American Literature: Romanticism research assignment Student Research Submissions 2013 research essay

Carrie C. Hatfield

May 2, 2013

Errands into the Wilderness:  “The Bear,” and its Two-Fold Jeremiad

            Though it originated many years earlier, the sermon form of the Jeremiad takes on new purpose and becomes a popular literary form in the American Romantic Era.  Romantic authors such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville, and John Greenleaf Whittier employed the Jeremiad, and shaped it into its recognizable literary form.  The American Modernist Movement employs, or modifies many of the same characteristics of Romantic writing.  Thus, we see a resurgence of the Jeremiad in the works of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Toni Morrison.  William Faulkner’s “The Bear” contains two very different Jeremiads: one is the pure straightforward, American Romantic form, and the other employs much earlier forms, but is wholly Modernist in its implications.

The Jeremiad Form

            The jeremiad sermon form is simple and formulaic.  Congregants are addressed as “chosen or “called” by God for a specific purpose and for the fulfillment of certain promises.  How those promises and potential have not been fulfilled by the people is outlined, and sins are delineated.  Whatever the current misery is, be it famine, war, pestilence, etc. is cited as a direct result of those sins.  These three parts are the essential European jeremiad.

Considered as a mode of denunciation, the jeremiad was an ancient formulaic refrain, a ritual form imported to Massachusetts in 1630 from the Old World.  Insofar as the Puritan clergy were castigating the evils of the time, they were drawing directly upon the sermons of fifteenth-and-sixteenth century England, which in turn derived from the medieval pulpit. (Bercovitch 52)

 The Puritans brought the jeremiad with them to America where it was enhanced.  The American jeremiad adds the wilderness errand (Bercovitch 49,) or the idea of the chosen people striking out into the wilderness (literally or figuratively) in order to fulfill promise and potential.  The American jeremiad also adds a fourth part.  After the current condition is justified by previous sin, a glimmer of hope is provided.  If the chosen people cease their sins and atone, there is hope of salvation, and that their full potential may be reached.

            Leading up to the romantic era the jeremiad was a favored form for sermons and civic speeches. 

            When drought or disease descended, or when Indians attacked, ministers found evidence that    God had withdrawn his favor from “the chosen people” because one or more of them had failed      to keep his commandments.  In times of prosperity m they rang the alarm bells, too, indicting the inhabitants for forgetting their “errand into the wilderness.”  (Altschuler 162)

The civil or civic impact of the jeremiad is its continued use in the political arena.

            Long after Puritans became Yankees, the jeremiad retained its cultural power, invoked by pious   prophets and secular reformers, anxious about the state of souls or the fate of a nation. Whether in support of an embargo on imports from Europe during the Revolutionary War, or             warnings that the Civil War was divine retribution for the sins of Americans, North and South, the Jeremiad became a part of the civil religion of the U.S. (Altschuler 162)

Many of the greatest speeches ever given by American leaders: “The Gettysburg Address,” Robert F. Kennedy’s “Time of Shame and Sorrow,” and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speeches all employ the jeremiad form.

            Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is quite possibly the most famous American jeremiad sermon.  Its timing, whether one calls it Enlightenment Era, The Second Great Awakening, or Pre-Romantic, and its grand oratory style in this author’s opinion, set the stage for the emergence of the jeremiad as a literary form. 

            The jeremiad as a literary form begins and thrives in the American Romantic Era.  How could a literary form not thrive when nursed by the likes of Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Stowe, Melville, and Poe?  Their employment of a fledgling literary form grafted the previously oratory form into the American literary consciousness.  Pre-occupation with nature, the frontier, and “untamed” wilderness are comfortable, literal adaptations of the puritanical “wilderness errand.”  Gothic and sublime elements impart the vocabulary to describe trials and enumerate sins in lurid detail.  Because the Romantics were working within the American jeremiad form, there is always hope of redemption, even if it is only longed for in the actual text. 

            American Realism is in many ways, the antithesis of Romanticism.  Thus, the jeremiad with its fervent idealism, and emotional assertions fell somewhat out of favor with the Realists.  Most references to the jeremiad in this period are either in the form of satire, or the “anti-jeremiad.”

            Modernism is in many ways a synthesis of Romanticism and Realism.  Modernism employs Romantic conventions with Realistic sensibilities.  Often a Romantic convention is employed in such a way as to appear self-conscious or ironic.  With the resurgence of Romantic conventions, the jeremiad also reappears in its literary form.  The gothic and sublime tendencies that were so effective in the Romantic era, have now become the grotesque.  Irony and self-consciousness add further dimension to the jeremiad as employed by Modernists.  The jeremiad was utilized by Zora Neale Hurston, T.S. Elliot, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and of course, William Faulkner.

