The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature: Five Hundred Years of Literary Homecomings (Biblical Refigurations) 9780198817291, 0198817290

Table of contents :
Cover
The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature: Five Hundred Years of Literary Homecomings
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Contents
1: Reading the Prodigal Son
The Prodigal Son in biblical studies
The Prodigal Son in literary studies
Conclusion
2: The Prodigal Son in Elizabethan Literature
The influence of Roman comedies
The Prodigal as rebellious son
Maintaining the status quo
Admonition and edification
Rebellion
Repentance
Conclusion
3: The Prodigal Son and Shakespeare
Prodigal Son references in Shakespeare’s plays
Shakespeare’s Bible
Shakespeare’s exegesis
The Prodigal Prince Hal
The Prodigal King Lear
Conclusion
4: Female Victorian Novelists and the Prodigal Son
The Bible in Adam Bede
The Bible in North and South
The Bible in Kirsteen
The Prodigal Son in Adam Bede
The Prodigal Son in North and South
The Prodigal Son in Kirsteen
Conclusion
5: The American Short Story and the Prodigal Son
The American short story tradition
The Prodigal Son in nineteenth-century short stories: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bret Harte
The Prodigal Son in Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’
The Prodigal Son in twentieth-century short stories: Willa Cather and Thomas Wolfe
Conclusion
6: Prodigal Ministers in Fiction
J. G. Lockhart’s Adam Blair
James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack
Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead
Home in Gideon Mack and Gilead
Being lost and found in Adam Blair and Gideon Mack
Conclusion
7: The Prodigal Son in Poetry: Elizabeth Bishop and Iain Crichton Smith
Elizabeth Bishop: context
Iain Crichton Smith: context
Elizabeth Bishop: religious context
Iain Crichton Smith: religious context
Robinson Crusoe as Prodigal Son
Conclusion
8: Conclusion
Identifying the Prodigal Son
The Prodigal Son in literature: a review of findings
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Biblical Refigurations

The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature

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BIBLICAL REFIGURATIONS

General Editors: James Crossley and Francesca Stavrakopoulou This innovative series offers new perspectives on the textual, cultural, and interpretative contexts of particular biblical characters, inviting readers to take a fresh look at the methodologies of Biblical Studies. Individual volumes employ different critical methods including social-scientific criticism, critical theory, historical criticism, reception history, postcolonialism, and gender studies, while subjects include both prominent and lesser-known figures from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. Published Titles Include: Jeremy Schipper Keith Bodner Mark Leuchter Louise J. Lawrence William John Lyons James Crossley Nyasha Junior

Disability and Isaiah’s Suffering Servant Jeroboam’s Royal Drama Samuel and the Shaping of Tradition Sense and Stigma in the Gospels: Depictions of Sensory-Disabled Characters Joseph of Arimathea: A Study in Reception History Jesus and the Chaos of History: Redirecting the Life of the Historical Jesus Reimagining Hagar: Blackness and Bible

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Biblical Refigurations GENERAL EDITORS: JAMES CROSSLEY AND FRANCESCA STAVRAKOPOULOU

The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature Five Hundred Years of Literary Homecomings ALISON M. JACK

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Alison M. Jack  The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in  Impression: 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, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press  Madison Avenue, New York, NY , United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number:  ISBN –––– Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Acknowledgements

This book has had a long gestation, and I have been encouraged along the way by many people. Colleagues at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh, have been supportive and interested, full of suggestions and ideas. Church groups who have heard me talk about the parables and the Prodigal Son in particular have been keen to share their insights with me, and I have appreciated this very much. The book was finished during a period of research leave, and I am grateful to the University of Edinburgh for the opportunity to be free of other responsibilities and to focus on drawing the material together. Two short periods of study at Westminster College, Cambridge, helped to consolidate ideas and fill in research gaps, and were of great benefit in the final year of writing. The editorial team at Oxford University Press has been supportive and understanding throughout the process, and I would like to thank them for the guidance they have given me. The title of the book was the subject of some discussion. ‘Literature in English’ seemed to raise unmet expectations, and so ‘English and American Literature’ was agreed. This should not be taken to downplay the texts from the field of Scottish literature which are so important throughout the book, and I hope my friends and colleagues working in that field will understand the balancing act that had to be struck between full description and a workable title. My children, Iain and Fiona, have been patient and uncomplaining when I have felt the need to point out a Prodigal Son reference in every film, television programme, or book we have experienced together. As always, I owe them my thanks for their unfailing resilience and sense of fun. Drew Brown was an encouraging and supportive presence as the book neared its completion. Finally, I dedicate this book to Ian Campbell, Emeritus Professor of Scottish and Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh, who has been a teacher, mentor, and friend for thirty years now, and who continues to be a supportive advocate of my work.

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Acknowledgements

Excerpts from ‘Crusoe in England’, ‘Over , Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’, ‘The Prodigal’, and ‘Questions of Travel’ from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright ©  by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright ©  by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Also published in The Complete Poems – volume. In the UK, these poems are found in Poems by Elizabeth Bishop published by Chatto and Windus. Reproduced by permission of the Random House Group Ltd. © . Permission to quote from the poetry of Iain Crichton Smith has been granted by Carcanet Press (), and is acknowledged with gratitude. The lines quoted are all from Iain Crichton Smith, New Collected Poems, edited and introduced by Matt McGuire (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd, ). ‘Never Go Back’ by Felix Dennis, taken from A Glass Half Full (Hutchinson, ), © Felix Dennis, is reproduced by kind permission of the Felix Dennis Literary Estate. A short section of Chapter  is adapted from my article ‘Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner”: Revisiting the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke .–)’ in Journal of the Bible and its Reception, vol. . (): pp. –, and is used with permission.

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Contents

. Reading the Prodigal Son . The Prodigal Son in Elizabethan Literature

 

. The Prodigal Son and Shakespeare



. Female Victorian Novelists and the Prodigal Son . The American Short Story and the Prodigal Son

 

. Prodigal Ministers in Fiction . The Prodigal Son in Poetry: Elizabeth Bishop and Iain Crichton Smith



. Conclusion



Bibliography Index



 

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1 Reading the Prodigal Son

‘Prodigal’ is an adjective with a chequered past. Its Latin root is prodigus, which denotes a lavishness which is morally neutral. In general English usage, strongly negative connotations attend its sense of wasteful squandering. However, more recently, ‘prodigal’ has cut loose from such negativity to take on a much more positive understanding which includes waywardness, perhaps, but more strongly still, a willingness to seek out adventure, even self-fulfilment, and a certain generosity of spirit. Today, the word is most often used in the context of Jesus’ parable about a father and two sons (Luke :–), the younger of whom is given star billing in the title: it is ‘The Parable of the Prodigal Son’ in common English usage.1 This son is often simply referred to as ‘the Prodigal’, and a negative judgement is certainly implied by Jerome’s reference in the fourth century CE to the parable as a story about the contrast between ‘the prudent and prodigal sons’.2 When I have introduced the parable to students in my Bible and Literature classes, 1 The most significant early association of ‘prodigal’ with this character in an English translation of the Bible is to be found in the Geneva Bible, which was first published with both the Old and New Testaments in . Here the parable is introduced in the text as the parable ‘of the Prodigal Sonne’, and the page heading repeats this, although the word is not found in the story itself. The same page heading was used in the King James Version of the Bible published in , sealing the ongoing connection between the parable and the prodigality of the younger son. The history of the word’s association with the parable is charted in detail in Ezra Horbury, ‘Aristotelian Ethics and Luke :– in Early Modern England’, Journal of Religious History . ( June ): pp. –. 2 Jerome, Lives of Illustrious Men, ch. , quoted in Amy-Jill Levine, Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi (New York: HarperCollins, ), p. .

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The Prodigal Son

however, ‘prodigal’ is often a puzzle to them and they are drawn to the positive rather than negative connotations of the word. Later commentators have sought to retitle the parable to refocus attention on the other characters in the story,3 but the parable remains associated with the younger son and this particular, ‘prodigal’, aspect of his character. This character, the Prodigal Son, and his story, have fascinated Christian preachers, biblical commentators and theologians, novelists, poets and playwrights, as well as those interested in the human condition from a therapeutic perspective. The Orcadian writer George Mackay Brown speaks for many in the literary community when he has a character assert, ‘I’m telling you this as a writer of stories: there’s no story I know of so perfectly shaped and phrased as The Prodigal Son.’4 One of the longest and most narratively complex of all of the parables attributed to Jesus in the Gospels, it deals with universal themes of family, home, rebellion, and return. This study will explore the significance of the influence of the parable on selected texts from the fields of English, Scottish, and American literature. Meaning will be sought in the reciprocal relationship between biblical and literary studies, and in the culture in which the reinterpretations of the parable take place. We will see that different aspects of the parable are emphasized in each of the periods and genres discussed, and that the Prodigal Son and his family are endlessly and creatively engaging characters who continue to beguile. In their appeal to this archetypal story of homecoming, authors seem to find multiple ways to connect with their readers at a deep and affective level. What this study does not offer is a survey of every appearance of the Prodigal Son in English, Scottish, or American literature.5 Instead, 3 The Waiting Father is the title of the English translation of Helmut Thielicke’s work on the parables (trans. John W. Doberstein (New York: Harper & Row, )). Klyne Snodgrass prefers ‘The Compassionate Father and his Two Lost Sons’, although he admits that brevity is not on the side of this suggestion, and the parable of ‘the Prodigal or of the Two Lost Sons’ will probably hold sway. See Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus, nd edn (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, ), p. . 4 George Mackay Brown, ‘The Tarn and the Rosary’, in Hawkfall (London: The Hogarth Press, ; repr. Edinburgh: Polygon, ), pp. –, p. . 5 Manfred Siebald and Leland Ryken attempt such a survey in ‘Prodigal Son’ in A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. David L. Jeffrey (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, ), pp. –. The entry would have to be

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each chapter is an in-depth exploration of a particular period, geographical place, and/or genre in which the parable or at least the character of the Prodigal Son is particularly significant, with a focus on the theme of homecoming. Some of these are widely recognized in literary studies, such as the Prodigal Son fiction of the sixteenth century, and the work of Shakespeare which followed and reworked that established intertextual relationship. The American short story tradition covers a wide period, but its use of the Prodigal Son paradigm is well attested, and is developed here. The novels of female Victorian writers such as George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, and Margaret Oliphant have not been extensively discussed in terms of their relationship with the Prodigal Son, but this book will argue that there is a common thread of interest in these novels in the competing themes of responsibility and innovation which the parable explores. Similarly, ‘ministers in literature’ is not a well-established literary category, but this book will suggest that the appearance of clerical characters in nineteenth- to twenty-firstcentury fiction highlights the contrast between lostness and foundness which is central to the parable. Finally, there is a tradition in poetry of appealing directly to the parable, and reworking it from a variety of perspectives. The work of two twentieth-century poets, Elizabeth Bishop and Iain Crichton Smith, is considered here, including both their poems which explicitly refer to the parable, and those which appeal more obliquely to its theme of homecoming. Of course there are other periods and genres which might have been included,6 but those chosen

considerably expanded to cover the literature of the past twenty-five years. Mikeal C. Parsons offers an overview of the appearances of the parable’s older brother in art and literature, in ‘The Prodigal’s Elder Brother: The History and Ethics of Reading Luke :–’, Perspectives in Religious Studies  (): pp. –. Manfred Siebald, in Der verlorene Sohn in der amerikanischen Literatur (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, ), focuses on the influence of the parable in American literature. 6 Such as American drama from the s to the s, which Geoffrey S. Proehl considers in illuminating depth in his Coming Home Again: American Family Drama and the Figure of the Prodigal (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, Inc., ), and which Leah Hadomi explores in The Homecoming Theme in Modern Drama: The Return of the Prodigal (Lewiston: The Edward Mellen Press, ). While the plays will not be considered in detail here, these literary critical approaches will be contrasted with more traditional reception history from within the field of biblical studies.

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The Prodigal Son

here highlight something of the range of possibilities opened up by literary engagement with the parable, particularly around the general theme of the possibility of return to the past. In this introductory chapter, some of the readings of the parable from the perspective of biblical studies will be explored, taking into account the reconstructed historical context of the parable in the life of Jesus, and its literary context within the Gospel of Luke, as well as readings from a reception-history point of view. Little or no background in biblical studies will be presumed. Readings from the perspective of literary studies will also be offered, and the contrast between the two discussed. The aim will be to assess the value to both fields of an engaged dialogue between the approaches. It is on this foundation that the significance of specific reconfigurations of the Prodigal Son and his story in literature in English may be assessed. For Klyne Snodgrass, whose magisterial volume on the parables of Jesus deals in minute detail with every aspect of these biblical stories, the parable of the Prodigal Son is a ‘two-stage, double indirect narrative parable’. He goes on that ‘the parable itself is relatively straightforward [although w]hat scholars often do to the parable is not’.7 The story is found only in the Gospel of Luke, and is the third of three parables in the same chapter connected by the theme of things that are lost and then found: first the sheep (Luke :–); then the coin (:–); and finally the son (:–). In terms of the wider story of the Gospel, all three are apparently told by Jesus in response to the Pharisees and scribes, who are ‘grumbling’ at his acceptance of ‘sinners’ and ‘tax collectors’ (:–).8 The parable itself involves three main, but unnamed, characters. A father’s younger son asks for his inheritance, so the father splits his property between his two sons. The younger son takes his share to a faraway place, where he squanders it. When famine hits the land, he is reduced to taking a job feeding a local man’s pigs, and to longing for

Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, p. . Unless otherwise stated, in this chapter all biblical quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version. In later chapters, it is the King James Version of the Bible which is quoted, unless otherwise stated. It is the KJV which has had the most influence on the literary texts under discussion. 7 8

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the food they are given. In dire need, he has a change of heart and hatches a plan to return home and ask to be given a position as a servant of his father. He sets off to carry out his plan, but his father runs to greet him before he can declare his intentions. His father embraces him and calls for a robe, sandals, and a ring to be brought, and a feast to be prepared, to celebrate his son’s return. The action then moves to a nearby field, where the older son has been working. He hears the party, and asks a servant what is the occasion for the celebration. When it is explained to him, he is angry and refuses to join in. His father comes out to speak to him, and they exchange heated words. The older son expresses his frustration and jealousy at the treatment given to his brother, who, in his view, does not deserve to be rewarded, while his hard work has gone unremarked. The father offers him reassurance about his ongoing status, but asserts that there had to be a party, because his brother ‘was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found’ (v. ). As with most parables, the action and the characterization is uncomplicated. The scenes are focused on dialogues between two of the main characters: there is no interaction between all three at any one time. The characters are identified only in terms of their relationships to one another, and they inhabit a resolutely masculine world in which mothers and sisters are either absent or silent. The parable is unusual in that it offers an extended perspective on the inner life of one of the characters: in this case, of the younger brother as he assesses his dire situation and mentally prepares a way to return home.9 The ‘compassion’ of the father and the ‘anger’ of the older brother are also mentioned although not elaborated upon in terms of their thoughts, only in terms of their actions and what they say. The response of either son to the action of the father is not revealed in the narrative, and this open-endedness has perhaps contributed to the parable’s attraction to exegetes, preachers, and artists of all kinds.

Levine, in Short Stories by Jesus, p. , notes that this internal debate is found in three other Lukan parables (the Rich Fool (:); the Dishonest Manager (:) and the Unjust Judge (:–)), and in each case, the resulting action is ‘morally ambiguous’. However, the parable’s insistence that the Prodigal Son ‘came to himself ’ (v. ) offers a more positive perspective on his internal struggle. 9

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The Prodigal Son

The Prodigal Son in biblical studies Turning now to the interpretation of the parable in the field of biblical studies, we should note that the focus of much concern in modern biblical studies and its reading of the parables is to establish meaning in context. That context may be the reconstructed historical ministry of Jesus, or the parable’s setting in the Gospel narrative(s) in which it is retold. In contrast, in the pre-modern period, the search for meaning generally took the form of allegorical readings which assigned significance for the Church or for personal faith to each element of the story. The context of the parable was of little interest in this endeavour. The parable of the Prodigal Son is such a well-known story that it is often used as a test case in histories of parable interpretation, and I will draw on one, which deals explicitly with receptions of the parables, to flesh out something of the range of readings from this perspective: David Gowler’s The Parables of Jesus.10 As Gowler and others have noted, in early Christian interpretations of the parable of the Prodigal Son, the father in the narrative is universally identified with God, and the differences of interpretation focus on the allegorical significance of the two brothers. Gowler, following Tissot,11 separates these different interpretations into four categories. In ethical readings, the older brother acts as a symbol of the righteous, and the younger brother is a symbol of all sinners: Jerome and Clement of Alexandria offer readings which follow this pattern. In ethnic readings, the older brother is associated with Israel, and the younger with the Gentiles, who might also be considered ethically sinners because they worship idols. Tertullian and Augustine are associated with such readings. In penitential readings, the older brother

10 David B. Gowler, The Parables of Jesus: Their Imaginative Receptions across Two Millennia (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic Press, ), pp. –. I have used the parable of the Prodigal Son as a similar test case in my ‘ “For those outside, everything comes in parables”: Recent Readings of the Parables from the Inside’, The Expository Times (October ): pp. –. 11 Yves Tissot, ‘Patristic Allegories of the Lukan Parable of the Two Sons, Luke .–’, in Exegetical Problems of Method and Exercises in Reading (Genesis  and Luke ), ed. François Bovon and Grégoire Rouiller (Pittsburgh: Pickwick, ), pp. –.

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represents unmerciful Christians who cannot be reconciled with baptized believers who thereafter sin and then repent. John Chrysostom is one such reader. Finally, in a very different and specialized category, gnosticizing readings take the older brother as a symbol of angels, and the younger as a symbol of humanity. An example of such a reading is found in the work of Pseudo-Jerome. In each case, the dominant hermeneutical concern is with issues contemporary to the interpreter. The parable is read for its meaning in the setting of the Church of the time, struggling to understand its relationship to Judaism, or to those outside the Church who might repent, or to those within the Church who have fallen away and seek to return. Alternatively it illuminated a cosmic world view within a gnosticizing tradition. Such allegorical readings had begun as early as the time of the Gospel writers, who offered interpretations of some of the parables on which the church Fathers’ readings built (e.g. the parable of the Sower in Mark :– and parallels). While these readings came to be downplayed by later biblical scholars, even ridiculed for their lack of historical sophistication or for their imaginative excess, the process of allegorization is an understandable response to the sort of literature the parables are, and the figural language they employ. It might be argued that a similar allegorizing process continues in much modern preaching of the parable. Marsha G. Witten studied the actual sermons of forty-seven ministers in the Presbyterian Church of the USA and in the Southern Baptist Convention, who took the parable of the Prodigal Son as their key text.12 As in the readings of the early church Fathers and beyond, the father in the parable is almost exclusively identified with God in these sermons, with the characteristics of this father-God as the focal point in two-thirds of the sermons. Witten assesses that the God-figure here is very far from the Reformed view of the transcendent God which might have been expected from these pulpits. Instead, from within the narrative of the parable, God has the very human traits of the ‘daddy’ who offers the individual safety and security in his arms, and celebrates without judgement. As one preacher puts it, ‘That’s what God is saying to you. It’s not “Go to your

12

Marsha G. Witten, All is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ).

