The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing

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THE ROMANCE OF THE HOLY LAND IN AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING, 1790–1876

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The Romance of the Holy Land in American Travel Writing, 1790–1876

BRIAN YOTHERS

The University of Texas-El Paso, USA

 Brian Yothers 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Brian Yothers has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Gower House Croft Road Aldershot Hants GU11 3HR England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington, VT 05401-4405 USA

Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Yothers, Brian The romance of the Holy Land in American travel writing, 1790–1876 1. American prose literature – 19th century – History and criticism 2. Travelers’ writings, American – Palestine – History and criticism 3. Travelers – Palestine – History – 19th century 4. Americans – Palestine – History – 19th century 5. Palestine – Description and travel 6. Palestine – In literature I. Title 810.9'325694'09034 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Yothers, Brian, 1975– The romance of the Holy Land in American travel writing, 1790–1876 / by Brian Yothers. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-5492-6 (alk. paper) 1. Travelers’ writings, American—History and criticism. 2. American prose literature— 19th century—History and criticism. 3. Middle East—Description and travel. 4. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages in literature. 5. Romanticism—United States. I. Title. PS366.T73Y68 2007 810.9'325694—dc22 2006036481 ISBN 978-0-7546-5492-6 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire.

Contents Acknowledgements 1

2

3

4

5

6

vii

The Emergence of the Levant in American Literature: Barbary Captivity Narratives, Oriental Romances, and the Holy Land as Protestant Trope

1

“The All-Perfect Text”: The Skeptical Piety of Protestant Pilgrims to the Holy Land

19

Alternative Orthodoxies: Clorinda Minor, Orson Hyde, Warder Cresson, and William Henry Odenheimer

43

“Such Poetic Illusions”: The Skeptical Oriental Romance of John Lloyd Stephens, Bayard Taylor, George William Curtis, and William Cullen Bryant

59

Quotidian Pilgrimages: Mark Twain, J. Ross Browne, John William DeForest, and David Dorr in Palestine

83

“As Seen through One’s Tears”: The “Double Mystery” of Place in Herman Melville’s Clarel

109

Bibliography

139

Index

145


Acknowledgements I would like to thank David Ruiter at the University of Texas at El Paso for his encouragement and advice as I have worked on this project. Deane MansfieldKelley has also provided tremendous enthusiasm and insight along the way. I would also like to thank Evelyn Posey, Chair of the English department at UTEP for release time to pursue this project. I am grateful as well to all my colleagues and students at UTEP for providing such a rich and rewarding environment in which to work. G.R. Thompson of Purdue University is the sort of mentor that every young scholar should have, and I cannot thank him enough for everything he has taught me. Kristina Bross, Robert Paul Lamb, Wendy Stallard Flory, Leonard Neufeldt, and the late Cheryl Z. Oreovicz have all shaped my understanding of American literature and culture, and this book would not have been possible without what I have learned from them. I would like to thank Ann Donahue and Ann Newell, my editors at Ashgate Publishing, for patiently guiding me through this process and for their remarkable promptness and efficiency in dealing with every question that I have had, and I would like to thank as well the anonymous reader for Ashgate who put so much time and thought into his/her response to my work. I am indebted to the Inter-Library Loan departments at both Purdue University and the University of Texas at El Paso for supplying what must have seemed an endless list of inter-library loan requests. I would also like to thank the Purdue Research Foundation for supplying summer grant support for the early stages of this project. On a personal note, I would like to thank Leslie, Yvonne, and Carmeline Jayasuriya for providing me with a quiet room in which to write during the summers when I was completing this project and for their support and enthusiasm for my endeavors. I am very grateful as well to my parents, Willard Yothers and the late Esther Yothers, for their love and support. Finally, my deepest thanks, for understanding, for support, for almost countless readings of this manuscript, and for so much more than I can possibly list here, are due to my wife, Maryse Jayasuriya, without whom “selfhood itself [would] seem incomplete.”


Chapter 1

The Emergence of the Levant in American Literature Barbary Captivity Narratives, Oriental Romances, and the Holy Land as Protestant Trope

Introduction: “That Speaking Landscape”: Reading Nineteenth-Century American Holy Land Narratives Today Near the end of The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain concludes that travelers to the Holy Land tend to formulate their accounts based more on their own preconceptions than on any empirical reality that they observe: I am sure . . . . that many who have visited this land in years gone by were Presbyterians, and came seeking evidences in support of their particular creed; they found a Presbyterian Palestine, and they had already made up their minds to find no other . . . . Others were Baptists, seeking Baptist evidences and a Baptist Palestine. Others were Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians . . . . Honest as these men’s intentions may have been, . . . . they entered the country with their verdicts already prepared, and they could no more write dispassionately and impartially about it than they could about their own wives and children. (384)

When I began this project, I planned to conclude with a reflection on the inevitability of, in Twain’s phrase, “finding what [one] seeks” when investigating the various texts that interpreted the Holy Land for nineteenth-century American readers. One of the most significant features shared by all of the texts discussed in this study, however, is an ineluctable tension between what is expected and what is found, between the pressure that already-written texts exert on each traveler’s perceptions and the ways in which each traveler finds new ways to write the landscape of Palestine. From the most piously conventional to the most comically irreverent, each of the works discussed below calls into question the conclusions of earlier writers and vigorously asserts its own claim to originality even while adopting some of the core conventions of nineteenth-century Holy Land writing.

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The Romance of the Holy Land

Contrary to my initial expectations, I have concluded, after reading texts ranging from Twain’s The Innocents Abroad and Herman Melville’s Clarel to Clorinda Minor’s Meshullam! and William M. Thomson’s The Land and the Book, that the most interesting and pertinent feature of these texts is their resistance to “finding what they seek” in any reductive sense. In the work of pious writers like Thomson, Edward Robinson, William T. Barclay, Orson Hyde, and Minor, this resistance takes the form of obsessive analysis of prior texts as the writers constantly grapple with earlier (often Catholic) interpretations of the sacred landscape and seek to debunk what they regard as pernicious myths even as they seek to reinforce faith in the sacred events of their religion. Although these writers certainly find some confirmation for their preconceived notions in their discussions of Palestine, the very intensity with which they engage with earlier interpretations results in a surprising ambivalence about what they find. Conversely, a pious figure like William Henry Odenheimer, who seeks to defend the validity of Catholic and Orthodox sacred sites, is forced to engage intensely with the texts written by other Protestants that pour scorn upon these sites. For less sectarian writers like John Lloyd Stephens, Bayard Taylor, George William Curtis, and William Cullen Bryant, as well as for the “irreverent” Twain, J. Ross Browne, David Dorr, and John William DeForest, resistance to prior accounts of the Holy Land also includes textual engagement, but more importantly emphasizes a doggedly affirmed empiricism—an ability to see the sacred landscape of Palestine with fresh, unprejudiced eyes. Again, Twain’s observation about “finding what one seeks” is both pertinent and at times misleading. To varying degrees, each of these writers emphasizes different aspects—economic, political, and religious—of the experience of traveling in Palestine, and in so doing undermines any attempt to affix a univocal meaning to the Holy Land. This emphasis reaches its culmination in Melville’s Clarel, which confronts the epistemological challenge presented by the Holy Land by giving full voice to all the varying interpretations of Palestine published by Melville’s predecessors. Edward Said’s study Orientalism has been so often discussed as an angry, polemical work that readers sometimes forget the positive vision that Said offers as a counter to the ideology that he critiques. Said asserts that his goal in writing was: [N]ot so much to dissipate difference—for who can deny the constitutive role of national as well as cultural differences in the relations between human beings—but to challenge the notion that difference implies hostility, a frozen reified set of opposed essences, and a whole adversarial knowledge built on these things. (350)

Said’s argument seems especially pertinent to the study of the Holy Land texts precisely because of the complex ways in which differing cultures interact and are

Emergence of the Levant

3

represented in these texts. Ottoman Palestine serves as a meeting place for the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions in these texts, and also a point of contact for widely divergent interpretations of the Christian religion. The representations of these intercultural contacts that appear in the works of the various Holy Land writers are by no means uniformly flattering to Christianity in general or to American-style Protestantism in particular. Moreover, the status of Palestine as a sacred originary point for the Christian narrative means that the confrontation with the Other in Palestine is always already a confrontation with the underlying structures of the traveler’s own culture. The contribution that further study of Holy Land travel writing can make to the larger fields of American Literature and American Studies lies in the picture of interpenetrating cultures that these works present. The decisions by Bayard Taylor and William Cullen Bryant to adopt “Oriental” dress after their respective journeys to the Middle East can certainly be read as facile appropriations of the Other (Obenzinger 45; J. Davis 42). Even a work as complex in its representations of cross-cultural contact as Clarel can be seen to be reductive in some of its depictions of characters local to Palestine. Nonetheless, as these examples show, American travelers to the Holy Land in the nineteenth century did not come away from Palestine unchanged, and the dialogues these travelers conducted among themselves and with earlier texts about the significance of their observations often serve as much or more (particularly in Melville and Twain) to undermine chauvinist expressions of American identity than to confirm them. Hilton Obenzinger ends his incisive study of Clarel and The Innocents Abroad with a pair of poignant questions: “Can an America be conceived without a covenantal framework? Can the land and its people be freed from the presumption of God’s special destiny?” (273). With these questions, Obenzinger links the American experience of nineteenth-century Ottoman Palestine to the ideal of America as a covenantal nation set apart by God for a unique destiny. Obenzinger’s quest is for a way of imagining America that dispenses with the need to associate it with a divine mission. I contend that the very complexity and variety of nineteenth-century American interpretations of the Holy Land that are discussed below demonstrate the possibility of an affirmative answer to Obenzinger’s questions. The range and diversity of American writing about the Middle East generally from the 1790s to the 1870s and the Holy Land specifically from the 1830s to the 1870s allows us to see, in one specific context, a history of ways of imagining American selfhood independently of the covenantal ideal. Examining the individual works that make up this history as contingent dramatizations of a complex experience allows us to avoid viewing American self-fashioning in purely covenantal terms and finding, in the end, merely what we seek.1

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Travel and the Antebellum American Ideology of Experience The seventeenth-century Puritan divine Thomas Hooker provides an incisive explanation of the importance of travel as an experiential validation of facts that otherwise would remain unassimilated. In his often-quoted sermon “A True Sight of Sin,” he observes: There is great ods betwixt the knowledg of a Traveller, that in his own person hath taken a view of many coasts, past through many countries, and hath there taken up his abode for some time, and by his Experience hath been an Eye-witness of the extream cold and scorching heats, hath surveyed the glory and beauty of one, the barrenness and meanness of the other; . . . and another that sits by his fireside and happily reads the story of these in a book, or views the proportion of these in a map, the ods is great, and the difference of their knowledg more than a little: the one saw the country really, the other only in story; the one hath seen the very place, the other only in the paint of a Map drawn. (64)

For Hooker, travel (used here allegorically as a trope for experiential Christianity) becomes an empirical means of validating knowledge that was previously only theoretical. The paradox of travel writing as a genre is that it claims to be able to impart the direct experience of Hooker’s Traveller to the reader, while at the same time it reinforces the primacy of direct experience, often by denying that previously written texts have any truth to convey to the reader. Travel writing consistently reinforces two significant ideas: first, that direct experience and observation are the only ways really to know a place or a people, and second that while most writers will simply provide more “maps” of the place discussed, the present writer will somehow take the reader beyond book knowledge into a direct, if vicarious, knowledge of the location explored. The claim of experiential validity becomes especially important when we survey the literature of American Holy Land travel, since the experience elucidated in these texts is often portrayed as a privileged insight into divinity itself. Hilton Obenzinger (162) has argued that this claim to authenticity (in this case taking a form that undermines all claims to direct knowledge of divinity) is especially strongly articulated in Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, and one of the crucial elements in Melville’s Clarel is the problematizing of the idea that experience of the Holy Land provides the preconditions for a trustworthy, authentic account of its nature. While the American philosophy of experience provides the justification that most of the travelers discussed in this essay would give for their narratives, there is another, more contemporary reason for wanting to explore American travel writings from the retrospective view of the twenty-first century. Larzer Ziff argues in Return Passages (2000) that “significant travel writing . . . is . . . simultaneously


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a movement forward past domestic boundaries and a meditation backwards on the limits that have been transcended” (16), and that the travel narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are significant precisely because of the ways in which they both define and question the boundaries of what it means to be an American. This is a claim that will become increasingly significant in my discussion of cultural and religious contact in Middle Eastern narratives, from the early Barbary captivity narratives of the 1790s to the Holy Land writings of the nineteenth century.

The Significance of Palestine for Nineteenth-Century American Religious Culture One question that will occur quite naturally to students of American religious culture, particularly American Protestant religious culture, is, “Why should there be a particular fascination with Ottoman Palestine? Why would the Holy Land occupy such a prominent place in the religious, literary, and cultural imagination of a nation that, particularly in its early years, associated itself primarily with Protestant Christianity?” It is indeed somewhat counterintuitive that a nation as predominantly Protestant as the nineteenth-century United States would produce a vigorous tradition of writing about locations that are conceived of in the Roman Catholic and Greek and Oriental Orthodox traditions as sites for pilgrimage. As Victor and Edith Turner note in their highly illuminating work on pilgrimage, unlike Catholicism and Eastern/Oriental Orthodoxy, Protestantism, particularly the evangelical variety commonly practiced in the United States, lacks a clear theological justification for the act of pilgrimage. By locating salvation in the personal relationship between the individual and Jesus, rather than in an institutional church with a concrete historical tradition, American evangelicalism removes the need for pilgrimage as an affirmation of religious community that appears in Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. There are several plausible theories that account for the ongoing American fascination with Ottoman Palestine in the nineteenth century. The first, and the one that Hilton Obenzinger appears to prefer, is based on the New England-centered analyses of American culture written by critics such as Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch. Miller and Bercovitch both believe the New England typological model of America as a kind of “New Israel” to be normative for the development of American culture during the nineteenth century (and, for Bercovitch, the twentieth as well). This typological identification of America with the biblical Israel allows for a way of understanding America’s fascination with the Holy Land (as Obenzinger argues), but it also raises important questions. Why, for example, should Americans who had identified themselves so completely with the biblical

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Israel need to bother to make a journey to the Holy Land, when presumably they were in Zion all along? Why would they not merely use the Holy Land as a trope, as Henry David Thoreau does in his essay “Walking”? Thoreau provides the clearest example of why use of the Holy Land as a trope need not indicate any great desire to go to the Levant. He writes: Sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from “idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under the pretext of going a la Sainte Terre”—to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainteterrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. (2157)

Here Thoreau detaches the term “Holy Land” from any literal geographical associations and instead invests it with metaphorical significance. The “Holy Land” signifies not Ottoman Palestine with all of its geographical, political, and religious particularity, but instead a way of being in the world, a lifestyle that is (in a secular sense) sanctified. Notably, Thoreau’s conception of sauntering does not require a particularly strong identification between American and any historical Holy Land. The fascination with the Holy Land that appears in American Protestantism in the nineteenth century thus cannot be explained solely by reference to the idea of America as a New Israel. Reiner Smolinski’s recent work on American conceptualizations of the relationship between the biblical Israel and early America is helpful at this point. In his article “Israel Redivivus,” Smolinski begins with first generation settlers such as John Eliot and moves on through all the major divines of the colonial and early national periods to show that, contrary to the assumptions some scholars have made, there is rarely an absolute typological identification between either the New England colonies or the early republic and the biblical Israel in American religious thought. Smolinski further notes that throughout the early literature, there is a profound interest in issues such as the contemporary situation of the Jewish diaspora in Europe, caused primarily by a fascination with chiliasm and particularly biblical prophecy. Therefore, following Smolinski, I argue that it was possible for American Protestants to be concerned about the Holy Land and its fate and related issues such as millennialism and Zionism precisely because they did not identify themselves entirely with the biblical Israel. Confirmation of Smolinski’s argument appears in chapter two, where I analyze the odd mixture of empiricism and credulity that appears in the Holy Land texts written by American evangelical Protestants. The attitudes expressed by many of these travelers, especially an ardent millennialist like Clorinda Minor, toward the sacred landscape they contemplated are inexplicable if we neglect the particularities of evangelical religious culture. The remainder of chapter one


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suggests, meanwhile, that the Holy Land narratives cannot be fully understood without careful attention to one the most popular genres of the late eighteenth century, the Barbary captivity narrative. An American Orient: The Barbary Pirates and American Discourse on the Middle East Possibly the most frequently ignored antecedent for the American Holy Land narrative in the nineteenth century is the American Barbary Captivity narrative of the eighteenth century. The few critics who have discussed American Holy Land travel narratives from the nineteenth century have generally treated the Holy Land as a sui generis case, one that bears little relation to a wider American discourse about the Middle Eastern “Orient.” I contend that the framework within which the nineteenth-century American Holy Land travel narrative operates is created in large part by the already-existing discourse on the Middle East that developed in a distinctly American form as a result of the popular narratives, novels, and plays about Barbary captivity that appeared in the eighteenth century. The two works that deal with the experience of Barbary captivity that have been of sufficient interest to contemporary critics to be published in new editions are Royall Tyler’s novel The Algerine Captive (1797) and Susan Haswell Rowson’s play Slaves in Algiers, or A Struggle for Freedom (1794). Tyler’s novel, with its combination of thorough ethnographic research and biting satire, can most usefully be analyzed against the background of the standard Barbary captivity narrative as represented by the narratives recently collected by Paul Baepler in White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives (1999). Rowson’s play, on the other hand, is instructive in the ways in which it differs from both the mainstream captivity narratives collected by Baepler and the satirical appropriation of the Barbary captivity genre in Tyler’s novel. The renewed interest in Royall Tyler’s often neglected novel The Algerine Captive over the last twenty years, together with the publication of Paul Baepler’s collection White Slaves, African Masters provides the student of the early American novel with the opportunity to perform the kind of source analysis that David S. Reynolds undertakes for mid-nineteenth-century literature in Beneath the American Renaissance (1988). Tyler’s novel, while not a staple of American literature courses, is at least quasi-canonical, and it is receiving increasing critical attention since studies such as Malini Johar Schueller’s U.S. Orientalisms (1998) and Cathy Davidson’s Revolution and the Word (1986) have called attention to some of its sociopolitical implications.2 Tyler’s achievement in The Algerine Captive can perhaps best be understood in light of the ways in which he shapes key elements of the captivity narrative genre in order to call for reform in the early republic. To place Tyler’s work in the broader context of the Barbary captivity

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narratives, I shall draw primarily on John Foss’s A Journal, of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss (1798) as a representative text, although not one that could have been a direct influence on Tyler since it was published several years later than The Algerine Captive. I shall also, however, give consideration to other texts that Baepler makes available, most particularly Cotton Mather’s The Glory of Goodness (1703), and will attempt to situate The Algerine Captive within the overall context provided by the purportedly non-fiction Barbary narratives. The most significant recent criticism on Tyler’s novel, that by Reynolds, Davidson, and Schueller, emphasizes the way that the story of Updike Underhill, Tyler’s protagonist in the novel, parallels other explicitly fictive accounts of North African slavery and/or other early American picaresque novels. Davidson discusses The Algerine Captive primarily in the context of picaresque novels. Because of this emphasis, she limits her discussion largely to the initial volume of the novel, which takes place in the United States. Schueller and Reynolds both focus on the ways in which the location of the novel in the Orient opens up space to discuss matters that could not safely be discussed in an American setting. For them, the key texts for contextualizing The Algerine Captive are Rowson’s Slaves in Algiers and Peter Markoe’s novel The Algerine Spy. Baepler’s anthology now enables critics to discuss Tyler’s novel with texts that make the same claims of authenticity for themselves that Updike Underhill makes as the narrator of The Algerine Captive. Furthermore, this anthology helps readers to see where Tyler’s text resembles these texts and where it parts company with them. It is useful to begin by characterizing the nature of the narratives contained in White Slaves, African Masters. Baepler includes a wide range of accounts in his anthology. The earliest is Cotton Mather’s second-hand account of the sufferings of a number of Christian captives, and this account is the one that may be contrasted most vividly with Tyler’s use of religious dialogue in The Algerine Captive. John Foss’s Journal provides the most thorough discussion of North African captivity that is roughly contemporaneous with Tyler’s text and can stand as a representative of the general tenor of the accounts published by prisoners of the Barbary pirates. Most of the other narratives were published significantly later than The Algerine Captive, but James Leander Cathcart’s narrative, while published in the late nineteenth-century, also refers to events taking place late in the eighteenth-century. My reading of The Algerine Captive will draw primarily on Mather and Foss. Cotton Mather’s The Glory of Goodness is perhaps the least like Tyler’s novel of any of the narratives from Baepler’s anthology. For Mather, in this sermon as throughout so much of his writing, the lines between good and evil are very clearly drawn. The heroes of Mather’s sermon are Christian captives of African masters whom he describes as utterly depraved. The captives’ virtue consists most centrally in their refusal to convert from Christianity to Islam despite


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threats of physical harm, including execution. He emphasizes the intensity of their sufferings and their courage in the face of being deprived of food, water, and rest, and sets them forward as exempla for the members of his congregation in New England. Because of the centrality of resistance to conversion to his characters’ virtue, Mather takes as the principal illustration in his sermon the case of two prisoners, an Englishman and a Frenchmen, who are threatened with torture and death if they do not instantly convert. The Frenchman converts, but the Englishman refuses and is rewarded with a particularly gruesome martyrdom. While the men of New England have not yet “resisted unto Blood” in this manner, Mather reports that they have been exposed to “bloody temptations” (65). Mather betrays throughout an intense anxiety about the possibility that the pure New England men will be contaminated by their captivity, and he exclaims that the men who have converted are “Hated, Loathed, Scorned, both by the baptized [Christians] and by the circumcised [Muslims]…. Temporally more abject than they ever were before, and seized by eternal Chains of Darkness” (66). For Mather the meeting between New England and North Africa is the meeting of Light and Darkness, virtue and vice in their most typical forms. Foss’s Journal is less chauvinist and more objective in its outlook than Mather’s sermon. The structure and content of Foss’s Journal allow it to perform two crucial functions. First, Foss’s Journal allows his American readers make a close identification with those afflicted by North African slavery by recounting in detail the sufferings, indignities, and dangers experienced by the American captives. Second, Foss provides what for many of his readers will be an exceedingly exotic entertainment by relating ethnographic details about the mores and social and religious customs of North African society. A telling passage addresses explicitly the emotions that Foss expected to arouse in his readership: The tears of sympathy will flow from the humane and the feeling, at the tale of the hardships and sufferings of their unfortunate fellow countrymen, who had the misfortunes to fall into the hands of the Algerines—whose tenderest mercies toward Christian captives are extreme cruelties; and who are taught by the religion of Mahomet (if that can be called a religion which leads men to the commission of such horrid and bloody deeds) to persecute all its opposers. (73)

The sympathetic identification that Foss hopes to cultivate in his readers is significant for several reasons. As Baepler points out, passages such as this one trespass on the generic territory of the sentimental novel (14). By employing tactics familiar to readers of sentimental fiction, Foss provides himself with a foothold in the American literary market. Moreover, by using sentimental rhetoric, he also provides an implicit call for action that summons Americans to ransom captives who are still enslaved and also to eliminate the threat posed by the Barbary Pirates,

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by force if necessary. The United States exercised just such force in a successful attempt to establish naval superiority several years after the publication of Foss’s Journal. The scene that best exemplifies this strand in Foss’s narrative occurs when Foss is still on the ship. He reports that a particularly brutal slave-master, Sherief, was beating the American slaves. One American exclaims in English “God grant that you may die the first time you offer to abuse another man” (81). The American’s prayer is answered when Sherief dies a few minutes later, “swept away by the devout breath of a suffering Christian” (81). This passage combines an expression of outrage at the captors’ cruelty designed to elicit an emotional response with the expectation that a triumph over the Barbary pirates will be easy for a virtuous America.3 The second function that Foss’s text fulfills, the ethnographic and geographical function, also serves a possible political purpose. As both Baepler and Schueller note, descriptions of the landscape and appealing features of foreign countries, when combined with condemnations of the barbarity or backwardness of the native inhabitants, can promote imperialism. There are several key moments in Foss’s text where these sorts of description appear. Regarding the country itself, Foss notes that “[t]he climate of this country is remarkably delightful. The air is pure and clean. The soil is covered with a remarkable verdure” (90). Foss also remarks at length upon the flora and fauna and the styles of architecture in the cities. It is the inhabitants that he discusses at the greatest length, however, with particular emphasis upon marriage customs and legal procedures. He mentions the presence of many hot baths, the ready availability of Turkish coffee, and the dietary habits of the people. While he often turns to ad hominem attacks on the Algerians, he is certainly more objective and complimentary than is Mather. He does not, however, find anything in the situation of Algerian slaves to make him turn a critical eye on American polity. For that development, we must turn to Tyler. Tyler, as Schueller points out, “complicates the dichotomies of liberty and slavery and of morality and licentiousness that are raised in other Algerian Orientalist texts of the period” (57). Tyler uses crucial elements that are common to other North African captivity narratives, such as the oppositions posited in Foss’s Journal and Mather’s sermon between American freedom and Algerian despotism, Christian charity and Islamic cruelty, and Western progress and African backwardness. He then deconstructs them, revealing the cruelty of slavery in America and the destructiveness of some portions of the Euro-American religious heritage. This element in Tyler’s text becomes strikingly apparent when Updike Underhill narrates the story of how he became a slave and how he spent his time while enslaved. The fictitious Underhill, like the real-life Foss, devotes considerable space not only to a discussion of the cruelty of his captors but also to a discussion of their


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history and customs. He spends several chapters narrating the life of Mohammed and the development of Islam. He comments on Islamic law at some length, criticizing the harshness of the floggings and executions, but also using certain incidents to make wry commentary on American justice. Perhaps most significantly, he includes extended dialogues with Muslim clergy, who artfully expose the contradictions in Underhill’s own rhetoric. He dutifully includes some standard anti-Islamic rhetoric, but as Cathy Davidson notes, Underhill reveals many of his own inconsistencies in his debates with several Muslim interlocutors, and it is small wonder that Tyler felt it necessary to state in his preface to The Bay Boy that the goal of the dialogues in The Algerine Captive was not to promote Islam at the expense of Christianity (208). As David Reynolds points out, however, the fundamental goal in Tyler’s use of Islam in The Algerine Captive is to perform a sort of ventriloquism, through which the Muslim characters give voice to religious ideas that correspond to the agenda of a more liberal and egalitarian version of Christianity than was being practiced in much of the United States (1617). The most significant of these dialogues occurs when Underhill is introduced, by an enslaved Englishman (a dissenter and not an Episcopalian like Tyler) who has converted to Islam in order to gain his freedom, to a Mullah who is also a convert from Christianity (Orthodox, in this case). The Englishman persuades Underhill to meet with the Mullah in order to make a choice between Islam and Christianity “founded on rational preference, and not on ignorance of any other religious system” (2.5.127). When Underhill meets with this Mullah, he finds that he is badly outmatched in terms of rhetorical and dialectical skill. The Mullah begins his dialogue with Underhill by pointing out the degree to which religious beliefs are derived from geographical location and upbringing, and makes a pointed argument for the study of comparative religion: Born in New England, my friend, you are a Christian purified by Calvin. Born in the Campania of Rome, you had been a papist. Nursed by the Hindoos, you would have entered the pagoda with reverence and worshiped the soul of your ancestor in a duck. . . . A wise man adheres not to his religion merely because it was that of his ancestors. He will examine the creeds of other religions, compare them with his own, and hold fast that which is right. (2.7.131-2)

Although his understanding of Hinduism is flawed, to say the least, it is significant that Underhill’s interlocutor establishes from the start that he wants to debate the differences between Christianity and Islam based on an independent rational standard of evaluating religion. At first, Underhill believes that defending the rational superiority of his own faith will be easy, but he is quickly proved wrong. When Underhill seeks to base the authority of his religion in the Bible, the Mullah responds with similar

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arguments for the authority of the Koran. When Underhill argues that the spread of Christianity proves its validity, the Mullah points to the even more rapid spread of Islam. When Underhill attributes the spread of Islam to the sword and the spread of Christianity to peaceful methods, the Mullah scores his greatest triumph, referring Underhill in detail to the history of violence within Christianity, and in particular addressing the issue of slavery. The Mullah argues: My friend, surely you have not read the writings of your own historians. The history of the Christian Church is a detail of bloody massacre . . . . The Mussulmen never yet forced a man to adopt their faith. . . . It is true, they then and we now, when a slave pronounces the ineffable creed, immediately knock off his fetters and receive him as a brother. . . . We leave it to the Christians of the West Indies, and Christians of your southern plantations, to baptize the unfortunate African into your faith, and then use your brother Christians as brutes of the desert. (2.7.135)

Underhill finds that he is too ashamed to respond to this indictment of slavery in Christian America. Underhill is, in the end, completely unable to refute the Mullah’s arguments, whether intellectual or moral, and he finally reports that “After five days of conversation, disgusted by his fables, abashed by his assurance, and almost confounded by his sophistry, I resumed my slaves attire and sought safety in my former servitude” (2.7.136).4 The Mullah’s arguments are rendered especially poignant for Underhill by his own experience as a ship’s doctor aboard a slave ship, which is ironically named the Sympathy. Even prior to his captivity, Underhill finds the American practice of slavery abhorrent. He is appalled by the cruelty of the sailors on the ship to the slaves (he mentions very explicitly, in additions to beatings and murders, the rapes of which his fellow sailors were guilty), and he is even more appalled by the inhumane acts in which he is forced to participate. He is particularly horrified by the task of inspecting the slaves’ bodies for flaws. He describes this task as being “transacted with all that unfeeling insolence which wanton barbarity can inflict on defenseless wretchedness. The man, the affrighted child, the modest matron, and the timid virgin were alike exposed to this severe scrutiny, to humanity and common decency equally insulting” (1.30.110). The careful reader cannot help but notice that Underhill here applies the same language to the white slave traders that Mather applies to the Barbary pirates. Underhill’s conclusion, in retrospect, is that his Algerian captivity is not merely a piece of bad luck, but a punishment for his own complicity in the evils of the slave trade. He writes: I cannot reflect upon this transaction yet without shuddering . . . . and I pray to a merciful God, the common parent of the great family of the universe, who hath made of one flesh and one blood all the nations of the earth, that the miseries, the


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insults, and cruel woundings that I afterwards received when a slave myself, may expiate for the inhumanity I was necessitated to use towards these MY BROTHERS OF THE HUMAN RACE [emphasis in original]. (1.30.110)

Here the use of sentiment is directed much more powerfully toward critiquing the evils of American slavery than those of Algerian slavery. This reading of Tyler’s novel as a profoundly abolitionist and reformist text points to the fact that there are many points of convergence between the project that Tyler undertakes in his fictitious account of Algerian slavery and that which Foss undertakes in his autobiographical account. Both accounts include a strong ethnographic component, seeking to comment at length on Algerian history and culture, the Islamic religion, and the treatment of Christian slaves within this culture. Both, moreover, write with an eye to exciting American sympathy for the plight of the slaves in the Barbary States, and indeed a sympathetic identification with the hardships of slavery is one of the key emotions that both texts strive to elicit. The texts differ, however, in Tyler’s use of the captivity narrative to suggest the need for such social reforms as the elimination of American slavery, factionalism, and religious sectarianism (and to a lesser degree, gambling and alcoholism). The “tears of sympathy” that Tyler covets from his reader fall more for the slaves who are being brought into Charleston than those being brought into Algiers, and still more for a nation that believes itself to be virtuous while abetting a form of slavery that Tyler suggests is more poisonous than that experienced by any Algerine Captive. Like Tyler’s novel, Susanna Haswell Rowson’s play Slaves in Algiers (1794) contains a sharp critique of social relations in late eighteenth-century America, but unlike The Algerian Captive, Rowson’s play does not take African slavery in the American South as its primary subtext. Instead, Rowson uses Algerian captivity as a backdrop for a call for greater freedom and respect for American women. Whereas Tyler engages in satirical humor at the expense of American nationalism before restoring more typical nationalistic discourse at the end of his novel, Rowson uses nationalistic rhetoric throughout her play with little apparent irony. Despite the contrasts, however, Rowson’s play is similar to Tyler’s novel in one very important way: both Rowson and Tyler use the Levant as a backdrop for analyzing important social issues in the United States, and both frame their critique of American society as it is as a plea for the United States to realize what they regard as its own best values. For Rowson, the identification of post-Revolutionary America with liberty is taken for granted. She does not explicitly question this identification, but rather seeks to extend the identification between “America” and “Liberty” to include an identification between American liberty and greater freedom and respect for women. Slaves in Algiers, unlike Tyler’s novel, takes place entirely within the

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philosophical speculation, the popular strand that draws on curiosity about the mysterious and alien Orient of myth and folklore, and the pious strand of missionary narratives of God’s providential work in foreign lands. A final tendency that appears in the Holy Land literature that is less common in other nineteenth-century American Orientalist works is an emphasis on archaeology, which contributes to the obsessive fascination with the sacred landscape that appears in many nineteenth-century American discussions of Palestine. The chapters that follow attempt to map the complex interrelationships among the various strands in U.S. travel writing about the Holy Land through a series of close readings of a wide range of travel narratives. What emerges from these readings is a picture of American discourse about the Holy Land in which faith and doubt, piety and protestations of incredulity, and nationalism and reflective criticism of national myths are inextricably linked.

Notes 1

The scholarly work that has been done to this point on literature relating to Holy Land travel has been mostly confined to either broad historical characterizations of a large number of texts, or close literary analysis of one or two texts by an established canonical writer such as Mark Twain or Herman Melville. Broad historical treatments of the genre include Moshe Davis’s America and the Holy Land (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), Lester Vogel’s To See a Promised Land (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993), Yehoshua Ben-Arieh and Moshe Davis’s Jerusalem in the Eyes of the Western World (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997), John Davis’s The Landscape of Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996), and Burke Long’s Imagining the Holy Land (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2003). Attempts to deal with the specifically literary dimension of the genre have been scarcer. Franklin Walker’s Irreverent Pilgrims: Melville, Browne, and Mark Twain in the Holy Land (Seattle, WA: U of Washington P, 1974) restricts itself to a fairly general description of the routes taken by three major literary travelers. The most complex and rewarding work to deal specifically with Holy Land writing as a literary genre (and the only one to have been published in full-length book form other than Walker’s Irreverent Pilgrims) is Hilton Obenzinger’s American Palestine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1999). 2 The most recent scholarship on The Algerine Captive is that of Caleb Crain, who has edited the most recent edition of the novel. Crain’s introduction to his new edition deals at some length with issues of masculinity and national self-fashioning. Schueller (1998) and Davidson (1984), both of whom are discussed at some length in the body of the text, are the other two recent critics to discuss Tyler’s novel at length. 3 Students of American Puritan literature will note the similarity between this moment and William Bradford’s account in Of Plymouth Plantation of the providential elimination of an abusive and blasphemous sailor. 4 It is interesting that Tyler does not allow Underhill to test the Mullah’s logic further here, given the history of North African complicity in the transatlantic slave trade. A possible


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explanation is that Tyler’s primary purpose in this portion of the novel is to use Algerian slavery to indict American slaveholding. Additionally, Updike Underhill’s status as a naïve narrator is preserved by not allowing him to score too many debating points against the sagacious Mullah. Underhill’s innocence is perhaps his most frequently emphasized virtue: he is a forerunner of many naïve but basically good-hearted characters in American fiction. 5 For more on the significance of the Oriental Romance in eighteenth and nineteenthcentury American literature, see Malini Johar Schueller’s U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890 (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan P, 1998) and David Reynolds’s Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Random House, 1988.) and Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1981).