Ike’s Jeremiad

Chapter four of “The Bear” contains, in its entirety the classic Romantic presentation of the American Jeremiad.

            At age sixteen, Ike takes down the old commissary ledgers, reconstructing through their faded     entries the sensational history of what Ike takes to be his grandfather’s incest with his own slave        daughter, a discovery which leads to Ike’s own decision to renounce his heritage and adopt a life             of penitential poverty. (Evans 189)

            David H. Evans, in “Taking the Place of Nature: ‘The Bear’ and the Incarnation of America,” states that

             his (Ike’s) sermon in the commissary takes a very familiar and very conventional form.  It is in     fact a version of the original American literary genre, the American jeremiad that was developed             among the first generations of immigrant Puritans. (190)

Ike’s jeremiad establishes the South, and more specifically the McCaslin family as a chosen people.  Ike’s cousin McCaslin reminds Ike of his heritage as “chosen.”

            You, the direct male descendant of him who saw the opportunity and took it, bought the land,       took the land, got the land no matter how, held it to bequeath, no matter how, out of the old             grant, the first patent, when it was a wilderness of wild beasts and wilder men, and cleared it,      translated it into something to bequeath to his children, worthy of bequeathment for his          descendants’ ease and security and pride and to perpetuate his name and accomplishments.             (Faulkner 242-243)

 These people expanded the frontier, conquered the wilds and established civilization in the southern United States.  They established prosperous plantations and raised families on land that just one generation before had been “untamed wilderness.”

            And then, they sinned. The Carothers family, and the South presumed to own other human beings.  This presumptive ownership--slavery, is per Ike’s world view summarized by his grandfather’s miscegenation and incest.  By piecing together the cryptic ledger entries left by Carothers McCaslin, Uncle Buck (Ike’s father,) and Buddy, Ike sees an undeniable pattern drawn by the birth of Turl (Terrel) and the deaths of Tomy (Tomasina) and Eunice.  Accompanying the announcement of Turl’s birth is a two word note, “father’s will.”  This cryptic entry is all that Ike seems to need to connect the dots. “And as the secret truth of old Carothers’s life reveals itself to Ike’s prophetic soul to be a Gothic tale of unspeakable secrets, so that history is one of sin guilt and corruption (Evans 190). 

            Ike’s only option for repentance for sins so far removed from his own generation, is to repudiate his inheritance from the very ancestors who sinned.  He renounces his part of the inheritance, and sets out to pay remunerations to Turl’s offspring.

            There is hope for the redemption, the McCaslins the South and America can be favored by God again if Ike forswears his inheritance and makes remunerations to Carothers McCaslin’s black descendants.  Ike’s attempt at redemption is both a tremendous act of faith, and a tremendous act of ego.  Ike’s conclusion places him as the messiah figure in his own sermon.

            Chapter four offers Romantic supporting details of the “fall” described by Ike’s jeremiad.  The plantation house serves as Gothic manse.  The plantation house is described as “the tremendous abortive edifice scarcely yet out of embryo, as if even old Carothers McCaslin had paused aghast at the concrete indication of his own boundless conceiving” (Faulkner 248.)  Carothers’ secret, known and hinted at by his sons, but ultimately uncovered by his grandson after his death is a graceful nod to the Gothic secrets kept by Poe and Hawthorne’s protagonists.

            He made no effort either to explain or obfuscate the thousand-dollar legacy to the son of an          unmarried slave-girl, to be paid only at the child’s coming-of-age, bearing the consequence of            the act of which there was still no definite incontrovertible proof that he acknowledged, not out             of his own substance but penalizing his sons with it, charging them a cash forfeit on the accident     of their own paternity; not even a bribe of silence toward his own fame; since his fame would suffer only after he was no longer present. . . (256)

Faulkner writes that Carothers did not hide this, but his sons both die without disclosing the family secret to Ike, making them implicit in the family’s secret, and sins.

            Faulkner’s use of the American Romantic jeremiad form in chapter four of “The Bear” implies that despite the Civil War, all is not lost for the South, or for America in general.  There is a chance of salvation through repentance and remunerations.  By repenting and “sinning no more” America and the South can resume their position as “God’s chosen people.”

