Equivocal Endings in Classic American Novels: The Scarlet Letter; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Ambassadors; The Great Gatsby

170 Pages·1988·3.72 MB·English

by  Joyce A. Rowe

Equivocal Endings in Classic American Novels
Equivocal Endings in
Classic American Novels
The Scarlet Letter;
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn;
The Ambassadors; The Great Gatsby
JOYCE A. ROWE
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© Cambridge University Press 1987
First published 1988
Reprinted 1988, 1989, 1990
British Library Cataloguing in publication data
Rowe, Joyce A.
Equivocal endings of classic American
novels: The scarlet letter, Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, The ambassador, The
great Gatsby.
1. American fiction — 19th century —
History and criticism. 2. American fiction
— 20th century — History and criticism
I. Title
813'.009 PS377
Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data
Rowe, Joyce A.
Equivocal endings of classic American novels.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
1. American fiction — History and criticism.
2. Closure (Rhetoric). 3. Ambiguity in literature.
I. Title
PS374.C56R68 1988 813'.009 87-15868
ISBN 0 521 33532 9
Transferred to digital printing 2004
GG
For
Claudia, Nina and Gerry

Contents
Acknowledgments page ix
Introduction i
1 Nathaniel Hawthorne: "My Kinsman, Major Molineux":
The Several Voices of Independence 14
2 Bleak Dreams: Restriction and Aspiration in
The Scarlet Letter 27
3 Mark Twain's Great Evasion: Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn 46
4 Strether Unbound: The Selective Vision of
Henry James's Ambassador 75
5 Closing the Circle: The Great Gatsby 100
Conclusion: Moby-Dick and Our Problem with History 127
Notes 138
Index 159
Vll

Acknowledgments
This book began as a doctoral dissertation written under the
direction of Quentin Anderson, now Professor Emeritus of
Columbia University. It gives me great pleasure and pride to
express my debt to him. His commitments, judgments and deep
learning have taught me what humanistic scholarship and criti-
cism can mean. Despite the pressure of his own responsibilities, he
has been selfless in his attention to the entirety of this project.
Rigorous as he is kind and caring, his challenges have enlivened
my work and sustained my spirit at every turn.
Readers of this work may recognize how much I also owe to
Sacvan Bercovitch, an inspiriting and generous teacher, whose
powerful ideas about American culture have stimulated me to
explore new perspectives on many traditional themes. Professor
Bercovitch has kindly read and commented upon part of this
manuscript. Werner Sollors saw the manuscript in its initial stages
and offered much valuable advice. Carl Hovde has been an astute
reader throughout. His suggestions and commentary have been
extremely helpful.
I would like to express very special thanks to Jack Salzman,
Director of the Center for American Culture Studies, Columbia
University. His judgment and enthusiasm made it possible to
transform an academic dissertation into a book.
For a grant from the Elliott V. K. Dobbie Fund to aid in pre-
paring the manuscript for publication, I am grateful to the
Graduate Department of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University.
Finally, I want to applaud my family for their unflagging good
cheer and self-reliance, for respecting my long hours of solitude,
and for their spontaneous faith that the free mind provides its own
reward.
IX

Introduction
i
To the passionate reader, the ending of a good story is a mixed
blessing. For though we demand endings to confirm or complete
our sense of relations within a story and so make a work fully
signify, an ending, like its real life counterpart, also entails a sense
of loss, of emptiness - a little death, as it were. In this sense, fic-
tional endings, whatever their ostensible resolution, are inherently
equivocal. In fulfilling our desire for a world of "charged meanings"
and singular events they recapitulate the wisdom of Prospero -
reminding us that the meaning we seek is a vision we impose; that
our finest aspirations are generated from the "baseless [and varied]
fabric" of our dreams.1
Shakespeare's The Tempest is associated with the Elizabethan
voyages to the New World and the Utopian ideals rekindled by its
discovery.2 But when Prospero breaks his staff, resigns his powers,
and returns to the world of the Renaissance state, he confirms his
audience (and their English descendants) in a more restrictive sense
of human possibility, and reality, than that which their American
cousins were to evolve on their side of the Atlantic ocean. For des-
pite cross-currents and interpenetrating influences between the two
continents, by the mid-nineteenth century when, it is generally
recognized, American writers had found their own style and voice,
their formal as well as thematic concerns were generating a
decidedly different literature from that produced by comparable
Writers abroad.
Nowhere, perhaps, is this more evident than in the pattern of
the endings of classic American novels and their troubling relation
to the narrative which precedes them. These endings are equivocal
in a special thematic sense, as they simultaneously promote
and deny a visionary ambition already defeated in the body
of the work. Neither tragic, comic nor ironic, they are, rather
deliberately evasive, eluding those truths of experience, of both
self and world, which the preceding narrative has been at pains