Terrors of the Soul: Religious Pluralism, Epistemological Dread, and Cosmic Exaltation in Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville

Abstract

Few critics have drawn our attention to the significance of doubt, irony, ambivalence, and skepticism for the study of dark romanticism as forcibly as G. R. Thompson. I suggest that an often-overlooked source of the epistemological uncertainties that pervade the gothic works of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville is the frequently chaotic religious pluralism of nineteenthcentury America. Nineteenth-century Americans faced a bewildering variety of religious options that offered widely disparate ontological, ethical, and epistemological bases for understanding their world. The proliferation of new religious denominations and sects within the United States offered a multitude of angles from which to view mainstream Protestantism (and to depart from it), while American travelers and intellectuals increasingly encountered works from religrous traditions that were strikingly different from Protestantism, including not only Roman Catholicism and Judaism but also Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. As the writings of the transcendentalists attest, the experience of religious pluralism could be p r e foundly liberating and exhilarating, but this same experience could also be the source of tremendous intellectual and psychological vertigo. Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville each explore the terrors and promises of religious pluralism in distinctive ways in their works. Poe’s prose poem Eureka, a curious pastiche of philosophy and farce, plays out the problem of pluralism on a grand scale. Hawthorne’s engagement with religious pluralism is more explicit, both in his accounts of the Puritans’ persecution of Quakers and Anglicans in colonial New England and in his deeply ironic discussion of American spiritual diversity in “The Celestial Railroad.” Melville, meanwhile, puts the problems and promises of pluralism at the center of his work, from the interaction of Ishmael and Queequeg and the sinister role played by the Parsee Fedallah in Mob-Dick to the anguished interreligious debates in his long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land. Terms like “pluralism” and “dialogue” are often tossed about casually as if they represent solutions to religious difference in themselves. Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, each in his own way, explore the anguish, fear, and uncertainty attendant on any effort to think seriously and systematically about religious difference. My focus in this essay will be on Poe’s representation of the euphoria connected with pluralism in Eureka and “Mesmeric Revelations,” Hawthorne’s skepticism about the liberalization of religious belief prompted by religious pluralism in “The Celes tial Railroad,” and Melville’s anguished grappling with both the allure and the terrifylng uncertainty associated with religious pluralism in Clarel.