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Chapter 2

“The All-Perfect Text” The Skeptical Piety of Protestant Pilgrims to the Holy Land

Let us, therefore, deal reverently with it, walk softly over those acres once trodden by the feet of patriarchs, prophets, and sacred poets, and most of all by the Son of God himself. Let us put off the soiled sandal of worldliness and sin as we enter this consecrated domain. There is design in this grouping of mountains and plains, hills and valleys, lakes and rivers, the desert and the sea . . . . The things were not the result of blind chance, were not merely natural, but beyond and above that, for we see in them the supernatural and divine. —William M. Thomson (1852)

The American accounts of the Holy Land that became a standard against which the experience of others could be measured were those of the devout evangelical Protestants who went as missionaries, archaeologists, biblical commentators, and, frequently, lachrymose tourists.1 These travelers provide the sources for many of the intertextual references in Holy Land accounts by Mark Twain and Herman Melville, but they are among the most frequently neglected of nineteenth-century American travelers to the Ottoman Palestine.2 This neglect has been unfortunate because the travelers who visited the Holy Land for specifically religious purposes set many of the parameters for the way that the more conventionally literary travel writers ranging from Bayard Taylor to Melville experienced Palestine. The first way in which American evangelical Protestant travelers shape the responses that their compatriots have to the Holy Land is in their curious mix of sentimental piety and empiricist skepticism. On the one hand, the pious Protestant pilgrims frequently engage in florid rhetorical excess when describing the emotions that they experience at the sight of locations about which they have read in the Bible. On the other hand, their texts are permeated by intense suspicion toward Catholic and Orthodox3 claims for the authenticity of many of the most famous sites in Palestine, and thus find themselves situated in the role of skeptics and scoffers almost as often as they find themselves in the role of humble

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Romance of the Holy Land

worshippers. Mark Twain may emphasize the element of skepticism nearly (although not entirely) to the exclusion of the element of piety in his Holy Land narrative. He is still, however, able to express such open skepticism about so much of what he sees precisely because the anti-Catholic polemic of much more devout Protestant travelers has made the expression of skepticism about Holy Land sites acceptable. What distinguishes Twain from these travelers is the fact that he turns this ready-made polemic to effective use against the pretensions of the very travelers who initially constructed it. The second way in which these devout travelers shape the terms for other travelers’ engagement with the Holy Land is in their treatment of local peoples and customs within Palestine. Regarding these matters, there is a considerable range of opinion that appears in the differing representations of the people who inhabit Palestine. Edward Robinson and William Prime tend towards a straightforward chauvinism regarding Palestine’s nineteenth-century inhabitants, whether Jewish, Muslim, or (especially) non-Protestant Christian. William M. Thomson, of all the pious travelers to the Holy Land, most readily embraces the local peoples and customs, and adopts a stance of Christian humanism similar to that of such genteel travelers as Bayard Taylor and John Lloyd Stephens. The third imprint that the devout travelers make upon the genre of Holy Land travel writing is their intense engagement with other texts. Robinson and Thomson, for example, draw heavily on their knowledge of church fathers like St. Jerome and Eusebius, historians like Josephus, and relative contemporaries like Rene Chateaubriand, as well as the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Moreover, Thomson and Prime cite Robinson’s archaeological research frequently. In addition to culling information from various travelers who preceded them, each of these writers is also quick to argue with their predecessors in order to establish the superior validity and relevance of their own accounts—a strategy that Mark Twain later employs so successfully that few readers of The Innocents Abroad ever question his depiction of Thomson, Robinson, and especially Prime as sentimental fools. The tension between the devout writers’ practice of incorporating numerous and eclectic sources into their texts and their attempts to debunk the authenticity of prior travelers’ responses to the land is one of the most ubiquitous features of American travel writing about the Holy Land. Finally, the devout travelers establish a tradition of finding the sacredness of the Holy Land in the landscape itself rather than in the various shrines that lay claim to historical significance. John Davis in particular argues that this close attention to the landscape of the Holy Land rather than to particular sacred sites is an essential part of the mission of the devout pilgrims. According to Davis, a powerful sympathetic identification with the landscape, particularly when viewing sites discussed at length in the biblical text, takes the place of devotion to churchsanctioned historical sites for these Protestant travelers.

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My examination of the various responses to the sacred geography of the Holy Land by these American evangelical Protestant writers will proceed by means of close readings of salient portions of several travel narratives: those by Edward Robinson, the influential biblical archaeologist; by William M. Thomson, a missionary to Syria; by William C. Prime, a Princeton educated lawyer whose sentimentally pious effusions about the Holy Land were later to be parodied by Mark Twain; and by William Turner Barclay and Sarah Barclay Johnson, a father and daughter who served as missionaries in Palestine.

Edward Robinson, Biblical Archaeologist Edward Robinson’s Biblical Researches in Palestine (1838) provides the most striking instance of the tendency of the Holy Land narratives to mix widely disparate genres. Robinson, famous as the founder of modern biblical archaeology and discoverer of several major Holy Land artifacts, including the eponymous Robinson’s Arch, combines travel narrative with biblical analysis, church history, apologetics, political history, explanations of archaeological discoveries, and meticulously detailed descriptions of every imaginable historical site in Palestine. Robinson’s method is to begin with a description of his initial reactions to a particular site, told in narrative form and suitable for the general reader, and then to proceed to close physical description of the site, followed by biblical and historical analysis of the site’s significance and authenticity. Throughout, Robinson’s account is colored by a strong Protestant polemic that leads him to cast doubt on the authenticity of sites venerated by Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians while attempting to create a sacred key to the geography of Palestine that can be matched closely to the biblical text. Unlike some of Robinson’s more extreme coreligionists, however, he does not completely dismiss the validity of traditional identifications of sacred sites, and he does rely on the Church Fathers and on previous researchers to provide evidence to support his conclusions. The ultimate verification of a site’s significance for Robinson must, nonetheless, come from the biblical text. A close reading of Robinson’s initial discussion of Jerusalem in the first volume of Biblical Researches reveals the form that Robinson’s biblicist empiricism takes throughout his discussions of Palestine. Robinson begins his discussion of Jerusalem with an almost lyrical outburst about the associations that Jerusalem calls up for pilgrims such as himself: The feelings of a Christian traveler on approaching Jerusalem, can be better conceived than described. Mine were strongly excited. Before us, as we drew near, lay Zion, the Mount of Olives, the Vales of Hinnom, and Jehoshaphat, and other

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Romance of the Holy Land objects of deepest interest; while, crowning the summits of the same ancient hills, was spread out the city where God of old had dwelt, and where the Saviour of the World had lived, and taught, and died. (1.6.326)

Notably, Robinson begins his account of Jerusalem very specifically with a discussion of the religious emotions that the thought of the city stimulates. Robinson’s naming of specific locations and his brief formulation of the historical and religious significance of the city possess an almost incantatory style as a result of his use of the parallelism (e.g. lived, and taught, and died) that would be familiar to him from the Psalms. After his poetic introduction to the significance of Jerusalem, Robinson proceeds to discuss his personal reaction to stories about Jerusalem that he heard as a child before embarking on any discussion of the city itself. He writes: From the earliest childhood, I had read of and studied the localities of this sacred spot; now I beheld them with my own eyes; and they all seemed familiar to me, as if the realization of a former dream. I seemed to be again among cherished scenes of childhood, long unvisited, indeed, but distinctly recollected; and it was almost a painful interruption when my companion (who had been here before) began to point out and name the various objects in view. (1.6.326)

The lyrical language of the opening sentences continues throughout this passage, and again Robinson’s emphasis is on the internalized picture of the Holy Land that he brings with him to Jerusalem and most particularly on the emotional shadings that this picture possesses as a result of constant exposure to the biblical narrative. Robinson illustrates here the way in which the biblical narrative has become integrated into his own experience of the world: the physical Jerusalem that he sees seems not to be a new landscape for him, but rather the stuff of childhood memory. In Mark Twain’s parody of texts like Robinson’s in The Innocents Abroad, this identification between the biblical accounts and childhood becomes material for ridicule, but for Robinson the identification is richly nostalgic. Robinson’s introduction to the subject of Jerusalem may be florid, but he quickly adopts a more businesslike tone as he begins to write about his experiences in Jerusalem. He briskly relates the names of the missionaries with whom he is staying, reveals that the rent for their house is “less than fifty Spanish dollars per annum” (I.VI.327), and provides a brief itinerary for his initial stroll through Jerusalem. He then proceeds to describe the physical appearance of Jerusalem, taking issue with Chateaubriand’s dismissal of contemporary Jerusalem as a place of squalor. Robinson argues that the: houses are in general better built, and the streets cleaner, than those of Alexandria, Smyrna, or even Constantinople. . . .The streets, and the population that throngs

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them, may also well bear comparison with those of any other oriental city; although if one seeks. . . .for the general cleanliness and thrift which characterize many cities of Europe and America, he will of course seek in vain. (1.6. 328-9)

Both Robinson’s eagerness to test the descriptions provided by other writers against his own empirical observations and his tendency to make chauvinistic comparisons between the people of the Holy Land and his fellow Americans are in evidence here. These two characteristics appear again and again as Robinson discusses the sacred sites and events that he observes in Jerusalem. Like Melville’s fictional Clarel, Robinson arrives in the Holy Land during a year in which the Western and Eastern celebrations of Easter coincide, and his first daily entry from his journey in Jerusalem relates his reaction to the celebrations of the Catholic and Orthodox Christians in Jerusalem. Like many of the American Protestant travelers who follow him, he is openly contemptuous of the rituals of the Christian sects that are indigenous to the Holy Land. He observes that his arrival in Jerusalem on Easter Sunday caused him to miss the Holy Week celebrations leading up to Easter, but he expresses no disappointment at having missed the festivities. He writes, “This, however, we counted as no loss, but rather a gain; for the object of our visit was the city itself, in relation to its ancient renown and religious associations; not as seen in its present state of decay and superstitious or fraudful degradation” (1.6.329). Robinson hopes to pierce the veil of Catholic and Orthodox tradition surrounding the Holy Land in order to produce a Holy Land that will provide a tangible, empirical counterpart to the infallible text of the Bible; therefore, seeing too much of the contemporary religious scene in the Holy Land is not only unhelpful, but also may be an obstacle to the “real” Holy Land that Robinson seeks. When Robinson does stop to observe the activities of the Catholic and Orthodox Christians of the Holy Land, his response is usually revulsion, as his discussion of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, identified by Catholic and Orthodox tradition as the site of Christ’s burial, shows. Robinson pointedly refers to the centerpiece of the church as the “reputed sepulcher,” and alleges that the priests and monks in attendance “looked more like ordinary ruffians than ministers of the cross of Christ” and are likely “ignorant and often illiterate men, chiefly from Spain” (1.6.330). When he surveys the entire church and the religious services held there, he mournfully concludes: The whole scene indeed was, to a Protestant, painful and revolting. It might perhaps have been less so, had there been manifested the slightest degree of faith in the genuineness of the surrounding objects; but even the monks themselves do not pretend that the present sepulcher is any thing more than and imitation of the original. But to be in the ancient city of the Most High, and to see these venerated places, and the very name of our holy religion, profaned by idle and lying mummeries; while the proud Mussulman looks on with haughty scorn; all this

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Romance of the Holy Land excited in my mind a feeling too painful to be borne, and I never visited the place again. (1.6.331)

Robinson sets the tone for many subsequent condemnations of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher with this scathing critique; it is not until Herman Melville’s Clarel that an American Protestant writer of Robinson’s stature provides anything resembling a positive description of this site. It is worth noting that Robinson’s response to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is openly skeptical precisely because of his intense piety. The paradox that faced American Protestants who traveled to the Holy Land was that their own deeply held religious beliefs called for incredulity in the face of claims made by the older churches about the sacred sites that they found in the Holy Land. Thus Mark Twain’s later satire of Holy Land travel can be seen to participate, however indirectly, in a tradition of Protestant incredulity that appears in the most pious of evangelical writers about Palestine. Robinson seeks to fulfill a positive quest as well as to debunk what he regards as superstitious claims about the Holy Land. He delineates the nature of this quest shortly after his contemptuous dismissal of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. In explaining the reasons for his journey to Palestine, Robinson reveals that his “one great object was the city itself, in its topographical and historical relations, its site, its hills, its dales, its remains of antiquity, the traces of its ancient population, in short, every thing connected with it that could have a bearing on the illustration of the Scriptures [my italics]” (336). Once again the goal of Holy Land travel is ultimately to allow the land of Palestine to function as a commentary on the sacred text of scripture. It is with precisely this goal in mind that he so vigorously rejects many of the sacred landmarks endorsed by the churches with a historical presence in Palestine. Robinson realizes that he cannot establish a Protestant counterpart to the sacred landscape constructed by Catholic and Orthodox tradition without a clearly definable method, and he seeks to explain his method in the paragraphs that follow his statement of the purpose of his travels. The method that Robinson uses has clear antecedents both in the Protestant belief in private interpretation of scripture and in the methods of empirical science. He describes his method as follows: Time and time again we visited the more important spots and repeated our observations; comparing meanwhile what we had seen ourselves with the accounts of ancient writers and former travelers, until at length conjectures or opinions were ripened into conviction, or gradually abandoned. Our motto was in the words, though not exactly the sense, of the Apostle: “Prove all things, hold fast that which is good.” During the same interval, I also took many measurements both within and around the city. (1.6.336)

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Robinson’s task, then, can be accomplished by a combination of rigorous textual analysis and careful observation of the contemporary realities of the Holy Land. Neither part of his method can be complete without the other—if he merely observes the contemporary situation, he will miss the numinous significance behind the façade; if he merely consults the texts of the ancients, he cannot truly be said to have sifted all the evidence for himself. Thus Robinson creates a persona that is compound of the skeptical modern empiricist and the worshipful, timeless pilgrim, with the resulting statements always in the service of pious knowledge. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher can provide an example of Robinson’s method as well as his aims. In the second volume of Biblical Researches, Robinson returns to this site and presents his argument against its authenticity, thereby attempting to justify rationally his initial visceral reaction to the church. Robinson begins, appropriately enough, given his presuppositions, with the biblical text itself. He notes that there are no direct references to the location of the sepulcher in which Christ was buried in the New Testament and that the earliest church documents are also silent on the subject. Furthermore, Robinson argues that the entire idea of making the sepulcher of Christ a place for veneration is contrary to the ideals of the New Testament: The great Apostle to the Gentiles too, whose constant theme is the death and resurrection of our Lord and the glory of his cross, has not in all his writings any allusion to any reverence for the place [italics in original] of these great events or the instrument of the Savior’s passion. On the contrary, the whole tenor of our Lord’s teaching and that of Paul, and indeed of every part of the New Testament was directed to draw off men’s minds from a particular attachment to times and places, and to lead true worshippers to worship God…everywhere in spirit and truth. (2.8.72)

The logic of Robinson’s argument in this passage places him in a curious position. Robinson is in the process of constructing a massive scholarly/popular treatise on the topography of a specific place for religious reasons while simultaneously arguing that his religion rejects the very idea of sacred places. Robinson’s argument would appear to make the authenticity of the sepulcher irrelevant, but he proceeds to devote the next twenty pages of his text to deriding the sepulcher’s authenticity. For Robinson the scholar, if not for Robinson the evangelical Protestant, noting the lack of New Testament evidence and constructing a logical argument based on the general principles of the New Testament does not suffice. He continues his attack on the authenticity of the sepulcher by consulting the works of Eusebius and St. Jerome, which had been used to justify the location of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in the past. Robinson notes that in both accounts the spot of the sepulcher can be identified because an idol has been constructed over the tomb

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by the Romans; in Eusebius’ account, however, the idol is a representation of Venus whereas in Jerome’s account it is an image of Jupiter. Robinson further argues that neither Eusebius nor Jerome mentions any earlier tradition testifying to the authenticity of the site; they merely assert that the idol had stood “over the site fixed upon by Constantine as that sepulcher [italics in original]” (1.2.74). Robinson is particularly offended by the fact that the emperor Constantine and his mother Helena are credited by Eusebius and Jerome with the identification of the sepulcher since Protestant ecclesiastical histories frequently condemn Constantine as the figure who corrupted the simplicity of the primitive church. Robinson therefore dismisses the textual evidence that Eusebius and Jerome provide as being insufficient. He presses his argument by comparing the evidence for the location of the sepulcher with that of several sites widely considered to be frauds and finds it wanting even in relation to these sites. He concludes that the: alleged discovery of [the sepulcher] by the aged and credulous Helena, like her discovery of the cross, may not improbably have been the work of a pious fraud. It would perhaps not be doing an injustice to the bishop Macarius and his clergy, if we regard the whole as a well laid and successful plan for restoring to Jerusalem its former consideration, and elevating his see to a higher degree of influence and dignity. (1.2.80)

The pious Robinson finds himself playing the role of the skeptic once again, precisely in order to purify the land of Palestine of its overlay of superstition so that it can correspond clearly and unambiguously to the sacred text of scripture. Robinson’s Biblical Researches illustrates the complexity of the discourse about the Holy Land that developed in the nineteenth-century American travel narratives about Palestine. The Holy Land evokes both belief and doubt, and both contemporary reality and the mass of texts that have accumulated around the Holy Land since biblical times serve alternately to obscure and to illuminate the land’s correspondence to the Bible. William M. Thomson’s The Land and the Book (1852) provides the most ambitious attempt to synthesize the contraries in Robinson’s work and to popularize the paradoxical understanding of the Holy Land that Robinson developed.

William M. Thomson, Missionary When Harold Frederic’s fictional clergyman Theron Ware decides to write a biography of the Hebrew patriarch Abraham, he quite naturally turns to William M. Thomson’s three-volume discussion of the contemporary topography and

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manners of Palestine for inspiration. Ware’s choice is highly appropriate, given Thomson’s explicit goal of writing a guide to the Holy Land that would allow American Protestants to understand the Bible itself more thoroughly. The Land and the Book was both the most self-consciously literary of the evangelical Holy Land texts and the most widely popular. It was second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin as an American bestseller in England before the Civil War, and it was used widely as a prize for Sunday School competitions (Vogel 105). Dorothee Finkelstein has noted that Melville draws heavily on Thomson’s descriptions of sacred sites when he writes about the Holy Land in Clarel. Thomson’s work ran through many editions throughout the nineteenth century, and used copies are still relatively easy to find compared to most other texts in the Holy Land genre. The broad appeal of The Land and the Book can be at least partially explained by reference to its form. Thomson presents his discussion of the Holy Land as a conversation between himself and an imagined naïve interlocutor, interspersed with sometimes lengthy segments of straight narrative, often in the persona of the naïve interlocutor. John Davis, one of Thomson’s most perceptive twentieth-century readers, argues that “Even today, the contemporary reader is prey to its seductive pedagogical format” (47). The persona that Thomson projects for himself throughout the three volumes of The Land and the Book is that of an immensely knowledgeable and experienced yet patient guide to the mysteries of Palestine. Thomson structures his narrative as a trip through Palestine with a companion who asks question after question about the sites that they visit, which Thomson answers with a mixture of wit, piety, and erudition that make the reading of his text both entertaining and instructive. Like Robinson, Thomson quotes extensively from biblical, patristic, and scholarly sources (St. Jerome, Josephus, Eusebius, and Robinson himself), but Thomson’s erudition is less heavy-handed than Robinson’s. Additionally, Thomson distinguishes himself by having considerably more knowledge of the language and politics of the Arabic inhabitants of the land than does Robinson. The message of the text is always appropriately edifying for any bright Sunday School reader who may have been awarded the tome, but the text is also sufficiently rich to merit more serious analysis at the present time than is usually attempted. The dialogue between Thomson and his companion that makes up most of the text is preceded by a general introduction providing both Thomson’s rationale for writing this truly massive work and an illuminating account of Thomson’s philosophical and theological premises regarding the Holy Land. Throughout the introduction Thomson’s controlling metaphor is that of language; the Holy Land, Thomson’s readers learn, can only truly be understood as a kind of divine encoded missive addressed to the discerning reader. In case any of his readers have not been quick enough to draw the conclusion that the “Land” (Palestine) and the “Book”

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(the Bible) from the title are intimately and inextricably linked, Thomson ensures that they will not fail to draw this conclusion after reading his introduction. Thomson makes the connection between Holy Land topography and language in the opening sentence of his introduction. He writes: The Land where the Word-Made-Flesh dwelt among men must ever continue to be an important part of Revelation; and Palestine may fairly be regarded as the divinely prepared tablet whereupon God’s messages to men have been graven in ever-living characters by the Great Publisher of Glad Tidings. That this fact invests the geography of the Holy Land with special importance, needs neither proof nor illustration. (1)

Thomson introduces the linguistic metaphor that dominates his introduction with his use of the specific title “Word-Made-Flesh” to refer to Christ. By making this reference to the Christian belief in Christ as the divine and incarnate Logos, Thomson prepares his reader for his next assertion—that the Holy Land is, as part of its essential identity, a location where the Word of God may be read. Thomson calls to mind the giving of the law to Moses with his reference to the land of Palestine as a “divinely prepared tablet” and the giving of the Great Commission to preach the gospel (literally glad tidings) by Christ with his use of the epithet “Great Publisher of Glad Tidings.” Thomson uses these tropes to establish an intimate connection between the idea of the concrete, physical reality of Palestine as a direct message from God and the idea of the text of the Bible as a direct message from God. Thomson continues to develop the metaphor of Land as Book throughout his introduction: It is from this land we have received that marvelous spiritual language through which we gain nearly all true religious knowledge. Here it was devised and first used, and here are found its best illustrations. To form an adequate nomenclature for the thoughts of God, and the wants of mankind, was the problem; and it would not be difficult to show that this was a matter of supreme importance, and not easily accomplished—one wholly beyond the unaided skill of man to achieve. (1)

The problem that Thomson suggests here, which the physical land of Palestine solves, is the need for a physical space in which the thoughts of God can be named. Thomson’s audacious claim is that Palestine is somehow topographically adapted so that only in its specific conditions could the message of the Bible have emerged. He makes this explicit when he writes: Like other books, the Bible has a home, a birthplace; but beyond all other examples, this birthplace has given form and color to its language. The underlying basis of this

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wonderful dialect of the Kingdom of Heaven is to be found in the land itself . . . . That land, we repeat, has had an all-pervading influence upon the costume and character of the Bible. Without the former, the latter, as we now know it, could not have been produced. (2-3)

Thomson’s insistence on the inextricable connection between the land and the book becomes intelligible when it is considered in light of Robinson’s fierce argument against the authenticity of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Robinson argued, in terms that most of his Protestant contemporaries would have found persuasive, that the goal of the New Testament is to separate the experience of the divine from its association with specific locations, and that therefore the veneration accorded to the sepulcher by Catholic and Orthodox Christians was blasphemous. Thomson is himself quite aware that the idea that a particular location can be invested with holiness contradicts the basic tenets of most Protestant formulations of the Christian religion, but he also wishes to claim a special, almost sacramental, status for Palestine. He is able to make this claim only by making Palestine itself into a supplementary text upon which the Bible itself depends, even as the validity of particular sites in the Holy Land depend upon the Bible, in order to make of Palestine the only sort of sacred object for which Protestant theology allows: a written message from God. Thomson concludes his introduction by claiming for himself a privileged position from which to interpret the Holy Land. He has been a missionary in Syria and Palestine for forty years and has thus had ample opportunity to observe both the geography and the people of the Holy Land. As a result of this experience, he is able to reveal the truth about the Holy Land to a degree that is not possible for those who have had less direct experience of the land itself. He sums up both the importance of studying the Holy Land and his own qualifications as an ideal guide for those seeking to understand the relationship between the land and the book with admirable economy: The Land and the Book constitute the all-perfect text of the Word of God, and can best be studied together. To read the one by the light of the other has been the privilege of the author for more than forty years, and the governing purpose in publishing is to furnish additional facilities for this delightful study to those who have not been thus favored. (3-4)

The passage suggests that Thomson’s imaginary companion and his many readers can depend on him to serve as a humble, yet uniquely well-informed, guide. Throughout the following three volumes, which total over 1,500 pages, Thomson provides a commentary on the Holy Land and its sites that embraces Robinson’s emphasis on the importance of interpreting the land in the light of the Bible, while simultaneously taking a much more charitable and less contentious view of the

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people and institutions that make up contemporary reality in the Holy Land. Ultimately, the difference between Thomson and Robinson is that whereas Robinson attempts to use scientific methods to strip away the illusions surrounding the Holy Land in order to bring the land into conformity with the book, Thomson sees the land as it is as a window to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The nature of Thomson’s approach to sacred sites in Palestine can be discerned by considering his response to the site that so offended Robinson: the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Rather than dismissing the church immediately as a tawdry site for “mummery” (Robinson’s favorite invective against Catholic and Orthodox Christian worship), Thomson describes the church as “by far the most interesting half-acre on the face of the earth” (I. XV. 468). Also unlike Robinson is Thomson’s care to provide the Arabic name for the site (El Kiyameh) before he begins to describe it. Thomson begins his discussion of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (using the persona of the naïve first-time visitor to the Holy Land) by describing the atmosphere within its walls. He mentions that the cool air and the dim light are refreshing after the heat and dazzling sunlight of the street (features of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that will appear later in Melville’s Clarel), and he takes the opportunity to spend several hours within the confines of the church to reflect. The thoughts that occur to Thomson’s naïve traveler there are quite different from Robinson’s disgust and dismay at the site. Again, speaking in the persona of the naïve traveler, he writes: Is it not possible that we Protestants carry our dislike for what is doubtful, or, at best, traditional, farther than is either necessary or profitable? Do not the purest and best feelings of our nature prompt us to preserve and protect from desecration such sites as that of the Holy Sepulcher? What, in fact, is it which gives such supreme gratification to our pilgrimage to Jerusalem? Is it not because we find the names of Olivet, Bethany, Gethsemane, Calvary, Zion, and the like, clinging to those sacred sites and scenes with invincible tenacity, through wars and destructions absolutely without parallel? . . . . I more than admit that nothing can justify idolatry; but is even a little too much reverence in such a case as odious to Him in whose honor it is manifested as cold neglect or proud contempt? (468)

The contrast with Robinson is striking. Tradition becomes, in this passage, not an obstacle to true knowledge about the Holy Land, but rather an imperfect but still useful lens through which the land can be viewed. In fact, the skepticism that Robinson expresses is regarded in this passage as a form of impiety. Thomson’s naïve traveler thus mitigates the skepticism that an American Protestant might be expected to feel when confronted with traditional sacred sites in the Holy Land. When Thomson replies to his imagined companion in his own persona of seasoned traveler and missionary in the Holy Land, he concurs with his

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companion’s observations. He agrees that “the reputed sepulcher of the Son of God is no place for soulless criticism—calm, cold, and hard as rock itself” (471). He reveals, however, that his “introduction to that church was totally different, and [his] first impressions were most unhappy” (476). When Thomson initially visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 1833, he was appalled by the Orthodox and Catholic ceremonies that he viewed, particularly the Orthodox ceremony of the Easter Fire and the Catholic Good Friday services. Regarding these proceedings Thomson writes, in words that closely resemble Robinson’s: There was not the least appearance of religious reverence during the entire ceremonies, and to me the spectacle was extremely humiliating; and when I remembered that this was the most imposing exhibition of the Greek religion which the Muhammedan or Turk ever see—though some of their ceremonies are equally offensive—I could no longer be surprised that they despise the name and the faith of such Christians, and call them dogs and idolators. (481)

Thomson, when speaking as himself, is as harsh towards contemporary Christian inhabitants of the Holy Land (and as generally uninterested in contemporary Jewish and especially Muslim inhabitants) as is Robinson. Nonetheless, Thomson, unlike Robinson, allows for the possibility of other, more sympathetic, characterizations of the sites that he views by allowing his naïve interlocutor to voice opinions that are less stridently sectarian than the dogmatically correct ones that Thomson finally offers as a corrective. In this tendency, Thomson anticipates the highly ambivalent, and even at times affirmative, response of Herman Melville’s characters to major sacred sites in Clarel while preserving the standard American Protestant stance of skepticism toward official pilgrimage sites and reverence for locations that could be easily identified from the scriptures. The Land and the Book derives its greatest significance from Thomson’s attempt to bring the religiously inclined reader in the United States into an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual relation with the sites that he describes. This quality both separates Thomson’s account from the others in this chapter and causes it to anticipate the most ambitious of American responses to the Holy Land in the nineteenth century, Herman Melville’s Clarel.

William Prime, Tearful Adventurer William Cowper Prime, a Princeton-educated lawyer who blended piety with physical aggressiveness in his narrative, wrote what is by far the most easily parodied of the evangelical Protestant responses to the Holy Land. Prime’s Tent Life in the Holy Land mixes the conventions of sentimental fiction with an anticipation of the “muscular Christianity” of the later nineteenth century. In

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Twain’s Innocents Abroad, Prime becomes “Grimes,” the author of Nomadic Life in Palestine, and a farcical figure who alternates between tearful effusions of sentimental piety and violent declarations of his willingness to slaughter any Bedouins who might molest him. Prime takes both tearful piety and national religious chauvinism to extremes that are found in none of the other American writers who discuss the Holy Land. Prime establishes his credentials as a full-fledged sentimentalist in the opening chapter, which is portentously titled “Nunc Dimittis Domine.” Prime begins his text with a veritable orgy of sentiment: To see the sun go down behind the Sepulcher and rise over the mountain of the Ascension, to bare my forehead to the cold dews of Gethsemane, and lave my dim eyes in the waters of Siloam, . . . to lie in the starlight of Bethlehem, and catch, however faintly, some notes of the voices of the angels . . . was not all this worth dreaming of—worth living for—worth dying for? And all this I was about to accomplish, not in some dim future, but tomorrow, tomorrow!. . . . How I shrank from the sea lest it should engulf me before I had seen Jerusalem . . . . How I looked earnest, longing, clinging gazes at my wife, lest some dire mishap should prevent that perfect joy of our glad lives and forbid our standing together on the Mount of Olives. (2)

Prime takes the florid language that Robinson and Thomson occasionally indulge in and brings it to the level of unconscious self-parody. In this passage, any attention to the actual topography of the land is firmly suppressed beneath a hazy overlay of pious appreciation for the aesthetic and spiritual wonders of an imagined Palestine. Notably, Prime ties his sentimental appreciation for the wonders of the Holy Land to the domestic/sexual sentimentalism that causes him to direct “earnest, longing, clinging gazes” toward his wife. Prime’s account could easily be seen as the quintessential sentimentally pious American response to the Holy Land. Many features of his text, however, make Tent Life in the Holy Land a glaring exception to the general trends in nineteenth-century American writing about the Holy Land rather than a typical American evangelical account. Unlike his contemporaries Thomson and Robinson, Prime identifies fairly closely with the indigenous Christians of the Holy Land and the Catholic and Orthodox pilgrims to the Holy Land and reserves his more distasteful expressions of chauvinism for the Muslim inhabitants of Palestine. Furthermore, Prime does not make a sharp distinction, as Thomson and Robinson do, between the landscape, which is holy, and the various human-made sites for pilgrimage, which are assumed to be frauds. Prime can be as enthusiastic about the shrines to which non-Protestant Christian pilgrims are crowding as he is about the Mount of Olives, a trait that is completely foreign to Thomson and Robinson.

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One of Prime’s attributes that makes him such an easy target for Mark Twain’s parody is his frequent abandonment of the Protestant skepticism and reserve that Thomson and Robinson maintain in the face of officially sacred sites. A comparison between Prime’s response to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and those of Robinson and Thomson illustrates this difference clearly. Like Robinson and Thomson, Prime dismisses the authenticity of the sepulcher, but with that dismissal all similarity between Prime and his more rigorously Protestant counterparts ends. Prime reflects about the sepulcher: Around it for eighteen centuries men have knelt with beating hearts and throbbing brows. Toward it for eighteen hundred years men have yearned with unutterable longing, and in distant lands, have turned their pale faces and fast-dimming eyes before they died. Millions who have gone to God, pious, humble, holy men, believed that on that rock the ineffable form of Christ dead once lay, and millions, foot-worn with long travel, knelt just here and sanctified the place with the burning incense of devout prayer. (76)

For Prime, the authenticity of the sepulcher becomes almost irrelevant beside its importance as a signifier of spiritual truths. For Thomson and Robinson, disbelief in the authenticity of the sepulcher matters intensely, and their skepticism in the face of the evidence for the site and their contempt for the rituals that take place there become a seal of their own piety. Prime makes of his skepticism toward the authenticity of the sepulcher a mere aside when compared to his reflection on the historical significance of the site. He again uses extravagant language to describe the emotions associated with the sepulcher, but he also gives depth to his reflection on the site by using the history of pilgrimage to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as his justification for the site’s importance. Prime further departs from the response of Robinson and Thomson when he goes so far as to relativize the distinction between his own Protestantism and the beliefs of other Christian bodies. He argues: Beyond all bigotry I place that of men who find idolatry in worshiping God before the tomb in which he lay, or who condemn all forms and ceremonies of religious worship, even to forgetting their belief that the holy sacraments of their church are but forms themselves. There is mummery enough among the Christians of every name who crowd this church, but all the mummery was not sufficient to forbid in my heart the sympathy it felt with the poor pilgrims from distant countries who knelt before the door of the tomb. (76)

For all the extravagance of his descriptions of various features of the landscape, Prime’s account is in many ways an exception to the norms of American evangelical Holy Land accounts, as this passage illustrates.4 Rather than

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disparaging the superstition of the Catholic and Orthodox pilgrims to Jerusalem, Prime expresses sympathy with them regardless of their specific religious convictions. The act of pilgrimage and the intention of worshipping the Christian God become for Prime an adequate counterbalance to the liturgical faults of which the non-Protestant pilgrims can be accused. In this way, Prime can be seen as the most ecumenical of the evangelical travelers to the Holy Land, at least so long as the people and institutions he discusses fall within the domain of Christendom. A far less tolerant side of Prime appears when he discusses the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of the Holy Land. When Prime views the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, he is moved by the scorn of the Turkish guards for the Orthodox and Catholic pilgrims, not to criticize the pilgrims, but rather to engage in broad Christian triumphalism. Prime exclaims with gusto: It was easy to laugh at the haughty Turk, who sneered at the poor pilgrim, ragged and dirty, who had but now arrived within the Jaffa gate, and rushed to lay his load down at the Sepulcher. He was master here; but the poor pilgrim was the representative of the religion of that tomb, by the suffrance of whose followers he was permitted to lord it a little while in Jerusalem, but who will ere long—God grant it be soon!—sweep from the face of the earth every vestige of the religion of the camel-driver of Mecca. (84)

Prime’s relative tolerance for the Holy Land’s indigenous Christians comes at the price of ferocious intolerance for its other inhabitants. As this passage indicates, Prime certainly is the most compulsively chauvinistic of the pious travelers examined in this chapter when he is writing about the Holy Land’s Muslim inhabitants.5 Prime thus becomes a very problematic instance of the explicitly religious tradition in American Protestant Holy Land travel writing. His account certainly illustrates the reductio ad absurdum of the tendency to write about the sacred landscape in bathetic language. Conversely, his account neglects the other pole of American Holy Land writing, the obsessive need for extensive empirical proof of the validity of sites observed. Prime shows no real interest in piercing the veil of tradition that surrounds the Holy Land; rather, he is content to express unqualified delight in whatever sites he sees, regardless of the implications of his Protestantism for how he ought to view the sites. In terms of how he views the contemporary inhabitants of the land, he frequently reverses many of the binaries that are apparent in the writings of Thomson and Robinson. For them Muslims appear as often as not as noble unbelievers scandalized by the iniquities of corrupt nonProtestant Christians. For Prime, Muslims are viewed mainly in caricatured terms that could come straight from the Song of Roland. Likewise, the Jewish people that Prime meets tend to be described in terms of European Christian stereotypes that Robinson and Thomson eschew. When he turns to discussions of the Catholic and

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Orthodox inhabitants of and pilgrims to the Holy Land, Prime is almost uniformly more sympathetic than his devout Protestant contemporaries. Prime can be taken, then, as a particularly important test case for my thesis that there is a coherent tradition in American writing about the Holy Land. Prime in some ways adheres to the tradition that Robinson and Thomson established, but in other ways violates this tradition. It is noteworthy that when Twain selects Prime as his main target for satire in The Innocents Abroad, Prime appears as the quintessential representative of a tradition that Twain is satirizing. However, many of Prime’s traits that Twain lampoons in his account of the Holy Land—Prime’s specific vehemence towards the Muslim Arabs who inhabit the Holy Land, his lack of zeal for uncovering an empirical reality behind the mask of tradition, and his broad-church Christian chauvinism—are precisely those traits that separate Prime from the other pious American pilgrims to the Holy Land. Twain’s critique of Prime uses many of the criticisms of Prime’s account that could be made by solidly respectable Protestants like Thomson and Robinson. Prime’s account helps by its very anomalies to define the nature of the Holy Land writing that was undertaken by devout Protestant pilgrims from America during the nineteenth-century, and it can serve as well as a bridge to the writings of those who were less overtly pious in their representations of Palestine.