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The Prodigal Son

room”. It’s “Come to the party.” ’13 God may be presented as suffering the loss of the son very deeply, and loving the son beyond human comprehension. Even when he is presented as the judge, the purpose of the trope is to motivate an individual’s response, rather than to condemn. God here is the instrument of relief for the believer, rather than a transcendent figure from whom humanity is separated by their own sin. The allegorical readings of the sons in the parable offer further insight into the way contemporary concerns influence these preacherly interpretations. Witten concludes that the preachers from the Southern Baptist tradition tended to focus on the negative example of the younger son, and on the visible effect of his time in the far country, which is identified as a place of separation from the presence of God. The Prodigal Son as the ‘Lost Child’, who has innocently wandered off the correct path, is a common characterization. Presbyterian preachers, on the other hand, tended to emphasize the negative example of the older brother and the internal, psychological effect of his refusal to join the celebration. The older brother is often identified as having a closed personality, and as being a figure for whom empathy is deserved. For both, Witten argues, there is what she calls ‘therapeutic tolerance’ in the generalized portrayal of sin: This stance attempts both to account for the brothers’ conduct in terms that are relatively value-free, and to understand, and empathise with, the hurts the brothers are said to cause themselves through their misguided actions. In doing so, the sermons position the listeners (who are invited to identify with the brothers’ actions, especially with those of the older brother) as vicarious clients in a mass session of Rogerian therapy, as the talk displays a style of therapeutic warmth, acceptance, and tolerance.14

For Witten, this represents a turning away from traditional Reformed theological assumptions about the depravity of human nature, and is a sign of cultural pluralism, accepting rather than judging the differences of others. The emphasis is on human agency reaching for self-realization rather than on the grace of God to bring about transformation. ‘Conversion is portrayed far less as the need to grapple with sin-nature than as a reorientation of one’s psychology toward the creation of a close 13

Witten, All is Forgiven, p. .

14

Witten, All is Forgiven, p. .

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15

interpersonal relationship with God,’ using the psychological strengths with which each individual is endowed. In many of the sermons surveyed in this study, at least, the main characters in the parable are firmly allegorized in terms of the contrasting psychological natures of modern humanity and their specific need for a very therapeutic, understanding God. Witten’s work is a product of reflection on preaching in two church contexts in the late s, and current preaching practices might be expected to be different today. The allegorization of the parable in these sermons focuses on the three main characters, and does not extend to include other details in the story which the interpretation of the church Fathers tended towards. However, her conclusions highlight the openness of the parable to reconfiguration in ways which might be identified as defying theological and historical expectation, but which speak to current concerns. As we have established, interpretations from the church Fathers, and those from a homiletic perspective, have tended towards allegorization, which attempts to discover the universal, divine meanings of a parable, although rooted in contemporary concerns. However, more recent, scholarly readings of parables have focused on their meanings in their historical settings, either in the reconstructed ministry of Jesus, or in the early Church as represented by the Gospels. Here, the work of Stephen I. Wright offers a measured and concise summary of some of the historical options.16 For Wright, nineteenth-century interpreters such as Adolf Jülicher pursued a historical quest to read the parables as similes rather than allegories which express one universal reality about the relationship between God and humanity.17 Each element of the story did not need to be explained theologically. Commentators such as Jülicher assumed Jesus was a man of particular insight about eternal and divine truths, which even the Gospel writers did not understand. In terms of the

Witten, All is Forgiven, pp. –. Stephen I. Wright, The Voice of Jesus: Studies in the Interpretation of Six Gospel Parables (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf & Stock, ). 17 Adolf Jülicher, Die Gleichnisreden Jesu,  vols (Freiburg i.B.: J. C. Mohr, , ); reprint in one vol. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, ). 15 16

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The Prodigal Son

Prodigal Son, such a reading disregards the positioning of the parable in Luke, and explores the parable as a narrative rendering of the readiness of a merciful God to welcome the sinner who returns, in a way which does not neglect justice. It assumes that the older son accepts the argument of the father, that he has not been treated unjustly, and that God’s willingness to forgive extends to all who repent. Later readings in this tradition have been more open to the elasticity of the parables as metaphors rather than similes, but have continued to attempt to work out what Jesus meant when he told parables such as the parable of the Prodigal Son. Wright offers the work of Bernard Brandon Scott as one representative of such an attempt.18 Scott’s interest is in the way Jesus might have been heard by his first readers, but of course this involves lifting the parable out of its context in Luke’s Gospel, and into something approaching the consciousness of Jesus himself. For Scott, the parable is a metaphor offering new insight into the kingdom of God. And where the metaphor engages most deeply is in the father’s coming out to meet the two sons. Scott assumes that there is an appeal to the wider context of the Hebrew Bible here, in which there is a tradition of God favouring the younger son: as he does with Cain and Abel, Ishmael and Isaac, and Esau and Jacob. However, the unexpected twist is that the father in the parable also reaches out to the older brother. All are drawn in to the kingdom of God which Jesus proclaims, although the action required of either son (and the reader) to receive this acceptance is not clearly articulated. The parable reverses expectations and leaves its original reader in a state of surprise, open to new possibilities about what the kingdom of God might mean for them, and about the nature of Jesus’ ministry. Most importantly, such a reading assumes that the father is presented, and understood, as a positive figure in the narrative. In contrast, Richard L. Rohrbaugh also takes the original context of the telling of the parable seriously, but suggests there is an identifiable critique of the father implicit in the story.19 For him, in the context of

18

See, for example, Bernard Brandon Scott, Reimagine the World: An Introduction to the Parables of Jesus (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Polebridge Press, ). 19 Richard L. Rohrbaugh, ‘A Dysfunctional Family and its Neighbours (Luke :b–)’, in Jesus and his Parables, ed. V. George Shillington (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, ), pp. –.

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the time, the father’s agreeing to split up the family’s land represents gross weakness and stupidity which would have provoked the outrage of the village: as would the son’s request. The father is forced publicly to receive the Prodigal home, and to offer a feast to the villagers, to prevent a community uprising against his son’s attempt to return. The father then has to plead with his older son to join the party, and to demonstrate reconciliation, as the villagers have done by taking part. The parable portrays a dysfunctional family struggling with issues of propriety and shame. For Rohrbaugh, the parable promotes a message of reconciliation, perhaps originally directed towards Jesus’ quarrelsome disciples. If there is a religious message, it is that the kingdom’s priorities are not prudence and propriety, but community-building which goes beyond duty and expectation. As many critics of this sociological approach have commented, however, the extent of the role of the villagers in this reading is strained beyond the narrative of the parable. Moreover, the ‘pay-off ’ in terms of the significance of the parable in the ministry of Jesus and beyond is somewhat understated. Rohrbaugh is not alone in questioning the actions of the father and the easy identification of him with God. As Amy-Jill Levine comments, ‘The younger son’s actions may reflect negatively on his father; by failing to discipline his son and acquiescing to his dishonourable request, the father may be seen as complicit in his son’s debauchery.’20 She goes on to compare the expectations for those who are to be appointed elders in Titus : with the character represented here: the children of such elders should be ‘believers, not accused of debauchery, and not rebellious’. She parts company with Rohrbaugh, however, in his depiction of the family’s Jewish neighbours who cannot wait to exact revenge on the shame-bringing son, suggesting this is ‘exegesis giv[ing] way to stereotype at best’.21 She also emphasizes the range of Jewish texts which suggest that the father’s response to the return of his son is far from atypical, and questions a reading of the parable which credits the narrator Jesus with presenting a new religion. For her, the father’s ‘fault’ is in losing sight of the blameless but alienated older son, whom he has to go and search out, as the shepherd and the woman had in the parables earlier in the chapter. In the parable, the father seeks to 20 21

Levine, Short Stories by Jesus, p. . Levine, Short Stories by Jesus, p. .

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The Prodigal Son

rectify this, with no promise of response (from either son, as a close reading confirms): and the story sits comfortably within a Jewish rabbinic tradition. This movement towards reconciliation is implicitly condoned, but there need be no easy or revelatory identification of the father with the God of Jesus and his first hearers, or of Rohrbaugh’s invisible villagers with the Jewish agricultural society of the day. Wright discusses several more readings from the context in which the parable was first told, and Snodgrass is even more comprehensive.22 Most attempt to explain the key narrative interest in the parable, which is in the contradiction between expectations of justice and the force of family ties which, for most, naturally tend towards reconciliation. For Wright, both the father and the older brother are presented as having valid points, one on each side of the debate between justice and compassion. However, by giving the father the last word, the parable indicates that the reader should be affirmed if they choose to applaud his actions. Wright argues that the parable embodies God’s compassion for his wayward children. As the Jesus Seminar, in its Red Letter Edition of the parables of Jesus, had noted, the parable demonstrates the exaggerations and hyperbole which are a regular feature of Jesus’ parables, and few commentators suggest that this parable did not originate in Jesus’ ministry.23 Wright’s conclusion represents a critical consensus about the original meaning of the parable, but he also wants to protect the generative power of the parable to mean more than this in different contexts. This process is underpinned by the history of the parable’s reception, which exerts its own hermeneutical pull on later readings. The writer of the Gospel of Luke is one such influential interpreter of the parable, and Wright’s reading of the role of the parable in that wider setting is instructive. Wright argues that Luke’s larger story about Jesus sheds light on the shorter stories his Jesus is presented as telling, and vice versa: ‘the gospel story causes the parables, while the parables bring the gospel to expression.’24 There is a metonymic relationship between the parable and the Gospel. In its widest and most general setting, the parable of See Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, pp. –. Robert W. Funk, Bernard Brandon Scott, and James R. Butts, The Parables of Jesus: Red Letter Edition (Sonoma, Calif.: Polebridge Press, ), p. . 24 Wright, The Voice of Jesus, p. . 22 23

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the Prodigal Son dramatizes the reversals and the demand for an obedient response which runs through the Gospel, beginning with Mary’s song in Luke . The hungry are fed, humility is rewarded, and the rich are turned away empty: the reader is invited in the Gospel, as in the parable, to identify with one of these categories. With exegetical care, Wright then explores five themes which interact in both the Gospel and the parable: wealth and poverty; celebration and friendship; compassion and mercy; humiliation and exaltation. Some of these themes are picked up by the readings of the parable from a literary perspective, and will be returned to then. Two, wealth and poverty, and life and death, will be considered here. Wright notes that the word ‘life’, repeated in verses  and , has an economic connotation: it is the father’s ‘living’ which has been divided, and it is the Prodigal Son’s means of life which has been eaten up by harlots, according to his older brother. The Prodigal’s sin may be read as his abuse of the family’s presumably considerable assets. He is motivated to return from a place of economic despair by the knowledge that the servants have more than enough to eat at home. Such abundance is not a sin in Luke’s Gospel, but to abuse such resources most certainly is, as suggested in the parable of the Rich Fool in Luke :– and, arguably, in the parable of the Unjust Steward in Luke :–. Wright associates the Prodigal Son’s abuse of his resources with the greed and oppression of the Pharisees, who, in :, are described as loving money. Usually it is the older brother in this parable who is associated with the Pharisees, but Wright suggests that the economic undercurrent here, in the wider context of the Gospel, might indicate that the father’s response to the Prodigal Son’s profligacy represents an appeal to the greedy. Such an appeal includes offering a way to return to economic and theological equilibrium which is based on compassion and forgiveness. Under the theme of life and death, Wright focuses on the repetition of the word in : and :,  to refer to death as ‘perishing’: the Prodigal Son asserts to himself that he is starving to death (‘perishing’) in the far country; and the father twice rejoices that his son was lost (‘perished’) and is now found. The same word is found in the parable of the lost sheep, and twice in the passage in Luke :–, in which the need for imminent repentance is asserted, if ‘perishing’ is to be avoided. At the end of the story about Zacchaeus, Jesus makes a

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The Prodigal Son

claim about his ministry, which is to ‘seek and to save what is lost (“perishing”)’ (Luke :). The fate to which the Prodigal Son nearly succumbs is connected with the wider lack of penitence amongst Jesus’ hearers. The stakes are high and concern their eternal fate. The urgency this injects into the parable reflects the preaching of Jesus which demands a response both from his original hearers and from later readers of the Gospel. There is an eschatological edge to this reading of the parable within its Gospel context. Not all commentators would read the parable of the Prodigal Son as a presentation of the Gospel in miniature.25 However, Wright has argued effectively that themes prominent within Luke’s Gospel, such as reversal of fortunes initiated by God’s grace, and the insistence of Jesus’ call to repentance, are reflected in the parable. And in that reflection, the themes are developed in the exemplary but fluid way the characters embody the wider ministry and teaching of Luke’s Jesus. Such a reading involves connotation and allusion rather than allegory, and leaves open the possibility of multiple associations. The Prodigal Son may be identified metonymically with the Pharisees in their misuse of money, but also with Jesus’ general hearers in the Gospel who recognize their imminent need to repent or perish. It is left open for later readers to find more associations with the larger Gospel story than Luke may have intended, depending on the way they have been influenced by the history of the parable’s reception, among other factors. However, Wright begins from the premise that Luke offers a reconfiguration of the parable within his narrative which adds layers of significance beyond that which is on the surface. A final area of interest in the parable within biblical studies lies in its reception history. David Gowler has published most recently on this aspect of parable research, motivated by the belief that finding analogies between texts leads to deeper reflection on their hermeneutical possibilities, and a reduction in the limiting biases of individual interpretations. He finds a quotation from Bakhtin a useful guide:

25 See, for example, Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, pp. –. Geraint Vaughn Jones (The Art and Truth of the Parables: A Study in their Literary Form and Modern Interpretation (London: SPCK, ), p. ) is equally adamant that there is no need to introduce notions of vicarious atonement into the parable.

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Truth is not born nor is it to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.26

Such a perspective reads parables as riddles with an answer to be discovered, and reads works of literature which allude to parables as rewarding the reader with new insights into the earlier text. For Gowler, ‘truth’ has a fixed quality, and it is important for him to assert that not every interpretation is of equal value or significance: ‘even dialogic narratives like parables provide buoys in the channel of interpretation that encourage interpreters to navigate within certain boundaries of readings.’27 He affirms, among others, Calvin’s concern about the double-edged nature of parabolic discourse. For Calvin, parables derive their rhetorical effect and power from their indirection, particularly for the elect, but their obscurity may also lead fallible, and reprobate, humanity into dark and obscure places.28 Nevertheless, for Gowler, engaging in the interpretation of others, in various media, is a worthwhile exercise as it ‘can make one’s own interpretations more cogent and more comprehensive’.29 There is a functional aspect to this foray into the reception history of the parables which approaches both the parables and the later works as means to getting closer to an undefined ‘truth’. This truth is hidden within or behind the parable, and the later text offers additional clues to the parable interpreter-as-detective. In practice, this involves setting the later text in its religious and cultural context and then identifying and briefly analysing the elements of the parable which are reflected there, looking for ways in which the later text adds to an understanding of the parable. These later texts will have an explicit connection with the parable, rather than an implicit one. Gowler uses the Prodigal Son as an example in his introduction and attempts to categorize some 26 Mikhail Bakhtin, The Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, ), p. , quoted in Gowler, The Parables after Jesus, p. . 27 Gowler, The Parables after Jesus, p. . 28 Gowler, The Parables after Jesus, pp. , , quoting John Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke, trans. A. W. Morrison and T. H. L. Parker, vol. : Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: A New Translation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, ), pp. , . 29 Gowler, The Parables after Jesus, p. .

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The Prodigal Son

of the responses he discusses in texts such as the musical Godspell and James Weldon Johnson’s poem ‘The Prodigal Son’: it is noted, for example, that the older brother tends to be either ignored, or identified with the Jews, or with self-righteous Christians in contrast to the repentant sinners who return. A further categorization is made within the third strand, noting there are some texts which offer a reconciliation scene between the brothers, going beyond the confines of the parable;30 and there are others in which the writer/artist self-identifies with the younger son.31 Generally, such drawing together or surveying of trends in the interpretation of other, individual parables is not possible given the diachronic rather than thematic arrangement of Gowler’s book. However, in his conclusion, Gowler emphasizes further his motivation for exploring the reception of the parables: it is to increase understanding that leads to action on the part of the reader. Gowler’s approach to the reception history of parables highlights something distinctive and relatively common about the status of the parables in the field of biblical studies, and perhaps about the Prodigal Son in particular.32 They are read for what they can reveal about truths beyond themselves. That might be about the ministry of the historical Jesus; or the theology of the Gospel writers; or about the ongoing force of scripture as revelation. The Prodigal Son has little purpose beyond serving the narrow world of biblical history and theology. His existence in the world of literary studies, however, is much less constrained than it is in biblical studies. Two monographs were written in the s which extensively explore the relationship between the parable and twentiethcentury American drama: Leah Hadomi’s The Homecoming Theme in Modern Drama and Geoffrey S. Proehl’s Coming Home Again. Neither is mentioned in Snodgrass’s comprehensive study of the parable, or in

30

The example of the play/film Godspell is offered as portraying the older brother joining the party, in response to the father’s pleas (Gowler, The Parables after Jesus, p. ). 31 Rembrandt’s multiple paintings of the parable, it is suggested, represent his identification with the Prodigal Son at various points in his life (Gowler, The Parables after Jesus, p. ). 32 That Gowler’s approach sits firmly within the wider field of biblical studies is suggested by the way Snodgrass praises Gowler’s book for encouraging readers to ‘wrestle with hermeneutical issues relative to the parables’ and for emphasizing that ‘parables demand that hearers respond’ (Stories with Intent, p. ).