The Nature Jeremiad

            “The Bear’s” other jeremiad (it cannot be called second as it technically happens chronologically before Ike’s Jeremiad.  Is a natural, or ecological jeremiad.  It begins with a history of the “chosen” people. 

            There was a man and a dog too this time.  Two beasts, counting Old Ben, the bear, and two        men, counting Boon Hogganbeck, in whom some of the same blood ran which ran in Sam        Fathers, even though Boon’s was a plebian strain of it and only Sam and Old Ben and the           mongrel Lion were taintless and incorruptible. (Faulkner 181)

With the history acknowledged, and the cast of characters “chosen,” Faulkner prepares the reader for the ultimate wilderness errand. 

            He was sixteen.  For six years now he had been a man’s hunter.  For six years now he had heard           the best of all talking.  It was of the wilderness, the big woods, bigger and older than any         recorded document:--of white man fatuous enough to believe he had bought any fragment of it,       of Indian ruthless enough to pretend that any fragment of it had been his to convey; bigger than          Major de Spain and the scrap he pretended to, knowing better. (Faulkner 181)

In the first two paragraphs, Faulkner outlines the major players in the action.  Boon, Sam, Lion, and Old Ben, but it is implied that the entire hunting party is “chosen.”  Sam despite his mixed race status, or perhaps because of it, is set apart from the rest of the party as “taintless and incorruptible.   

But beneath the conventional ritual lies the religious rite: the hunting of the tribal god, whom they are impelled to challenge.  In this rite the established social relations dissolve; the artificial ranks of Jefferson give way to more natural relations as Sam Father is automatically given the lead. (Lydenberg 65)

Sam is both the master of the hunt and a kind of high priest in this nature myth. If Sam is the priest, then the hunt is a ritual.

            To him, they were going not to hunt bear and deer but to keep yearly rendezvous with the bear     which they did not even intend to kill.  Two weeks later they would return with no trophy, no     skin.  He had not expected it.

In this yearly ritual, with Sam presiding as priest, nature is their god, and Old Ben, is this god’s avatar. 

            Like a totem animal, Old Ben is at the same time sacred, and dangerous or forbidden (though in no sense unclean).  Also he is truly animistic, possessing a soul of his own, initiating action, not      inert like other creatures of nature. (Lydenberg 65)

The forest, or the “Big Woods” also represent nature.  More than a simple backdrop for the story, the woods represent wilderness, lack of civilization (in a positive way,) and the dwindling frontier.  Faulkner links the two, nature and god, forest and bear in the descriptions of Ike’s anticipatory assumptions about the bear which border on premonition.

            It loomed, it towered in his dreams before he even saw the unaxed woods where it left its             crooked print, shaggy, tremendous, red-eyed, not malevolent but just big, too big for the dogs         which tried to bay it, for the horses which tried to ride it down, for the men and the bullets they        fired into it, too big for the very country which was its constricting scope. (Faulkner 183)

“The country that is its constricting scope” is at least metaphorically, America, and in this case the uncontainable force represented by the bear is the last wilderness, or the frontier.

At the end of chapter two, Ike is able to pinpoint (retrospectively, of course,) the moment where it all “went wrong.”

            It seemed to him that something, he didn’t know what , was beginning, had already begun.  It        was like the last act on a set stage.  It was the beginning of the end of something, he didn’t know         what except that he would not grieve.  He would be humble and proud that he had been found             worthy to be a part of it too or even just to see it too. (214)

The hunting party sins.  They finally kill Old Ben.  They have achieved the irrevocable destruction of the frontier.  They have for once and for all, conquered nature.  They have killed their god. 

            At this point in Faulkner’s jeremiad, the suffering beings.  Lion dies.  The interment of Lion in the woods is attended by as many men as would attend another man’s funeral.

            They carried Lion into the woods. . . Boon carrying Lion and the boy and General Compson and   Walter and still almost fifty of them following with lanterns and lighted pine knots—men from   Hoke’s and even further, who would have to ride out of the bottom in the dark, and swampers       and trappers who would have to walk even, scattering toward the little hidden huts where they    lived. (236)

Lion’s “funeral” is a gathering (seemingly the last according to the rest of the story) of wild men, men who are tied to the land.  They are gathering to mourn the end of an era, the era of Old Ben, just as much as they are mourning the death of the tool of his destruction.  The paradox of Lion’s funeral is basically an illustration of the paradox of the American “frontier mentality.”  By doing the “utterly American thing,” that is expanding westward, exploring and conquering the frontier, was to also directly participate in bringing about the frontier’s demise. 