James Turner Barclay, Campbellite Missionary to Jerusalem James Turner Barclay and Sarah Barclay Johnson both published narratives about the Holy Land in 1858, and in both cases, their writing was explicitly shaped by the Holy Land narratives that had already been widely disseminated. Barclay wrote as a respected minister and missionary in the Campbellite6 church, and Johnson, Barclay’s daughter, wrote as a Campbellite missionary and as the wife of U.S. consul to Syria, Augustus Johnson. Although both Barclay and Johnson demonstrate a high level of engagement with previous Holy Land narratives, they choose very different strategies for dealing with the problem of writing about a topic that has already been so frequently discussed. For Barclay, the solution to the public’s saturation with texts about the Holy Land’s past is to make bold and sometimes eccentric predictions about Palestine’s future. Johnson’s solution to the same problem is to write in considerable depths about the Levant’s mundane present. From the start, James Turner Barclay’s discussion of Jerusalem, The City of the Great King (1858), is haunted by the possibility that so many Protestant pilgrims have recorded their responses to Jerusalem that Barclay’s own efforts are obsolete. Barclay begins by acknowledging that there have been so many recent books on the subject of Jerusalem that he must provide a justification for

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presenting his text to the public. Significantly, Barclay frames his apology for his work by reflecting on the utilitarian importance of time in the nineteenth-century and the role of mass production in making literal the biblical aphorism that “of the making of many books there is no end”: In this Augustan age of electro-magnetic progression, when time is not only the convertible representative of knowledge, power, and pleasure, but—manufactured—is the equivalent of that “which answerest all things;” and indeed, is the very warp and woof of which the web of life is woven, most evident is it that no one has the right to consume his neighbor’s time without rendering a valid “quid pro quo” in exchange for the expenditure of a commodity so invaluable. “Ars longa, est—vita brevis.” And this apothem is especially applicable in this utilitarian age, when the prolific steam press teems with publications on all subjects; and is particularly exuberant in works on Palestine and the Holy City. In announcing a new work, therefore, upon a theme so hackneyed, a few prefatory remarks are equally the dictate of propriety and policy— for truly “of making many books” on this subject “there is no end;” and of remunerative circulation of not a few there is no beginning. (xi)

Beneath Barclay’s mannered prose, several distinctive traits of his approach exhibit themselves. First, Barclay, unlike William Thomson or Edward Robinson, cannot claim that his work will be intrinsically new or exciting even for his most devout readers. By 1858, American readers have had the opportunity to read not only pious accounts of Palestine by Thomson, Robinson, and Prime, but also the more secular discussions of the Levant by John Lloyd Stephens, Bayard Taylor, and J. Ross Browne. Moreover, the American readership itself is in the process of a fundamental change fueled by rapid technological progress. More than his predecessors, Barclay must self-consciously determine how to justify to his readers their expenditure of time, a precious commodity in a rapidly industrializing age. Faced with the challenge of justifying his text to an audience that has already enjoyed a surfeit of travel writing about Palestine, Barclay emphasizes two major features of his text: first, his own tendencies toward millennialism that exceed the millennialist tendencies of most of his American Protestant contemporaries who wrote about Palestine, and second, the technological and political changes that had made Palestine so much more accessible to Americans by the time of his writing. These features become closely intertwined with each other as Barclay suggests that the presence of railroads in the Levant and a more tolerant regime in Istanbul mean that the coming of the kingdom is at hand: What mean the various lines of steamers not traversing the length and breadth of the Mediterranean and Red Seas—placing Palestine in such direct, constant, and intimate communication not only with other parts of Asia, but with Europe, Africa, America, and the Isles of the Gentiles? What the railways now projected between

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Jaffa and the Persian Gulf, via Neapolis, with which a branch from Egypt is to unite—passing through Jerusalem, a “highway” from Egypt into Assyria? (Is.xix.23) And what the electric telegraph at the Holy City—the great central metropolis! (xiii)

Barclay suggests that all these technological, industrial, and social developments portend the coming of the kingdom of God. Barclay thus distinguishes himself from his predecessors by looking at the Holy Land less as a timeless locale impervious to change than as the stage for the future enactment of the deepest religious aspirations of his Campbellite coreligionists. He thus overcomes his anxieties about the potential derivativeness of his text by focusing his attention on the Holy Land’s rapidly changing present, and, according to Barclay’s eschatological expectations, glorious future. Barclay’s system of organization illustrates his marriage of material progress and millennialism. The first portion of his text is entitled “Jerusalem—As It Was,” and this explication of the city’s past is followed, quite naturally, by “Jerusalem—As It Is,” and “Jerusalem—As It Is To Be.” In the concluding portion of his text, Barclay indulges in a vision of a future Holy Land where the language of ancient scriptural prophecies merges with the language of scientific and technological progress. Barclay speculates that the “glorious luminary canopy” of God’s presence could result in “the alteration of electrical, thermal, and magnetic agencies,” resulting in an “astonishing change of climate” (620-1). Barclay suggest that predatory animals will adopt vegetarianism as the result of this salutary change of climate, and he concludes with the sort of emotional language that William Prime would have embraced: “Who, that has a heart to feel, can refrain from praying a laboring for ‘a consummation so devoutly to be wished!’” (621).

Sarah Barclay Johnson, Missionary and Diplomat Sarah Barclay Johnson’s Hadji in Syria, or Three Years in Jerusalem (1858) complicates the boundaries between pious and skeptical and religious and political writings about Ottoman Palestine, and it certainly sticks more closely to present material realities than the writings of her father. Although Johnson works within the framework of her father’s Campbellite theology, her tone is considerably less solemn, and she even provides evidence of having read and enjoyed the work of J. Ross Browne, one of the more skeptical American Holy Land travelers during the 1850s. The tone of Johnson’s discussion of language and clothing in the Levant can be taken as a representative sample of her tone throughout her Holy Land narrative. She describes her incomprehension of the many languages of Palestine in the following whimsical lines:

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Romance of the Holy Land Of the ten thousand words I have heard from these various tribes, not one syllable have I understood. Be not surprised, then, that when I heard a child cry in real good English, I could but feel a momentary satisfaction in being reminded of my country by this imp of Mohammed, so lustily expressing his sentiments in the very language used by the little urchins of America! Still more satisfactory was it to find the canine citizens giving expression to their views and feelings of matters and things in the same classic lingo that distinguishes the “friend of man” in occidental climes! (17)

Johnson’s tone here is quite distinct from that of the other pious travelers, despite her status as a missionary’s daughter and a missionary in her own right. Rather than engaging in an extended reflection on the similarities between the Palestine of the first century and that of the nineteenth, she comments lightheartedly on her own linguistic confusion at the remarkable variety of languages spoken in the Holy Land. Johnson’s discussion of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher wavers between the intense Biblicist skepticism of Thomson and Robinson and the romantic sympathy of William Prime. She adopts the same humorous tone that she employs when discussing the languages of Palestine when she notes: The faith of the most devout and credulous pilgrim must, however, be put to the severest test, when he finds the reputed site of the crucifixion and resurrection in the very heart of the city, instead of being without the walls, as we learn that it evidently was, both from the Old Testament and the New. (70-1)

She continues her commentary, however, by embracing the sentiments that brought pilgrims to Jerusalem: But notwithstanding this inexplicable difficulty, we can but yield ourselves unresistingly to the impression, even though it be a delusion, that this is none other than the site of the most soul-affecting tragedy ever recorded in the annals of time or the cycles of eternity. And I envy not the heart of the individual, who can enter the tomb, alleged to have been that of the Son of God, and feel not emotions that he had never felt before, even though he may feel oppressed with doubts of its reality. (71)

Johnson’s doubt here is the doubt of a devout Protestant who rejects the factuality of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox religious traditions on the basis of her own Biblicism. It is, nonetheless, a doubt that is tinged with a romantic attachment to the traditions that brought so many pilgrims to Jerusalem. What distinguishes Johnson most sharply from the other writers discussed in this chapter is the concluding portion of Hadji in Syria. Johnson closes her narrative with a chapter entitled “An Appeal in Behalf of Oriental Females.” She begins with a paean to the progress that women have achieved in the United States since its founding. She claims that America is “justly celebrated as the arena in

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which woman is allowed the freest exercise of all the functions of her exalted mission”—a statement that both praises the United States and implies that the “mission” of women is distinct from that of men, thus inscribing fairly conventional domestic ideologies. She proceeds, however, by circumspectly questioning the status quo inside the United States. She writes, “It is but too evident, however, that we neither prize nor improve these privileges as we should” (295). By emphasizing the necessity for “improvement” in the position of women in the United States, she thus suggests obliquely that the United States itself is in need of change and progress in terms of the relationship between the sexes. From this discussion of the current situation in America, she turns to the position of women in the Levant. After noting the great ethnic diversity of women in the Levant, she argues: But, however widely they all may differ in blood, manners, customs, and appearance; they all more or less resemble each other in at least this common point—they are the abject slaves of the “lords of creation.” If then you would form a proper estimate of the lot and condition of woman in her Oriental phases, you need not go beyond the precincts of Jerusalem. Do you see that white sheet and thick veil, enveloping something, whose yellow boots suggest the idea that it may be a piece of living humanity? Shade of Eve, it is a daughter of yours! Reader it is a sister of ours! (298)

Johnson makes a powerful appeal to her readers’ sympathetic identification with the women of the Levant. She emphasizes the idea that woman are reduced to the status of things by their segregation and subservient position, an idea that she develops more thoroughly when she turns to a discussion of the harem. She argues that the harem, often portrayed by male travelers as an exciting and exotic site, actually constitutes a form of slavery because it renders companionate marriage impossible. She emphasizes especially the role of women’s physical labor in supporting the well-being of their husbands: You see that one-robed woman, with a tattooed face and narrow little bead-adorned veil…She truly has a hard lot. She is bringing the vegetables to market. She planted the seed; she worked the ground; she gathered the crop, and now she must make a sale of them. (300)

Johnson’s impassioned indictment of the exploitation of women in the Holy Land can be read in several ways. It can certainly be criticized as a culturally chauvinistic condemnation of a non-western culture that does not pay adequate attention to the mistreatment of women in nineteenth-century America, and there would be some truth in such a critique. I would suggest, however, that Johnson’s appeal for an amelioration of the condition of women in the Levant contains the

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seeds of a critique of the ways in which women’s labor was also rendered invisible and unrewarded in nineteenth-century America. In any case, Johnson’s careful attention to the condition of women in Palestine distinguishes her from the vast majority of her fellow nineteenth-century American travelers to the Holy Land.

The pious travelers have a distinctive place in the tradition of American Holy Land writing. They set the standards for appropriate religious sentiment in the presence of the various sacred sites in the Holy, and other writers either conform, or, like Mark Twain, explicitly rebel against these standards, often citing Thomson, Robinson, and Prime while doing so. Furthermore, the pious travelers provide the controlling trope for virtually every American visitor who writes about the Holy Land with their insistence on a spiritual correspondence between the land and the book. The case of William Prime provides a link between the at times deeply sectarian Holy Land travel narratives written by explicitly religious pilgrims to Palestine and the more broadly humanistic narratives written by travelers whose aims in writing about the land are primarily literary. John Lloyd Stephens, Bayard Taylor, William Cullen Bryant, and George William Curtis all provide accounts of their travels in Palestine that aspire less to edification than to providing an entertaining and educational guide for the perplexed would-be traveler or vicarious fireside explorer of the Holy Land. These narratives will form the subject of chapter four. James Turner Barclay, meanwhile, provides a link to a group of writers who, like the writers discussed above, were devoutly religious, but who, unlike the writers discussed above, held to beliefs that were outside the nineteenth-century Protestant American religious mainstream. Barclay stressed the role of millennialism in understanding the Holy Land more than his evangelical Protestant predecessors, but Clorinda Minor’s Millerite chiliasm and Orson Hyde’s Mormon vision of Jerusalem carried millennialism well beyond the limits within which most American Protestants would be comfortable. Moreover, William H. Odenheimer, as an Episcopal priest who embraced the Oxford Movement’s identification with (non-Roman) Catholicism provided an incisive critique of the entire American Protestant project in Palestine, and Warder Cresson provides a critique of the Christian relationship to Palestine from the perspective of a Jewish convert. I turn the alternative orthodoxies embraced by these four writers in the following chapters.

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Notes 1

I have reserved the works of Millerite editor and missionary Clorinda Minor, Mormon elder Orson Hyde, Jewish convert Warder Cresson, and Anglo-Catholic bishop William H. Odenheimer for chapter three. Although these works are fully as pious and earnest as those of the writers discussed in this chapter, they are considerably farther from the nineteenthcentury American religious mainstream. 2 There are some works that deal briefly with these writers. Lester Vogel’s To See a Promised Land (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1993) provides a brief overview of the various travelers to discuss the Holy Land, including Prime, Robinson, and Thomson. John Davis includes a more detailed discussion of Thomson and Robinson in his The Landscape of Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1996), where he argues that their depiction of the landscape of Palestine can contribute to a fuller understanding of representations of the Holy Land in the visual arts. David Klatzker’s “American Christian Travelers to the Holy Land, 1821-1939,” in Yehoshuah Ben-Arieh and Moshe Davis’s Western Societies and the Holy Land (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991), posits that “few travelers were transformed by their visits,” (64) but offers relatively cursory readings of the texts that he considers in support of this thesis. Moshe Davis’s America and the Holy Land (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994) and Yehoshuah Ben-Arieh and Moshe Davis’s Jerusalem in the Mind of the Western World (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1997) also contain brief references to the travelers I consider in this chapter. Most recently, Bruce Harvey has discussed Thomson and Robinson in American Geographics; U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865 (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001). Harvey includes Thomson and Robinson in his larger argument about the ways in which American Protestant writing about Palestine (and American travel writing in general) helps to redefine American masculinity. 3 I use “Catholic” and “Orthodox” in this chapter to refer respectively to any Christians in communion with the Roman Catholic Church and to Christians belonging to the various Eastern churches, whether those affiliated loosely with the See of Constantinople through various national churches, or those that are commonly designated as “Oriental Orthodox” churches and that are Monophysite or Nestorian in Christology. 4 Prime actually goes so far as to engage in an intertextual debate with the revered Robinson over the matter of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, applying his skills as a lawyer to confuting Robinson’s painstakingly constructed argument against the site’s authenticity. 5 Prime’s representation of the Jewish pilgrims and residents whom he meets in the Holy Land is another feature of his text that separates it from those of other pious travelers. Prime’s representations of the Jewish people he meets in the Holy Land are far less chauvinistic than his representations of Muslims, but they are still disturbingly linked to older European anti-Semitic stereotypes that Thomson and Robinson generally avoid. 6 The term “Campbellite” refers to the nineteenth-century “Christian Church,” which later split into the Disciples of Christ in the North and the Church of Christ in the South. The members of this denomination were followers of the ex-Presbyterian minister Alexander Campbell, who sought to return Christianity to the purity of the primitive church.

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Campbellites resembled the Baptist Churches in many of their doctrines. See Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1988) for an extended discussion of the fortunes of this religious movement.

Chapter 3

Alternative Orthodoxies Clorinda Minor, Orson Hyde, Warder Cresson, and William Henry Odenheimer

We passed by its hoary trees, as the burning glory of the sun was beaming behind the summit of Olivet; and as we paused, I thought how like our spiritual state was that speaking landscape. Gethsemane, in the deep shade of the Mount, is like our present pilgrimage of tears! While the bright rays of the rising sun, gleaming from behind its summit, was like our “blessed hope” of the near coming of the Sun of Righteousness! —Clorinda Minor (1851) But I soon discovered that I only now perceived [Truth] in Idea, in Sentiment, in Theory, and longed to behold her realized in Fact, in Reality, in Time, Place, and Circumstances, as I have since in Jerusalem. —Warder Cresson (1851)

If the mainstream Protestant pilgrims to Palestine sought to ground orthodox doctrine in experience of a particular sacred locality, the travelers who fell outside of the nineteenth-century Protestant mainstream sought to reinterpret orthodoxy by using the same sacred sites. If “orthodoxy” in the nineteenth-century United States was defined by the doctrines of the major Protestant denominations: Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Congregational, and Christian (Campbellite), alternatives to this orthodoxy could take multiple forms. In the case of Clorinda Minor alternative orthodoxy took the form of the Millerite belief that Christ’s second coming would occur in the mid-nineteenth century. For Orson Hyde, an elder in the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, alternative orthodoxy took the form of the revelations that Mormons believed had been made to Joseph Smith in the early years of the nineteenth century. For both of these figures, the traditional Christian urge to convert the Jews to Christianity became intensified by the chiliastic nature of their religious beliefs. Warder Cresson’s spiritual pilgrimage led him to a conclusion that was almost the exact inverse of the stances of Minor and Hyde: for Cresson the answer to the problems of the nineteenth

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century was not for the Jewish people to convert to Christianity, but for Christians to return to Judaism. Cresson’s impulse to return to an earlier orthodoxy than that represented by the American religious mainstream can be seen in a very different form in the writings of the Anglo-Catholic priest William Henry Odenheimer, who embodied an alternative orthodoxy in that he proffered the possibility of a return to Old World, and even (non-Roman) Catholic, modes of Christian spirituality.

Clorinda Minor, Millennial Publicist One feature that Edward Robinson’s account and William Thomson’s account share is their lack of interest in the contemporary inhabitants of the Holy Land except as possible followers of customs that would have been extant at the time of Christ or as examples of the dangers of idolatry. Clorinda Minor’s narrative of travel to the Holy Land, Meshullam! Or, Tidings from Jerusalem (1851) is significantly different from the other accounts in this respect. For Minor, editor of the Advent Messenger of the Daughters of Zion, a millennialist publication, the ultimate goal in writing about the Holy Land is not so much to provide pious believers with an opportunity for reflections on the sacred landscape from the comfort of their own firesides as to goad them into action that she hopes would hasten the return of Christ and the end of the world (J. Davis 38). For Minor what is of paramount importance is the establishment of a colony of Christian converts from Judaism in the Holy Land, an accomplishment that she regards as a necessary precondition for the apocalypse. Minor’s devotion to this cause was so great that, as John Davis notes, she actually established a short-lived colony of young American Millerites, largely women, in Palestine.1 At the center of Minor’s text is the figure of John Meshullam (1799-1878), a convert from Judaism to Christianity. Minor relates Meshullam’s story in some detail in the body of her text, and she also includes a lengthy appendix that narrates his biography. Meshullam was the son of a Jewish merchant from London who attempted to immigrate to Jerusalem. Meshullam’s father, mother, and siblings were diverted to Salonica because of the difficulties involved in settling in Jerusalem, and they were killed in the midst of the struggle between Greek and Turkish nationalists. Meshullam converted to Christianity as an adult, and proceeded to develop a plan to settle Palestine with Jewish converts to Christianity, who would be trained in agricultural pursuits in order to restore the land to its biblical status as a “land flowing with milk and honey.” Although Meshullam was an Anglican operating under the auspices of the bishop of the Church of England in Jerusalem, his ambitions coalesced nicely with those of the American Millerites. Minor’s text, then, becomes an appeal to the most radical U.S. millennialists to

Alternative Orthodoxies

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support a Christian form of Zionism in order to hasten the second coming of Christ. Minor’s differences from Thomson and Robinson can readily be understood in light of her own personal and religious background. Both Thomson and Robinson write as members of the respectable churches: Thomson is a member of the Presbyterian Church, and Robinson of the Congregational. They are both welleducated in the various theological and linguistic disciplines that are relevant to interpreting the Holy Land. Minor, by contrast, is not a scholar by profession, despite her evident intellectual curiosity and ability, and belongs to a much less respectable sector of nineteenth-century American religious culture. Minor was an early convert to the Millerite movement, a millennialist sect that was the direct precursor of the present-day Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-Day Adventists, and also a forerunner of the various pre-millennial and Pentecostal sects of the twentieth century. Minor’s account of her own conversion to radical chiliast doctrine provides a necessary background for her contemplation of Palestine. Minor relates that she was for “twenty-four years…conscientiously walking in connexion with the Congregational Church of a Puritan ancestry” (v). Her dissatisfaction with the contrast between nineteenth-century America and the early Christian church led her into intense study: I searched commentaries, and read biographies of ancient and later Christian experience, which more confirmed my sense of the great degeneracy of our common profession of religion, in its general falling away, coldness of love, and weakness of spiritual life. This mostly I realized in myself, and often struggled with fasting and tears, for greater nearness of life to Christ, knowing that no corporate, or general failure is any excuse for individual unfaithfulness. (v-vi)

Minor emphasizes her vigorous pursuit of textual research as a means of resolving her religious difficulties, a response of which her Puritan forbears would have doubtless approved. This method was unsuccessful, however, until in the midst of her study of the prophetic books of the Bible, she was introduced to the Millerite doctrine of “the pre-millennial advent of our blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ!” (vi). Minor experienced this introduction with a visceral intensity that stirred her to frenetic action. Her trip to Palestine, far from being a sightseeing tour or even an exercise in biblical exegesis, is ultimately an attempt to change the world by means of her travels and writing. It is small wonder that Herman Melville described Minor (whom he misidentified as “Mrs. Minot”) as a woman of “fanatic energy & spirit” in his Journal of a Voyage to Europe and the Levant (157). Although she gives evidence of extensive knowledge of the Bible (hardly surprising in a nineteenth-century American Protestant of whatever sect) and of a

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familiarity with ancient writers like Josephus, Minor departs significantly from the academic mode in which Thomson and Robinson write. Rather than filling her text with erudite references and engaging in extended controversies with prior interpreters of the sacred landscape, Minor addresses herself quite directly to advancing her own idiosyncratic vision for Palestine. Minor’s focused vision and clarity of purpose at times make her discussions of some of the more famous sites within the Holy Land rather desultory, but these qualities also give to her descriptions of the Holy Land an immediacy and urgency that other accounts lack. Furthermore, Minor is frequently the least sentimental of the various writers discussed in this chapter in her descriptions of the sacred landscape. These characteristics give her work an engaging quality for the modern reader that the more ponderous Robinson and Thomson often lack. Minor’s guiding idea in her account of her journey to the Holy Land is fairly simple. As a millennialist, and specifically a believer in the pre-millennial return of Christ, Minor believes that the return of Christ and the pattern of events leading to the end of the world are imminent. For her, as for many Christian chiliasts throughout the centuries, this end of time is connected to the conversion of the Jewish people to Christianity.2 Minor’s pre-millennialism, however, adds an element to this precondition for the apocalypse that has had significant political implications in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Minor’s literal reading of the esoteric prophecies in the Revelation of St. John, the last book in the Christian scriptures, leads her to believe that a physical restoration of the Holy Land to the “Israelites” (sometimes seemingly defined as the Jewish people, sometimes as Jewish converts to Christianity, and sometimes as Christians of Minor’s particular sectarian beliefs) is a necessary precondition for the return of Christ. Minor quite naturally proposes to accomplish this precondition by encouraging Christians, diasporic Jews, and particularly Jewish converts to Christianity to settle in the Holy Land. Thus, in Minor’s Meshullam, we can see an early forerunner of the curious political alliance between Zionism and Christian evangelicalism/fundamentalism that has appeared in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Minor structures her account in a more episodic manner than Robinson or Thomson. Rather than recording an orderly progression from one site to another, each of which is then fully discussed, Minor organizes her account into a series of “egresses” into Jerusalem and the countryside surrounding Jerusalem. She frequently moves back and forth between Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other nearby sites. Because of this characteristic, she often revisits sites at several different points of her narrative, thus allowing for differing perceptions of particular sites at various points in her account. When Minor visits the site that draws forth so much discussion from Thomson and Robinson, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, she is far more laconic than any of her counterparts. Minor devotes less than a page to her initial


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description of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. She notes that the church is “interesting as the oldest [italics in original] building in the city, . . . supposed to have been built by the mother of Constantine in the proudest era of early nominal Christianity” (48). Minor does not bother to discuss the authenticity of the Holy Sepulcher, although her casual reference to “nominal Christianity” shows that she is not inclined to credit any post-Constantinian traditions with much validity. She limits herself to a terse physical description and reveals that she had attempted to sketch the site but had to leave her sketch unfinished because she was interrupted by beggars. Curiously, Minor devotes half of her journal entry that discusses the Church of the Holy Sepulcher to a matter completely unrelated to the sepulchre itself. She writes that once she had retired to her quarters after her visit, she reflected on the sounds that could be heard in Jerusalem at night. She writes regarding the state of the city during the night: The darkness and silence of the streets increases the awe that broods over these somber walls at night, in this city without wheels. This stillness continues till midnight, when I am often awaked by a sullen jar that sounds like distant thunder, and grieve to think of the weakness, suffering, and toil which occasion it. It is the sound of countless rude millstones, which are here mostly turned by women, who nightly commence to grind about this time, and continue till morning; the labor is so heavy, that it is too great for their weak frames to endure in the heat of the day. I have made one effort, and could scarcely move one of their smallest stones. (49)

Although it is virtually a requirement for American writers who discuss Palestine to bemoan the effects of Turkish tyranny on the Holy Land and its people, discussions like this one of the physical hardships that face individuals resident in Palestine are rare. Minor demonstrates in this passage an attentiveness to the material facts of life in nineteenth-century Jerusalem that cannot often be found in Thomson or Robinson. Minor’s attentiveness to women’s labor is surpassed only by Johnson. Minor is certainly less interested than Thomson and particularly Robinson in agonizing over the authenticity of specific sacred sites and attacking Catholic and Orthodox claims about the sites in detail. Paradoxically, the reason for this attitude may be that she is much more sectarian in her outlook than either Thomson or Robinson. For members of sects as radical as the Millerites, virtually all established denominations could be grouped under the unflattering rubric of “nominal Christianity.” For Minor, Robinson and Thomson, as a Congregationalist and Presbyterian respectively, would have no great advantage over the Catholic and Orthodox Christians who flocked to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. As a sectarian of the sort described in some detail in Nathan Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity, Minor’s quarrel is less with the non-

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Protestant churches as such than with the entire idea of a Christendom that can include those who have not had dramatic conversions to an intensely personal faith. Minor provides a view of the Holy Land from a religious standpoint that was just emerging in the mid-nineteenth-century, one that in many ways defined itself precisely by its differences from older evangelical traditions like those of the other authors considered in the previous chapter. The features of the Holy Land that do hold Minor’s attention are almost all related to the Jewish population in the Holy Land. She is keenly interested in observing the religious practices of the synagogues of Jerusalem, and she devotes a considerable amount of space to a description of a religious service at a Jerusalem synagogue. She writes about this service with considerably more sympathy than is expressed by Thomson and Robinson for any of the indigenous religious celebrations, whether Muslim, Jewish, or Christian. Minor describes the service as follows: The rabbies [sic] have treated us with kind attention, and yesterday compelled us to sit in their pulpit, that we might have a better view of the ceremony . . . . I cannot easily express the tender emotions of sorrow and reverence that oppressed me, while witnessing the ceremonies of this feast, which are here celebrated by the remnant of Jehovah’s ancient and chosen people, on this ruined altar, in “THE PLACE OF THE NAME OF THE LORD OF HOSTS,” still clinging, as through so many weary centuries they have done, to these types of unfulfilled promises, and still engraving them upon the heart of their infant sons, despite their low estate and long captivity. (76)

Minor indulges in traditional Christian chauvinism toward Jewish religious rites in various portions of her text, and it is impossible to forget that her ultimate goal is conversion, but the sympathy for the services she observes that appears in this passage and others distinguishes her from her counterparts among Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land. Minor’s interest in the Holy Land centers on a goal that cannot easily be fitted into an interpretation of American religious culture that emphasizes its continuity with Puritanism. She is perhaps the least self-referential of all the American writers who discuss the Holy Land because her ultimate goal is not describing the Holy Land in terms of America, but rather ushering in the final return of Christ by means of her Christian proto-Zionist activism. Paradoxically, she also represents a truly “made-in-America” religious tradition (the Millerite movement) and as such provides an important counterpoint to figures such as Robinson, Thomson, and Prime. In this trait, Minor resembles Mormon elder Orson Hyde, who also attempts to view the Holy Land through a set of religious lenses made in America.


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Orson Hyde: The Latter-Day Saint as Holy Land Pilgrim Orson Hyde’s A Voice From Jerusalem (1842) makes even larger claims for itself than Minor’s Meshullam. If Minor has reached her conclusions through diligent study of Millerite doctrine and prophecy, Hyde’s account asserts that the cause of his travels was a direct verbal communication from the almighty. In the introduction to his narrative, Hyde reports: In the early part of March last, I retired to my bed one evening as usual, and while contemplating and enquiring out, in my own mind, the field of my ministerial labours for the then coming season, the vision of the Lord, like clouds of light, burst on my view. The cities of London, Amsterdam, Constantinople, and Jerusalem all appeared in succession before me; and the Spirit said unto me, ‘Here are many of the children of Abraham whom I will gather to the land I gave to their fathers, and here also is the field of your labors.’ (iii)

Hyde sees himself as being specifically called to visit Jerusalem in order to supervise the return of the Jewish Diaspora to Palestine. In this, he resembles Minor, and his work, like Minor’s and Cresson’s, contributes a proto-Zionist element to the field of nineteenth-century American travel writing about the Holy Land. As an elder in the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (Mormons), Hyde had particularly strong reasons to be interested in Palestine. Mormon theology posited a more direct connection than most Euro-Americans would accept between the ancient Israelites and the native peoples of the Americas. America itself becomes a “Holy Land” to a much greater degree among the LatterDay Saints than among any other group of American Christians, and this enthusiasm for the idea of America as Holy Land translates into an intense enthusiasm for an Americanization of the more traditional Holy Land of Palestine. Once Hyde arrives in Jerusalem, he finds that it confirms his expectation exactly. He writes to Parley Pratt that he has “seen Jerusalem precisely according to the vision [he] had” (28). His journey to Jerusalem, however, has not been idyllic. He notes that his travels through Lebanon have coincided with a “war of extermination…between the Drewzes [sic] and Catholics,” and he relates the story of a 27-year-old Presbyterian clergyman in his party who dies of typhus en route (28). Once he arrives at the Mount of Olives and views the city of Jerusalem, his accounting of the material realities of the Levant are pushed to the side. Hyde moves from a fairly straightforward narrative of events to a florid invocation of the divine destinies of Jerusalem, America, and the Mormon religion. The most striking feature of Hyde’s prayer is the way in which his invocations of the patriarchs of the Hebrew scriptures, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,

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blend seamlessly with his meditations on the providential meaning of his own journey. Hyde begins his prayer by surveying the religious history of the Jewish people as recounted in the Hebrew scriptures, and he moves effortlessly over the millennia that have passed since these events to connect the biblical past with his own specifically Mormon brand of Christian Zionism. More than any of his contemporaries, Hyde imagines the restoration of the Jewish people to Jerusalem in explicitly political terms: Thou, O Lord, did once move upon the heart of Cyrus to shew favor unto Jerusalem and her children. Do thou now also be pleased to inspire the hearts of kings and the powers of the earth to look with a friendly eye toward this place and with a desire to see their righteous purposes executed in relation thereto. Let them know that it is thy good pleasure to restore the kingdom unto Israel—raise up Jerusalem as its capital, and constitute her people a distinct nation and government. (30)

The language here wavers between deliberately archaic diction that seems to indicate a specifically sacerdotal form of prayer, and the bureaucratic language of law courts. The curious marriage of these elements in Hyde’s prose indicates the unprecedented degree to which he collapses the distinction between the distant biblical past and the nineteenth-century present. Hyde reaches his highly idiosyncratic conclusions by well-established paths, however. As with so many other nineteenth-century American visitors to the Levant, Hyde makes this intimate connection with the distant past by referring to his own personal experience and imbuing it with spiritual significance. Hyde refers directly to the ethnoreligious violence and the disease-related fatalities that he has witnessed on his journey, and to his anxieties about the condition of his family at home: Though thy servant [Hyde], is now far from his home, and from the land bedewed with his earliest tear, yet he remembers O Lord, his friends who are there, and his family, who for thy sake he has left. Though poverty and privation be our earthly lot, yet ah! Do thou richly endow us with an inheritance where thieves do not break through and steal….Do thou also look with favor upon all those through whose liberality I have been enabled to come to this island….Particularly do thou bless the stranger in Philadelphia, whom I never saw, but who sent me gold, with a request that I should pray for him in Jerusalem. (31)3

For Hyde, his own travels and sentiments, and the strokes of fortune and misfortune that he meets along the way, incorporates his own tale into the more ancient narratives that contribute to the Holy Land’s contemporary significance. Small wonder, then, that the languages of the Bible and of the nineteenth-century American business world intertwine so frequently throughout his text.


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Warder Cresson: Convert to Judaism Warder Cresson’s mission in his pamphlet The Key of David (1852) is, in many ways, the converse of his fellow Philadelphian Clorinda Minor’s mission. Minor seeks to convert the Jewish people to Christianity and thus hasten the end of the world and the making of the New Jerusalem by means of the destruction of the Old Jerusalem. Cresson reverses this goal and seeks to convert Christians of all creeds to Judaism. In addition to the fact that he is an adult convert from Protestantism to Judaism, Cresson stands out from his contemporaries in several other significant ways. Unlike most American travelers to the Holy Land, Cresson goes to Palestine not to see the sights, but to stay. Paradoxically, perhaps, despite the fact that he does stay and that Jerusalem itself represents for him the ultimate in divine revelation, Cresson spends relatively little time discussing the topography of Palestine. Instead, Cresson devotes most of his space to an intense polemical argument for Judaism and against Christianity. Despite Cresson’s relative lack of discussion of the topography of Palestine, his obsession with grounding religious epistemology in experience and in the particular locality of Jerusalem makes him an important part of the tradition of American writing about Jerusalem. Like Minor, Cresson begins with a narrative of his conversion. The narrative takes a form that would be familiar to most American Protestant readers, in that it represents Cresson’s conversion as a rejection of dead religious ideas for a real and living experience of the divine. What was shocking to American Protestant readers (so shocking in fact that Cresson’s sanity was questioned in court by his family), was that Cresson’s conversion was not the conventionally acceptable conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism, or from an older Protestant sect to a newer one, but rather from Christianity to Judaism.4 Knowing that his readers will be inclined toward suspicion of his argument, Cresson frames his conversion experience as the result of an uncompromising quest for truth: In the spring of 1844, I left everything near and dear to me on earth. I left the wife of my youth and six lovely children (dearer to me than my natural life,) and an excellent farm, with everything comfortable around me. I left all these in pursuit of Truth, and for the sake Truth alone [emphasis in original]. –I had often from my youth asked my soul, “Where is perfect, evident, incontestable truth to be found? The answer was It exists everywhere, It is in the heart. It consists in the conscious evidence [emphasis in original] of her existence, against which no reasoning can prevail.” (13)

Cresson thus begins by raising the crucial epistemological issues that haunt so much of mid-nineteenth-century American literature. He seeks to find a secure grounding for knowledge, and finds that identifying this grounding is extremely difficult. Thus far, he could be a Transcendentalist like Emerson or a Romantic

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critic of Transcendentalism like Poe, Hawthorne, or Melville.5 The approach that Cresson takes to the epistemological uncertainty that foils his desire for a transcendental Truth resembles that of William M. Thomson, Edward Robinson, and Clorinda Minor more than that of Emerson or Melville, however. Like Thomson and Robinson, Cresson grounds his understanding of reality in sacred texts, and like Minor, Cresson rejects the inherited ideas of mainstream American Protestantism. Like all three of these figures, Cresson uses his personal religious experience to attain a satisfactory interpretation of the Bible. Cresson achieves his religious breakthrough when he accepts the necessity of combining abstract expressions of truth with concrete experience. Cresson relates this conclusion in one of his most portentous passages: I found “Truth in the mind was never complete,” Truth in the abstract was never developed [emphasis in original]. I therefore found one Key that would infallibly lead me through the door of Truth. It was this:--an entire faith and dependence on God’s ever living word and promises. (14)

Cresson’s desire for an expression of truth that will combine the abstractions derived from sacred texts with the concrete details of lived experience leads him away from American Protestantism and ultimately to Judaism, but it also connects him closely with the ideology of experience that works its way through earlier texts, from Thomas Hooker’s A True Sight of Sin to Thomson’s The Land and the Book. Cresson’s critique of abstract knowledge eventually leads him to reject altogether the distinction between the spiritual and the literal. Cresson develops his critique of the spiritualization of scriptural promises with a comparison to the practice of slavery in the American south. Cresson imagines a dialogue between an abolitionist Episcopal priest and a slave in which the slave uses the Episcopal priest’s own reading of sacred history to assert that he is not currently enslaved despite the fact that he is manifestly in chains (197-202). Cresson argues that if a slave is free only spiritually, he is simply not free; therefore, by extension, if the Hebrew scriptures have been fulfilled only spiritually, they have not been fulfilled. Knowing that his Protestant readers cannot accept the idea that the messianic prophecies of the Hebrew scriptures remain unfulfilled, Cresson proceeds to argues that, based on their own premises, his readers should regard King David as the messiah referred to in the Hebrew scriptures, and reject the typological interpretations of these prophecies embraced by Christianity. It is with his rejection of the distinction between the spiritual and the literal that Cresson most sharply distinguishes himself from contemporaries such as Thomson and Robinson. For Thomson and Robinson, the Holy Land is to be interpreted by scholars who understand the typological relationship between the


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land and the book, whereas for Cresson, typology itself becomes illegitimate because any promise that is fulfilled only spiritually, is by definition unfulfilled. In this way Cresson closely mirrors Minor. For both Cresson and Minor, despite their differences, Jerusalem is to be transformed to conform to biblical promises, not merely interpreted in the spiritual light of those promises. For this reason, Jerusalem is an almost ghostly presence throughout Cresson’s text. Cresson emigrated from America and took up residence in Jerusalem, and like Minor, he sought to encourage Jewish agricultural settlements around Jerusalem, with the crucial difference that he sought Jews who practiced Judaism, not converts to Christianity. Cresson devotes little time to topographical description, paradoxically, because his own emphasis in the necessity of a literal understanding of religion leads him to concentrate on abstract polemics in an effort to win converts. Cresson’s polemical approach to refuting Christianity must have been particularly galling to nineteenth-century Protestant readers. Cresson adapts the language of Protestant controversies with Catholicism; instead of identifying the biblical “whore of Babylon” with the Catholic hierarchy, he uses the label “the whore of Babylon” to encompass all of Christianity (14-15). Instead of dismissing Catholicism as a corruption of an original pure Christianity, he dismisses all of Christianity as an illegitimate accretion that has corrupted the purity of Judaism. Cresson’s significance to the nineteenth-century tradition of American writing about the Holy Land lies in his ability to take the tropes so often favored by American Protestant pilgrims to Palestine and turn these tropes against American Protestantism itself. Cresson disconnects typology from empiricism in the name of faith, in order to correct what he regards as the religious errors of Christianity. Later writers would perform this same operation—the separation of typology and experience—as part of a more general critique of religious belief.

