the new
American middle class – all for under $7000. Mortgages were offered and special loans were
made available specifically for returning servicemen. Levittowns appeared in New York,
Pennsylvania, and eventually even in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, and there were similar
projects popping up elsewhere across the country. Evans notes that, “some 13 million homes
were bought in the decade after 1948.”39 Suburban consumer bliss was born.
“Fuelled at first by large personal savings accumulated during the war years,” Spindler
writes, “the consumer boom of the late 1940s established those features of a consumer society
which emerged during the 1920s in a much larger scale.”40 As resources such as rubber and
plastic were freed from rationing restrictions, industrial output and mass production capabilities
could transfer from wartime necessities to items that were erstwhile luxuries such as automobiles
and children’s toys.
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It is not merely the physical presence of wealth that directed this shift, however, but the
recently-acquired national confidence in American exceptionalism and the developing
dichotomy of capitalism versus communism that created a new divide between “us” and “them”
in the years immediately following World War Two. Fascism was eradicated in Europe by the
combined efforts of the Allies and their home-front. But now a different kind of enemy loomed
and the foreseeable battleground would be an ideological rather than physical one. The socialist
trend had been contained to the radical fringes in America but its rally in the years following the
First World War remained a political fear.
It is in this context that Arthur Miller’s first major production, All My Sons (1947), made
its Broadway debut. A professional and commercial success, it explored a crumbling family
facing an ethical dilemma as they face the capitalist conundrum of war-time profiteering and
letting go of the past. It is in his second play, Death of a Salesman (1949) – which, ironically, is
usually considered to be a character piece rather than a social commentary – that Miller tackles
some of the deeper issues of the free market economy. For this reason, Spindler labels Salesman
as a play about “Consumer man in crisis”41 but the conflict is much deeper, and older, than
American capitalism.
The Play
The broken myth of the American bucolic ideal had become apparent – the
manufacturing boom during the war years had firmly established urban industrialism as the wave
of the future. The Great Depression of the 1930s effectively marked the end of the independent
American agriculturalist, as family farms and ranches were abandoned out of necessity or
repossessed by force. The pre-war industrialism and post-war affluence only sealed the fate of
the rural, pastoral existence that had been a staple of the American vision since its inception and
created in its place the new promise of consumer- and competition-driven happiness. As
Spindler writes, “The spirit of independence and self-reliance declined and a hierarchical status
system created an anxiety-producing interpersonal assessment of social worth.”42
Throughout his career, critics hailed Miller as the poet of the common people in pursuit
of the elusive American Dream: the voice of the middle-class, self-made man who questions the
very self he made; the conscience of the working man who just wanted to keep up with the
proverbial Joneses. It was in his concern for the state of the American everyman that Miller
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found another archetypical figure as the most compelling source for inspiration – two figures, in
fact: Cain and Abel.
Miller often alluded to the story of these brothers in his writings. Many critics saw
strains of the ancient conflict in his play The Price, with the fraternal conflict between Victor and
Walter; others found it in After the Fall, in Quentin’s struggles with guilt and responsibility; and
Miller addressed this theme very literally in his rarely-studied and critically-panned 1972 play,
Creation of the World and Other Business. We see his interest in the figures of Cain and Abel in
his non-dramatic writings, as well, such as when Miller specifically evokes Cain’s question of
“Am I my Brother’s Keeper?” in his essay of the same title, in which he questions his own place
as a pacifist American Jew during the Holocaust. Miller often remarked that he regarded the
Genesis account of Cain and Abel as the “first real story” because it involved choice,
responsibility, morality, and purely human conflict.43 There is little question that elements of the
story are present in several of his works, but I propose that we can see him begin to explore the
motif in several of his earlier works, perhaps most notably, in his 1949 masterpiece, Death of a
Salesman.
An initial reading of Salesman in this light reveals a number of fairly obvious parallels.
There is fraternal competition and paternal anger; men make offerings and cultivate jealousy.
And there are character parallels. For example, Biff, like Cain, is a wanderer who has left home
after his father hurts him. Yet despite his searching and inner turmoil, we are hopeful that Biff
will be successful in the end by leaving the city and its meaningless pursuits behind him. We see
a further connection to Cain through the character of Ben, who has also rejected the city and the
penny-pinching existence that it offers and has become a wanderer himself, roaming everywhere
from Alaska to Africa and leaving a trail of financial successes in his wake. And Willy, like
Abel, conveniently dies.
But upon deeper examination, this premise seems flawed; it is a far too simplified
application of the Cain and Abel motif – a reading based upon elements rather than themes. Yes,
Biff certainly wanders, but why? And what is he doing while he wanders? And there is
definitely jealousy, but on whose part? And while there was the requisite pair (or pairs) of
brothers, is that really where the deepest conflict lies?
While it is certainly not intended to be an obvious allusion, the story of Cain and Abel is
unquestionably present in Death of a Salesman, but it is not evoked in any kind of predictable
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way. To read through it, one can still understand the underlying tragedy and overreaching moral
of the text; but to read in light of it, one can come to appreciate those same themes in a new and
slightly different manner.
The initial obstacle is establishing and justifying the identities of the two main characters:
just who are Salesman’s Cain and Abel? As numerous scholars of Miller’s work have pointed
out, the play is truly Willy’s, shared occasionally by Biff. The other characters are obviously
important, but it is the interaction between Willy and Biff and the internal conflict that Willy
faces alone that ultimately give Salesman its Aristotelian-decreed plot movement. It is therefore
upon these two characters that the roles of Cain and Abel are projected.
It is true that it may seem a bit of a stretch to connect the relationship of father and son
with that of two brothers – especially when there are several sets of brothers already present in
Salesman. However, the parallel does not seem as unlikely when one considers that the conflict
between the two men is not rooted so much in their relationship of father and son as in their
differing views of what is an acceptable role for a man in the world of business, and according to
Willy, “the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal
interest, is the man who gets ahead.”44 It is in their relationship to the professional world that
they are paired, and I shall discuss this issue further below.
At the moment, however, let us first consider Biff in the role of Abel. Abel, of course, is
the favorite son who works with livestock. His ultimate demise is important, too, of course, but
it is his notable aspects while living that make the most obvious connection to Biff, because Biff,
too, is the favorite son, the golden boy who can do no wrong in his father’s eyes. Even when he
steals a football from the high school and cheats on his homework, Willy (as the doting father)
encourages Biff rather than punishes him. Willy does not reject the lesser son, Happy, but he
does not praise him in the same way. As an adult, Biff further embodies the character of Abel by
working on a ranch, in animal husbandry, a profession his father sharply contradicts not once,
but twice.
Turning to the character of Willy it is his hubris – his pride and capacity for envy – that,
like Cain, provides his primary characterization. His perceived inadequacy haunts him, as does
his lack of acceptance, and it is this that drives him to kill. And as a kind of final nudge to the
audience regarding Willy’s archetypical identity, we see at the play’s climax his sudden desire to
plant a garden. The last time that we see Willy alive, he is in the backyard, cultivating a
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vegetable patch in a clear visual link to the first gardener, Cain, and an obvious contrast to his
cattle rancher son.
It is important, too, to take note of the tradition from which Willy comes. His father, as
Ben tells us, “was a very great and very wild-hearted man. We would start in Boston, and he’d
toss the whole family into the wagon and then he’d drive the team right across the country;
through Ohio and Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and all the Western states. And we’d stop in the
towns and sell the flutes that he’d made on the way.”45 It is possible that through the unseen
character of Willy’s father, Miller is tapping into the stereotype of the Jewish peddler, a solitary
figure who is forced to roam about the country side – ever entering into the community but never
accepted as a part of it. And now, though Willy feels the encroaching city is trapping him, he is
no more stationary as an adult than he was as a child, because Willy, too, has accepted his
inheritance in the more modern form of the proverbial “traveling salesman.”
Post-War America was certainly a hospitable climate for such a profession. Spindler
notes that in the late 1940s, “recruitment into white-collar occupations and the service trade
continued to increase, as selling became a pervasive activity directly involving over three million
people, some 38 percent of whom were mobile salesmen.”46
By embracing the rules of this figure, by immersing himself in this archetypical role,
Willy has marked himself symbolically just as God placed a mark upon Cain, which denotes him
as a wanderer, a traveler in the liminal reaches of society – a part of, but apart from, all he
encounters. We see the adherence of this label when Willy approaches Howard to ask for a
position in New York. “You’re a road man, Willy” Howard tells him. “And we do road
business.”47 Howard is right when he tells Willy that there is no place for him in New York –
Willy, like Cain, is destined to wander.
The irony, of course, is that New York is no Eden. The stage directions demonstrate that
the cityscape is dominating, immense, and inescapable; and like his ancient counterpart, Willie is
living in a world that is already fallen and his work is already cursed, so while he may travel long
distances from his family, he has never known a Paradise of rest and permanence. Nevertheless,
his travels stand as a kind of banishment from the now-gone happiness of his home circle. He
must work to pay the mortgage and the home repairs, and he must travel to work. Again, like
Cain, Willy has only ever known labor, and it is this that he offers up…but to whom? Just who
is God in this post-Lapsarian America?
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Miller’s cynical answer is, of course, the American economy – the overarching force that
has created a new morality and affluence, which has in turn created a new breed of human: the
American businessman. Ben tells Biff, “Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get
out of the jungle that way.”48 As Spindler points out, “‘Jungle’ is used here, of course, as the
stock Social Darwin metaphor for the city under laissez-faire capitalism.”49 In this view then, is
Willy’s offering of an urbanized, salesman’s life not a more pleasing gift to the deity of
Capitalism? Is not pursuit of wealth the new worship of the new god in the post-war American
prosperity? Would not Willy, then, be the son upon whom Fortune would smile, while rejecting
Biff’s outdated, and painfully obsolete offering of agricultural labor? Is Willy not truly the
favorite son of our new American religion?
It is with this very conclusion that Miller convicts both his characters and his audience:
this may be a fallen world, but God is still God and no man-made economy – no matter how farreaching or universally dominant – can replace ultimate truth. Transcendent of time and place, a
simple existence enjoying nature and quiet contentedness is still a purer form of truth than a dogeat-dog, nickel-and-diming-it-to-pay-for-luxuries kind of life. Biff and Hap demonstrate this
conflict in their first scene. Biff admits that he is afraid that his work on the ranches is a waste
because it’s not “makin’ my future.” Helplessly, he turns to his brother and asks:
Biff: Are you content, Hap? You’re a success aren’t you?
Hap: Hell no!
Biff: Why? You’re making money, aren’t you?
Happy (moving about with energy, expressiveness): All I can do now is wait for
the merchandise manager to die. And suppose I get to be the merchandise
manager? He’s a good friend of mine, and he just built a terrific estate on
Long Island. And he lived there about two months and sold it, and now
he’s building another one. He can’t enjoy it once it’s finished. And I know
that’s just what I would do. I don’t know what the hell I’m working for.
Sometimes I sit in my apartment – all alone. And I think of the rent I’m
paying. And it’s crazy. But then, it’s what I always wanted. My own
apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I’m lonely.50
Mammon may be king in this fallen world, but it is not and cannot replace God, though
the American business man may now self-deify his own figure into the angelic purveyor of Wall
Street’s blessings by viewing himself in the role of Provider rather than at the mercy of the One
who Provides. Men may lose sight of Truth, but that does not alter or destroy it in any way.
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It is Biff therefore, who, like Abel, is the one who makes the offering most pleasing to the
Lord. Because this is a fallen world, the offering must be made in the form of work – but Willy
has misunderstood the rules. He believes that the offering to be made is in the end result rather
than the effort. While this worldview is not unlike that of Camus’ Sisyphus, consider what Willy
holds as the pinnacle of what his career has to offer: Dave Singleman, a legendary salesman who,
according to Willy:
drummed merchandise in thirty-one states. And old Dave, he’d go up to his
room, y’understand, put on his green velvet slippers – I’ll never forget – and pick
up his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age
of eightyy-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling
was the greatest career a man could want.51
What Willy has misunderstood, however, is that the work of Dave Singleman is not work
– it is profitable leisure, which is a privilege only afforded to those who came before the fall of
man. Consider his last name, after all – Singleman. It was only when Adam was the single man
on earth that he was granted the luxury of self-sufficiency without effort. The introduction of
woman to the world and their subsequent sin, put an end to those days forever. What Willy and
all capitalists seek – a financial windfall as a result of their efforts that can put end to their daily
work – in Miller’s view, is an offer displeasing to God because it denies and defies man’s Godgiven punishment. Working toward a goal of ease, of respite; working for a financial master be
it a mortgage or appliance repair or a car payment, is not a recognition of God’s curse and
sovereignty; working for survival, for sustenance, such as being a farmhand, is an
acknowledgement of the true nature of work and therefore, redemption – because there is
redemption to be found in this world – but not in sales to be made or deals to be closed. Biff has
found it on the ranches out west and Willy, on the brink of madness, seeks it in his vegetable
garden – his return to a simpler time, to a better time.
But the catch is that Biff is a member of a dying breed, after all. Though Willy-as-Cain is
the one who dies in the play, it must also be noted that he is the murderer, too; and Biff-as-Abel
is hardly granted longevity. As has already been established, the plight of the American farmer
was bleak in the post-war era, as a business-based economy had showed itself to be the future of
the country. Willy may not survive, but the profession he embodies – or wishes to – does. And
it is Cain, in the end, who was the city-builder.
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Ultimately, Willy and Cain ask the same pointed question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
But whereas Cain asks this to avoid responsibility for his wasting of a life, Willy asks it in an
attempt to embrace responsibility for his past failures, or as Miller once wrote, “he gave his life,
or sold it, in order to justify the waste of it.”52
In his famous essay “The Salesman has a Birthday,” which commemorates the one-year
anniversary of the play’s opening, Miller writes that: “A time will come when [future
generations] will look back on us astonished that we saw something holy in the competition for
the means of existence.”53 His view of America’s future was not a wholly optimistic one, but
like God’s promise in Genesis to Cain that he possesses the inherent ability to sin, so too does
Miller foresee a time when competition and envy and jealousy will no longer cloud the offerings
humanity puts forth.
Death of a Salesman is ultimately a tragedy not only because it is Willy’s coming to
terms with his own broken life, but because the characters fail to recognize themselves as players
in a kind of farcical Genesis. In this new world, this great American Eden, humanity has
repeated its same tragic story.
Conclusion
Though East of Eden explores the social situation of an earlier era than does Death of a
Salesman, both works reveal a similar sense of economic awareness. Roughly contemporary
texts (Salesman preceded Eden by three years), they express similar anxieties about the current
American situation and the seemingly random successes and failures of the capitalist system.
Though Steinbeck is much more overt about his refiguring of the biblical story of Cain and Abel
than is Miller, the evocation of the myth and the traditions it has accumulated across time and
culture, is significant move in the pattern of mythic rhetoric. The ideas encapsulated by the story
– the fear of failure and rejection – are the inherited memories of countless generations of people
working to survive in the face of seemingly fickle forces.
America is the land of economic freedom – the freedom to profit (as Ben and Cal did)
and freedom to fail (as Willy’s futile selling efforts and Adam’s refrigerated lettuce shipments
did). What both Miller and Steinbeck recognized in the story of Cain and Abel was the same
thing that was Philo and Augustine observed, the medieval playwrights recognized and, (most
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importantly) by the men and women who preserved these ideas and developed them with each
successive political change. The story can represent so much more than simply a blood feud
between brothers. It gives a voice to the ancient and universal struggle for dominance, power,
and security. The curse of an unyielding ground is the same fear that has haunted the selfsufficient in every economic system throughout history.
As Steinbeck reminds us, the story is not new; rather, it repeats itself throughout the
pageant of human history because of our own willing blindness to the Cain that lurks inside of all
of us. Samuel makes note of this fact, observing, “Cain lived and had children, and Abel lives
only in the story. We are Cain’s children.”54 The elimination of Abel did not resolve the
conflict, but instead guaranteed its perpetuity – this is the unfortunate truth that the central
characters of both East of Eden and Death of a Salesman fail to recognize. Competition will
always exist, and those who deny the lessons of the past will ultimately become unwary Cains
projecting their insecurities and anxieties upon unsuspecting Abels.
Even in modern, industrial America the story had a place. Miller and Steinbeck
understood the power of the myth – a power that existed in its ancient and universal themes.
And as the focus of the American identity shifted from its agricultural reliability to its capitalistic
might, these authors sought to resurrect the myth in order to create a connection between their
modern situation and the timeless plight of man. With the help of Miller and Steinbeck, the
figure of Cain – still marked by the guilt of fratricide – reaches across the centuries to offer
fraternity to those who know the frustration of a failed offering and the sting of rejected effort.
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PART TWO:
ADAPTATIONS AND NEGOTIATIONS
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CHAPTER FOUR
Cain, Caliban, and Crow:
The Outcast Speaks
“You taught me language, and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse. The red-plague rid you
For learning me your language!” – Caliban, The Tempest
“I spect you gwan to make a show of me.” – Ginger Blue, The Virginia Mummy
The character of Cain has undergone an incredible series of metamorphoses throughout
the western literary tradition. In Chapter Four we explored the development of the myth of Cain
as it came to have political and economic interpretations in successive retellings of it. The
previous discussion hinged upon the constancy of the story across time and space and its
elemental sameness despite thematic change and differing agendas of the author or commentator.
This chapter is dedicated to the reception of another important facet of Cain’s character – its
changing form as it developed in new traditions separate and apart from its original narrative
context. This study will focus on just one of those manifestations: the character development of
Cain as the vocal other.
As already discussed, the nature of a lore cycle is, in some ways, akin to genetic biology.
The curly hair or violet eyes of an ancestor may not show up in the descendants for several
generations until some undetectable force or a particular combination of triggers re-activates
those traits to re-emerge and speak to an all but forgotten or unrealized link between the
generations. With a lore cycle, those traits come in the form of gestures, images, themes, ideas,
and symbols. Unlike the intentional evocation of myths explored in the previous chapters, these
traits are not consciously invoked and embedded in the text for the sake of fulfilling a specific
agenda. For one thing, these traits are often unrecognizable in their current form, bearing little
resemblance to the original through the convoluted and complicated history of human reception,
usage, interpretation, and elaboration. Secondly, these lore cycles are not incorporations of the
whole: we do not see the full story enacted or a recognizable character re-formed. Instead, they
pull out only certain aspects of the iconography to pass on; they only tug at certain strings rather
than the entire fabric. The selection of these elements may be seemingly arbitrary – perhaps is,
in many cases. But for many of the persistent traits there seems to be a buried justification
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somewhere, an obscure but nevertheless logical connection that explains the pieces of older
stories and figures in later ones that bear no obvious connection.
And finally, these lore cycles are almost always the exclusive domain of vernacular
culture. I would argue against the conventional notion that creative production is the realm of
the leisure class that has the time to devote to a cause other than survival. This may be true to a
degree, but it is hard to examine, say, a collection of African-American spirituals composed in
the cotton fields and slave quarters of antebellum plantations and stand by such an assertion.
Just as there is cultural output that stems from the need to fill a life marked by ease, so too is
there cultural output that emerges in the midst of survival struggles. A text produced by
hegemonic forces historically betrays its own reception awareness and the cultural tradition of
which it is a part and that it helps to continue. That is not to imply that “low” culture is not also
part of a continued chronicle of production, but there are more ambiguities in this family tree
than that of “high art” because the habits of history and advantages of a predominantly written
versus an oral culture have generally only preserved for us the hegemonic cultural lineage.
We will, therefore, be looking at the lore cycle of Cain as it emerges in two very distinct
cultural contexts. The first is in Renaissance England, where the works of William Shakespeare
were revolutionizing the stage and the audiences were a heterogeneous conglomeration of
laborers, middle class, and nobility. The second context is that of the mid-nineteenth century
trans-Atlantic stage, in which blackface minstrelsy was simultaneously re-enforcing the raciallydefined social strata and shaking their very foundations.
Caliban
It may seem a bit of a stretch to classify Shakespeare’s works as “vernacular” when they
are generally held up as the pinnacle of high culture in modern public schools. It is essential to
remember, however, that the Bard was a tradesman with little formal education and no family
connections to the upper crust.
What we must remember, too, is that Shakespeare’s writing was a radical break from
conventional and hegemonic notions in its time. The shift away from strictly liturgical drama in
the early sixteenth century had only strayed so far as moralizing dramas that were less allegorical
than actual church-sanctioned morality plays. Formal stages – not simply ale house platforms –
were a thing only of classical memory. This is a very significant fact, as Gary Taylor points out,
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since the first European theatres built since the decline of Rome were constructed in Madrid in
1575 and in London the following year.1
The niche was new but what was more important, the niche was disruptive. There is no
question that the staging of many medieval morality plays would shock puritanical American
religious sensibilities, but the plays always remained within the watchful eye of the clerical
authorities. Even when the language and gestures veered more towards the Anglo-Saxon and
less toward the Norman-French, they only offered commentary upon the world of sinful human
nature and not upon the hegemonic forces of church and crown. In short, they were both
contained and containable.
We see a very different relationship between the Renaissance dramatists and the sociopolitical forces in control of their society. As Taylor writes, “Literary historians remember,
within the niche of their genres, the playwrights of early modern England because they created
new forms of vernacular drama from classical models and fundamental to the way subsequent
generations conceived of theatre, poetry and personality.”2 At times, the companies were very
much in favor and were graced by the patronage of the Queen and sponsored by various of her
courtiers. At other times, the companies were received less graciously and had to figure out new
ways to adapt to the various new legal sanctions and limitations placed against them. When the
church forbade the performance of any holy rites on stage, dramatists adapted by including such
characters as the Roman wedding-god Hymen or Circe, his female counterpart, to oversee the
festivities, facilitate the union, and encourage procreation. The same actions, ideas, gestures, and
ultimate result were all present but they took a new form in order to keep their cultural carriers
alive.
It is not surprising, then, that we should see something similar occurring in the character
of Caliban. Though his development was clearly not facilitated by any legal restrictions, it is
apparent that his voice incorporates many of the same complaints, motivations, and traits as an
earlier counterpart. It could be argued that Cain serves here as an archetype but he is actually
less – or more – than that. He has provided an array of gestures from which subsequent cultures
have picked and chosen to preserve and incorporate into their own forms. Eventually, the
reproduction is at best only partially aware of its own copying. True to Bourdieu’s concept of
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habitus, it is merely preserving and transmitting the elements of its own context because that is
what it knows.
Shakespeare’s construction of Caliban the Other is no exception.
The Age of Exploration recognized new-found continents and established imperial
colonies, and in so doing prompted a distinct rise in nationalism among the colonizers. The
tendency of European adventurers to record their experiences with foreign people as monstrous
encounters with the antithesis of European ideals was a clearly established precedent by the
Renaissance; as contact with new races, customs, and behaviors increased, so too did an identity
forged from a sense of “what we are not.” Native peoples living outside the confines of western
Christian civilization were regularly accused of human sacrifice, undomesticatable wildness, and
cannibalism. These traits, long-associated with the fiendish children of Cain, became the
conceptual lexicon through which the indigenous people were translated to European minds and
the pattern upon which their Otherness could be portrayed – in other words, the manner in which
the unfamiliar could be made understandable. And the poster child for this issue of cultural
translation who has been at the center of the colonialist debate since at least the eighteenth
century is Caliban, the monstrous native of Shakespeare’s Tempest who mars the otherwise
utopian island that Prospero claims.
This intriguing character, whose name is clearly an anagram for “cannibal” is clearly
part of this trend of Othering the native. Shakespeare takes pains to assure the audience that
Caliban is certainly no human but rather, a “freckled whelp, hag-born[,] not honor’d with/A
human shape” whose mother was “This damn’d witch Sycorax.” Despite the best efforts of the
politically dominant Prospero and Miranda to assimilate the creature into their civilized world by
teaching him to speak human language, Caliban bitterly remarks, “My profit on’t/Is, I know how
to curse.”3
Quinones asserts that the attributes of isolation, cannibalism, cursing, physical
deformity, and demonic patronage all point to Caliban as a direct literary descendant of Cain. He
further notes, “although he has no brother, he nevertheless figures prominently in Shakespeare’s
last great brother drama, The Tempest, where his function, like Cain’s, is once again to disturb
visions of community and harmony.”4 Quinones is right to label The Tempest as a “brother
drama” but his failure to elaborate upon the idea leaves an important point undiscussed – the
motif of fraternal violence driven by jealousy. Such an act is, in fact, the precipitating event for
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the action of the play. It was Antonio’s unsuccessful attempt to steal the Dukedom by killing his
brother Prospero and Prospero’s infant daughter Miranda by starvation/drowning in a leaky and
provision-less vessel that causes the still-living Prospero to conjure up the storm that washes up
Alonso and the rest of the ship’s passengers onto the shores of the magician’s island home in
order to enact revenge and to restore the divinely-ordained order of things. Antonio proves that
twelve years have not changed his nature when he convinces Sebastian to kill his own brother in
order to obtain his title, lands, and power. The rivalry is not confined to the human players,
either. Though the spirit Ariel was the servant and not the son of Caliban’s mother Sycorax, the
two have nevertheless found themselves as rivals for Prospero’s benevolence and power upon his
assumption of the island. Though sometimes a bit audacious, Ariel is the dutiful lackey of their
new master, promptly does his bidding, and willingly offers his services for exploitation
according to Prospero’s plans. Caliban, however, is the grudging servant who curses his master
and challenges his authority:
As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed
With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen
Drop on you both! A south-west blow on ye,
And blister you all o’er! . . .