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Gowler’s work on its reception history. The monographs themselves refer only to a narrow range of interpretations in biblical studies, such as J. D. Crossan in Hadomi’s book,33 and J. Duncan M. Derrett’s article on Law in the parable in Proehl’s.34 Hadomi and Proehl’s insights into the reconfiguration of the Prodigal Son, however, offer an illuminating contrast with the preoccupations of biblical studies. The Prodigal Son in literary studies Both Hadomi and Proehl lift the parable out of the world of its original setting and focus on its archetypal, analogical power. Rather than pointing to the benevolence of God, for Hadomi, the parable may be read as ‘an analogy for man’s eternal strife, his fight against sin and his attempt to return to innocence’.35 For Proehl, the parable is an ‘instance of a narrative structure that predates its appearance in the biblical text, a structure [Abrams] describes as “one of the most persistent of the ordering designs by which men have tried to come to terms with their nature and destiny”’.36 Emphasizing the openness of the structure of the parable of the Prodigal Son to substitutions, and its circular journey from unity, separation, and back to unity, Abrams reads it as: that type of the journey of all mankind out of and back toward its original home; . . . frequently conflated with the apocalyptic marriage that signalized the restoration of Eden in the Book of Revelation. Accordingly, the yearning for fulfilment is sometimes expressed as Heimweh, the homesickness for the father or mother and for the lost sheltered place; or else as the desire for a female figure who turns out to be the beloved we have left behind; or sometimes, disconcertingly, the desire for father, mother, home, and bride all in one.37

33 Hadomi refers briefly to Crossan’s exploration of the polyvalent paradox of the welcome given to the Prodigal and the lack of concern about the dutiful son in ‘A Metamodel for Polyvalent Narration’, Semeia  (): pp. –. 34 J. Duncan M. Derrett, ‘Law in the New Testament: The Parable of the Prodigal Son’, New Testament Studies  (): pp. –. 35 Hadomi, The Homecoming Theme in Modern Drama, p. . 36 Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. , quoting M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, ), p. . 37 Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. , quoted in Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .

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The Prodigal Son

In these literary readings, the parable of the Prodigal Son offers a shared vocabulary with which to explore universal themes. Both highlight the critical way in which literary texts, particularly American dramas from the twentieth century, bring questions to the parable which have no easy answers, so that, as Hadomi comments, ‘[t]he comfortable myth has become the alienating literary reality’.38 Ironical reinterpretation of the intergenerational conflict and the oppositions of fragmentation and wholeness, rupture and potential, life and death which are at the dramatic heart of the parable, are explored by both, so that themes common to these dramas are understood better in context. Some examples from each book will be offered to highlight the reconfigurings of the Prodigal Son and his family each promotes. In both, reflections on the history of interpretation of the parable in English and American literature are offered, and some of these will be returned to in later chapters in this book. By the twentieth century, Hadomi argues, the focus is firmly on the moment and possibility of return home, often identified as a return to the self. In place of the value system implied in the parable, in American domestic dramas it is memory which keeps alive the possibility of reintegration into the space understood as home. These dramas are heavily influenced by relativism and subjectivity rather than the detached objectivity of the parable. Sin is not the issue to be overcome, but material or biological weakness or instability. Crucially, the return is not associated with the positives of life and being found, and the focus shifts from the figure of the Prodigal to the experience of the family who waits for him, often uneasily. In plays such as Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (written in –, but published in ), with its multitude of characters who might be described as ‘prodigal’ and in need of a return to a place of familial wholeness, there remains a code of normative behaviour which may be relied upon although it is challenged. ‘Sin’ is closely identified with addiction, and the guilt it brings with it is passed down through the generations. There is an absence of a forgiving fatherfigure: instead, the father is as guilty and addicted as the other members of the family, in need of forgiveness. Nevertheless, mitigating circumstances are presented which provoke sympathy in the audience.

38

Hadomi, The Homecoming Theme in Modern Drama, p. .

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In more recent, modernist plays such as Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (), in the place of guilt there is a fear of existential nothingness, and an unsatisfied need for communication, love, and connection. The secret, guilt-inducing, and fictitious son of George and Martha, who will never come home, may be compared with the secret of marital infidelity in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (): both are misinterpretations of the past, and not causes of the current, much more serious situation. In the Albee play, the pretend son is a refuge by which George and Martha avoid confronting the emptiness of their marriage; while, in the Miller play, the infidelity is a cover for a much more significant issue of betrayal between father and son. In all of these plays, value judgements take the place of the parable’s religious framework and, instead of a search for mercy, it is a search for an elusive truth which drives the narrative. In the world of these plays, coming home and leaving maintain links with the parable of the Prodigal Son through their suggested metonymic connection with life and death. However, the lack of resolution despite the desire for it, in the face of the lack of interest of the universe, leads to deeply unsettling fear at an existential level. Memory may drive the homecoming, but it is shown to be unreliable; when there is no authority represented by a father-figure, the plot structure of the parable breaks down; the quest for identity when there is no religious underpinning to the plays casts doubt on the authenticity of the characters’ self-understanding. The reality of homecoming is continually disappointing, but the yearning remains. For Hadomi, the transformation of the myth of the parable of the Prodigal Son in these dramas highlights the tragedy of the modern condition, alienated from all that the parable asserts. As she concludes: There is no escape. The relationship to the family and its expression in literature is so powerful that it continues to assert itself even if there is no ‘father’, no ‘mother’, no family to return to . . . Modern drama deconstructs the archi-pattern of the prodigal son only to restate the eternal truth of the desire of man to return.39

39

Hadomi, The Homecoming Theme in Modern Drama, pp. –.

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The Prodigal Son

The focus is no longer on the prodigality of the parable’s son, or on his particular need for forgiveness, but on his longed-for home as a place of contention rather than sanctuary. Proehl shares Hadomi’s interest in the deconstruction of the archetype of the parable in a similar range of plays, but he also, critically, sets the dramas in their wider context, not least in the biographies of their authors. Furthermore, he offers a study of the complexity of the relationship between the paradigm and this literature by tracing the fluid characterization of each member of the Prodigal Son’s family. Proehl highlights the ways in which conventional readings of the parable in the history of the dramatic tradition are manipulated in American plays written after the end of the Second World War. Compared to the Prodigal Son plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these dramas question the assumption that the son ought to return, and they extend the process of self-realization to include not just the youthful, Prodigal Son characters, but also their parents and siblings. The father–son relationship, and the strand in the earlier plays which focused on the choice between the faithful wife and the mistress, are continued in the later fiction, in an extension of the parable’s plot. Proehl also discusses the rise in popularity of the temperance plays of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which he argues are a bridge between the comedies of the Renaissance, with their stock Prodigal Son figures, and the dramas under consideration. For him, the use of the paradigm in the temperance plays leaves open the possibility that the Prodigal Son will not reform, and will instead drink himself to death; and there is a shift in focus from the son and father to the prodigal husband and his wife. This is developed into an understanding of home which is ambivalent at best, and conflicted at worst. The desire for freedom and independence is pitted against the warmth, nurture, and security of home. Proehl grounds his discussion not so much in Hadomi’s existential angst, but in the tension between fragmentation and unity which energizes the structure of the parable. He explores the ways in which modern drama interrogates this tension between the family as a limiting or foundational institution in American life. Proehl effectively elucidates the dramatic functions of the parable of the Prodigal Son, and maps these onto the later dramas. He notes that the simple but clear structure is open to variation and allows

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

exploration of issues in contrasting pairs in terms reminiscent of Stephen Wright’s analysis: youth and age, authority and rebellion, wealth and poverty, earthiness and spirituality, famine and feasting, suffering and exaltation, rags and robes, the everyday and the foreign, and finally the faithful son and the errant one.40

The loss of a member of the family is the basis of the structure’s emotional appeal, evoking grief at the departure and joy at the return, a symbolic victory over death. He notes that while the departing figure is a child in the parable, when he is a husband or father in the plays, another child may take the place of the parable’s child and offer the emotional power lost by the maturity of the figure in the play. This child may actually die: Proehl offers the death of Eugene in O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night as an example; and notes that the imagined child in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf represents all the hopeful potential and all the ruptured loss in the play, long awaited but never to appear. The structure of the parable is both conducive to mirroring in later drama, and open to development and divergence from the conventional. While, in the biblical text, the domestic resolution is a means to an end in terms of religious significance, in these later dramas, the domestic is an end in itself and allegory gives way to dramatic realism, although spiritual resonances may hover at the edges. For Proehl, the dramatic and reassuring power of the parable guarantees its significance in the psyche of twentiethcentury Americans: In other words, more than any parable, this one—in part, because of its domestic setting—has captured the imagination and emotions of readers apart from its figural functions, especially middle-class readers who come to it with a strong investment in family cohesiveness.41

From this foundation, Proehl explores the significance of the figure of the Prodigal character in modern American family dramas, whether he is a son or a husband, under the rubric of two characteristics: rupture and potential. The rupture is embodied in the presence of one who waits at home, and the lure of a place which is the opposite of home, 40 41

Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. . Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .

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peopled with strangers. The place which is not home may be the tavern (and drinking conventionally represents the cause or the effect of the rupture, in the tradition of the temperance play), or a place of sexual liberation, or it may be related to the poverty-stricken deprivation of the swineherd in the parable. The dynamic of the plays lies in the movement between the two places, across the open space or highway which is traversed by the one who escapes the confines of home. While this movement is viewed conservatively by the parable, as an essentially radical move, the plays question such an assumption. By portraying damaging relationships between fathers and sons, and the unsatisfying elements of marriage, as well as celebrating the more positive aspects of the Prodigal’s initiative and ‘good buddiness’, the eventual return is not wholly to be celebrated. Proehl asserts: My argument is that American domestic drama traditionally wants to find a way to end with some version of ‘Home, Sweet Home’, but that this music cannot quite drown out what has gone before. Although we try to fix the family, something is not quite working in the way it should: even though the prodigal son comes home, life in that household will never quite be the same.42

Nevertheless, for Proehl, the second characteristic of potential for reform is a key indicator of connection with the parable: although it may be twisted in the plays away from the conventional to happen many times or ultimately be thwarted. While, in the parable, the sins of the Prodigal Son appear to be of such gravity that he believes set space, add he has no claim to return to the life he had before, emphasized by the older brother’s objection that it appears he can, in the plays the audience is conventionally not asked to forgive a sin beyond such a pale. The potential for reform must be protected by limiting the range of sins committed, rather than depending on the limitlessness of the parable’s divine grace: One of the ways in which we identify these figures as prodigal is their participation in actions that conventionally cause a sense of rupture within the family but that can also be readily forgiven, especially if, within the terms of the convention, the prodigal experiences a sincere change of heart.43

42 43

Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. . Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .

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Proehl categorizes such sins as rarely going beyond the middle-class and perfectible ‘whisky, womanising and waste’, and offers the three prodigal characters in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman as representative of this trend: for Willy, his fault is women; for Biff, it is wasted talent; and for Happy, it is the squandering of money on empty pleasures. A category of unconventional plays remains, exemplified by Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh (, published in ), in the earlier temperance tradition, in which the prodigality leads permanently away from the potential for return (although even here there may be the intervention of surprising grace), but for Proehl this is a variation on the more usual pattern. We might note that Hadomi emphasized rupture more than potential in these plays, and focused more on the destabilizing effect of the return even when it happens. Finally, Proehl comments on the portrayal of female characters in these plays, exploring ways in which they might be categorized as prodigal rather than the more fundamentally flawed fallen woman or failed wife or mother. He suggests that while female characters may have prodigal characteristics, they are rarely offered the possibility of return or redemption. In Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (), Blanche Dubois is as conventionally prodigal as other characters from this period, drinking and wasting her inheritance, but while her brother-in-law Stanley may return to his wife Stella, despite his violence, Blanche may not return, suffering further assault rather than redemption. Her suitor, Mitch, cannot overcome his humiliation and anger towards her, even when she confesses and explains herself to him. Proehl suggests that Martha, in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?, may be the closest female character to the conventional Prodigal Son, but he concludes that in general female Prodigals in these plays suffer a ‘stunning foreclosure of potential’.44 Proehl goes on to explore the function of the brother and the one who stays at home in American family dramas, assessing the interplay between the conventional, the parable, the paradigmatic, and the plays themselves. A final, illuminating example is his reading of Stanley’s return to the forgiving Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire. The presence of someone left behind and to come home to is identified as an

44

Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .

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essential for the Prodigal Son paradigm to work. While the figure is the father in the parable, in these dramas it is often the patient and salvific wife: Proehl describes these figures as mingling together ‘in some part of the American imagination’.45 The scene in which Stanley returns to Stella portrays him as laying his head against her pregnant stomach. In that moment, he is both son and husband, and there is an undeniably sexual element to the scene. Proehl comments that this is not a perversion or a deviation from the paradigm of the prodigal’s return, but a metaphor for it, an extension of what it always implies: an end, if even for a moment, to fragmentation and division, a return to a certain unity, the discovery of one where there were two. This unbroken circularity after all is the meaning of the ring that the Lukan father gives his son.46

This is a perceptive and revealing reading of the scene and its relationship to the parable, drawing the spectator of the play into participating in the metaphor. Like Stella, the audience operates as a grace figure, waiting in an enclosed space for the return, listening to and processing the confession, and asked to respond to the Prodigal not rationally but emotionally. The parable in this reading is not a fixed form demanding an uncritical acceptance, but an open-ended archetype with a historical tradition and its own set of conventions to be followed or broken. A concluding, if lengthy, quotation from Proehl highlights the breadth of perspective he offers to anyone who seeks to interpret the significance of the parable of the Prodigal Son in literature, not least those from the tradition of biblical studies: To my mind the fundamental need is to see the paradigm as such, to see it moving in and about domestic drama in a number of ways; to appreciate, when appropriate, the complexity of forms it takes along with its more or less naïve persistence; to use an awareness of conventionality to read against the naturalizing, self-affirming, truth claims of realism and autobiography so central to American theatre; to understand that our narratives have a history, that in some degree O’Neill’s late plays (to take one set of examples) find their foreshadowings not only in the author’s life experiences but also in certain nineteenth-century temperance melodramas, some Renaissance comedies, the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral, and Augustine’s Confessions.47 45 46 47

Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. . Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. . Proehl, Coming Home Again, p. .

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Such a reading of the paradigm lifts it from a focus on the extent of intertextual overlap or historical usefulness, and credits it with a timeless literary value and inheritance. Its nimble acceptance of complex positive and negative receptions is a worthwhile exemplar to which we shall return. Conclusion The parable of the Prodigal Son has been described by a notable parables scholar as ‘straightforward’, and the same scholar has suggested that there is a prodigality in the multitude of interpretations of it which have been offered through the centuries.48 For this scholar, Klyne Snodgrass, this is prodigality in its original, negative sense rather than its more recent, extravagantly positive if misguided sense. The simplicity of the structure of the parable, however, should not be mistaken for straightforwardness, if that means lacking in historical depth, narrative power, or metaphorical reach. Readings of the parable, and of the figure of the Prodigal Son in particular, which take an instrumental view of the text suggest it may reveal much about the ministry of Jesus and the teaching of the early Church. Moving into later literature, such readings may highlight the theological and ecclesiastical influence of the parable, and the way it provokes action and changes beliefs. When the parable is read as a literary paradigm rather than a theological or historical document, new possibilities are opened up and the Prodigal Son becomes an archetype with his own metaphorical imprint in a variety of literary contexts. His contribution is then to an understanding of the artistic whole or to the contrast between texts which share a genre, period, or audience, particularly those with an interest in homecoming in its broadest sense. The cutting loose of the younger son’s prodigality from its negative connotation is an apt figure for the parable’s resistance to limits and constraints. Literature, theology, and history are insufficient in themselves to close down the parable’s dance through time. The hermeneutical resources of all these disciplines bring worthwhile perspectives

48

Snodgrass, Stories with Intent, p. .

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and all are employed here.49 Only then will we begin to do justice to the parable and its insight into an essential truth: something arises in the world which all men have glimpsed in childhood, a place and a state in which no-one has yet been. And the name of this something is home.50 49

The indebtedness of disciplines to one another in this intertextual world is stressed in monographs such as Hannibal Hamlin’s The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –, in which it is argued that the basis of the study of literary allusion is to be found in biblical exegesis. 50 Ernst Bloch, On Karl Marx (New York: Herder and Herder, ), pp. –, quoted in Hadomi, The Homecoming Theme in Modern Drama, p. .

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2 The Prodigal Son in Elizabethan Literature

In his influential article ‘Terence Improved: The Paradigm of the Prodigal Son in English Renaissance Comedy’, Ervin Beck asserts that ‘[t]he story of the Prodigal Son is the most ubiquitous one in comedy of the English Renaissance (–)’.1 The parable of the Prodigal Son, however, had proved a popular source for preaching, morality tales, and iconography since well before the sixteenth century. It is offered by Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale, apparently without irony, as an antidote to a sense of despair about the mercy of God, that most heinous of sins against the Holy Spirit. The Parson portrays the joyful feast laid on by the father, whose son had been lost and then returned penitent, as an image of the needlessness of despair and the readiness of God in his mercy to forgive.2 However, it was in the Elizabethan period that the parable became particularly prevalent in literature: ‘ubiquitous’ even, in the comedy of the time, in the view of Ervin Beck. Shakespeare was writing at the end of this period, and continued into the Jacobean era. The appearance of the Prodigal Son in his work will be considered in Chapter . Here we will trace the rise of what have been called the ‘Elizabethan Prodigals’, those writers from the latter half of the century who took the parable as their inspiration and who, for some commentators at least, sometimes understood it as the 1 Ervin Beck, ‘Terence Improved: The Paradigm of the Prodigal Son in English Renaissance Comedy’, Renaissance Drama NS  (): pp. –, p. . 2 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parson’s Tale, in The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. – (.), p. .

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narrative of their own lives. We will see, if proof were needed, that their appropriation of the parable strongly challenges any notion of a straightforward reading of the Prodigal Son’s homecoming. After the separation of the Church in England from the Church of Rome in , Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s chief minister, commissioned John Bale to write and organize the performance of plays in support of the reform as it continued into the late s. As Happé has commented, ‘[i]t was perceived . . . that the drama was an effective means of persuasion’.3 Such a policy also carried with it the possibility of subversion, of course, and this was acknowledged by the increase of censorship in the later years of Henry’s reign, and the decline, through the s and s, of the mystery plays which had been such a feature of pre-Reformation society. As a result, most of the surviving plays from the second half of the sixteenth century have a strongly Protestant flavour, with biblically based notions of personal justification and salvation at their heart. Erasmus (?–), although a Catholic, also had a deep effect on the theatre of the later sixteenth century. His approach encouraged the dramatic reappraisal of biblical texts, often in the light of newly disseminated texts from the classical period. It was a fertile time for those who had religious or moral objectives for their secular narratives. Within this variety, many have noted that across a wide range of texts a common pattern emerges in Elizabethan literature: a young man is offered moral admonition by an older, father-figure; the young man goes off and does exactly what he was told not to do; he suffers as a result and repents and/or is imprisoned; in some texts he returns to a happy ending and a reward for his disobedience, while in others he remains disillusioned and suffering, although repentant. In some, the parable of the Prodigal Son is explicitly alluded to; in others, it remains a silent echo. In much Elizabethan literature, however, the Prodigal Son is an implicit metanarrative. The influence of Roman comedies It was John Dover Wilson in his key article on ‘Euphues and the Prodigal Son’, published in , who first traced a common path of 3

Peter Happé, English Drama before Shakespeare (London and New York: Longman, ), p. .