William Henry Odenheimer, High Church Episcopalian At first glance, William Henry Odenheimer seems an unlikely figure to include in a chapter on religious figures who were out of the American religious mainstream. Odenheimer, after all, was the rector of a major urban congregation (St. Peter’s Church, in Philadelphia), and his Anglo-Catholic views certainly fit within the mainstream of historic Christian orthodoxy. Moreover, Odenheimer wielded significant influence in the years following his travels to Jerusalem because he ultimately became the Episcopalian bishop of northern New Jersey. In relation to most American Protestant travelers, Odenheimer does indeed provide an alternative version of orthodoxy, however. In Jerusalem and Its Vicinity (1855), his collected lectures on his 1851 journey to Jerusalem, Odenheimer’s evident

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sympathy with Catholic and Orthodox Christian sacred sites is so strong that it would almost certainly be regarded as heretical by Robinson, Thomson, and even Prime. Odenheimer’s departure from the Protestantism of most of his fellow nineteenth-century American travelers to Palestine (and, for that matter, most of his fellow American Episcopalians) was the result of his interest in the ideas of the Oxford Movement in England. The Oxford Movement, led by John Henry Newman, who ultimately became a convert to Roman Catholicism, and the lifelong Anglican John Keble, sought to renew the Church of England’s Catholic heritage in opposition to the staunchly Protestant status quo of the early nineteenth-century Anglican Church.6 By 1855, the year that Odenheimer published his account of his travels to Jerusalem, Odenheimer had transformed his parish of St. Peter’s Church into a firmly Anglo-Catholic parish along the lines recommended by the Oxford Movement.7 A key distinction between Odenheimer’s text and most of the other Holy Land texts produced by American clergymen in the nineteenth century is that Odenheimer is less concerned with proving the veracity of a particular group of sites and the mendacity of the claims for others than with stimulating a sense of worship and awe in his readers. When Odenheimer does turn to polemics, he usually does so in order to secure the claim of a particular locale to be an appropriate inspiration for Christian worship. Odenheimer organizes his lectures on Jerusalem as a pilgrimage through the city during the Christian Holy Week, and he intersperses observations from his own 1851 pilgrimage to Jerusalem with his reflections on the significance of various sites. Odenheimer resembles Cresson in his emphasis on the necessity of correspondence between physical and spiritual realities. Never is this clearer than in his consideration of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher: I will only say that it is in my opinion, an insult [emphasis in original] to our early Christian forefathers, to affirm that their spiritual religion was such an ungrateful, unlovely, unreal thing, that they could dwell within the limits of the Holy City, and be daily thinking and hearing of what Jesus did and suffered for them, and never feel their hearts drawn to Calvary or the Tomb. (204-5)

For Odenheimer as well as for Cresson, spiritual realities must be related in some way to physical realities. If Cresson finds the Christian religion wanting because of its tendency to spiritualize what in Judaism are regarded as concrete physical realities, Odenheimer as a High Church Christian clergyman also suggests that a form of Christianity that rejects the physical in favor of the spiritual is deeply flawed. As a result of this belief, Odenheimer generally accepts the ancient traditions that undergird the validity of many of the sacred sites in Palestine. Chief


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among these is the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, the validity of which Odenheimer defends using some of the rhetorical tools that many of his contemporaries used to discredit it. As in the case of so many of his contemporaries, Odenheimer draws his rhetoric regarding sacred sites in Palestine from the American experience. He begins his defense of the authenticity of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher with a direct appeal to American filial piety: Have you forgotten the grave of your father or your mother? Have you no knowledge, nor feeling for the tomb of him, whom this nation styles, “The Father of His Country”? Is there no Puritan tradition which jealously embalms the memory of Plymouth Rock, and, amid all the changes of our new world, preserves intact to this day the site where the so-called Pilgrim Fathers landed? (206)

Odenheimer suggests that Americans have developed their own, secular iconography in the years since the Mayflower arrived, and he notes that Americans might find more sympathy for Catholic and Orthodox sites in Palestine if they remember the role that George Washington plays in America’s own civil religion. Odenheimer accepts the validity of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and issues a sharp rebuke to biblical archaeologists such as Edward Robinson, stating that they “have been compelled to rely on the slender authority of their measure lines and their own private conjectures” (201). For Odenheimer, if Americans can remember their own most cherished traditions, it is the height of bigotry to doubt that inhabitants of the Levant also possess historical memory. When Odenheimer turns from his argument for the Church of the Holy Sepulcher’s historical validity to physical description of the Church itself, his tone is one of reverence. He confesses to having visited the Church of the Holy Sepulcher no fewer than nineteen times for devotional purposes, and he seeks to lead his readers, imaginatively, into the experience of entering the Church. He writes: Now, omitting all the minor points, let me ask you to stop, and fill out this homely illustration, by adding, in imagination, to the building described, vast proportions, venerable antiquity, and awe-inspiring gloom. Fill the air with sacred chants, in the manner of the Franciscans, mingled with the quick, harsh measure of the Greek, and the wild, piercing cry of the Arminian! Make the interior of this mysterious building vocal with sounds of prayer, in languages almost Pentecostal in variety, and issuing from the different chapels and yet not making discord, as if there were something in the moral, as well as in the architectural magnitude of this strange place, which harmonized every hymn that confessed Christ’s true character, and blended into one fervent supplication the multitudinous prayers for mercy, which the divided children of the church poured forth to a common “Father in Heaven!” As if an unearthly

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The Romance of the Holy Land voice rectified the jarring sounds of unfraternal Liturgies through tenderness to those, who despite their divisions, loved one common Lord. (212-13)

Odenheimer finds in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher a poetic version of orthodoxy that reconciles the conflicting voices that so many of his contemporaries dismissed as constituting a hellish din. In this respect, Odenheimer anticipates the nuanced approach to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that Herman Melville takes in his long poem Clarel, even though Melville’s text lacks Odenheimer’s devotion to a particular orthodoxy.

What brings such disparate voices as those of Minor, Hyde, Cresson, and Odenheimer together? I suggest that this unlikely grouping of figures shares several significant traits. First, all four are in one way or another outside of the dominant Calvinist, post-Calvinist, or anti-Calvinist traditions of American Protestantism. Second, while all make earnest use of the Bible in interpreting Palestine, all four are also committed to an understanding of Palestine that privileges the material realities of the then present-day landscape over a reading of the landscape that is simply a form of biblical exegesis. In their various ways, then, each of these figures problematize the notion of a single pious response to the Holy Land on the part of nineteenth-century Americans. This problematization of the question of a single conventional response to the Levant becomes even more vexed in the self-consciously literary narratives that follow in the next chapter.

Notes 1

Minor has been the subject of one recent scholarly biography, Barbara Kreiger’s Divine Expectations: An American Woman in Nineteenth-Century Palestine (Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1999). Otherwise, her work and life have received relatively little attention. 2 The idea that the return of Christ would be preceded by a conversion of the Jewish people to Christianity has roots in medieval Christian culture and theology. For a description of the development of this belief and its role in the history of Christian anti-Semitism, see Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide (New York: Seabury, 1972). This belief gained particular currency among seventeenth-century Puritans, and appeared in America in the writings of the “Apostle to the Indians,” John Eliot, who for a time believed that the native inhabitants of Massachusetts might be a part of the lost ten tribes of Israel and that their conversion might fulfill the eschatological requirement of Jewish conversion. This belief also reappears among the nineteenth-century Mormon movement, as the case of Orson Hyde illustrates. 3 Hyde’s use of the term “island” here is puzzling. Presumably this is a metaphorical statement about the prominence of the Mount of Olives.

Alternative Orthodoxies 4

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Hilton Obenzinger provides an excellent overview of Cresson’s biography and of the anxieties that Cresson’s conversion prompted among U.S. Protestants in Chapter Seven of American Palestine: Melville, Twain, and the Holy Land Mania. (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 114-137). Obenzinger relates Cresson’s story both to millennial currents in nineteenth-century America and to the development of Zionism. 5 Interestingly, Cresson’s persona as a seeker of truth in this passage corresponds closely to the spiritual journey of another nineteenth-century American whose conversion was viewed with alarm and suspicion: Orestes Brownson. Brownson was involved in a series of orthodox and heterodox Protestant sects, then immersed himself in Transcendentalism, and finally converted to Roman Catholicism. When Cresson’s family tried to have him judged a lunatic, the judgment in Cresson’s favor made a wry reference to Brownson: “If Orestes A. Brownson, who changes his religion every year, has not yet been made a subject of a commission de lunatico inquirendo, it is probably because his worldly means are not extensive” (Cresson 228). The judge’s commentary suggests that Cresson was less unusual in the context of nineteenth-century American religious culture than twentieth-century readers might suspect. 6 A useful account of Odenheimer’s religious odyssey is found in the funeral oration given by William Crosswell Doane, Bishop of Albany, after Odenheimer’s death in 1879. The oration is entitled A Memorial of William Henry Odenheimer, D.D. (Newark, NJ: Advertiser Stream Printing House, 1879). 7 Again, Doane supplies the relevant details. Interestingly, Herman Melville introduces arguments associated with the Oxford Movement, and particularly John Henry Newman, into Clarel with the character of the Dominican friar.


Such Poetic Illusions

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Chapter 4

“Such Poetic Illusions” The Skeptical Oriental Romance of John Lloyd Stephens, Bayard Taylor, George William Curtis, and William Cullen Bryant

There lay Jerusalem, dead in the white noon. The desolation of the wilderness moaned at her gates. There was no suburb of trees or houses. She lay upon a high hill, in the midst of hills barren as those that we had passed. There were no sights or sounds of life. The light was colorless, the air was still. Nature had swooned around the dead city. There was no sound in the air but the wailing in my heart. —George William Curtis (1856)

When we turn from the edifying narratives of Holy Land travel related by Thomson, Robinson, Prime, and Minor to the narratives written by professional writers of travel and adventure narratives, the distinction between the two categories appears quickly. The persona that is created by the professional travel writers is not that of an adoring, if at times skeptical, pilgrim, but rather that of the experienced, worldly humanist who brings experience and sophistication to the land. John Lloyd Stephens, Bayard Taylor, George William Curtis, and William Cullen Bryant all promise readers a fresh view of the Holy Land that is free of religious cant and that will allow them to experience vicariously an exotic and exciting journey into a radically different space from any they have seen or imagined. Furthermore, the humanism that these travelers promise to bring to the Holy Land contains as well an element of sympathetic identification with current inhabitants of the Holy Land. At its best, this quality of sympathetic identification allows the literary travelers to look at their own culture in a new light and to experience meaningful epiphanies regarding their contemporaries living in the Holy Land. At its worst, the quality of sympathetic identification serves merely as flimsy pretext for unabashed imperialism—not infrequently, moving descriptions

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of the suffering of inhabitants of the land are followed by meditations on the great benefit that American or European control would bring to these inhabitants. Instead of demonstrating an obsessive concern with verifying the reality or fraudulence of various sacred sites in the Holy Land, the writers that I have chosen to describe collectively as “literary travelers” provide copious details regarding the specific contemporary features of the sites that they observe. As a result, these writers are much more likely to engage in humor than in lamentation—and much more likely to describe the contemporary inhabitants of the Holy Land at some length rather than to engage in historical polemics against Catholic “mummery.” There are, however, important similarities between the works of the literary travelers and those of the pious pilgrims. Although the literary travelers are less obsessively concerned with tracking down biblical references and establishing the fraudulence of Catholic and Orthodox Christian pilgrimage sites, they nonetheless do engage in biblical citation and at times in interdenominational controversy. Furthermore, intertextuality occupies a particularly important place in the writings of the literary travelers as well as those of their devout counterparts. In the case of the literary travelers, this intertextuality often takes the form of pointed criticisms of the works of Chateaubriand and other European travelers to the Middle East. One major distinction that obtains both between the pious travelers and the literary travelers as groups and among individuals within those groups is related to the authority of personal experience. For Robinson, Thomson, Barclay, Johnson, and Minor, personal experience is important, but only because it can illustrate the truths of the Bible. For Prime (and to some degree also for Odenheimer) this relationship begins to become inverted because his piety takes the form of intense emotional immediacy. The Bible itself seems to be validated in Prime’s text by the intensity of his emotional response to the land. For the literary travelers, experience becomes in varying degrees a standard against which to measure the Bible as well as a standard against which to measure the veracity of previous travelers’ accounts. A second distinction between the pious travelers, both orthodox and heterodox, and the literary travelers, one that is equally important, is the relationship between the religious and the aesthetic in the accounts authored by the two groups. The pious travelers generally look for the landscape of Palestine to provide factual verification for their particular religious beliefs. Both the disappointment and the delight that they express in various portions of their narratives are based primarily on how well the Holy Land is functioning as an empirical aid to faith. For the literary travelers, however, the Holy Land is valuable less for its empirical validation of biblical truths than for its role in contributing to the poetry of religion. As a result, the narratives by the literary travelers borrow heavily from the genre of the Oriental romance, which was extremely popular in nineteenth-century America.


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This chapter explores in detail the works of four literary travelers to the Holy Land, beginning with the earliest, John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Egypt, Arabia Petraea, and the Holy Land (1837), followed by discussions Bayard Taylor’s The Lands of the Saracen (1852), George William Curtis’s Howaji in Syria (1856), and William Cullen Bryant’s Letters from the East (written 1852; collected 1869). The first literary traveler I discuss at length is the lawyer and explorer whose work set the tone for the development of the specifically literary response to the Holy Land and was admired by both Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville: John Lloyd Stephens. Stephens’s Incidents of Travel is the first travel narrative about the Holy Land by a major American figure, and it adumbrates many of the key features of Holy Land writing that appear in subsequent works by authors ranging from Taylor to Bryant.1

John Lloyd Stephens, Explorer John Lloyd Stephens had already traveled extensively in the American West and in Europe by the time he undertook his trip to the Holy Land. Unlike many of the travelers who came after him, Stephens arrived in the Holy Land at a time when travel there still involved real risks for European and American travelers, and well before the Holy Land tour became part of the standard American tourist experience. Stephens, as a well-educated and well-respected lawyer, was in an ideal position within American society to inaugurate a specifically literary tradition of writing about the Holy Land. Stephens’s biographer, Victor Wolfgang van Hagen, notes that Stephens’s narrative: Exhibited considerable erudition, for Stephens had read widely so as to enhance his own observations. Volney’s Ruins, Keith’s Prophecies, the “Travels of Lamartine,” the researches of Pococke, and Keniker’s The Letters from Palestine of Joliffe, the Narratives of Legh, the published explorations of Burckhardt, Laborde, Linant, Belzoni, Banks, and Ulrich Seetzen were read, studied and absorbed, yet so judiciously that their presence is barely recognizable. (xxxix)

This lightly worn erudition (and the largely secular background of this erudition) allows Stephens to avoid the ponderousness of the pious writers while simultaneously establishing impeccable credentials as a commentator on the Holy Land. Stephens’s account of his travels in the Holy Land won considerable praise from his contemporaries, including, most notably, Edgar Allan Poe. Writing in the New York Review, Poe lauded Stephens for both the honesty and the style of his narrative, writing:

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The Romance of the Holy Land [Stephens] is a traveler with whom we shall like to take other journeys. Equally free from the exaggerated sentimentality of Chateaubriand, or the sublimated, the too French enthusiasm of Lamartine on the one hand, and on the other from the degrading spirit of utilitarianism, which sees in mountains and waterfalls only quarries and manufacturing sites, Mr. Stephens writes like a man of good sense and sound feeling. (941)

Poe emphasizes both the Americanness of Stephens’s writing (in contrast to the “too French” Lamartine) and the characteristics that make Stephens’s writing distinct from texts that are too redolent of the utilitarian American business ethic. Stephens is, according to Poe, an essentially American writer in his empiricism, but his “sound feeling” combines with his “good sense” to make him an ideal sort of American writer in contrast to those Americans who might be accused of excessive utilitarianism. Stephens’s approach to representing the Holy Land that he explores in his text can perhaps best be described as a form of devout ambivalence. Stephens certainly presents himself as a fairly traditional Protestant Christian believer, and he makes many of the same criticisms of the non-Protestant Christians of the Holy Land that the pious pilgrims make, but he also reserves the right to test even Protestant explications of the Bible by the empirical evidence provided by the land itself. As a result, Stephens’s account in the end has the effect, not of simply reconciling the Land and the Book, but of providing a detailed and often sympathetic account of contemporary life in the Holy Land. As with the pious pilgrims, Stephens’s response to the famous Church of the Holy Sepulcher can provide a valuable touchstone for gauging the nature of his response to Palestine as a whole. Stephens introduces his discussion of the church by inviting the reader to join him in exploring the church. He writes: During my stay in Jerusalem a day seldom passed in which I did not visit the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; but my occupation was chiefly to observe the conduct of the pilgrims; and if the reader will accompany me to the interior, he will see what I was in the habit of seeing every day. (349)

Stephens uses the strategy of directly addressing the reader as if the reader is about to be initiated in the mysteries with which Stephens is already familiar quite frequently throughout his account. The effect is to enhance the reader’s voyeuristic sense that he or she is about to observe something that has previously been hidden and also to increase the reader’s sympathetic identification with the narrator. When Stephens relates the sights that he sees once he is in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, his account involves considerably more detailed observation than do the accounts of Robinson and even Thomson. Describing the Sepulcher itself, Stephens writes with great precision:


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Again, bending the head, and lower than before, the visitor enters the inner chamber, the holiest of holy places. The sepulcher “hewn out of rock” is a marble sarcophagus, somewhat resembling a common marble bathing tub, with a lid of the same material. Over it hang forty-three lamps, which burn without ceasing night and day. The sarcophagus is six feet, one inch long, and occupies about one half of the chamber; and one of the monks being always present to receive the gifts of tribute of the pilgrims, there is only room for three or four at a time to enter. The walls are of a greenish marble, usually called verd-antique, and this is all. And it will be borne in mind that all this is in a building above ground, standing on the floor of the church. (353)

Stephens’s close physical description of the sepulcher itself provides an almost photographic effect for his reader. Stephens progresses spatially through the sepulcher, providing his reader with a clear and concrete picture of the sepulcher in all its particularity before moving on to larger religious questions regarding the sepulcher and its authenticity. Also noteworthy is Stephens’s use of the comparison between the marble of the sarcophagus and the marble of the bathing tub. Such comparisons that both allow readers to picture the objects being described by reference to familiar objects and diminish the impressiveness of the objects themselves are a staple of the literary accounts of Holy Land travel. When Stephens progresses from physical description of the sepulcher to a description of the non-Protestant pilgrims who throng about the sepulcher, his tone becomes distinctly harsher. His conclusion regarding the pilgrims who come to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher shows his disillusionment: Disappointed, disgusted, and sick at heart, while hundreds were still struggling for admission, I turned away and left the church. A warmer imagination than mine could perhaps have seen, in a white marble sarcophagus, “the sepulcher hewn out of a rock,” and in the fierce struggling of these pilgrims the devotion of sincere and earnest piety, burning to do homage in the holiest of places; I could not. (347)

Stephens’s response to the undignified behavior of the Catholic and Orthodox pilgrims who flocked to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is the part of his narrative that comes closest to that of Robinson, and helps to establish the persona of the American Protestant traveler to the Holy Land: pious, but shocked at the enthusiasms of local Christians in Palestine, and eager to share voyeuristic depictions of the non-Protestants’ shocking behavior to a receptive American audience. Despite sharing their visceral response to the liturgical practices at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Stephens’s treatment of the question of the authenticity of the Holy Sepulcher is also notably different from that of Robinson

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and Thomson. Stephens responds to the Holy Sepulcher with ambivalence rather than with outright skepticism. He writes: If I can form any judgment from my own feelings, every man other than a blind and determined enthusiast, when he stands by the side of that marble sarcophagus, must be ready to exclaim, “This is not the place that the Lord lay”; and yet I must be wrong, for sensible men have thought otherwise; and Dr. Richardson, the most cautious traveler in the Holy Land, speaks of it as the “Mansion of victory, where Christ triumphed over the grave, and disarmed death of all its terrors.” The feelings of a man are to be envied who can so believe. (354)

Stephens sides with his fellow Protestants in ultimately dismissing the claims to validity of the Holy Sepulcher, but he raises a note of epistemological uncertainty combined with sympathy for other forms of belief that appears only infrequently in the writings of the devout evangelical pilgrims. This combination of uncertainty with nostalgia for the older forms of Christian belief that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher represents becomes a repeated motif in the writings of the literary travelers, and reaches its fullest expression in Herman Melville’s Clarel. Another contrast between Stephens’s response to the Holy Land and that of the travelers who wrote for specifically religious purposes can be seen in his response to the various groups of people present in the Holy Land, whether Jewish, non-Protestant Christian, or Muslim. Stephens shows particular sympathy for the Jewish inhabitants of the Holy Land, praising the chief rabbis at both Hebron and Jerusalem for their kindness, and revealing that he believed the Jewish inhabitants to be “the best topographers of Jerusalem” (367-8). Stephens attended Jewish services on several occasions during his time in the Holy Land, and he expresses particular pleasure about being invited by the chief rabbi of Jerusalem to partake in the feast of the Passover. He further expresses indignation at his observations of the mistreatment and humiliations that European Christians and Turkish and Arab Muslims inflicted on Jewish communities throughout Europe and the Middle East. When Stephens relates his observations of Jewish worship in Jerusalem, he describes the prayers offered up at the Western Wall in a particularly sympathetic and affecting manner: I saw that day, as other travelers may still see every Friday in the year, all the Jews of Jerusalem clothed in their best raiment, winding through the narrow streets of their quarter; and under this hallowed wall, with the sacred volume in their hands, singing, in the language in which they were written, the Songs of Solomon and the Psalms of David. White-bearded men and smooth-cheeked boys were leaning over the same book; and Jewish maidens, in their long white robes, were standing with their faces to the wall, and praying through the cracks and crevices….The tradition


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is characteristic and serves to illustrate the devoted constancy with which the Israelites adhere to the externals of their faith. (368-9)

The picture Stephens provides here is composed with obvious affection and sympathy for the people he observes. Compared with the description he offers of the Greek Orthodox Easter service, to name one example, the description of the decorum and pathos of the observances is almost entirely laudatory. A note of prejudice intrudes at the end of the passage, however, when Stephens pointedly refers to the worshippers’ adherence to the “externals (italics mine) of their faith”—a typical Protestant jibe at the artificiality of non-Protestant and nonChristian religious traditions. Another aspect of Stephens’s persona as a Holy Land traveler appears during a visit to a synagogue in Jerusalem. Whereas Clorinda Minor uses her visit to a synagogue to introduce reflections on the nearness of the restoration of the Jewish people to Zion and its relation to the apocalypse, Stephens finds a distinctly more carnal satisfaction in this visit. He confesses that: As I could not understand the words of exhortation which fell from the lips of the preacher, it was not altogether unnatural that I should turn from the rough-bearded sons of Abraham to the smooth faces of their wives and daughters. Since I had left Europe, I had not been in an apartment where the women sat with their faces uncovered; and, under these circumstances, it is not surprising that I saw many a dark-eyed Jewess who appeared well worthy of my gaze; and it is not a vain boast to say, that while singing the songs of Solomon, many a Hebrew maiden turned her bright black orbs upon me. (370)

Stephens introduces what is to become an important theme among the male travelers to the Holy Land: an intense curiosity about and erotic fascination with the women of the Holy Land. As Malini Johar Schueller in particular has noted, this focusing of the male gaze upon the “native” women is a nearly ubiquitous feature of U.S. Orientalist writing. Stephens’s blending of a description of a religious service that will be unfamiliar to many of his readers with a voyeuristic description of exoticized local women adds titillation to his text, and the assertion that many of the women were returning his gaze no doubt contributes to the persona of “manliness” that Edgar Allan Poe notes in his review of Stephens’s work. Stephens’s specific interest in the female inhabitants of Palestine is not limited to the women he sees at the synagogue, however, and some of his descriptions are less voyeuristic and exoticizing. When he visits Jericho, Stephens reports as well on the Muslim women whom he sees there who are participating in a communal dance. Stephens distinguishes himself here by giving his readers a portrayal of the scene that is both sympathetic and considerably less exoticized

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than could have been allowed for by the substance of the scene. Stephens describes the dance as follows: That evening I saw at Jericho what I never saw before. It was a beautiful moonlight [sic] night, and all the women were out of doors singing and dancing. The dance was altogether indescribable consisting not of wanton movements, like those of the dancing girls of Egypt, but merely in joining hands and moving round in a circle, keeping time to the music of their own voices. I had never seen so gay and joyous a scene among the women of the East; and though their fathers, and brothers, and husbands, and lovers were away among the mountains, I did not feel disposed to judge them harshly. (387)

Several aspects of Stephens’s description of this scene are instructive. First, Stephens deliberately underplays the voyeuristic element of the scene by denying that the women are engaging in “wanton movements.” Furthermore, Stephens makes a point of noting the absence of the women’s fathers, brothers, husbands, and lovers, an observation that has the effect of reminding his readers that the women that Stephens is describing are people with real personal connections, and not just embodied tropes for the romance of the East. Stephens closes his discussion of Jerusalem with one of the most telling passages in his entire account. He reveals that of all the activities that he undertook while in Jerusalem, the activity he most enjoyed was his daily walk around the outside walls of the city. When walking, he would pass through a Muslim cemetery, where he could see various mourners walking through the graveyard. He describes in detail the scene with which he is presented and his reaction to it: Regularly, on a fine afternoon, towards sunset, the whole Turkish population, in all their gay and striking costumes, might be seen wandering among the tombs. Few things strike the traveler in the East more than this, and few are to us more inexplicable. We seldom go to a graveyard except to pay the last offices to a departed friend, and for years afterward we never find ourselves in the same place again without a shade of melancholy coming over us. Not so in the East; today they bury a friend, tomorrow they plant flowers on his grave, and the next day, and the next….To them the grave is not clothed with the same terrors. It is not so dark and gloomy as to us. They are firmer believers than we are, though, as we think, in a false and fatal creed; and to them there is light beyond the grave, which we of a better faith can seldom see. (379)

This daily encounter becomes, for Stephens, an opportunity to measure his own culture by that of the cultural Others whom he is observing in the Holy Land and to find his own culture wanting. Stephens’s assertion that the grave was “not clothed with the same terrors” for the Muslims who visited the graveyard introduces a note of introspection and self-criticism to Stephens’s account that shows that rather than


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being a merely passive observer, Stephens is being changed by his encounters in Palestine. In addition to his sympathetic treatment of the Jewish and Islamic communities in Jerusalem, Stephens, unlike writers such as Robinson and Thomson, is willing to find much to admire (if much to deprecate as well) in the Orthodox and Catholic Christians of Palestine and in the Muslims and Jews of the Holy Land as well. A particularly striking, even touching, example of Stephens’s ambivalent willingness to empathize with religious and cultural Others comes the night after he ascends Mt. Sinai. He writes: Wrapping myself in my Arab cloak, [I] took a small lamp in my hand, and, groping my way along the passage, descended to a chapel, where the monks were all assembled. I leaned behind a protective pillar and watched their proceedings; it was an event of no uncommon interest, thus, at the dead hour of night, to be a witness to their sincerity, and earnest though erroneous devotion. There was not one among them who did not believe that he was doing God good service, and that his works would find acceptance at the throne of Grace, and obtain for him blessed immortality for which we are all seeking. (199)

Stephens is clearly not, here or elsewhere, devoid of prejudice against the Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims whom he meets in the Holy Land. Nonetheless, the passage above can be taken as emblematic of the way in which Stephens finds himself drawn to the expressions of cultural and religious difference that he finds writ large in the Holy Land, and the way in which he usually avoids the cultural imperialism that condemns difference, if not always the cultural imperialism that turns difference into an object of voyeuristic consumption. Stephens himself finds his own attitudes changed throughout his Holy Land journey, and although he often expresses a desire for European-style “improvements” to the land, he also finds much to admire in the cultures observed. It is noteworthy that in this portion of Incidents, Stephens is wearing an “Arab cloak,” and that later in the narrative he expresses profound regret at the fact that his religious scruples prevent him from receiving communion with the Catholic and Orthodox Christians whom American Protestant missionaries like Thomson so vociferously scorn. Stephens’s interpretation of the peoples and sacred sites of the Holy Land is more broadly humanistic than that of the devout travelers discussed in Chapter Two, but his interpretation of the landscape of Palestine owes much to that of Robinson and the rest of the evangelical cohort, while still retaining some distinctive features. After discussing the array of sacred sites that he has explored in Jerusalem and concluding that although he had doubts about the authenticity of most sites, he “was not disposed to cavil,” Stephens leaves the city of Jerusalem to venture into the natural environment outside (354). He reveals that:

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The Romance of the Holy Land If the stranger leaves the walls of the city, he finds that his faith is not so severely tested; and, for my own part, disposed to indemnify myself for my unwilling skepticism, the third day after my arrival in Jerusalem, on a bright and beautiful morning, with my Nubian club in my hand, which soon became the terror of all the cowardly dogs in Jerusalem, I stood on the threshold of St. Stephen’s Gate….Here I was indeed among the hallowed places of the Bible. Here all was as nature had left it, and spared by the desecrating hand of man; and as I gazed upon the vast sepulchral monuments the tombs of Absalom, or Zachariah, and Jehoshaphat . . . I had no doubt that I was looking upon the great gathering place, where, three thousand years ago, the Jew buried his dead under the shadow of the temple of Solomon. (354-55)

Like the pious pilgrims, Stephens writes that he experiences a much more powerful and unambivalent religious response when he observes the natural landscape of the Holy Land than when he observes the most sacred sites for non-Protestant pilgrimage. Curiously, however, the landscape that Stephens chooses to present in this passage, despite his reference to its having been “spared the desecrating hand of man” is anything but free of human influence. The focal points of Stephens’s description are not natural features of the landscape, but instead ancient tombs— tombs one might suppose are not unlike the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. This scene foregrounds two paradoxes of the genre of American Holy Land writing. First, there is a general tendency to subsume deserted ruins, however obviously of human construction, under the category of nature. This tendency no doubt owes much to the Romantic fascination with ruins that appears in much English Romantic literature and also in such American Romantic poems as Philip Freneau’s “The Indian Burial Ground” and William Cullen Bryant’s “The Prairies.” Second, the American Protestant travelers are much more likely to accept as authentic sites that are attested to by Jewish tradition rather than by that of nonProtestant Christians. This tendency can also be easily explained by reference to the desire to validate scriptural texts with examples from the land. By accepting the sites associated with the Hebrew scriptures as valid, Stephens and the pious pilgrims can alike establish an intimate link between the land and the Bible without conceding any validity to the interpretations of non-Protestant Christian bodies. Also noteworthy in the above passage is the wry humor that is interspersed with Stephens’s musing on the sites that he observes. By inserting the image of himself terrorizing the “cowardly dogs of Jerusalem” with his Nubian club, Stephens tempers the solemnity of his description, again allowing his reader to remember that the quotidian side of life intrudes upon even the most awe-inspiring scene that Stephens may view. When Stephens mixes the sacred and profane in this way, he reminds his reader that his account of the Holy Land is not simply that of a naively devout traveler, but rather a thorough and accurate accounting of all of


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Stephens’s impressions and activities. Stephens thus enhances his persona as an everyman who will report the unadorned truth about the Holy Land. When Stephens visits Jericho, he arrives at a conclusion that is reached by each of the literary travelers to the Holy Land. Reflecting on his feelings when viewing Jericho, he writes: I have observed that travelers generally, when they arrive at any place of extraordinary interest, find the right glow of feeling coming over them at precisely the proper moment. I never had any difficulty in Italy; for there in the useful guidebook of Madame Starke, beautifully interspersed with valuable information about hotels, post-horses, and the price of washing linen, the reader may find prepared for him an appropriate catalogue of sensations for almost every possible situation and object….but in a country like this, a man is thrown upon his own resources; and, not withstanding the interest attached to the name of Jericho, I found it a hard matter to feel duly excited. (384)

The sites observed become, in this passage, dependent on the descriptions of prior travelers, and particularly the emotional responses of those prior travelers, for their interest to the current traveler. Since Stephens is one of the earlier American travelers to Jericho and Jericho lacks the volume of travel description that has been applied to Italy (or, for that matter, Jerusalem) it is difficult for a traveler to know an appropriate response to the scene there. This point becomes increasingly important in the writings of Taylor, Melville, and Twain, all of whom note that travelers to Jerusalem tend to shape their emotional responses to sacred sites according to what they have already read about them. The most famous example of Stephens’s devout ambivalence is the portion of Incidents in which he discusses his decision to cross the desert of Idumea despite his awareness that Alexander Keith,2 the student of biblical prophecy, had declared such a feat to be impossible on the grounds that the Bible had said that no one could cross this land and live. Stephens proceeds to cross the desert and live to tell about it, but he is careful to preserve the authority of the sacred text while casting doubt on certain aspects of orthodox interpretation. He explains that: I should have considered it daring and impious to place myself in the way of a still impending curse. But I did not go so far as the learned commentator [Keith], and to me the words of the prophet seemed sufficiently verified in the total breaking up of the route then traveled, as the great highway from Jerusalem to the Red Sea and India, and the general and probably eternal desolation that lives in Edom. (139)

Here Stephens reaffirms his faith in the validity of the biblical prophecy while reserving the right to reinterpret the prophecy in the light of experience, thus

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drawing on the evangelical doctrine of experience at the same time that he calls certain dogmatic evangelical tendencies into question. Stephens’s complex intermingling of doubt with faith, of sympathy for the religions and peoples of the Holy Land with fear and contempt, and of respect for the otherness of Palestine with frank imperialism, helps to set the tone for the other literary travelers to the Holy Land from the 1830s to the 1850s. Stephens’s account is particularly rich in commonalities with the popular account of the Holy Land written by Stephens’s contemporary, Bayard Taylor.