This island is mine by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me.
. . . All the charms
Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats light upon you!
For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king.5
With rivalry and revenge oozing from the motives of so many characters, it is difficult to
ignore the thematic ties to the same undercurrent in the Cain and Abel legend.6 Indeed, despite
some thematic links and perhaps a veneration of Cain’s character on Caliban’s part, one would
be hard-pressed to argue that Caliban is intended to be read as a Cain figure. He offers no
scorned sacrifice – in fact, the offering he does make of his island home is accepted far too
readily by Prospero; he plans a murder for Stephano to carry out but the act is never committed;
he is never cast away from society and never wanders – rather, as Prospero reminds him, he is
“Deservedly confin’d into this rock;”7 he curses more than he is cursed; and he certainly never
builds a city. The link to his mythic predecessor is simply not one of story or of character.
Instead, the connections that we sense between Cain and Caliban are the elements of a
lore cycle still weaving its way in and out of human awareness. He was not written as a Cain-
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figure in the sense that he is espousing the archetypal form. Instead, he merely incorporates
various features of Cain that have been remembered and transmitted with associated ideas, and
emerged in the mind of an author who recombined these elements into a new and distinct figure.
The memory that he represents is not one of thematic ties – the commonalities are incidental
ones that abound in western literature. Rather, it is the memory of traits.
We see that Caliban is prone to disruption and defiance of order. We acknowledge that
he is the firstborn of the island who knows its lands and possesses a sense of birthright as well as
indignancy. We witness his rage and his defiance and we (as a modern audience, at least)
recognize his anger at an unexplained injustice as warranted. In this we see elements of many
stories and figures. But it is in Caliban’s monstrosity that we see Cain.
While the narrative in Genesis states that Cain was the first born of post-lapsarian sexual
union between Adam and Eve, one of the foundational elements of Cain’s later literary forms is
the tradition that he was the son of Satan or a high-ranking hellion rather than of Adam. This
tradition was developed first in Jewish folklore, but was readily absorbed into Christian beliefs
as well, probably because it not only helped to defame an already unsympathetic character but
also because it furthers the image of Eve as morally debased, if not a temptress. In recording the
Rabbinic roots of this legend Oliver Emerson points out that the assertion is made explicitly in a
number of rabbinic writings.8 He even cites an important passage from Legends of the
Patriarchs and Prophets by Baring-Goulds, which was originally published in 1881. In giving
voice to the ancient Hebrew legends of the first murderer, the authors write: “According to some
Rabbis, all good souls are derived from Abel, and all bad souls from Cain. Cain’s soul was
derived from Satan, his body alone from Eve; for the evil spirit Samael according to some, Satan
according to others, deceived Eve and thus Cain was the son of the evil one.”9
Friedman makes the point, as well, stressing in his comprehensive study Monstrous
Races:
Rabbinic tradition . . . developed a suitably evil lineage for Cain. Whereas
Genesis tells us simply that Cain was the firstborn of Adam and Eve, the Zohar, a
thirteenth century collection of midrashim, explains the difference between the
two sons of Adam as follows: “When the serpent injected his impurity into Eve,
she absorbed it, and so when Adam had intercourse with her, she bore two sons –
one from the impure side and one from the side of Adam . . . Hence it was that
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their ways of life were different . . From [Cain] originate all the evil habitations
and demons and goblins and evil spirits in the world.”10
Emerson points out that belief in Cain’s demonic origins may even appear in Christian
traditions quite early with the first recorded instance possibly occurring in the Christian New
Testament, where the author of I John writes, “We must not be like Cain who was from the evil
one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil
and his brother’s were righteous.”11 While never a mainstream element of orthodox beliefs, the
idea that Cain was the progeny of Satan became an accepted part of some of the early heterodox
sects. Whether a literal child of the devil himself or merely the first recipient of tainted human
seed, the figure of Cain is generally portrayed as an inherently evil figure forever in need of
grace but always keeping himself removed from its reaches.
We see this same origin assigned to Caliban. Whether meant literally or merely as
exasperated hyperbole, Prospero often reminds the monster that he was “got by the Devil himself
upon thy wicked Dam” and remarks to himself that Caliban is “A devil, a born devil on whose
nature/Nurture can never stick.”12 Demonic origin, an essential part of later Cain legends, is also
a defining trait of Caliban’s supposed physical, mental, and emotional nature, rendering him
depraved and presumably beyond the reaches of any kind of social or spiritual redemption.
The physical malformation can also stem from another source than demonic parentage.
There was a hugely popular medieval belief that the mark God placed on Cain was one of
monstrosity that would be passed to each successive generation, resulting in a race or multiple
races of grotesque creatures, all the posterity of Cain. Friedman asserts that “In the course of
time, apocryphal accounts of his legend added many features that made him an ideal ancestor for
the monstrous races in hostile Christian treatments. They stressed Cain’s violent nature, his
association with the devil, and his degradation from human status, often figured by his ugliness
or physical deformity.”13 These bodily afflictions ranged from such demonic iconography as red
eyes or horns to physical maladies or monstrous characteristics resulting in sub-human forms.
Among the English traditions, the most notable discussion occurs in the text of Beowulf,
as the narrator describes the physical deformity placed upon Cain that resulted in a monstrous
nature that is perpetuated through his offspring. As the monster descends upon the banquet hall,
the scop tells us:
So times were pleasant for the people there
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until finally one, a fiend out of hell,
began to work his evil in the world.
Grendel was the name of this grim demon
haunting the marshes, marauding round the heath
and desolate fends; he had dwelt for a time
in misery among the banished monsters,
Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed
and condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel
the Eternal Lord had exacted a price:
Cain got no good from committing that murder
because the Almighty made him anathema
and out of the curse of his exile there sprang
ogres and elves and evil phantoms
and the giants too who strove with God.14
It is from this miserable land that Grendel hails, and later in the text, as his mother plans
her own attack, the audience is reminded:
Grendel’s mother,
monstrous hell-bride, brooded on her wrongs.
She had been forced down into fearful water,
the cold depths, after Cain had killed
his father’s son, felled his own brother
with a sword. Branded an outlaw,
marked by having murdered, he moved
into the wilds, shunned company and
joy. And from Cain there sprang
misbegotten spirits, among them Grendel
the banished and accursed.15
There is some debate as to whether these sections belong in the original text of the epic
due to their obvious Christian influences, but the outcome of such a debate is not significant for
this discussion, as the presence of such passages clearly indicates that the beliefs were in
existence and were being disseminated through the scops.
In 1290, we see clear evidence of Cain’s connection with cannibalistic peoples in the
English imagination in the creation of the Hereford world map. “Cain’s descendants, who retain
his cannibal tendency,” Friedman writes, “are shown on the Hereford world map, where the
author places the Anthropophagi in northeast Asia. Their legend reads, ‘Here are exceedingly
truculent men, eating human flesh, drinking blood, cursed sons of Cain.’” Friedman asserts that
the Cain-as-cannibal tradition seems most likely to stem from the same passage of Vita Adae et
Evae as discussed in this work in chapter four. Here, as Eve dreams of watching Cain consume
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the blood of Abel, there is a clear cannibalistic overtone with no explanation offered, which
leaves little room for doubt that the Vita simply recorded an older tradition into a tangible form.16
Cain’s presence as the father-of-monsters is present in another medieval figure, the Wild
Man. This character also traces its roots back to the early Christian era, when hermits and
desert-sages were often described to have gone so far in their desire to separate from the vanity
of the world and sinfulness of man that they traded their civilized way of life for an
undomesticated, almost animalistic one. In the Middle Ages, however, the wild man figure took
on a different significance. As the tradition developed, he came to be viewed as a hairy creature,
encrusted in leaves, mud, moss, and other forest trappings. He separated himself from society
and, as Timothy Husband points out, “lived only in places unfit for human habitation, in fens and
woods, in water and in mountains, in caves and in bushes.” His choice of habitat was not the
only thing that made the wild man an outcast. Husband continues:
By every account the wild man’s behavior matched his primitive surrounding.
Strong enough to uproot trees, he was violent and aggressive, not only against
wild animals but also against his own kind. His brutish, contentious nature
expressed itself in a natural combativeness against which neither beast nor man
was equal, though his club – and sometimes only his bare hands – was his only
weapon . . . By many accounts, the wild man also indulged in cannibalism. By
the sixteen century this habit brought him into association with werewolves and
other flesh-eaters . . . Incapable of speech, the wild man muttered only
unintelligible sounds or none at all.17
Still a real and developing concept in the early Renaissance, Shakespeare clearly drew
upon the wild man tradition for the creation of Caliban. The alleged cannibalism has already
been established, but we see connections in other traits, as well. Friedman points out that in the
Lebor Balála, a twelfth century Irish text pertaining to Biblical expansion and national history,
God afflicts Cain with large lumps about his head and body, then he: “dwelt, a wild fugitive, in
the eastern border of the land called Eden.”18 In this tradition, the city-builder trope is lost and
Cain becomes, instead, the prototypical wild man. Perhaps more intriguing is the presence of the
club, significant in that it was a part of the iconography of the wild man and a visual connection
to the figure of Cain. Also forced to live outside of societal boundaries, Cain shares the
iconographic symbol of the club as a reminder of his violent murder. Friedman concurs,
pointing out that a number of monstrous figures were depicted wielding such a weapon in
medieval bestiaries, providing a visual link to Cain who either used a club proper or fashioned
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the previously mentioned ass’ jawbone into a club of opportunity.19 Caliban himself possesses
no such weapon in Shakespeare’s script – it may be inferred that Prospero disarmed him or even
that the presence of a club would provide too much of a visual connection between such a prop
for Caliban and Prospero’s ubiquitous staff. It cannot be ignored, however, that when Caliban
describes to Stephano the best way to kill the magician, he opens with the suggestion of
bludgeoning, stating: “[t]hou mayst brain him,/Having first seize’d his books; or with a
log/Batter his skull.”20
Significant, too, are the speech patterns exhibited by this feral creature. Like Caliban, the
wild man possesses no inherent language. In fact, human speech was a trait often noted as
conspicuously absent from the various monstrous peoples of the world.21 The reason for this
lack of rational verbal communication could extend back to Cain, as well. According to the
Genesis account, following their transgression, Adam and Eve admit their sin to God and
wordlessly accept their punishment from him. When confronted with his sin, Cain talks back to
God, offering the defiant statement, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and then protests his
punishment and bewails his fate.22 Such an audacious use of language must surely have struck
ancient apologists. It is not surprising, therefore, to see that later descendants of Cain who have
been stripped of their humanity have correspondingly been stripped of their ability to speak.
When Caliban is schooled in the tongue of his colonizer, we witness at first just the
rudimentary uses of it for the sake of snarling curses and subversive epitaphs. As the play
progresses, however, we see Caliban emerge as the true artist of the play as he seizes control of
the action through his poetic recitations and wondering observations, such as when he famously
enjoins his companions:
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked,
I cried to dream again.23
This ironic turn is one of the most commonly-discussed aspects of this play, especially by
post-colonial critics. Through the domination of the character of Caliban, according to this
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critical approach, we see the eventual triumph of the subjugated peoples. He turns the language
of the conqueror upon his enemy and uses his mastery of it to undermine the power structure
which the language set into place. And in the end, it is only those who were native-born
speakers of the language that leave the island; the Other has regained the land of his inheritance.
Like Cain, however, his history is never told in the original version of the story and must only be
supposed as it is usurped by the life of the new favored son, Seth.
Even if this reading is an anachronistic interpretation of the events of the play, it
nevertheless strikes upon the important point of language as a weapon of power and of
subversion. Further, it introduces the important question of race. Clearly, there are certain
cultural anxieties present in The Tempest. Caliban as a monstrous native is certainly one;
Sebastian’s criticism of Alonso’s marriage choice for his daughter is another. “Sir, you may
thank yourself for this great loss,” Sebastian remarks. “That would not bless our Europe with
your daughter,/But rather loose her to an African.”24
Race in Society
The issue of racial difference is an undercurrent in much of the literature of the British
Isles, especially in the later Middle Ages and early modern period. The concept of “race”
however, was a far more muddled category than one would suppose by its modern definition.
The mutated humanoids of distant lands celebrated in sensationalized and highly imaginative
writing were often termed as “races;” conversely, dark-skinned peoples were often considered
“monstrous” variations on the human design. A commonality that connects many of these
descriptions is the attribution of the grotesque elements to biblical figures, and most commonly,
to the curse of Cain.
Most scholars now concur that the European etiology of the foreign-ized Cain is actually
the result of either intentional or unintentional interpolation of the curse of Cain onto the curse of
Noah’s disrespectful son Ham, as recounted in Genesis nine. In this pronouncement, Noah
condemns Ham and his descendants: “lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers”25 – a
pronouncement that situates this story a brother drama, as well. The following narration, which
gives account of the genealogy of Noah’s posterity, attributes to Ham the people of Cush
[Ethiopia], Egypt, Put [North Africa], and Canaan.”26 These genealogies were the source of the
tradition that of the sons of Noah, Japheth was the father of the European peoples, Shem of the
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Asiatic ones, and Ham of the Africans. “Cham” (as Ham’s name was often spelled in medieval
texts) and “Chaym” (as Cain’s name was often written, among other creative spellings) could
easily have been mistaken for one another in transcription or commentary error, a confusion
further complicated by the thematic similarity between the cursing of a disobedient son.
Whether the blending of the two traditions was deliberate or not, most scholars agree that it
occurred and offered the impetus for later traditions, most notably that the enigmatic mark of
Cain was the black skin of African peoples.
Friedman explains the early evidence that such a blending of characters occurred
and reflected racial anxieties, asserting:
[J]ust as Ham and Cain were linked by the orthography of their names, they were
also identified by both receiving a father’s curse.
Ham’s curse connected him particularly with the Ethiopians, called the
“dun-coloured one-footed people” in the [medieval] Rawlinson treatise. Perhaps
the most sweeping account of the curse, and the one that reveals most strikingly
the deeply rooted and early hostility toward black men on the part of Arab
geographers, occurs in the work of the eleventh-century traveler Ibihim ben Wasif
Sah. Entitled the Abregeg des merveilles by its modern editor, this work reports
that Noah cursed Ham by asking God that all his reprobate son’s descendents be
black and that they be the servants of Shem’s children in the future. Giving a
vivid portrait of Ham’s son Nimrod as having black skin, red eyes, a deformed
body, and horns on his forehead, he concludes that Nimrod the hunter was the
first black man after the Flood.27
This mistaken belief was already viewed as justification for the enslavement of the darker
races but the idea did not fully take hold among European travelers and traders until several
centuries later. As the Age of Exploration established European colonies around the globe, there
arose the need to people and work these newly-claimed lands. In some cases, the native
population sufficed. In others, they were quickly decimated by the importation of diseases or
were openly hostile and uncontrollable. As expeditions sailed farther and farther from European
shores they had increasing contact with other races and provided a ready market for the already
present slave trade on the African continent. The argument progressed: Because these native
peoples were unaware of Christian theology, they were clearly living outside of the grace of God
much as did their ancestor Cain. And as the monster and curse traditions came together, they
seemed to indicate and validate the existence of the African slave trade in Europe and in the New
World.
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The slave trade between Europe, Asia, and Africa was an ancient and well-established
practice. European slaves were prevalent in the Middle East and North Africa as a result of
various unsuccessful crusades through the Middle Ages and in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries through the actions of the Barbary pirates of the North African coast. Likewise,
African and Arabian slaves were common in the other’s territory as trade routes provided a
market for goods as well as human trafficking. Warring tribes and clans habitually enslaved or
sold their captives to other tribes or caravans.
The importation of slaves from Africa to Europe and its American colonies arose in the
seventeenth century with the need for labor and the breakdown of the indentured servant system.
With more and more free men populating the colonies and leaving manual labor after the
completion of their contracts, large property owners recognized the need for a more permanent
and ample labor supply. The solution came in the form of a circuitous navigation of the
Atlantic. Ships from Europe to Africa loaded with fabrics, dyes, and other commodities sailed
southward to West Africa, unloaded their goods and bartered for slaves. With the ships
restocked – this time with humans rather than goods – they set out across the Atlantic to the
colonies of North and South America and the Caribbean. There, the slaves were unloaded,
auctioned off, and the ships were crammed with grain, lumber, tobacco, and sugar before they
headed back to the waiting ports of Europe. As these triangulated trade routes increased in
popularity, efficiency, and profitability in the eighteenth century, debate ensued as to the moral
justification for such callous regard for human life. Social awareness was growing in Britain, a
movement largely influenced by the ever-growing industrial complex and wretched urban living
conditions of the unskilled laboring classes. As the numbers of the urban poor in Britain grew
and their hopeless situations became increasingly apparent, so too did the moral outrage against
chattel slavery.
Parliament officially outlawed the practice of slavery in 1833, but the American economy
was far more dependent upon it than was Britain. The actual importation of slaves to the United
States was outlawed in 1808, but ships continued to do so in a clandestine manner for several
more decades and the American practice of keeping slaves enjoyed legal protection until the
1860s. In both nations, however, people of African descent were still denied citizenship and
many basic legal protections until much later.
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As unavoidable issues of racial identification emerged in nineteenth century society, so
too did biblical justification for ethnic subjugation. As early as the colonial period in America,
the connection between the enslaved races and Cain’s curse were part of the cultural production.
Phillis Wheatley’s poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” hails her captivity as a
blessing because of the Christian conversion it allowed. She writes, “’Twas mercy brought me
from my pagan land,/Taught my benighted soul to understand/That there’s a God, that there’s a
Savior too.” As the short verse closes, she enjoins her white readership to remember that darkskinned people also possess souls, “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain/May be
refined, and join the angelic train.” 28
Race on Stage
Fabricated blackness was not a new convention in European dramatic history. The
staging directions for medieval English liturgical dramas often called for the demons and hellminions to be depicted with black faces to counter the spotless white of the angels and possibly
also to provide a visual reminder of the smoke and ashes of the eternal flames. Traditional
English morris dancers often paint their faces black in modern performances, but the practice is
not intended to denote race and the tradition seems to have been a nineteenth century
development. Blackness as a racial distinguisher was employed in Italian comedia dell’arte
shows through masks, called vizards, which were usually covered with black leather or velvet.
The practice was eventually abandoned in favor of makeup, however, because its full-face
coverage limited expression and the mouth straps by which it was often held in place impeded
vocalizing.29
It is interesting, however, that the practice of “blacking up” took so long to be fully
absorbed into theatrical practice, despite the on-going artistic acknowledgment of epidermal
pigmentation differences. This slow acceptance of staged ethnicity is apparent in the extant
records of mystery plays. One historian points out that as the tradition of the African magus
began to develop in Western iconography in the early Middle Ages, its inclusion on the stage
was much slower and seems to have been shaped by rather than involved in shaping the racial
differentiation:
It is of course possible that even in the fourteenth century one of the Kings was
blackened in productions of the Magi play, and it is even rather likely that this
was at least occasionally done in the later fifteenth century, by which time the
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black King was well known in literature and art. But the complete absence of pre1500 references to such a figure in drama makes it extremely improbable that
drama played any real role in either engendering the black King in art, or in
helping to encourage his adoption by artists in this period.30
It is significant to note, too, that though most early usage of blackface to denote Africanness was for servant characters, these were usually parts that had few or no lines, as the mouth
straps of the comedia vizard indicate. The figure of the singing, dancing, joke-cracking, punmaking blackface character is the convention of the much later minstrel show. Further, as
Kaplan takes pains to point out, throughout the Middle Ages, “European images of Ham,
Canaan, or Chus as black are few and far between, and never openly allude to any pejorative
connotation of blackness.”31 It is not until the eighteenth century that racist ideas, as a modern
audience would recognize the concept, begin to develop fully and manifest themselves in cultural
output. And it was not until the early middle of the nineteenth century that those ideas of racial
difference and subversion would be realized on-stage first in America and later in England in the
form of a grinning, jumping, slippery figure named Jim Crow.
But despite the long history of the look in European performance, the beginnings of
blackface theatre as racialized performance in America are problematic to identify with
etiological certainty, as W.T. Lhamon points out in his study Raising Cain: Blackface
Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Many of the dances and gestures that became
signature elements of the later stage performances were part of the normal repertoire of slave
songs and entertainments in the eighteenth century. By the early 1800s, New York City had an
established tradition of African-American street performance that also incorporated certain
moves and lyrics in the ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged Catherine Market
area. In other words, long before the ubiquitous black face of Jim Crow took the stage in a
formalized performance, he was singing, dancing, and “wheeling” his way around the edges of
hegemonic culture and social respectability.
These street performances were widely viewed by the local residents, but were hardly
recognized as legitimate entertainments by the societal elite. As Gary Taylor asserts, in order to
survive as a cultural form, it is necessary to have a cultural space: “Artists must choose one of
two strategies for survival: either they develop a niche that has never been occupied before, or
they invade and conquer a niche developed by the occupant they will displace.”32 African-
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American street performance of the early to mid-nineteenth century is remarkable in that it
managed to do both.
By the close of the 1820s, white performers done up in blackface were beginning to take
the stage of the Chatham theatre to sing many of the songs that would eventually become part of
the broader minstrel show tradition. This small, financially troubled theatre in a working class
neighborhood was purchased by social reformers in 1832 and converted into a church in the
hopes of establishing what would today be termed an inner-city mission. The area was already
plagued with social unrest and riots and the Chatham conversion project was quickly given up.
Just seven years after its makeover, the church converted back into a theatre and it was here in
1843 that, as Lhamon points out:
Dan Emmet, Frank Bower, Dick Pelham, and Billy Whitlock joined together for
their inaugural performance in New York City of the Virginia Minstrels on the
stage of the Chatham. This performance is customarily described as the beginning
of the classic minstrel show with its street stories in staccato rhythms, its rude
interruptions and overlaps of market confrontation, and, perhaps above all, its
flexibly short element that encouraged improvisation and interaction with the
audience.33
The Virginia Minstrels were a sensation and the genre of performance in which their
show was situated became one of the staple entertainments of nineteenth century vernacular
entertainment. The only other major contenders for working class attentions within the theatre
proper were melodramas and to a much lesser degree, the English tradition of slapstick
pantomimes, though both of the latter were generally the realm of the more socially-conscious
middle class. Burlesques and music hall shows would be later competitors and, as Lhamon
points out, the circus was a popular training ground for many aspiring American performers; but
blackface persisted for the not-so-simple reason that:
Blackface was built up in the Atlantic markets and other working places where
men and women rubbed against each other under the stresses that produce cultural
form. This blackface form was a long time coming. It grew out of the way actors
copied and adapted the dances of New York markets and plantation frolics. It
grew out of the way they proved those gestures in theatres across all regions of
the United States and, across the Atlantic, from London to Dublin. It grew out of
the way the blackface figure always resisted, or did not easily fit into, other
people’s forms – and so gradually forced a form that gave it room of its own.34
The shows were, indeed, revolutionary. And as they developed, constantly changing and
adapting according to spectators’ reactions, audience expectations, and social circumstances, the
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shows also provided an important venue for racial and cultural mingling. African-American
traditions were lifted, reformed, and popularized by white performers. Audiences were often
integrated and many of the anxieties dramatized, such as the villainous fat-cat northern business
owner, were common among black and white working audiences alike. A number of AfricanAmerican acting troupes also joined the movement, particularly after the Civil War. And as the
genre grew from singular “Ethiopian melodies” to include one-act plays and eventually the full
minstrel repertoire of variety acts, the “black” central character was often given license to speak
subversively to his white counterparts on stage.
This last convention was particularly significant because it presented as entertainment a
cultural taboo. The form of the intentionally exaggerated character was here more important
than ever. As Michael Pickering notes in “The Blackface Clown,” an essay contained in the
exceptional study Black Victorians, Black Victoriana: “For medieval and renaissance fools and
jesters, for example, their identity as clowns allowed certain transgressions of social codes and
relations, such as those of deference and hierarchy, and frames what they said or did as comic
rather than offensive.”35 Only because the character was a recognized hyperbolic parody was the
blatant subversiveness permitted.
Of course, the acknowledgment of such excused impertinence is not to imply that there
were not racial problems with the show. The absorption of traditionally African-American
material almost always resulted in a kind of erasure of authorship or source and the subversive
words of the black-faced figure were usually the result of buffoonish misunderstandings or puns
resulting in an idiotic butchering of language. And Pickering makes the important point that:
[b]lackface clowning may seem most applicable to the form of the performance,
for the specifics of blackface in themselves were predicated on the white
adoptions of the mask of a black low-Other whose racialized inferiority was
constructed in the interests of attesting to white racial superiority and imperial
dominion . . . Blackface was always an effort at stabilizing uncertainty and
ambiguities, at managing racial boundaries in the interests of polarizing their
opposition rather than interiorizing them. Yet such management was never
complete precisely because blackface entertainments were pivoted at the
crossover points of these boundaries. The entertainment demanded a degree of
risk, and the risk could then never finally ensure the success of the manipulation.
