| dc.description.abstract | My dissertation examines signal works of American tragic fiction—novels, novellas, and short stories—from Charles Brockden Brown to Ralph Ellison. With the exception of scholar-critics like Rita Felski and Terry Eagleton, many of today’s literary commentators have little to say about tragedy, especially as it has appeared in American literature. My study is an attempt to fill this critical void. Despite their differences in style and subject, as well as their distance from each other in time, the works I treat present unique variations on a theme I call tragic evasion. Again and again in American fiction we encounter characters who evade tragic realities, who turn away—physically and psychologically—from their problems only to run up against the limits of themselves and their world. Drawn to certain falsehoods and half-truths, including the myth of Adamic innocence and the dream of radical freedom, these characters seek escape from a world of moral ambiguity and tragic limitation. My title derives from “Hawthorne and His Mosses,” in which Herman Melville suggests that it is possible for an American writer to rise to the level of a Shakespeare by revealing the “Truth” about a character, a situation, and, by symbolic extension, a nation: “For in this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,—even though it be covertly, and by snatches.” The authors I cover are all “masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,” tragic visionaries determined to rend the veil and make us see, if “only by cunning glimpses.” The dissertation addresses the following questions: Why have so many American fiction writers, separated across time, explored evasion and its tragic consequences? What cultural ideas and historical conditions, intrinsic to life in America, might account for evasion and its tragic consequences? Why are the forms and visions of American tragic fiction—though never severed from the broader Western tragic tradition—more daringly experimental than some of the dramatic tragedies of the past? Across five chapters I perform close readings of several tragedies of evasion: Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “My Kinsman, Major Molineux” and The Scarlet Letter; Frederick Douglass’s The Heroic Slave; Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno; William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying; Katherine Anne Porter’s Noon Wine; Eudora Welty’s “The Hitch-Hikers”; and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. These classic works, each illuminating the others, confront their evasive characters with the tragic actualities of American experience. | |