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influence along which the parable often travelled in the Elizabethan period. Wilson noted that texts by classical writers, particularly comedies, had been read and acted out in schools throughout the fifteenth century. The advent of printing made these texts more accessible than in the past although, by the sixteenth century, it was felt to be particularly unfortunate that these texts were not Christian, and often not particularly moral. Erasmus was especially keen on the works of Terence, a Roman playwright from the second century BCE, probably from North Africa. Erasmus praised his purity of language and diction, his drawing of characters, and the way he encouraged rational thought. And so, in order to retain the verve and vigour of these classical plays, and yet bring them within the sphere of the religious feelings of the day, new dramas were written which were a cross between these Latin comedies and more acceptable morality plays. Wilson argued that the plays of Terence were particularly popular and amenable to this treatment, and that the parable of the Prodigal Son was particularly useful as the basis for the plot of these hybrid works: The parable of the Prodigal Son contained a moral lesson which was admirably adapted for the consideration of the youthful mind, and incidentally admitted of an interpretation that gave strong support to the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith; while, on the other hand, a loop-hole was found for the introduction of the whole Terential machinery of parasites, slaves, and meretrices in the half-dozen words ‘wasted his substance with riotous living’, which were expanded [in Acolastus] into more than twice that number of scenes.4

Wilson highlighted the importance of one of these reworked Latin dramas, Acolastus, which was published in Antwerp in  by a schoolmaster, Willem de Volder, better known as Gnapheus. Because of his Reforming leanings, Gnapheus was forced to flee his home and died in exile. However, although it was not the first text of its kind, his play became extremely popular in the Netherlands, Germany, and many other places where the scholastic setting was similar. The plot of Acolastus falls into four parts: the son departs with his share of his father’s money; he spends the money on riotous living; endures a John Dover Wilson, ‘Euphues and the Prodigal Son’, The Library  (): pp. –, pp. –. 4

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period of degradation; and returns home to a joyful welcome. The older brother of the parable has no place here, and, as Wilson notes, the influence of the plays of Terence is to be found most strongly in the half of the play which is taken up with the second section dealing with the son’s period of freedom. Two characters in the play are introduced from the morality play tradition, representing two opposing faces of wisdom: Eubolus, the old man who advises the father to let his son leave and to trust in divine providence; and Philautus, the young man full of self-love who encourages Acolastus to leave by endorsing his desire for travel and promoting an attitude of arrogance towards his father. After receiving much good advice and a Bible from his father, the son leaves and throws away the Bible as he does so. He is taken by two ‘hangers-on’, who note the money bulging in his purse, to a brothel, where he meets and is entertained for the night by the beautiful Lais. These scenes are described in some detail. The following day he loses his money in a game of dice, his clothes are stolen by Lais and others, and he ends up homeless, naked, and in a far-off land in the midst of a famine. Taken in by a farmer to feed his pigs, Acolastus laments his situation in a series of soliloquies, expresses his sorrow, and moves from despair to hopeful repentance. Finally he returns home, uttering the words from the parable as he throws himself at his father’s feet, and is received with great rejoicing. The play proved extremely popular and was widely translated. The influence of Acolastus on English literature that century, and on John Lyly’s influential Euphues texts in particular, has not been seriously challenged by literary critics of the period. Our interest in it lies in its deep dependence on the parable of the Prodigal Son, which brought a powerful interpretation of the parable into the literary world of sixteenth-century England. We will return to Euphues presently. First we must consider why the parable, and this reading of it in particular, proved so arresting for writers in this context. The Prodigal as rebellious son For most commentators, it is the motif of filial rebellion which defines the use of the parable in this period, which Acolastus highlights by its introduction of debating partners in the characters of Eubolus and Philautus, and in its emphasis on the ultimate emptiness of the

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exquisitely described ‘riotous living’ section. For Beck, in the texts influenced by Acolastus and the Prodigal Son tradition, ‘the most important fact about the hero . . . is not that he is a prodigal, but that he is a son who denies or misvalues his heritage and has to learn through experience to value it’.5 While Beck does not assume that any author necessarily had the parable in mind when he wrote, the essential element of these plays is that a young man departs from the values of his elders, to which the play crucially assumes he ought to return. An implicit connection is made with the youthful and repentant figure of the parable, which is in stark contrast to the understanding of youth in Roman comedies such as those of Terence. In the Roman plays, the young man’s desire for a girl is thwarted by external opposition, usually emanating from his parents or a parent-substitute. However, the young hero and the fresh start he embodies is usually vindicated and the older generation is shown to be corrupted by tired strictures and irrational laws. The society inaugurated by the hero recalls a purer, golden age ruled by natural law, prior to the setting of the play. In contrast, the Prodigal Son comedies of the sixteenth century begin with the aged yet desirable society in control, they experiment with the new and chaotic society initiated by the young hero, but then signal and approve of a return to the original society and all its stable characteristics. They are inherently conservative, seeing deviation as a violation of natural law. Instead of harking back to a golden age, they recognize a social order for a fallen world which involves the ‘reforming of the internal desires of the young hero’6 through the conscious rejection of the old creation and the internalizing of the ‘new creation’ of Ephesians :–, represented by social reconciliation. This is an intensely theological insight into the human experience of repentant return achieved by the imitation of the parable of the Prodigal Son, with no endorsement of rebellion. In this world where society is to be reaffirmed rather than remade by the next generation, as dramatized in the texts under discussion, there is no guarantee of merciful redemption, even if the son shows repentance for his transgressive behaviour. In Thomas Ingelend’s The Disobedient Child (c.), the son is sent back to the nagging 5 6

Beck, ‘Terence Improved’, p. . Beck, ‘Terence Improved’, p. .

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wife whom he had chosen against his father’s advice. In the anonymous Nice Wanton (–), the sons both die. Even where there is a happy ending, as in Acolastus, the disregarded precepts must be fully conformed to. The resolution often involves punishment rather than forgiveness for those who dare to rebel. In addition to being a son, the Prodigal hero in these plays may have other roles which encourage the reader/audience to consider the wider implication of the hero’s falling away from responsibility in these areas. In the early play Nice Wanton, he is a student; in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts  and  (c.–), he is a prince; in Chapman, Jonson, and Marston’s Eastward Ho (), he is an apprentice; and in Heywood’s The Wise Woman of Hogsdon (c.?) he is a lover. The themes of education, politics, economics, and romance are all invoked by these additions to the parable’s stark characterization of the hero, and the return to the status quo in each is emphasized. The variable nature of the intrigue into which the hero descends also affects the tone of the play, and the way in which the parable is adapted. Beck offers various categories of plays defined by the nature of the rebellions and their consequences. In some plays, those most closely identified with the morality play tradition, conventional vice figures lure the hero into ruinous situations, with the play’s goal being to demonstrate the ultimate purification of the hero’s soul. There tends to be no involvement of a romantic nature in these plays, but the culmination of the process of recognition is the return to the fatherfigure. For Beck, the earliest English Prodigal Son comedy, the anonymous Interlude of Youth (–), is a good example of this type of play, as are Henry IV and Eastward Ho. Complementing these moral plays are those which bring a censorious element into their portrayal of the hero’s fate. Here there is evil intrigue but no restoration to the position from which the hero has fallen. Instead, he is censured for his failure to reform, or for getting into a position from which he cannot escape, despite his repentance. The anonymous Pater, Filius and Uxor, or The Prodigal Son () is such a play, as is Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (c.–). Romantic comedies celebrate the affection of the hero for a virtuous woman. While he may dally with other women during his riotous period, he returns to his original lover and marries her. This return demonstrates his spiritual regeneration and provides the excuse for a celebration to end

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the play. Often in this category of Prodigal Son play, the intrigue is managed by virtuous characters who have the good outcome for the hero in view. The original lover is often behind the intrigue, usually helped by the father-figure and always with his endorsement. Examples of such plays would be The London Prodigal (Anonymous, –) and Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona (c.–). The final category Beck identifies is the satiric. These usually begin in the middle of the parable, with the hero in a repentant state, fallen from grace and status, but seeking to recover his lost inheritance and social status. The hero is the prime mover and the common outcome is the removal of the old guard who has or have tried to prevent the rebellion in the first place. Closest in structure and intention to the Roman plays discussed earlier, these satiric plays still lie within their Christian heritage by taking for granted the fallen nature of the hero and the need for change arising from repentance. There may be a marriage at the end, but this romantic element is not the driving force of the drama. Examples of such plays include Middleton’s A Trick to Catch an Old One and A Mad World (both –). While these categories are not mutually exclusive or exhaustive, they offer us a starting point for understanding the variety of ways in which the parable of the Prodigal Son echoes through this strand of literature in the period and just beyond. The parable proved to be remarkably adaptable for writers attempting to make a theological stand, in dialogue with the Roman comedies which offer a rather different perspective. Beck’s analysis will not have the last word when it comes to interpreting the significance of the parable to such writers, but his conclusion is incontrovertible: the entire tradition of prodigal-son comedy is properly emphasized as one of the earliest, most persistent, and most important strains in drama of the English Renaissance.7

We have begun to chart the variety of ways in which the parable of the Prodigal Son was used in the literature of this period, and to assert its prevalence. Further explanation for that remarkable prevalence, in terms of the wider events of the period, has been offered by critics such

7

Beck, ‘Terence Improved’, p. .

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as Richard Helgerson.8 Helgerson concurs with Beck’s analysis that the crux of these texts’ use of the parable of the Prodigal Son is the act of rebellion by a younger man against an older father-figure, which is implicitly or explicitly condemned within the text. So, in the texts considered by Helgerson by writers such as George Gascoigne, John Lyly (of Euphues fame), and Robert Greene, it is not the prodigality of the son, nor the dramatic and joyful resolution symbolized by the killing of the fatted calf, which is so important in the parable, but the motif of rejection of authority which is key. Although pictorial representations and sermonizing treatments of the parable up until now had focused on that happy reception of the repentant son, in the Elizabethan texts this faded in significance, even when a happy ending was allowed. As Helgerson comments, ‘not the Parable of the Prodigal Son, with its benign vision of paternal forgiveness, but rather the paradigm of prodigal rebellion interested the Elizabethans’.9 Of course, an observant reader of the parable will be aware that the killing of the fatted calf in preparation for the homecoming party is not the actual resolution of the story in Luke’s Gospel, and the positioning of the father’s later interaction with the older son may lay claim to being the key moment in the narrative. However, rarely is this aspect of the parable commented upon, either within the Elizabethan texts, or in the later discussions of their use of the parable. Why this might be remains to be discussed. Maintaining the status quo Meanwhile, we return to evaluate Helgerson’s assertion that the Prodigal Son paradigm of youthful rebellion was so potent in Elizabethan England. As he points out, the period before the births of these writers had been particularly unsettled. The parents of these writers had experienced four changes in the official state religion; a shifting redistribution of wealth caused by economic and religious movements; Renaissance thinking and the rise of courtiership leading to a revolution in education and manners; and political upheaval following the 8 Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). 9 Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .

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death of Edward and the fear of more, should Elizabeth’s reign prove short. They had ‘reason to feel the peril of disorder’,10 and to wish to impress upon their children the prudent advice that conventional behaviour might protect them from the changes over which they had no control. Gentility was linked to a life of public service, with learning based on gaining skills that would lead to rational virtue. A practice of passing on printed advice from father to son arose, based on the literature of the ancients and more modern writers, mingled with experience. Alongside the Christianized plays of Roman writers such as Terence which were so important in the schooling of these young men, these pamphlets warned that wastefulness, travel, love, would necessarily lead to repentance. Inheritance depended on maintaining the values of the father. All were vehicles for the ‘conservative fears of men who had lived through the period of dangerously rapid change brought on by the Reformation, men to whom the world necessarily seemed beset with perilous temptations’.11 One of the worrying temptations for the sons of these conservative forebears was the pursuit of worthless writing. In the later decades of the sixteenth century, literature and youthful folly were clearly linked. This led to the writers under discussion being placed in a very difficult position, and Helgerson argues that many of them assert, or at least imply, that they themselves were represented by the Prodigal Son character they used so frequently as a paradigm. Influenced by the teaching that literature was potentially morally harmful, while unwilling or unable to give up the writing of it, such writers had to prove over and over that their texts might be construed in a positive, even beneficial way: They were thus forced to argue their work, rightly understood, warns against the very wantoness it portrays, but such arguments only involved them in a maze of self-contradiction, revealing their dilemma—the dilemma of their generation—without resolving it.12

By invoking the character of the Prodigal Son, they were able to dramatize their dilemma. The pattern of admonition by an authority 10 11 12

Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. . Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. . Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .

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figure, rebellion against it and them, followed by repentance, which is found in much of the work by the writers under discussion, suggests they were ‘trying to reconcile their humanistic education and their often rebellious tastes and aspirations; and that . . . they found in the figure of the repentant prodigal a role that would do just that’.13 The struggle inherent in this position is also portrayed in the literature of the time. These writers were exposed not just to the re-written, Christianized plays of Terence, but also other classical texts, medieval, courtly romance, and the literature of Chaucer. Humanism and Christianity could be in tension in the struggle to define the self in relation not just to parental figures of authority, but also to the opposite sex, who are routinely portrayed at this time as shrews, harlots, or overly indulgent maternal figures. In a world which conventionally viewed poetry as soft and effeminate, there was a hostility towards beauty, poetry, and forgiveness. But these might be seen as the very means of repentance. Writers of this generation may well have struggled to define themselves between the identity assigned them by their fathers and their own rebellious desire to experience life in its fullness. By making themselves interested parties in their own fictions, particularly by identifying themselves with the Prodigal Son figure who perhaps not surprisingly featured so frequently, they could express some of this struggle, if not resolve it. Helgerson offers the writing of George Whetstone as an example. Justifying his writing of what he calls his ‘vain, wanton, and worthless sonnets’, in his work The Rocke of Regard (), Whetstone writes: In plucking off the vizard of self-conceit under which I sometimes proudly masked with vain desires, other young gentlemen may reform their wanton lives in seeing the fond and fruitless success of my fantastical imaginations, which be no other than poems of honest love, and yet, for that the exercise we use in reading loving discourses seldom, in my conceit, acquiteth our pains with anything beneficial unto the commonweal or very profitable to ourselves, I thought the ‘Garden of Unthriftiness’ the meetest title I could give them.14

Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. . George Whetstone, The Rocke of Regard (), sig. ¶iiᵛ. (UMEES, Reel ), quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. . 13 14

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Although the love being described in these sonnets is perfectly chaste, Whetstone is more in confessional than defence mode here. The love is ‘honest’ but his life, like those of the readers he is identifying with, is ‘wanton’. His desires are ‘vain’ but they may prove a warning to others. The title he chooses suggests that the reader will be wasting his or her time in reading the volume: but by invoking the idea of the Prodigal Son in the hope of the reformation of ‘wanton lives’, it may not be pointless in the end. Whetstone did indeed later turn to work with a graver theme, and is able ultimately to claim the persona of the repentant Prodigal: ‘Think that my beginning with delight, running on in unthriftiness, resting in virtue, and ending with repentance in no other than the figure of the lusty younker’s adventure.’15 (We will meet that closing phrase again when we consider the parable in Shakespeare: the ‘younker’ is another way to describe the younger, prodigal son, just as the stay-at-home son is called the ‘elder’.) Not all sixteenth-century writers were as explicit as Whetstone in naming the parable of the Prodigal Son as their literary paradigm, of course, but the pattern of warning, rebellion, and repentance, with some identification with the repentant hero, was a common theme.

Admonition and edification Helgerson notes three phases of influence with slightly different emphases between the s and s. His approach takes a diachronic view of the categories Beck had identified, as discussed above, and covers a wider range of texts. The earliest phase Helgerson details involves ‘rhetorical admonitory works’ and begins with Gascoigne’s repentance in  of his earlier ways as a writer of worthless prose. His Glass of Government dramatizes the idea of edification of the reader through experience, especially through the rebellious experiences of the author. In his earlier works, such as the collection of poetry A Hundred Sundry Flowers (), there is little in the way of a moral or lessons to be drawn. Instead, the adventures of a young man in youthful romances and exciting military endeavour are closely 15

Whetstone, The Rocke of Regard, sig. ¶iiiᵛ, quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .

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linked to the author’s own experiences, and no moral stance is promoted. However, this innocent retelling for literary pleasure is short-lived, and Gascoigne writes of his later works that they ‘make amends for the lost time which I misbestowed in writing so wantonly’.16 Here there is no sense of taking pride in past experiences or that self-knowledge is to be gained from the excesses or poetry of youth. Instead, the message of plays such as The Glass of Government is that those who disdain the pleasures of this world will share in its riches and those who take delight in beauty and romance will lose what they might have had. And this stance does indeed bring Gascoigne the worldly preferment he sought, as he was employed in  by Lord William Cecil Burghley. A consideration of The Glass of Government starts with its setting, in the Antwerp of its Terentian predecessors such as Acolastus. There are two fathers who have succeeded due to their own hard work. Each one has two sons, the older of whom is quick-witted, while the younger is rather less gifted. While believing ambition is inappropriate, they nevertheless give their sons the best education they can afford, believing it ‘not amiss to bring up [their] children with such education as they may excel in knowledge of liberal sciences . . . then may they by learning aspire unto greater promotion and build greater matters upon a better foundation’.17 While the emphasis in the play is on order and stability, the ‘desire of promotion (by virtue)’18 is certainly allowed and is satisfied to some extent. In addition to the fathers, there is another authority figure, Gnomaticus the schoolmaster to the sons. He bases his instruction on eight sentences which describe the obligations of young men towards all members within the fixed hierarchy which is the universe around them. This starts with God, then moves to the king, the country, ministers, magistrates, parents, those older, and their bodies, which are the temples of the Lord. Gnomaticus patiently explains all eight sentences, and then the dutiful younger sons turn 16 George Gascoigne, The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. John W. Cunliffe,  vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), II, p. , quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. . 17 Gascoigne, The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, p. , quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. . 18 Gascoigne, The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, pp. –, quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .

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them into verse. These principles are the glass of government of the title: the mirror in which men are to find their likeness and ‘learn what they are of themselves’.19 Self-knowledge here is completely contained within an understanding of duty towards the established order. In addition to this positive mirror is the mirror of evil which is held up to the overly bright older sons and a cast of menial characters who implicitly contrast and parody the steady moral instruction of the good schoolteacher. The brothel-keeper, Pandarina, is the contrasting authority figure to the schoolmaster, and offers three lessons in life to her niece Lamia. While Gnomaticus taught that duty involves fearing, trusting, and loving God, Pandarina asserts: ‘Trust no man how fair so ever he speak. Next Reject no man (that hath aught) how evil favoured so ever he be. And lastly Love no man longer than he giveth, since liberal gifts are the glue of enduring love.’20 The older sons spend their time with Lamia rather than with Gnomaticus, and even talk of versifying her beauty rather than the schoolmaster’s dull principles. When their fathers discover how they have fallen, he sends all four sons to university. There one of the older bothers is executed for robbery in Heidelberg, and his younger brother, who has advanced to a position of influence in the court, can do nothing to save him. The other older brother is whipped for fornication in Geneva, where his younger brother has become a minister. Neither of the prodigal brothers reaches self-knowledge or repentance. The reader is forcefully guided towards approval of the glass which brings advancement and happiness. For Helgerson, The Glass of Government lies firmly in the rhetorical admonitory phase of the Prodigal Son play tradition. In this tradition, the parallel development of the hardening of attitudes towards rebellion and of the rise of humanism and the need for education is clearly demonstrated. The Prodigal Sons in the play receive the same education as their righteous younger brothers: the problem lies in their quick-wittedness. This identification of the problem is associated with the parable of the Prodigal Son through Erasmus’ commentary 19 Gascoigne, The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, p. , quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. . 20 Gascoigne, The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, p. , quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .

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on the parable. There, in the English translation of Nicholas Udall, Erasmus speaks of the ‘quickness of wit’ of the Prodigal,21 although it should be noted that in the parable there is no suggestion that this brings disaster on the rebellious son. However, the message is that the young mind, and particularly the quick-witted one, must be thoroughly indoctrinated, in classical and in Christian morality. Conformity is what is to be aimed at, and experience is of no benefit in bringing repentance. Gascoigne, who knew something of turbulent times, needed to excise the romantic rebellion of his younger days without offering his experience, through fiction, as an example or a possibility to be followed. Helgerson comments: His intermediate position, between two generations, made him both the first Elizabethan prodigal and one of the most uncompromising of the mid-century enemies of prodigality.22

Lyly’s first Euphues text, The Anatomy of Wit (), is perhaps at the centre of this phase, and having introduced this text via the plays of Terence earlier, I will now consider it in greater detail. Just as The Anatomy of Wit closely followed the pattern of the classical plays of antiquity, so this text was much imitated by others. Lyly claimed it was a self-portrait, aligning himself with the Prodigal Son tradition we have already noted. In this book, the main character, Euphues, rejects the advice of the older man Eubulus, meets Philautus who offers an opposing set of advice, and then falls for Philautus’ lover Lucilla. This love is reciprocated. Philautus is sent by Lucilla’s father to do business abroad, and when he returns to marry Lucilla, the true situation comes out. Lucilla then transfers her affections to another man, and Philautus and Euphues are reconciled, both rejected lovers. Lucilla is left to her fate, but Euphues is a changed man, deeply repentant of his first rebellion and full of warnings to others of the dangers of falling in love with women.

21 Erasmus, Paraphrase upon the Newe Testament (), quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. . In endnote  (p. ), Helgerson goes on to note that the allegorical identification of the Prodigal with the Gentiles meant, particularly for Erasmus, that he was identified with the wisdom of the pagan writers of the classical period. 22 Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .

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The similarities with Acolastus are obvious: there is a key figure of authority who offers sound advice which is ignored, although in this case the figure is not the father of the main character; there is a contrasting, younger figure, although here Philautus has a more active role than the earlier exemplar; finally, Lucilla is the prostitute Lais, her dyed hair marking her out as a suspect temptress, although she inhabits a much more refined world. The riotous living of the parable still takes place, but it is in a drawing room rather than a tavern. The key difference between the two is that while the Prodigal in Acolastus is welcomed back to a new life, for Euphues, life is a hollow shell of restraint and disillusionment. For modern readers of The Anatomy of Wit, the unsympathetic nature of this text stands out very strongly, although it seems to have been accepted at face value by its contemporary readers. The apparent ambivalence shown towards the imperfections of Euphues at the start, the attraction towards the objects of the satire, without which there would be no drama, are undercut by the way in which the narrator merges with him at the end. In The Anatomy of Wit, he is offered as a figure to be admired once he has repented, after his pretensions are gently mocked at the beginning, and experience is shown to justify the warnings of age, especially in the sphere of love. While a modern reader might find the later Euphues’ ‘reproving and renouncing, abstaining and refraining’23 priggish and unattractive, the text proved popular with Lyly’s contemporaries, perhaps because it was viewed as expressing the world view of their elders. In many of the texts which followed this influential work, youth was portrayed as a time of instructive failure, whether in love, travel, business, or adventures in the army. Rebellion In the second of Helgerson’s categories of Prodigal Son texts of the Elizabethan period, there is a shift of emphasis. Rebellion against any straightforward acceptance of the need for repentance and against an identification with the views of the older generation may be traced in the literature of this middle period. 23

Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .

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Writing firmly within this category is Robert Greene, who subverted the message and structure of the parable in striking ways. Robert Greene was not ambitious for advancement in the court, the army, or in politics, but did wish to sell his books, and so was more free than some in his approach to the expected pattern of engagement with authority. Perhaps more than any of the writers considered in detail so far, Greene is explicit that his work is autobiographical, as it moves from an exploration of the ‘romantic other’ before coming home to his ‘guilty self ’.24 In his early works, such as Mamillia: A Mirror or Looking Glass for the Ladies of England (), there is no sense that following precepts laid down by one’s elders will protect against sin or passion. Instead, nurture and precept are no defence against falling into vice: human actions have no effect or significance on outcomes, and it is time alone which brings order out of disorder (and vicious passion is usually punished, just not as a result of moral action). Mamillia falls prey to a deceiver, despite taking the advice of her father to control her passion. The moral tradition of the past has been replaced by stoic resignation, often associated with the feminine characters, as the virtue of greatest importance. Male figures of authority become the typical villains of this fiction, rather than figures whose only vice may be excessive kindness. Conflict is between abusive authority and youth, although the story begins with the dominant Prodigal Son theme of a paternal warning of moral consequence. The narrative focuses on how to get around it or refute it, rather than on the ruinous results of ignoring it. Thus the message of the parable of the Prodigal Son is subverted; passion and fortune rather than repentance are the chief movers of the action. Overarching benevolence is missing: in Greene’s Card of Fancy (), the father rejoices at the news his troublesome son is leaving, and recommends that travel is a good way to find oneself. It is his advice that moderation is the key which the hero ignores in the first section of this text, although this theme is soon forgotten in the remaining three-quarters of the book. The hero returns to sort out the disorder in the family and the state only because he has fallen in love: the pattern is restored through an agency which

24

Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .

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is beyond rationality. The aim of the book is entertainment, rather than edification. This triumph of love is demonstrated perhaps most convincingly in Pandosto (), a refutation of the Prodigal Son story with the usual elements of Greene’s writing at this stage: ‘A passion beyond the control of reason motivates the action of each part, and time, rather than any human agent, resolves the conflicts.’25 Here abusive authority persecutes innocent virtue, and moral excellence is represented not by the actions of a repentant man, but by a patient and suffering woman. Ultimately the message of the text is that the young man’s passionate desires are proved worthy, although his identity has to be given up when he rebels. In this text, Dorastus the hero refuses to marry the princess his father has chosen for him as a way of avoiding all the temptations of youth, although this rebellion troubles him. He remains in this troubled state when he falls in love with Fawnia, who is apparently a shepherdess but is in fact a princess, who had been abandoned by her father Pandosto as he believed she was the product of his wife’s adultery, a fact known to neither Fawnia nor Dorastus. Dorastus finds it hard to justify his love for one who is so far below his status rationally or morally. He suffers further when he is forced to put on the costume of a shepherd in order to win Fawnia—his view of himself is identified with that of his father, although it seems in the text that by losing himself to passion, he finds himself more fully than before. It is love which enables the growth of his character from dependence on his father to independence. First, however, he is imprisoned by Pandosto, who has also unwittingly fallen in love with Fawnia, his daughter, who remains true to Dorastus. In prison, it is his father’s advice which comes back to him: Poor Dorastus lay all this while in close prison, . . . sorrowing sometimes that his fond affection had procured him this mishap, that by the disobedience of his parents he had wrought his own despite.26

Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. . Robert Greene, Pandosto, in The Life and Complete Works of Robert Greene, ed. Alexander B. Grosart,  vols (–; repr. New York, ), IV, pp. –, quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. . 25 26

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He does not repent, however, and in the end his rebellion is rewarded with his freedom, with Fawnia as his wife and with an increased kingdom. The clear message is that love was the better guide than his father’s prudence. The parable of the Prodigal Son is drawn into the text in the invocation of parental advice, its rejection, the loss of identity, and the recollection of the advice; and there is certainly a contrast made between rebellious youth and the belief systems of the older generation. However, youthful rebellion is shown positively as a rite of passage towards independence. Although it is painful, no repentance is needed, and it is that rebellion which restores stability to society. In contrast, Pandosto had not rebelled in his youth, but in his old age yields to jealousy and incestuous lust. Such a message about the positive advantages of rebellion is a far cry from the admonitions of Gascoigne to follow the precepts of conventional wisdom. For Helgerson, this movement reflects the stability of the s, which the religious and military conflicts of the s would quickly problematize. In this decade, the third of Helgerson’s categories of Prodigal Son texts appears, in which repentance becomes the dominant theme. Repentance At the end of the s, Greene came under attack for his romantic tales, which were seen to violate the principles of humanistic morality. Defensive prefaces were added to his pamphlets, which seemed to highlight that they were indefensible from the perspective of conventional rationality. Greene responded to criticism of his portrayal of love, first with repentance for his view of women and then for his storytelling itself. He expressed concern that his earlier work might have led young readers astray, and begged forgiveness. At the end of his life, he embarked on a new text, Mourning Garment, about which he claimed: ‘I have only with humanity moralized a divine history.’27 The divine history he is referring to is of course the parable of the Prodigal Son, and in his humanized version he even inserts elements of the parable which other writers of the period have steadfastly ignored, such as the older brother, the pigs, and the fatted calf. 27

Robert Greene, Mourning Garment, in The Life and Complete Works of Robert Greene, IX, p. , quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .

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He also adheres to extra traditions familiar through iconographic representations of the time and earlier, such as the inn with the three prostitutes with whom the Prodigal loses his money, and who strip him and throw him out once the money has gone. Here women are back in their place as temptresses to sin, in opposition to humanistic morality. The dangers of rebellion are clearly re-asserted, as the hero discovers through his experiences: the forwardness of youth to ill, their restless appetites to amorous effects, the prejudice of wanton love, the disparagement that grows from prodigal humors, the discredit that ensues by such inordinate desires, and, lastly, the fatal detriment that follows the contempt of grave and advised counsel.28

The pastoral subplot of the text of the betrayal of the virtuous shepherdess by the fickle shepherd may signal the remnants of Greene’s romantic leanings, but the overwhelming power of the narrative comes from the retelling of the repentance of the prodigal hero who disregarded the advice of his elders. In his own life too, Greene aligns himself to the Prodigal Son, and offers his experience as a warning to all humanity. Conclusion For Helgerson although not for Beck, the s signalled the end of the era of Elizabethan Prodigals, as war with Spain, rapid inflation, and the ageing of the key writers take their toll and there is a general renunciation of fiction. I will argue in Chapter , with Beck, that in the work of Shakespeare, the motif of the parable of the Prodigal Son remains strong, although it would be hard to refute Helgerson’s closing assessment of the age: The pattern of rebellion, guilt, and repentance was a guarantee of achieved selfhood for so many of these writers—a mirror in which they found a reflection of their works and lives—that we may, not unfairly, call them a generation of prodigals.29

28 Greene, Mourning Garment, p. , quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. . 29 Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .

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The commentators considered in this chapter have placed their emphasis on different aspects of the Prodigal Son tradition in the sixteenth century, but together they have demonstrated that the parable was a key metanarrative for writers in this period. The pattern of advice from an authority figure, rebellion, trouble of some sort leading often but not always to repentance, and then a resolution which in some way reasserts the status quo, occurs again and again in the literature of the time. Helgerson’s interpretation has been given in some detail, as it most thoroughly considers the evidence. While his developmental categorization of texts following an approach of admonitory rhetoric, rebellion, and then repentance relies on a diachronicity which sees changes happening over a surprisingly short period of time, his readings of the texts as sites of engagement between culture and the parable of the Prodigal Son are compelling. Although I have not presented all of the evidence he amasses to substantiate his claim that the writers themselves identified with the Prodigal Sons they were portraying, that too is an intriguing element of his thesis, and adds a new dimension to the intertextual use of the parable here. It will be interesting to note if a similar pattern emerges in other periods of intense upheaval, and if the parable appears more frequently in literature written when literary production is not viewed positively. Here, I have demonstrated that thwarted rebellion against established authority is the attractive element of the parable at this time, leading to a particularly harsh understanding of homecoming. Other elements which are more important at other periods of interpretation, such as the generous and graceful response of the father and the sulky assertion of justice of the older son, are generally under-considered. As ever, the parable is open to many different interpretations, depending on the context in which it is read, indicating its powerful narrative hold on the collective imaginations of its readers.

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3 The Prodigal Son and Shakespeare

While for Richard Helgerson1 the Prodigal Son tradition finished in the s with the posthumously produced Mourning Garment of Greene, for many commentators the tradition extends further and wider and includes the works of Shakespeare. Ervin Beck, for example, asserts that Shakespeare used the Prodigal Son archetype in six of his plays. For him, Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Lucentio in The Taming of the Shrew, Prince Hal in Henry IV, Parts  and , Bertram in All’s Well that Ends Well, and Caliban in The Tempest are all Prodigal Son figures.2 Others, such as Peter Milward, have argued for a subversive use of the parable in King Lear, in which the king is presented as the prodigal child/ parent returning to his welcoming parent/child Cordelia.3 In this chapter, I will consider two of these plays, Henry IV Part  and King Lear, and their interaction with the parable as archetypal source, or metanarrative, in more detail. In common with the earlier Prodigal Son plays, we will find that Shakespeare’s use of the parable interrogates notions of rebellion against authority, and serves the interests of the author’s art over morality in its portrayal of homecoming. First, however, we should note that there is a discernible shift in the way the parable is alluded to as the Jacobean period proceeds. Filial 1 Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). 2 Ervin Beck, ‘Terence Improved: The Paradigm of the Prodigal Son in English Renaissance Comedy’, Renaissance Drama NS  (): pp. –, pp. –. 3 Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (London: Sedgwick & Jackson, ), pp. –.

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rebellion, associated with foreign travel, becomes less uniformly unwelcome. Michelle M. Dowd offers a reading of plays such as John Fletcher’s Monsieur Thomas (–c.) and Thomas Heywood’s If You Know Not Me (–) in which changing economic forces affecting those with inheritances to pass on cast an ambivalent shadow over the use of the Prodigal Son paradigm.4 In this period, building capital through trading ventures, particularly abroad, was one way to increase, or protect, inherited wealth. To travel and to trade in unfamiliar contexts might bring great rewards, although the risks may also be great. ‘Prodigality’ redefined may offer the sort of training in risk-taking and improvisation which would stand those who were in line to inherit in good stead when they returned to family responsibilities. For Dowd, in these plays, ‘travel, whether it be physical travel abroad or more symbolic travel away from traditional behavioral norms or patriarchal ideologies, becomes valuable precisely because it engenders a degree of dissolution and waywardness’.5 This displacement may be an enabling aspect of male identity for the elite members of society in a new and changing economic climate. Dowd’s reflections offer a wider context for Shakespeare’s use of the parable, and we will return to her work when we focus on Henry IV Part . Prodigal Son references in Shakespeare’s plays The parable of the Prodigal Son appears to be one of Shakespeare’s favourite biblical passages, along with the Psalms. Fleeting references to the parable appear in many plays, often in the mouth of the Fool, such as Dromio of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors, who combines ideas from Genesis –, Luke , and  Corinthians  in a breathless jumble: Not that Adam that kept the Paradise, but that Adam that keeps the prison; he that goes in the calf ’s skin that was killed for the Prodigal; he that came behind you, sir, like an evil angel, and bid you forsake your liberty. (..–)6 4 Michelle M. Dowd, ‘A Gentleman May Wander: Inheritance, Travel, and the Prodigal Son on the Jacobean Stage’, Renaissance Drama . (): pp. –. 5 Dowd, ‘A Gentleman May Wander’, p. . 6 All references are taken from The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, David Scott Kastan, and H. R. Woudhuysen (London: Cenage Learning, ; rev. edn ).

