Notes
Notes 1. Calvinist Humor . As Calvin characteristically writes in Institutes of the Christian Religion: “Original sin, therefore, seems to be a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused into all parts of the soul, which first makes us liable to God’s wrath, then also brings forth in us those works which Scripture calls ‘works of the flesh’” (25), and also, “[T]he uncleanness of the parents is so transmitted to the children that all without any exception are defiled at their begetting” (248). 2. In an essay in the Wilson Quarterly in which he defends the design of American bipartisan foreign policy through several administrations, John Ikenberry characterizes the more critical perspective on American foreign policy as follows: “To hear critics tell it, the American preoccupation with promoting democracy around the world is the product of a dangerous idealistic impulse” (56). 3. Wimsatt and Phillips agree—perhaps unawares—when they write in union with Rickels, “[A] strict Presbyterian, Harris unrolled in Sut a demonic energy and apocalyptic fury perhaps inspired by the Calvinistic strain in his religious heritage” (56). 4. William J. Bouwsma explains, in John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait, that in Calvin’s system “the human body was “[l]owest of all . . . , the primary source of human wickedness.” He adds that “Calvin suggested that God had displayed his own disdain for it by creating it from the dust to keep us humble. . . . At times, then, the body seemed to him not only the prison of the soul but worse: ‘carrion, dirt, and corruption,’ full of a ‘stinking infection’ that defiles the rest of the personality” (80). Later on, Bouwsma balances the scales somewhat by writing, “He also praised the body. Noting a tendency in himself to refer to it ‘grossly,’ he apologized to his congregation for implying that it might be intrinsically corrupt” (34). In any event, the human body emerges in this system, both directly and in terms of residual influence, as corrupt. 5. Neil Schmitz shares Wilson’s view, in the Columbia Literary History of the United States: “Sut’s tales, proudly presented, barely bracketed, relate sadistic pranks, acts of vandalism, practical jokes that humiliate and injure victims, and they are vividly told in a mean hard voice” (322). 95 6. William Shurr approaches a similar perspective when discussing a letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes to Harriet Beecher Stowe. “In the present letter,” Shurr writes, Holmes “picks over the points of this old calvinism one by one: reprobation, predestination, inherited guilt, the just and angry God, infant damnation, and the pleasure of God and the saints at witnessing God’s just retribution against the wicked” (23). 7. Writing about Hart Crane, in the collection of essays Voices and Visions: The Poet in America, Alan Williamson observes in passing, “Like almost every other American writer, [Crane] finds by experience that the ravages of Puritanism have been worse in America than elsewhere” (343). Again, the writer feels no need to explain what is meant by “Puritanism.” 8. “Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?” (Matt. 7.9). 9. Lowell’s membership in this Calvinistic fraternity might also be signified by his poem “Mr. Edwards and the Spider” (946), especially by the line “What are we in the hands of the Great God?” (l. 0). 0. In “Memories of West Street and Lepke” (959), Lowell describes himself at the time of World War II as “a fire-breathing Catholic C.O.” (l. 4). . For one searching discussion, among many others, of these doctrines, see Gerald J. Goodwin, “The Myth of ‘Arminian-Calvinism’ in Eighteenth-Century New England.” 2. Lawrance Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel with God (952). 3. As in the case of Twain, many other stories and novels might be cited in support of Faulkner’s membership in this dark literary fraternity. 4. In Nathanael West: The Art of His Life, Jay Martin quotes Matthew Josephson’s testimony on this point: “We might be of mixed English, German, Irish, or French ancestry or, as in my own case, Jewish, yet the prevailing ‘Protestant Ethic’ of middle-class America seemed to possess all our parents alike” (24). 2. Calvinist Humor and the American Puritans . For some cinematic treatments of the problems involved in this sociological transition , see What’s Cooking (2000), directed by Gurinder Chadha, and Pieces of April (2003), directed by Peter Hedges. 2. See Hawthorne’s “The May-Pole...
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