Bayard Taylor, Professional Traveler Bayard Taylor’s The Lands of the Saracen also demonstrates an ambivalent attitude toward belief and skepticism and admiration for some of the cultural Others encountered in the Holy Land. Unlike Stephens, for whom his account of the Holy Land was his first major literary undertaking, Taylor was already a popular travel writer when he wrote The Lands of the Saracen. Taylor had made his fame with his first travel book, Views A-Foot, which was a guide for young Americans looking to see the sights of Europe on a limited budget and an account of Taylor’s experiences while doing so. Taylor is thus the first of the American travelers to the Holy Land to write about his experiences specifically as a professional writer, and as a result, he incorporates elements drawn from literary discourses about the Orient more freely than does Stephens, and certainly much more freely than most of the pious travelers to Palestine. The Lands of the Saracens shares with Stephens’s work a general acceptance of the religious framework to which the evangelical pilgrims to the Holy Land subscribed, combined with a tendency to focus on the current state of the land rather than on the direct connections between the land and the Bible. Taylor does reflect at length on matters of religion and morality, but his reflections generally take place within the framework of a melioristic Christian humanism that abhors the prospect of needles human suffering rather than that of theological and historical polemic. Taylor is free to express his skepticism toward various Catholic and Orthodox sacred sites within the Holy Land without feeling the need to substitute a rigorous Protestant sacred topography. He also feels free to record negative impressions, not only of sites for pilgrimage, but also of the natural phenomena that he observes, phenomena that are sacrosanct for the more pious writers. Taylor reveals a sense of disappointment with the Holy Land early in his text when he writes:


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In the glory which overhangs Palestine from afar, we imagine emotions which never come when we tread the soil and walk over the hallowed sites….I cannot assume emotions I do not feel, and must describe Jerusalem as I found it….In many cases the devotional rhapsodies—the exclamations of awe and reverence--in which [travelers] indulge, strike me as forced and affected. The pious writers have described what was expected of them, not what they found. (84-5)

This aspect of Taylor’s writing provides a dim foreshadowing of the later perspectives of Herman Melville and Mark Twain on the subject of the appearance of the Holy Land. In addition to parallels with Stephens, Taylor also brings to mind some of Twain and Melville’s observations when he speculates about how much bloodshed would have been spared to the world if “instead of simply adoring [Christ] as a Divine Mediator, [Christians] would strive to walk the ways He trod on earth” (85)..Taylor differs drastically from Melville, who declared that “the conversion of the East to Christianity is against the will of God” (Journal 94), in his belief that a Christianization (meaning, of course, a conversion to Taylor’s more liberal, melioristic brand of Christianity) of the Holy Land will restore it to its former greatness. Taylor exclaims, “Judea cursed of God! What a misconception, not only of God’s mercy and benevolence, but also of actual fact. Give Palestine into Christian hands, and it will again flow with milk and honey” (52). In Taylor’s work the plea for European and American imperialism in the Middle East thus becomes much more explicit and pronounced than it ever is in Stephens’s work. Taylor’s enthusiasm for western colonization of the Holy Land is nonetheless adulterated by his contempt for the Protestant missions that had been set up in the Holy Land at the time of his travel. Taylor dismisses the English Mission in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem as “a kind of religious luxury” the funds for which could have “Christianized tenfold the number of English heathen” (78). Unlike Thomson, Robinson, Prime, Barclay, Johnson, Hyde, and Minor, all of whom are intent on conversion, Taylor casts doubts on the efficacy and even the morality of Protestant proselytizing in the Holy Land. Taylor’s text continues the tradition derived from Robinson and Thomson of comparing the Christians of the Holy Land negatively to the Muslim inhabitants of the land. After making a survey of the various Christian denominations and missions in Palestine, Taylor concludes: Jerusalem is the last place in the world where an intelligent heathen would be converted to Christianity. Were I cast here, ignorant of any religion, and were I to compare the lives and practices of the different sects as the means of making my choice—in short, to judge of each faith by the conduct of its professors—I should at once turn Mussulman. (79)

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Taylor employs a strategy in this passage that has been an essential part of American discourse about the Middle East at least since Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797). Like Tyler, Taylor uses a generally positive view of Islam as a means to condemn what he regards as corrupt versions of Christianity. Unlike Tyler, however, Taylor does not seek to relate this critique of the flaws within Christianity as practiced in the Holy Land to any kind of critique of the flaws within Christianity as practiced within the United States. Taylor’s critique remains tightly focused on the local Christians of the Holy Land, resulting in a text that would likely promote more self-satisfaction than self-examination among most of Taylor’s readers at home. Taylor’s reflection that were he to have to choose a religion based on the lifestyles of the peoples of Palestine he would convert to Islam might indeed have troubled some of his more astute readers, however. The fact that Islam would be the religion of choice based on the conduct of its professors suggests that the dominant religious culture in a particular region may be the culture in which it is easiest to lead a consistently religious life. This suggestion resurrects the religious and cultural relativism of Tyler’s Mullah, who suggests that the persuasiveness of various religious teachings often depends more on culture and environment than the coherence of the teachings themselves. Like so many of his compatriots who traveled to the Holy Land, Taylor uses the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as the touchstone for his criticism of the local Christians. Taylor cites as evidence of the corruption of Christianity in the Holy Land the presence of “nineteen [italics in original] chapels, each belonging to a different sect, calling itself Christian” and notes that the Turkish police often are forced to moderate violent disputes between these sects. Taylor argues that in particular the feud between the Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians over the ownership of the sepulcher is “a scandal, not only to the few Christians here, but to the Muslims as well” (79). Taylor describes the liturgical services at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as a sacrilegious parody of prayer: Go into the Holy Sepulcher, when mass is being celebrated, and you can scarcely endure the din. No sooner does the Greek choir begin its shrill chant, than the Latins fly to the assault. They have an organ, and terribly does that organ strain its bellows and labor its pipes to drown the rival singing. You think the Latins will carry the day, when suddenly the cymbals of the Abyssinians strike in with harsh brazen clang, and for the moment, triumph. Then there are Copts, and Maronites, and Armenians, and I know not how many other sects, who must have their share, and the service that should be a many-toned harmony pervaded by one grand spirit of devotion, becomes a discordant orgy, befitting the rites of Belial. (79-80)

Taylor’s description of the services contrasts sharply with that of William Henry Odenheimer, who applauds the very polyglot features of the Church of the Holy


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Sepulcher that Taylor decries. Taylor’s disapproval serves several functions. It allows Taylor himself to appear as a skeptic and truth-teller in relation to the Christians residing in the Holy Land while at the same time reinforcing the Protestant prejudices of his readership. Again, for a writer such as Royall Tyler (or later, Melville and Twain), this passage might have become an occasion to offer some kind of critique of parallel sorts of sectarianism and intolerance within the United States. For Taylor the passage merely becomes the occasion for another voyeuristic, if humorous glimpse into the perversions of Christianity practiced by non-Protestants. If Taylor’s treatment of the Christians of the Holy Land is much less positive than that which he gives to the Muslim inhabitants, his discussions of the Jewish population of the Holy Land are strikingly positive and certainly show an openness to deeply sympathetic depictions of cultures and religions other than Taylor’s own. Taylor continues the tradition observed by Stephens and Minor of giving the most positive descriptions of the inhabitants of Palestine to the Jewish population of the city. Taylor cites the superior religious tolerance practiced by the Jewish population, observing that: Here, although the Jews freely permit Christians to enter their synagogue, a Jew who should enter the Holy Sepulcher would be lucky if he escaped with his life. Not long since, an English gentleman, who was taken by the monks for a Jew, was so severely beaten that he was confined to his bed for two months. (80)

For Taylor, then, its religious intolerance becomes the ultimate grounds for disgust with the local Christian community, and the religious tolerance of the Jewish community becomes the basis for Taylor’s respect and admiration. One of the most poignant pictures that Taylor creates in his discussion of Jerusalem is his description of a young Jewish man whom he comes to conflate with Christ. Taylor writes: On the evening of my arrival in the city, as I set out to walk through the bazaars, I encountered a native Jew, whose face will haunt me for the rest of my life. I was sauntering slowly along, asking myself, “Is this Jerusalem?” when, lifting my eyes, they met those of Christ! It was the very face which Raphael has painted—the traditional features of the Saviour, as they are recognized and accepted by Christendom.... As the dusk gathered in the deep streets, I could see nothing but the ineffable sweetness and benignity of that countenance, and my friend was not a little astonished, if not shocked, when I said to him, with the earnestness of belief, on my return, “I have just seen Christ.” (81-2)

This passage sums up the paradoxes of Taylor’s work. On the one hand, Taylor can be seen here to be unquestionably tolerant and open-minded when compared with

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compatriots such as Prime, Thomson, Barclay, and Robinson. Nonetheless, the appropriation that Taylor makes when he identifies this young man with the founder of the Christian religion surely also shows the same sort of incomprehension of the possibility of a coherent faith that differs from his own that marks Clorinda Minor as she marches off to the Holy Land in search of converts. For Taylor, the romance of the Holy Land remains a distinctly Christian, Protestant romance, and his text thus falls short of the complexity and sympathetic insight that Melville is later able to establish in Clarel. Taylor does, however, introduce a distinctive element into the American Holy Land narrative by incorporating it into the wider tradition of romantic depictions of the Orient. This element is developed still further by a traveler whose journeys coincided chronologically with Taylor’s: George William Curtis.

George William Curtis, Romantic Pilgrim George William Curtis takes the Orient itself as his primary topic rather than the particularities of the sacred landscape of Palestine, and his The Howadji in Syria (1852) provides what is perhaps the closest approach by an American writer to the Anglo-French Orientalism critiqued by Edward Said.3 Curtis, even more than Taylor, emphasizes the romantic aspects of Oriental travel, and because of this, Curtis’s text at times strays from the empiricist persona that the majority of American Holy Land texts seeks to display. Notably, Curtis makes an explicit division between the experience of Palestine and his other experiences in the Orient, and the chapters that deal with Palestine are the chapters in which he comes closest to projecting an empiricist persona. More than most of his compatriots who write about their travels, Curtis attends to matters of style as well as verisimilitude. As Ahmed Mohammed Metwalli observes regarding The Howadji in Syria and its companion volume, Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851): Though published as two separate volumes, the pervasive continuity of theme, tone and mood, method, geography and time render them as two movements of one impressionistic opera of Levantine travel, melodious and harmonious, at times passionate, ever sensuously delightful, yielding a totality of poetic effect. (159)

As Metwalli notes, Curtis seeks, perhaps more than any of the other American Holy Land travelers of the mid-nineteenth century, to record the affective side of his Oriental journeys. More than Stephens or Taylor, Curtis foregrounds his own subjective responses to the landscape that he observes, resulting in a text that contains much emotional nuance.


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Curtis follows Taylor in emphasizing the exotic elements of his experience, and he goes beyond both Stephens and Taylor in his romanticizing of the women of the Orient. Curtis devotes considerable space in The Howadji in Syria to a discussion of his infatuation with Khadra, the daughter of his Armenian guide. Curtis explicitly connects his obsession with Khadra with British Orientalist traditions when he quotes Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall,” even as in the same passage he strikes notes familiar to the readers of Thomson and Robinson: Glancing toward the tent of the Armenian Khadra, you shout aloud to the astonished MacWhirter “I will take some savage woman, she will rear my dusky race.” But as the day draws forward and you see the same forms and the same life that Abraham saw, and know that Joseph leading Mary into Egypt might pass you today, ... then you feel that this germ, changeless at home, is only developed elsewhere, that the boundless desert freedom is only a resultless romance. (61)

Several key elements in Curtis’s construction of the Orient emerge in this passage. First, Curtis’s quotation of Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” establishes a link with the world of Oriental romance with which Curtis’s readers would already be familiar and, because of the substance of the quotation, introduces racy connections with the idea of miscegenation.4 As such, the passage emerges as a patent example of the exoticizing of the Orient that Said has described in Orientalism. Second, the passage establishes a relationship between Curtis’s enterprise and that of William M. Thomson and Edward Robinson. Like Thomson and Robinson, Curtis sees the Orient as essentially unchanged since the time of the biblical accounts. In this way, Curtis serves as a bridge between conventional generalized depictions of the Orient and the specific tradition of American writing about the Holy Land represented by predecessors such as Thomson, Robinson, Stephens, and Taylor. Third, the fact that Curtis identifies feminine beauty with the Armenians, one of the larger Christian sects in Palestine, is not without significance. As in the case of Stephens, who proclaims his lack of interest in Arab women but his profound interest in Jewish and Circassian women, Curtis finds someone to admire who will be different enough from his American Protestant readers to be exotic, but insufficiently different to seem threatening. In Curtis’s account, then, a reading emerges of the topography of the Holy Land that is particularly embedded in the overall portrayal of the Orient. In the midst of his oriental romancing, Curtis devotes a substantial portion of The Howadji in Syria to a discussion of Palestine. Curtis betrays a certain anxiety about grouping his religious impressions of Palestine with his “romantic” impressions of neighboring regions such as Egypt and Lebanon, however. As Curtis narrates his entry to Jerusalem (on Palm Sunday, appropriately enough), Curtis writes concerning the contrast between his perception of Palestine and his perception of surrounding lands:

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The Romance of the Holy Land Behind and before—the desert and Damascus—lay the peculiar Orient. But we entered now upon a land consecrated by one life to universal and eternal interest. At the gate too, as if so fit a figure of our strictly oriental and poetic dreams must not mingle with our changing thoughts, the grave old Armenian and the beautiful Khadra went another way, and we should not meet again until we reached Jerusalem. (134)

For Curtis, a clear division must be made between the oriental romance that makes up the bulk of his text and the more specifically edifying reflections called forth by Palestine. As his text progresses, however, significant slippages appear between the idea of the romantic Orient and the idea of biblical Palestine. Khadra, who initially parts with Curtis as he enters Palestine, returns to the narrative by the time Curtis arrives in Jerusalem, and even before that she is constantly the subject of his reflections. At every point in Curtis’s discussion of the Ottoman Palestine proper, Khadra hovers in the background as a figure of the Oriental romance that Curtis is tempted to write as he narrates his experience of the Holy Land. When Curtis arrives at Jerusalem, his assessment of the city vacillates between sardonic observations (for example, when he refers repeatedly to the aphorism that “the worst Muslims are those of Mecca, the worst Christians those of Jerusalem” (158) and awe at the religious associations that the city has for him. Significantly, Curtis’s discussion of these religious association invokes not the intense scrutiny of biblical texts in which Robinson and Thomson engage, but rather the aesthetic of the sublime that appears in much Romantic writing about landscape and ruins. He begins his chapter “Jerusalem or Rome,” which as the title suggests weighs the relative merits of the cities of Rome and Jerusalem as sites for contemplation, with a general reverie on the nature of the first experience of a new city. He writes: To any young man, or to any man in whose mind the glow of poetic feeling has not yet died into “the light of common day,” the first view of a famous city is one of the memorable epochs of life. Even if you go directly from commonplace New York to commonsense London, you will be awake in the night with a hushed feeling of awe at being in Shakespeare’s city, and Milton’s, and Cromwell’s. More agreeable to your mood is the heavy moulding of the banqueting room at Whitehall, than the crystal splendours of the palace in the park. Because over the former, the dusk of historical distance is already stealing, removing it into the romantic and ideal realm. (159)

Curtis thus establishes the mood for his discussion of Jerusalem. The glamour of a distant past, the romance of history, and the sense of the picturesque associated with ancient landmarks all make up the atmosphere that Curtis establishes for his comments on Jerusalem. Also present in this passage is a note of Anglophilia,


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mixed with an emphasis on the newness of American experience. Curtis makes the public spaces of the British Isles stand metonymically for the “romantic and ideal realm” of history, whereas New York appears as a city without a history, for better or for worse unburdened by profound historical associations. Curtis proceeds in his introduction to Jerusalem by means of an extended comparison between Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem, framed as a discussion between Curtis and his fellow pilgrims. After enumerating the glories of ancient Greece and Rome, he concludes that Jerusalem is no match for Rome except in what he regards as its central religious significance. In order to justify his choice of Jerusalem as the most compelling spot on earth to visit, he meditates on the significance of the day (Palm Sunday) on which he is entering Jerusalem, and concludes with an eloquent peroration: That figure [Christ seated on a donkey] meets the might of Rome, the skill of Greece, and the wit of Egypt, and the flame of their glory is paled before his glance. He rode in at the golden gate and was crucified between thieves. But it is the victim that consecrates the city.... The cold auroral fires stream anew to the zenith, as we sit in the starlight at the tent door. But a planet burns through them brighter than they, and we no longer discuss which city we approach with the profoundest interest. (164)

Curtis clearly demonstrates here that although his religious fervor may match that of the pious pilgrims, he is much more interested in pursuing the religious elements of Holy Land travel in their affective, poetic aspects than in engaging in rationalistic apologetics a la Robinson. Khadra may still be banished from his company at this point in the narrative, but the Oriental romance that she typifies looms over Curtis’s text. Curtis’s preoccupation with the aesthetic and the picturesque becomes particularly evident when he visits one of Jerusalem’s most imposing sites: the mosque of Omar. Regarding the mosque of Omar (also known as the Dome of the Rock), Curtis writes: It is the most beautiful object in Jerusalem, and the most graceful building in the East. It is not massive or magnificent, but the dome, bulbous, like all oriental domes, is so aerial and elegant, that the eye lingers to see it float away or dissolve in the ardent noon …. In the picturesque gloom and brightness of the city, the mosque is a dream of heaven also, even to the unbelievers. (178-9)

Curtis neglects the customary doleful remarks about the sorrowfulness of the sight of a mosque standing above a church in order to contemplate the beauty of the mosque. For him, the mosque symbolizes not the triumph of an “infidel” religion, but a taste of transcendence simply because of its beauty. Significantly, Curtis has

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little time for arguments over the authenticity of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, so enraptured is he by the aesthetic allure of the mosque. Ultimately, Curtis, more than any of his contemporaries except for Melville, approaches the Holy Land with the eye of the poet and the artist rather than that of the apologist or the theologian. In one of the nicer paradoxes of Holy Land travel, Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, proves far more luxuriant in his descriptions of the Holy Land than the revered poet to whose account we turn next: William Cullen Bryant, whose Letters from the East (1869) provides a marked counterpoint to the other texts considered in this chapter. Curtis’s luxuriant descriptions of a romantic, Orientalized Palestine give way to Bryant’s terse discussion of the landscape that nonetheless reaffirms some of Curtis’s major assumptions.

William Cullen Bryant, Poet William Cullen Bryant is one of the few nineteenth-century American travelers to Palestine who remains a household name. He also stands out, along with Bayard Taylor, as a traveler whose journeys in the Middle East brought about a marked change in his public persona, as he began to adopt “Oriental” styles of dress and grooming after returning to the United States. As Hilton Obenzinger notes, Bryant’s decision to go about in a long beard and a turban after returning to the United States shows something of the depths of the nineteenth century American fascination with all things Oriental. This adoption of Eastern costume upon returning to the United States was also employed by Prime and Taylor, but the fact that Bryant was a prominent figure aside from his status as a writer of travel narratives makes his choice of attire all the more striking. On the way to Jerusalem, Bryant adopts some of the common poses of conventional Holy Land travelers. He notes that reading becomes an important part of his company’s experience while they are in Palestine, and he very nearly conflates the Bible with the general mass of travel books being consulted when he writes: One of our entertainments as we traveled through the desert was reading books of travel relating to countries through which we were passing. Sometimes as we sat on our camels, one would read aloud for the benefit of the rest …. For these evening readings, we frequently took parts of the Scriptures, to which the scenes around us gave new interest—narratives of the journeys of the early Hebrews to the Land of Egypt. Their abode in the country, their passage out of it, which once brought them to the very region in which we were travelling. (153)

Bryant makes the familiar move of relating the topography of contemporary Palestine to the text of Scripture, but it is not this move, but rather the silence that


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follows it that makes this passage distinctive. Bryant, unlike his contemporaries, makes no move to typologize the experience that he is having; instead, he next mentions that after one of these sessions of Bible reading, some jackals disturbed the party. Bryant maintains his surprising reticence about religious and typological matters throughout his discussion of Palestine, and his account actually grows more taciturn the closer his party gets to Jerusalem. Bryant’s discussion of Jerusalem as seen from outside its walls, a common set piece in the writings of travelers to Palestine, is notably restrained. Rather than indulging in the ecstasies of Prime; the theologizing of Robinson, Thomson, Barclay, or Minor; or the metaphysical reflections of Taylor or Stephens; Bryant writes in an understated manner: I will not attempt the description of a place described so often, nor dwell upon the reflections that arose from my mind at the first sight of that spot from which the light of that religion now proclaimed by all of the civilized world, dawned upon mankind, and to which the hearts of millions in every zone yet turn with a certain reverence. (183)

Bryant avoids any attempt to represent what he sees as he gazes down on Jerusalem, and the tone of his dismissal of the idea of doing so suggests that he regarded the description of Jerusalem from afar as a cliché. He reinforces, however, several of the standard approaches that nineteenth-century American writers take towards Jerusalem. He directs the reader’s attention forcibly to the connection between the landscape and religious belief, and he accepts the attitude of Christian chauvinism taken by many of his compatriots who traveled to the Holy Land as a given. Bryant reinforces the facile equation between Christianity, European/Euro-American culture in general, and civilization that lurks in the background of many of his fellow American travelers’ texts. Bryant’s discussion of Jerusalem does not become significantly more detailed once he begins to describe the landmarks and people inside the city gates. Bryant, though one of the most illustrious of the American travelers to chronicle his journeys in the Middle East in the mid-nineteenth-century, is unexpectedly reticent when discussing Palestine. In this way, Bryant demonstrates the alternative to Curtis’s uncomfortable dance between theological speculation and Oriental romance. Rather than seeking to reconcile the otherworldly associations of Palestine with the rest of the scenes of his journeys through the Middle East, Bryant simply elides any serious discussion of the landmarks that he observes. For most of the Americans who traveled to the Holy Land during the mid-nineteenth century, the trip became an occasion for loquaciousness. For Bryant, it becomes an

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occasion for inscrutable silence, a variation for which it remains difficult to account.

Perhaps the greatest contribution that the various antebellum literary accounts of the Holy Land make to the developing tradition of Holy Land writing is to merge the theological ponderings of the pious writers with the enticing and mysterious elements of the Oriental romance. From Stephens to Bryant, all of the writers promise to disclose hitherto hidden mysteries about Palestine, and from Stephens to Bryant, all of the writers engage a similar set of themes. The enigma of the Islamic, Jewish, Catholic, and Eastern Christian faiths is foregrounded. The sexual politics of the Holy Land narratives become evident as well, as Stephens and Taylor, among others, share the same ambivalent response to the allure of the women of Palestine—a tendency most fully developed by Curtis, but shared by all of the literary travelers. For all of the travelers, the journey becomes an occasion for a record of their own consciousness as they respond to sacred sites and to the contradictions and uncertainties of the contemporary face of Palestine. The lens through which America views the Holy Land becomes, in the work of these writers, transfigured from that of biblical prophecy and exegesis, to that of the interpretation of symbols that are as much aesthetic as they are spiritual. For Stephens, Taylor, Curtis, and Bryant, the Holy Land is not a sacred text to be deciphered, but rather a concrete location wreathed with powerful emotional associations, to be either embraced or suppressed. All four of these writers strive to reconcile the tensions between the concrete realities of Ottoman Palestine and the powerful emotional associations they ineluctably attach to “the Holy Land.” Unlike the pious pilgrims, they do not reconcile these tensions by a leap of faith; unlike David Dorr, John William De Forest, and J. Ross Browne, the three most visibly skeptical travelers to Palestine before the publication of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, they do not turn to satire or farce as a result of their disillusionment. For all these writers, the “poetic illusions” that Stephens tries to dispense with in his representation of Palestine are finally inescapable antagonists.

Notes 1

One figure whose narrative of travel to the Levant resembles in some ways the accounts discussed in this chapter is William F. Lynch (Narrative of the United States’ Expedition to the River Jordan and the Dead Sea. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchford, 1849.) I have chosen not to devote a separate section of the chapter to Lynch because his work, while of genuine historical interest, does not contribute, as do the other texts, to revising the conceptualization of Palestine or the tropes used to represent this conceptualization. Bruce Harvey includes a fine reading of Lynch’s discussion of the Dead Sea in American Geographics: U.S. National


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Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865. (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001). Harvey’s treatment of the issue of gender in John Lloyd Stephens work is also highly instructive. 2 Alexander Keith was a prominent Scottish Protestant minister whose The Evidence of Prophecy (1830) “categorically asserts that anyone passing through the cursed land of Edom would perish” (Obenzinger 46). 3 Curtis is unfortunately given little attention by the most thorough recent study of American travel writing. Larzer Ziff (Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing, 1780-1910. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2000.) devotes a chapter each to John Lloyd Stephens and Bayard Taylor, but he does not devote a significant amount of space to Curtis. This lacuna in Ziff’s study provides an opportunity for supplementary work on nineteenthcentury travel writers who, like Curtis, are specifically literary in their orientation but are overshadowed by Taylor and Stephens. 4 Curtis refers to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “Locksley Hall” (1842) in this passage. In “Locksley Hall,” a young narrator who is disillusioned because he has been rejected in love fantasizes about escape to the (Indian) Orient. He surmises that this course of action will allow him to escape from the “march of mind” (165) of industrial society and that “There the passions cramped no longer shall/ have scope and breathing space;/ I will take some savage woman, she shall rear/ my dusky race” (168-71). Both the romantic escapism and the fundamental condescension and racism of the passage help to form the background for Curtis’s description of his infatuation with Khadra.


Quotidian Pilgrimages

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Chapter 5

Quotidian Pilgrimages Mark Twain, J. Ross Browne, John William DeForest, and David Dorr in Palestine

I am now letting loose the thread of my knowledge; the broach is turning from me to pull away the end, and with it the satisfaction that though it is a hard broach to tie to, I have spun no yarn. The reader that only believes what he can see, through a limited source of facts, is always losing time and money, to read another man’s knowledge; but the one who is always seeking to add to the stock of knowledge which he already has, is sure to gain time and knowledge in the stride of life. —David Dorr (1858) We had fleas all through Syria; we were flayed by fleas from Beirut to Jerusalem. They are the living embodiment of the nights in Palestine, which are now the nearest approximation to the knights of Jerusalem. —J. Ross Browne (1853) Yet notwithstanding it is only the record of a picnic, it has a purpose, which is, to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. I make no pretence of showing anyone how he ought to look at objects beyond the sea—other books do that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do that, there is no need. I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel-writing that may be charged against me—for I think I have seen with impartial eyes, and I am sure that I have written at least honestly, whether wisely or not. —Mark Twain (1869)

The pious pilgrims to the Holy Land and the genteel literary travelers to Palestine both share presuppositions about the seriousness with which the Holy Land should be treated. These presuppositions are rejected by a third group of travelers: the skeptical travelers who wrote entertaining accounts of their journeys to the Holy

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Land that emphasize the farcical or quotidian elements in their pilgrimages. The four most notable travelers in this category are the well-known novelist John William DeForest, the soldier and adventure writer J. Ross Browne, and the African-American travel writer and slave David Dorr, and, of course, Mark Twain. DeForest’s Oriental Acquaintance (1856), Browne’s Yussef, or the Journey of the Farangi (1853), Dorr’s A Colored Man Round the World (1858) and Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad (1869), all use humor both to deflate the pretensions of previous American travelers to the Holy Land and to contribute to a persona that in each text advertises itself as fundamentally candid and even fearless, when candor conflicts with piety. Ultimately, the distinction between Browne, DeForest, and Dorr and the pious pilgrims and the literary romantics rests on the degree of self-consciousness that they bring to their experience of the Holy Land. For Browne, DeForest, Dorr, and especially Mark Twain, all responses to the sacred landscape of Palestine are filtered through a self-mocking irony that calls attention to their own failures as well as those of their predecessors and contemporaries.

J. Ross Browne, Soldier and Adventurer Franklin Walker has identified J. Ross Browne, along with Herman Melville and Mark Twain, as an “irreverent pilgrim” to the Holy Land. Browne’s Yusuf, or the Journey of the Farangi: A Crusade in the East offers a view of the Holy Land that is stripped of sentimentality and that, like DeForest’s account, shifts its focus away from the religious and artistic associations of Holy Land travel. In the preface to his book, Browne writes: An essayist in the Reflector tells us that “Columbus can not be more famous than a man who describes the Temple of Jerusalem.” Now, although I have a great desire to be as famous as Columbus, it is due to the reader to state at the outset that he will find very little about temples in this volume. The only ground upon which I can aspire to such a distinction is, in having avoided, as far as practicable, every thing that has given fame to those who preceded me. (iii)

Browne claims explicitly that he shuns using the material favored by earlier travelers to the Holy Land. His claim is given an especially resonant quality by his invocation of Columbus. Earlier travel writers, he implies, have sought to gain fame approximating that of Columbus by writing about familiar locations; Browne, on the other hand, will gain Columbian fame by metaphorically covering new territory, thus approximating the accomplishment of Columbus. With this bold claim, Browne begins his discussion of his travels in the Orient.


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Like DeForest, Browne frames his narrative as an adventure story rather than as a pilgrimage. As Franklin Walker notes, Browne presents himself as a frontier humorist (83). Therefore, ribald jokes and puns and outrageously exaggerated accounts of everyday events abound. One of the most distinctive features of his text is the way that he makes his dragoman, Yusef, a leading character in his account. Frequently throughout Browne’s account Yusef becomes the vehicle for Browne’s humor. Yusef’s role is, however, relatively limited in the Holy Land portion of the text. Browne advertises his text as unconventional, but he actually follows numerous conventions of travel writing about the Holy Land quite closely even as he occasionally amplifies or redirects these conventions. His account of the inhabitants of Palestine, particularly the non-Protestant Christians, is quite conventional. His treatment of the landscape veers between romanticized descriptions of set tableaux and matter-of-fact expressions of disappointment with the appearance of the land as it appears to the traveler who has already seen America. Like other American writers who discuss the Holy Land, he discusses at length the commercialization of sacred sites, and like DeForest and Twain after him, he responds with humor rather than with the earnest outrage of earlier travelers. Browne also continues the inviolable tradition (broken only by Dorr and Twain) of referring with deference to Edward Robinson at numerous points in his narrative. In his discussion of the inhabitants of the Holy Land, Browne relies heavily on conventional representations of the Orient as backward but exotic. When he describes the town of Tiberias, located near the Sea of Galilee, he writes: Unlike the larger towns in Syria through which we had passed, Tiberias showed no symptoms of European influence. The turbans and fezzes, the loose flowing robes and Oriental slippers, the sashes of rich silks, and all the peculiarities of costume which distinguish a purely Oriental people, existed here without change or innovation. Many of the Jewish women, whom we accidentally saw as we passed by the doors, had fine features but seemed wasted and haggard from sickness. The children were gaudily dressed in red and yellow robes, and were remarkable for their beauty. (322-3)

This passage combines the pious pilgrims’ emphasis on the changelessness of the Holy Land, expressed by Thomson with his assertion that the nineteenthcentury visitor of Palestine will be able to experience the same customs and mores that Abraham experienced, with the fascination with clothing and features that appears in accounts by Stephens, Taylor, and Curtis. Like many of his compatriots, Browne presents an unflattering portrait of the Holy Land’s Christian population. In terms reminiscent of George William

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Curtis’s repeated assertion that “the worst Christians are those of Jerusalem” Browne declaims: It is deplorable and melancholy to see how profaned are the precepts of Him who preached peace and good-will toward all men in this very spot; whose voice still lingers upon Zion and the Mount of Olives; to witness in their worst form envy, hatred, and malice practiced in His name, and the outward worship of God where sin and wickedness reign triumphant. Perhaps upon the whole face of the globe there could not be found a spot less holy than modern Jerusalem. All the fierce bad passions that drive men to crime are let loose here in the struggle for immortality; all the better traits of human nature are buried in fanaticism; all the teachings of wisdom and humanity are violated in a brutish battle for spiritual supremacy. (360)

Here Browne reinforces the most conventional of American Protestant representations of the Holy Land. One aspect that both the literary travelers and the pious pilgrims could agree upon was the corruption of local Christian institutions, and Browne’s discussion of this corruption could as easily come from Robinson or Curtis as from Browne himself. Browne’s descriptions of the physical landscape of Palestine work simultaneously to diminish expectations and to feed his readers’ desire for exotic images of the Orient. Two passages that are immediately adjacent to each other in the text provide an example of this double movement in Browne’s descriptions. When Browne begins to describe the area around the Sea of Galilee, he writes: The ruined villages along the shores presented strange and mystic pictures in their inverted shadows; palm-trees overhung the deep with all their mirrored richness of outline; white ruins of mosques glittered in the distance; the naked and craggy mountains behind were steeped in an atmosphere of purple; and the waters and the mountains were wrapt in the sublimity of repose and the hallowed associations of the past. (321)

Browne departs from the descriptions offered by both pilgrims such as Thomson, Prime, and Robinson and more secular travelers such as Stephens when he describes the Sea of Galilee: Apart from the scriptural interest so interwoven with every spot around the Sea of Galilee, and the gratification of finding some place upon which to refresh the eye, after days of travel through desert regions of parched earth and sterile hills, there is in reality but little in the natural scenery about the lake, unaccompanied by freshening rains and a glowing sky, to attract attention. The valley of Genesareth is certainly a charming spot, but the charm is greatly heightened by the predisposition to be enchanted in the eye of the beholder. Around the shores of the lake the mountains are much the same as all the mountains throughout Palestine; and it is


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only in certain conditions of the atmosphere that they acquire that beauty which had so delighted us. This I think it due to the reader to state, in order that he may not be disappointed should he ever visit that region. (321)

What Browne does here is very different from the standard Protestant critique of sites sacred to Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians. Here Browne dismisses the idea that the landscape itself is peculiarly blessed, a conclusion that would have horrified Thomson, Robinson, and Prime. Significantly, Browne locates the key to a positive reaction to the Holy Land in the “predisposition to be enchanted” of the viewer, thus undermining the idea of an intimate connection between the land and the sacred that so clearly obtains in Thomson’s The Land and the Book. If the allure of the sacred sites found in Palestine is to be credited to a “predisposition to be enchanted,” a project such as Thomson’s, which seeks to learn objective truths about the supernatural from a meticulous analysis of the sacred landscape, is unfounded. Browne also departs from more conventional representations of Palestine in his discussion of fraudulent sites within the Holy Land. Unlike other travelers who castigate non-Protestant religious groups for their roles in propagating pious frauds, he highlights the commercialization of Holy Land travel in a way that calls attention to his own venality as well as that of the members of the local tourist industry: For a few piasters, however, a good deal can be done even in the Garden of Gethsemane; twigs and leaves and pieces of roots can be bought by a little persuasion, and a little more backshish to overcome any lingering scruples of conscience on the part of the custodians. Wicked as it was to do it, I thought so much of my friends at home, that I violated my own conscience and that of an old priest several times, in order to get a good supply of the sacred relics. (362)

Browne follows many of his predecessors and joins many of his contemporaries in noting the commercial exploitation of the sacred in Palestine, but he distinguishes himself by not waxing particularly indignant about the matter. He good-naturedly admits to “violat[ing] my own conscience.” He goes still further several pages later, when he describes a business venture involving the waters of the Jordan: I took my tin can . . . , went down to the river, and filled it with water for the benefit of some acquaintances at home. Every drop of that water, I intended distributing with miserly discretion, and when I came to the last drop, it was my design to fill the can again with water from the nearest pump, and still protest on my veracity, as a traveler, that it contained water which I had myself dipped up out of the Jordan. (377)

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As this passage illustrates, Browne does not position himself fundamentally as a Protestant crying out against Catholic or Eastern Orthodox abuses in Palestine. To the contrary, he positions himself as an amiable confidence man who merely wants to be assured of a piece of the action himself.

John William DeForest, Novelist John William DeForest is better known as the author of the novel Miss Ravenel’s Conversion (1867) than as a travel writer, but his Oriental Acquaintance (1856) is one of the more entertaining nineteenth-century American treatments of the Middle East. DeForest does not devote his whole account, or even the majority of his account, to a description of the Holy Land, but the narrative of his Oriental travels contains a lengthy portion that narrates his adventures in Palestine. DeForest, more than any of the other travelers discussed to this point and to a degree surpassed only by Browne and Twain, highlights the comical aspects of his journey to Jerusalem. DeForest’s experience of the Holy Land was more extensive than that of most American travelers. Ahmed Metwalli notes that DeForest had an acquaintance with Palestine that began in 1846, when he went to live in Palestine for a year in order to accelerate his recovery from an acute bronchial infection (324). A curious aspect of An Oriental Acquaintance is that DeForest does not emphasize his inside knowledge of Palestine; instead, he presents himself as a “typical” American traveler. Metwalli has argued that DeForest’s failure to craft a distinctive persona in his account of his Middle Eastern travels can partially explain the fact that his book was much less commercially successful than those of his counterparts. But there is, in fact, a persona in his text that is distinct from most of his fellow American pilgrims to Palestine. There are also strong resemblances between The Innocents Abroad and An Oriental Acquaintance in their jocular tone and their emphasis on explaining the experience of Holy Land travel rather than reinforcing expectations about what the Holy Land would be like. By calling attention to the incongruity of his experiences in the Holy Land with expectations formed in America, DeForest positions himself as a truth-telling guide to a land frequently obscured by the accounts of biased or naïve guides. This claim of authenticity is consistently present among American travelers to the Holy Land; where DeForest differs from his contemporaries, whether pious or skeptical, is in his lack of interest in making or refuting apologetics regarding the sacred landscape. DeForest’s account of his visit to the Holy Land takes the form of a straightforward adventure story. He helps his reader to visualize the experience of traveling in Palestine, complete with heat, dust, fleas, the annoyances that the well-


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to-do American traveler feels when confronted by beggars, and the annoyance that the cultured American feels at the arrogance and stupidity of his less cultured American traveling companions. DeForest sets the tone for his comical treatment of the Holy Land as soon as he begins to narrate his journey to Jerusalem. Narrating the beginning of the journey, he writes: And one fine morning in early March we had everything packed up, called our tribe together, mounted our horses and set out for the holy city. “God preserve your eyes!” shouted the beggars with sore optics or none at all, as we rode by them. “God keep your children!” screamed women, holding out disgusting babies to attract our pecuniary commiseration. “God give you!” roared the unlucky ones who had no ostensible title to pity except their dirt and their tatters. “O God!” shouted the servants as they urged each other to hasten. “God!” yelled the muleteers to their stumbling donkeys. (60)

This passage demonstrates that DeForest’s treatment of Palestine will be much less reverent than that of most of his compatriots. Beyond the quasi-sacrilegious character of the passage, it is noteworthy that DeForest does not adopt a pose common to most American travelers to Palestine: he does not seek to show his readers that he is feeling any particular compassion for the inhabitants of Palestine. He positions himself as a writer who will not be guided by the conventions of travel writing in the Holy Land and will therefore be a trustworthy guide to the sordid realities of the ostensibly sacred landscape. One of the most memorable forms that DeForest’s emphasis on the farcical elements of Holy Land travel takes is that of his animadversion on the topic of fleas. Regarding the fleas of Palestine, DeForest exclaims: The annoyance caused by these vivacious animals to the Eastern traveler is almost insupportable; and the disagreeable consciousness of their restless pilgrimages and vigorous burrowings, often destroys the effect of the finest ruin or landscape. How can a man think about Joshua or the Valley of Jehoshaphat, when fifty indefatigable little bores are sharply reminding him of the actual and suffering present? Humanity pauses for a reply. In the helplessness of his rage, the bitten tourist seeks consolation in thinking of the infinity of nature, by which even these diminutive tormentors are furnished with still more dwarfish persecutors. (66)

DeForest contrasts the exalted feelings that travelers to sacred sites are supposed to experience with the reality of finding that physical distractions, like flea bites, prevent the traveler from engaging in meaningful contemplation. The flea, in fact, becomes the primary object of DeForest’s reflection and contemplation, with the identity of the sacred site before him becoming merely a fact to be noted in passing. By making the quotidian aspects of his journey the center of his account,

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DeForest undermines the tendency in much of Holy Land travel writing to stress the connections between the physical landscape observed and experienced and its sacred associations. DeForest’s treatment of the sites that he visits becomes even more flippant when he arrives in Jerusalem. He dispenses with his tour of Jerusalem in just one paragraph, writing that: The first, last, and chiefest thing that we did at Jerusalem was, of course, to see it. We went regularly through it, then around it, and visited all the holy and unholy places with which it is crowded . . . . A shaven monk showed us Mount Calvary in the second story of his church; and a gray-bearded Moslem showed us a hole in the Mount of Olives, which, he said, went as far as Bagdad [sic]. There is such an air of absurdity about most of the sacred localities and traditions which abound at Jerusalem, that they excite unbelief and irreverence rather than faith and devotion. These subjects, however, have been so widely and thoroughly discussed, that all the world knows them; and I shall, therefore, confine myself to my customary chit-chat about traveling companions and adventures. (80-81)

DeForest reveals his knowledge of other travelers’ reflections on the impediment to faith posed by the physical realities of the Holy Land, but he evinces little interest in exploring the matter. Instead, DeForest positions himself firmly outside the stream of pilgrims and tourists who come to the Holy Land for religious reasons and reminds his reader that the focus of An Oriental Acquaintance will remain on contemporary realities, even when he writes about Jerusalem itself. Furthermore, the flippant tone suggests a theme of Holy Land travel that David Dorr mentions and Mark Twain develops at some length, namely, the commodification of experience that is an ineluctable part of nineteenth-century American travel. The traveler pays his (or occasionally her) money, comes to Palestine, experiences what everyone else experiences, and turns the raw material of these experiences into a book, which may recoup the traveler’s fare to Palestine and provide some added profit and fame. DeForest observes that the trope of extended reflection on sacred sites has been used so frequently that it has become a cliché.1 Therefore, he studiously avoids engaging in such reflection and promises his readers a version of Holy Land pilgrimage that undermines the authority of previous writers and provides himself and his readers with some amusement at the expense of his more lugubrious predecessors.2 DeForest highlights the arrogance and foolishness of his fellow American tourists, an aspect of American tourism in the Holy Land that his predecessors and contemporaries rarely emphasize. Regarding his party’s entrance to Jerusalem itself, DeForest writes:


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A tall, grave Turkish officer, dressed in the blue frock-coat and straight trowsers of his uniform, advanced to our Sagamore and bade him dismount. “For what reason?” asked our resolute chieftain, without offering to stir from his saddle. “A new system of passports has been instituted, and yours must be examined.” “Who has ordered it?” “His Excellency, the pasha.” “Well, send the pasha to me!” thundered the Sagamore; and, putting spurs to his horse, he pranced on over the clattering pavement. Our whole party followed . . . supposing that all differences had been settled righteously. (77)

Several aspects of this passage distinguish DeForest from most of his predecessors. First, we have a clear portrayal of the arrogance of the company of American travelers, which is contrasted with the orderly behavior of the Turkish officer. Second, DeForest reverses a common trope in American writing about the Middle East, that of comparing Arabs and other residents of the Middle East to American Indians, and refers to the American leader of their party as a “Sagamore” and alternately as a “chieftain.” This reversal of the common Arabs-as-Indians trope is certainly pejorative in relation to American Indians, but it also undermines conventional distinctions between the civilization of Western travelers and the “primitiveness” of local customs. DeForest’s willingness to represent the American tourists in an unflattering light anticipates Mark Twain’s more extensive commentary on the failings of American pilgrims to the Holy Land.