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Lance, in Two Gentlemen of Verona, makes a further light-hearted reference to the parable, asserting: I have received my proportion, like the prodigious son, and am going with Sir Proteus to the Imperial’s court. (..–)

In a verse we shall consider more below, Falstaff continues this playing with verbal allusions, commenting unfavourably on the ragtag company of soldiers he has assembled that You would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals, lately come from swine-keeping, from eating draffs and husks. (..–)

Similarly, in typically robust fashion, Falstaff had earlier accused Hostess of picking his pockets, just as the Prodigal, or younger, son, had been robbed by prostitutes in medieval retellings of the parable: ‘Will you make a younker out of me?’, he asks of Hostess (..–). In a rather more attractive passage, the same phrase, with an explanation, is used in The Merchant of Venice, when Gratiano muses on the difference between the embarking on the chase for a lover’s affections, and the frequent result of the attempt: How like a younger or a prodigal The scarfèd bark puts from her native bay, Hugged and embracèd by the strumpet wind! How like the prodigal doth she return, With overweathered ribs and ragged sails Lean, rent, and beggared by the strumpet wind! (..–)

The force of love both energizes and exhausts those who seek to be carried along by its power. Here the contrasts in the parable combine with the image of the sea-bound ship to create a complex yet satisfying simile. A different relationship, between brothers this time, and thus more closely connected to the parable, is drawn on in Orlando’s complaint to his brother at the beginning of As You Like It: Shall I keep your hogs and eat husks with them? What prodigal portion have I spent, that I should come to such penury? (..–)

In and out of its context, the parable is drawn on as a common story, expressing a variety of states. The rebellion theme so clearly expressed in the Prodigal Son plays is not the only one alluded to, from these

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brief references. The extravagance and the wretched fall are both here, but also, in Dromio’s words, a possible theological understanding of the role of Christ in the parable, who has been identified with the sacrificial calf killed to welcome the younger son home. Characters are both described by others as Prodigal Son figures (Falstaff of his soldiers) and take on the role themselves, either joyfully revelling in the opportunities opened up to them due to their snatched inheritance (Lance) or complaining that they are unjustly in the position of the ruined younger son (Orlando). Gratiano’s synthesis of it into his metaphorical musings about human experience, focusing on its contrasts, offers another use of the story. Once again, the parable proves to be a remarkably fertile common source. Its role as part of the narrative backdrop of Shakespeare’s created literary world is demonstrated materially in its presence as a painting which Falstaff recommends to Mistress Quickly at the Boar’s Head Tavern in Henry IV Part  (..–) and in The Merry Wives of Windsor (..–) on the wall in Falstaff ’s room in the Garter Inn. Shakespeare’s Bible However, it is the archetypal use of the parable that will form the basis of the remainder of this chapter. Such a consideration prompts a wider discussion of the role of the Bible in Shakespeare’s work. Shakespeare’s extensive use of biblical quotations and references has intrigued many commentators, provoking questions about which of the available translations he had access to, and whether he used the Bible uncritically or felt able to subvert it. Interest has also been shown in the ways he might have been affected by the Censorship Commission of , and the complete ban on plays using the name of God which came about in . Beatrice Groves notes that Shakespeare’s audience were only the second generation of people in England for whom the Bible in English would have been available and accessible. She asserts that ‘its language would not yet have become simply proverbial’, but argues that Shakespeare expected his audience to hear and understand quite obscure allusions.7 This is not a difficult argument to sustain, given Beatrice Groves, Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare – (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. . 7

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that church attendance during this period was compulsory, religious orthodoxy was taught at home, and earliest schooling, under the influence of the literacy-valuing Reformation, was based on the Bible. Even those who could not read would have heard sermons, used the catechism, sung the Psalms, and perhaps enjoyed the pictures in the cheap religious works which were now available. As Cromwell in  had realized, theatre could be used as a way of educating people, and new versions of plays based on the Bible had over the past decades rivalled the Catholic mystery plays so popular in the previous century. By the time Elizabeth came to the throne, this uncompromising Protestant biblical theatre came under scrutiny and worries arose about the possibility of it offering a threat to authority. Early in her reign, in , unlicensed interludes of a religious or political nature were prohibited. Increased theological debate in the theatre led to increased censorship, forcing playwrights to take less direct ways to deal with the theological issues which were current concerns. This increased interest in the Bible, allied to restrictions about how it could be referred to in a play, led to new, subtle, and ambiguous intertextual echoes in the work of many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. However, for Groves: This sublimation of the Bible reached its zenith in Shakespeare, who harnesses the power of biblical language and Christian stories and uses them metonymically to express, echo, and comment upon central themes, ideas, and emotions within the plays.8

Both the biblical wordplay we have already noted, and the wider use of biblical themes, characters, and archetypes, which we are about to consider, may be found in Shakespeare’s texts, presumably with the expectation that they would be recognized and appreciated by his audience.9 Which translation Shakespeare used and knew, out of the range available to him, remains an area of interest, and identifying references which are specifically his and not his sources’ might offer an insight into his religious leanings. Today’s best-known translation, the King James or Authorized Version, did not appear until , of course. Groves, Text and Traditions, p. . Hannibal Hamlin’s The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ) offers further detailed reflections on the prevalence of the Bible in Shakespeare’s time, a literature review of the study of the Bible in Shakespeare’s work, and methodological issues around the use of the term ‘allusion’. 8 9

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Before that, the range was limited. Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible from the late fourteenth century was the first English text Shakespeare could have consulted, but it was not printed until , so it was highly unlikely he had owned a copy or was influenced by it. Tyndale’s Pentateuch () and final revision of the New Testament () would prove very influential on subsequent English translations, as was Coverdale’s revision of Tyndale’s text which included the Apocrypha and, famously, the Psalms. Matthew’s Bible was a compilation of Tyndale and Coverdale, published in  by John Rogers under the pen name of Thomas Matthew, and was granted a royal licence. At Cromwell’s request, Coverdale was involved in the revision of Matthew’s Bible, and the Great Bible was the result, first published in . A copy of this translation, which appeared in an appropriately large version, was authorized to be placed in every church in England. In , Henry decreed that all Bible translations other than the Great Bible were illegal, and many were destroyed at this time. This makes it highly unlikely that Shakespeare owned any version of the Bible from before , other than the Great Bible, and this was not produced for personal use. In , under Edward VI, more editions of the Bible appeared alongside the first books of Common Prayer. The situation was reversed when Mary succeeded to the throne, and in  public use of the Bible was banned and again bibles in English translations were destroyed. Meanwhile the important Geneva Bible was produced by Reformed-leaning exiles from Mary’s regime who gathered in Geneva. Its unique and attractive features included the clarity of its Roman typeface, its compact size, its division of the text into chapters and verses, with each verse a separate paragraph, and, crucially, the explanatory notes which appeared in its margins and its introduction to each book of the Bible. The Geneva Bible was first printed in England in , although it had been available as a complete Bible since , printed abroad. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker, after the accession of Elizabeth, quickly realized that the Presbyterian-leaning Geneva Bible highlighted the deficiencies of the Great Bible, and in  sent portions of the Great Bible to bishops and others to revise. These diverse translations were brought together by Parker, and the resulting text appeared in , in a magnificent volume and given the title the Bishops’ Bible. This became the official Bible of the Church of England.

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However, the Bishops’ Bible did not win the hearts of those who wanted a copy of an accessible Bible to read at home, for whom the Geneva Bible was very much the favoured text. Between the first printing of the Geneva in England in  and the arrival of the KJV in ,  editions of the complete Bible were published in England, of which  were Geneva Bibles and  were Bishops’ Bibles.10 This indicates the relative popularity of the two translations. Meanwhile, a group of Roman Catholic exiles from Elizabeth’s reign gathered in Douay and produced an elaborate English translation of the New Testament based on the Latin Vulgate. This was published in Rheims in  (hence the Douay-Rheims Bible) and although it was possible that Shakespeare owned or had read a copy, it was unlikely: imprisonment and torture were the punishment for being caught with one in your possession. Most of the biblical references in Shakespeare’s work are to texts that did not feature in the lectionary readings heard in the weekly liturgy in church, which strongly suggests that he owned a copy of the Bible which he used for personal reading.11 The question is, which translation did he favour? Because of the similarities between translations, it is hard to trace biblical references to one version rather than another, but of the  references found by Naseeb Shaheen in the History plays (not counting references to the Psalms, the most commonly referred to biblical text, generally from the Psalter of the Prayer Book), there are at least  which are closer to one translation than to others.12 While two of these references are less like the Geneva and more in the Bishops’/Great/Tyndale tradition, suggesting Shakespeare had had exposure to this line of translation, perhaps from hearing the Bishops’ Bible read in church, the rest follow the distinctively Genevan approach. One of these we have come across already, as it refers to the parable of the Prodigal Son. When Falstaff describes his army as ‘A hundred and fifty tatter’d prodigals lately came from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks’ (Henry IV Pt  ..–), this is clearly a 10

Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s History Plays (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, ), p. . 11 Naseeb Shaheen, ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of the Bible—How Acquired’, Shakespeare Studies  (): pp. –, p. . 12 Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s History Plays, p. .

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reference to the Geneva translation of Luke :. All other Tudor versions have ‘cods’ here rather than ‘huskes’, except the Douay-Rheims, which followed the Geneva Bible (as did the KJV). The same key word was noted in the reference from As You Like It (..). From the evidence of his writing, then, it seems most likely that Shakespeare owned or at least was very familiar with the Reformed Geneva translation. He may also have owned or, much more likely, have heard a Bishops’ Bible. It is not a surprising conclusion that Shakespeare’s Bible of choice for personal reading was the Geneva Bible, given the period in which he lived and worked. Shakespeare’s exegesis More significant is the range and depth of the intertextual use he put it to, from the level of wordplay already considered, to the more archetypal reference which takes the Bible as a series of overarching narratives to be appropriated in a new literary and historical context.13 Stephen Marx offers a refinement to this approach. He argues that the Bible influenced Shakespeare on a typological level, in which, on the basis of similarities and correspondences between the Bible and the literary work, a character or event is understood to represent another. For Marx, Shakespeare also offered a commentary on the Bible through his plays, and he names this appropriation as ‘midrash’. Midrash is a rabbinic approach to the reading of scripture which seeks to elaborate on the biblical text, explaining lacunae and seeking answers to new questions through playful, creative exegesis. Marx explains the difference between the two in this way: Typology illuminates patterns of repetition and variation between earlier and later texts that illuminate both. Midrash illuminates an earlier text with elaborations that create a later text typologically related to it.14

Alison Shell, in her Shakespeare and Religion (London: Bloomsbury, ), offers further reflections about the significance of Shakespeare’s beliefs, not least about the Bible. 14 Stephen Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. . 13

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While in practice it is not easy to keep these two approaches apart, the notion of Shakespeare creatively interpreting the biblical story of the Prodigal Son, both by typologically associating characters with figures in the parable, and by offering a new, midrashic, interpretation of the parable as a whole, is an attractive one. This is a way to understand Shakespeare’s use of this biblical story, not a suggestion that he was aware of or was consciously following a rabbinic reading practice. But once the typological connection is made, we will see that the plays are midrashically playful and imaginative (and allusive, too, under the pressure of laws on censorship) with the original parable, with a discernible purpose: creative exegesis indeed. Here we will consider one play with an obvious typological relationship to the parable of the Prodigal Son, involving a son and his father, and one which has a less obvious relationship, involving a father and his daughter. Read as midrash on the parable, we will see that the openness of the biblical text to multiple interpretations is clearly and powerfully attested, but also that the plays offer illuminating new ways to read the familiar, sacred story. The Prodigal Prince Hal In a key source for Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part , the anonymous The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (), the story is simple: a dissolute prince repents and reforms, a classic Prodigal Son type in the model of the Prodigal Son plays of the period. In Chapter , it was noted that Ervin Beck argued that Shakespeare’s play fell into this traditional morality play category too. Many other commentators have suggested that the relationship between Shakespeare’s play and the parable is rather more complex, however. It was first performed in , and is the second of four plays in which Henry V has a role: the others are Richard II, Henry IV Part , and Henry V. An understanding of the nature of that role has become a key to understanding these plays, although it is only in recent years that this has been recognized. Before the middle of the last century, it was Falstaff, or Percy, or King Henry IV, who tended to take centre stage, with the perceived reformation of the prince as a generally accepted but unremarkable subplot. The focus on Hal did not come until all four plays began to be staged in sequence, and his rise to political power was perceived to be a thread running through them all, with Falstaff ’s descent as a counterbalancing

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movement in Henry IV Parts  and . Associated with this perspective was a positive and uncritical alignment of Hal with the Prodigal Son. For John Dover Wilson, Hal is clearly the Prodigal Son who repents and returns to his father’s house: represented by chivalry in Part  and by good governance in Part .15 E. M. W. Tillyard saw the plays as mirrors of a shared Elizabethan belief in an ordered, fixed universe and a firmly established and hierarchical social order.16 Hal’s rise to power was viewed as an inevitable and expected narrative trajectory, based on the typology of the parable of the Prodigal Son and with a similarly positive outcome: The Prince as depicted in Henry IV is a man of large powers, Olympian loftiness, and high sophistication, who has acquired a thorough knowledge of human nature both in himself and in others. He is Shakespeare’s studied picture of the kingly type.17

However, more recent commentators have questioned this uncritical appropriation of the parable, and the associated assumption that a belief in a fixed, ordered, and hierarchical universe was universally shared. The popularity of history plays may well have been due to a sentimental desire to look back to a past when national glory and stability were idealized, in contrast to the shifting economic, social, political, and religious experiences of the current age. But the uneasy identification of Hal with the Prodigal Son in the plays, and his father with the father in the parable, suggests that there is an uneasiness about accepting that a simple and fixed message from the past is adequate when applied to the complexities of the present. Hal is not a solid, present hero who carries the identification clearly and simply. He is first mentioned in Richard II when the newly crowned king, his father, asks: Can no man tell of my unthrifty son? ’Tis full three months since I did see him last. (..–) See John Dover Wilson’s edition of William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ). 16 E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto & Windus, ); Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto & Windus, ). 17 E. M. W. Tillyard, ‘The Second Tetralogy’, from Shakespeare’s History Plays (London: Chatto and Windus, ; repr. Penguin, ), reproduced in the Norton Critical Edition of  Henry IV, ed. Gordon McMullan; rd edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co, ), pp. –, pp. –. 15

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Hal, however, does not appear to his father until the next play in the sequence, and even in the Henry IV plays, in which he is the main character, he continually plays different roles designed, he tells the audience, to hide who he truly is. The distance he places between himself and his father, and the world of the royal court, marks him as a Prodigal Son figure, but the extent and nature of his rebellion, and his return or homecoming to the status he had apparently rejected, is ambiguously described. The key passage to understanding Hal and his motives is his soliloquy in Act , scene . The setting is the palace, but Hal has been in the company of Falstaff and Poins, rather than his own, royal family, and the plot is an unsavoury one involving theft and double trickery. Alone, Hal muses on his plans for the future, which involve taking on the role of the Prodigal Son: I know you all, and will awhile uphold The unyoked humor of your idleness. Yet herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagion clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, That, when he please again to be himself, Being wanted, he may be more wondered at By breaking through the foul and ugly mists Of vapours that did seem to strangle him. If all the year were playing holidays, To sport would be as tedious as to work; But when they seldom come, they wish’d-for come, And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents. So, when this loose behaviour I throw off And pay the debt I never promised, By how much better than my word I am, By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes; And like bright metal on a sullen ground, My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault, Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. I’ll so offend to make offense a skill, Redeeming time when men least think I will. (..–)

This is knowing rebellion with a political purpose, filling in the lack of motive offered in the parable with a very carefully assessed plan for

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advancement. Whether the scheme is to be taken positively or negatively is unresolved. Resurrection, in the image of the sun appearing through the clouds, hints at transformation with a divine impetus behind it. Atonement through beguiling the beguiler, a classical picture of Christ’s act of redemption, is invoked here also. But from the audience’s perspective, Hal remains an ambiguous and not entirely sympathetic character. The privileged knowledge they have of Hal’s motive, deeply deceptive, leaves his relationships with others lacking in the directness and openness of the interactions portrayed in the parable of the Prodigal Son. Crucially, all of the main characters are persuaded by the trickery. Hal spends more time with Falstaff in the first play than with his father, honing his play-acting and powers of deception in the scene in which he rehearses his meeting with his father to explain his conduct. Falstaff parodies Lyly’s Euphues when he pretends to be the king berating his son, and then proceeds to commend himself as good company for the heir apparent: This pitch, as ancient writers do report, doth defile; so doth the company thou keepest. For, Harry, now I do not speak to thee in drink, but in tears; not in pleasure, but in passion; not in words only, but in woes also; and yet there is a virtuous man whom I have often noted in your company . . . (..–)

Hal, in his turn as king, is less compassionately welcoming to the returning son, but is more clear-sighted in his assessment of Falstaff ’s role: Swearest thou, ungracious boy? Henceforth ne’er look on me. Thou art violently carried away from grace. There is a devil haunts thee in the likeness of a fat old man. (..–)

When Falstaff attempts to defend himself, in the guise of Hal himself, famously declaring ‘banish plump Jack, and banish all the world’, Hal either as the king or as himself asserts, ‘I do, I will’ (.. ). Falstaff, who acts as the tempter in the play, is indeed beguiled by Hal, seeing him as an ally, and his surprise when he is snubbed at the end of the second Henry IV play is real. As the embodiment of the forces of disorder but also freedom for Hal, he acts as a contrast to the king which Hal must reject if his return to favour and destiny is to happen. What is interesting from the perspective of the audience, and those who are familiar with the Prodigal Son tradition of earlier literature, is

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that the king-father-figure Falstaff adopts is very much in line with a strand of that tradition. He berates his son for his rebellion, but his tears speak of compassion for him. In contrast, Hal’s father-persona bears no resemblance to the father in the parable or in the tradition, and rejects his son in no uncertain terms. Perhaps Hal’s play-acting reveals his deepest fears of rejection, just as his response to Falstaff as his father is acted with more truth than first appears—Falstaff will indeed be banished. However, Falstaff ’s playing of the king suggests he expects the narrative of the parable of the Prodigal Son to apply favourably to him: Hal will not reject him. Despite his opinion, expressed to others later in the play, that ‘the prince is a Jack, a sneak-up’ (..), when Hal challenges him, he asserts, ‘thou owest me thy love’ (..). Falstaff is entirely deceived by the persona Hal has presented to him. He might be considered an alternative Prodigal Son figure to Hal, with Hal taking on the role of the father but, as Hamlin comments, ‘ “[t]he roasted Manningtree ox” (..) is denied the parable’s fatted calf ’.18 The king’s relationship to the father-figure in the parable is also more midrashic than straightforward and, as with Falstaff, Hal’s deception seems to have effectively beguiled him. In the opening scene of the play, the king compares himself to Hotspur’s father. While Hotspur is ‘the theme of honor’s tongue’, the king sees ‘riot and dishonour stain the brow | Of [his] young Harry’ (.., –). He wishes: that it could be proved That some night-tripping fairy had exchanged In cradle clothes our children where they lay, And called mine Percy, his Plantagenet! Then would I have his Harry, and he mine. (..–)

Hal’s apparent rebellion has been so complete that the king would rather hope that he is not his son, than that he will return. As the battle approaches, however, Hal withdraws from Falstaff and returns to face his disappointed father. The scene is ultimately one of filial submission, in which Hal asserts he will in future be bold to make 18

Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare, p. .

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the claim ‘I am your son’ (..), but there is little of the humility of the Prodigal Son’s repentant return, or of the father’s unhesitating and generous welcome. The king attempts to explain Hal’s behaviour as God’s punishment for his past wrongdoings. Hal attempts to offer ‘extenuation’ in the reports being unreliable, while admitting some fault ‘wherein [his] youth | hath faulty wandered and irregular’, and asking for ‘pardon on [his] true submission’ (..–). Taking the role of priest, the king proclaims, ‘God pardon thee!’ (..), while warning that Hal’s actions have ‘ruined’ the ‘hope and expectation of [his] time’ (..–). In the king’s eyes, Hal has lost his place in Council, which suggests he has lost his rights as first born son and become ‘almost an alien’ to the ‘court and princes’ of his father’s family. As Dowd points out, ‘alien’ at the time had a specific legal meaning and referred to immigrants from continental Europe who were now living in England: ‘[f]or his father, the prince’s prodigality is a behavioral and spatial flaw, physically and symbolically displacing Hal from court and its authority.’19 The connection with the parable of the Prodigal Son is clearly made, but this play, insofar as its perspective is represented by the king, falls short of finding virtue in the son’s prodigality, as some other plays of the Jacobean stage had done, particularly in light of new socioeconomic pressures. There is more at stake here than the economic stability of one family. The positive aspect of Hal’s apparent strategy of mixing with the common people is rejected by the king, although he is moved to tearful ‘foolish tenderness’, as he considers Hal’s absence in his own life (l. ). It is only this display of warm emotion which seems to provoke an honest response from Hal: ‘I shall hereafter, thrice gracious Lord, | Be more myself ’ (..–). However, from Hal’s perspective, redemption in the king’s sight remains conditional on Hal’s successful vanquishing of Hotspur, and his assumption of Hotspur’s role: ‘Percy is but my factor, good my Lord | To engross up glorious deeds on my behalf | And I will call him to so strict account | that he shall render every glory up’ (..–). His redemption comes through the shedding of blood, not the blood of the fatted calf but his own and that of Hotspur: 19

Michelle M. Dowd, The Dynamics of Inheritance on the Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .

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I will redeem all this on Percy’s head, And in some closing of some glorious day Be bold to tell you that I am your son, When I will wear a garment all of blood, And stain my favors in a bloody mask, Which, washed away, shall scour my shame with it. (..–)

While this may be a reference to atonement through the blood of cleansing, recalling Isaiah , and adding to Hal’s aspirations to greatness, in terms of the parable this is a very conditional and transactional return to the welcome of home and the father’s love. As Hamlin comments, ‘[t]his is the chivalry of the shopkeeper’.20 The king as father is no idealized model of parental forgiveness, but rather a figure defined by the desire to overcome those who would inhibit his claim to the throne in perpetuity. The parable highlights the distance between the message of the Gospel in terms of homecoming as salvation and the restoration of family relationships, and the conditions for homecoming upheld by the king, who is as much duped by Hal as is Falstaff. Hotspur too believes in the prince’s complete rebellion from all that represents honour and order in his eyes, and this gives him courage to continue on his course to oppose the king. In Act , when the news comes that Hotspur’s father is unwell and is not joining the battle, Hotspur equates this absence with the absence of Hal, asking: Where is his son, The nimble-footed madcap Prince of Wales, And his comrades, that daffed the world aside And bid it pass? (..–)

Hal and his choice of companions, in his perspective, have chosen the alternative world of the jester rather than the chivalrous bygone age which he represents. In fact, while Hal’s self-knowledge is at the heart of the interest of the play, Hotspur’s hotheaded interest in horses and the trappings of chivalry is shown to be ridiculous. Vernon replies to Hotspur’s question that the prince is ‘All furnished, all in arms; | All plumed like estridges that with the wind | Glittering in golden coats 20

Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare, p. .

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like images’ (..–), to which Hotspur replies, ‘No more! Worse than the sun in March | This praise doth nourish agues’ (..–), unwilling to listen. Instead, he sees pell-mell action as the way to proceed: Come, let me taste my horse, Who is to bear me like a thunderbolt Against the bosom of the Prince of Wales. (..–)

In the following Act, when he brings the news that Hal has offered to engage in single combat with Hotspur, Worcester alone offers insight into the prince’s deceptive and deceiving rebellion: If he outlive the envy of this day, England did never owe so sweet a hope, So much misconstrued in his wantonness. (..–)

Again, Hotspur’s response reveals his willingness to believe the tales of Hal’s rejection of the way of the king: Cousin, I think thou art enamoured Upon his follies. Never did I hear Of any prince so wild a liberty. (..–)

In his disbelief and scepticism in response to the apparent return of the long-lost son, Hotspur perhaps represents the older brother of the parable, truculent for having played by the established rules but receiving no reward; full of anger against his father for apparently letting him down. The correspondences are not exact, of course, but Hotspur’s refusal to be convinced by Hal’s repentance, and his self-righteous clinging to the systems of the past are suggestive. His fate is a midrashic comment on the parable which certainly suggests that the old ways are inadequate in the world Hal represents, in which there are no certainties and nothing is as it seems. Hotspur is not an entirely unsympathetic character, as the pathos of his closing speech suggests (‘O Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth!’ (..)), and Hal in his death calls him a ‘great heart’ (..). However, his attempts to reestablish the systems of the past, compared to the experience of life and forward political thinking of Hal, are shown to be ineffective. The parable draws back from demonstrating its judgement on the older

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brother’s self-righteous refusal to accept the return of the Prodigal: in contrast the play does not leave anything to the imagination in its rejection of Hotspur’s way and its focus on and interest in Hal’s. While Hal goads Hotspur by saying he will take his honours as ‘a garland for [his] head’ (..), in fact he uses his own ‘favors’ to cover the ‘mangled face’ (..) of Hotspur. The trappings of the old system are of much less concern to him than the achieving of his aims, although in this case he respects Hotspur’s reliance on the tradition. Although the characters of Falstaff, the king, and Hotspur are shown to be unable to recognize Hal’s strategy of deception to further his political and social ends, Henry IV Part  does not end cleanly with the public emergence of the prince. Falstaff ’s apparent resurrection from the dead alludes to the father’s statement in the parable that his son was ‘dead and is alive again’ (v. ). But this homecoming draws attention away from Hal, and subverts his strategy of dissimulation. The typological connection between Hal and the Prodigal Son is not completed until the end of Part . The regal forgiveness he shows to the captured Douglas at the end of Part  is undercut by our next sight of him in Part , back in the tavern, craving beer and commenting that ‘these humble considerations make me out of love with my greatness’ (..–). It is only by the end of this play that he announces, ‘Presume not that I am the thing I was, | For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, | That I have turned away my former self ’ (..–) along with his tavern-companions. The language of the parable, of the coming to one’s self as the revelatory act of rebellion which enables return, is used and, without the knowledge of the soliloquy in the first play, the hearer might assume that Hal is describing a moment of repentance which has brought him to his senses, returned him to himself. However, read in conjunction with the soliloquy, the statement merely continues the deception, and involves God himself in the guaranteeing of it. There is an ambiguity here at least, as to the extent to which Hal is a Prodigal Son returned repentant, which is not resolved. In his article ‘History, Theatricality and the “Structural Problem” in the Henry IV Plays’, Paul Yachnin asserts that: The winner in this game of deception is Hal, who deliberately impersonates the prodigal son and feigns the false impression he knows his subjects have formed of him in order that, eventually, they will be convinced by his equally

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contrived reformation. Only he succeeds in an imperfect world by ingeniously exploiting its imperfections.21

Certainly the typology of the parable is invoked in the play, with characters such as the king and Falstaff sharing features of the father, Hotspur and the older brother having some sort of relationship, and Hal playing with the rebellion and return of the Prodigal himself. The result is a midrashic interpretation of the parable which offers a new interpretation of it: questioning the motives of the younger son in his leaving home and returning to it; and offering two opposing models for understanding the father-figure, either as harsh maintainer of a potentially corrupt system, or an anarchic tempter away from duty. The result of the return, in Henry V, is beyond the scope of this chapter and the parable, but has been read both positively and negatively, just as the ingeniousness of Hal’s deception is left open to debate in the two Henry IV plays. The Prodigal King Lear I close this chapter with a brief discussion of the use of the parable in a completely different play, the late tragedy King Lear (first performed in ). For Peter Milward, Shakespeare draws on the parable of the Prodigal Son in a ‘surprisingly large number of his . . . plays . . . though it is here [in King Lear] perhaps that his use of it reaches a climax and extends to the whole meaning of the play’.22 Many would argue that the parable extends across other plays, such as both parts of Henry IV, but certainly in King Lear there are specific allusions to the parable, and the pattern of warning, rebellion, and welcomed return home is adhered to. This is despite the play appearing after the Act of  which forbade any actor from using the name of God, Jesus, the Holy Paul Yachnin, ‘History, Theatricality and the “Structural Problem” in the Henry IV Plays’, Philological Quarterly  (): pp. –. Also in the Norton Critical Edition of  Henry IV: Pt. , ed. Gordon McMullan, rd edn (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co, ), pp. –, p. . 22 Peter Milward, ‘The Religious Dimension of King Lear’, Shakespeare Studies (Japan)  (–): pp. –, abridged in Shakespeare’s Christian Dimension: An Anthology of Commentary, ed. Roy Battenhouse (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, ), pp. –, p. . 21

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Spirit, or the Trinity jestingly or profanely on stage. From this point on, scriptural references are veiled rather than explicit, and the use of the parable in the opening scene of As You Like It, as described above, is very different from the covert association with it at the climax of King Lear, although the fictional, allegorical nature of the parable’s form at least protects its use to some extent in the drama of the time. In this play, the father is the wayward Prodigal Son, and Cordelia, the dutiful daughter, may be read as the merciful father.23 The exchange is signalled by Lear, after his ordeal in the wilds, being welcomed back to Cordelia as ‘this child-changed father’ (..). Further intertextual links with the son in the parable are to be found in the description of Lear’s knights as ‘riotous’ (..), and Cordelia’s pity for her father as ‘poor perdu’ (..), the lost one now found. The most explicit reference is found in Cordelia’s description of her father driven into a hovel for protection with only the mad beggar and the fool for company: And wast thou fain, poor father, To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn, In short and musty straw? (..–)

There were no swine in Lear’s experience, but the mention of them brings the parable into play, and gives his ordeal the overlay of the experience of the rebellious son who must come back to his senses in order to come home. Lear’s repentant realization of himself is fleeting, but the casting of Cordelia in the role of the father emphasizes the divinity with which she is associated elsewhere. France echoes  Corinthians : when he says of her, ‘thou art most rich, being poor’ (..), and in a classic double entendre, she applies the words of Christ to herself when she asserts, ‘O dear father! | It is thy business that I go about’ (.. –—a near quotation of Luke :, the boy Jesus’ words to his own family). Kent’s lament over her dead body is in the form of a reverent question, ‘Is this the promised end?’ (..), evoking hope either in the apocalypse or the resurrection, while the scene portrayed is that of the classical pietà, Mary (Lear) cradling the This interpretation is developed in Susan Snyder’s article ‘King Lear and the Prodigal Son’, Shakespeare Quarterly . (Autumn ): pp. –. 23

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dead body of her son (his daughter). While the playing with genders and generations makes the parable of the Prodigal Son a less immediately obvious metanarrative than it was in Henry IV, in fact its pattern is more clearly adhered to. Rebellion against the natural order of things is punished, and repented for, and there is a forgiving return awaiting the Prodigal. This is a bold reworking of the story, but it is a reworking nonetheless. Compared to Henry IV, the typological connections between the play and the parable are more complex, but the midrashic outworking of it is much less ambiguous than in the history play, although there are some elements of reinterpretation. Cordelia’s death at the hands of Edmund brings a more strongly Christological element to the interpretation of the parable. Her acceptance and forgiveness of Lear might be said to bring him to himself, in the terms of the parable, although there is no sense here of the family unit continuing in his character in a place they all call home. Closer perhaps to those earlier Prodigal Son texts in which the rebellious son does not live to enjoy the party which is thrown at the end of the Lukan version of the story, this play follows the conventions of tragedy, and leaves the next generation of survivors to pick up the pieces. Specifically the steady voice of Edgar, the brother who stayed behind, is the last one to be heard, and affirms the way of Cordelia: The weight of this sad time we must obey; Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. (..–)

In King Lear, it is the figure of the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son, in the person, ironically, of Cordelia rather than the father in the play, whose perspective is highlighted and affirmed. Unlike the Prodigal Son plays of the century before, this points to a new way to understand homecoming, rather than a return to the conventions of the past. King Lear represents a shift away from the constraints of the Prodigal Son tradition, and despite the restrictions on religious representation in drama, in fact is closer to the biblical message of the redemptive power of forgiving love than any of the plays we have considered in this chapter or Chapter . The re-gendering of the hero father-figure gives it a contemporary and surprising edge, but the message is powerful and positive, and very much in line with the

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counter-cultural message of the parable. Many readers have noted the connection between the Book of Job and the play, in the patient suffering endured by many of the characters, unmerited in many cases.24 This has led to a wider discussion about the belief system which underpins the play, and questions about the presence or absence of God. I suggest that the play’s engagement with the parable of the Prodigal Son leaves open the possibility of an omnipotent deity, while giving the characters and their plight theological and human significance. By playing with the figure of the father, the play resists the traditional identification of the father in the parable with God, at the same time as it highlights the potential of familiar Christian tropes of sacrificial love and integrity. Snyder’s conclusion, that ‘[i]n King Lear Shakespeare deprives his characters of revealed Christianity and forces them to create Christian values out of their own terrible need— or to perish’,25 may seem overly dogmatic, but it highlights a strong implication of the presence of the parable in the play. Conclusion Alison Shell, in her Shakespeare and Religion, argues that King Lear is compatible with the Christianity of its time and place, although it has often been read as calling into question the existence of God. She goes on to suggest, however, in contrast, that readings which highlight the redemptive echoes in the play do not do justice to its ‘irresolvable sadness’.26 I have suggested that the interplay with the parable of the Prodigal Son in the play is only one element which contributes to an overall understanding of the text, but that this points to a potentially positive homecoming ending which does not underplay the trauma of the whole. The discussion of the Prodigal Son paradigm in both of the plays considered in detail here affirms Shell’s wider conclusion that Shakespeare’s writing ‘treated all religions, including the Christian doctrine of his time, as subservient to artistic unity and closure’.27 See, for example, Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, pp. –; and Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare, pp. –. 25 Snyder, ‘King Lear and the Prodigal Son’, p. . 26 Shell, Shakespeare and Religion, p. . 27 Shell, Shakespeare and Religion, p. . 24

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The Prodigal Son

The Prodigal Son is a character and the parable is a shared narrative which Shakespeare re-appropriated in a variety of literary and religious contexts, whether ironically, approvingly, or simply to engage his audience with a well-known story. In contrast to many of the traditional Prodigal Son texts already discussed, in Shakespeare’s work, the parable serves the interests of the drama, rather than drives the narrative.

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4 Female Victorian Novelists and the Prodigal Son

[N]o story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.1

The narrator of George Eliot’s Adam Bede () makes the comment above as he/she reflects on what has happened to Adam in the light of his awakened feelings for Dinah. It might also stand as a comment on the way in which the parable of the Prodigal Son is read and reflected in the literature of the nineteenth century. This chapter will consider three novels by female Victorian novelists, and attempt to chart the way in which the parable is alluded to and adapted to speak to their interests and concerns around the troubling, shifting notions of home and homecoming. In the Prodigal Son plays of the sixteenth century, characters associated with the parable of the Prodigal Son tend to move more closely to the paradigm of return to the fixed point of home which the parable apparently promotes. Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, Cordelia, and King Lear have a more ambivalent relationship to the homecoming scene in the parable, but it remains a goal for all to some extent. In the novels considered in this chapter, characters’ understanding of home and their relationship to it, whether positive or negative, shifts and develops over time as their experience shapes their perspective. The three novels have been chosen, out of the many which might have been considered, because of the contrasting religious views of 1

George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Penguin, ), p. .

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their authors which bring a particular focus to their readings of the Prodigal Son. In this chapter I will discuss the contrasting ways in which characters in Adam Bede, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (–),2 and Margaret Oliphant’s Kirsteen3 () act as interpreters of biblical passages. Following this, I will explore a key theme in Victorian literature, of the balancing of respect for family duty with the longing to be a free and self-determining individual, through the way characters are aligned with figures in the parable of the Prodigal Son. The argument of the chapter will be that the parable offers a lens through which tradition and innovation, stability and change, may be refracted and contrasted, in the search for new answers to contemporary worries about what home might mean. It is striking that all three novels share the same dyadic structure we have noted is a defining feature of the parable. In Gaskell’s North and South, the contrast between rural Helstone and industrial Milton is the most obvious of many other contrasting pairs: Margaret and her privileged cousin Edith, but Bessy the mill-worker’s daughter also offers a striking comparison between Margaret’s family’s economic situation and her own; John Thornton the mill owner and Henry Lennox the lawyer, both Margaret’s suitors but from very different backgrounds and offering very different prospects; Margaret’s mother and John’s mother, in terms of their strength of character and their relationship with their children; and Margaret and her brother Frederick, who are clearly identified with the older brother and his prodigal sibling respectively. In Eliot’s Adam Bede, there are two actual brothers, Adam and Seth, and they are contrasted in terms of their religious beliefs, relationship to their parents, and, ultimately, their success in wooing Dinah. Adam and Arthur, the heir to the estate, offer an economic as well as a moral contrast in terms of their behaviour towards Hetty. Hetty and Dinah are often compared, most pointedly as they sit in their adjacent rooms and contemplate either their reflection in the mirror (Hetty) or the open window (Dinah). Dinah as Methodist preacher, preaching in the open air, is contrasted with the rector of the parish church, the Revd Adolphus Irwine, as are religious doctrines

2 3

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (London: Penguin, ). Margaret Oliphant, Kirsteen (London: Dent, ).

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compared with religious feelings. In Oliphant’s Kirsteen, the family home in the remote highlands is contrasted with the grand residence in Edinburgh where Kirsteen finally settles (and earlier with the shop in London where she goes to work); the importance of the sons of the family compared to the way the daughters are valued is a further key contrast. In terms of romantic interest, the shadowy Ronald Drummond, to whom Kirsteen makes an understated commitment, is presented in sharp contrast to the suitor preferred by her father, the showy Glendochart. Of course, narrative thrives on oppositions such as these, but in these novels the starkness of the oppositions, particularly in terms of place and family relationships, is perhaps more obvious and important than in others, as it is in the parable of the Prodigal Son.

The Bible in Adam Bede Within this dualistic structure, an important aspect of characterization in each novel is the use individuals make of the Bible in general and the parables in particular. Famously, of course, novels from this period, such as Brontë’s Jane Eyre (), use biblical knowledge and application as a marker of reliability and narrative approval. The Revd Brocklehurst’s misappropriation of Jesus’ words, ‘Man cannot live by bread alone’, to deny the children at Lowood school a replacement for their burnt breakfast5 marks him in Jane’s perspective, and thus the reader’s, as a foolish and hypocritical literalist. Biblical images, and parabolic phrases in particular, are used rather differently in both Adam Bede and North and South. On several occasions in Adam Bede, Hetty Sorrel is described as ‘a poor wandering lamb’, an echo at least of the parable of the lost sheep in both Luke :– and Matthew :–, in which one of a hundred sheep goes astray in the ‘mountains’ (Matthew) and in the ‘wilderness’ (Luke). Hetty’s character has been established as vain and selfish, although her beauty draws the attention of both Adam and a local squire, Arthur. 4 Clifford J. Marks, ‘George Eliot’s Pictured Bible: Adam Bede’s Redeeming Methodism’, Christianity and Literature . (Spring ): pp. –, discusses the significance of Methodism in the novel. 5 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (London: Grenada, ), p. .