Operating in the licensed space of in-betweenness, or even evoking it, calls into
question that which lies on either side of the boundaries of ideologically
constructed difference.36
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But in many of the earlier shows that grew out of the urban playhouses of the proletariat, the
radical and risky elements were there all the same, obscured by the presentation or diffused with
a joke. Like Caliban and Cain before them, these characters identified and remarked upon the
tension of their situation by using the gift of language to rebel against the dominant power. But
was the seizing of center stage by these black-faced characters truly an invocation of Cain’s
legacy?
The story of Cain was commonly invoked in the goings-on of many minstrel shows. It
appeared in farcical stump-speeches, in song lyrics about past crimes, and in subversive jokes
that claimed the first family of Genesis were all black until Cain’s fear of God’s wrath rendered
him pale like the white man, and his descendants all followed suit. Cain’s name, story, and
character abounded in the texts of these performances for several significant reasons. As
Lhamon points out:
Cain was the first angry young man. As the earliest agent to take
significant action after the banishment from Eden, Cain became talisman to those
young workers suddenly driven from the country to cities to inaugurate the
industrial era.
Cain was the first person born of human sexuality. In his own throes of
passion, Cain was the first in the line of men who have killed their brothers. Cain
pioneered fraternal strife and its consequences.
Cain was a farmer who founded cities. Cain nurtured roots, but he was
uprooted. His licensed vagabondage, and the paradox by which he took it on, are
keys to understanding Cain the way blackface performers and their early
audiences did. Their Cain founded the very cities to whose complexity these
youths were contributing. Like them, Cain was transient not sedentary within the
city. Like theirs, Cain’s energy was more than unsettled. It was unseatable.37
There is, perhaps, one further common element that rendered Cain a sympathetic figure
to an audience of displaced young men: his famous response to God, “Am I my brother’s
keeper?”38 The unskilled laboring class of the industrial revolution was, indeed, its wealthy and
fortunate brother’s keeper. Its backbreaking labor kept the factory in business, kept the owners’
pockets lined, and kept the privileged class in power. Cain denied the unavoidable relationship
he despised. The audiences of the earliest minstrel shows could not have helped but to feel a
kinship with Cain, as they desired to pose the same question with the same defiance.
The evocation of Cain’s myth in these particular social settings served a precise cathartic
purpose that reveals a great deal about the social context of the performances and the audiences
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that were consuming them. Significantly, however, Cain’s story was not dramatized, was not
reformed, and was not re-enacted. It was merely mentioned, acknowledged, and then set aside.
His story was important for establishing a connection – “Early blackface actors invoke fratricide
but sidestep the audience’s repulsion by framing it as a joke old as Genesis”39 – but his character
was no longer bound by the old conventions.
Let us now turn to a specific example of how we see Cain again sneaking bits of himself
into a blackface performance. This is not a play in which his presence is explicitly
acknowledged, as it is in many of the lyrics examined by Lhamon but rather, a performance in
which his presence is merely felt – or maybe not felt at all. Perhaps his presence merely is.
Jim Crow
Thomas Dartmouth Rice was a no-account New York actor at the same time that the
Catherine Market were performers enjoying immense (if local) popularity and several years
before the Virginia Minstrels crashed onto the Chatham Theatre stage with their burnt cork faces
and lightly lifted lyrics, leaps, and leers. Beginning in the 1830s, during a period marked by
small-to-moderate scale race and class riots in New York City, Rice began to enact the song-anddance character that made him famous and that outlived its creator in reputation and notoriety:
Jim Crow.
Like the blackface genre that launched him into the mainstream consciousness, Jim
Crow’s origins are difficult to pin point. He existed as a kind of trickster hero in slave lore, who,
as Lhamon writes in Jump Jim Crow was: “a local figure whom rice and indigo workers down
the coastal Carolinas to the Caribbean used to express and explore their hopes and fears.”40 In
some musical versions of his life he is from tidewater Virginia and in others, from the same
mountains of Kentucky where Harriet Beecher Stowe would set Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852.
Sometimes he was a runaway slave, sometimes a free man, but he was always fleet of foot and
able to dodge whatever force happened to be after him at the moment. And his impersonation by
Rice only further proved his changeability.
There are at least eight plays attributed to Rice that feature Jim Crow or a related
character and more than a dozen songs that, if they did not originate from Rice’s pen, were
certainly popularized by his blackface performance and the artistic license he took with them.
The plays were often reflective of the social settings in which Rice found himself. For example,
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Jim Crow in his New Place is set in London and was written in 1838 in anticipation of Rice’s
own return to the London theatre circuit. Other plays feature elements that were also part of the
contemporary popular imagination. Central to The Virginia Mummy, for example, was the
Egyptology craze that had taken hold of a western world emerging from the neo-Classical era
and caught up in the excitement surrounding the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, Jean
François Champollion’s deciphering of the previously enigmatic hieroglyphics in the 1820s, and
the new realm of scientific archaeology that such advancements were aiding. Such academic
intrigue was accepted with great enthusiasm in the theatre as the push towards realism in “high
art” performances increased. In Theatre in the Victorian Age, Michael Booth asserts:
“Archaeology in the theatre was both pictorial and realistic, this admirably suiting the cultural
tendencies of the age . . . When archaeology came together with spectacle on the stage, as it often
did . . . it satisfied public taste twice over.”41
Rice’s play makes a mockery of such tastes, self-referentially calling itself “A Farce in
One Act,” and playing upon the new-found fascination with Egyptian history and relics. The
plot centers around the efforts of Captain Rifle to win the hand of Lucy, despite the protestations
of her ward, an experimental doctor named Galen. Rifle hits upon his opportunity to enter
Galen’s home and convince Lucy to elope when he reads a newspaper advertisement for
mummies that the doctor has placed in the hopes of testing his newly-invented “elixir of life” and
thus, resurrecting the corpse. Rifle convinces his “waiter,” a blackface character named Ginger
Blue, to stand in as a mummy while Rifle woos his love and arranges for her escape. Ginger
Blue agrees to the arrangement and, as a stand-in for a real mummy, has a series of slapstick
mishaps before narrowly escaping being poisoned by the doctor’s concoction. A tantrum by
Galen and a hearty laugh from the rest of the cast is shared as the curtain drops.
A close reading of the play,42 however, reveals a number of significant elements, layered
meaning, and buried impudence in this bit of theatrical tomfoolery. Here again, we see a link to
the monstrous and the use of the hegemonic language by the Other at once to acknowledge and
undercut the established authority – morsels of Cain’s own story that have emerged once again.
The most obvious manifestation of the monster theme is in the central object of the play:
the mummy. Rifle describes the object as, “a dead man preserved in spices, put away into a
coffin, deposited in a tomb, and never molders away” and tells Ginger Blue that he will paint
him, “like a mummy – white, black, green, blue, and a variety of colors.” It is here that Ginger
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Blue makes an especially interesting request, stating “Massa, put plenty of turpentine wid de
white paint so it won’t rub off. I like to make ’em believe I’m a white man, too.”43 Here, we
see clearly that in the creation of the Other into the monster, there is also a desire to rid one’s self
of Otherness. The irony, however, is that – just like the ten drops of blackness added to the
white paint to make it superior a century later in Ralph Emerson’s Invisible Man – the idealized
whiteness is a necessary part of the monster make-up, as well. There is also a joke present in the
layers (literally) of meaning because the actor playing Ginger (presumably Rice himself) really
was “painted” – white to black, as burnt cork allowed.
The layers of difference become apparent again when O’Leary, one of Galen’s domestics
announces, that the black and painted figure of Ginger “looks for all the world like a smok’d
hog” and then attempts to hack off a souvenir toe. Lhamon points out in the notes that “in what
may be Rice’s hand, the MS has ‘ham’ crossed out and replaced with ‘hog.’ ‘Hoggler’ or
‘hogler’ was an old word for a field worker of the lowest class; blacks were often said to be
‘smoked.’”44 Again, the intentional joke spoken by an unwitting character serves to highlight the
racial distinction between the white (in this case, Irish) speaker and the objectified monster.
Finally, we see the willing acceptance not only of the white characters to see Ginger as a
monster, but of Ginger’s willingness to be one himself. The artist Charles, who formerly
remarked that the Ginger-mummy had “such prodigious height – almost a giant” shouts with
surprise when all is revealed: “Curse me if it isn’t Ginger Blue, the nigger that lives at the
hotel.” There seems to be an embedded joke here upon the imperative statement “curse me” in
the presence of a former mummy as well as in O’Leary’s statement that follows, “What a cursed
scrape I’d got into, if I had cut his toe off!” Thus, in the very scene where we see Ginger’s
power denied as his monstrous presence loses its value, there is still a linguistic nod to the
supposed powers that such a monster was rumored to possess.
Also significant is the unconscious parallel in those exclamations to the curse of Cain.
Just as the ancient criminal waged a violent attack on his brother’s body and so merited the
famous curse, so too did O’Leary seek to assault the physical form of Ginger Blue-as-mummy,
and calls down a curse, in expletive form, upon himself for such an action.
This scene is important, too, as we witness Ginger Blue’s willingness to re-embrace the
character of the mummy, as he declares in the closing line of the play: “[s]hould any ob de
faculty had occasion for a libe mummy again, dey hab only to call on Ginger Blue; when dey’ll
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find him ready dried, smoked, and painted, to sarbe himself up at de shortest notice.”45 Cain
asks God for the mark upon his body, crying, “Anyone who meets me may kill me;” the
narration then tells us, “the LORD put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would
kill him.”46 Likewise, Ginger is pleased to take the identity of the monster upon himself,
offering his body to be marked by such a role.
The subversive use of language and the tension between speaking and silence is
especially significant in this play, as well. Throughout the work there is a repetition of point and
counterpoint or, more accurately, a juxtaposition of straightforward language and a defiance of
meaning. For example, in the play’s opening moments, Rifle sends Ginger on an errand and
remarks, “[s]uppose I do not choose to pay you? What then will be the consequence?” Ginger
responds, “It will be rather hard to hear you when [the bell] rings.” In another instance, Rifle
asks whether Ginger Blue knows where he can get a dead man. Ginger responds, “I know where
you can git a man dead drunk.” These witty responses and turns of phrase persist throughout the
text in a way that serves quite the opposite function of painting Ginger entirely as the fool.
Rather, as Rifle observes, “The rascal seems between the two – cunning as well as stupid.”47
We also see the riskiness of which Pickering writes in Galen’s gushing before the
pseudo-mummy he believes he will soon revive with his elixir:
Galen: But before I bow with reverence as Solomon did before the Great Sheba –
Ginger: [aside] De same, to you, I hope you berry well.
Galen: Could you but speak, what scenes you would relate about your anscestors,
and wonders you would tell to this world, what happened in yours!
Ginger: [aside] I’d tell you who eat up your breakfast.
Galen: Those lips, that look so parch’d and dry, perhaps did seal the nuptial kiss
to some fair princess, chaste and fair as the lilly beams of Bright Aurora.
Ginger: [aside] De only Prince he kiss was old Aggs, and she’s a black as de
debbil.
Galen: Where now are your friends that mourned your loss, that saw you
embalmed, and saw you laid in the mighty hetacombs of Egypt?
Ginger: [aside] I guess some of dem gawn down de river.48
In this exchange we witness several shocking moments. First is the narrowly-averted spectacle
of a white man prostrate at the feet of a black man, an image repeated in the invocation of
Solomon and the Queen of Sheba – or as Ginger Blue later calls her, “de She nigga.”49 We also
see a shocking proposition of miscegenation – a concept again introduced just a few lines later
and commented upon by Ginger himself when Galen proposes that the revived “mummy” should
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take Lucy as a wife. As the rebellious remarks accumulate, Ginger diffuses each one with a joke,
even though the joke might be even more biting than the original remark, as we see in his
response to the whereabouts of his friends.
Because of his propensity to not only vocalize but to do so in a consistently disruptive
manner (both situationally and socially), we see a concerted effort throughout the play to silence
the voice of the oppositional Other. Rifle’s idea of a dummy-mummy played by Ginger Blue
comes to him immediately following Ginger’s longest speech thus far in the text of the play.
And the speech isn’t just a train of nonsensical manglings of the English language but rather,
ends with a very undercutting remark as the black man remarks to himself: “I’ll be mighty
careful how I drink de wine at de dinner table . . . Be careful, Ginger Blue, you isn’t fool’d like
de white folks: get up in de mornin’ and wonder why dey can’t find demselves.”50 The joke, of
course, is that Ginger Blue is nipping sips of his employer’s wine but the final remark does
remind the audience that the servants of a household see the private goings-on and behind-thescene behaviors of the privileged class after the public face at the banqueting table.
Rifle’s immediate response to Ginger Blue’s comments is to ask, “How long can you
hold your tongue without speaking?” Having struck upon the idea of using the waiter as part of
his plan, Rifle is now concerned with his ability to control Ginger Blue’s speech and to control
him by speech, as in the following exchange:
Rifle: Can you shut your mouth – not speak without I tell you?
Ginger: Yes. Spose you tell me to speak to people I don’t ’sociate wid – how I
gwan to do den?
Rifle: Suppose you don’t speak at all?
Ginger: Den it de best way for me to say notin’.
Rifle: So it will. Now, listen. [Ginger goes to door.] No, no, come here to me; I
want now to make folks believe you are a mummy.51
Further emphasizing this value through silence is Galen’s promise “[y]ou must be silent
as death and, if you succeed, I will give you a five dollar note.” Ginger, of course, is anything
but silent, though most of his comments done in the mummy guise are made as asides to the
audience and never acknowledged by those on-stage with him. Nevertheless, the ruse works,
Rifle gets his girl and in a final ironic moment, we see a schoolmaster arrive onstage who was
hired by Galen to transcribe the orations of the revived monster. O’Leary announces, “Here
comes the schoolmaster, who is to write the life of the mummy.” Galen, having realized the
deception and raging both at his own gullibility and Rifle’s success with Lucy, rages, “Write the
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life of the devil!” and according to the stage directions: “knocks Schoolmaster down.”52 The one
who would record the history of the monster is never used, never acts, and never speaks himself.
He is useless because, like Cain and Caliban and the real-life black slave of the American
economic system, the story will never be told.
Langston Hughes perhaps best summarized the plight of the performed African-American
a century later, in his 1949 poem “Note on Commercial Theatre.” He writes:
You’ve taken my blues and gone –
You sing ’em on Broadway
And you sing ’em in Hollywood Bowl,
And you sing ’em mixed up with symphonies
And you fixed ’em
So they don’t sound like me.
Yep, you done taken my blues and gone.
You also took my spirituals and gone.
You put me in MacBeth and Carmen Jones
And all kinds of Swing Mikados
And in everything but what’s about me.
The speaker dreams of speaking with his own voice and performing himself and he is hopeful
that it will happen; but the outcast must still struggle for his voice and the speaker’s reality is that
his dream is still in the realm of “someday.”53
Conclusion
Cain, Caliban, and Jim Crow all share the plight of the rejected son. They all exist on the
borders of mainstream society. Cain worked the fields that fed the family, Caliban hauled the
wood that fed Prospero’s fires, and the Jim Crow figure engaged in all kinds of manual labor on
behalf of his white bosses as he traipsed across the stages of the Atlantic.
Cain first distinguished himself in the competition between two brothers – a competition
that was not just about religious offerings but the emergent dominant human livelihood. He lent
some of his traits to Caliban, who embodied the anxieties of an English audience in an era of
expansion and colonization; and Caliban, in turn, passed them along to Jim Crow who sometimes
defended and sometimes betrayed his own race by employing these traits again.
The figure of the outcast viewed in terms of otherness, as the aberration from or mutation
of the acceptable “norm;” the figure whose only weapon against the controlling powers of the
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world is language and through this language does he assert his defiance, undermine the
authorities, and seek to destabilize the system that has subjugated him – this figure is peeking at
us from the margins of texts and the edges of maps; he is peeping out from beneath the Globe
stage and the tattered curtains of many a Jacksonian working class theatre.
In these new contexts, he has been given new life, new struggles, and old gestures. He is
still the outcast but he is no longer voiceless. Cain has no longer been lost among the faceless
crowds of the very cities he established but rather, has re-entered the mainstream society from
which he was banished and is again demanding notice from the powers-that-be.
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CHAPTER FIVE
“You won’t recognize it/It’s a surprise hit”:
Jack Sheppard’s Slips, Slides, and Sidesteps into and out of Popular Culture
The Lore Cycle
In 1724, Jack Sheppard, the notorious eighteenth-century thief and escape artist, first
entered the popular imagination during his widely-publicized crime spree and impossible
escapes. Following Sheppard’s much-anticipated execution on November 16, 1724, John Gay
composed The Beggar’s Opera in 1728 and its companion piece Polly at the end of that year,
both sensationalized accounts (if such a thing were even possible) of Jack’s extraordinary life
and times. Though Gay does rename Jack’s character as “Macheath,” the intentional
resemblance was unmistakable to the audience. Ainsworth even crafts a meeting in his Jack
Sheppard novel between Gay and Sheppard wherein they discuss plans for the production. The
Beggar’s Opera was fantastically successful, much to the surprise of theatre critics and cultural
purists who found its mockery of high art to be troublesome, to say the least.1 The sensational
reception of this unconventional show kept the story of its rogue-hero alive in the popular
imagination over the next century.
Jack’s re-emergence in Ainsworth’s novel helped to stoke the embers of the legend,
however. First published in 1839, Jack Sheppard: A Romance was an instant commercial
success and quickly produced a number of spin-off Jack Sheppard plays, including the popular
musical version by John B. Buckstone, which was performed regularly at the Theatre Royal Adelphi in London for a number of years beginning in October of 1839. So pervasive were the
catchy tunes of the show – especially the defiant “Nix My Dolly,” a nose-thumbing ditty directed
at institutional authority – that they remained popular through the Victorian era. In 1869, James
Greenwood conducted a study on the working classes entitled The Seven Curses of London in
which he seeks out authentic experiences such as those his subjects might encounter.
Greenwood writes of the great anticipation he felt before a Jack Sheppard show, stating that:
It was one thing to hear play-actors on the stage, in their tame and feeble delineations of
the ancient game of “high Toby,” and of the redoubtable doings of the Knights of the
Road, spout such soul-thrilling effusions as “Nix my Dolly Pals,” and “Claude Duval,”
but what must it be to listen to the same bold staves out of the mouths of real “roaring
boys,” some of them, possibly, the descendants of the very heroes who rode “up Holborn
Hill in a cart,” and who could not well hear the good words the attendant chaplain was
uttering because of the noisy exchange of boisterous “chaff” taking place between the
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short-pipe smoking driver, whose cart-seat was the doomed man’s coffin, and the gleeful
mob that had made holiday to see the fun!2
The story of Jack was more than just a theatrical trend, however. The informal, “lowbrow” productions which originally bore his name while dramatizing and elaborating his story
grew greatly in popularity after Ainsworth’s book, and quickly became part of the rise of a
cultural revolution. For the first time, the amusements of the lower classes were suddenly being
accepted within the higher realms. This novel and its subsequent spin-off texts and various
performances, mark a distinct and important shift as we first see the acceptance of the working
class’ tastes and preferences by the public and then the eventual domination of such tastes and
preferences over those of the gentry. Modern British pop culture was thus beginning to emerge.
But why this time and why this figure? The first question is answered fairly simply. Due
to the steady rise of the literate middle class over the previous two hundred years, traditional
hegemony was breaking down as cultural output was no longer the sole domain of the aristocrats.
Literacy had, to a large extent, become the great equalizer. And even for those who could not
read, there were staged versions that told the stories and disseminated the legends just as, if not
more, effectively. Though the Jack Sheppard novel was deemed “immoral” by many Victorian
critics for its glamorized portrayal of criminal acts, its prominent placement of prostitutes, and its
gratuitous violence it was still being printed, sold, and read by the literate and produced,
performed and viewed by the less fortunate.3
The second question – that of “why this figure?” – is more difficult to answer. Certainly
the colorful stories and charismatic characters account, at least in part, for the tremendous
popularity enjoyed by the various retellings of Jack Sheppard’s story and the enduring traits that
are the modern remnants of his hey-day in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But these
things alone could not account for the powerful cultural revolution that was spawned and the
persistent strands of the story that have emerged as part of new lore cycles. The social, political,
and economic factors in place at each major resurfacing of his story seem to be major factors in
incubating the cultural Petri-dish in which we see echoes of Jack flourish again.
The Real Jack Sheppard
The actual story of Jonathan Sheppard is difficult to discern, as his rather sensational
exploits rendered him a larger-than-life character before his execution and prompted a series of
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fictionalized accounts of his adventures for almost three centuries afterwards. The facts of his
life – as much as can be verified by roughly contemporary documents, legal records, and
historical studies – are as follows.
Born some time in 1702, Jack (as he was most commonly called) packed an incredible
amount of insubordination, lawlessness, and style into his twenty-two years of life. The son of a
transient carpenter in one of the most economically depressed sections of London, he benefited
from some basic education in a poorly-supported workhouse charity school. By most accounts,
after his father’s death around 1708, Sheppard was fostered to his mother’s employer, a Mr.
Kneebone, who employed the boy in his drapery shop until he was of age to be apprenticed. In
1717, he was granted an apprenticeship under a socially respectable carpenter named Owen
Wood, who would teach Sheppard not only how to work with wood, but also another skill that
would prove rather fortuitous: locksmithing.
Sheppard was usually described as small, even for the time – just five feet, four inches
tall – and was quite thin; but what he lacked in stature, he made up in charisma. According to
one popular tradition, Sheppard fell under the corrupting influence of a pub called the Black
Lion, which opened near his master’s shop in 1722 or 1723. It was here that Sheppard first fell
prey to the temptations of strong drink and wayward women, whose attentions he easily attracted
– most particularly, a prostitute named Elizabeth Lyon but commonly called “Edgworth Bess.”
There are also indications that Sheppard had an older brother named Thomas who was already an
established criminal and who helped foster the young man into the lifestyle. It seems likely, too,
that he was simply an intelligent and energetic young man who needed more of a challenge and
thrill than practical carpentry had to offer.
Whatever the cause of his corruption, Sheppard’s first crimes seem to have taken place
the same year that the Black Lion opened its doors, and were simple petty theft from customers’
homes where Sheppard was admitted while delivering completed carpentry orders. By the
following year, Sheppard had left the Drury Lane shop and followed in his father’s footsteps as a
journeyman carpenter but with an established habit of petty theft that soon graduated to full
burglary in April of 1724 – an act that cost him his first arrest and subsequently, his first escape a
mere three hours after he was imprisoned in St. Giles Roundhouse. The escape was the stuff of
adventure stories – it involved a rope made from bedclothes and sawing through a wooden
ceiling – but the freedom did not last long. He was apprehended in May and this time sent to
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Newgate Prison, where he escaped again by sawing through his chains, using his bedding to
rappel through a hole he had made in the wall, and scaling a twenty foot gate. This time,
Sheppard and an accomplice robbed a tailor’s shop with the intention, as it was later reported, of
stealing expensive and modish clothes. That they stumbled upon close to three hundred pounds
of legal tender was merely an unexpected windfall.4
In July, Sheppard was arrested again, and again he managed an astounding and
innovative escape – he filed through an iron window grille in his door and wriggled through the
hole. This third arrest was a particularly stinging one for Sheppard, as he had been betrayed by
Jonathan Wild, the famed thief-catcher who was known to the authorities of a kind of bountyhunter but who managed a kingdom of criminals in the London underworld. (Wild himself was
executed in 1725, only six months after Sheppard). He had hired Sheppard as part of his illegal
empire but quickly decided that the young man was worth more in bounty money than the stolen
goods he could provide. The trial had sentenced Sheppard to death and his escape had taken
place just hours before the warrant was to be delivered to the prison. The duplicity of Wild and
his underhanded betrayal of the dashing figure who was by now something of a rogue hero
among his own laboring class, was to be a major factor in later accounts of Sheppard’s life.
In less than two weeks, Sheppard was captured for the fourth time and placed in what
would be termed today as Newgate’s “maximum security ward.” The “Castle,” as the cell was
called, held Sheppard for over a month but eventually, even this could not contain him. In a
study of resourcefulness and innovation, Sheppard used a small nail to pick the lock of his
handcuffs, dislodged an iron bar set in the chimney to block the flue, used it to break through the
ceiling, climbed through to an empty cell, the prison chapel, and the roof of the prison before
returning to his cell for his blankets to craft a rope. Retracing his steps, he finally slid down the
six story Newgate wall to a neighboring house, which he quietly entered and casually exited at
street level. Still in leg irons, he managed to wander to a village outside of London and paid a
shoemaker to remove them several days later.
On November 2, 1724, just sixteen days after his latest miraculous escape, Sheppard was
arrested and bound with several hundred pounds of iron chains and weights in Newgate. He was
under constant observance for the sake of security, but it became something of an entertainment
spectacle. He was visited by artists who sought to portray his likeness or story and paying
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visitors who just wished to catch a glimpse of the famous figure before his scheduled hanging on
November 16.
The execution went as planned and Sheppard was hanged in front of a crowd reported to
have numbered more than 200,000.5 The event was one of the most well-attended events ever to
take place on Tyburn Hill, the scene where most death penalties were carried out in eighteenth
century London. There was a sense of anticipation as to whether Jack might have some last
spectacular escape planned – in fact, there seems to have been evidence of such a plan in the
works but it never reached fruition – but also just a morbid curiosity in the final moments of a
man who had seemed uncontainable.