David F. Dorr, Traveler and Slave Another counter to the more mainstream Holy Land narratives appears in the work of David F. Dorr, author of A Colored Man Round the World (1858), who occupies a curious position among the travelers discussed in this chapter because, unlike his contemporaries who wrote about the trip from America to Palestine, he did not make his trip of his own free will. Dorr visited Palestine as the slave of another traveler, Cornelius Fellowes. As Malini Johar Schueller notes in her introduction to Dorr’s text, Dorr thus occupies a distinct position among American travelers, most of whom were drawn from the upper classes. What makes Dorr’s narrative so distinctive is the element of hybridity that appears in his narrative,3 mixing his social position as a victim of oppression and exploitation as a slave with his need to present himself as a gentleman of leisure in his persona for his text. This hybridity is possible because Dorr occupied an intermediate position as a “mulatto” and as a personal slave to a wealthy lawyer (Schueller xi). Dorr’s text, moreover, was published after his escape from slavery, and throughout the text Dorr is shaping his persona as a free man of letters. As a result, many portions of Dorr’s

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narrative read as if they could have been written by any genteel white American traveler from the 1850s; at other points, however, Dorr’s discussion of Palestine is clearly shaped by his racial, economic, and social position as an African-American slave.4 Obenzinger has argued that Dorr’s travel writing is “unique not only to African-American literature, but also to the entire corpus of antebellum travel literature for its flouting of conventions and genteel proprieties” (228).5 Although Obenzinger is certainly correct about the distinctiveness of Dorr’s text, it is worthwhile to note as well the ways in which Dorr’s writing consciously participates in the tradition of American travel writing already being established, as well as the ways in which it complicates that tradition. Dorr’s discussion of the Holy Land is relatively brief (roughly nine pages in length), but a comparison between his account of the Holy Land and that of his white compatriots is instructive. Dorr adopts a similar stance in relation to the local population to that of the other American travelers. Like most of the pious travelers, and Melville as well, Dorr expresses considerable anxiety about the relative positions occupied by the mosque of Omar and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher: The mosque of Omar’s dome glittered in the sunbeam, and this Mahommedan sanctum towered above all the buildings of the city that was once “the glory of the world” because of its godliness. Yes, the mosque of the Turk looked down upon our glorious sepulcher, as it were with contempt. I made my way straight to our humble edifice, and fell upon the marble slabs that once entombed the flesh and blood of the greatest man ever tabernacled in a body of flesh. (184)

Dorr responds with conventional Christian indignation to the contrast between the prominence of the mosque and the church, but his initial reaction to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher distinguishes him from many of the other American writers. Dorr does not immediately distance himself from the traditions surrounding the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on Protestant grounds. Instead, he initially embraces the site, and only later in his narrative, after hearing the stories associated with the sacred sites in Jerusalem, does he become incredulous. Dorr’s conflicted intertextuality with other American travelers’ accounts appears at several other points in his narrative as well. Like virtually all of his fellow American travelers to Palestine, Dorr invokes the fame of Edward Robinson, albeit briefly. Dorr mentions that his guide had in earlier years “traveled along the range with one Dr. Robinson who wrote a book, and was attacked by this rascally Sheik before, and refused to pay then, and would refuse now” (181-2). Dorr’s brief mention of Robinson shows both his similarity to and his difference from the other American writers discussing the Holy Land in the 1850s. On the one hand, Dorr does not leave the ubiquitous Robinson completely out of his text; on


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the other, Robinson appears only briefly and is described without any particular deference. Dorr reserves his real admiration for Robinson’s guide, who has the courage and resourcefulness to counteract all attempts at extortion. Dorr’s identification with the guide, so unusual for American travelers, is reminiscent of the solicitude of Clorinda Minor and Sarah Barclay Johnson for the plight of women in Palestine. In both cases, the personal experiences of the authors lead them toward great empathy with particular local groups. Dorr emphasizes several of the major concerns that appear in Stephens’s and Taylor’s accounts. In Dorr’s account, the primacy of experience and the contrast between experience and expectation that appear in so many of his fellow Americans’ writings about the Holy Land are readily evident. When a guide provides information that stretches the limits of credibility, Dorr pointedly remarks that: I was not inclined to believe anything I heard from the people about here, because I knew as much as they did about it. I came to Jerusalem with a submissive heart, but when I heard all the absurdities of these ignorant people, I was more inclined to ridicule right over these sacred dead bodies and spots, than pay homage. . . . Having stayed in the city of Jerusalem for seventeen days I leave it, never wishing to return again. (186-7)

This statement reflects both the empiricist posture adopted by the bulk of American travel writers when discussing Palestine and the sense of disappointment at a landscape that fails to measure up to expectations. The vehemence with which Dorr states his disillusionment with the sites that he observes goes far beyond the fashionable disillusionment of most of the genteel writers, however. This passage is one moment, perhaps, when Dorr dispenses with the urbane persona that he adopts in many portions of his narrative and writes bluntly about his perceptions in a way that makes his text more similar to those of Twain and Melville than to those of the other literary travelers in the genteel tradition. Dorr differs from the other antebellum Holy Land exegetes as well in his focus on economic issues. Regarding the famous hospitality of the Holy Land monasteries, Dorr writes somewhat cynically: The best place to locate for a short time, is in the convent attached to the church; they make no charges against a pilgrim, but no pilgrim can come here unless rich, and no rich man will go away without giving something to so sacred a place as the tomb of our Savior. (185)

Dorr demonstrates a sensitivity to the power relations involved in the practice of Holy Land travel that is only infrequently seen among American Holy Land travelers. Perhaps because of his position as a slave, Dorr is able to see a basic fact

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that many of his compatriots fail to mention at all: the privileged status of the American traveler in Palestine. By foregrounding this element of the traveler’s experience in Palestine, Dorr makes visible a crucial element in the American construction of the Holy Land. Dorr provides a particularly clear-eyed account of the nature of Holy Land travel in the antebellum period precisely because he is able to recognize the role that the power relations among the protagonists of Holy Land travel are fundamentally unequal. This insight is one of those that will provide Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad in the post-bellum period with some of its humor, but it is noteworthy that Dorr is the only antebellum traveler who anticipates this feature of Twain’s work. Browne, DeForest, and Dorr collectively serve as a bridge between the mainstream tradition of American writing about the Holy Land and the most iconoclastic of the nineteenth-century American travelers to Palestine, Mark Twain. All three of them, like Twain himself, reproduce many of the most common themes of Holy Land writing as developed by both the pious pilgrims and the literary travelers. Conversely, all three of them present a persona that is humorous and adventuresome rather than reverent or romantic. Twain employs these strategies in his account of the Holy Land, incorporating them into a wideranging critique of the religious and epistemological foundations of Holy Land travel.

Mark Twain: Questing Skeptic Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad combines the ambitiousness of Thomson, Barclay, or Stephens with the irreverence of DeForest, Browne, or Dorr. Twain emphasizes many of the same incongruities between expectation and reality that so bemuse Dorr, Browne, and DeForest, but in his efforts to reconstitute a sense of usable reality for the Holy Land, Twain’s project resembles that of Protestant pilgrims like Thomson and Robinson and their efforts to reclaim the Holy Land from alleged Eastern Orthodox and Catholic perversions of the sacred landscape. Twain is not content simply to debunk the standard traveler’s myths about Ottoman Palestine; rather, he attempts to fashion a response to the Holy Land that is peculiar to post-Civil War America and that provides a view of Palestine as seen by a skeptical American Everyman. Unlike DeForest, Dorr, and Browne, Twain undertakes a project that is at least as constructive as it is demythologizing; like DeForest, Dorr, and Browne he makes humor the basis for his project.6 In his discussion of Palestine in The Innocents Abroad, Twain consistently foregrounds issues of epistemology and “seeing.” Twain explores self-consciously the ways in which travelers either construct a Holy Land of their own or allow their


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predecessors to construct a Holy Land for them. Most of his fellow travelers, Twain suggests, are content to see the Holy Land that has been constructed for them by Robinson, Thomson, Prime, and other generally pious travelers who wrote widely popular narratives about Palestine. Consequently, Twain portrays the Holy Land as the one place where Americans are most likely to be dazzled by the sight of lands other than their own, where the hard-headed empiricism that can criticize so easily the splendors of Europe and even those of other portions of the Orient breaks down into reverent awe. The persona that Twain crafts for himself stands in striking contrast to that of many other American tourists since Twain is able to use the very credulity of his compatriots as a tool for unveiling his own view of Palestine. Significantly, Twain focuses his attention in his account on other travelers who will throw his own skepticism into high relief, largely ignoring figures like De Forest and Browne, or even Taylor and Stephens. In The Innocents Abroad, Twain seeks to extend the domain of American skepticism and empiricism to include even the topography of the Holy Land, and he accomplishes this first and foremost by exposing the timid reverence that many in his party show for the sacred landscape of Palestine. In the newspaper valedictory for The Innocents Abroad, Twain describes a surprising difference between the responses of his fellow travelers to Europe and Egypt and their responses to the Holy Land: We examined modern and ancient statuary with a critical eye in Florence, Rome, or anywhere we found it, and praised it if we saw fit, and if we didn’t we said we preferred the wooden Indians in front of the cigar stores of America. But the Holy Land brought out all our enthusiasm. We fell into raptures by the barren Sea of Galilee . . . .. After dismal, smileless Palestine, beautiful Egypt had few charms for us. (494-5)

This description of the contradiction between the travelers’ skeptical response to the beauties of Europe and their wholehearted embrace of the more dubious attractions of Palestine exemplifies the sardonic tone of his treatment of the landscape of the Holy Land and the often naïve attitudes of his fellow American travelers. Moreover, the passage also underscores some of the significant departures from more mainstream American traditions of Holy Land writing that appear in Twain’s account. Twain goes beyond his predecessors in highlighting the special position that is granted to Palestine in standard American travel narratives and explicitly questioning this position. Twain’s discussion of the Holy Land calls attention to the ways in which many of those who write about Palestine project their own mental and cultural constructions of the Holy Land onto Palestine, a tendency that Edward Said identifies as a defining characteristic of Orientalism (12). Twain’s achievement in The Innocents Abroad is that he has understood the ways in which texts have

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supplanted reality in Holy Land writing. Because of this he provides an incisive critique of naïve American travel writing that extends the arguments of predecessors like Bayard Taylor and J. Ross Browne. Twain’s interrogation of previous American accounts of Palestine is complicated and enriched by the persona that he crafts for himself in his narrative. Twain presents himself as an American Everyman—skeptical, shrewd, businesslike, considerably less cultured than the real Samuel Clemens, and invariably candid in his reporting of his impressions. Twain’s account of the Holy Land therefore becomes, more than any of the previous accounts, an account of the American psyche as well. In this regard, The Innocents Abroad bears a striking resemblance to Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive. From the start, Twain’s depiction of the Holy Land contains two major features: his ambivalent attitude towards the topography and nineteenth century inhabitants of the Holy Land, and his demythologizing of Western constructions of the Holy Land. These two strands often come together as Twain uses his experience of Holy Land topography and his interactions with its inhabitants to critique the naïve accounts of the Holy Land given in travel narratives written by his fellow Americans and accepted unquestionably by his fellow pilgrims aboard the Quaker City. Furthermore, Twain includes the biblical accounts of the Holy Land, and those accounts provided by Christian tradition among those he wishes to debunk. Notably, the initial reaction to the experience of travel in the Holy Land that Twain records is not that of disillusionment. Instead, Twain’s first remark on the Holy Land experience addresses the surprising luxuriousness of the accommodations for the travelers in his company. Regarding the tents in which the travelers have been lodged, he remarks: And they call this [his italics] camping out. Those stately fellows in baggy trousers and turbaned fezzes brought in dinner which consisted of roast mutton, roast chicken, roast goose, potatoes, bread, tea, pudding, apples, and delicious grapes; the viands were better cooked than any we had eaten in weeks . . . . yet that polite dragoman, Abraham, came bowing and apologizing for the whole affair. . . . They call this camping out. At this rate it is a glorious privilege to be a pilgrim in the Holy Land. (323)

The passage represents the peak of the narrator’s enthusiasm in his description of Palestine. The pleasant surprise that he feels at the luxury of his tour in Palestine only serves to reinforce the series of unpleasant surprises that follow, as he rehearses all the conventional grounds for disappointment with the landscape and sacred sites of Palestine and adds some new grounds for dissatisfaction as well. Like DeForest and Browne, Twain goes beyond expressing disappointment with the sacred sites of Palestine to express disappointment with his physical


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surroundings in the Holy Land. The topography of Palestine as seen by Twain is substantially different from the Holy Land he learned about in Sunday School. He describes his reaction to the physical smallness of Palestine in the following passage: I can see easily enough that if I wish to profit by this tour and come to a correct understanding of the matters connected with it . . . . I must begin a system of reduction. Like my grapes which the spies bore out of the Promised Land, I have got everything in Palestine on too large a scale . . . . The word Palestine always brought to my mind a vague suggestion of a country as large as the United States. (363)

Twain seeks to revise the impressions about the Holy Land that he has received from his culture by looking at the land itself and describing it in terms of the American landscape with which he is already familiar. Thus the “kings” described in biblical narratives become “a parcel of petty chiefs—ill-clad and ill-conditioned savages much like our Indians, who lived in full sight of each other and whose ‘kingdoms’ were large when they were five miles square” (363). 7 By attempting to reduce the Holy Land to its true proportions, Twain also reduces the biblical narrative itself to proportions that are less awe-inspiring and seemingly irrefutable to his readers. Twain’s discussion of the “system of reduction” that he must undertake as he travels in Palestine includes a significant mention of the difference that technology makes in the traveler’s perception of space. He unpacks the biblical phrase “from Dan to Beersheba” when he writes: It is equivalent to our phrases ‘from Maine to Texas’—‘from Baltimore to San Fransisco.’ Our expression and that of the Israelites both mean the same—great distance. With their slow camels and asses, it was about a seven days’ journey from Dan to Beersheba—say a hundred and fifty or sixty miles—it was the entire length of their country, and not to be undertaken without great preparation and much ceremony. (357)

Twain marvels at the fact that a distance of one hundred and fifty miles can seem so significant in the biblical narrative. He recognizes, however, that a trip by rail from Baltimore to San Francisco would be an easier and more comfortable trip than the journey from Dan to Beersheba even at the time of his own journey. He therefore concludes, “If we chance to discover that from Dan to Beersheba seemed a mighty stretch of country to the Israelites, let us not be airy with them, but reflect that it was and is [italics in original] a mighty stretch when one cannot traverse it by rail” (358). Twain’s consistent debunking of the size and beauty of famous landmarks fulfills his goal of stripping away the veil of illusion that the Western construction

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of the Orient has put between the traveler and the reality of the land. This demystified description of Holy Land topography stands in stark contrast to a passage from Prime’s Tent Life in the Holy Land, and, in fact, Prime’s account is repeatedly mocked by Twain in The Innocents Abroad, as is indicated by the transformation of Prime into “Grimes” at many points in the narrative. Prime confesses that if the stories related in the New Testament had taken place in New Jersey or Long Island, he would find their reality much more difficult to accept. Once he has visited the Holy Land however, he finds that “Every step I advanced on the soil of Palestine offered some new and startling evidence of the truth of the sacred story” (Prime 314). Thus, the Holy Land for Prime is suffused with a magical glow that enables him to believe that events had happened there that Long Island would be unable to evoke. Thomson’s The Land and the Book, to which Twain refers in passing without subjecting it to the biting criticism that he reserves for Prime, provides another example of the credulous attitude that Twain criticizes. This text represents a less easily ridiculed instance of American travel writing than Prime’s work since Thomson spent forty years as a missionary in Palestine and Syria, and his account is more informed by experience than that of Prime. Thomson joins Prime, however, in asserting that the Holy Land must be approached in a radically different manner from other geographic locations: “Let us, therefore, deal reverently with [the Holy Land]. . . .Let us put off the sordid sandal of worldliness and sin as we enter this consecrated domain” (1). Thomson’s goal is to allow the land of Palestine to serve as a commentary on the Bible and vice versa. Thus he writes in a thoroughly religious context, with his acceptance of the accuracy of the biblical narrative acting as a given. Thomson proposes (note the similarity to Twain’s argument about the religious construction of Palestine) that the Holy Land cannot be approached except through the perspective of faith if it is to be accurately understood. Twain's project in The Innocents Abroad, however, is to provide a perspective on the Holy Land that does not have faith as an a priori commitment. A specific instance of Twain’s intense disagreement with Prime’s description of Palestine, and by extension Prime and Thomson’s dogmatic attempt to view the Holy Land specifically through the eyes of faith, is his cynical description of the hallowed Sea of Galilee, which becomes a mere foil for his glowing description of Lake Tahoe. When Twain arrives at the Sea of Galilee, his thoughts turn almost immediately to the superiority of Lake Tahoe, which he describes in glowing terms. The Sea of Galilee, in complete contrast to Tahoe, is a “solemn, sailless, tintless lake, reposing within its rim of yellow hills and low, steep banks and looking just as expressionless and unpoetical . . . as any metropolitan reservoir in Christendom” (381). After dismissing the Sea of Galilee’s charms so brusquely, he then turns to Prime’s description of the same


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landmark, and subjects it to a withering critical analysis. Prime, (or “Grimes”) writes a glowing description of the lake, referring to the lake’s surroundings as “scenes of glorious beauty” and providing a breathless account of the stark beauty of the lake itself. Twain’s response is biting in its sarcasm: So stripped, there remains a lake six miles wide and neutral in color; with steep green banks, unrelieved by shrubbery . . . . in the north, a mountain called Hermon, with snow on it; peculiarity of the picture, calmness; its prominent feature, one tree. No ingenuity could make such a picture beautiful to one’s actual vision. (382)

Prime’s depiction of the lake’s beauties is thus exposed as an attempt to preserve the mystique of the Holy Land while ignoring the reality. As Walker points out, the only time that Twain finds the Sea of Galilee beautiful is when he sees it by starlight (179). Twain suggests that Prime’s religious presuppositions always color the lake with the tints of starlight, but beyond this suggestion, he also intimates that the landscape of Palestine still has its own peculiar value, even for the traveler who is able to see the land clearly by day. By night, once the contradictions and flaws in the landscape are veiled, even the skeptical traveler can once again find grounds for awe. Of particular interest to those examining the concept of Orientalism as defined by Said is the way in which Twain’s fellow pilgrims internalize the description of the Holy Land which they have read in travel books by authors like Prime and Thomson. Twain’s critique of the general bad behavior of the American pilgrims on the Quaker City cruise has been noted repeatedly and has been discussed at some length by Robert Egan (1982), but Twain’s fiercest mockery is reserved for the way that the pilgrims fail to see the reality of contemporary Palestine. He notes repeatedly that the pilgrims quickly apply pious descriptions culled from American travel books to whatever they observe. He writes, “I can almost tell, in set phrase, what they will say when they see Tabor, Nazareth, Jericho, and Jerusalem – because I have seen the books they will ‘smouch’ their ideas from [italics in original]” (384). Twain is amazed to note that they seem incapable of seeing any kind of Holy Land other than that described in the travel books that they read. Twain looks beyond the issue of the pilgrims’ borrowings from contemporary travel narratives and sees an agenda behind the production of these narratives: I am sure . . . . that many who have visited this land in years gone by were Presbyterians, and came seeking evidences in support of their particular creed; they found a Presbyterian Palestine, and they had already made up their minds to find no other . . . . Others were Baptists, seeking Baptist evidences and a Baptist Palestine. Others were Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians . . . . Honest as these men’s intentions may have been, . . . they entered the country with their verdicts already

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The Romance of the Holy Land prepared, and they could no more write dispassionately and impartially about it than they could about their own wives and children. (384)

Twain skillfully ties the choices that the pilgrims make to their source in the affective side of religious belief, particularly when he compares the pilgrims’ response to the Holy Land to their devotion to their own families. Twain’s critique of the Western textualization of the Holy Land extends beyond nineteenth-century travel-writing to the sacred texts and traditions with which the travel-writers are familiar. His tour of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is filled with sardonic commentary on the various relics and landmarks that he sees. He devotes a particularly wry aside to the column in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher that tradition marked as the center of the world. Twain suggests facetiously that the fact the pillar has moved several times can be explained by postulating that large mountain ranges have flown into space, thus shifting the center of the earth. This pseudo-theory, Twain says, would serve as “a withering rebuke to those philosophers who would make us believe that it is not possible for any portion of the earth to fly off into space” (427). Twain also parodies the quasilogical proofs that are presented for the historicity of some of the sacred landmarks. James M. Cox has described Twain’s response to this portion of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as follows: Moving back up the stream of human history toward the source of the Christian myth, the irreverent Innocent keeps taking up the burden of history only to cast it off again. His discovery is constantly that the myth, though not certainly worthless, may well be. And he feels that impersonated grief is as appropriate a response in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher as real grief, for the simple reason that the tourist cannot tell what is real in the context of the fraudulent excrescences upon the body of the myth. (57)

As Cox suggests here, the presentation of sacred sites in The Innocents Abroad takes the form of a dramatic performance. Twain alternately assumes the masks of believer and unbeliever, and this performance enacts the very ambiguities that the Holy Land presents to the traveler. Twain’s pilgrimage through the Church of the Holy Sepulcher brings up a distinction that must not be ignored: the difference between his treatment of hagiographic traditions and his treatment of biblical traditions. Twain is not content merely to debunk the writings of contemporary travel writers. Rather, he attempts to take on the tradition of Christian dogma insofar as it relates to the Holy Land. He criticizes these Christian traditions and teaching on two levels: that of Christian tradition and that of biblical narrative. On the first level, he attacks traditions that are associated with the hagiographic literature of the Catholic and


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Orthodox churches. In ridiculing these traditions he is overtly merciless, perhaps because his audience in largely Protestant America is unlikely to be angered by his tone. In fact, Twain’s criticism of the hagiographic tradition in the Holy Land is quite similar to that of Prime and Thomson. Twain goes beyond Prime and Thomson in his willingness to extend his critique to the biblical narrative itself. He is nonetheless much more careful in his criticisms of the biblical narrative, which would likely offend many of his Protestant readers. Therefore, it would be inaccurate to assert a simple opposition between Twain as a debunker of legends and Thomson as a credulous defender of every tradition that has been propagated in the Holy Land. Thomson is strikingly skeptical of the claims that many of the locals make about instances of the supernatural in the Holy Land, and he is frequently appalled by the traditions of the Eastern Orthodox churches in Palestine. He refers in particular to the ceremony of the holy fire that he sees celebrated at the Church of the Sepulcher in Jerusalem, and he states, “There was not the least appearance of religious reverence, and to me the spectacle was extremely humiliating” (481). Twain’s suspicion of Catholic and Orthodox traditions belongs as much to the mentality of the Protestant travel writers Twain mocks as to Twain himself. The uniqueness of Twain’s text lies not in his eager debunking of older traditions, but in his willingness to attack the sentimentality and culturally constructed vision of American Protestants. Twain’s attack on the Protestant vision of the Holy Land proceeds by subjecting the Bible itself to close scrutiny. Twain’s comments on the Bible are more restrained than his comments on hagiographic traditions, and quite often the irony in these passages is heavily veiled. A particularly significant passage of this sort appears when he discusses the biblical story of Joshua’s invasion of Canaan and the particularly lurid tale of Jael and Sisera, and another occurs when he contrasts the story of Joseph with the story of Esau. In the first passage, he relates two tales from the Old Testament that he finds offensive in their violence and lack of compassion for Israel’s enemies. His comments on Joshua’s victory over the Canaanites at the waters of Merom are pointed: “But Joshua destroyed them all, root and branch. That was his usual policy in war . . . . He made this valley, so peaceful now, a reeking slaughterpen” (361). Twain goes on to describe how Jael, another heroic figure from the Old Testament, drove a tent peg through the temples of Sisera, a Syrian general, while he was asleep in her tent. These instances provide the grounds for Twain’s critique of the morality of the biblical narrative. Twain juxtaposes the story of Jacob and Esau in chapter 20. Twain compares Joseph’s vaunted forgiveness of his brothers when they met him in Egypt with Esau’s forgiveness of Jacob after Jacob’s theft of his birthright. Twain questions both the generally accepted understanding of Joseph’s act of forgiveness as wholly admirable and the tendency to ignore Esau’s magnanimity in forgiving Jacob. He writes, “Who stands first—outcast Esau forgiving Jacob in prosperity, or

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Joseph on a king’s throne forgiving the ragged tremblers whose happy rascality placed him there” (369). Twain’s critique of the Western tendency to judge the Holy Land on the basis of already-read texts thus extends from the travel-writers of his own day back through the earliest biblical texts. When Twain criticizes the morality of the story of Jacob and Esau, he goes beyond criticism of the biblical narrative itself to an implied criticism of specifically Calvinist beliefs. As Twain’s Presbyterian readers (those of his readers who share Twain’s upbringing) would know, the story of Jacob and Esau occupies a particularly prominent place in Calvinist doctrine because God’s choice of Jacob before birth to be Esau’s superior indicates God’s complete freedom from the influence of human effort.8 By offering a moral criticism of the story of Jacob and Esau, then, Twain undermines the claim to morality of one of American Protestantism’s most venerable religious traditions. It is worth noting, however, that by criticizing Calvinism, Twain engages in one of American Protestantism’s most venerable traditions. Twain’s eighteenth-century satirical forerunner in writing about the Middle East, Royall Tyler, includes a scene in his quasiautobiographical novella The Bay Boy in which a parson rejects an overbearing deacon’s request that he name his son Calvin on the grounds that he already owns an “ill-tempered cur” by that name, implying that the Calvinist tradition has more in common with the canine than the human. Furthermore, as Nathan Hatch notes, polemical “hymns” critical of Calvinism made up a large percentage of songs sung at revivalist camp meetings in nineteenth-century America. Twain’s irreverence in this case is modulated somewhat by the fact that his satire conforms to an acceptable segment of American Protestant opinion, even as it hints at a broader critic of Biblicism.9 Twain’s status as an “irreverent pilgrim” is complicated by the fact that he occasionally takes an ambivalent stance toward the sacred sites that he views, rather than simply pouring scorn on all of them. The most significant instance of Twain’s refusal to take his satire as far as it could possibly go occurs when he is touring the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and comes to the site of the crucifixion. Twain’s tone changes markedly, and he actually brings himself to refer to Prime by his real name and to use an argument in favor of the site’s authenticity, one he admits to deriving from Prime. Twain agrees with Prime that this is indeed at the very least near to the spot of the crucifixion, and for several pages Twain becomes surprisingly reflective. He still notes the constructedness of this site, mentioning that the visitor to this spot is hard-pressed to remember that Jesus was crucified outside and not in a Catholic church, but he is moved to reflect on the significance of the site of the crucifixion even for a skeptical pilgrim like himself. He writes, “With all its claptrap side-shows and unseemly impostures of every kind, it is still grand, reverend, venerable—for a god died there” (434). While Twain is unwilling


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to accept the dogma of the faiths that trace their lineage to that event, he is still respectful of the event itself. Twain’s ambivalence toward sacred sites can also be understood in light of the ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his Divinity School Address (1838), Emerson argues that “Alone in all history, [Jesus] estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world” (54). Several lines later he reveals the reason that, not despite but because of his reverence for Jesus as he understands him, Emerson embraces an anti-dogmatic position. He writes, “[C]hurches are not built upon [Jesus’] principles, but upon his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teachings of Greece and Egypt, before” (54). Emerson wishes to recover the pure essence of Jesus’ teachings and remove all subsequent accretions, and he contends that the pure essence of Jesus’ teachings is same as his own teaching. Twain’s representation of the Holy Land seems for the most part to be quite similar to that suggested by Emerson’s ideal of anti-dogmatic Christianity, but important distinctions remain. Whereas Emerson seeks a Christianity of principles purified of its antiquated tropes, Twain suggests that the tropes of the biblical narrative are valuable insofar as the reader remembers that they are tropes. Twain, unlike Emerson, does seek to preserve the romance of the scriptures and of Christianity in general while forcefully reminding his readers that he views them through the “starlight” of romance rather than as absolute empirical guides. Twain represents the emotion that is associated with sacred sites as something that, purified of cant and sectarian violence, can reasonably be expected to lead to meaningful moral reflection. In this respect, then, The Innocents Abroad bears the impression of the Holy Land that Twain himself came to seek. He searches in The Innocents Abroad for a Holy Land experience that can allow him to criticize and ridicule American popular religion and present an Emersonian account of the significance of the biblical narrative, and he, like the Presbyterians and Methodists he so trenchantly critiques, finds the Holy Land that he seeks. The distinctiveness of Twain’s text rests, however, on more than its embrace of an anti-dogmatic reading of Christianity, which is after all present in embryonic form in Stephens and Taylor. The crux of Twain’s distinctiveness as a commentator on the Holy Land appears in his summary of his reflections on the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Twain notes sadly, “History is full of this Church of the Holy Sepulcher—full of blood that was shed because of . . . the meek and lowly, the mild and gentle Prince of Peace” (434). Hilton Obenzinger offers an illuminating gloss on this passage:

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The Romance of the Holy Land By focusing on the way that history has determined value, Twain seems to displace the absurdity. Sacred geography is not to be read as a palimpsest, the pilgrim-tourist vainly trying to decipher the true script beneath the “claptrap sideshows and unseemly impostures”; rather, those erasures (those sights without actual sites) should be ignored (or relegated to the imagination) in favor of what others have written over it—in prayers, in blood, in human folly. (174)

As Obenzinger suggests, Twain seeks not to interpret the Holy Sepulcher or confirm or disconfirm its validity, but to meditate on the site’s resonance throughout history. A rich irony in this passage that Obenzinger does not note, however, is that the initial source for this strategy for describing the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is none other than William Prime, the figure who is the butt of Twain’s jokes throughout the rest of his account. Prime’s account of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, like Twain’s, emphasizes the importance of subsequent history for the contemporary interpreter of the site’s significance: Toward [the Church of the Holy Sepulcher] for eighteen hundred years men have yearned with unutterable longing, and in distant lands, have turned their pale faces and fast-dimming eyes before they died. Millions who have gone to God, pious, humble, holy men, believed that on that rock the ineffable form of Christ dead once lay, and millions, foot-worn with long travel, knelt just here and sanctified the place with the burning incense of devout prayer. (76)

The tone and style are completely different from Twain’s, but the congruity between Twain’s basic idea of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and Prime’s is clear: both Twain and Prime see the site through the prism of its history since Constantine proclaimed it the site of the crucifixion. Unlike Robinson or Thomson, or even Stephens, they are less interested in passing judgment on the validity of the site’s origins than in recognizing its objective influence in history. The congruence between Twain’s position and Prime’s in this case provides a solution for one of the quandaries that the portions of Innocents Abroad that describe the Church of the Holy Sepulcher raise for critics. In light of the attitudes adopted toward the Church of the Holy Sepulcher by many of Twain’s more pious contemporaries, Twain’s reticence regarding the authenticity of the site of the crucifixion in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is curious, to say the least, if Prime’s influence is not considered. Chroniclers of Holy Land travel from Robinson to the young Melville all rendered harsher verdicts regarding the Church of the Holy Sepulcher than Twain, and his approving citation of Prime as a source in his discussion of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is without precedent in the rest of The Innocents Abroad.


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What does Twain accomplish with this dramatic reversal in his judgment of Prime and in his acknowledged and unacknowledged use of Prime’s arguments in this portion of The Innocents Abroad? I suggest that this passage is the key to an ironic subtext of Twain’s account of the Holy Land. Twain’s skepticism is not, in itself, a dramatic departure from the standard contours of Holy Land discourse. Where Twain goes beyond even Browne, Dorr, and DeForest, however, is in his willingness to mock his own position as an authority on the Holy Land.10 Twain ridicules Prime throughout The Innocents Abroad but then proves willing to make Prime a central authority for his response to the most frequently commented upon site in Palestine. This reversal effectively subverts the opposition that Twain has established as the linchpin of his entire account of Palestine. Twain undermines the dichotomy between deluded pilgrims who read their own meanings into the landscape and the plainspoken American Everyman who relates the experience of Holy Land travel to his readers in the precise form that they themselves would use for their own accounts. Twain’s persona is seen to be reliant on the very accounts that he exposes as utterly ridiculous, and his reader is able to see that the ultimate distinction between Twain and previous travelers is one of degree rather than kind.11 The Innocents Abroad is the most self-conscious and complex of the nineteenth-century American Holy Land texts prior to Melville’s Clarel. It can claim this distinction not on the basis of its irreverence, which was shared by other texts, but rather by virtue of its insistent questioning of the epistemological issues confronting any traveler, irreverent or otherwise. Twain’s account of Palestine points out the limitations of all representations of the Holy Land, including his own, and thereby calls attention to the need for a reading of the Holy Land that is more expansive than the reading that the individual traveler, however sophisticated, can provide. Twain’s ability to encourage his readers to reflect on the kind of spectacle that the American traveling in Palestine presented allows the standard American epistemological position to be relativized. By making the American travelers the object of satire, Twain reveals the possibility of a truly intercultural reading of the experience of Holy Land travel, a reading that incorporates voices other than those of American travelers, reverent or irreverent. This kind of reading of the Holy Land is not, however, actually carried out by Mark Twain; rather, it is reserved for Herman Melville, whose long poem Clarel complicates the history of nineteenthcentury American writing about Palestine considerably.

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Notes 1

The motif of extended reflection on a particular site appears in almost all the travelers discussed in chapters two and three, particularly Robinson, Thomson, Prime, Stephens, Taylor, and Curtis. This motif also has roots in European travel writing, particularly Alphonse de Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient ( 1835). 2 DeForest is able to establish this persona because of his familiarity with earlier American accounts of the Holy Land. Metwalli notes that DeForest provides copious evidence in Oriental Acquaintance having read John Lloyd Stephens’s travel narratives (325). 3 I use the term “hybridity” here as defined by the postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha in his seminal essay “Signs Taken for Wonders” in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994). In the most general terms, Bhabha uses hybridity to refer to any kind of mixing of cultural norms. In much of Bhabha’s criticism, hybridity takes the form of a state in which characteristics of the dominant culture are mimicked by the dominated culture. The mimicry engaged in by the colonized culture both reinforces the power of the colonizer’s narrative and appropriates the colonizer’s narratives for the (sometimes) subversive ends of the colonized. As Bhabha argues regarding one of the central anecdotes of his essay, “If these scenes, as I have narrated them, suggest the triumph of the writ of colonialist power, then it must be conceded that the wily letter of the law inscribes a much more ambivalent text of authority” (107). 4 Schueller argues that Dorr’s narrative “challenges the racial aesthetics and ideologies that separate Anglo and African-American writing in the antebellum period. By subverting the hegemonic black-white racial definitions of the dominant culture, Dorr asserts the rights of African-Americans to fashion varied identities” (x). This aspect of Dorr’s account is, I contend, readily observable in the portions that he devotes to the Holy Land. 5 Obenzinger notes especially Dorr’s preoccupation with the erotic as a distinguishing feature, although George William Curtis seems to match Dorr’s interest in this matter. One instance of Dorr’s rakish tone comes earlier in A Colored Man Round the World when describes at some length a review in Paris “which language is inadequate to express the vulgarity of” (95). 6 The criticism on The Innocents Abroad is rather extensive. In addition to Obenzinger and Walker, Alfred Kazin has explored some of the religious aspects of Twain’s representation of Palestine in God and the American Writer (New York: Knopf, 1997) as has Robert Egan in “The Reprobate Elect in The Innocents Abroad.” ( American Literature. 54:2 May 1982). Richard Bridgman’s Traveling in Mark Twain (Berkeley: UP of California, 1987) and Larzer Ziff’s Return Passages (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2000) situate The Innocents Abroad within the wider framework of Twain’s travel writing. Perhaps the most comprehensive discussion of Twain as a travel writer is Jeffrey Melton’s Mark Twain, Travel Books, and Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement (Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, 2002). Melton’s study brilliantly analyzes the role of conventional tourism and critiques of tourism in Mark Twain’s travel writings. James M. Cox has discussed the issue of humor in The Innocents Abroad in Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor. (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 2002). Richard S. Lowry’s “Littery Man”: Mark Twain and Modern Authorship (NewYork: Oxford UP, 1996) deals with Twain’s literary persona in The Innocents Abroad.

