Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction by Thomas J. Ferraro

Reviewed by: Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction by Thomas J. Ferraro Judie Newman Transgression and Redemption in American Fiction. By Thomas J. Ferraro. (Oxford Studies in American Literary History) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020. viii+263 pp. £60. ISBN 978–0–19–886305–2. Catholic Studies has been an emerging field for at least a decade, since Paul Giles examined how secular transformations of religious ideas shaped the works of American artists from Catholic backgrounds in American Catholic Arts and Fictions [End Page 490] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). The field remains amorphous but is certainly expanding, as reflected by the recent publication of the Black Catholic Studies Reader: History and Theology, edited by David J. Endres (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021). Strongly influenced by the work of Leslie Fiedler, Thomas J. Ferraro looks back to the Marian Catholic Mediterranean in his study of a variety of canonical works, arguing that the Protestant temptation towards Roman Catholicism is strongest at the moment of modernist breakthrough (Harold Frederic, Kate Chopin, Henry James) or at its height (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway). Americans often revaluate their national identities by looking at a mirror image of their society across the Atlantic, and most contemporary Americanists would accept that American literature should be treated from an international and comparative perspective. Ferraro focuses on works which feature sexually self-determining women 'radiant in desire' (p. 6) and men (mostly rather feeble) caught in their nets, arguing that the great American works are narratives of beset sexuality, often accompanied by violence and death, offering redemption in transgression. Thus, writers are drawn to the Mariolatric worship of female fertility and the pagan underlay of Catholicism. Predictably perhaps, the analysis begins with The Scarlet Letter (Hester with the babe in arms, the prison rosebush iconographic of the Virgin Mary and a pagan symbol of female genitalia) traced back to Mediterranean folk tales of enraged cuckoldry and vengeance. The case needed to be more strongly made both for these sources and for the Americanness of the transgression involved. Nathaniel Hawthorne's sources have been traced persuasively to Oriental works, for example (Hester in Persia, the poison damsel tale in 'Rapaccini's Daughter'). Nor is there any shortage of adultery in European novels, as Tony Tanner established forty years ago in Adultery in the Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), and violence features prominently. One thinks of Madame Bovary's agonizing end from rat poison, of Anna Karenina under the train, and indeed of the entire Gothic tradition. According to Ferraro, the Protestant modelling of true religion is individually focused, 'ideal-essence, thing-rejecting, body-fearful, and ethically obsessed' (p. 25). This would be a surprise to John Updike, avowedly Protestant and a keen student of John Barth and Paul Tillich inter alios, whose novels teem with radiantly sexual women, involve a varied menu of sexual transgressions, and violence ranging from baby-killing to poisoning, premeditated murder, killing by witchcraft, death by arson, mass slaughter in a religious cult, and cannibalism. Updike rewrites The Scarlet Letter three times without any Catholic elements. (He sets it in an ashram based on the Rajneeshees.) Ferraro is also somewhat sweeping in his categorization of American criticism as operating under Protestant notions of consciousness. 'Just breathing the air in the U.S. makes us all half-Protestant', he suggests (p. 1). Even poststructuralist epistemologies are 'Protestant-inflected' (p. 1). Many Americanists, however, are not only not Protestant, or even Christian, but they do not breathe American air either. Oddly the tone of the opening chapter is that of the Puritans' favourite literary device, the jeremiad. Ferraro is better when providing lengthy close readings [End Page 491] of specific works: Cather's 'Coming, Aphrodite', a short story which could only be published originally in heavily censored form, in which the heroine Eden Bower (originally Edna) goes entirely unpunished for her sexual indulgences; The Damnation of Theron Ware as rewriting The Scarlet Letter; The Awakening as a story of beset female sexuality; The Professor's House (Catholic Augusta becomes a key character); The Great Gatsby as martyr tale of forbidden love; and finally, The Sun Also Rises...