            Sam dies.  He just “quits.”  He has served his purpose, and there is no need for the priest of a dead god.  The land that he has been so tied to by his Native American roots, is disappearing.

            Ike returns to “civilization” to make the discovery in the commissary ledgers.  As he did not participate in the killing of the bear, he is not held accountable for the destruction/death of nature.  However, by way of the family secret he discovers his own issue with owning the land.

            In chapter five Ike, Ash and Boon return to the hunting camp, perhaps to hunt, but mostly to pay their respects at Sam’s grave.  Boon is the final casualty of the hunting party’s folly.  He loses his grip on reality, and Ike finds him hammering his gun on a stump, mumbling at squirrels.

            Then he saw boon, sitting, his back against the trunk, his head bent, hammering furiously at         something on his lap.  What he hammered with was the barrel of his dismembered gun, what he       hammered at was the breech of it.  The rest of the gun lay scattered about him in a half-dozen     pieces while he bent over the piece on his lap his scarlet and streaming walnut face, hammering    the disjointed barrel against the gun-breech with the frantic abandon of a madman.  He didn’t        even look up to see who it was.  Still hammering , he merely shouted back at the boy in a hoarse     strangled voice: “Get out of here!  Don’t touch them! Don’t touch a one of them! They’re mine!”

Boon’s sanity is the final cost extracted from the hunting party for the death of Old Ben.  Though ironically, he was never that bright or coherent to begin with.

            Faulkner’s nature jeremiad ends with pain and suffering being the result of sin.  In true Modernist fashion there is no false hope held out for redemption.  “The Bear” is what “Hyatt Waggoner has called a ‘story about  the need for an experience of a kind of redemption conceived as dependent upon mingled lore and rite” (Stonsifer 220).  Due to “The Bear’s” Modernist tendencies, that need cannot be fulfilled.  Thus there is no hope of redemption in the nature jeremiad, and nature/ the frontier is forever lost.  The marked lack of hope of redemption makes this jeremiad a European jeremiad.  Though Faulkner’s nature jeremiad utilizes an earlier form than the American or Romantic jeremiad, the resulting disenchantment and hopelessness are thoroughly Modernist in conventions and scope.

            The nature jeremiad in “The Bear” exhibits other Modern tendencies as well.  The chapters are not chronological, but nonlinear and recursive.  In chapter one, for example,  Ike is both ten and sixteen.  The narrative also exhibits the extremely long descriptive sentences typical of Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness writing.  Primitivism is indicated by Old Ben’s godlike status, as well as Ike’s initiation into the forest/ first sighting of the bear.  Classical references abound.  Descriptions of the dogs baying the bear, the slaughtered colt, and the death of Old Ben all contain examples of the grotesque.  These Modernist elements combine well with the European jeremiad form.

            “The Bear” contains two intimately related stories, and two interrelated jeremiads. 

            Part IV (chapter four) and Old Ben’s story resemble the components of a binary star.  They          revolve about each other and even cast light upon each other.  But each contains the source of    its own light. (Lydenberg 65)

The two separate stories and their jeremiads contrast each other.  “Somehow, Faulkner seems to be saying, a right relationship to nature is akin to a right relationship between men, or between the sovereign whites and the dominated Negroes” (Stonesifer 220).  Considering the two jeremiads, it is worth nothing that though nature/ the frontier cannot be saved, there is hope of salvaging and correcting race relations.  Faulkner’s utilization of the jeremiad form utilizes both American and European versions, and employs both Romantic and Modernist sensibilities.

Works Cited

Altschuler, Glenn C. "Apathy, Apocalypse, and the American Jeremiad." American Literary History 15.1 (2003): 162-71. Project MUSE. Web. 12 Apr. 2013.

Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1978. EBook.    

Evans, David H. "Taking the Place of Nature: "The Bear" and the Incarnation of America." Faulkner and the Natural World. :University of Mississippi, 1999. 179-97. EBook.

Faulkner, William. "The Bear." Go Down, Moses. New York: Random House, 1942. 181-315. Print.

Lydenberg, John. "Nature Myth in Faulkner's "The Bear"" American Literature (2003): 62-72. Academic Search Complete. Web. 12 Apr. 2013.

Stonesifer, Richard J. "Faulkner's "The Bear": A Note on Structure." College English 23.3 (1961): 219-23. JSTOR. Web. 12 Apr. 2013.