Quotidian Pilgrimages 7

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Twain’s use of Native American imagery to describe the residents of the Holy Land continues a trope developed by several of the genteel literary writers who discussed the Holy Land as well as DeForest and Browne. Stephens also makes specific comparisons between the lifestyle and appearance of the Arabic inhabitants of Palestine and the Indians of North America. 8 See Romans 9-11 for the classic Calvinist prooftext for the Pauline doctrine of predestination. Romans 9.13 states explicitly the significance of the story of Jacob and Esau: “As it is written, ‘Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.’” 9 Twain’s critique of Biblicism is quite forceful, but it is noteworthy that he uses examples from the “Old Testament” of the Hebrew scriptures rather than the “New Testament” of the specifically Christian scriptures. By focusing on the moral flaws of the Old Testament and leaving the New Testament’s teachings largely untouched, Twain stops short of challenging the doctrine of Christian supersessionism, the belief that the Christian community had taken the place of the Jewish people in the divine economy. In this way, Twain’s critique of Biblicism is perhaps less radical than Melville’s, which, as Stan Goldman argues, undermines the doctrine of supersessionism. 10 For a further discussion of the issue of authorship and authority in The Innocents Abroad, see Richard S. Lowry’s “Littery Man”: Mark Twain and Modern Authorship (NewYork: Oxford UP, 1996.) Lowry also argues that Twain’s performance in The Innocents Abroad constitutes a critique of the idea of authorship itself. 11 Jeffrey Melton offers an insightful alternative to this view of Twain’s use of Prime. Melton argues that by embracing Prime at this particular moment, Twain temporarily embraces a naïve “tourist’s faith” in the validity of certain highly romanticized sites (77-8).


Through One’s Tears

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Chapter 6

“As Seen through One’s Tears” The “Double Mystery” of Place in Herman Melville’s Clarel

No country will more quickly dissipate romantic expectations than Palestine— particularly Jerusalem. To some the disappointment is heart sickening. Is the desolation of the land the result of the fatal embrace of the Deity? Hapless are the favorites of heaven. —Herman Melville (1856) J.C. should have been born in Tahiti. —Marginal note in Melville’s copy of his 1856 Journal Travel to a large and generous nature is as a new birth. Its legitimate tendency is to teach profound personal humility, while it enlarges the sphere of comprehensive benevolence until it includes the whole human race. —Herman Melville, “Traveling”

The epistemological quandary that religious pluralism posed for nineteenth-century Americans was a pressing matter for Herman Melville long before he published his 18,000 line Clarel, A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land in 1876, and even before he visited Palestine in 1856. Melville’s struggle with the issues raised by religious pluralism begins in his first novel, Typee, and continues throughout his career. It is in Clarel, however, that this strand of Melville’s thought reaches its culmination. In order to comprehend fully the magnitude of Melville’s achievement in Clarel, a brief survey of the role that religious pluralism played in shaping Melville’s career is in order. Melville’s first two novels, Typee and Omoo, are set in the South Pacific, the region that Melville references again and again throughout his works as an earthly paradise. For Melville, the South Pacific often functions as a sacred space, hallowed not by religious texts and traditions, but by the luxuriance of nature and the relative innocence of the inhabitants. The issue of religious pluralism comes to the forefront particularly in Melville’s consideration of Protestant missions in the

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South Pacific. The themes that Melville begins to develop in Typee and Omoo are developed in more philosophical depth in Mardi, Moby-Dick, and finally The Confidence Man, where the terrifying epistemological uncertainty involved in the new religious pluralism comes to the fore. With the advent of the Civil War, the epistemological and political problems raised by pluralism begin to coalesce in Melville’s work. Battlepieces, Melville’s collection of Civil War poetry, raises the possibility that the problem of interpretation, foregrounded in so much of Melville’s earlier work, may actually be unresolvable, and, as a result, Melville endorses a “sacred uncertainty” as the appropriate means of dealing with disputes within and among nations in the prose supplement to Battlepieces (184). Clarel is the last major work by Melville published in his lifetime, and it is also the work to which Melville devoted the greatest amount of time in composition. He worked on Clarel for two full decades, and his obsession with the poem was so great that it led Elizabeth Shaw Melville to question his sanity. Not surprisingly then, Clarel represents Melville’s most sustained attempt to resolve the questions with which he grappled throughout his career. Increasingly, critics have begun to realize that Clarel, far from being a mere oddity that either mars or is irrelevant to the rest of Melville’s career, is in fact at the center of Melville’s project. This realization leaves critics with a new problem: Why the Holy Land? Why would such a preeminent critic of conventional religiosity in nineteenthcentury America have poured nearly half of his career into writing about a conventional site for religious tourism? The answer lies in the way in which Melville appropriates, critiques, and reinterprets the body of texts that have been explored in the preceding chapters. For Melville, the Holy Land is the site at which the primacy of interpretation becomes manifest, and thus the Holy Land provides the best conceivable backdrop for his relentless interrogation of the relationship between pluralism and authority, experience and interpretation. Clarel transforms the genre of the American Holy Land travel narrative by using the landscape, the inhabitants, and the pilgrims in nineteenth-century Palestine to interrogate the fundamental ideas about religion, nationality, and epistemology that the earlier travelers take for granted. Perhaps the most significant distinguishing feature of Clarel that separates it from the other examples of travel writing is Melville’s refusal to treat either the many communities that inhabited the Holy Land in the nineteenth century or the American and European pilgrims to the Holy Land, both the devout and the skeptical, with anything less than a thoroughgoing and respectful intellectual rigor. Furthermore, Melville extends the strategy, used by Tyler, Taylor, Browne, and Twain, of making what is seen in the Levant apply to America. He applies this strategy to a withering critique of the idea of America as a variety of sacred space in the fourth part of Clarel, the Bethlehem cantos.


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Melville’s choice of genre is significant as well. Like many other travelers to Palestine, Melville kept a journal of his voyage to the Holy Land in the 1850s. Unlike many of these travelers, he did not simply publish a narrative of or commentary on his experiences. Rather, he worked on the raw material of his experiences and of the recorded experiences of others for two decades before publishing a massive narrative poem, a work that fits within the generic boundaries of both poetry and fiction. This choice was no accident. Clarel is a text haunted by the idea of truth, and it struggles to achieve a truthful reconstruction of the Holy Land precisely by using the latitude provided by fiction and poetry. Perhaps paradoxically, Melville’s method is to achieve comprehensiveness in his depiction of Palestine by means of the detail provided by poetry, and accuracy by means of the multiple perspectives available through fiction. Melville might initially appear to be Mark Twain’s natural ally in the project of demythologizing the Holy Land—after all, both Twain and Melville were outspokenly critical of the shape that Christianity assumed in nineteenthcentury America. Both were especially contemptuous of the claims of American missions societies; and both employed lacerating satire in their writings. Furthermore, Twain and Melville are the only two American writers who wrote about the Holy Land in the nineteenth century who are still regarded as unequivocally canonical writers. Despite the initial appearance of similarities, however, the seemingly natural grouping of Melville’s massive and underappreciated poem with Twain’s The Innocents Abroad as an “infidel countertext[s]” (Obenzinger 13) or an “irreverent pilgrim[ages]” (Walker) both underestimates the commonalities that Melville’s poem shares with the writings of lesser-known writers and overestimates the congruencies between Melville’s and Twain’s visions of the Holy Land. Most of all, it underestimates Melville’s ability to represent convincingly and sympathetically the voices of inhabitants and pilgrims ranging from Protestant fundamentalists to Catholic and Orthodox monks to devout Muslims and Druzes to disillusioned seekers and outright skeptics. The reason that I close my discussion of the genre of American Holy Land writing with an analysis of Clarel is that in many ways, Clarel manages to provide a summation and interrogation of the entire range of tendencies represented in the other works, while simultaneously presenting a unique and nuanced account of the concept of sacred space and pilgrimage. Furthermore, Clarel occupies a distinctive position in the field of Holy Land travel writing in its treatment of place and of the perceptions that become attached to particular locales. Other writers of Holy Land travel narratives, from Bayard Taylor to Mark Twain, emphasize the constructedness of their predecessors’ descriptions of the Holy Land and promote their own texts as sources of unbiased insight into the reality of the land. In Clarel, however, Melville seeks to reveal the truth about the land not by debunking all other

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representations of the Holy Land, but rather by multiplying the representations of the Holy Land in his own text. Recognizing the inherent artificiality of literary representations of any landscape, let alone a landscape redolent of powerful sacred associations, Melville seeks to explore the significance of sacred sites by allowing each site to be interpreted from a variety of perspectives by characters with varying theological, philosophical, and political orientations. In this way, as Malini Johar Schueller argues, Clarel engages in “a productive critical dialogue with the textual palimpsest that the Near Eastern Orient had become” (128). Melville’s reading of an enormous range of texts about the Near East and his ability to represent those texts through his characters in Clarel are the qualities that make Melville’s writing on the Holy Land, both in its topographical and theological aspects, so distinctive. I regard two recent studies of Clarel as being particularly important to an understanding of the poem. William Potter’s Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds examines the importance of comparative religion to Melville’s project in Clarel with impressive rigor and erudition. Stan Goldman’s reading of the theological subtext of Clarel in Melville’s Protest Theism emphasizes the importance of Melville’s use of multiple competing voices to produce an irreducibly complex response to the questions posed by religion.1 Goldman’s emphasis on Clarel’s complexity of response to theological questions and his Bakhtinian2 foregrounding of the dialogical elements in the text inform my reading throughout this essay. Unlike Goldman, however, I will be concerned primarily with how the many voices in Clarel describe, interrogate, and interpret the sacred space of Palestine in the context of an American tradition of travel writing about the Holy Land. Although my conclusions are quite similar to Goldman’s when I consider the theological and philosophical subtexts of Melville’s poem, my focus on the specific descriptions of place is different from Goldman’s emphasis on the theological and philosophical debates to which Melville contributes in Clarel. Goldman argues that Melville offers his readers neither traditional Christianity nor agnosticism, but rather a distinctive religious position that gives voice to both faith and doubt while emphasizing the importance of the theological virtues of faith, charity, and reverence over specific creedal content. I extend Goldman’s argument by contending that in his discussion of the physical landscape and inhabitants of the Holy Land, Melville creates a poem that subjects what Thomson calls “the all-perfect text” (3) of the Holy Land to a closer interrogation than do any of the works by Melville’s fellow nineteenth-century travelers, and at the same time provides a more genuinely sympathetic reading of the Land because of the multiplicity of perspectives that are employed. Obenzinger has classed Clarel with Twain’s The Innocents Abroad as an “infidel countertext” (13); I argue that in view of the wide array of competing orthodoxies located in the Holy Land, any text will inevitably be an infidel text in relation to some orthodoxy, and thus


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Clarel, with its ability to read the topography of the Holy Land from Protestant, Roman Catholic, Greek and Oriental Orthodox, Muslim, Druze, and Jewish, as well as agnostic perspectives, is perhaps the text least open to the praise or blame associated with the term “infidel.” Goldman’s discussion of Melville’s theological method in Clarel is directly relevant to my objection to Obenzinger’s characterization of Clarel as an “infidel text.” Goldman argues that Melville’s non-adherence to a specific set of denominational teachings should not blind his readers to his ability to create a meaningful approach to religious faith that draws on elements of several differing traditions. Goldman writes: [P]rotest theism should take us beyond the desire to identify Melville with a specific creed or church, or even the combination of two theologies: Calvinism and Unitarianism. Like a liberal Unitarian, Melville was attracted in Clarel to ethics, not dogma; to Jesus, not Christ; to Spirit, not the incarnation…. Yet Melville seems closer to Calvinism in his attraction to Original Sin….By focusing on the four great theological movements of American history and literature—Calvinism, Deism, Unitarianism, and Transcendentalism—we discover a Melville who identified with some of these doctrines but also distanced himself from many of them…. Protest theism is not to be mistaken for theological certainty, for a formulation of a creed or maxim. (168-9)

Goldman thus emphasizes the ways in which Melville creates a unique religious position out of the contraries of various religious positions and refutes the notion that Clarel can be described as an anti-religious work simply because it does not settle on one of the doctrinal options provided by nineteenth-century American Christianity. One might add that Melville goes beyond borrowing merely from mainstream Protestant religious traditions by incorporating Roman Catholic characters such as the Dominican and Franciscan monks, Eastern Orthodox characters like the Syrian monk, and non-Christian characters like the Jewish Abdon, Nathan, Agar and Ruth, the Druze Djalea, and the Muslim Belex. Moreover, Melville includes as well the voices of various philosophies that cannot easily be identified with any one religious tradition. As Potter and Goldman argue, Melville incorporates all these visions into the religious sensibility of Clarel, and he does so by calling attention to their varying responses to the Holy Land itself. In fact, Clarel is able to embrace such a wide range of religious and intellectual contraries precisely because it grapples from the start with the epistemological problems that arise from the physical presence of a land designated as holy. Inevitably, there is a clash between the imagination’s reconstruction of a place described in a sacred text and the mundane realities of any geographical location. Nineteenth-century American writers who discuss the Holy Land resolve this conflict in several differing ways. The more conservative

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Protestant writers (Thomson, Robinson, Barclay, and Prime) divide the lore about the Holy Land into pernicious Catholic myth and solid Protestant truth and then abandon the former and defend the latter in the teeth of any contrary evidence imaginable. Less sectarian writers like Taylor and Stephens are more likely to find sophisticated ways of redeeming the appearances in accord with a predominantly ethical, melioristic understanding of Christianity. Skeptics like Twain and Browne find in the Holy Land the perfect text with which to lampoon the self-deception involved in the piety of evangelicals like Thomson and Prime. Melville’s approach manages to incorporate all these strategies, as well as giving voice to the many perspectives found in the Holy Land that are alien to the faith-doubt continuum in American Protestantism. He is able to expound the significance of Holy Land sites in this manner due in no small part to his voluminous reading of Holy Land narratives by his contemporaries and forerunners (Finkelstein 59-91). Melville’s approach to discussing the sacred terrain of the Holy Land is further enhanced, as both Goldman and Nathalia Wright note, by his wide-ranging use of scriptural allusion throughout—a practice that is common enough in Holy Land writing, but which is employed with especial rigor in Clarel. The intertextuality and dialogical nature of Melville’s text are thus intimately connected to the brute facts of the Holy Land that Melville confronts in Clarel. This connection has rarely been foregrounded in Melville criticism. Lawrence Buell, for example, includes in his rigorous discussion of Melville’s poetry the following disclaimer: By concentrating on Clarel as a semi-omnisciently orchestrated dialogue among contending participant observers, I have neglected its other conspicuous strength: its attention to the physical environment of Palestine—its geography, its polyglot architecture and social life—and how these are seen through the lens of a geopiety conditioned by Bible reading, religious fantasy and nineteenth-century travelogue and archaeologism. (146)

I argue that the “geography [and] polyglot architecture and social life” to which Buell refers is precisely what provides the grounds (literal and metaphysical) for the “dialogue among contending participant observers” that Buell, like Goldman and Bezanson, identifies as being central to Clarel’s art. This relationship between the land itself and both the inhabitants and pilgrims who comment on it is what makes Melville’s poem the culmination of the tradition of nineteenth-century American Holy Land writing outlined in this study. The complexity of Melville’s response to sacred sites and to the peoples of the Holy Land can be seen as a logical but distinctive development out of Melville’s own travels in the Holy Land. A careful reading of Melville’s Holy Land journals alongside Clarel reveals that the multivalent reading of sacred space in Clarel is a genuine modification of Melville’s initial response to the Holy Land


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when he visited it. Melville’s visceral response to the Holy Land when he visited it in the mid-1850s was a profound sense of disappointment. The most devastating expression of the disappointment engendered by a visit to the Holy Land appears when Melville quotes the conversation of the tour guides he accompanies while walking through Jerusalem: “Here is the stone Christ leaned against, and here is the English hotel. Yonder is the arch where Christ was shown to the people, and just by that open window is sold the best coffee in Jerusalem” (89). As these comments reveal, Melville’s response to Jerusalem in his Journal is much more negative than the balanced description given in Clarel. Perhaps the best indicator of the sheer depths of Melville’s disillusionment in the Journal can be seen in his description of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Melville writes of the interior of the church: [T]he anointing stone of Christ …veined with streaks of moldy red, looks like a butcher’s block. Nearby is a blind stair of worn marble ascending to the reputed Calvary where among other things the showman points you by the smoky light of old pawnbroker’s lamps of dirty gold the hole in which the cross was fixed. (87-8)

This picture of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher contrasts sharply with the ambivalence of the images used by the narrator in Clarel. The elements of pastoral romance that allow for a nostalgic, wistful description of the church in the poem are completely lacking from the journal, and in their place is sheer contempt for everything about the site. The journal’s description of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher serves very simply to expose the church as a fraud; the poem seeks to create a sympathetic if detached sense of the emotions that the church might stir in a true believer. This contrast illustrates the substantial difference between Clarel and Melville’s first impressions of the Holy Land, and it further demonstrates the degree to which Melville was willing to revise his own perceptions in order to make Clarel a poem that could serve as a history of many minds and not merely Melville’s own. Melville’s Journal reflects the sense of despair that shows up in the darker voices in Clarel, but it generally does not reflect the other side of the “double mystery” enacted in Clarel, the side that provides grounds for hope in the face of God’s silence and inscrutability. Because I follow Goldman’s reading of Melville’s “protest theism” as neither placid acceptance of Christian dogma nor as the sometimes facile skepticism to which Twain can be prone, I regard Melville’s capacity to show both sides of the “double mystery” of the Holy Land in Clarel as the result of his continuing intellectual development after his completion of the Holy Land tour in the mid-1850s. The increased artistic and intellectual maturity that appears in Clarel when it is compared to the Journal, which was written in the

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same decade as most of Melville’s fiction, provides a powerful rationale for a stronger focus on Clarel among Melville scholars. The maturity and complexity of Clarel is particularly striking in the poem’s representation of the boundaries between cultures. Edward Said has argued in Culture and Imperialism that a new method is needed in texts that seek to cross textual boundaries, one that moves beyond the prerogatives of either imperialism or nationalism. Said writes: Survival is, in fact, about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding—and more difficult—to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter). For the intellectual, there is quite enough of value to do without that. (293)

Clarel, I contend, is a remarkable example of what the kind of cross-cultural criticism that Said calls for might look like. Throughout, Melville’s poem derives its richness from the ways in which it reads the various cultures of the Holy Land contrapuntally, and in the end it is this quality that makes the poem simultaneously a deeply cosmopolitan work and one that comments extensively on American culture and politics. The multivocal discussion of both America and the Holy Land that emerges throughout Clarel allows the explicit site of pilgrimage, the Holy Land, and the implicit object of discussion, America, to interrogate each other. In this way, Clarel subverts the possibility of a one-sided and voyeuristic American gaze on an exoticized Orient. Clarel’s profound interrogations of theology, philosophy, literature, and politics center above all on the importance of place. The organizational structure of the poem is built around four distinct locations: the city of Jerusalem, the desert (particularly in relation to the Jordan River and the Dead Sea), the ancient monastery at Mar Saba, and the city of Bethlehem. Exploring Melville’s polyphonic descriptions of each of these locales allows for a richer understanding of Clarel as a document of travel, and further allows the genre of the travel narrative to be expanded to include content of much greater depth than is typically conceded. I shall proceed by discussing the descriptions of the landscapes, sacred sites, and people: first, of Jerusalem, the city that provides the setting for the beginning and ending of Clarel; second, of the desert surrounding the Dead Sea that provides the backdrop for Part II of the poem; third, of the monastery at Mar Saba where Part III is set; and finally the town of Bethlehem, where Part IV is set prior to Clarel’s return to Jerusalem.


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“The Blank Towers of Jerusalem”: Disillusionment and Faith at the Beginning of Clarel’s Pilgrimage Jerusalem served as a central site for most of the Holy Land narratives from the nineteenth century, and Clarel is no exception to this rule. The portion of Clarel that takes place in Jerusalem frames the rest of the narrative, and many of the most important themes and motifs in the poem are introduced in Part I.3 As Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein notes (63), Thomson’s The Land and the Book is a significant intertext for Melville as he describes Clarel’s perception of Jerusalem in Clarel. Finkelstein notes that that Melville’s strikingly descriptive phrase, “the blank towers of Jerusalem,” is drawn almost verbatim from Thomson, and she notes other indirect references to Thomson that are sprinkled throughout the text. Finkelstein regards Thomson’s explicit linking of Holy Land travel with a Protestant spiritual pilgrimage4 the most significant contribution that he makes to Melville’s text. As Hilton Obenzinger has noted, a less well-known source for Melville’s use of the landscape of Palestine is Minor’s Meshullam. Melville relates the story of Minor’s attempt to set up a colony of Jewish converts to Christianity in Jerusalem with a certain bemusement in his Journal of a Visit to Europe and the Levant, and he expresses familiarity with her letters to supporters of her mission in the United States. Melville’s work in Clarel demonstrates the same enthusiasm for the interpretation of the landscape of Palestine that Minor expresses in one of the most striking passages in her text. Minor wrote: We passed by its hoary trees, as the burning glory of the sun was beaming behind the summit of Olivet; and as we paused, I thought how like our spiritual state was that speaking landscape. Gethsemane, in the deep shade of the Mount, is like our present pilgrimage of tears! While the bright rays of the rising sun, gleaming from behind its summit, was like our “blessed hope” of the near coming of the Sun of Righteousness! (80)

Minor’s ecstatic response to the Levant is far removed from Melville’s, but her search for analogies to the spiritual condition of modern human beings in the “speaking landscape” of the Holy Land resonates strongly with Melville’s approach to Palestine. The Jerusalem cantos of Clarel make the link between the physical landscape of the Holy Land and the spiritual pilgrimages of the characters strikingly explicit, and they do so by foregrounding the range of interpretations that can be applied to the sacred landscape. Melville’s poem begins just before Clarel’s arrival in Jerusalem, and the narrative of his time in Jerusalem proceeds by means of a series of vignettes that provide brief, concentrated depictions of some of the most commonly visited sacred sites as seen by a multifarious cast of characters. The picture of Jerusalem that is provided throughout the first canto of Clarel becomes increasingly complex

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because, as Finkelstein has noted, it is filtered through the individual consciousnesses of widely divergent characters, providing a multi-faceted reading of the landscape that is reminiscent of the multiple readings that Ahab, Starbuck, and Stubb, give to the doubloon that Ahab nails to the mast in Moby-Dick. The epistemological quandary posed by Palestine for the pilgrim is foregrounded early in Clarel. As the title character reflects on his journey to Palestine in the opening chapter, he observes, “Yes, I am young, but Asia old, / The books, not all the books have told!”(1.1.82-3). This recognition that the narratives of previous visitors to the Holy Land will be insufficient as guides for Clarel himself prompts him to recall a conversation with a fellow American that he had had prior to his trip. Clarel’s fellow American had argued that: Our New World’s worldly wit so shrewd Lacks the Semitic reverent mood, —hardly may confer Fitness for just interpreter of Palestine. Forgo the state of local minds inveterate, Tied to one poor and casual form. To avoid the deep saves not from storm. (1.1.6)

With these lines, the reader of Clarel is introduced to several central themes of the text: the otherness of the Holy Land, and the inadequacy of a monological (“tied to one poor and casual form”) strategy of interpretation for an understanding of the Holy Land. Throughout Clarel, Melville eschews a monological approach to the description of place, instead providing many angles of vision from which to see the sacred sites via the conversations and speeches of the characters and narrator. The best developed readings of the sites discussed in the Jerusalem canto are provided by characters who continue to appear throughout the poem—the unnamed narrator, Clarel, and Clarel’s fellow Americans Rolfe and Vine—but there are also significant readings of the landscape and its relationship to faith provided by characters who perish in the first canto—Celio and Nathan—and even by anonymous pilgrims who never appear in the text, but who leave written artifacts (sometimes in the form of graffiti, sometimes written on scraps of paper) at important sites that spark reflection or discussion among the pilgrims. The first appearance that these written artifacts make in Clarel comes in the second chapter. In this chapter, Clarel is spending his last night before arriving in Jerusalem at a hostel owned by an aging Black Jew from India named Abdon. Significantly, Abdon himself is a traveler who has come to Palestine to die. He has lived in both his native Cochin and the Netherlands, and for him, as for so many characters in Clarel, the Holy Land emerges as the site at which he can finally confront the ultimate questions of the meaning of life and death.5 As Clarel is about to retire for


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the night, he finds that the paper used to line his tray contains a poem written by an earlier pilgrim. The poem, which Clarel reads immediately, provides a foreshadowing of the disappointment that many of the characters throughout Clarel feel toward the Holy Land, and also, through its use of two voices in dialogue, a preview of the multivocal character of Clarel itself. The unknown poet has written: The World accosts— “Last one out of Holy Land, What gift bring’st thou? Sychem grapes? …. I demand Something cheery at thy hand. Come, if Solomon’s Song thou singest, Haply Sharon’s Rose thou bring’st.” (1.2.109-16)

These lines introduce the naïve idyll associated with the Holy Land by some of its more romantic visitors—an idyll that is quickly debunked in the following lines of the poem. The response to the world’s expectations is succinct and devastating: The Palmer replies: “Nay, naught thou nam’st thy servant brings Only Judaea my feet did roam And mainly there the pilgrim clings About the precincts of Christ’s tomb These palms I bring—from dust not free, Since both dust and ashes were trod by me. (1.2.117-22)

These lines foreground a contrast that is a staple of American Holy Land writing, namely, the contrast between an imagined Holy Land full of beauty and religious inspiration, and an actual Holy Land full of “dust and ashes.” It is significant that Clarel comes into Jerusalem with these verses and his countryman’s advice already in his mind. From the start, then, Clarel’s reading of the Holy Land is not innocent, but rather shaped by texts provided by travelers who had gone before him. The other significant contrast that appears in these lines is between the sensuality of the world’s expectations and the sensory deprivation that the Palmer reports. “Solomon’s Song” refers to the most explicitly erotic text in the Hebrew or Christian scriptures, and the imagery of “Sharon’s rose” also corresponds to an eroticized metaphor for spiritual fulfillment. The sense of loss in these lines, then, corresponds to the lack of physical immediacy that the pilgrim experiences in Palestine. Rather than an experience that combines the spirit and the flesh, the experience of Palestine provides only “dust and ashes” for the flesh, with ambiguous results for the spirit.

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After reading the poem, Clarel looks out his window at the Mount of Olives in the distance and ponders the conflict between the Holy Land of pious representation and the sight that he is seeing from his window. The narrator compares the scene to “Katahdin, in hot noon/ lonely, with all his pines in swoon” (1.2.134-5). Mount Katahdin, as Walter Bezanson notes (716), is a mountain in central Maine that lacks the spiritual associations of the Mount of Olives and, as readers of Thoreau’s The Maine Woods are aware, is known for its stark and desolate appearance. This comparison resembles the contrast that Mark Twain develops between the Sea of Galilee and Lake Tahoe in The Innocents Abroad, but unlike the satirical, even farcical, tone of Twain’s comparison, the tone here is serious, and serves as a reflection of Clarel’s mental distress. The narrator highlights the metaphysical significance of the scene by declaring, “The nature and evangel clashed/ Rather, a double mystery flashed” (136-7). The first line of this couplet emphasizes rather poignantly the absolute disjuncture of the sacred associations of the scene from the mundane phenomena that Clarel is observing by setting the evangel (literally, good news) in opposition to nature. The second half of the couplet qualifies the bleakness of line 136 by referring to the relationship between the natural phenomena of the Mount of Olives and its religious associations as a “double mystery”—in other words, both nature and evangel are in need of decoding by the observer, and neither the triumphalistic faith of a Thomson or Prime nor the triumphalistic skepticism of a Mark Twain is allowed to serve as the sole interpreter of the scene. Clarel proceeds toward Jerusalem with this tension between evangel and experience in mind. Against this backdrop of religious disappointment and “dust and ashes,” the anonymous third-person narrator often provides descriptions of sacred places that are surprisingly winsome and touching. When Clarel begins his visit to Jerusalem, the narrator provides much of the description at first. The first site that Clarel visits is the source of much confusion for many American Protestant visitors to the Holy Land, Melville included. Clarel begins his tour of Jerusalem with the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which was regarded with outrage by Thomson, Stephens, and Taylor, all of whom considered it a fraud perpetrated by the corrupt Eastern and Roman Churches, and with derision by Twain, who incorporated the sepulcher into his larger critique of organized religion. Melville himself described the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in his Journal as “a sickening cheat” (88). The description of the church provided by the narrator in Clarel is, however, considerably more ambivalent than those of the other writers and, for that matter, the younger Melville of the Journal. The narrator declaims: What rustlings here from shadowy spaces, Deep vistas where the votary paces Will, strangely intermitting, creep


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Like steps in Indian forest, deep. How bird-like steals the singer’s note Down from some rail or arch remote: While glimmering, where kneelers be Small lamps, dispersed, with glow-worm light Mellow the vast nave’s azure night, And make a haze of mystery: The blur is spread of thousand years, And Calvary is seen as through one’s tears. (1.3.43-54)

The description here is quite lyrical. The narrator here moves beyond the most automatic responses of the “New World’s worldly wit” to achieve a genuine sympathy with the worshippers in the church, and he does so by employing the familiar trope of a comparison between an American site and the Holy Land site under observation. The narrator compares the aura of mystery in the church to that of an “Indian forest,” drawing on a trope familiar to American readers. Unlike Twain’s Tahoe comparison, or Melville’s own Katahdin comparison, this trope, instead of cutting the Holy Land site down to size, serves to add to the reverence that is accorded to the Holy Land site. The fascination with virginal nature that pervades American frontier romances such as James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales is thus enlisted in order to create a sense of the pastoral in a church that most Protestant pilgrims described as a site for cheap and meretricious mummery. The final three lines quoted above emphasize again the interest in epistemological problems that is present throughout Clarel. The image of Calvary seen “as through one’s tears” is suggestive of both the sorrow associated with the crucifixion and the sorrow that a disillusioned pilgrim might feel, but it is also suggestive of clouded vision. In this instance, the Holy Land itself, in its nineteenth-century manifestation, serves as an obstacle rather than a help to true knowledge of Calvary and the events that took place there. The imagery that Melville uses here, that of seeing through tears or some analogous distorting mist, recurs frequently in the poem. Therefore, the portrayal of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Clarel is simultaneously one of the most sympathetic nineteenthcentury American portrayals of the church itself and the rites held within it and a very serious interrogation of the relationship of sacred sites to knowledge about the divine. This response to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is representative of the ambivalent responses to place that appear throughout Clarel. As the poem moves on, the narrator’s commentary becomes replaced increasingly by the voices of Rolfe, Vine, Mortmain, Derwent, Nehemiah, Djalea, and Ungar, and the contraries that the narrator’s voice illuminates in the passage on the Holy Sepulcher become embodied in paired antagonists such as Derwent and Mortmain or Derwent and

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Ungar. Rolfe is consistently the figure who mediates between the opposed positions, and increasingly as the poem goes on, he begins to take over the commenting role of the narrator. The characters who embody these responses appear at significant turning points in the poem, and frequently the appearance of a new character signifies the emergence of a new issue for the cast of characters to debate and discuss. In the Jerusalem canto, several major characters are introduced who offer Clarel the possibility of a method for understanding the landscape of the Holy Land. The first major character to appear in the Jerusalem canto is Nehemiah, an American Protestant missionary who is trying to trigger the second coming of Christ and the subsequent end of the world by proselytizing among the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine. Nehemiah is a character who can easily be dismissed as an American evangelical fanatic who is thrown in for comic relief, but his role is too significant to the plot of the poem, and the attitudes that the other characters express towards him too complex for him to be dispensed with so lightly. In addition to representing one approach to dealing with questions of faith, that of unquestioning acceptance of a particular tradition, Nehemiah also provides a composite of several of the earlier American travelers to the Holy Land. Most specifically, Nehemiah represents a blend of the ideologies of William M. Thomson and Clorinda Minor. Thomson’s influence is most clearly seen in Nehemiah’s ceaseless effort to provide an authoritative interpretation of Jerusalem by means of careful study of the biblical text. Minor, whom Melville met during his own travels, shared Nehemiah’s monomaniacal goal of converting the Jews of Palestine to Christianity in an effort to hasten the second coming of Christ. For a writer with Melville’s already well-established skepticism toward religion, Nehemiah could easily become the object of ridicule. That this is not the case can be seen from his first introduction to the reader. Nehemiah appears immediately after Clarel has been pondering the story of Jesus’ appearance to his disciples on the road to Emmaus and wishing that he too could meet someone who could interpret the world for him in relation to faith. Nehemiah’s appearance is an ironic fulfillment of that wish. The initial description that the narrator gives to Nehemiah is worth quoting at length: Scarce aged like time’s wrinkled sons, But touched by chastenings of Eld, Which halloweth life’s simpler ones; In wasted strength he seemed upheld Invisibly by faith serene— Paul’s evidence of things not seen. No staff he carried; but one hand A solitary Book retained. (1.7.63-71)


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Nehemiah is immediately marked as one of “life’s simpler ones,” but he is also presented as a very attractive figure. He appears to have attained the peace and simplicity that Clarel lacks and desires, and the strength that is attributed to his faith makes him a source of potential support and guidance for Clarel. Moreover, as Clarel makes Nehemiah’s acquaintance, the narrator continues to represent the old man in a positive light. When Nehemiah identifies himself as a “sinner,” the narrator exclaims that he is indeed a saint. Walter Bezanson has noted that the characters who provide the many-sided commentary on the Holy Land throughout the text appear at significant sites. Rolfe and Vine, for example, are closely associated with the Mount of Olives, and later, Mortmain and Nehemiah become identified with the Dead Sea and the Jordan River, respectively. A crucial (to indulge in a Melvillean pun) example of this phenomenon is the tortured ex-ascetic Celio’s speech beneath the Ecce Homo arch, where Christ was said to have been displayed in mock-royal attire by Pontius Pilate. Celio uses the occasion provided by the site to reflect on the anguish inherent in the Christian hope in an apostrophe to Christ that could easily have been uttered by Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, Swinburne’s aging pagan centurion in his “Hymn to Proserpine,” or Melville’s own Captain Ahab: Ere yet thy day no pledge was given Of homes and mansions in heaven— Paternal homes reserved for us Heart hoped it not but lived content-Content with life’s own discontent. Nor deemed that fate e’er swerved for us: The natural law men let prevail; Then reason disallowed the state Of instinct’s variance with fate. But thou—ah see, in rack how pale Who did the world with throes convulse; Behold him, yea, behold the man Who warranted if not began, The dream that drags out its repulse. (1.13.51-6, 63-5)

These lines comprise one of the bitterest assessments of Christianity in Clarel, accusing the Christian faith of introducing an ultimately destructive discontentment with the world as it is into human thought. They provide a model for how Melville’s meditations on sacred landscape function throughout Clarel: they begin with a specific character’s observation of a specific spot in the Holy Land; they continue with the character’s reflection on the biblical narrative that stands behind the physical site; and they bring together the character’s philosophical and experiential responses to site and narrative, land and book, in a way that allows

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Melville’s reader to engage critically with the “textual palimpsest” (Schueller 128) that covers the sacred sites in Palestine. A complement to Melville’s exploration of the physical space of the Holy Land in Clarel involves the people of the Holy Land. Of all the residents of the Holy Land whom Clarel meets in his journey, those who can most usefully illustrate the role of the actual inhabitants of Palestine in the poem are the members of the American Zionist family that Clarel meets in Jerusalem. The family is composed of the father Nathan, a descendant of the Puritans and convert to Judaism from radical skepticism; the mother Agar, a Jewish American who regrets her husband’s decision to settle in the Holy Land; and the daughter Ruth, who because of her combined American and Zionist heritage embodies the tensions between America and the Holy Land that are explored throughout the text. Ruth is particularly important to the plot because she is Clarel’s love interest. Nina Baym has argued that the unconsummated romance between Clarel and Ruth is more important to a critical understanding of the poem than many critics have realized because it represents the inability of Christianity to come to grips with sexuality. Malini Johar Schueller follows Baym in this vein by suggesting that the unconsummated romance (along with the homoerotic features of Clarel’s attraction to Vine, which have been remarked by critics from Richard Chase onward) can stand for a breakdown in heteronormativity, and that Clarel’s desire is directed more strongly towards Vine and the Druze Djalea than toward Ruth (131-40). Similarly, Bruce Harvey argues that Ruth’s role is to provide a cover for Clarel’s more deeply felt homoerotic urges, which Harvey suggests are repressed out of a sense of shame (139). These readings of the Clarel/Ruth relationship have served a valuable function in bringing the relationship and the role of sexuality in Clarel under the lens of critical scrutiny. A supplementary reading, however, might regard the tragic inability of Clarel and Ruth to consummate their romance (as a result of two deaths, first Nathan’s, then Ruth’s) as emblematic of the impossibility of any facile synthesis of religious truths. The tragic divide between Judaism and Christianity and between any one of the various religious responses represented in the text and any other can be seen as the ultimate import of the truncated relationship between Clarel and Ruth.

