Confessing on Impulse(s): Surveying Hawthorne's Veil, Thoreau's Ornaments, and Northup's Violin

Abstract

AbstractFrom Augustine’s Confessions to Reformed Protestants’ Confession of Faith, from Rousseau’s Confessions to the “Confessional” poets of the twentieth century, the conceptualization and uses of “confession” in the West reveal transcending characteristics of the word that can be traced across literature of varying genres, eras, and cultural contexts. My dissertation articulates these characteristics—a ‘discernible essence’—by theorizing confession through human experience. While formulating my theory, I considered why writers found “confession” a fitting word in particular but wide-ranging situations both religious and secular. Consequently, I formulated my theory from an historical investigation of literature, an investigation of my own cultural context, as well as my own experience with confessing. However, conspicuously absent from the literary evolution of “confession” uses was the nineteenth-century. Following the Protestant Reformation, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries reveal notable literary revisions of “confession”, as did the twentieth. Yet no such event has been significantly marked in nineteenth-century American literature. My dissertation seeks to reconcile this void through three case studies drawn from literature of the American Renaissance (1830-1870)—all of which are examined through my theory of confession. For my case studies, I have chosen Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836); Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854); and Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853). The questions that ground my investigation are: What does American literature tell us about “confession” as it passes through the nineteenth century? And, in turn, what can these discoveries tell us about writers of the American Renaissance? While seeking to answer these questions, my theory has been shaped and affirmed by the narratives of Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Northup. Consequently, I show that these writers share an implicit, yet unified conception of “confession” and, in so doing, plotting nineteenth-century American literature on the historical timeline of its evolution.