The hanging took place and the criminal was finally stopped, but his legend had just
begun.
Setting the Stage: Daniel Defoe, John Gay, and William Hogarth
According to most literary historians, the first half of the eighteenth century is a
particularly notable period because it was at this time that the novel first began to emerge as a
sustainable and acknowledged (if not respectable) genre. In 1719, one of the first significant
texts of long fiction in the English language was published: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe.
The book purported to be a biographical account of the exotic happenings in the unfortunate life
of a real traveler. The novel is punctuated throughout by remorse over youthful rebellion and
memories of warnings against such rash actions as voiced by the narrator’s own father. The
wages of Crusoe’s sins, however harsh they may have seemed to the narrator, are actually a
thrilling series of suspenseful events and brilliant ingenuity, written in such a way as to instill in
countless readers a longing for the uncharted thrills of a life adventuring. This unorthodox
morality – that adventure and interest stem from a life of rebellion – became the backbone of
many of the earliest novels. Such works as Moll Flanders (1722) also by Defoe, as well as
Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) by Samuel Richardson recounted the stories of individuals
either born into poverty and crime or consumed by it due to the unfortunate circumstances of
their lives – subjects that hardly helped the reception of the novel into the libraries upper classes.
It was feared that the exposure to such morally debased characters would have a corrupting
influence on the readers; but the authors of these crime texts found an eager and responsive
market, which had been perhaps primed for such texts by the circulation of various magazines
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offering summaries of notorious trials and The Newgate Calendar, which served up monthly
accounts of the various trials and goings-on of London’s most prominent prison. It was from
these lurid real-life dramas that many novel writers drew their inspiration, though some authors
(such as Defoe) actually served as reporters for periodicals and thus were physically present at
the hearings of the accused and privy to the most explicit and gruesome details.
One scholar offers a particularly succinct description of the moral dichotomy the modern
novel presented:
[W]ithout the appearance of the whore, the rogue, the cutpurse, the cheat, the
thief, the outsider, it would be impossible to imagine the genre of the novel
coming about. The image of the criminal is complex and seems to serve at least
two differing and opposing purposes. On the one hand, the criminal signifies
sinfulness, evil, and degeneration. His life is to be avoided and his fate deplored.
On the other hand, the criminal’s life, especially as it was depicted in criminal
biographies and novels, serves as a means to lead the criminal (and the reader) to
repentance and salvation. Thus, the criminal’s history serves a double function as
both an example of a life to be avoided and an example of a self-scrutiny and
repentance to be imitated.6
The criminal subject matter in which the modern novel is at least partially rooted was a
logical catalyst for longer fiction. The imaginative writings of figures such as Bunyan and Swift
in the previous century had certainly set the stage for the novel, but Christian allegories and
socio-political satire only offered a limited scope. As one scholar notes in his examination of
eighteenth century crime fiction:
[T]he trials taught novelists that however much they might improve them by
abridgement and proper editing, they could not speculate on what might have
been going on in the minds of the parties involved without indulging in a form
of fiction. At the same time they showed that there was a reading public that did
not have to be amused by comic pieces, an audience that was fascinated by a
situation involving life and death and turning on points of guilt and innocence.
Because the trials were considerably longer than the usual Newgate Calendar
entry, they also showed that interest in such subjects might be sustained for
hundred of pages. Even the Newgate Calendar began to give more pages over to
trials of particular interest, sometimes providing the psychological analysis that
was beyond the scope of the trials.7
In short, in order to meet the demand for such stories, it became necessary to elaborate and
embellish, speculate and fabricate, romanticize and fantasize – specialties in which Defoe was
well-skilled.
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Defoe exhibited an interest in the dynamic and attractive criminal in much of his work.
In 1724 (a particularly prolific year for him), he published The General History of the Pyrates, a
text which helped to launch the archetypal image of the swashbuckling free spirits on the high
seas – a romanticized interpretation that persists to this day. Throughout the 1720s, he
supplemented his longer writing with reporting work and in the fall of 1724, shortly after Pyrates
was released, he was called upon by Applebee’s Magazine to cover the upcoming trial of one
particularly intriguing figure: the now-famous house- and prison-breaker Jack Sheppard. What
resulted was The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard, a fairly short but widely read
text that included a biography of the criminal as well as a detailed accounting of his various
crimes and escapes.
In the prelude, Defoe offers a note of social commentary, remarking: “Crimes ever were,
and ever must be unavoidably frequent in such populous Cities as yours are, being the necessary
Consequences, either of the Wants, or the Depravity, of the lowest part of the humane [sic]
Species.” The plight of Sheppard seems not to have been quite so dramatically unfortunate,
however. His education, while rudimentary, still rendered him functionally literate, a trait
highlighted in Defoe’s text by the inclusion of a letter from Sheppard to a friend, purported to
have been composed “five Hours immediately after his escape from Newgate.”8 To say that the
note is riddled with puns hardly does it justice; it contains well over thirty such linguistic twists.
He makes a joke regarding another of London’s notorious prisons, Bridewell, remarking “Being
a Batchelor, and not being capable to manage a Bridewell you know. I had no Business near St.
Brides.” Elsewhere he includes some geographic word play, saying, “having gone a little way,
Hefford’s-Harp at the sign of the Irish-Harp, put me a Jumping and Dancing to that degree that I
could not forbear making a Somerset or two before Northumberland House.” As his recounted
adventures conclude, he writes, “meeting by meer chance a Bakers Cart going to TurnhamGreen, I being not Mealy Mouth’d, nor the Man being Crusty I wheel’d out of town.” He leaves
directions for all mailed to be sent inscribed to one “Mr. Sligh Bolt” at a given address.9
The letter is an obvious fabrication – whether by Defoe or some sensationalist fan of the
story is unclear – but its cleverness is undeniable. Taking the old slapstick mantra to heart that
stepping on three rakes is funny, four tiresome, and fourteen funny again simply for sheer
absurdity, the letter is an odd but intriguing addition to the text. It paints Sheppard as a
charming, witty figure who is indeed a criminal but a good-natured and high-spirited one. The
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impression created is not that of a cutthroat skulking about dark alleyways but rather, a lightfooted, dynamic character dropping clues and laughing once again as he dances just outside of
the reach of the law he has already defied so many times.
It is important, too, to remember that at the time of this text’s composition (late October
of 1724), Jack was again on the lam, after having recently amassed his astonishing third escape
from jail – his second from the supposedly impervious Newgate and its execution orders. Thus
Defoe writes before beginning his story:
But here’s a Criminal bids Defiance to you Laws, and Justice who
declar’d and has manifested that the Bars are not made that can either keep him
Out, or keep him In, and accordingly hath a second time fled from the very
Bosom of Death.
His History will astonish! And is not compos’d of Fiction, Fable, or
Stories plac’d at York, Rome, or Jamaica, but Facts done at your Door, Facts
unheard of, altogether new, Incredible, and yet Uncontestable.
He is gone once more upon his wicked Range in the World. Restless
Vengeance is pursuing, and Gentlemen, ‘tis to be hoped that she will be assisted
by your Endeavors to bring to Justice this notorious Offender. 10
It is important to note that Defoe takes pains to point out that this account of Jack’s life is
not a fictionalized one. Nevertheless, it was received excitedly by a thoroughly engaged public,
and consumed as if it were entertainment rather than reporting. We see evidence of such a
reception the following year in 1725, in an article published in the Dublin Journal that railed
against the middle class consumption of such texts. James Arbuckle, the author of the piece,
tells the readers: “your Robinson Crusoes, Moll Flanders, Sally Salisburys and John Shepards
[sic] have afforded notable instances how easy it is to gratify our curiosity, and how indulgent
we are to biographers of Newgate, who have been as greedily read by people of the better sort as
the compilers of last speeches and dying words by the rabble.”11
Jack, it seems, was still breaking into homes and disrupting the social order even after his
death. And just as prison walls could not contain him, neither could the printed page. Within
two weeks of his execution, a pantomime of his life by John Thurmond, entitled Harlequin
Sheppard, was performed in Drury Lane – not far from the home of Sheppard’s former master
Mr. Wood.12 It was not until 1728, however, that a dramatized version of his story really
captivated the public all over again: it was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and its impact was
unprecedented.
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Gay himself is an interesting figure. His parents passed away when he was still young,
leaving him without family connections or much of an inheritance and while he spent most of his
adult life in the company of intellectual and artistic elite, though not a university man himself.
As a result, Gay was keenly aware of the inherent class system present in English politics and the
sharp divisions between the social strata of society. He often tried to curry favor among the
politically connected with varying success, but was befriended by such literary notables as
Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, who recognized the young man’s talents for farce, parody,
and satire. He acquired a number of patrons who enabled him to publish, which resulted in
financial gain and a fair amount of critical acclaim. Unfortunately, this success was short-lived
as he had invested heavily in the badly-managed but governmentally-backed South Sea Bubble
just a few months prior to its collapse in 1720.
This reversal of fortune drove Gay once again to try for a political position but the best
offer he received was an appointment as Princess Louisa’s Gentleman-Usher, an offer he refused
and regarded as a personal affront. Gay nursed this grudge against the political elite – both for
the perceived professional insult as well as for the mismanagement of the South Sea Trading
Company – and in 1728 sought his revenge against them in his production of The Beggar’s
Opera. The production was an unusual one – rather than imitating the Italian opera style that
was very much in vogue at the time, Gay chose to compose in English, using commonly-known
folk melodies for his songs and thus introducing to the English stage the so-called “ballad-opera”
form, which would grow steadily in prominence and popularity. And rather than portraying
scenes of courtly intrigue and romance, he selected a very different cast of characters with which
to make his statement.
The story features highwaymen and double-dealers as its protagonists, purposely
equating them with the aristocracy and current governmental powers. Meanwhile, the dialogue
is laced with digs at the aristocracy, such as when Peachum pronounces matter-of-factly: “A
lawyer is an honest employment; so is mine. Like me too he acts in a double capacity, both
against rogues and for ’em; for ’tis but fitting that we should protect and encourage cheats, since
we live by them.” There are passing remarks, as well, such as when Macheath murmurs
romantically to Polly, “Is there any power, any force that could tear me from thee? You might
sooner tear a pension out of the hands of a courtier, a fee from a lawyer.” 13
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More significant for this study, however, is not the political commentary that Gay issues
but rather, those criminals from whom he drew his inspiration – most notably, Jack Sheppard and
Jonathan Wild. Roberts, discussing this commonly-recognized fact, writes “In part because of
Defoe’s biographical accounts of them, these men captured public imagination as no rogues had
previously done; they caught Gay’s imagination, too.”14 The double-dealing, backstabbing
figure of Peachum was immediately recognizable as Wild. His cottage industry of thieving and
thief-catching was well known to the upper class, theatre-going audience upon whom Wild’s
employees preyed. The play even includes an exchange between Filch, a pickpocket-in-training,
and Mrs. Peachum, who compliments him on his take of seven colored handkerchiefs from the
wealthy crowd awaiting coaches outside the opera house. Meanwhile, the charismatic, welldressed, and multiply-married figure of Macheath was an obvious portrayal of Jack Sheppard
who was known not only for his charm and penchant for fine clothing, but also his retinue of
women. Macheath, we see, is confronted by Lucy with her own matrimonial claims after she
catches word that he has wed Polly and is then greeted by “Four more women, Captain, with a
child apiece!” in his prison cell. These are an obvious exaggeration, but definite salute to Jack
Sheppard’s own woman-juggling.15
However, Jack was most famous, of course, for his ability to find an escape from even
the most impossible-seeming situations. The ending of The Beggar’s Opera is an oftendiscussed technique of the play in which the Player and Beggar from the play’s introduction
reappear as the Player objects to Macheath’s implied hanging: “But honest friend, I hope you
don’t intend that Macheath shall really be executed.” The Beggar argues that such an ending is
the only morally permissible one, and that the impending punishment of all the criminal
characters was to be understood. When the Player persists in his objections, however, the
Beggar introduces a deus-ex-machina re-write with the following preface:
Through the whole piece you may observe such a similitude of manners in high
and low life that it is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable vices) the
fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the
fine gentlemen. Had the play remained as I first intended, it would have carried a
most excellent moral: ’twould have shown that the lower sort of people have their
vices in a degree as well as the rich: And that they are punished for them.16
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Thus, as the ending is changed, Macheath (like Jack) escapes from an inescapable
scenario and is hailed the hero for it. And as the curtain falls on the assemblage of Macheath and
his multiple wives, we see Jack Sheppard dance across the stage for merely the first time.
The reception of the play was overwhelming. Even those political figures whom Gay
lampooned attended the show and were reported to have acted amused by it publicly, though
scandalized privately. On the heels of this unprecedented success, Gay attempted to produce the
second half of The Beggar’s Opera, a similarly-written ballad opera called Polly. This play,
which follows Polly Peachum’s incognito travels to the West Indies in an effort to reconnect
with her slippery husband Macheath (now living as a black-faced pirate named Morano),
possessed little of the political satire that its predecessor did. Nevertheless, it was banned from
production by Prime Minister Robert Walpole who was still smarting from the thinly-veiled
attacks lobbed against his administration in the previous Gay piece. Kept from the stages, Polly
instead hit the presses, enjoying almost as wide a readership as it might have had viewers. As
one critic notes, “Ironically, however, Gay’s sequel became imitated by history itself. For just as
Polly Peachum and Macheath both don disguises and exist throughout much of the play in
counterfeit roles, so, too, did the script go underground and become pirated by presses defiant of
Walpole’s edicts, ensuring that it would enjoy enormous financial success and rival its
predecessors in popularity.”17
Polly may be “a corrective satire, appropriating out of bankrupt European morality the
crucial virtue of honor and relocating it among the ‘savages’”18 but it is more notable, perhaps,
for its inclusion of the element of blackface. Macheath/Morano remarks to his new wife, Jenny:
“Was it not entirely for you that I disguised myself as a black to screen myself from women who
laid claim to me wherever I went? Is not the rumor of my death, which I purposely spread,
credited through the whole country? Macheath is dead to all the world but you.”19 The disguise
is not merely one of appearance but rather, Macheath has exchanged his entire identity, as the
following dialogue between the shady business man Ducat and an indigenous Caribbean
demonstrates:
Indian: . . . The pirates are ravaging and plundering the country, and we are now
in arms, ready for battle, to oppose ’em.
Ducat: Does Macheath command the enemy?
Indian: Report says he is dead. About twelve moons are passed since we heard
of him. Morano, a Negro villain, is their chief, who in rapine and
barbarities is even equal to him.20
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Thus there is performed on this hypothetical stage (since the play was not actually produced for
another fifty years after its textual release), both racial difference (the natives) and self-reflexive
racial difference (Macheath/Morano).
Gay’s use of such a disguise with Macheath seems to have stemmed from a recent series
of laws recently passed in response to the new trend of black-face robberies. Between 1722 and
1723, there were groups of men assembled in the forests of several shires who would paint their
faces black before ambushing travelers and demanding payment or goods for safe passage. As
result of this activity, the so-called “Black Act” was passed under which, as Pat Rogers writes,
“it became a felony without benefit of clergy to go abroad into woods in any form of disguise or
with a blackened face.” The behaviors of the bands caught the popular attention to enough of a
degree that in 1723, a pamphlet was published entitled The History of the Blacks of Waltham in
Hampshire: and those under the like Denomination in Berkshire that purported to trace the
events surrounding the robberies. Rogers makes the point that “the great Jonathan Wild was then
at the very summit of his power. This is of more interest than it might appear, for one particular
reason. The Blacks, to anticipate the story, prove to have been extortionists and protectionracketeers – as, in his more genteel and businesslike fashion, was Wild.” Wild was even
rumored to have been in attendance at the trial of several of the Waltham Blacks, indicating that
the London criminal world was cognizant, if not supportive, of the activities of their lawless
brethren. 21
Though we have no reason to believe that Sheppard himself ever had assumed a burnt
cork disguise in the commission of any of his crimes, this unusual gesture assumed by his stage
persona only a few years later will prove to be a significant moment in the development of his
lore cycle, as shall be demonstrated below.
The final figure of this first phase of the lore cycle is William Hogarth. A noted member
of the eighteenth century satirist camaraderie, he chose to ply the technique through images
rather than words. Hogarth was a notable artist in portraiture and painting who trained under
royal portrait painter Sir James Thornhill, but it is for his editorial cartoons and satirical etchings
that Hogarth is remembered. In 1721, he published a print mocking the South Sea Trading
Company and its unethical practices. He also crafted scenes ridiculing the contemporary trends
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of the British stage (which he felt had become more about spectacle than art), poked fun at
various political figures, and skewered upper-class morality in his illustrations.
His social commentary pieces, however, have been the source for much of the modern
scholarship surrounding him. A Harlot’s Progress was a series of six illustrations completed in
1732, which trace a country girl’s life from her beginnings in urban prostitution to her
misadventures, disease, and miserable death. A similar series of eight pictures was released in
1735. Entitled A Rake’s Progress, it follows a young man of privilege as he squanders his
fortune on wild living and eventually lands in the infamous asylum, Bedlam. These, and other of
Hogarth’s depictions of poverty-stricken scenes, have provided modern social historians with a
unique lens into the world of the urban underbelly – a setting not otherwise widely recorded by
artists of the mid-eighteenth century.
In 1747, Hogarth completed a set of twelve prints that would prove to be one of his most
famous works: Industry and Idleness. The pictorial narrative tells the story of two apprentices
with common beginnings and vastly diverse endings. The first plate reveals the boys at work in
their master’s weaving shop – one diligently practicing his trade and one already exhibiting signs
of sloth and a fascination with the morally abhorrent (as illustrated by the page of Moll Flanders
pinned to the wall above his head). Subsequent scenes depict the idle apprentice skipping
church, whoring at sea, and being betrayed by his consort and a criminal accomplice. The
industrious apprentice, on the other hand, wins the favor of those around him as well as the hand
of his master’s daughter.22 In the end, the villainous young man is sent to Tyburn while the
upright one gains an apprenticeship to the Lord Mayor of London. The etchings, which were
received with a great deal of public interest, were widely understood to have been inspired by the
life of Jack Sheppard.
These moralistic graphic tales were not received with the universal concern that Hogarth
might have wished, however. Thanks to the new mode of theatre ushered in by the success of
Gay’s ballad-driven proletariat opera, many of the didactic sketches of Hogarth were quickly
translated to the stage as pantomimes or farcical musical tableaux. Theatrical productions, such
as Theophilus Cibber’s dramatization of A Harlot’s Progress at Drury Lane in 1733, launched a
new and growing interest in the recreation of a popular work to the stage. Martin Meisel notes:
Transformation, and especially the animation of the inanimate, were essential to
the pantomime genre and as such would influence profoundly some of Hogarth’s
literary and graphic successors, notably, Dickens and Cruikshank. In Cibber it
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appears, not because it is derived from the actions of the spirit of Hogarth’s
images, but because transformation was the genre-linked concomitant of the
actions that normally constituted the pantomime dumb show.23
The images Hogarth records proved to be poignant as well as duplicatable (and in their
re-creation, recognizable) and these short, dramatized parodies would eventually translate into
broader, longer scripts when the staging principles were applied to the works of Hogarth’s
artistic heirs a century later. Likewise, images introduced by his works would eventually find
their way into later cultural productions.
Ainsworth and the Collective Memory (or, The Not-So-Good “Sheppard”)
The mid-nineteenth century brought with it a spate of social reforms to help the blighted
urban landscape that was groaning under the pressures of industrialization and a culture of dire
poverty and criminal behavior. It also brought a new genre of fiction, often called “rogue
fiction” or “Newgate novels” after the famed London prison in which many of the main
characters in these works – usually victims of this inner-city penury themselves – were held.
The reform legislation was not particularly successful; the Newgate novels were.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton popularized this genre with the publication of Paul Clifford in
1830 and Charles Dickens transformed it into a more respectable form with Oliver Twist in 1839.
This respectability was essential for its full acceptance by the increasingly literate middle and
working classes. As one Ainsworth biographer, George J. Worth, has noted:
The new rogue fiction of the 1830s and 1840s provoked a great deal of
controversy, which – like comparable controversies today, surely did sales no
harm. These novels were widely condemned for their violations of morality and
good taste, for the immeasurable damage that might be done to impressionable
readers by depicting a criminal as a human being rather than a monster – possibly
even an attractive human being or one who might arouse sympathy. They were
published in an age which was far more self-consciously moralistic than those
which had preceded it – an age, moreover, of tremendous political and social
unrest and change. They were obviously addressed to a growing reading
audience, drawn from an increasingly wide social base, about whose susceptibility
to contamination by literature was a real worry.24
It is in this delicate balance between despicability and pitiability that Ainsworth sought to
situate his story of Jack Sheppard. Oliver Twist, with its morally redeeming ending, and Jack
Sheppard were very much contemporary texts that shared four months of publication in
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Bentley’s Miscellany in 1839 while Dickens’ serialized novel was concluding and Ainsworth’s
was commencing. Interestingly, “Jack Sheppard soon became more popular than Oliver Twist”
and was attacked by a number of critics – including Dickens himself – “as a threat to public
morals and decency.” The novel was actually so popular that it was being reproduced for stage
even before Ainsworth’s serialization had been fully published. Its form lent itself so well to the
dramatic melodrama that was taking the stages of London’s second- and third-tier theatres that
its popularity was instant and unstoppable over the following years – so much so, in fact, that it
suffered ridicule in another novel whose run began in 1849. Worth writes, “Thackeray
lampooned the storm scene in Jack Sheppard and the underworld ‘flash’ jargon sprinkled
throughout that novel . . . in a passage, originally included in Chapter 6, which was omitted from
Vanity Fair beginning with the edition of 1853.”25
Such a reception obviously begs the question as to why Ainsworth’s novel enjoyed such
success while other works, much more memorable to modern audiences, were not greeted with
the same enthusiasm. What was it about Ainsworth’s handling of Jack Sheppard that struck a
chord with audiences in a way that other similar works did not?
It seems that the enigma of Sheppard’s success stems, at least in part, from his connection
with an older tradition present in religious practices of the proletariat. An avid historian who
surrounded himself with people of similar interests, Ainsworth established a friendship spanning
sixty-five years with James Crossley, who seems to have been the source for much of
Ainsworth’s research and inspiration. “Crossley was an omnivorous reader,” Worth notes, “an
ardent book collector especially interested in antiquarian, historical, and archeological works and
the later Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and dramatists . . . Whenever Ainsworth had an idea
involving knowledge of the past, he could always, even in his old age, turn to Crossley for advice
and information.”26 Evidence of this shared interest in the cultural productions of the past is
prominent in the Jack Sheppard novel. Throughout his fictionalized biography of the famed
criminal, Ainsworth repeatedly employs phrases, images, and actions that mimic the medieval
traditions of the peccadillo Christ child stories, visionary images of the nativity, and scenes of
the passion from mystery plays. What Ainsworth seems subtly to be achieving is, in effect, a
manifestation of the earlier traditions in the later ones. Sheppard was himself an interesting
figure historically, but it is the interpolation of these popular medieval traditions onto his story
that granted him a sense of familiarity with, and consequently a welcome into, the collective
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memory and experience of his working-class audience. The subtlety Ainsworth employed
necessitates a close reading of the novel to reveal the evidence of such a pervasive pattern.
In “The Christ of the Church,” Charles A. Briggs writes: “We must always distinguish
between the Christ of the church and the Christ of . . . the people . . . The Christ of the church is
always the Christ of the Bible, for the church always holds the divine authority of the Bible in
her Christology.”27 While this is a fine assertion for a twentieth century theologian to make, it is
not a universally applicable distinction. In the Middle Ages, for example, the Christ of the
people was the Christ of the church. With the firm belief that Biblical texts were solely the
realm of the priests and literacy rates near zero among the laity anyway, it stands to reason that
the figure of Jesus that most people knew and worshipped was not one formed from their own
study of the Gospels but rather, was a compilation of images and stories drawn from sermons,
dramas, artwork, mystic writings, and oral traditions. This patchwork Christ was largely
eliminated following the combined influences of the Renaissance and the Reformation, as
literacy and the printing industry grew dramatically. With the scriptures now in the hands of the
common man, the long-standing extra-Biblical traditions began to fall away in favor of the Jesus
of the Gospel accounts, and no others.
The older traditions did not disappear, however. Oscar Brockett, the renowned theatre
historian, notes in his History of the Theatre that the medieval dramas did not cease until the
second half of the sixteenth century. They enjoyed immense popularity through the reign of
Henry VIII, when they were often actually “used as a weapon to attack or defend particular
dogmas.” In an effort to quell religious animosity, however, Elizabeth ordered the performance
cycles to cease not long after her 1558 coronation. Brockett stresses the point, however, that the
plays did not completely end until after 1570. Even then, there were still occasional
performances of the cycles, though on a much smaller scale. Thus, the liturgical dramas were a
common practice in England as recently as Shakespeare’s lifetime, and as late as the seventeenth
century in parts of the Continent.28
The number of allusions that seem to have been imported to the novel from vernacular medieval
versions of the Christ story is too plentiful to pay them all due attention, so here the focus will rest
primarily upon the use of vernacular and extra-Biblical texts either centered upon the holy Nativity or
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else connected to the overarching story of the birth and childhood of Jesus, though we will take note of a
few interesting moments later in his story. Admittedly, it is quite difficult to undertake such an
endeavor without drifting into the Biblical allusions that permeate Ainsworth’s text and are heretofore
unexplored by critics. However, the sheer number of images disallows such treatment at this time as an
exhaustive discussion of the placement and function of each is a study far too broad for this particular
context.