Clarel in the Wilderness Walter Bezanson and Richard Chase, among others, have identified the second book of Clarel, the portion of the poem that is set in the desert around the Dead Sea, as a counterpart to Dante’s Inferno. They have pointed out that the desert functions as a kind of hellscape and that the most bitterly disillusioned of all of Clarel’s many guides and interlocutors, the ex-revolutionary Mortmain, sets the


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tone for most of the second book. Despite the fact that the desert is the grimmest portion of the sacred landscape that Melville explores in Clarel, the pilgrims themselves still embody contradictory understandings of the landscape that allow even the seemingly unambiguously negative terrain of the desert to yield more than one interpretation. Furthermore, the Syrian monk, who relates a struggle with doubt that is resolved after he rejects theodicy but retains his faith, and the Dominican, who provides an expansive defense of Catholicism reminiscent of John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua, provide a balance to the otherwise hopeless sentiments impressed on the travelers by the wilderness. The relationship between the pilgrims and the land, and indeed the function of the pilgrims as a part of the landscape, becomes established very quickly. After warning that these pilgrims are facing a grimmer journey than that undertaken by Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, the narrator begins a descriptive catalogue of the pilgrims who make up Clarel’s party. The members of the party represent a range of responses to the land, and it is through their characterization and their words that Melville paints a complex picture of the landscape of the wilderness. Significantly, even though the wilderness portion of Clarel has been compared to Dante’s Inferno, the perspectives of the characters who speak in this part of the poem are as often hopeful as despairing. Fundamentally, the land does not predetermine the response of the characters however much it shapes that response. The first member of the party described is Derwent, the most loquacious of the non-American characters. Derwent is an Anglican clergyman who is “a priest o’ the club—a taking man, / and rather more than Lutheran” (2.1.53-4). He possesses “a facile wit/which suits the age—a happy fit” (56). Derwent’s theological views are such that he identifies Christianity with progress and sees the fulfillment of the Gospel as a gradual amelioration of the human condition to be achieved through science and the progress of political and religious tolerance. Derwent has been able to reconcile a reasonably traditional set of religious beliefs with modernity by combining sophisticated intellectual arguments wedding faith and progress with a willingness to look the other way when these arguments break down. He is able to maintain his faith precisely because he does not allow it to be tested severely, and while he prides himself on his tolerant and progressive spirit, he proves to be more Eurocentric in his attitudes than Rolfe or Vine or even Clarel when he is confronted with religious traditions different from his own Broad Church Anglicanism. Derwent is followed in the procession by a figure who appears only briefly and seems to serve as a foil for Derwent’s progressive Protestantism. The unnamed Elder is a strict Calvinist who, like a true heir of the Puritans, refuses to take off his hat when the host goes by when he is in Rome itself (60). The Elder has become so fixated on the Protestant goal of stripping away the erroneous accretions of

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Catholic doctrine that when “he hurled zeal’s javelin home, / It drove beyond the mark—pierced Rome/And plunged beyond, through enemy/to friend (81-3). The result of this violation of “natural piety” (83) has been to make the Elder an extreme skeptic, who has made it his goal to “quite disenchant the land divine” (79). Unlike Derwent, who is able to retain his faith by reconciling it with modernity, the Elder loses his faith as the result of its very inflexibility. After Derwent and the Elder come a wealthy banker and his son, Glaucon. Glaucon and the Banker are Greek tourists who have little interest in the metaphysical concerns that dog the other members of the party. The Banker enjoys the pleasures of money, and Glaucon enjoys the pleasures of seduction. They represent a further extreme beyond Derwent. He has married religion to pleasure and progress; they simply enjoy pleasure and progress unalloyed by religious concerns. The desert has little effect on them, since for them the entire journey is a pleasure trip. Their presence helps in some degree to demystify the landscape, showing that its effect on the pilgrims is not essential, but rather is conditioned by their own religious proclivities. Glaucon and the Banker’s amoral hedonism6 is most starkly contrasted with the attitudes of the pilgrims who follow them. Mortmain, who receives only a brief introduction here, but who is later revealed to be a disillusioned revolutionary who has lost faith in reason and progress as a result of the betrayals of the great revolutions of 1848, eventually proves to be the most radically negative character in the poem. He rejects both traditional religious belief and the idea of progress. Nehemiah, who follows right behind Mortmain in the procession and who, like Mortmain, will die in the desert, is the embodiment of simple faith on the American evangelical model. Nehemiah is described in terms that make him both a stereotypically naive American evangelical and, simultaneously, a Christ figure: His Bible under arm, and leaves Of tracts still fluttering in sheaves. In pure good will he bent his view To right and left. The ass, pearl-gray, Matched well the rider’s garb in hue, And sorted with the ashy way; Upon her shoulder’s jointed play The white cross gleamed, which untrue Yet innocent fair legends say Memorializes Christ our Lord When him the throngs with palms adored. (2.1.196-206)

Nehemiah is thus explicitly linked as he leaves Jerusalem with Christ’s Palm Sunday entrance to Jerusalem. Nehemiah, like his predecessor nineteen centuries earlier, is meek, lowly, and seated on an ass, and the donkey herself is adorned


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with a white cross, thus recreating a pious legend associated with Palm Sunday. Typologically, Nehemiah provides a tragicomic reversal of the Palm Sunday narrative as he, like Mortmain, goes out into the desert to die. Mortmain and Nehemiah’s pairing, however, goes well beyond their mere position in the caravan and their subsequent fate of death in the desert and Mar Saba, respectively. Both, it is suggested elsewhere in the poem, are radically disillusioned by life, and both give concrete pictures of radically opposed responses to sacred space. Mortmain’s disillusionment results in extreme misanthropy; Nehemiah attempts to redeem his failures by a complete surrender to faith at its most childlike and anti-intellectual. The two are joined most strikingly in the text by their quasi-sacramental acts of drinking: Nehemiah from the Jordan River, and Mortmain from the Dead Sea. Nehemiah’s draught from the Jordan is inspired by an unlikely source: namely, the singing of the Ave maris stella by a group of Roman Catholic friars. Nehemiah is so transported by the “concord full, completion fine—/ rapport of souls in harmony of tone,” that he feels that he must perform some visible act to express his devotion (2.24.51-2). When he kneels to drink the brackish waters of the Jordan River, Nehemiah carries to its logical conclusion the standard reverie on the beauties of the Holy Land that appears in works such as William Prime's Tent Life in the Holy Land. It is obvious to all the other characters and to the narrator that Jordan's waters are “unsweet” but Nehemiah, though “tasting spare” and not “quaffing,” still describes the taste of the Jordan as being “as sugar sweet”(2.24.6770). Nehemiah is subsequently mocked by Margoth, a Jewish geologist who has renounced Judaism in favor of natural science, for his inability to see (and taste) the world as it is. Mortmain’s draught from the Dead Sea becomes the counterpart to and negation of Nehemiah’s blind faith. When the pilgrims are at the edge of the Dead Sea, which is, as Melville’s readers would know, associated with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and brimstone, Mortmain appears like a deranged John the Baptist, crying “Repent! Repent in every land/ Or hell’s hot kingdom is at hand” (2.34.30-1). Mortmain then rushes to the side of the Dead Sea (a clear antimony to the Jordan River, where John the Baptist baptized Jesus) and prepares to drink. At this moment, curiously, it is the non-Christian member of the party, the Druze Djalea, who rebukes Mortmain and delivers one of his longest speeches in the entire poem. Djalea entreats Mortmain: Would you know what bitter drink They gave to Christ upon the Tree? Sip the wave that laps the brink Of Siddim: taste, and God keep ye! It drains the hills where alum’s hid— Drains the rock salt’s ancient bed;

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The Romance of the Holy Land Hither unto basin fall— Here is Hades watershed. Sinner would ye that your soul Bitter were and that the pool? Sip the Sodom waters dead; But never from your heart shall haste, The Marah—yea, the aftertaste. (2.34.50-63)

Djalea’s speech here is significant on several levels. First, this is one of the few times that one of the non-Christian characters in the poem speaks directly and at length. Often the narrator provides sympathetic descriptions of these characters, but for the most part the local characters who speak at length are Eastern Christians like the Syrian monk. Second, Djalea’s position (and elsewhere that of the freethinking Muslim Belex) here shows the centrality of Druze and Muslim guides for the Christian pilgrims’ experience of the Holy Land. Third, Djalea interweaves in this passage biblical and scientific etiological explanations for the bitterness of the sea, and thus is able to leave Mortmain with an incentive not to drink from the Dead Sea that is both empirically supported and tinged with religious dread. Despite Djalea’s uncharacteristically loquacious warning, Mortmain “madly tried the gall” (2.34.66) of the Dead Sea, thus providing a grim counterpoint to Nehemiah’s semi-comical sip from the Jordan. Mortmain’s impulsive decision to drink of the waters of the Dead Sea becomes all the more startling in light of the role that the Dead Sea played in the cultural imagination of pilgrims to the Holy Land. Bezanson notes that The Dead Sea, for the imaginative mind, was still a powerful symbol. The biblical account of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and ashes rained down upon a corrupt people had for thousands of years invested the area with a violent sense of evil. The natural desolation of the surrounding mountains, the slimy shores of the sea, and especially the acrid, vile-tasting waters in which no life could survive had in turn fostered a lively uprising of evil lore. (520)

This background of evil lore and terror is what Melville invokes when he has Mortmain, near the end of his life, rashly drinking of the waters of the Dead Sea itself.7 Mortmain continues to play an important role in Melville’s ambivalent interpretation of the landscape as the pilgrims move on to the monastery at Mar Saba.


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The Monastery at Mar Saba The third part of Clarel, the pilgrims’ stay at the famous monastery at Mar Saba, provides an expanded opportunity for Clarel’s company to view the Holy Land. Clarel, Rolfe, Derwent, and Vine, as guests of the abbot, are all able to interpret the sacred landscape of Palestine on a grander scale than was previously possible, because of the monastery’s position on a mountain. The interpretation of the landscape therefore becomes foregrounded all the more powerfully in this portion of Clarel. At the Mar Saba monastery, Rolfe, an American ex-sailor with a philosophical bent, and Vine, an American traveler with strongly contemplative and ascetic qualities, provide much of the commentary on the landscape. Mortmain also continues to play the role that he took on in the desert up until his death at Mar Saba. The most striking reveries at Mar Saba take place when three different characters—Vine, Mortmain, and Rolfe—reflect in separate cantos on a particularly ancient palm tree at Mar Saba, which was alleged to have been planted in the midst of the desert by St. Saba, for whom the monastery was named. In each case, the palm becomes a sacramental sign of the pilgrim’s inward condition. The three pilgrims all observe the palm tree simultaneously, but from different perspectives—Vine from the hill above the tree, Mortmain on level with the tree, and Rolfe looking up from below. Vine is the first of the pilgrims to offer a reflection on the palm. For Vine, the palm embodies his fear of the future, disillusionment with the present, and veneration of the past; but Vine also views the palm as a comforting object because of its persistence throughout time even as he contemplates the fact that even the palm will eventually die. He apostrophizes the palm with the lines: Tropic Seraph! Thou once gone, Who then shall take thy office on, Redeem the waste and high appear, ….But braid thy tresses, yet thou’rt fair Every age for itself must care: Braid thy green tresses; let the grim Awaiter never find thee dim! Serenely still thy glance be sent Plumb down from horror’s battlement: Though the deep fates be concerting A reversion, a subverting, Still bear thee like the Seraphim. (3.26.49-63)

Vine sees the palm as a triumphant, but nonetheless evanescent, persistence of the past in the midst of a dismal present symbolized by the “waste” all around the

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palm. The future is all the more grim because the palm is mortal, but Vine wishes fervently that it will continue to flourish as long as possible. By the end of Vine’s apostrophe, the palm has taken on almost supernatural qualities and is compared to the Seraphim, the angels who have the task of praising the deity in his very presence. The second character to reflect on the meaning of the palm is Mortmain, who is stirred by the palm, under which he is to die, to reflect on the tragic nature of human knowledge. For Mortmain, the palm is connected intimately to the more famous “tree” on which Christ was crucified, and Mortmain reads the crucifixion as an unredeemed failure. He addresses an imagined audience of believers with the lines “Cling to his tree, and there find hope:/Me it but makes a misanthrope” (3.28.14-15). The more Mortmain ponders the tree, however, the more he seems to undergo, if not a deathbed conversion, at least a subtle mitigation of his despair, ending with a plea for comfort from the Paraclete (or Holy Spirit), who has become mysteriously identified with the palm in Mortmain’s mind. Mortmain, aware that his death is impending, appeals to the palm: When the last light shall fade from me, If, groping round, no hand I meet; Thee I’ll recall—invoke thee, Palm: Comfort me then, thou Paraclete! The lull late mine beneath thy lee, Then, then renew, and seal the calm. (3.29.88-97)

These are Mortmain’s final words, and when read alongside his earlier utterances, they show that even Mortmain contains in himself some of the contraries that Melville explores through the poem. Rolfe is the final character to observe and reflect on the palm. Once more, the character of the observer and what is being observed are blended in the description. Rolfe sees in the palm a reminder of his own travels in the South Pacific, and the scene from those travels that he specifically recalls is the commonly described apotheosis of the European/Euro-American in the eyes of the natives. Rolfe imagines the islands first as “Eden” (3.29.46) and later as “Puck’s substantiated scene” (3.29.63), progressing from an image that describes a paradise on the verge of an inevitable fall to one that emphasizes the illusoriness of the envisioned paradise. The traveler whom Rolfe describes finally renounces his idyllic surroundings and returns to sea. Rolfe’s response to the palm is in the end to construct a narrative much like his own, in which a man who has tasted the joys of the South Pacific is driven by an internal compulsion to leave for other lands. In this model, Rolfe’s own journey to the Holy Land becomes, ironically, a fall from paradise. In the final portion of Clarel, this idea of a fall comes to be applied to the United States itself, and finally to Clarel’s own quest.


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Bethlehem: Rolfe, Ungar, and the Renunciation of U.S. Exceptionalism The pilgrims’ return to Jerusalem via Bethlehem finds its focus in two major events: first, the three-cornered debate between Derwent, Ungar, and Rolfe, and second, the death of Clarel’s beloved Ruth, which shatters the possibility of a truly redemptive conclusion to the poem. These two events provide a culmination for two major strands in the poem: the Derwent-Ungar-Rolfe debate provides a climax to the discussions of the meaning of America and the American political scene, and Ruth’s death is the ultimate example of the quarrel with theodicy that is carried on throughout the poem. Ungar’s discussion of the meaning of America and the question of America’s role in the world remains remarkably topical in the opening years of the twenty-first century, as debates about the nature and consequences of America’s national myths remain vigorous, both in the academic field of American Studies and in the public sphere.8 Ungar is in a unique position to see the contradictions in America’s national myths as a result of his complex ethnic and religious heritage. Ungar is the descendant of both Cherokees and English Catholics, and he fought on the Confederate side during the Civil War. As a descendant of the English Catholics who settled Maryland, Ungar stands outside the Protestant mainstream and is not a part of the Puritan “errand into the wilderness” that Perry Miller has analyzed. As a descendant of Cherokees, moreover, Ungar has actually experienced the other side of the white American errand, the side experienced by the displaced native peoples of North America. Finally, as a Southerner, Ungar stands outside the Yankee moralism and triumphalism of post-Civil War America. He is thus in an admirable position to critique the reigning assumptions in American life. Significantly, Ungar’s eloquent speeches on the subject of America are triggered by a specific locale in Palestine that the pilgrims visit. In the Valley of the Shepherds, Ungar views a pair of shepherds dividing the grazing land between them, and begins to meditate on the tragic conflict between North and South in the Civil War. He lashes out at the American Rolfe, using the biblical account of Abraham and Lot as his text. Abraham and Lot, Ungar argues, were able to divide the land that they were promised between themselves prudently, but the North and South in the United States were unwilling to achieve this, instead engaging in the bloody war that has embittered Ungar(4.9.65-81). 9 Ungar does not stop his quarrel with America with the Civil War, however. He continues with a vigorous condemnation of the crimes of white, Anglo-Saxon Americans (and Englishmen). He addresses to the English Derwent, and presumably to the American Rolfe as well, the lines:

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The Romance of the Holy Land As cruel as a Turk [italics in original]: Whence came That proverb old as the crusades? From Anglo-Saxons. What are they? Let the horse answer, and blockades Of medicine in civil fray! The Anglo-Saxons—lacking grace To win the love of any race; Hated by myriads dispossessed Of rights—the Indians East and West. These pirates of the sphere! Grave looters— Grave canting Mammonite freebooters, Who in the name of Christ and Trade (Oh, bucklered forehead of the brass) Deflower the world’s last sylvan glade! (4.9.112-25)

Notably, with his phrase “Indians East and West,” Ungar draws a direct connection between English and American imperialism, both of which are characterized as being carried out “in the name of Christ and trade,” and rejects both. In Ungar, Melville has a character who, because of his American identity and his expatriate status, is able to reverse the gaze effectively and provide a detailed critique of the American character that corresponds to the standard nineteenth-century American critique of the inhabitants of Palestine. In the discussion that follows, Rolfe accepts most of Ungar’s charges, with some modifications, while Derwent dismisses them. Ungar’s critique is explicitly directed at the imperial pretensions that the idea of America as “Holy Land” have inspired. He ridicules the imperial pretensions of the Anglo-Saxon race, the idea that progress is inevitable, and in fact the entire secularized version of a national covenant that characterized Manifest Destiny. Through Ungar, the physical, historical Holy Land of Christian tradition is used to undermine American claims to particular divine favor. Ungar’s response to his loss of faith in American exceptionalism in particular and the entire framework of the nationalistic narrative in general is to link the story of Jesus’ passion to all those who are suffering. He argues: …This type’s assigned To one who, sharing not man’s mind Partook man’s frame; whose mystic birth Wrecked him on this reef of earth Inclement and inhuman. Yet, Through all the trials that beset, He leaned on an upholding arm— Foreknowing, too, reserves of balm. But how of them whose souls may claim, Some link with Christ beyond the name,


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Which share the fate, but never share Aid or assurance, and nowhere Look for requital? Such there be In by-lanes o’er the world you see The Calvary faces… (4.10.34-47)

These words of Ungar’s resemble the efforts of twentieth-century liberation theologians to identify Christ with the oppressed in every culture, but Ungar goes further than the liberation theologians in that he suggests that the sufferers metonymically suggested by the phrase “Calvary faces” actually face a more terrifying trial even than the Passion, since they do not have the gift of divine foreknowledge. This assertion of the universal human Passion calls into question the uniqueness of all possible “holy lands”—including both Palestine and the United States. Ungar’s speeches take the critique of nationalism in Clarel to its most sophisticated level, but the larger themes of the poem are brought to a crisis by events in the plot. The central event of the fourth part of Clarel is Ruth’s death, which inspires the dialectic between death and life, Passion Week and Easter Day in the closing cantos of the poem. In the aftermath of Ruth’s death, Clarel’s observation of Passion Week as memorialized in the Holy Land, particularly by Armenian Christians, affects him profoundly; and on the morning of Good Friday, he has a dream in which all those who have died during Clarel's wanderings in Palestine appear before him. In a particularly Gothic passage, the narrator describes Clarel’s dream: The dead walked. There amid the train, Wan Nehemiah he saw again-With charnel beard; and Celio passed As in a dampened mirror glassed; Gleamed Mortmain, pallid as a wolf-bone Which bleaches where no man hath gone And Nathan in his murdered guise— Sullen, and Hades in his eyes; Poor Agar with such wandering mien As in her last blank hour was seen. ….but Ruth—ah, how estranged in face He knew her by no earthly grace. (4.32.86-99)

These lines reinforce again the significance of death as a motif throughout Clarel,10 and they raise again the central question toward which all the meditations on the landscape and inhabitants of the Holy Land throughout the poem point.

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The tropes that the narrator uses in describing Easter in the canto of that title are significant. As at other places in the poem, the ancient Holy Land sites are described in terms drawn from the new world, but here, rather than comparing the sacred sites to an equivalent space within the United States, the comparison is with South America. The vestments of the Catholic, Orthodox, and Oriental Christian priests who lead the joyful Easter celebrations are described as resembling the plumage of Brazilian birds (IV.33.31-5). Only after Ungar’s critique of the hubris of triumphalism in the United States does the narrator start to use metaphors from American locations outside the United States to describe residents of the Holy Land positively. Perhaps Ungar’s speech is precisely what is needed in the context of the poem to allow for thoughts about the New World that go beyond the scope of the United States as a covenant people. In Clarel the New World still has hope to offer the Old, and vice versa, but only once myths that reinforce political and social domination have been dispelled through the characters’ dialogues. When Clarel reaches its conclusion, ending on Easter day with Clarel’s despair at Ruth’s death, followed by the Epilogue, which, as Stan Goldman suggests, seems to advocate a chastened (but still protesting) theism as the appropriate response to Clarel’s trials, it does so only after providing the most rigorous and complex reading of the landscape of the Holy Land of any of the texts in the American Holy Land tradition. The great strength of the poem is Melville’s ability to allow the reader to view the complex interplay between the Land, the Book, and the traveler’s ability to interpret and reinvent both. Significantly, the Epilogue to Clarel draws back from the close engagement with sacred spaces that has marked the rest of the poem. Instead of focusing the reader’s gaze on a particular sacred site (the one site to which Melville refers is a pagan site outside of Palestine), the epilogue directs the reader to characteristic elements within the experience of Holy Land travel. In the first couplet, “If Luther’s day expand to Darwin’s year/Shall that exclude the hope—foreclose the fear?” (4.35.1-2) Melville emphasizes once again the debate between faith and doubt that frames much of the poem. Notably, Melville points to both the positive and the negative dimensions of faith in this line. Scientific progress may “exclude the hope”—in other words, undermine the consolation that the faithful derive from their faith, but it may also “foreclose the fear”—or eliminate the terror of hell that may also haunt the faithful. Thus both the promises and the terrors of faith and doubt alike are to be explored in the Epilogue.11 The lines that follow dramatize the tension between these antimonies: Unmoved by all the claims our times avow, The ancient Sphinx still keeps the porch of shade; And comes Despair, whom not her calm may cow, And coldly on that adamantine brow


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Scrawls undeterred his bitter pasquinade. But Faith (who from the scrawl indignant turns) With warm blood oozing from her wounded trust, Inscribes even on her shards of broken urns The sign o’ the cross—the spirit above the dust! (4.35.3-11)

Melville employs here a strategy that he uses frequently throughout Clarel. Melville uses competing graffiti written by adherents of faith and doubt. In this case, however, the graffiti are written on an ancient Egyptian artifact: the Sphinx. By using an Egyptian artifact rather than one with specifically Judeo-Christian associations, Melville suggests that the difficulties through which Clarel has struggled are not specific to Christianity, or even to the monotheistic tradition as a whole, but rather to the common experience of humanity. Moreover, Melville refers as well to the genealogy of monotheism that he has proposed in his journals when he locates the origin of the Hebrew prophets’ “terrific theology” in the pyramids. These lines present on the one hand, the Sphinx as the exemplar of all that is mysterious and sublime in human experience, and on the other the responses to this mystery that are presented by Faith and Despair. Significantly, Melville does not oppose faith directly to doubt, but rather to despair. Also of importance is the fact that faith and despair both respond to the inscrutability of the Sphinx with writing. Despair’s response is to sneer at the possibility of interpreting the Sphinx’s calm, whereas faith’s response is to continue the act of interpretation even in the midst of its apparent dissolution. Faith thus incorporates doubt, while despair can no longer maintain a productive tension with doubt. The imagery of faith writing on the shards of broken urns becomes particularly charged when we remember that one of the persistent themes of Clarel is the fragmentation of belief into different and even contradictory persuasions. By representing this fragmentation in the closing lines of the poem, Melville underlines Clarel’s most important themes.

Despite its depth and complexity, or perhaps because of these attributes, Clarel has had a reception history of being condemned by many critics and praised faintly by others, with only an embattled few willing to contend that it represents a significant part of Melville’s literary corpus. If we recognize, however, that far from being a mere amateur exercise, Clarel is a rich and challenging text that complicates the religious and epistemological issues raised in Melville’s more renowned earlier works and represents a distinctive stage in Melville’s artistic development, we can build on the foundation laid by critics such as Bezanson and Goldman and begin to provide students of the poem with the kind of rich, suggestive body of criticism that has grown up around Melville’s other works.

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As the culminating example of the genre of American Holy Land writing, Clarel carries still further significance. Clarel, with its metaphysical depth and intellectual ambitiousness, shows more than any other work the powerful intellectual and psychological responses that the Holy Land was capable of evoking from American writers. The importance of Clarel for the wider fields of American Literature and American Studies lies in the fact that in this poem, Melville gives voice to a wide array of expressions of American religious, literary, and political cultures, and also, paradoxically, allows these voices to come into meaningful dialogue with European voices to a degree that is rarely seen in American literature before Henry James and with Asian voices to an even more surprising degree. It is my hope that Clarel and the line of American travel narratives about the Holy Land will be afforded more of the attention that their rich analysis and extension of American literary culture deserves.

Notes 1

Goldman gives the most thorough and rigorous theological reading of Clarel, but he is far from alone in foregrounding the theological and metaphysical aspects of the poem. Ronald Mason’s 1951 study The Spirit above the Dust emphasizes Melville’s attraction to Catholicism and what Mason regards as the hopeful and redemptive epilogue to the poem. Joseph Knapp (Tortured Synthesis: The Meaning of Herman Melville’s Clarel. New York: Philosophical Library, 1971) writes an analysis of Clarel that regards Melville’s disillusionment with Protestantism and his interest in Catholicism as vitally important. Clark Davis’s After the Whale (Tuscaloosa: UP of Alabama, 1995) also provides a theological reading of the poem. Davis regards the Christian paradox of Christ’s missing body—the fact that it is precisely because Christ’s body is not present in the tomb that the hope of the Resurrection exists—as the central paradox of the poem. William Braswell’s Melville and Christianity (Ph.D. diss. U of Chicago, 1934) and Alfred Kazin’s God and the American Writer (New York: Knopf, 1997) provide briefer treatments of the subject of religion in Clarel. 2 I follow Goldman in applying the conceptual categories of dialogism and monologism as expounded by Mikhail Bakhtin to Clarel. The poem has in fact many similarities with the dialogical qualities identified by Bakhtin in Dostoyevsky’s novels. 3 Wyn Kelley’s work on Melville’s representation of urban spaces is particularly relevant here. Kelley argues in “Haunted Stone: Nature and City in Clarel.” (Essays in Arts and Science 15 (June 1986):15-29) and Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in NineteenthCentury New York. (New York: Cambridge UP, 1996) that the mysteries of the modern city take on the qualities of inscrutability associated in Moby-Dick with the White Whale. 4 The fact that Melville frames his poem as a pilgrimage, like Thomson, rather than as a farce of a pilgrimage, like Twain, is particularly significant here, and is relevant to my reading of the text as a whole. Victor and Edith Turner (Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1978) argue that pilgrimage must be seen as a “liminoid


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phenomenon” where alternatives to everyday hierarchies can be explored. I contend that the dialogues in Clarel constitute an example of this liminoid quality of pilgrimage that simply could not appear were the concept of pilgrimage not taken seriously in the poem. 5 Abdon’s characterization has been the subject of some debate. Bernard Rosenthal has identified the motif of the “Wandering Jew,” running through Clarel, and as Timothy Marr points out, Abdon can easily be associated with this motif and the anti-Semitic stereotypes associated with it. Walter Bezanson, on the other hand, has identified Abdon as one of the more admirable characters in the poem. 6 Shirley Detlaff (“Counter Natures in Mankind”: Hebraism and Hellenism in Clarel.” In Melville’s Evermoving Dawn: Centennial Essays. John Bryant and Robert Milder eds. Kent, OH: Kent State UP, 1997) has seen the appearance of Glaucon, the Banker, and several other characters, including the Lesbian, as a sign of an ongoing dialectic between Hebraism and Hellenism as expounded by Matthew Arnold in Melville’s work. 7 One of the most insightful recent readings of the Dead Sea portions of Clarel appears in Bruce Harvey’s American Geographics: U.S. National Narratives and the Representation of the Non-European World, 1830-1865. (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2001.) Harvey reads Melville’s treatment of the Dead Sea and its traditional connection to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah as an expression of Melville’s anguish over his own homoerotic inclinations and attachments. Harvey’s reading makes a valuable contribution to the assortment of studies that deal with the issue of sexuality in Clarel. 8 Hilton Obenzinger has noted that the publication of Clarel coincided with the centennial celebrations of the American Revolution. Rolfe and Ungar’s tortured debates on the past and future of America provide a striking counterpoint to the kind of rhetoric that surrounds such occasions (153). 9 One of the more disturbing elements of Ungar’s speech is his apparent blindness to the horrors of slavery. Indeed, while Melville criticizes slavery quite explicitly in Mardi (1853), there is not an equivalent discussion in Clarel. I would suggest that Melville was perhaps not interested in fighting a battle against slavery that had already been won in the 1860s, and thus found Yankee imperialism to be a more relevant concern. Also, there is certainly an implicit critique of the treatment of African-Americans in Ungar’s animadversions on the crimes of the Anglo-Saxon race. Nonetheless, Ungar’s lack of consideration of the particularly severe oppression suffered by nineteenth-century African-Americans can be read as both an expression of the limitations of his point of view within the poem and as an expression of Melville’s own disturbing post-Civil war tendency to overlook the demands of racial justice in the South in the interest of national reconciliation. For more on Melville and race and imperialism, see Carolyn Karcher’s Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race and Violence in Melville’s America (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 1980) and Wai-Chee Dimock’s Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991). 10 Basem L. Ra’ad (“The Death Plot in Melville’s Clarel.” Emerson Society Quarterly 27 (1981): 14-27) and Stanley Brodwin (“Herman Melville’s Clarel: An Existential Gospel.” PMLA 86 (May 1971): 375-87) have both discussed this motif at some length in their respective articles.

138 11


See James Duban’s “From Bethlehem to Tahiti: Transcultural ‘Hope’ in Clarel.” (Philological Quarterly 70.4 (Fall 1991): 475-83), for a particularly insightful reading of the Epilogue.

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Index Asia 15, 36, 118, 136 Baepler, Paul 7-10 Bakhtin, Mikhail 112, 136 Barbary Captivity 1, 5, 7-15 Barclay, James Turner 21, 35-41, 47, 60, 71 Baym, Nina 124 Ben-Arieh, Yehoshua 16, 41 Bercovitch, Sacvan 5 Bethlehem 32, 46, 110, 116, 131-5 Bezanson, Walter 114, 120, 123, 124, 128, 135, 137 Bhabha, Homi K. 106 Braswell, William 136 Bridgman, Richard 106 Brodwin, Stanley 137 Browne, J. Ross 2, 16, 36, 37, 80, 83, 84-8, 94-6, 105, 107 Bryant, John 137 Bryant, William Cullen 2, 3, 40, 59, 61, 68, 78-80 Buell, Lawrence 114 Chase, Richard 124 Calvinism 102, 113 Cox, James M. 100, 106 Cresson, Warder 40, 41, 43, 51-3, 54, 56, 57 Curtis, George William 2, 40, 60, 74-8, 80, 81 Davidson, Cathy 8, 11, 16 Davis, Clark 136 Davis, Moshe 16, 41

Davis, John 3, 20, 27, 41, 44 Dead Sea 80, 116, 123, 124, 127, 128, 137 DeForest, John William 2, 83, 84, 85, 88-91, 94, 96, 105, 106, 107 Detlaff, Shirley 137 Doane, William Crosswell 57 Dorr, David F. 2, 80, 83, 84, 85, 90, 91-4, 105, 106 Eastern Orthodox Christianity 5, 38, 67, 87-8, 94, 101, 113 Egan, Robert 99, 106 Egypt 37, 61, 66, 75, 77, 78, 95, 101, 103, 135-6 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 15, 51, 52, 103 Epistemology 51, 94, 110 Finkelstein, Dorothee Metlitsky 27, 114, 117, 118 Foss, John 8-10, 13 Goldman, Stan 107, 112-114, 134, 135, 136 Harvey, Bruce 41, 80, 124, 137 Hatch, Nathan 102 Holy Sepulcher, Church of the 23-6, 29-31, 33, 34, 38, 41, 46, 47, 54-6, 62-4, 68, 72-3, 78, 92, 100-104, 115, 120-1 Hyde, Orson 2, 41, 43, 48-50, 56

146


Imperialism 10, 59, 67, 70, 71, 116, 132, 137 Islam 3, 8, 10-15, 67, 72, 80

Minor, Clorinda 2, 6, 40-1, 43-56, 59-60, 65, 71, 73-4, 79, 93, 117, 122

Jerusalem 16, 21-41, 43-56, 59, 62, 64-79, 83-101, 109, 115-24 Johnson, Sarah Barclay 21, 35-41, 47, 60, 71, 93 Judaism 3, 6, 14, 20, 31, 34, 44-53, 64-5, 67-8, 71, 73, 75, 80, 85, 107, 124, 127

Obenzinger, Hilton 3-5, 57, 77, 81, 92-93, 104, 106, 111, 112, 117, 137 Odenheimer, William H. 2, 40-1, 43-4, 53-6, 60, 72 Orientalism 2, 15, 74-5 Ottoman Palestine 3, 5-6, 19, 37, 76, 80, 94

Kazin, Alfred 106 Kelley, Wyn 136 Knapp, Joseph 136 Lamartine, Alphonse de 61-2 Lowry, Richard 107 Lynch, William F. 80 Marr, Timothy 137 Mar Saba 116, 129-30 Mason, Ronald 136 Mather, Cotton 8-10, 12 Melton, Jeffrey 107-8 Melville, Herman 2-4, 15-17, 19, 23-4, 27, 30-1, 45, 52, 56-7, 61, 64, 69, 71, 73-4, 78, 84, 92-3, 104-6, 109-137 Battlepieces 110 Clarel, a Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land 115-137 Journal of a Voyage to Europe and the Levant 109-116 Mardi 110 Moby-Dick 110 Typee, or a Peep at Polynesian Life 109-10 Metwalli, Ahmed Mohammed 74, 88, 106 Miller, Perry 5, 131

Pluralism 109-10 Poe, Edgar Allan 52, 61-2 Potter, William 113 Prime, William 20-2, 31-41, 48, 54, 59-60, 71, 74, 78-9, 86-7, 95, 98-107, 114, 127 Protestantism 1-3, 5-6, 19-41, 43, 45, 48, 51-6, 62-81, 85-8, 92, 94, 101-3, 109, 111, 113-14, 117, 120-5, 131, 136 Ra’ad, Basem L. 137 Reynolds, David S. 7, 8, 11 Robinson, Edward 2, 20-7, 29-36, 38-40, 44-53, 60-1, 63-4, 67, 71, 74-6, 79, 85-7, 94-5, 98-9, 101, 104, 106, 112, 114, 117, 120, 122, 136 Roman Catholicism 1-2, 5, 14, 1921, 23-4, 29-32, 34, 38, 40, 47, 49, 51, 53-6, 60, 63, 67, 70, 72, 80, 86-8, 94, 99102, 111, 113, 114, 125-7, 131, 134, 136 Rosenthal, Bernard 137 Rowson, Susanna Maria 7-8, 13-15 Said, Edward 2, 74, 95

Index Schueller, Malini Johar 8, 10, 16, 65, 91, 106, 112, 124 Smolinski, Reiner 6 Stephens, John Lloyd 2, 20, 36, 40, 59-71, 73-5, 79-81, 85-6, 93-4, 103-6, 114, 120 Taylor, Bayard 2, 3, 19-20, 36, 40, 59, 61, 69-75, 78-81, 85, 93, 95-6, 103, 106, 110-11, 114, 120 Thomson, William M. 2, 19-21, 2636, 38-41, 60, 62, 64, 67, 71, 74-6, 79, 85-7, 94-5, 98-9, 101, 104, 106, 112, 114, 117, 120, 122, 136 Thoreau, Henry David 6 Turner, Victor and Edith L. B. 5

147 Twain, Mark 1, 2, 3, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 35, 40, 57, 69, 71, 73, 83, 84, 85, 88, 90, 93, 94106, 110-111, 114-115, 120, 136 Innocents Abroad, The 94-106 Tyler, Royall 8, 10-13, 16, 72, 73, 102, 110 Van Hagen, Victor Wolfgang 61 Vogel, Lester I. 27 Walker, Franklin 84, 85, 99, 106, 111 Wright, Nathalia 114 Ziff, Larzer 4, 81

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