Beyond Good and Evil

The essays in this issue question the moral discourse of their day by variations on the same rhetorical strategy, either attacking head-on or outflanking the binaries by which moral strictures are naturalized and enforced. I will note these in reverse order, the most frontal first, that is, Don Adams's fine analysis of James Purdy's allegories of love. Purdy abjures plot and character progression in order to depict forces operating at an unconscious level. Conventional moral judgment is an illness of the superego's attempt to repress authentic desire. Allegory trumps realism as the mode to depict a world in which "we do not fully own or possess ourselves."

Daniel Kane's intertextual study of the poet Robert Duncan and the filmmaker Kenneth Anger demonstrates that Duncan found in the seriality of Anger's avant-garde films a way out of oppressive binaries of good and evil. Duncan and Anger, as well as Purdy, were able to move beyond the socially inflicted shame of homosexual desire.

Hawthorne's morality seems more conventional, but Martin Bidney shows how at certain points in Hawthorne's stories there is an epiphanic moment in which moral categories disperse into psychological chains of "fire, flutter, fall, and scatter" that appear to operate on an unconscious level for the author as much as for his characters. Bidney brings home his argument with a strong reading of "Young Goodman Brown" that parallels Adams's observation that Purdy's "most pitiable victims are those society members unable to root out the collective hatred in themselves so as to pursue their individual happiness," exactly the case of "Goodman" Brown in the conclusion of his misadventure.

Finally, Carole Moses shows a different pattern in the writings of Fanny Fern. Like the transcendentalists, Fern protested against Calvinist doctrine, but within the bounds of sensible and sentimentalized Christian faith. This was not a ploy but a belief system she shared with many women in her world. Whereas Purdy, Duncan, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman flaunt a masculine individuality and transgressiveness, Fern arguably had a more immediate and benevolent effect on her audience by balancingout cultural binaries, rather than challenging them, and by being one with her audience.