It is necessary, too, to focus only on the details crafted by Ainsworth himself with intentional
creative license. His main resource seems to have been Defoe’s 1724 account, which was rooted more
firmly in fact and contained far less embellishment of the story than Ainsworth eventually supplied.
Because the similarities in Ainsworth’s work between Jack’s actual biography and the figure of Christ
(except when otherwise noted) are the result of authorial choice and not factual coincidence, this further
bolsters the argument that Ainsworth had deliberate intention in his presentational choices.
It is not a stretch to imagine that Ainsworth intentionally laced his novel with theatrical
references. He began writing plays at the age of fifteen and while he ultimately made his name as a
novelist, he retained a love for the theatre throughout his life. It comes as no surprise, then, that
Ainsworth features John Gay and his visit with several distinguished curiosity-seekers to Jack’s prison
cell rather prominently, wherein the playwright decides to:
write an opera, the scene of which shall be laid altogether in Newgate, and the
principal character shall be a highway man. I’ll not forget your two
mistresses, Jack . . . my opera shall have no music except the good old ballad
tunes. And we’ll see whether it won’t put the Italian opera out of fashion.29
Ainsworth seems to have included other, more subtle references to famous English
theatrics, as well. He describes Caliban, the servant of Mrs. Spurling, as “a hideous, misshapen,
malicious monster, with broad hunched shoulders, a flat nose, and ears like that of a wild beast, a
head too large for his body, and a body too long for his legs. This horrible piece of deformity . . .
was nicknamed the Black Dog of Newgate.”30 Shakespeare’s monster-man of the same name is
described as: “a freckled whelp, hag-born,” “a puppy-headed monster,” and “as disproportioned
in his manners /As in his shape.”31 Later, Jack encounters a gravedigger at work and inquires as
to the person for whom the job is being completed. In a scene much akin to Hamlet at Ophelia’s
grave, Jack is told that his actions drove his mother “out of her mind” and caused her to take her
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own life.32 An author thus demonstrating his familiarity with the history of English performance
from the preceding two centuries could reasonably and even predictably have a working
familiarity with the texts still being produced with regularity through Shakespeare’s time.
The trap in making such an argument regarding Ainsworth’s intentions to draw
comparisons with his hero and Christ is that, as Richard B. Hauck has argued, the reader
“expect[s] to reveal a complete set of parallels between the figure and Christ . . . If we try
exhaustively to exploit the metaphors surrounding such a character, twisting the figure quite out
of shape in order to win the game, then the joke is on us – and we will fail to get it.”33
Hauck’s insightful study of inverted or unconventional Christ-figures in literature raises a
number of excellent points essential for the methodology of this study. He makes the point that
“it may prove difficult for the reader to decide whether or not the figure is intended as an
imitation of Christ or a parody of Christ figures” and even if a parody is intended, it is not
necessarily, or even usually, intended to be sacrilegious. Rather, he argues, a comedic or parodic
Christ-figure “disarms the reader and thus serves, not hinders the rhetorical purpose of drawing
our sympathies” to the otherwise unsympathetic character and “since a parody is still an
imitation, he is still-Christlike.”34
Hauck is referring specifically to presentations of a Christ-figure in ostensibly humorous
situations. Though there is some humor involved in several of Ainsworth’s comparisons, it is
certainly not maintained throughout. Hauck makes an applicable argument when he states: “To
understand the use of the comic Christ . . . is to understand through experience a prime example
of the literary fusion of the comic and tragic.” Thus the parallels between Jack and the medieval
Christological traditions are not always simple and not always clear-cut. The goal of the author
is not to walk the reader through every intentionally crafted connection or to have created so
obvious a series of analogies that the work loses its own identity and becomes an allegory.
Rather, the successful author of a skewed Christ-figure sometimes inverts, sometimes leaves
intact familiar elements of the story, which are intended to spark a sense of recognition (either
overt or subliminal) with the reader. The goal is not to create a doppelganger for Christ because,
after all “no character can be Christ except Christ [but] any character can be Christ-like and
something else besides.”35
Turning now to Ainsworth’s own set of written images, it is important to note that these
stories, which either have no Biblical precedent or are greatly elaborated versions of otherwise
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only incidental mentionings in the canonical Gospels, were accepted by the medieval laity as true
and authentic happenings in the life of the central figure of the Christian faith. Their
understanding of Christ was couched in these stories and images and, as been stated above, did
not simply disappear with the Reformation. As will become apparent, Ainsworth seems to have
employed a number of these traditions for the deliberate purpose of harkening his readers back to
these common, older stories and thus granting his own hero a kind of vicarious sympathy and
respect by association: because the audience is presumed respectful and sympathetic to Christ, it
will be respectful and sympathetic to one who is like him, even if the resemblance is only
superficial.
Before we can begin to examine the specific instances of borrowing, however, it is
necessary first to establish probable cause. What would prompt Ainsworth even to begin
connecting between an infamous underworld figure and Jesus Christ? Ironically, the catalyst for
his literary crafting, ironically, may have origin in the historical facts of Jack’s life. First, there
is the issue of the main character’s name: Jack Sheppard. The family name is an obvious
etymological derivative of the word “shepherd,” a vocation intricately laced with Christian
iconography: Christ as the good shepherd,36 the parable of lost sheep,37 the shepherds present at
the birth of Jesus38 – in fact, there are no less than twenty-nine separate passages involving sheep
or shepherds in the New Testament alone. Shepherding is truly, as one set of art historians has
stated, “one of the commonest symbols” in Christian iconography.39 Surely any person with
even the most rudimentary education in Victorian England would have such associations with
images of a shepherd. Even without purposely seeking out a connection, such a parallel would
almost certainly be drawn by a man in Ainsworth’s social position (though the case studies of the
factory children cited earlier certainly help dispel the universality of this claim). True to the
nature of habitus, the world of ideas and images into which Ainsworth and his original audience
were born would have necessarily influenced his own interpretations and representations of his
chosen subject matter.40 Further, Jack was trained in the trade of carpentry by his foster-father,
sparking an obvious recollection of the profession of Jesus and his relationship with his earthly
foster-father. Thus, the happy accident of Jack’s last name and profession harken the reader
automatically to make religious connections. Ainsworth, it seems, found the symbolism
irresistible and just played upon those preexisting ideas to imbue his character with even more
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similarities and to capitalize upon them with the goal of establishing an emotional connection
between his readers and his subject.
It is not too much of a stretch, either, to imagine that popular illustrations, like those in
the Tring Tiles and Selden manuscript of the Christ child facilitating miraculous escapes from
locked towers simply by pulling a friend by the pinky finger through a crack in the masonry,
could have reminded Ainsworth of Jack Sheppard’s own seemingly miraculous escapes from
various locked prison towers41 with an ease that Harry Houdini must have envied.
Perhaps Ainsworth just detected a sense of irony in the fact that, in some circles, the
popularity of this famous thief rivaled the popularity of a man crucified between two thieves.
Whatever the motivation behind his decision, it is undeniable that Ainsworth did chose to make a
series of connections throughout his work, beginning with the birth of the hero.
At the opening of the York nativity play entitled The Birth of Jesus, Joseph complains
that the family’s rudimentary dwelling will not stand up to the weather outside. He sighs, “if we
here all night abide,/We schall be stormed in this steede:/The walls are doune ilk a side,/The
ruffe is rayned aboven our hede.”42 When Mr. Wood ventures to the Mint to ask Mrs.
Sheppard if he can raise her son as his carpentry apprentice, he takes note of the impending
storm and is shocked by the rough nature of this “miserable habitation,” noting that it:
had a sordid and miserable look. Rotten, and covered with a thick coat of dirt, the
boards of the floor presented a very insecure footing; the bare walls were
scorched all over with grotesque designs, the chief of which represented the
punishment of Nebuchadnezzar. The rest were hieroglyphic characters executed
in red chalk and charcoal. The ceiling had in many places given way; the laths
had been removed; and where any plaster remained, it was either mapped and
blistered with damps, or festooned with dusty cobwebs.43
These are hardly the circumstances under which one would expect to encounter an infant
of (as is revealed much later) noble blood and linage. Indeed, Mrs. Joan Sheppard (later shown
to be Lady Constance Rowland) is, by Wood’s surmise, “much too good for him [her late
husband] and was never meant to be a journeyman carpenter’s wife”44 and indeed, her dignified
air is a point of interest throughout the narrative. George Cruikshank’s illustration of this
transposed nativity scene is the frontispiece for Ainsworth’s work. The triad of mother,
swaddled child, and carpenter foster-father together form a tableau which, again simply on the
basis of habitus, is the proper formula to evoke in any Victorian reader images of the Holy Birth.
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The illustration goes beyond simply the Lukan description of the Nativity, however. It
employs the prescription for manger scenes as was first established by the fourteenth century
writings of St. Birgitta of Sweden. The narrations of her heavenly visions spread quickly, and by
the late 1300s they had become a standard source for visual depictions of the birth of Christ. It
was among the first widely disseminated texts to include a detailed account of what are now such
standard elements as the posture of Mary and the presence of the animals.45 In Chapter 21 of her
“Seventh Book of Revelations,” Birgitta describes in great detail how present with the Virgin
Mary is “a very dignified old man and with them they had both an ox and ass. When they had
entered the cave . . . the old man went outside and brought to the Virgin a lighted candle.”46 In
Cruikshank’s etching not only are the man and the single candle central, the presence of the
beasts of burden is even suggested in the background by the horse and rider which is situated
immediately above the aforementioned pictorial re-enactment of Nebuchadnezzar’s divine
punishment, described in the Book of Daniel thus:
Let his heart be changed from man's, and let a beast's heart be given unto him; and let
seven times pass over him. This matter is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand
by the word of the holy ones: to the intent that the living may know that the most High
ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it
the basest of men . . . and let it be wet with the dew of heaven, and let his portion be with
the beasts of the field, till seven times pass over him; This is the interpretation, O king,
and this is the decree of the most High, which is come upon my lord the king: That they
shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, and they
shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and they shall wet thee with the dew of heaven, and
seven times shall pass over thee, till thou know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom
of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will.47
Ainsworth’s subtle yet readily identifiable joke here can be detected when one examines
the picture carefully, noting that the king is wearing his crown while crouched on all fours over a
patch of grass, opening his mouth as if to eat it. It seems that the cattle are present for Jack’s
nativity, after all – just as Birgitta prescribed.
Another distinctive feature of Birgitta’s narration that was adopted into the standard
depiction is her description of Mary’s appearance. The Virgin was:
most very beautiful, clothed in a white mantle and finely woven tunic through
which I could clearly discern her virginal flesh. Her womb was full and much
swollen . . . the Virgin then took the shoes from her feet, put off the white mantle
that covered her, removed the veil from her head and laid these things beside her
. . . with her most beautiful hair – as if of gold – spread out upon her shoulder
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blades. She drew out two small cloths of linen and two of wool, very clean and
finely woven, which she carried with her to wrap the infant that was to be born.48
On the contrary, Mrs. Sheppard seems to be a perfect negative of this celestial image, as she is
said to have been:
dressed in a tattered black stuff gown, discolored by various stains and intended,
to it would seem, from the remnants of rusty crape with which it was here and
there tricked out, to represent the garb of widowhood, and held in her arms a
sleeping infant, swathed in the folds of a linsey-woolsey shawl.
Not withstanding her emaciation, her features still retained something of a
pleasing expression, and might have been termed beautiful, had it not been for
that repulsive freshness of lip denoting the habitual dram-drinker; freshness in her
case rendered the more shocking from the almost livid hue of the rest of her
complexion. She could not be more than twenty; and though want and other
suffering had done the work of time, had wasted her frame, and robbed her cheek
of its bloom and roundness, they had not extinguished the luster of her eyes nor
thinned her raven hair.49
So deliberate an inversion of Birgitta’s vision is this one of Ainsworth’s creation that the latter
almost seems to function as a lampoon of the iconography of the Holy Birth. There are enough
similarities to establish the parallel, but the reader is simultaneously placed in and yanked out of
the traditional scene. For instance, the presence in Ainsworth’s narrative of the “linsey-woolsey
shawl” that wrapped the infant compares to Birgitta’s “two small cloths of linen and two of
wool, very clean and finely woven, which she carried with her to wrap the infant that was to be
born;” but at the same time, there is a sharp difference in the treatment of light by the two
authors. Birgitta writes that from the holy infant “there went out such great and ineffable light
and splendor that the sun could not be compared to it. Nor did that candle that the old man had
put in place give light at all because the divine splendor totally annihilated the material splendor
of the candle . . . And then I heard the wonderfully sweet and most dulcet songs of the angels.”50
The concept of light as elemental in the nativity of the child Jesus also appears in a number of
later liturgical dramas such as The York Cycle Birth of Jesus. When the candle appears near the
child Jack in Ainsworth’s novel, however, he is “alarmed by the light” and “uttered a low and
melancholy cry . . . as if imploring protection.”51 Again we see a reversal of the standard
Nativity elements: while one child radiates light, the other hides from it.
The medieval liturgical tradition could also parody holy scenes. Though the Holy
Nativity was certainly treated with reverence, just three days after the Feast of Christmas fell the
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Feast of the Innocents on which a Boy Bishop, “appointed for the day, was allowed to boss
around his ecclesiastical superiors; outrageous lampooning of the service gave choristers the
opportunity to make braying noises or grimaces.”52 This widespread tradition was a muchanticipated event in the post-advent season. Perhaps Ainsworth’s parody functioned in a similar
way to the ribbing allowed by the Boy Bishop on a feast to mark the mass-murder of children. In
Hauck’s words: “We laugh superficially at a number of jokes, but the real effect of the surface
humor is to prepare us for a darker message.”53
A further connection between Jesus’ story and Jack’s may have existed for Ainsworth in
the name of the hospital for the psychologically deranged, to which Jack’s mother is eventually
committed in the novel. Founded in the mid-fifteenth century, the structure was originally built
for the order of St. Mary of Bethlehem and their work with the mentally ill, but as the
pronunciation of “Bethlehem” was abbreviated to “Bedlam,” the vernacular term came to be
synonymous with the pandemonium and chaos of an asylum.54 Indeed, Ainsworth writes a kind
of second nativity that takes place in the ramshackle cell to which Mrs. Sheppard is committed.
Upon recognizing her adult son, she “strain[s] him to her breast” and as Wild and his thugs burst
into the cell to capture Jack and lead him back to Newgate for hanging, Jack’s mother “clasped
him in her arms.” Present at this nativity again are mock-elements of the sacred scene, this time
in the persons of the asylum. Instead of Nebuchadnezzar, the role of the beast is now played by
“a terrific figure . . . howling like a wild beast;” the Magi are represented by “a poor, half-naked
creature, with a straw crown on his head, and a wooden scepter in his hand, seated on the ground
with all the dignity of a monarch on his throne.”55
Another popular subject in both the drama and art of the Middle Ages is the so-called
“Visitation” described in Luke 1:39-45 wherein Mary encounters her kinswoman Elizabeth, the
mother of John the Baptist who is traditionally considered the cousin of Christ. This event,
though rather short in its Biblical description, “was popular in the visual arts, being depicted as
part of a nativity cycle as early as the sixth century, and finally claiming an independent position
in pictorial history in the Late Middle Ages.”56 The scene was held in such regard, in fact, that
the scriptural account expanded to form its own play in the Wakefield Cycle with its drama The
Salutation of Elizabeth. There is present in Jack Sheppard, too, an event that seems to pay
homage to the popularly re-created scene. Following the switched identity of the two babies
(Jack and the as-of-yet-unnamed Thames Darrell), the two mothers meet and exchange children
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in order to return each to its proper parent. Later the reader learns that the mysterious other
woman in this scene is Thames’ mother, and Mrs. Sheppard’s long-lost sister, thus making the
infants cousins. Though the relationship of the women is not known at the time, the exchange
between them is still significant in that it bears a resemblance to the visitation element of the
medieval nativity cycle. Further, it is interesting to note that in the chapter immediately prior to
the meeting, Ainsworth first introduces a character known as “Baptist,” as if intentionally
priming the awareness of his reader so as to goad him or her into making these same
connections.
The sub-plot surrounding the presence of Thames Darrell has liturgical overtones, as
well. The second century Protoevangelium of James, which many scholars have noted was a
highly influential text in the Middle Ages,57 at one point pits Elizabeth against Herod in an act of
defiance of the so-called “Slaughter of the Innocents.” Whereas Joseph and Mary are warned by
God and able to flee (as dramatized in the York cycle The Flight into Egypt), Elizabeth is left in
Israel and must hide her child from Herod’s murderous rampage. This gruesome event featured
prominently in medieval drama, appearing in the Fleury and Wakefield cycles, among others. In
these plays, Herod is featured as a blustering, raging maniac terrified of losing his throne to an
infant who is destined by birth to overthrow him. So, too, in Ainsworth’s novel is Sir Rowland,
though later repentant for his murderous ways, fearful that he will lose his father’s estate to his
sister’s son and therefore seeks to murder the child. The first eighty-three pages of the novel are
dedicated principally to the way in which Jack came into the care of his foster-father carpenter,
but the primary narrative ultimately becomes intertwined with the efforts of Rowland and Wild
to kill both children indiscriminately. In an effort to save the babies, Wood is forced to flee
across the river with the children, hiding them while hurrying towards safety and out of the
reaches of the madmen bent on murder – an undertaking highly reminiscent of the actions of
Mary and Joseph as well as Elizabeth.
The presence of Jonathan Wild with Sir Rowland plays to another favorite moment in
medieval drama, as well. Throughout the novel, Wild is referred to variously as “the tempter,”
“a demon,” “the enemy of mankind . . . permitted to take human form,” 58 and many times simply
“Devil.”59 Clearly these appellations coupled with his underground lair adorned by the “relics
. . . in yonder cases,”60 which are actually bones of the people whom Wild has condemned and
serve to make his hole a kind of twisted chapel, all function to connect Jonathan Wild with
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Satan. Most interesting, perhaps, is Ainsworth’s inclusion of Wild’s Well Hole, into which
Rowland is beaten and dragged by Wild and one of his minions to be violently killed.61 This
scene is reminiscent of the staged damnation of Herod which occurred with some degree of
regularity in medieval drama. David Bevington describes the scene in The Death of Herod, in
which “the devils emerge from hell-mouth to drag away their prostrate victim.”62 Thus does
Rowland’s own death – in which he is jumped by the Jew Abraham Mendez and murdered in the
Well Hole – contain clear echoes of Herod’s own violent end in Hell’s Mouth; and Wild’s
direction of the murder coincides with the role of the Devil/Death in Herod’s dramatic demise.
Finally, there is the rather odd inclusion of Balaam in the nativity plays of the later
Middle Ages. Though he is a somewhat obscure Old Testament prophet, the Numbers 22 story
of his ass being spooked by an angel of the Lord invisible to Balaam and the subsequent
conversation in human language that beast and rider share surely must have been a quirkily
amusing tale for performance. Indeed, the figure of Balaam does seem to show up with some
consistency in these dramas in the so-called “pageant of prophets.” Even in plays where he is
not explicitly portrayed, his character is often invoked, such as in the The Shepherds and The
Birth of Jesus of the York Cycle,63 and the Wakefield Cycle’s Offering of the Magi64 because
Balaam’s presence in medieval liturgical drama was so indispensable. Ainsworth incorporates
elements of Balaam’s story into the otherwise inexplicable opening to the novel’s chapter
sixteen. The narration states:
a horseman, mounted on a powerful charger, and followed at a respectable
distance by an attendant, galloped into the open space front Newgate, and directed
his course towards a house in the Old Bailey. Before he could draw in the rein,
his steed – startled apparently by some object indistinguishable by the rider, –
swerved with such suddenness as to unseat him, and precipitate him on the
ground.65
Though we soon learn that this rider is none other than Sir Rowland himself, there is never any
explanation offered for the strange behavior of the horse other than that it was “startled
apparently by some object indistinguishable by the rider,” nor is any reason offered for its
inclusion in the novel. Perhaps there is significance in Ainsworth’s blending of the story’s
Herod figure with the figure of a prophet who predicts the coming of Christ to usurp Herod’s
position as King of the Jews. Whatever the case, this incident serves as one more invocation of
the medieval nativity pageant traditions in Jack Sheppard.
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The ties to medieval traditions continue throughout the novel including several notable
instances at the story’s climax. In his last and most dramatic escape from Newgate, Jack must
fight his way through nine locked doors before he finally reaches freedom. Trapped in one
particular cell previously occupied by a large number of insurrectionists, he remarks to himself,
“I’ll let a little fresh air into this dungeon. They say it hasn’t been opened for eight years.” His
plan is slightly deterred, however, as “stepping across the room, some sharp point in the floor
pierced his foot, and, stooping to examine it, he found that the wound had been inflicted by a
long rusty nail, which projected from the boards. Totally disregarding the pain, he picked up the
nail and reserved it for future use.” Clearly, passion symbolism is being employed in this scene
but the iconography becomes even more intense. After acquiring a long iron rail something like
a crow bar, he carries it with him through the rest of the escape narrative. Ainsworth tells us
that “during all this time, he had never quitted the iron bar” and later, upon retrieving his bedding
so as to make a rope to ease himself down the prison walls, he is pictured as triumphantly
“throwing the blanket over his left arm, and shouldering the iron bar.”66 This freeing of himself
from prison and the ensuing imagery are clearly meant to reflect the common medieval
iconography of the Harrowing of Hell, where Christ is pictured either draped in a cloak or still
wrapped in his grave clothes and is virtually never without his stave, which he uses to pierce the
gates of Hades and usher the Patriarchs towards paradise. These two elements are “the
immediate visual clues to art historians that a scene is one of the Harrowing.”67 As Bevington
points out, despite the fact that the scene is “mentioned nowhere in the Bible [it] forms an
essential part of all Corpus Christi plays.”68 Though the only physical freedom Jack secures is
his own, the iconography is especially potent when one considers the upheaval of cultural
liberation that Jack’s chronic defiance spawned.
Also undeniable is the subtle crafting of language in Jack’s execution narrative, which
employs three images in particular that cause the reader to do a double-take, having mistaken the
scene on the page for a scene very much embedded in his or her iconographic literacy. As Jack
is led to the “fatal tree” for hanging, “the owner of the Crown [Tavern] . . . issued from the
house, bearing a large wooden bowl filled with ale, which he offered to Jack.” This scene is
obviously paralleling the scriptural event recorded in every gospel but Luke’s and a popular
moment in the medieval passion plays, featured in the York Death and Burial, among others;
further, Ainsworth subtly includes the symbol of the thorny crown. Further, during Blueskin’s
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failed rescue attempt, “the body of Jack Sheppard, meanwhile, was borne along by that
tremendous host,” an attempt to remind the reader of the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation.
And finally, as Thames examines Jack’s corpse, he discovers that “it had been cut down before
life was extinct, but a ball from one of the soldiers had pierced his heart.” 69 As at Christ’s
crucifixion when “one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side”70 – arguably one of the most
essential scenes in medieval passion iconography – so too does Jack ultimately defy his
persecutors one last time by surviving their execution tactics, necessitating more extreme
measures finally to defeat him.
Jack Sheppard, both as a historical and literary figure, emerged at a time of cultural flux
in England. In the 1720s, when his real-life exploits first won him infamy, Jack represented not
just a charming, savvy thief, but also a man who was able to defy authority and humble the
hegemonic sphere by his continual triumph over their restrictions. His boldness and audacity
symptomized the shift towards democratic rule and the elevation of the individual spirit that was
beginning to take shape both across the Atlantic and across the Channel. Jack’s role in literature
functions in much the same way. Just as Macheath charged onto the eighteenth century stage
and caused proponents of highbrow culture and patrician rule to question the sanctity of their
sphere, so did Jack Sheppard, through Ainsworth’s book and the street plays it spawned, cause
the Victorian ruling class much trepidation at the pervasiveness that working class culture was
beginning to have. Engels and Marx recognized the coming of this trend and were writing on it
soon after Ainsworth was putting pen to page to elevate the life of one of England’s most
infamous figures and make him something of a tragic hero.
Thus, the literary Jack is representative of his cultural context and the pending sea change
in the empowerment of the lowest classes; and yet, he also is representative of cultural history.
