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American Literature 74.1 (2002) 143-145



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The Marriage of Heaven and Earth: Alchemical Regeneration in the Works of Taylor, Poe, Hawthorne, and Fuller . By Randall A. Clack. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. 2000. 152 pp. $62.50.

Americanists who are not aficionados of alchemy will be surprised to discover from Randall Clack's book how lasting its influence has been. Governor John Winthrop Jr. of Connecticut maintained a chemical physician's correspondence with English and American associates based upon his collection of 250 alchemical texts. Even as the Enlightenment was relegating alchemy to [End Page 143] a pseudoscience, Samuel Danforth was offering a sample of his philosopher's stone to a skeptical Benjamin Franklin. Ezra Stiles was more drawn toward the mutational promises of alchemy than he was willing to admit. The many allusions to alchemy in fictions of Gothic romance have long been recognized, but Clack shows us that even a willful progressive like Emerson (who admired Kepler, Bacon, Newton, and Humboldt) could write, apropos of the soul's search for empowering Beauty, that "Alchemy, which sought to transmute one element into another, to prolong life, to arm with power,—that was in the right direction." General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, author of Remarks on Alchemy and the Alchemists (1857), sought out Hawthorne in 1862, surely because Hitchcock assumed that the author of "The Great Carbuncle" must believe as fully as he in the alchemy of love between man and woman. Even Carl Jung wrote a five-hundred-page study entitled Psychology and Alchemy (1944). Most surprisingly, we learn from Clack's epilogue that in 1980 at Berkeley's Lawrence Laboratory, $10,000 of research money was spent successfully transmuting bismuth into less than a cent's worth of gold. The fantasies of Hermes Trismegistus, Paracelsus, and centuries of alchemical believers were thus finally vindicated, though not in a way sufficiently cost-effective for human greed.

Clack certainly makes good on his modest opening thesis that Taylor, Poe, Hawthorne, and Fuller all "drew upon the tropes and metaphors of alchemical philosophy to illustrate their visions of regeneration" (1). When alchemy is one of these authors' explicit subjects (Poe's "Van Kempelen and His Discovery," Hawthorne's "The Great Carbuncle," Fuller's "Leila"), Clack's knowledge of the postmedieval literature of alchemy (which was still available to all four authors) usually informs the meaning of the whole text under consideration. Similarly, when alchemy serves as an explicit and recurrent poetic metaphor, as in Taylor's Preparatory Meditation, series 1, number 7 or Fuller's "Double Triangle, Serpent and Rays," the seeming esoterica of particular lines and stanzas are often clarified. The trouble is, however, that Clack's desire to underscore the importance of alchemy (and perhaps to redeem alchemy from generations of scholarly dismissal) leads him to advance sweeping claims for supposedly alchemical tropes uncovered in unlikely places, and thereby to make unconvincing leaps of interpretation. A few possible alchemical references are too often mistaken for the meaning of a whole work. By volume's end, Clack's original thesis ("drew upon the tropes and metaphors of alchemical philosophy") has become enlarged into the claim that the four authors "adapted the tropes and metaphors of alchemy to give form and order to their visions of regeneration" (133), as if alchemy had provided the major signifier by which the four authors gave literary form to their desire for human spiritual renewal.

Such overreaching is most evident in Clack's one-dimensional readings of complex, major short stories by Poe and Hawthorne. The bridal chamber of Lady Rowena in "Ligeia," Clack surmises, "seems reminiscent of an alchemical furnace—the athanor—and the room an alchemical vessel" (57); the final [End Page 144] revivification of Ligeia through the body of Rowena "evokes the royal marriage of Sol and Luna—the narrator and Ligeia—in the vas hermeticum of Poe's magical room" (58). The crimson moon rising over the crumbling house of Usher "combines, like Madeline's blood-stained gown, the alchemical white and red and...

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