Degeneration and the Failure of Recognition in Harold Frederic’s The Damnation of Theron Ware

At first glance, Harold Frederic’s 1896 novel The Damnation of Theron Ware appears to be a story of innocence corrupted. A provincial minister encounters three tempters: Celia Madden, a New Woman who is economically and sexually independent; Father Forbes, an Irish Catholic priest who espouses German higher criticism; and Dr. Ledsmar, a scientist who studies evolution and conducts experiments on both plants and his personal servant alike. Theron also encounters Sister Soulsby, a pragmatic sort of confidence-man who manipulates parishioners into order raise funds. As Theron enters the modern world of ideas, he degenerates; his intellectual “illumination” (the novel’s British title) brings about his moral and spiritual “damnation.” From a simple preacher in rural upstate New York, he gradually starts to demean his wife Alice and his congregation, and he ends up a drunken, lustful, dishonest, and murderous petty thief and stalker in a New York City slum, as if stripping away his provincial trappings, a thin veneer of civilization, reveals his latent capacity for brutishness.

Yet this seemingly naturalist story has long confounded its critics, who offer contradictory interpretations of the abuse, the degeneration, and the gender fluidity of its characters. They disagree on its tone and moral worldview, as well as which character, if any, leads Theron to his damnation. An early response from the 1920s to the 1940s was to reject the novel for not properly adhering to the conventions of any literary tradition, such as realism and naturalism. While some readers have since conceded its ambiguities, others have tried to pin it down, anchor it in some way. Both these latter approaches are viable at the same time, if we allow the novel to be slippery at the level of content, while also holding that the power and gender dynamics between the characters follow a structural logic. Previous critics, particularly Donna Campbell and Lisa Watt MacFarlane, have effectively ventured this type of approach although their structures differ, one linear, the other triangular. In this vein, another approach would be to see the power relations as dyadic. More precisely, the dialectics of recognition, which was first articulated in Hegel’s master/slave parable, offers a structure by which to chart the fluid movement of power, the shifting roles of subject and object, which appear throughout the novel as acts of domination and subordination that are socially encoded primarily in terms of gender. In the parable, a subject seeks recognition from another subject in order to have a sense of worth and a confirmation of one’s identity. However, a master cannot receive meaningful recognition from a slave whom he has devalued, and in turn a slave cannot receive recognition from a master who sees the slave as an object. This thwarted desire for recognition results in abuse and a deprived sense of identity. Thus, a major theme of novel, Theron’s degeneration into a brute, can be understood at one level as an innate condition or a consequence of harsh realities but more fundamentally as a breakdown in mutual recognition, a product of a fraught relation between individuals.

Lacking a stable identity, Theron goes through several transitions. He takes on the role of a married Protestant minister, a disillusioned intellectual, and a potential politician. In each of these roles, Theron requires the recognition of his audience in order to have satisfaction and worth. Yet an unequal distribution of power complicates each mutation. Theron occupies different power positions as he goes through his transformations. When he moves from married minister to disillusioned intellectual, he devalues the first position by weakening and feminizing it. True to Hegel’s master/slave parable, Theron acts like a master who cannot receive satisfying recognition from subordinates; he ceases to care about the opinions of his wife Alice and his congregation. Looking for recognition elsewhere, from Father Forbes and Celia Madden, he then plays another role, and the dialectic repeats itself with Theron now feminized and infantilized in the slave’s position, attempting to adopt the ideology of the master. Many critics, including Campbell, have read the novel...