By intentionally seeking to invoke images of medieval vernacular spirituality, Ainsworth is able
to do more than just gain sympathy by association. He is also able to remind the reader of a time
when the common people created traditions for themselves from restricted texts. Though the
Catholic Church of the Middle Ages still had a large hand in the production and performance of
the liturgical plays, the iconography, and the dissemination of visionary manuscripts, the
traditions themselves persisted by means of the masses through such routes as the trade guilds’
adoptions of various dramas and simple oral tradition. Bourdieu would consider Ainsworth’s
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evoking of tradition as “the system of disposition – a past which survives in the present and tends
to perpetuate itself into the future by making itself present in practice structured according to its
principles.”71 The authorial decision to create a figure who both invokes and revokes earlier
traditions of Christ gains Ainsworth admittance to the realm of recognition within his
readership’s experiences. By playing not just to allusions to Christ but vernacular perceptions of
Christ, he is creating a kind of inside joke to which the ever-growing pool of literate working
class men and women might have access. Hauck writes about a similar concept, stating “Many
jokes are fairly complicated metaphors, and our response to a joke is similar to our response to a
literary metaphor: we have to get it, we are surprised by the analogy, and we are pleased,
amused, and satisfied to have been surprised and to have been bright enough to get it.” Like a
skilled housebreaker, Ainsworth has created his own entrance into the collective experience of
his audience. The religious allusions are respectable enough for middle class prudence, but at
times are also rebellious or irreverent inversions. He has not only played to a broad demographic
but he has also empowered his audience by setting up allusions to which they all might be privy.
The newly-literate working class, too, can be “satisfied to have been . . . bright enough to get”
his tactics.72
A literary shape-shifter like its central figure, Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard novel is able to
take on the character of whatever or whomever it needs to for survival. And indeed, survival is
Jack Sheppard’s ultimate accomplishment. The plays and music inspired by this work not only
opened the gates to other popular products to be consumed first by the lower classes and then the
higher ones, but they also evolved into new forms of entertainment and manifested themselves in
new products of the emerging popular culture. Thus Ainsworth’s text, like Jack’s spirit itself,
“was launched into eternity.”73
From Page to Stage
It would be a gross exaggeration and mischaracterization, of course, to imply that Jack
Sheppard was viewed as Christ figure by the general public. Rather, it is those iconographic
manipulations that assisted Ainsworth’s text in striking upon familiar, comfortable elements in
the vernacular imagination. There was another element, however, that truly launched the story
and figure into the realm of popular phenomenon.
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In January of 1839, Bentley’s Miscellany ran its first episode of William Ainsworth’s new
novel, Jack Sheppard. Though it was slated to complete its serialization in February of 1840, the
novel was released in its entirety in October of 1839 and by the end of the month, a dramatized
version of the novel by J. B. Buckstone opened in London at the Adelphi Theatre. (The novel
did complete its obligation to the magazine, however, running its final installation in early 1840.)
The popular chord that the novel had struck among its readership was soon to become a full
orchestration of melodramas, pantomimes, ballad operas, and common ditties. Ainsworth’s
writing had certainly enabled the text’s initial reception, but the illustrations of Cruikshank are
what enabled it to cross effectively from the printed page to live-action re-creations.
Meisel details the ways in which Cruikshank’s sketches were used in advertising the
various plays, with a pictorial series of images forming a narrative sequence of events on
playbills and posters. Meisel includes the telling words of William Makepeace Thackeray (who
bore little love for Ainsworth) that the one element of the novel that stays most with the reader is
“George Cruikshank’s pictures – always George Cruikshank’s pictures.” Thackeray goes on to
pen: “[I]t seems to us that Mr Cruikshank really created the tale, and that Mr Ainsworth, as it
were, only put words to it.”74 Despite the well-known dislike between the authors, Thackeray’s
assessment of the situation seems fair and accurate – it is the visual genius of Cruikshank’s work
that breathes life into the story.
It is significant, too, that such vivid illustrations were received with such widespread
excitement. As print reproduction technology developed, it enabled the cheaper, easier, and
therefore wider dissemination of graphic images. And since the illustrations offered such
sequential narration, they were able to convey the story of Jack’s adventures and triumphs even
to the least literate of the urban poor who saw the images emblazoned on theatre advertisements
and in shop windows. Thus, the text was “read” by far more than those who possessed the
complete volumes or a subscription to Bentley’s, and this familiarity translated to the stage.
Tableau vivant, the nineteenth century parlor game and theatrical entertainment that
assembled famous artistic scenes from living people and real items, found a new form of
realization via these illustrations. It had already developed alongside Hogarth’s etchings, but it
was now popularized in the mainstream so as to be a standard part of staging melodramas.
Matthew Buckley points out the essential link that a real-life enactment of a textual image
created for the working class audience of these earliest Jack Sheppard plays:
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Dramatic realization of such images as tableaux allowed a theatrical audience
unfamiliar with the book, but possessed of some acquaintance with its
illustrations, to assign a narrative to the visual skeleton offered by Cruikshank’s
prints. Dramatic realization, however, in its achievement of a familiar illustration
in living form, also elicited the complex, sensational pleasures of pictorial
recognition.75
As each familiar scene took to the stage, these “sensational pleasures of pictorial recognition”
produced a kind of gratification for the audience – there was a mutual understanding between
director, actors, and audience. It was a kind of cultural inside joke that the proletariat audience
got but that simultaneously represented a kind of cultural and visual literacy closed to those who
normally availed themselves only to “high art.” Buckley also notes that “Jack Sheppard mania,”
as he calls it, was the result of “that hybrid ‘book’ which served as a primary mechanism, and not
simply a literary articulation, of the modernity it describes.”76 And as the mania surrounding this
figure and the popularity of his plays rose, the class distinction grew even greater. Jack, who
was one of the lumpenproletariat in real life and gained notoriety by repeatedly defying the
social order in place, was once again emerging as the hero of the underprivileged and the bane of
the upper-crust.
One of the earliest and perhaps the most famous example of the anxieties caused by this
play is the May 5, 1840 murder of Lord William Russell by B.F. Courvoisier, his valet. The
case was well-publicized and the defendant famously remarked afterward that he had been
influenced by both Ainsworth’s novel and a production of Jack Sheppard by J.T. Haines at the
Surrey theatre. The public reaction to this confession was tremendous in part because of the
extremity of this crime but also because, as was rapidly becoming evident, it was not the only
response elicited by the popularity of Jack’s story. As Buckley notes, the songs, catch phrases,
and attitudes of Jack were all quickly catching on; “the working class population had reason to
be angered, and the Jack Sheppard mania offered a wonderful set of gestures and signs, attitudes
and postures through which a servant, beggar, or a petty laborer could make anger evident.”77
The upper-class insisted that this merely proved what they had suspected all along – that the
popular literature and entertainment of the working class were dangerous, unhealthy pastimes
that would only lead to violence and revolt. A new effort was launched to prevent future
productions of Jack Sheppard on London stages and would stay on the books until 1880, but it
had little effect. The playwrights simply adapted their works as theatre historian George Taylor
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points out, “by renaming the play The Stone Jug. Other titles adopted included The Idle
Apprentice [after Hogarth’s illustration], The Boy Burglar, Thames Darrell, and The Storm in the
Thames.”78
The Stone Jug is an especially significant title, as it comes from the opening line of the
plays’ most popular song, “Nix My Dolly.” Jack opens the song with the following
pronouncement: “In a box of the stone jug I was born” – implying that his birth took place in a
prison cell. The song continues with a cheerful recounting of Jack’s early peccadilloes and
criminal beginnings that, ironically, are contrary to Jack’s childhood in Mr. Wood’s care, as the
audience has just witnessed. But the dramatized Jack makes it abundantly clear that he has
chosen to ally himself with the lower class, even while he is still living a respectable middleclass life. In the opening scene of Buckstone’s second act, the curtain lifts to reveal a tableau of
Cruikshank’s “The Name on the Beam” illustration. Here, the audience witnesses a twelve-yearold Jack carving his name into the crossbeam of Wood’s workshop while singing a fortuitous
song to himself about the carved names in Newgate’s walls. In his second spoken line of the
play, he remarks to himself: “Tut, tut! what a fool I am. I ought to have cut John not Jack; but
it don’t signify, everybody calls me Jack, perhaps I was christened so, who knows?” After
singing a few more bars he steps back to admire his work and bemuses, “I’ve half a mind to give
old Wood the slip and turn highwayman.”79 Thus we see an immediate and deliberate choice for
the vernacular – he rejects the more decorous form of his name and wants to shake off the
respectable profession for which he has been trained. The effect is the same as his lyrics in “Nix
My Dolly” – his desire is an association with the lower classes and is a desire that will be
realized in both the fictionalized performance of his story and in the real-life demographic of his
audience.
Jack’s alliance with the lower classes extended beyond the realm of his dramatized life,
as well. The early Victorian era was marked by its inheritance of several seismic social shifts
from the Regency period (1811-1820) and the intervening years to Victoria’s coronation in 1837.
It was during this time that cultural output was marked by a rise in social consciousness. Sir
Walter Scott popularized idyllic scenes of royal leisure; Jane Austen penned novels driven by
class standing and social decorum; and manners guides crystallized the practices and gestures of
the upper class for an increasingly status-conscious middle class. Even more significantly,
however, was the passage (and subsequent repeal) of the Corn Laws and the introduction of the
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Parliamentary Reform Act of 1832. The Reform Act extended parliament election rights
dramatically, almost doubling the number of men deemed eligible to vote. The restructuring of
the districts also heavily favored the densely populated manufacturing centers around London
and in the north, thereby granting significant political power to urban residents and signaling a
cultural shift in self-perception: England was now a country of modern industry rather than
agrarian dependence.
The Corn Laws also affected the condition of the urban working classes, but in a very
different way. In 1815, a series of tariffs were enacted to limit foreign imports of such staples as
wheat. The goal was supposedly to preserve the jobs of British farmers and harvesters but since
British colonies were already the most profitable producers of grain, the perceived competition
was a governmental fabrication and the measure only succeeded in keeping prices artificially
high – all to the benefit of wealthy British landowners. The issue was one of the most hotly
contested issues through the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. When the
potato famine began in Ireland in 1845, the need to revoke the Corn Laws became apparent to
bring down the cost of bread but the debate continued until 1846, when the restrictions were
finally lifted. The policy change was viewed as a tremendous blow against the landed
aristocracy and the decades-long debate was considered another sign that the British laborers –
from the harvesters to the dock hands to the processing and production workers – were speaking
up and grasping at political, economic, and social power. In a trend that caused the upper classes
some concern for their hegemonic status, the culture was beginning to shift in favor of the little
man and Jack Sheppard, with his defiant maneuverings and subversive triumphs, was emerging
as their spiritual leader.
That is not to say that Jack summarily rejected all objects representative of wealth. Peter
Reed points out that “Buckstone’s Jack Sheppard instead exhibits a marked fascination with
clothing and sumptuary display” and rightly recognizes this tendency for finery through
dishonest gains as a consistent trait throughout Jack’s performed adventures in various media.80
The display of such lavish consumption does not seem to be a tip of the proverbial (and in this
case, “smartly cocked and edged with feathers”81 hat to the tastes and habits of the bourgeois but
rather, is a mockery of such consumption. He does not clothe himself in items purchased by his
earnings but rather, pilfered by his profession. The gesture is not imitation as much as it is
defiance of social restrictions and sumptuary regulations. This audacity is much the same as that
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Macheath displays in The Beggar’s Opera. Reed makes the additional note that Jack’s costume
changes “culminat[e] in the ‘Scarlet hunting coat, trimmed with gold lace, high boots, and
feathered hat’ made famous by early stagings of Macheath.”82 Though the figure is changing as
his story is reworked, certain iconographic elements are inherited, marking the progression of the
cycle.
The Ainsworth/Cruikshank/Buckstone Jack Sheppard is very self-aware of its
borrowings from John Gay, even inventing for the audience an incident whereby Gay, Hogarth,
Thornhill, and several other notables visited Jack in his Newgate cell. In the play’s version of
this scene, Jack and his visitors have the following exchange that imagines a jumping off point
from which the lore cycle might have launched:
Jack: And so you’re Mr Gay, the playwriter, eh? I saw your Captives at the
Drury Lane one night. Poll, Bess and I went into the gallery; we were
highly entertained. The Prince of Wales was there too.
Gay: And pray who may Poll and Bess be?
Austin: His two wives, if you please, sir.
Gay: Two wives! Egad, Jack, you should write your adventures; they would be
quite as entertaining as the histories of Lazarillo de Tormes, Meriton
Latroon, or any of my favourite rogues, and far more instructive.
Jack: You had better write ’em for me, Mr Gay.
Hogarth: (to Gay) If you write them I’ll illustrate them.
Gay: I will. An idea has just occurred to me – I’ll write an opera, the scene of
which shall be laid altogether at Newgate, and the principal character a
highwayman. I’ll not forget your two mistresses, Jack.
Jack: Nor Jonathan Wild, I hope, sir.
Gay: Certainly not. I’ll gibbet the rascal, a thief-taker! Eh? Ha!ha!ha!—I’ll call
him Peach’em; and my opera shall have no music except the good old
ballad tunes, and we’ll see whether it won’t put the Italian opera out of
fashion . . .
Hogarth: . . . Sheppard’s story has given me a hint – I’ll take two apprentices, and
depict their career; one, by perseverance and industry, shall obtain
fortune and honour, and the other, by an opposite course and dissolute
habits, shall eventually arrive at Tyburn.
Jack: (dejectedly) Yours will be nearer the truth, and have a deeper moral, Mr
Hogarth.83
The illustration of the scene from Cruikshank’s hand is a study in layered representation.
It depicts Jack in the center of the room flanked by Thornhill’s formal painting on his right and
Hogarth’s sketch on his left – all in a scene that formed an essential part of the theatrical tableaux
of each performance. But Reed stresses the important point that the representation does not end
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there, noting, “Cruikshank’s drawing represents an already theatricalized scene. Jack performs
for his audience, who process his performance into various other modes and media. Once again,
blurring the boundaries between on- and offstage, Cruikshank’s actors and audience occupy the
same space.”84 Indeed, the re-creation of Jack Sheppard was taking place all over Britain in its
working class theatres and by working class people whistling his songs and chanting his lyrics.
The traits and tricks, gestures and jokes of the real life Jack Sheppard and his various creative
manifestations were continuing to live, grow, and spread throughout Britain, across the Atlantic,
and eventually, over the Channel.
Black Jack
In December of 1839, two months after the opening of Buckstone’s play in London’s
Adelphi, Jack Sheppard, or the Life of a Robber! made its debut at the Bowery Theatre in New
York. The play was the creation of Jonas B. Phillips, a nominally successful playwright in the
melodrama genre and, as Reed writes, “The Bowery seems a particularly fitting place to stage
the escapes and insouciances of the Atlantic lumpenproletariat . . . As one might expect from a
theatrical venue in the middle of public negotiations over the relationships between class and
culture, the Bowery was a tumultuous place.”85 The neighborhood was racially mingled and
socially charged – recent years had been marked by violent demonstrations and riots that often
involved the theatre itself. And it was among this demographic that T.D. Rice had been jumping
Jim Crow to enthusiastic responses for the past few years.
The traditional minstrel variety show was still developing in the late 1830s, but as the
popularity of Rice’s blackface character had become a sensation, it opened doors for a new form
of working class entertainment and its fame had earned it hegemonic status among the lower
classes. The cultural consumption of the laborers was no longer dictated by the tastes and trends
of the moneyed class but rather, by the songs, dances, and characters of their own creation. Such
organic entertainment had obviously always existed but now it dominated the popular venues.
The almost-simultaneous development of such vernacular forces as Jim Crow’s and Jack
Sheppard’s stage personae was made even more remarkable by the shifts in Jack’s lore cycle
than manifested themselves in several of Rice’s later shows.
As noted above, Rice took his Jim Crow show to London in the summer of 1836,
returning there regularly until 1844. Jack Sheppard mania (to employ Buckley’s term once
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again) launched three years later, re-stoked by several manifestations of Jack’s story. (In fact,
Ainsworth’s was not the only novelized version of Jack Sheppard’s life to be released in 1839;
Lincoln Fortescue published The Life and Adventures of Jack Sheppard anonymously in London
that same year, placing his name on the second printing in 1845, only after the popularity of his
subject was certain.) As the Jack Sheppard plays leapt to prominence by winter of 1839 on both
sides of the Atlantic, evidence suggests that Rice had already absorbed elements of Jack’s cycle
into his own trans-Atlantic performances.
In the autumn of 1835, an early version of Bone Squash Diavolo played around the
northeast, first at the Bowery and then at the Walnut Theatre in Philadelphia. In 1839, truly a
red-letter year for working class entertainment, a re-worked version Bone Squash86 opened in
London in 1839. A self proclaimed “Burletta” (burlesque/operetta), it featured original
composition as well as lyrical reworkings of popular tunes and like Gay’s work, featured a
character who has several traits of Jack Sheppard. Bone Squash, a good-timing chimney sweep
(played by a blacked-up Rice) sells his soul to the devil – “a real genuine Yankee devil, or a
devil of a Yankee”87 – a figure with a real-life correlation to the so-called “Yankee devils” who
were fat-cats of New York industry. After the transaction, Bone Squash wins the admiration of
Pompey Duckellegs, a black man trying to live like a white man, who is impressed by Bone
Squash’s expensive new clothes and apparent upswing in fortune. Duckellegs secures Bone
Squash’s promise to marry Junietta – a young woman of similar class and race aspirations as her
father. The plans for the wedding are interrupted, however, by the appearance of Janza who
insists that her claim on Bone Squash is the rightful one, as well as by the repeated attempts of
the Yankee Devil to entrap his quarry. The crafty Bone Squash eludes capture by means of an
awaiting hot air balloon, pushing the Devil back into the pits of hell and leaving his friends and
brides-to-be behind.
Lhamon makes an important observation about this play, noting that the two wives at the
close of the curtain:
makes swift allusion to John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), which was still
standard fare in the theatre when Rice was coming up. Macheath’s promises to
Polly and Lucy a century earlier activate Bone’s vows to Junietta and Janza . . .
Moreover, Rice solves the infamous problems of Macheath’s release at the end of
The Beggar’s Opera, but without Gay’s contrivance. Gay sends in a reprieve.
Rice sees to it that the play shakes Bone free, its very instability accessing the
uncertainty of its characters’ lives.88
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Even before Jack was reliving his adventures between the covers of Bentley’s Miscellany
throughout 1839, it seems that he also found himself between the proscenium arches of Atlantic
stages.
Eighteen fifty-three saw the premier of another “burlesque opera” by Rice, this one a
parody of Shakespeare’s Othello entitled Otello. The role of the Moorish hero is performed in
blackface and incorporates only reworked folk melodies such as “Yankee Doodle” and “Dan
Tucker” for its characters’ songs. Two songs are of special note, however. Lhamon suggests
that Iago and Roderigo’s duet, “‘Polly Will You Now’ was perhaps derived from Gay’s Beggar’s
Opera and its sequel, Polly.” Likewise, Otello has a ditty set to the tune of none other than “Nix
My Dolly” of Jack Sheppard fame. Lhamon makes note of this, as well, pointing out that, “It
may be that Rice has Otello sing his ‘notin’ to pay’ lyrics at this point to emphasize his likeness
to Jack Sheppard’s Romany or ‘gypsy’ mood.”89 The inclusion of this song is not at all
surprising, as Rice’s shows were often performed in the same playhouses that hosted Jack
Sheppard productions and the primary audience of both shows was the same – working class
youths with no other social or influential voice than the advancement of their own vernacular
culture.
And one of the most important elements of vernacular culture is its recognizability by a
large group, as well as its flexibility to adapt to changing tastes, trends, and contexts. These
minstrel shows, with their use of familiar elements, quickly grew to become arguably the most
powerful source of popular culture in the mid-nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic.
Much of their appeal lay with the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the predictable
and the unpredictable, the static and the ever-changing elements of each show. Lhamon opens
his book Jump Jim Crow with the remark Shakespeare penned for Roderigo in Othello, in which
the younger man warns Brabantio about the secret marriage between Desdemona and the
Moorish soldier:
Your daughter . . . hath made a gross revolt,
Tying her duty, beauty, wit, and fortunes
In an extravagant and wheeling stranger
Of here and everywhere.90
It is on this description of Othello as an “extravagant and wheeling stranger” that Lhamon
chooses to base his discussion of the blackface Jim Crow character, and it is an amazingly
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accurate description of what the gestures of the minstrel shows would contain almost four
hundred years later. The ubiquitous chorus of the character’s title song, “Jump Jim Crow,”
repeats the following passage: “Weel about and turn about and do jis so,/Eb’ry time I weel about
and jump Jim Crow.”91 These lyrics and their accompanying spinning, leaping dance, were the
only stable part of an ever-changing series of verses that quickly became a staple part of
blackface minstrel shows and comedy routines.
The dances and acrobatics highlighted in blackface performance were some of the most
distinguishing features of the shows. Constance Rourke describes the typical show in her
seminal study American Humor: A Study of the National Character, first published in 1931. She
stresses that:
Primitive elements were roughly patterned in minstrelsy. Its songs, its dances, its
patter, were soon set within a ritual which grew more and more fixed, like some
rude ceremonial. Endmen and interlocutors spun out their talk with an air of
improvisation . . . In the dancing a strong individualism appeared, and the single
dancer might step out of the whole pattern; the jig dancer might perform his feats
on a peck measure, and dancers might be matched against each other with high
careerings which belonged to one alone: but these excursions were caught within
the broad effect. Beneath them all ran the deep insurgence of Negro choruses that
flowed into minstrelsy for many years, even after its ritual grew stereotyped and
other elements were added.92
The formula of these gestures is especially evident in their treatment in Harriett Beecher
Stowe’s groundbreaking 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe, who insisted that she had never
attended a minstrel show herself,93 exhibits signs of habitus in that she is nevertheless cognizant
of the elements of this popular entertainment. This influence is evident in the manner in which
St. Clare introduces Ophelia to the unforgettable Topsy:
“I thought she was rather a funny specimen in the Jim Crow line. Here
Topsy,” he added giving a whistle, as a man would to call the attention of a dog,
“give us a song, now, and show us some of your dancing.”
The black, glassy eyes glittered with a kind of wicked drollery, and the
thing struck up, in a clear, shrill voice, an odd negro melody, to which she kept
time with her hands and feet, spinning round, clapping her hands, knocking her
knees together, in a wild, fantastic sort of time, and producing in her throat all
those odd guttural sounds which distinguish the native music of her race; and
finally, turning a summerset or two, and giving a prolonged closing note, as odd
and unearthly as that of a steam-whistle, she came suddenly down on the carpet,
and stood with her hands folded, and a most sanctimonious expression of
meekness and solemnity over her face, only broken by the cunning glances which
she shot askance from the corners of her eyes.94 (369)
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A few pages later, we see Ophelia’s fruitless attempts to school Topsy in the ways of domestic
chores:
Topsy would hold a perfect carnival of confusion, for some one or two hours.
Instead of making the bed, she would amuse herself with pulling off the
pillowcases, butting her wooly head among the pillows, till it would sometimes be
grotesquely ornamented with feathers sticking out in various directions; she
would climb the posts, and hang head downward from the tops; flourish the sheets
and spreads all over the apartment; dress the bolster up in Miss Ophelia’s nightclothes, and enact various performances with that, -- singing and whistling, and
making grimaces are herself in the looking-glass; in short, as Miss Ophelia
phrased it, “raising Cain” generally.
On one occasion, Miss Ophelia found Topsy with her very best scarlet
India Canton crape shawl wound round her head for a turban, going on with her
rehearsals before the glass in great style . . .
“Topsy!” she would say, when at the end of all patience, “what does make
you act so?”
. . . “I spects I ’s the wickedest critter in the world;” and Topsy would cut a
summerset, and come up brisk and shining to a higher perch, and evidently plume
herself on the distinction.95
As Topsy creates her own minstrel show hilarity, “in the Jim Crow line,” Jim Crow
seems to have developed this “extravagant and wheeling” style of performance while he also
absorbed the specific elements of the Jack Sheppard lore cycle discussed above. As Stowe’s
novel was adapted for stage – both in the versions maintaining her abolitionist stance and those
(usually in lower class playhouses) that reversed it – the character of Topsy became an
indispensable comic-relief figure. Her subversive songs, coupled with wild dances and
gymnastics were often a main attraction of the show. In light of this, one cannot help but be
reminded of Jack’s defiant escape letter and spontaneous celebration as it was recorded in
Defoe’s popular book: “having gone a little way, Hefford’s-Harp at the sign of the Irish-Harp,
put me a Jumping and Dancing to that degree that I could not forbear making a Somerset or two
before Northumberland House . . . [and] meeting by meer chance a Bakers Cart going to
Turnham-Green, I being not Mealy Mouth’d, nor the Man being Crusty I wheel’d out of town.”96
As is evidenced by the inclusion of such social fixtures as the Yankee Devil in Bone
Squash, the defiance of hegemonic concepts of decency in “Nix My Dolly,” and possibly even
the jumping acrobatics of the general minstrel show tradition, it is apparent that the blackface
inclusion of Jack Sheppard elements was more than convenient cross-pollination. Meer asserts,
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“Minstrelsy could thus direct the class anxiety of white workers at potential black rivals and at
the same time suggest the possibility of allegiance. Blackface’s inherent political ambiguity was
enhanced by the fact that performances were topical, partly improvisatory, and acutely
responsive to their audiences.”97 Lhamon makes a similar argument in Raising Cain, stating
simply that “The blackface lore cycle is what held together in useful tension the conflicted voices
of this class.”98 The same class-conscious fear that had erupted in England over the popularity of
Jack Sheppard’s story among the working classes was applied on both sides of the Atlantic to
minstrel shows, as well. Lhamon applies this argument to the Jim Crow figure, quoting the
Devil in his own exasperated curse at Bone Squash:
“You’re like a ‘lasses candy in a shop window. You run away on all sides” (Act
II, scene 4). His melting instability is exactly what bosses held against Jim
Crow’s public. And that’s why polite culture aimed its big guns of disrepute
against Jim Crow. Elites could not entirely outlaw common people, but they
could try to make taboo their cultural activities.99
As Jack’s lore cycle developed, it also diversified. Its nature dictated the working class
realms in which it stayed – the politically and economically satisfied rarely have an interest in
the emblems and images of those who are not, except when those images threaten the structure
that keeps the status quo in place. Elements of Jack’s presence in burnt cork make-up on a
proletariat stage could hardly have seemed threatening to the hegemonic powers; after all, a
black laborer was the only person less socially empowered than a white one. And his persistence
was at first only a cultural victory. But the political potency of the cycle would eventually
become apparent.
