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A Hymn of Faith Is a Tale of Love: Lohengrin and Platonic Romance in W. E. B. Du Bois’s “Of the Coming of John”
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 66, Number 4, Winter 2020
- pp. 676-701
- 10.1353/mfs.2020.0047
- Article
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Abstract:
This essay argues that Du Bois’s story “Of the Coming of John,” which adapts Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, depicts romance projected across hierarchized lines of sociocultural difference (race), in order to scrutinize love’s capacity to engender liberation. Tempering the failed intimacy and justice of Lohengrin with a Platonic vision of love that is no insular phenomenon, but rather, an expression of universal beauty and goodness, Du Bois characterizes the love of beauty as what crosses metaphysical as well as sociopolitical borders. He underscores thereby the cosmopolitan tenor of Platonic thought and recasts democracy as a form of caritas.