Harold Frederic and the Failure Motif

HAROLD FREDERIC AND THE FAILURE MOTIF Sydney J. Krause* Wedded as the country is to the myth of success, its novelists have rather persistently depicted an equally fateful rendezvous with failure. As Denis Donoghue once asked, "do we not feel that American literature thrives upon the conditions of failure and that it would lose its character . . . were it given the conditions of success?"' Obsession with the power of failure creates a bond among the obviously doomed, monomaniacal types like Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, Herman Melville's Ahab, and William Faulkner's Sutpen, and it also embraces the variously more and less subtle types of personal loser, like Henry James' John Marcher, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Dick Diver, Bernard Malamud's Morris Bober, John Updike's George Caldwell, or William Gass's Omensetter, characters who fail for, among other things, the simple reason that they have to. For them, to live is to fail at it. This is particularly relevant for the fiction termed "Realism." In "Up the Coulee," Hamlin Garland's semi-autobiographical tale in Main-Travelled Roads, a weary Grant McLane, oppressed by hard times on the farm, rejects his brother's offer of help because his situation is beyond help. Helplessness is not just a fact of life for Grant; it has an appeal almost to his perverse pride, for, having failed, one joins the multitudes. "I've come to the conclusion," he says, "that life's a failure for ninetynine per cent of us."2 There are also, of course, those for whom failure becomes a particularly challenging affair, characters who sustain a material loss in order to win at a higher level, following the conventions of realization and transcendence, as with some of the classic protagonists of American Realism: Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer, Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, Silas Lapham, and Huck Finn. However, more in keeping with what is assumed to be distinctively realistic is that strand of Realism in which the major character enacts a thorough-going rejection of the redemptive, second-chance thesis. This anti-redemptive strand is exemplified by Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware. The Damnation is important because it meets head on and discredits the supposed possibilities of a cleansing ascent from the ashes of failure through illuminative experience. Rather, *Sydney J. Krause is a Professor of English at Kent State University. In addition to articles in the scholarly journals on Charles Brockden Brown, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Stephen Crane, and T. S. Eliot, he has published a book, Mark Twain as Critic. He is also the Editor of the Center for Scholarly Editions project on Brown. 56Sydney J. Krause one's illumination darkens into despair, or, worse yet, causes it.3 The Reverend Theron Ware will awaken to a new life, outgrowing the rustic Methodism that had so hopelessly narrowed his vision, "closed" so many "doors" on him.4 However, while this small-time minister was well rid of small-mindedness, it would turn out to be an awakening he might better have slept through, and, to the extent of his chronic unawareness, particularly when awakened, that is what the man does. This novel, in other words, represents that counter-phenomenon in the American tradition wherein knowledge not only fails to set someone free, it actually enslaves him to a false notion of the freed Self. While Ware may be impressionable, weak, and certainly culpable, the blame for his deterioration is also customarily laid on the combined influence of the local intelligensia, Celia Madden, Father Forbes, and Dr. Ledsmar—respectively a Pateresque aesthete, a worldly priest, and a shady scientist—who tempt the minister beyond his depth. Some responsibility is also assigned to Sister Soulsby, the aggressive debt-raiser and advocate of worthy fraud, who gave him a schooling in pragmatic morality . It is said that Ware is prideful and accepts an overly optimistic assessment of his capacity for transforming himself.5 As far as it goes, there seems little to quarrel with in this analysis. Nonetheless—and this is the key point—it clearly overlooks some essential ironies of the minister 's fall: His knowledge did not so much fail him as he failed it, so that...