Jack to the Future
Bone Squash may have sailed away into the heavens in the Diavolo, but a century later
Macheath resurfaced in the underworld again – and as himself this time – in Bertolt Brecht’s
Dreigroschenoper (in English, The Threepenny Opera). Brecht’s creative retelling of Gay’s
story also comes in the form of a parody, now of the German high art conventions that were
being perpetuated by theatrical forms such as Wagnerian opera. As Lotte Lenya, one of the stars
of the original production (and wife of composer Kurt Weill), recollected about the play in the
1940s, “Respected Berlin theatre oracles slipped out to spread the word that Brecht and Weill
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proposed to insult the public with a ludicrous mishmash of opera, operetta, cabaret, straight
theatre, outlandish American jazz, not one thing or the other.” 100
Such was Brecht’s style – he was eclectic and unabashed about borrowing from other
cultural sources as part of his own creative genius. Lenya describes what was Brecht’s tendency,
“As his admirers have it: to adapt, reinterpret, re-create, magnificently add modern significance;
or in his detractors’ eye: to pirate, plagiarize, shamelessly appropriate – to borrow at will from
the vanished greats like Marlowe and Shakespeare and Villon, and even from his actual or near
contemporaries like Kipling and Gorky and Klabund.”101 As such, when the idea came to him
to resurrect The Beggar’s Opera but in a satirical manner that would ultimately highlight
Brecht’s socialist ideals, the borrowing of Gay’s story and characters was not only convenient, it
was quite appropriate. After all, Gay’s original production had been laced with political satire
itself.
And similar to the theatrical revolution of which Gay’s ballad opera was a catalyst, so too
did Brecht’s treatment of the story mark an important era of change in cultural production. In the
visual arts, the painters dubbed “modern artists” were reclaiming the two-dimensional canvas
from the photo-realists; meanwhile, a similar movement occurring with the stage. Playwrights
like Brecht sought to recapture the stage from the realm of suspended disbelief and to tear down
the so-called “fourth wall.” If one wanted to be lost in the melodic scores of classical
composition (so the reasoning went), one should attend an orchestral performance; if one sought
entertainment, one should seek out a cabaret or the moving picture shows; if one desired to see
real life performed, one should simply stand on a city street corner, or in a drawing room or
workhouse and see real life displayed before one’s very eyes. If one wanted live performance in
a theatrical setting, the performance should be delivered in such a way that the immediacy and
fabrication of the live theatre was never forgotten, suspended, or imagined away. The result of
such a philosophy were performances punctuated by dropped signs announcing new scenes,
costume changes on stage, and theatre-in-the-round in which the audience was always acutely
and unavoidably self-aware due to the section of audience seated across the stage from
themselves – in short, it was a reclaiming of the Greek “theatron” or “spectacle” of the theatre.
Brecht described the process by which theatre ideally reclaims the written word for performance
as such:
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Today the theatre exerts an absolute primacy over dramatic writing. The primacy
of the theatrical apparatus is a primacy of means of production. The theatre as a
whole resists any attempt to change its function for other ends. The moment it
gets hold of a play, the theatre immediately starts transforming it – except those
passages which are not in direct contradiction to the theatre – so that it no longer
in any way remains a foreign body in the theatre. The necessity for presenting the
new drama adequately – more important for the theatre than for the drama – is
weakened by the fact that the theatre can present anything and everything: it
“theatricalizes” any play.102
It is in this atmosphere of cultural change and social activism that elements of Jack
Sheppard emerges again – and again with Macheath, the dashing and slippery underworld rogue.
It is important to note, however, that Brecht’s interests in the play had nothing to do with the
actual figure of Sheppard. It is unlikely that Brecht was even aware of the historical inspiration
for Gay’s Macheath. Instead, it is the gestures that Macheath brings that Brecht sought to
perpetuate. The plethora of wives (Polly, Lucy, and Jenny are those explicitly named) are again
in place, as is the dapper appearance (in Act one, Scene one, Polly breathlessly describes
Macheath’s “White kid gloves and a stick with an ivory handle and spats over his patent leather
shoes and a nice polite manner and a scar”), and the chronic escapes (from both the prison of his
physical confinement and the prison of matrimonial responsibility via his eleventh-hour royal
lordship). But the circumstances of the play are slightly altered. In Brecht’s version, Peachum is
no longer just an underworld dealer of stolen goods. Now, he is a tight-fisted capitalist who has
built an industry of begging and regulates his myriad panhandler and pickpocket employees in
their various professional endeavors throughout the London streets. His business is based upon
the principle that hypocrisy is a marketing technique:
that the rich of the earth indeed create misery, but they cannot bear to see it. They
are weaklings and fools just like you. As long as they have enough to eat and can
grease their floors with butter so that even the crumbs that fall from their tables
grow fat, they can’t look with indifference on a man collapsing from hunger –
although, of course, it must be in front of their house that he collapses.103
Peachum thus reveals himself a player in the very system he seeks to exploit.
Macheath makes a similar observation as to the hypocrisy of the commercially
successful, but from the point of view of one outside of the capitalist establishment. In “Second
Threepenny-Finale” he and Ginny Jenny share a duet commenting on the inherent problem with
social moralizing separate from social equality. Macheath opens with the statement:
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Now all you gentlemen who wish to lead us
Who teach us to desist from mortal sin
Your prior obligation is to feed us:
When we’ve had our lunch, your preaching can begin.
All you who love your paunch and our propriety
Take note of this one thing (for it is late):
You may proclaim, good sirs, your fine philosophy
But till you feed us, right and wrong can wait!
Or is it only those who have the money
Can enter the land of milk and honey?104
Once again, Jack Sheppard emerges as the champion of the lumpenproletariat and the
mouthpiece of their anger. And once again, his form ruled the dictates of popular culture. Lenya
recalls, “From that day [of the play’s opening] Berlin was swept by a Dreigroschenoper fever.
In the streets no other tunes were whistled. A Dreigroschen bar opened, where no other music
was played. Immediately the ‘Brecht style’ and the ‘Weill style’ were slavishly imitated by other
dramatists and composers.”105
Brecht’s version may have secured Macheath in a barony among the elite, but Jack
Sheppard was never one to shun the common folks. As The Threepenny Opera opened and
closed in Berlin, there was a song that lingered. Composed hastily to create a grander entrance
for the egotistical actor originally cast as Macheath, the song was sung on-stage by an organ
grinder, representing the downtrodden empire of which Macheath was the criminal hero. It was
called “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” in German, which translates to “The Deadly Deeds of
Mr. Mackie.” And because Anglophone cultural ties with Germany from the First World War
were not fully mended before the second broke out, the song remained on the continent until the
1950s. It was not until the rebuilding of Europe after World War Two that trans-Atlantic cultural
exchange really began again, and it is at this point that Jack Sheppard once again crossed to
America.
In 1954, Marc Blitzstein translated the musical into English for its New York debut, and
re-named the song “Mack the Knife.” The show was a hit off Broadway; the song was a
phenomenon everywhere else. American jazz great Louis Armstrong recorded a version of it in
1956. Two years later, Bobby Darin did the same, and the cut rapidly rose to the top of the
American charts. Its ubiquitous presence on the radio and on bandstands assured it a solid place
in popular music history, as well as establishing it as a perennial remake favorite. Bill Haley and
His Comets, The Doors, Frank Sinatra and Lyle Lovett have all offered up their own versions of
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the song; in fact, between 1956 and 2006 there were at least fifteen renditions of the song
recorded by mainstream popular musicians and it became common practice to tweak the lyrics
according to each singer’s situation. Armstrong, for example, spontaneously added the name of
“Miss Lotte Lenya” in his own adaptation as tribute to original Threepenny cast member, as she
was present at Armstrong’s recording session. In a rather ironic application of this song from
Brecht’s capitalist protest, it was even parodied in the late 1980s as “Big Mac Tonight” in an
advertising campaign launched by McDonald’s, perhaps the most readily recognizable brand of
western capitalist consumerism. True to the nature of lore cycles, the elements are unstable and
malleable. They change and adapt to fluctuating circumstances and shifting contexts.
Perhaps one of the most significant performances of “Mack the Knife” occurred in 1960.
Ella Fitzgerald was in Germany, recording her album Ella in Berlin, when someone suggested
that she perform the song live in the studio. She agreed, but with the caveat that she might not
remember all of the words; and the band began. After crooning the first verse flawlessly, she
started to stumble over the lyrics, then began to extemporize and the result was a high-spirited,
hilarious tribute to Armstrong, Darin, and Mack himself. The mood was infectious and in 1961,
Fitzgerald was awarded the Best Female Vocal Performance for the album as well as for the
single. Jack Sheppard must surely have been laughing at how far a common housebreaker had
come from his unceremonious hanging, and yet how little he had traveled from his common-man
roots. The song is now one of the most widely recognizable tunes in modern music, but its
beginnings in German socialist theatre have just as widely been forgotten. It is the song and not
the story – the element and not the entire figure itself – that is disseminated in popular culture.
As Fitzgerald improvises towards the end of her recording:
“You won’t recognize it –
It’s a surprise hit,
This tune called ‘Mack the Knife.”106
Indeed, Jack is not always recognizable, whether he is in the figure of Macheath or Bone
Squash, Morano or Mack the Knife, but thus is the nature of lore cycles: they are elements, not
archetypes; they are memories, not originals.
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Conclusion: “Launched into Eternity”
Wordsworth famously commented that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotion
recollected in tranquility.” We might best define lore cycles as the spontaneous emergence of a
remembered trait recollected in a moment of cultural transition. We see Jack as Macheath in the
overhaul of British opera, as well as making political jabs; we see Jack in the industrialized
urban centers as proletariat power is beginning to swell; we see Jack under the burnt cork mask
of blackfaced minstrelsy; we see Jack in economic commentary of post-war political theatre; and
we see Jack in the earliest stages of a widespread youth music culture. Yet it is not Jack who we
see so much as it is his gestures. What persists are moments, gestures, and traits that surface in
his finery and his wives and his African disguise and his subversion of authority. And every
time he emerges as recognizable, he changes his form and slips away, only to resurface at
another time or place or in a different guise. The lore cycle of Jack Sheppard, like its real life
counterpart, is always able to break free and re-emerge again.
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CHAPTER SIX
Conclusion:
Dawkins, Duchamp, and the Persistence of Memories
Clichéd phrases tell us that unrepeatable events now exist “only as memories” and that
these memories are “mere echoes of the past.” While these statements intend us to understand
that we cannot retrieve the past, semantically, they speak to just the opposite: A memory is a
form of indefinite survival that preserves the image and reality of something far beyond its own
tangible span or immediate life. Likewise, an echo is a repetition of sound that reflects back to
the listener when certain conditions are right for preserving and retransmitting that sound.
Despite their common semantic application, memories and echoes do not mark absence but, in
fact, preserve and transmit proof of the existence and continued presence of something.
In 1976, biologist Richard Dawkins released his groundbreaking and hotly debated study
on evolutionary theory The Selfish Gene, in which he introduced a theory about the persistence
of human memory via the passage of information from one carrier to successive generations. He
deemed these units of knowledge “memes,” and considered their function in human culture to be
similar to that of genetic survival. Dawkins writes:
Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of
making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene
pool by leaping from body to body via sperms and eggs, so memes propagate
themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which,
in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a
good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his
articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on it can be said to propagate itself,
spreading from brain to brain.1
The theory is certainly an intriguing one, but it does not account for purposeful changes
or rhetorical applications of a cultural memory unit. Change is, after all, the antithesis of
imitation. We can certainly credit consistency with preserving certain aspects of cultural
thought, such as the stories discusses in “The Genesis Complex.” But as we saw in a
microcosmic way with the concept of the American Eden, a foundational myth can lose its
impact on the basis of its very prominence in a culture. It becomes a victim of image saturation
– because it has so successfully propagated itself in the cultural memory, it is well-known, but no
longer remarkable. The most memorable cultural products are often situated in a unique place
within their social context; they are noteworthy because they are exceptional. It is for this reason
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that Gary Taylor notes, “We are particularly prone to remember stimuli associated with changes
in a niche.”2 A work that transforms the familiar becomes memorable for its novelty,
distinctiveness, innovation, or defiance.
The “ready-made” works of Marcel Duchamp illustrate this point perfectly.
In 1915, the experimental and early modern artist Marcel Duchamp introduced the first of
his innovative sculptures based upon prefabricated objects. Dubbed “Ready-Mades,” these
controversial works represented the inherent aesthetic pleasure present in ordinary items of
everyday life. His first of such exhibits was a spinning bicycle wheel, soon followed by such
pieces as a hanging snow shovel suspended from a piece of wire, a dog comb, and a typewriter
cover. In 1917, he made an arrangement involving a porcelain urinal and entitled it The
Fountain. For Duchamp, one critic observes, “a work of art was not meant to remain a mere
object of sensual presence, but was intended, as directly as possible, to address our sympathetic
awareness.”3 Another art scholar, Cliff G. McMahon, asserts, “To demonstrate the sovereignty
of the theoretical intellect of a modern man of autonomous reason (and thus accept a concept of
the rational self derived from the Greeks, Descartes, and Locke), Duchamp chooses
Readymades, which are useless and un-beautiful . . . This choice constitutes a portentous and
radical event in art history.” McMahon notes further that these works were “designed for a
radical shift and a genuine shock.”4
Duchamp, in a self-critique of The Fountain (which was released under the pseudonym of
R. Mutt), sheds some further light on this motivation for his works, writing “Whether Mr. Mutt
with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an
ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title
and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”5 These thoughts from Duchamp’s
own pen are, perhaps, the most important for this particular study. The use of pre-existing
elements in an alternately-meaningful whole is not so remarkable as is the creator’s conscious
choice to use them. When a cultural producer recognizes a useful element and selects it for use
within an original work, we witness a change to the original object as it takes on both its original
significance, as well as its newly-assigned one.
141
Sarah Beckwith explores a similar concept in Signifying God, her study of the medieval
York cycle plays. Though her discussion is related to the unique nature of theatrical
performance, the sentiments are appropriate:
When it enters illusory space and time, anything put onstage begins to signify, to
point to, represent, become of or about something else. Consider, says
[performance theoretician] Herbert Blau, an object in front of your eyes. ‘On
stage it is no longer simple. A real chair used for a real chair in a ‘realistic
setting’ remains, though a real chair, a sign for a chair. It is what it is not, though
it appears to be what it is.’ And yet it is the especial, unique property of theatre
that its signs are also in a very special way of the world . . . The materiality of the
signifier plays a constitutive role in theatre for it relies very heavily on the iconic
identity of its signs.6
Such a discussion inevitably raises the question of the performativity of every text, but
for our purposes, the most pertinent application is the intentional multiplicity of symbolic
elements in a work. Each layer of meaning designates a choice – conscious or not – of inclusion,
reformation, and change.
But there has to be a reason or a motivation for the change, and it is here that the choice
becomes essential. As Newton’s first law of motion clearly states, if no external force acts on an
object, then the object does not accelerate; the same is true of cultural change. There must be
some catalyst that creates the desire to cause a kink or fork in the perpetuation, a twist in the
otherwise stable and predictable forward movement of a myth’s continued existence in a culture.
The use of ready-made stories surfaces in specific cultural contexts not as an impetus to some
new cultural movement, but as a response to it.
In Brontё’s case, it was the developing struggle for women’s suffrage. By undercutting
the stance of the opposition via a negation of its basic rhetorical argument, Brontё subtly (but no
less forcefully) asserted change upon both the story and her society in much the same way that
the prominent modern feminist bumper sticker boldly and simply declares, “Eve was framed.”7
For Cather, the myth of the American Eden rapidly played itself out to a predictable ending. It
was less a case of Frost’s famous pronouncement, “Nothing gold can stay,”8 than a reconciliation
with the inevitable conclusion of the original story. A culture cannot selectively draw its identity
from a myth, the novel argues; by embracing the story, the society necessarily admits
responsibility for the entire narrative, including its liabilities. Both Steinbeck and Miller were
keenly aware of the social issues their audiences faced and were each able to speak to the
142
anxieties and values of their own context by deliberately composing the modern story in the
framework of an ancient myth. Because the myth had gradually expanded to take on broader
dimensions, their interpretations were dramatic but not out of line with the story’s own, more
organic development.
Yet the changes that each author executes are not permanent, nor pervasive. They do not
alter the narrative in the collective memory but rather, broaden the scope of each story’s
implications and applications. Ultimately, each author offers changes not to the text, but to our
understanding of it; to employ Duchamp’s language, each author “created a new thought” for the
story.
In lore cycles, however, the changes are pervasive – perhaps even invasive. We can still
see the choices that each transmitting and receiving culture has made regarding preservation and
re-presentation, but what becomes harder to detect are the sources of the ready-made elements.
As is the essential truth of gradual change, we do not witness the process – only the results of it.
The surviving notions, gestures, ideas, and images that emerge in later works and traditions are
not the choices themselves but evidence that they have occurred. The texts in which we observe
the various manifestations of Cain or Jack Sheppard are merely tangible forms of ideas that
existed, developed, and gained their own significance in cultural awareness before they were
fossilized in performed space or transcribed page. As Gary Taylor writes, regarding Ivor
Stravinsky’s orchestral premier of The Rites of Spring, “For Stravinsky, sounds were the essence
of the work; the score was a mere supplement, an afterbirth. For us, though, the score preserves
the only representation of sounds that have vanished.”9 And like a fossil, the recorded text is
only a brief, frozen moment in the life of a lore cycle. Their very nature requires them to reform,
re-invent, resurface . . . and be rediscovered.
The question remains, however, as to why it is that certain cultures invoke specific myths
as social commentary while leaving others alone, or why only a few gestures or traits from a
work persist and transform. The easiest answer, perhaps, would be to point to the universal
themes present in these myths and lore cycles – the inherent elements that appeal to our most
basic humanity, regardless of social context. But this cannot be the entire answer because, as we
have seen, there is a reclamation process, a re-forming of that which is pre-existing from its
universally recognizable form into something “created in our own image” – and yet even this
143
image of creation is a pre-existing one, central to the western concept of existence and invention.
Perhaps the discussion of authorial choice is not altogether essential to this discussion, after all.
Maybe the choices are inevitable ones, dictated less by conscious, unique decisions and more by
an intuitive understanding of the patterns of human behavior and trends of social thought. As
certain images are handed down, they come to us with perceived value simply because they have
been remembered. These ready-made stories stand not as testaments to the archetypal memory
of culture, but as reminders of the inherent contradiction and backwards glances of cultural
production: We stand on the shoulders of giants, and yet there is nothing new under the sun.
144
ENDNOTES
Notes to Introduction
1
Aristotle. Poetics, Loeb Classical Edition. Stephen Halliwell, ed. and trans. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1995), 89.
2
Gary Taylor. Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of time – And Other Don’t. (New
York: Harper Collins, 1996), 142.
3
R.W.B. Lewis. The American Adam. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1959), 2-3.
4
Gary Taylor, 14.
5
Philip Fisher. “Introduction.” In: The New American Studies: Essays from Representations. (Berkley:
University of California, 1991), vii.
6
Jean M. Higgins. “The Myth of Eve: The Temptress.” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 44 (4),
December 1976), 639.
7
Lewis, 1
8
Michael Spindler. American Literature and Social Change: William Dean Howells to Arthur Miller.
(Bloomington: Indiana, 1983), 3.
9
David Lowenthal. The Past is a Foreign Country. (New York: Cambridge, 1985), xx.
Notes to Chapter One
1
All biblical quotations in this text are from the New Revised Standard Version unless specified otherwise, such as
when the King James Version would have been the most likely translation available to an author.
2
Genesis 2:11-14
3
Tertullian. “On Female Dress.” The Writings of Tertullian. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, eds. (Kila,
MT: Kessinger, 2004), 304.
4
Ambrose of Milan. Hexameron. Saint Ambrose: Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel. John J. Savage,
trans. (New York: Fathers of the Church Inc. , 1961) 173-174.
5
Kim Power. Veiled Desire: Augustine on Women. (New York: Continuum, 1995), 209, 229.
6
Elaine Pagels. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. (New York: Random House, 1988), 114.
7
Jean M. Higgins. “The Myth of Eve: The Temptress.” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 44 (4),
December 1976), 641.
8
Fall of Man (York). Medieval Drama. Ed. David Bevington. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), ll. 108-110,
118-119, 144-146.
9
Harrowing of Hell (Wakefield). Medieval Drama. Ed. David Bevington. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), ll.
33, 375.
10
John Knox. The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. (Geneva. Short Title
Catalogue: 253:09, 1558), 14-15.
11
Knox, 18.
12
John Milton. Paradise Lost. Roy Flannagan, ed. The Riverside Milton. (1674; New York: Houghton Mifflin,
1998), IX.404.
13
Milton, IX.997-999.
14
Higgins, 643.
15
Christine Pizan. City of Ladies. Earl Jeffrey Richards, trans. (1405; New York: Persea, 1998), 24.
16
Lynn Stanley. The Book of Margery Kempe. (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan, 1996), 1.
17
Jane Anger. Her Protection for Women. (London. Short Title Catalogue: 644, 1589), C.
18
Rachel Speght. A Mouzell for Melastomus, The Cynicall Bayter of, and foule mouth Barker against Evahs Sex,
or an Apologeticall Answere to that irreligious and Illiterate Pamphlet made by Io. Sw. and by him Intitled, The
Arraignment of Women. (London. Short Title Catalogue: 23058, 1617), 4, 10.
19
Ester Sowernam. Esther hath hang’d Haman: or An Answere to a lwed Pamphlet, entitled, The Arraignment of
Women. With the arraignment of lewd, Idle, forward, and unconstant men, and Husbands. (London. Short Title
Catalogue: 22974, 1617), 3, 5, 7.
20
Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication on the Rights of Women. (1792; New York: Cambridge, 1995). 95
21
A Brief Review of the Women’s Suffrage Movement Since Its Beginning in 1832. (Westminster. Strozier Library
microfilm 4068.954 (9496), April 1911), 4,1.
22
Charles Kingsley. Women and Politics. (London: Spottiswoode. Strozier Library microfilm 4068.953 (9390),
1869), 3-4.
23
Christine Peters. Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England.
(New York: Cambridge, 2003), 130.
145
24
Barbara Taylor. Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. (New York:
Pantheon, 1983), 22-24, 118.
25
Gregory I. Molivas. “Richard Price, the Debate on Free Will, and Natural Rights.” (Journal of the History of
Ideas, 58 (1), January 1997), 109.
26
All of the Brontë passages are taken from: Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre. (1847; New York: Penguin, 1996.), 41.
27
Brontë, 42.
28
Brontë, 405, 394, 447-448.
29
Brontë 451.
30
Chris Vanden Bossche. “What Did Jane Eyre Do? Ideology, Agency, Class and the Novel.” (Narrative. 13(1),
January 2005), 55.
31
Brontë, 31, 33.
32
Brontë, 284, 277, 278, 283, 352.
33
Brontë, 294, 355.
34
Genesis 3:17-18, KJV.
35
Brontë, 242, 478, 500.
36
Genesis 2:23, KJV.
37
Brontë, 502.
38
Genesis 3:22
39
Micæl M. Clarke. “Bronte's Jane Eyre and the Grimms' Cinderella.” (SEL: Studies in English Literature 15001900) 40 (4), Autumn 2002), 696, 696.
40
Brontë, 284.
41
Howard Schwartz. Lilith’s Cave: Jewish Tale of the Supernatural. (New York: Oxford, 1988), 223.
42
Brontë, 15.
43
Brontë, 128.
44
Brontë, 22, 259.
45
Brontë, 225, 230, 266, 294, 317, 357, 487.
46
Brontë, 317, 487.
47
Brontë, 276, 290, 291, 300, 408, 485, 487.
48
Brontë, 153, 290, 293.
49
Brontë, 300.
50
Brontë, 486.
51
Brontë, 406.
52
Brontë, 316, 24.
53
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century
Imagination. (New Haven: Yale, 1979), 341.
54
Schwartz, 15.
55
Brontë, 317, 239.
56
Lynn Grossman Bartholome. “Lilith the She-Demon.” (Master’s thesis, Florida State University, 1986), 59, 64.
Notes to Chapter Two
Eric T. Freyfogle. “Owning the Land: Four Contemporary Narratives.” (Florida State Land Use and Environmental Law
Review, 13, 1998), 279.
