Hawthorne’s New Pilgrim’s Progress and Antebellum America: Subversion and Containment in 'The Celestial Railroad'

Autor: Ali Hassanpour Darbandi, Tahereh Rezaei
Rok vydání: 2021
Předmět:
Zdroj: Neophilologus. 106:147-165
ISSN: 1572-8668
0028-2677
DOI: 10.1007/s11061-021-09702-9
Popis: This paper studies Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad” as a critique of Bunyan’s visionary tale, Pilgrim’s Progress, and examines the transformation of its religious ethos in the context of antebellum America. To this aim, this study mainly focuses on Hawthorne’s criticism of supernatural explanations, religious teleology, and divine salvation from the New Historical perspective of subversion and containment, and the way they are transformed in terms of natural explanations, chance, and secularly-minded terrestrial salvation, respectively. As a rewriting of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, “The Celestial Railroad” not only subverts the dogmatic and authoritarian religiosity of its predecessor but also demonstrates the containment of this religious discourse in a more this-worldly, humanistic, and secular vision, as the narrative is also vigilant about the repercussions that this transformation might bring about. The controversial and unsatisfactory ending of “The Celestial Railroad” is shown to be a point of strength in the story via two different interpretations: first, by appealing to the fictional nature of the dream vision, the ending undermines the truth claim ascribed to visions in the past and is thus made more appropriate to modern interpretations of dreams. Second, the contradiction at the end can function as a distraction to blur Hawthorne’s intentions and to protect him against possible accusations.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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