2
Frederic I. Carpenter. “‘The American Myth’: Paradise (To Be) Regained.” (PMLA, 74(5), December 1959), 605-606.
3
John Locke. Two Treatises of Government. (London, 1690. Wing/L2766), 254, 268.
4
Crèvecoeur. Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. The Norton Anthology of American Literature,
Shorter 6th Ed. Nina Baym, ed. (1782; New York: Norton, 2003), 303.
5
Crèvecoeur, 301.
6
David W. Noble. The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden: The Central Myth in the American Novel Since
1830. (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 5.
7
Noble, 4.
8
F.O. Matthiessen. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. (New York:
Oxford, 1941), 347.
9
R.W.B. Lewis. The American Adam. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1959), 114.
10
Nathaniel Hawthorne. The House of the Seven Gables. (1851; Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 195.
11
Lewis, 115.
1
146
12
Hawthorne, ix.
William Cullen Bryant. “The Prairies.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 6th Ed. Nina
Baym, ed. New York: Norton, [1833] 2003.) ll. 1-3. As Norton notes, Bryant replaced “ere man had sinned—” in
subsequent editions with “For which the speech of English has no name—.” (473)
14
Lewis, 91.
15
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 6th Ed. (1836; New
York: Norton, 2003), 488.
16
All Whitman quotations are from the following edition: Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. Emory Holloway, ed.
New York: Doubleday, Doan, and Co. [1891 ed.] 1943). “Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals,” [1860], 91.
17
Matthiessen, 517-518.
18
Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 75.
19
Henry David Thoreau. Walden. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 6th Ed. Nina Baym, ed.
(1854; New York: Norton, 2003), 857.
20
Thoreau, 901.
21
Noble, 56.
22
Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (1884; New York: Dover, 1994), 162.
23
Twain, 220.
24
Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises. (1926; New York: Scribner, 2003), 120.
25
Frederick Jackson Turner. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Re-reading Frederick
Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ and Other Essays. John Mack Faragher,
ed. (1893; New Haven: Yale, 1999), 60.
26
Lester R. Kurtz. “Freedom and Domination: The Garden of Eden and the Social Order.” (Social Forces, 58(2),
December 1979), 453.
27
Emma Lazarus. “The New Colossus.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 6th Ed. Nina
Baym, ed. (1883; New York: Norton, 2003), ll.14.
28
U.S. Bureau of the Census: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1919. (Washington, D.C., Department of
Commerce, 1919), 89. The total number of immigrants admitted between 1895-1904 is 5,250,210.
29
F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby: 75th Anniversary Edition. (1925; New York: Scribner, 2000.), 189.
30
Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom. “Willa Cather’s Novels of the Frontier: A Study in Thematic Symbolism.” (American
Literature, 21 (1), March 1949), 72, 74.
31
Genesis 2:15.
32
All quotations from O Pioneers! come from the following edition: Cather, Willa. O Pioneers! (New York:
Vintage, [1913] 1992). 6, 1, 7, 6 (emphasis added)
33
Genesis 3:7.
34
Cather, 118.
35
Cather, 41.
36
Genesis 3:19.
37
Cather, 40, 41 (emphasis added).
38
Cather, 65.
39
Cather, 76, 65, 76-77.
40
Cather, 115.
41
Cather, 132, 132, 133, 133.
42
Cather, 136, 140, 61.
43
Bloom, 79.
44
Cather, 33.
45
Robert H. Footman. “The Genius of Willa Cather.” (American Literature, 10 (2), May 1938), 134.
46
Cather, 158.
47
Leo Marx. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 35th ed. (1964; New
York: Oxford, 2000), 364-365.
48
T.S. Eliot. “East Coker.” The Four Quartets. (1940; New York: Harvest, 1968) l. 1.
13
Notes to Chapter Three
Gary Taylor. Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of time – And Othesr Don’t. (New
York: Harper Collins, 1996), 87.
2
Oliver F. Emerson. “Legends of Cain, Especially in Old and Middle English.” (PMLA, 21 (4), 1906), 831.
1
147
3
The quotations from Philo are all from the following source: Philo Judaeus. The Works of Philo Judaeus, A
Contemporary of Jospehus. Charles Duke Yonge, trans. (London: H.G. Bohn. [1854-1890] 1993.
EarlyChristianWritings.com.). On the Birth of Abel and the Sacrifices Offered by Him and His Brother Cain,
XIII.52.
4
Philo, On Husbandry, V.21, XXIX.127.
5
Philo, On the Posterity of Cain and His Exile III.10-11, L.172.
6
Philo, Posterity, XI.35.
7
Philo, Posterity, XII.42.
8
Flavius Josephus. Jewish Antiquities: Books I-IV. H. St. J. Thackeray, trans. (London: William Heinemann,
1926), 25-27.
9
Ambrose of Milan. Cain and Abel. Saint Ambrose: Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel. John J. Savage,
trans. (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1961), 360, 383-384.
10
Ambrose of Milan. On the Holy Spirit. Saint Ambrose: Theological and Dogmatic Works. Roy J. Deferrari,
trans. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1963), 200.
11
The Banns (N-Town). Medieval Drama. David Bevington, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin., 1975), ll. 64-65.
12
John Gardner. “Theme and Irony in the Wakefield Mactacio Abel.” (PMLA, 80 (5), December 1965), 515.
13
The Killing of Abel (Wakefield). Medieval Drama. David Bevington, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), ll.
91-93, 140-143.
14
Gardner, 516.
15
Killing of Abel (Wakefield), ll. 99-100, 111.
16
Gardner, 516.
17
Thomas Paynell. A Frutefull Booke of the Common Places of All S. Pauls Epistles Right Necessarye for All Sorts
of People, but Especially for those of the Ministerye Dyligentelye Sette foorthe by Thomas Paniell. (London. Sort
Title Catalogue: 19492, 1562), 5.
18
Alleine, Joseph. An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners, In a Serious Treatise. (London. Wing/A961, 1672) 15-16.
19
Genesis 2:2.
20
Meyer Schapiro. Late Antique, Early Christian, and Medieval Art: Selected Papers. (New York: George
Braziller, 1979), 249.
21
Schapiro, 256.
22
Donald Clark Hodges. “Fratricide and Fraternity.” The Journal of Religion, 38 (4), October 1958): 245.
23
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, II. Oklahoma! (Original 1943 Broadway Cast Recoding. Decca U.S.
[1943] 2000). Audio CD.
24
Philo. That the Worse is Want to Attack the Better, I.1-2.
25
Augustine. The City of God. Marcus Dods, trans. (New York: Random House, 1994), 479, 487-488.
26
George M. Shulman. “The Myth of Cain: Fratricide, City Building, and Politics.” (Political Theory, 14 (2), May
1986) 227, 227-228.
27
Genesis 4:7.
28
Michael Spindler. American Literature and Social Change: William Dean Howells to Arthur Miller.
(Bloomington: Indiana, 1983), 98.
29
Spindler, 98.
30
U.S. Bureau of the Census: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1919. (Washington, D.C., Department of
Commerce, 1919), 389. Between 1910 and 1914, the numbers fluctuated between approximately 34,000,000 and
37,500,000. Previous to that, between 1989-1909, the total amount ranged from approximately 22,000,000 and
28,000,000.
31
Harold Evans. The American Century. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 176.
32
John Steinbeck. East of Eden. (1952; New York: Viking, 1977), 305.
33
Steinbeck, 309.
34
Steinbeck, 310-311.
35
Steinbeck, 622, 647, 650.
36
Steinbeck, 647-650, Genesis 4:7.
37
Spindler, 202.
38
Evans, 435.
39
Evans, 435.
40
Spindler, 202.
41
Spindler, 202.
148
42
Spindler, 203.
Matthew Roudane. Conversation with author. Editor, South Atlantic Review. Atlanta, 5 November 2005.
44
Arthur Miller. Death of a Salesman. Miriam Gilbert, Carl H. Klaus, Bradford S. Field, Jr., eds. Modern and
Contemporary Drama. (1949; New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 345.
45
Miller, 349.
46
Spindler, 203.
47
Miller, 358.
48
Miller, 349.
49
Spindler, 204.
50
Miller, 342.
51
Miller, 358.
52
Miller, Arthur. “The Salesman has a Birthday.” The Salesman has a Birthday: Essays celebrating the Fiftieth
Anniversary of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Stephen A. Marino, ed. (Lanham, MD: University Press of
America, 1999) 14.
53
Miller, “The Salesman has a Birthday,” 14.
54
Steinbeck, 310.
43
Notes to Chapter Four
1
Gary Taylor. Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of time – And Other Don’t. (New
York: Harper Collins, 1996), 47.
2
Gary Taylor, 67.
3
William Shakespeare. The Tempest. G. Blakemore Evans, J.J. M. Tobin, eds. The Riverside Shakespeare, Second
Edition. (1611; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), I.ii.283-284, I.ii.263, I.ii.362-363 (1665, 1666).
4
Ricardo J. Quinones. The Changes of Cain. (Princeton: Princeton, 1991), 59.
5
Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.ii. 321-324, 331-332, 339-342 (1666).
6
We may even see Cain in his full form lurking in the background of the story – almost unrecognizable as himself,
perhaps – but present and intrusive nonetheless. When courtiers Stephano and Trinculo encounter Caliban upon the
island, the monster has the following exchange with the two chronic drunks:
Caliban: Hast though not dropp’ed from heaven?
Stephano: Out o’ th’ moon, I do assure thee; I was the Man in the Moon, when time was.
Caliban: I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee. My mistress show’d me thee, and they dog
and bush.
Stephano: Come, swear to that . . .
Trinculo: By this good light, this is a very shallow monster!
I afeared him! A very weak monster! The Man i’th’ Moon! A most
poor credulous monster! Well drawn, monster, in good sooth!
Caliban: I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’th’ island; and will kiss they foot. I
prithee be my god. (II.ii.137-149)
Though clearly intended to poke fun at the recent contemporary accounts of native peoples who believed
that the arriving Europeans were heavenly beings descending to earth (one famous example being the Aztecs’
reception of Cortés as Quetzacoatl), it also seems to indicate something else.
Oliver Emerson asserts that the medieval tradition that Cain burned thorns and thistles in defiance of
God’s cursing of the ground through such vegetation (Genesis 3:18) led its perpetrator to be depicted throughout
medieval Europe in a new form as the proverbial Man in the Moon figure, a character that reached its fullest
development in Renaissance literature. Dante alludes to the connection between these figures twice in the Divine
Comedy: first in the Inferno, where Virgil urges: “But onward now: / For now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine
/ On either hemisphere, touching the wave / Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight / The moon was round”
(xx.124-127); and secondly, in Paradisio when the narrator asks Beatrice, “But tell, I pray thee, whence the gloomy
spots / Upon this body, which below on earth / Give rise to talk of Cain in fabling quaint?” (ii.51-53). The
connection is bolstered by the iconography of the Man in the Moon as a wanderer who carries a lantern and bundle
of thorns with him as he traipses about the earth, ever shielded from the warming, benevolent light of the sun, and
often accompanied by a loyal dog – a commonly-invoked figure in Shakespeare’s plays who appears in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.i. 59-61 (266), V.i.240-259 (278-279). (The canine element enters the story through
rabbinic literature as, Emerson points out, according to some traditions, the mark that God places upon the banished
Cain to ensure his protection is actually the faithful shepherding dog that had first belonged to Abel.)
149
As evidence of Shakespeare’s own awareness of the connection between Cain and the Man in the Moon,
Emerson cites the lines of Bolingbroke in Richard II V.vi.43, as he sentences Exton to exile for regicide: “With
Cain go wander through shades of night,/And never show thy head by day nor light.” Emerson then asserts, “If now
‘wander through shades of night’ be assumed to apply to Cain in the moon, we may reasonably infer that the other
references in Shakespeare to the moon and the thorns are also connected with the Cain legend” (844). Stephano
refers to Caliban as “moon-calf” five times and Caliban accepts this term because, it is imperative to note, he views
himself an eager disciple of the newly-arrived god, not a manifestation of it himself. He reveres his new god, even
emulates his behavior at times, but Caliban is Cain no more than Cortés was the promised plumed white god from
the west.
7
Shakespeare, I.ii.360-361. (1666).
8
Specifically, Oliver Emerson notes the writings of Pirke Rabbi Eliezar xxi.6 and the Bibliotheca Magna Rabbinica
I, 291 by Batolocci, which quotes Ialkut Sect. Berescith as well as making its own elaborations on the ill-fated
coupling.
9
Oliver F. Emerson. “Legends of Cain, Especially in Old and Middle English.” (PMLA, 21 (4), 1906), 835.
10
John Block Friedman. Monstrous Races. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1981), 95.
11
Emerson, 832 (citing I John 3:12).
12
Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.ii.321-322, IV.1.189. (1681).
13
Friedman, 95.
14
Seamus Heaney. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. (New York: Norton, reprint 2001), ll. 99-113.
15
Heaney, 1258-1267.
16
Friedman, 95.
17
Timothy Husband. The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
1980), 2, 13.
18
Friedman, 96.
19
Husband, 34.
20
Shakespeare, III.ii.88-90.
21
Friedman, 29.
22
Genesis 4:9, 4:13-14.
23
Shakespeare, The Tempest, III.ii.135-143. (1676).
24
Shakespeare, The Tempest, II.i.124-126. (1669).
25
Genesis 9:25.
26
Genesis 10:6.
27
Friedman, 101.
28
Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature,
Shorter 6th Ed. Nina Baym, ed. (1773; New York: Norton, 2003), ll. 1-3, 7-8.
29
Virginia Mason Vaughn. Performing Blackness on English Stages: 1500-1800. New York: Cambridge, 2005),
18, 31-32.
30
Paul H.D. Kaplan. The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1985), 36.
31
Kaplan, 32.
32
Gary Taylor, 46.
33
W.T. Lhamon. Raising Cain. Cambridge: Harvard, 1998), 31.
34
Lhamon, Cain, 58, 59.
35
Michael Pickering. “The Blackface Clown.” Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, ed. Black Victorians, Black
Victoriana. (Piscataway: Rutgers, 2003), 167.
36
Pickering, 169-170.
37
Lhamon, Cain, 124.
38
Genesis 4:9.
39
Lhamon, Cain, 124.
40
W.T. Lhamon. Jump Jim Crow. (Cambridge: Harvard, 2003), 3.
41
Michael R. Booth. Theatre in the Victorian Age. (New York: Cambridge, 1991.), 96.
42
I shall be using the Lhamon text as it appears in Jump Jim Crow: T.D. Rice. The Virginia Mummy: A Farce in
One Act. W.T. Lhamon, ed. Jump Jim Crow. (1835; Cambridge: Harvard, 2003).
43
Rice, 164, 164, 165.
44
Lhamon, Crow, 427.
45
Rice, 171, 177, 177, 177.
150
46
Genesis 4:14, 15.
Rice, 160, 163, 163.
48
Rice, 165.
49
Rice, 177.
50
Rice, 164.
51
Rice, 164.
52
Rice, 165, 177.
53
Langston Hughes. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 6th Ed. Nina Baym, ed. (1949; New
York: Norton, 2003), ll. 1-11, 12.
47
Notes to Chapter Five
1
Edgar V. Roberts. “Introduction.” In: The Beggar’s Opera. John Gay. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1969),
xvii-xviii.
2
James Greenwood. 11 November 2001. Seven Curses of London. Victorian London. Comp. Lee Jackson.
Viewed: 3 Apr. 2005.
3
Dee Garrison. 1976. “Immoral Fiction in the Late Victorian Library.” ( American Quarterly, 28(1), 1976), 85.
4
Peter Linebaugh. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. (New York:
Cambridge, 1992), 27.
5
Christopher Hibbert. The Road to Tyburn: The Story of Jack Sheppard and the Eighteenth-Century London
Underworld. (Cleveland: World, 1957), 212.
6
Lennard J. Davis. “Wicked Actions and Feigned Word: Criminals, Criminality, and the Early English Novel.”
(Yale French Studies. (59), Winter, 1980), 108.
7
Maximillian Novak. “‘Appearances of Truth:’ The Literature of Crime as a Narrative System (1660-1841). (The
Yearbook of English Studies. 11 (Special Number), 1981), 40-41.
8
Daniel Defoe. The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard, Containing a Particular Account of His
Many Robberies and Escapes. (1724; New York: Hard Press, 2006), 26.
9
Defoe, 28.
10
Defoe, 7.
11
Davis, 160.
12
Linebaugh, 39.
13
All quotations for The Beggar’s Opera will be taken from the following text: John Gay. The Beggar’s Opera.
Edgar V. Roberts, ed. (1728; Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1969), I.i., I.xiii. (28).
14
Roberts, xxiii.
15
Gay, Beggar’s Opera, I.vi, II.ix, III.xv. (15, 44-45, 81).
16
Gay, Beggar’s Opera, III.xvi. (82).
17
Rob Canfield. “Introduction to Polly: An Opera.” Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century Drama. J. Douglas
Canfield, ed. (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview 2001), 1545.
18
Canfield, 1545.
19
All quotations from Polly will be taken from the following text: John Gay. Polly. Restoration and Early
Eighteenth Century Drama. (1729; Orchard Park, NY: Broadview [1729] 2001), II.iii. (1567-1568).
20
Gay, Polly, I.xii. (1560).
21
Pat Rogers. “The Waltham Blacks and the Black Act.” (The Historical Journal. 17 (3) September 1974), 465,
466, 474.
22
This particular plate is particularly interesting, as Hogarth himself married the daughter of his artistic master,
Thornhill.
23
Martin Meisel. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England.
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 99-103.
24
George J. Worth. William Harrison Ainsworth. (New York: Twayne, 1972), 35.
25
Worth, 37, 39.
26
Worth, 16.
27
Charles A. Briggs. “The Christ of the Church.” (The American Journal of Theology, 16 (2), 1912), 196.
28
Oscar G. Brockett. History of the Theatre. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), 117.
29
All Ainsworth quotations are from a 1908 printing of his original work: William Harrison Ainsworth. Jack
Sheppard: A Romance. (1839; New York: Century, 1908), 456-457.
30
Ainsworth, 361.
151
31
William Shakespeare. The Tempest. G. Blakemore Evans, J.J. M. Tobin, eds. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd Ed.
(1611; New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1997), I.ii.285, II.ii.146-147, V.i.294-295. (1665, 1673, 1685).
32
Ainsworth, 512.
33
Richard B. Hauck. “The Comic Christ and the Modern Reader.” (College English, 31 (5), 1970), 502.
34
Hauck, 498, 502.
35
Hauck, 499, 501.
36
John 10:1-16, Hebrew 13:20.
37
Luke 15:3-6.
38
Luke 2:8.
39
Peter and Linda Murray. Oxford Dictionary of Christian Art. (Oxford: Oxford, 2001), 531.
40
Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1977). 81-82.
41
Montague R. James and R.L. Hobson. “Rare Mediaeval Tiles and Their Story.” (The Burlington Magazine for
Connoisseurs, 42 (238), 1923), 34.
42
The Birth of Jesus (York). Medieval Drama. David Bevington, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 373. It
should be noted that the want of a better walls is appropriate and important, as the plays were often produced by
trade guilds of related subject matter. This particular drama was sponsored by the tile thatchers.
43
Ainsworth 1, 3-4.
44
Ainsworth, 14.
45
The Pseudo-Gospel of Matthew of the late eighth or early ninth century is actually the first text to explicitly
include the presence of animals (Murray 450), but Birgitta’s text is thought to be the one that truly popularized the
notion.
46
Birgitta of Sweden. Birgitta of Sweden: Life and Selected Letters. Marguerite Tjader Harris, ed. (New York:
Paulist, 1990) 203, 202.
47
Daniel 4:16-17, 23-25 KJV.
48
Birgitta, 203
49
Ainsworth, 2.
50
Birgitta, 203.
51
Ainsworth, 11.
52
Bevington, 53.
53
Hauck, 499.
54
Evidence of this verbal shortening is present in numerous medieval nativity plays, in which one character or
another makes mention of going to worship the holy child in “Bedlam” or “Bedlem” as the case may be, such as in
the Wakefield Cycle plays Herod the Great/Slaughter of the Innocents (l. 219)and Offering of the Magi (l. 487).
55
Ainsworth, 349, 343.
56
Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons. Illuminating Luke: The Infancy Narrative in Italian Renaissance
Painting. (New York: Trinity. 2003), 61.
57
Hornick and Parsons 47; Murray, 269; Bart D. Ehrman. Lost Scriptures: Books that did not make it into the New
Testament. (New York: Oxford, 2003), 63.
58
Ainsworth, 232, 248.
59
Ainsworth, 264, 350, et al.
60
Ainsworth, 313.
61
Ainsworth, 399-401.
62
Bevington. 454.
63
The Shepherds (York). Medieval Drama. David Bevington, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 379. The
Birth of Jesus (York), 375.
64
The Offering of the Magi. (Wakefield). Medieval Drama. David Bevington, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1975), 415-416.
65
Ainsworth, 233.
66
Ainsworth, 465, 465, 473, 474.
67
Cathy Oakes. Lecture. “Saints and Sacred Places: Romanesque Art and Architecture.” (University of Bristol. 6
March 2002).
68
Bevington, 594.
69
Ainsworth, 555, 551, 556, 556.
70
John 19:34, KJV.
152
71
Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1977), 82.
72
Hauck, 500, 500.
73
Ainsworth, 555.
74
Meisel, 247.
75
Matthew Buckley. “Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience.” (Victorian Studies, 44 (3),
2002), 437.
76
Buckley, 458-459.
77
Buckley, 431.
78
George Taylor. “Introduction.” Trilby and Other Plays. (New York: Oxford, 1996), 277.
79
Busckstone, III.i.96, II.i.14-16, 23-24. (44, 21).
80
Peter Reed. Arrant Beggars: Staging the Atlantic Lumpenproletariat, 1777-1852. (Ph.D. diss., Florida State
University, 2005.), 116.
81
Buckstone, III.1. (42).
82
Reed, 116.
83
Buckstone, IV.3. (70-71).
84
Reed, 113.
85
Reed, 121.
86
Again, I shall be using the Lhamon text as it appears in Jump Jim Crow: T.D. Rice. Bone Squash Diavolo: A
Burletta. W.T. Lhamon, ed. Jump Jim Crow. (1839; Cambridge: Harvard, 2003).
87
Rice, 183-184
88
Lhamon, Crow, 57.
89
Lhamon, Crow, 445, 447.
90
Shakespeare, Othello. I.1.132-136.
91
Lhamon, Crow, 1, 96.
92
Constance Rourke. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. (New York: New York Review of
Books, [1931] 2004), 83-84.
93
Sarah Meer. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. (Athens: U of
Georgia Press, 2005), 23; Lhamon, Crow, 91.
94
Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Or, Life Among the Lowly). (1852; New York: Aladdin/Simon and
Schuster, 2002), 369.
95
Stowe, 386-387.
96
Defoe, 28.
97
Meer, 11.
98
Lhamon, W.T. Raising Cain. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1998), 64.
99
Lhamon, Crow, 53.
100
Lotte Lenya. “August 28, 1928.” The Threepenny Opera. Desmond Vesey, Eric Bentley, trans. (1956; New
York: Grove, 1960), xiii.
101
Lenya, v.
102
Bertold Brecht. “Notes to The Threepenny Opera.” The Threepenny Opera. Desmond Vesey, trans. (1929;
New York: Grove, 1960), 98.
103
Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weiss. The Threepenny Opera. Desmond Vesey, Eric Bentley, trans. (1929; New
York: Grove, 1960), III.1. (72).
104
Brecht and Weiss, II.iii. (66-67).
105
Lenya, xiv.
106
Ella Fitzgerald. “Mack the Knife.” Ella in Berlin. Norman Grantz, producer. (Verve Records, 1960).
Notes to Chapter Six
Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition. (New York: Oxford, 2006), 192.
2
Gary Taylor. Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of time – And Other Don’t. (New
York: Harper Collins, 1996), 67.
3
Jindrich Chalupecký. “Marcel Duchamp: A Re-Evaluation.” Paul Wilson, trans. (Artibus et Historiae. 6(11),
1985), 131.
4
Cliff G. McMahon. “The Janus Aesthetic of Duchamp.” (Journal of Aesthetic Education. 26(2), Summer 1992),
44, 45.
1
153
5
Quoted in Chalupecký, 131.
Sarah Beckwith. Signifying God: Social Relations and Symbolic Action in the York Corpus Christi Plays.
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001), 62-63.
7
“Eve Was Framed” bumper sticker. Copyright, Northern Sun Co., 1998.
8
Robert Frost. “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 6th ed. Edited by
Nina Baym. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 1890.
9
Gary Taylor, 149.
6
154
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Tiffany Yecke Brooks grew up in Virginia and attended Harding University in Searcy,
Arkansas, where she completed her Bachelor of Arts in English and Theatre in 2001. That fall,
she began work on her Master’s Degree in Classical Mythology at the University of Bristol in
Bristol, England, and graduated in 2002.
After completing her M.A., she taught writing and literature at Abilene Christian
University and McMurry University (both in Abilene, Texas), and English and Drama at Pamlico
County High School in Bayboro, North Carolina. In 2004, she enrolled in the doctoral program
in literature at Florida State University.
She currently teaches at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort.
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