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Dinah is characterized as Hetty’s opposite, unconcerned about outward appearance and focused on the needs of others. While Dinah’s goodness is not in doubt, her use of scripture is questioned. Near the beginning of the novel, Dinah explains to Adam’s brother Seth that she must leave Hayslope, on the basis of a ‘clear showing of the Lord’s will’: her interpretation of the sentence she read when she opened her Bible at a random page. She goes on that she is ‘loth to go, for my heart yearns over my aunt and her little ones, and that poor wandering lamb Hetty Sorrel. I’ve been much drawn out in prayer for her of late, and I look on it as a token that there may be mercy in story for her.’6 As the reader will find out, Dinah’s decision to leave again on the same basis later in the novel will have far-reaching consequences. Then Hetty, pregnant with Arthur’s child, tells her family she is going to visit Dinah, when she is in fact hoping to find Arthur. When she discovers Arthur has left for Ireland, Hetty senses that Dinah would not judge her or turn her away, but she cannot summon the courage to journey to Dinah in Snowfield to confess. Instead, she believes she must choose death, and so begins the descent into desperation which will lead to the death of her baby. Dinah is presented as a merciful alternative, but on the basis of her interpretation of the Bible she has chosen to leave Hetty (now indeed a ‘poor wandering lamb’), and she remains unaware of Hetty’s situation. ‘Mercy’ is the opposite Hetty is ultimately shown by the legal system, or her family. In a subtle way, Dinah’s random reading and interpretation of her Bible is shown to be flawed and inadequate. Its subjectivity locks her into an understanding of Hetty which fails her. At the end of the novel, Hetty is again described as a ‘lost lamb’, this time in a direct address to the reader by the narrator, and this time she is compared to ‘a foolish lost lamb wandering farther and farther in the nightfall on the lonely heath’.7 The comment is made as Hetty formulates a plan to go to Arthur, under the pretext of going to visit Dinah. The narrator continues with a reminiscence about travelling in countryside abroad, and coming across an ‘image of a great agony— the agony of the Cross’.8 The incongruity of the image, comments the narrator, would seem ‘strangely out of place in the midst of this joyous 6 8

Eliot, Adam Bede, pp. –. Eliot, Adam Bede, p. .

7

Eliot, Adam Bede, p. .

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nature’ to a traveller who knew nothing of religious history. This same man might also be unaware that hidden within a scene of natural beauty might be ‘a young blooming girl, not knowing where to turn for refuge from swift-advancing shame; understanding no more of this life of ours than a foolish lost lamb . . . . yet tasting the bitterest of life’s bitterness . . . No wonder man’s religion has much sorrow in it: no wonder he needs a suffering God.’9 The tone is detached, and the connection between Christ on the cross and Hetty in her deep anguish is kept at the level of the theoretical rather than the emotional or sympathetic. The image of Christ as the sacrificial Passover lamb is left open as an interpretative possibility in connection with Hetty, but her perceived ignorance, and the absence of her internal view, instead belittles her and her suffering in a theological context. Hetty functions here for the narrator as an example of a wider observation about religious perception (and not a religious truth), mediated through an experience of the natural world. The narrator’s use of a biblical image in such a context does not enhance his or her reliability or their sympathy towards the characters, but rather emphasizes their detachment from any theological interpretation. The two references to the biblical image of the lost lamb highlight well-established aspects of George Eliot’s attitude towards orthodox Christianity: a scepticism about divine revelation in scripture, although not about the right of individuals to interpret the Bible for themselves, and a suspicion about traditional theological views of atonement. Her fiction has been read as offering an alternative, ‘secular scripture’, in which human sympathy and compassion for the suffering of humanity promote positive outcomes at a personal and community level. Eliot’s novels such as Adam Bede encourage the reader to question the adequacy of Christian orthodoxies while promoting the development of an alternative perspective which is no less challenging in terms of its demands on the individual.10 For Marks, Eliot, ‘[b]ringing a

Eliot, Adam Bede, p. . See Norman Vance, Bible and Novel: Narrative Authority and the Death of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –, for further details about Eliot’s beliefs and the reception of her fiction. Charles LaPorte’s chapter on George Eliot in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English, ed. Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowland (London: Blackwell, 9

10

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sceptical eye to Scripture, . . . creates in the novel a space that differs dramatically from that of the pulpit’11 and which gives power of comprehension to the reader rather than the preacher. As Vance concurs: For [Eliot] Christianity could still be seen and reconfigured as a religion of humanity. Its partly outmoded scriptures with their grand narrative of salvation history could now be reread or revised as narratives of the mystery of goodness, self-sacrifice, and love in society and history, or they could be replaced by her own narratives on the same theme.12

As we will discover, Eliot rereads and revises the parable of the Prodigal Son in Adam Bede, while offering her own narrative as an alternative way to understand both independence and homecoming for the current age. The Bible in North and South Two examples of parable echoes in North and South offer a rather different approach to the Bible and religion, as we might expect from the Unitarian Mrs Gaskell. In a troubling visit Margaret Hale makes to see the ailing Bessy Higgins, Bessy’s interpretation of the Bible places Margaret in a position she finds deeply uncomfortable. The scene in Bessy’s poverty-stricken home is merged with the scene before by being introduced without a paragraph break. In this earlier scene, Margaret models silk dresses for her mother, at her request, to decide which one to wear to the dinner she has been invited to at the Thorntons’. The incongruity of the place and the hour in which to be so dressed up leads her to ‘play some pranks’, but she quickly realizes that her mother is taking the event seriously, and so becomes ‘sedate and grave’ to please her. Bessy’s response to the news of this dinner, like that of Margaret’s mother, ‘rouse[s]’13 her from her sickbed. Like Margaret’s mother, Bessy worries that Margaret will not appear good enough in such company: Bessy’s ‘Milton eyes’ had appraised the material of Margaret’s ), pp. –, considers the influence of the Bible as cultural object, and biblical hermeneutics generally, on her work. 11 Marks, ‘George Eliot’s Pictured Bible’, p. . 12 Vance, Bible and Novel, p. . 13 Gaskell, North and South, p. .

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current dress ‘at sevenpence a yard’. However, while her mother believes that Margaret is above the Thorntons in terms of her family position, and must present herself as such, Bessy believes Margaret is below the Thorntons, in terms of her relative lack of money and the restricted size of her house. Tellingly, Margaret offers another level of social stratification, that of education, and asks Bessy, ‘We are educated people, and have lived amongst educated people. Is there anything so wonderful, in our being asked out to dinner by a man who owns himself inferior to my father by coming to him to be instructed?’15 While she does not enter into the anxiety about her appearance, there is no doubt that Margaret at this stage believes herself to be superior even to the ‘first folk in Milton’.16 Having established these different perceptions of hierarchy in Milton, Gaskell turns the conversation between Margaret and Bessy to religious matters. Bessy reveals that she had dreamt of an angel coming to soothe her, dressed in a white gown (the ‘shining raiment’ of Revelation)17 as Margaret will be at the dinner, and that she is convinced Margaret is that comforting angel. Margaret finds such a literal application of the biblical prophecy preached at Pentecost about dreaming dreams and seeing visions in the last days (Acts :, quoting Joel :) inappropriate, especially related to herself, and calls it ‘a fancy’. Bessie’s insistence reduces her to silence, and she finally suggests they may talk about it ‘sometimes, but not now’.18 The conversation moves from the heavenly realm to the desperate plight of the families of those out on strike, and Margaret again asks Bessy to stop speaking, or ‘[she] will make [her]feel wicked and guilty going to this dinner’. It is at this point that Bessy introduces a parable to the discussion, asserting that: 14

Some’s pre-elected to sumptuous feasts, and purple and fine linen—may be yo’re one on ’em. Others toil and moil all their lives long—and the very dogs are not pitiful in our days, as they were in the days of Lazarus. But if yo’ ask me to cool yo’r tongue wi’ th’ tip of my finger, I’ll come across the great gulf to yo’ just for th’ thought o’ what yo’ve been to me here.19

14 15 16 17 18 19

Gaskell, North and South, p. . Gaskell, North and South, pp. –. Gaskell, North and South, p. . Gaskell, North and South, p. . Gaskell, North and South, p. . Gaskell, North and South, p. .

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Much of the vocabulary from the parable of Dives and Lazarus in Luke :– is reused here (‘sumptuous’, ‘purple and fine linen’, ‘dogs’, ‘tip of my finger’, ‘great gulf ’), but Bessy offers to do what Abraham in the parable affirms is impossible: to cross the great divide to bring comfort to the person who has comforted her. Margaret rejects her interpretation on the basis that she is feverish, and offers her own, alternative, spiritual interpretation: It won’t be division enough, in that awful day, that some of us have been beggars here, and some of us have been rich—we shall not be judged by that poor incident, but by our faithful following of Christ.

The parable of Dives and Lazarus is a difficult and allusive one to interpret. It is one of the parables which has no application or explanation in the Gospel, and its connection with the wider narrative is not obvious. Like the parable of the Prodigal Son, which it follows, the action occurs in four stages, and offers a finely balanced progression of contrasts: one man is rich and happy, the other is poor and miserable; after death, their situation is reversed. Both men desire only a small change to alleviate the suffering they are enduring. This parable and the Prodigal Son have etymological connections also: both the Prodigal Son in his hour of distress and Lazarus at the rich man’s gate desire to be ‘filled’, and both come into contact with impure animals. The celebration which takes place at the end of the Prodigal’s story is an everyday occurrence for the rich man while he is on earth.20 While these connections have little to add to an interpretation of this scene in the novel, the oppositions which make up both parables are central. The gulf between the rich and the poor, the circumstances which lead to these states, and the possibility of returning home, either to the father’s house or to Abraham’s bosom, are key concerns for the parables and for the novel. Neither Bessy’s nor Margaret’s interpretation of the parable is traditional, which takes the parable as a warning about the responsible use of wealth to help the poor. For Bessy, the human condition is preordained, and there is nothing anyone can do to change their situation: for Bessy, Margaret is one of those elected to enjoy the rich life, and 20 See Klyne R. Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, ) pp. –, for more about the connection between the two parables.

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although she offers help to those in need, she is still not expected to take up a place beside Abraham. Bessy believes that she will be able to return Margaret’s kindness by crossing the great gulf, but there is no suggestion that both women will end up in the same place. Margaret is horrified by this, and offers her interpretation which lifts the parable out of the realm of the response of the rich to the needs of the poor, and instead sees it as a warning about making the correct response to the calling of Christ, giving the closing section of the parable some spiritual weight, although such a reading is not obvious from the text. Bessy takes on the role of prophet in the novel, offering new and startling readings of the Bible which relate directly to Margaret, but Margaret does not want to hear that no change is possible, and all is fixed. She has a better grasp of the damage a fixed view of status and position may do, and is presented as preferring the dynamic idea behind the parable of the Prodigal Son: that choices are not irrevocable, and it remains possible to return home, changed by experience. From Margaret’s perspective, Bessy is a false prophet. Bessy’s use of biblical references, and particularly her reading of the parable of Dives and Lazarus, brings Bessy comfort but it is inadequate as Margaret seeks to learn from her experiences at Milton. Margaret’s interpretation of the parable remains on the level of piety, but it allows her to resist the view that change is impossible. She is neither an angel nor trapped by the benefits of her upbringing, but must discover a way to find her own freedom. The contrasting use of the parable drives the narrative forward and confirms that in a world of opposites, a new way must be charted. Jon Singleton discusses a similarly dissonant use of the Dives and Lazarus parable in Gaskell’s earlier novel Mary Barton (), in which different and conflicting class-based meanings are offered as alternatives for the reader to sympathize with and consider from their own perspective. Singleton argues that [t]he themes introduced by . . . ‘Dives and Lazarus’ resurface throughout Mary Barton: the neglect of the poor by the rich; the equal shares of good and evil ultimately experienced by each person, regardless of their social rank; and the ‘great gulf ’ not only between prosperity and poverty, but between middle-class and working-class perceptions.21 Jon Singleton, ‘The Dissonant Bible Quotation: Political and Narrative Dissension in Gaskell’s Mary Barton’, ELH . (Winter ): pp. –, p. . 21

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The same themes resurface in North and South, and are developed in the journey of understanding Margaret experiences, not least through the contrasting exegeses of parables such as Dives and Lazarus to which she and the reader are exposed. A further example of dissonant Bible reading in the novel highlights Margaret’s need to interpret the Bible differently in her new situation, and calls on the reader to do the same. In an earlier chapter entitled ‘Masters and Men’, the relationships between the workers and the masters of the mills is discussed by the Hale family and John Thornton the mill owner in terms of the relationship between parents and their children. The tension between the need for control and the drive for independence are key themes, as they are in the parable of the Prodigal Son, and there is a direct quotation from the parable within a story Margaret tells to make her point as she engages in the discussion. The limits of such ‘comparisons’,22 ‘similes’,23 and ‘analogies’24 are noted, but the parental image is accepted by all as an apt one not just for workers and masters, but also for the state. Extrapolating from this universal image, Margaret tells a particular story she heard ‘very lately’ about what had happened in Nuremberg ‘only three or four years ago’. A rich man had lived alone in a house which had been ‘both dwellings and warehouses’. After his death, the rumour that he had a son was found to be true: the son was now an ‘overgrown man, with the unexercised intellect of a child, whom he had kept up in that strange way, in order to save him from temptation and error’. Once freed, the man had no powers of discernment between good and evil, and was unable to fend for himself: ‘after fourteen months of riotous living, the city authorities had to take charge of him, in order to save him from starvation’.25 ‘Riotous living’ and dissolution to the point of starvation, having been led astray, connects the carefully established story to the parable. In this case, however, the story takes and judges the perspective of the father, who seeks to protect his son from life outside the restricted and mingled world of the home and commerce. Thornton had argued that 22 23 24 25

Gaskell, North and South, p. . Gaskell, North and South, p. . Gaskell, North and South, p. . Gaskell, North and South, p. .

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his workers are best considered children for the period in which they are working for him for they, like children, ‘are the happiest under the unfailing laws of a discreet, firm authority’.26 Margaret’s father has gently pointed out that children as they grow older need to be given independence in order to develop in a healthy manner, and specifically so that their relationship with their parents may mature. Margaret’s invoking of the parable of the Prodigal Son here seems strangely exaggerated, recasting it in the present day but in a foreign land, and placing the fault with the father, rather than the son, who is presented as a victim of his father’s obsession. Thornton in his response returns to Mr Hale’s reasoned argument rather than Margaret’s story, and breaks the control of the parent–child image by reminding him they are discussing the world of work, rather than the family. In that context, he argues, independent action has little meaning, but also that as master, he has no control over the workers outside of working hours, when he does not interfere. Margaret’s interpretation and use of the parable in the context of the discussion is judged inappropriate (her father will later make ‘a sign to her to be silent’, and warn her against using further ‘similes’27). Thornton will comment that she is like ‘all strangers who don’t understand the working of our system . . . and suppose our men are puppets of dough’.28 At this early point in Margaret’s progression towards independence, her interpretation of the parable at the service of the debate about parental control and the independence of children reveals much about her own lack of informed independent thought and action, and her father is still needed to guide her. Later in this chapter it will be argued that she inhabits the character of older son in the parable, who stays where he is, when compared to Frederick, her wayward brother. Here, Margaret’s misinterpretation of the parable and its relationship to the dynamics she is exposed to outside the home suggests she is not yet ready to embrace independence. While the episode contributes to the reader’s understanding of Margaret’s character development, it also highlights what Amy Coté calls Gaskell’s ‘radical yoking of political and religious discourse in which the implications of a text extend beyond the book and into the 26 28

Gaskell, North and South, p. . Gaskell, North and South, p. .

27

Gaskell, North and South, p. .

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readers’ lives’.29 Coté associates Gaskell’s Unitarian emphasis on individual choice and the working out of faith in daily life with the ‘catalytic’ form of parables to bring about change in their readers. Coté’s focus is on Mary Barton, and her limited interpretation of parables as ‘subversive, even scandalous’30 in their original context is open to debate, but her argument that Gaskell’s flexible use of parables had religious and social implications is illuminating. Coté traces the ways Gaskell complicates the return of the Prodigal Son in Mary Barton, by the failure of characters such as Barton to act according to expectation, thus ‘revitali[zing] the radical nature of the parable genre’. Esther is not allowed to come home, and her sin of prostitution cannot be overcome due to the social stigma attached to it: but Gaskell refuses to condemn her. In accordance with Unitarian principles, universalist hope is extended to both Barton and Esther in terms of an eternal homecoming. Coté concludes: By populating Mary Barton with modern instances of Biblical parables, Gaskell effectively mimics the narrative structure of the gospels: she provides her readers with inset stories ripe for interpretation and requiring selfexamination and action.31

Like Eliot, Gaskell invites her readers to recognize the Prodigal Son paradigm in her work, and to be open to its reinterpretation. Unlike Eliot, she continues to assert the presence of a divine narrator who guarantees a meaning beyond the comprehension of readers and characters and their multiple interpretations.32 The Bible in Kirsteen As I have commented elsewhere,33 biblical interpretation by characters in Victorian fiction may reflect contemporary movements in biblical studies, allied to the author’s understanding of scripture. In Oliphant’s 29 Amy Coté, ‘Parables and Unitarianism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton’, Victorian Review . (Spring ): pp. –, p. . 30 Coté, ‘Parables and Unitarianism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton’, p. . 31 Coté, ‘Parables and Unitarianism in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton’, p. . 32 See Singleton, ‘The Dissonant Bible Quotation’, p. . 33 See my Scottish Fiction as Gospel Exegesis: Four Case Studies (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, ).

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Kirsteen, various characters offer two opposing biblical references as justifications for their behaviour: Exodus : (‘Honour thy father and thy mother’) and Genesis : (also Matthew :; Mark :) (‘leave [thy] father and . . . mother, and . . . cleave unto [thy] wife: and . . . be one flesh’). Kirsteen’s sisters Anne and Mary offer the Genesis text as the basis of their decision to leave home to get married, placing them in the position of scripturally justified independent actors, rather than prodigal daughters. However, Kirsteen adopts a position not of ‘gentle sister, but an unyielding judge’34 towards Anne, who had run away from home to marry. Towards Mary, who marries the man Kirsteen had been expected to marry, she responds with silence.35 When the duke discovers Kirsteen in London, when she herself has run away from home in order to avoid marrying, he attempts to persuade her to return with the ‘word of scripture’ from Exodus :: ‘it is the only right way . . . You must really go home,’ he tells her.36 However, Kirsteen realizes that the prooftext is an inadequate response to her situation, for [h]er father would never again receive into his house the fugitive who had escaped from it. Kirsteen had been very well aware of this fact, however, from the beginning, and in her soul it supported her, like a rock to which she had set her back.37

Kirsteen’s resistance to the use of biblical prooftexts marks her as an independent biblical interpreter, sceptical of the direct application of the Bible in all contexts. However, her independence is not presented uncritically, and her judgements of Anne and Mary’s decisions taken with biblical sanction are subjected to narrative critique: the friend of Marg’ret, who shelters Kirsteen in Glasgow, offers a voice of compassion and reason which makes allowances for Anne, while offering practical help to Kirsteen who has also run away from home.38 Where the Bible speaks with more than one voice, the context of the interpreter, it is suggested here, is an important hermeneutical guide, and no one character may be entrusted with a truth for all time.

34 36 38

Oliphant, Kirsteen, p. . Oliphant, Kirsteen, p. . Oliphant, Kirsteen, p. .

35 37

Oliphant, Kirsteen, p. . Oliphant, Kirsteen, p. .

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Oliphant’s autobiographical writing suggests an ongoing engagement with scripture as it applied to the challenging events of her life, even when the passages she read seemed to make little sense. Following the sudden death of her daughter, she writes: When I went to read the chapter about the many mansions, even then I seem to be stifled again. Whatsoever you shall ask in my name seemed to me like a mockery.

However, after several references to other texts and the way they apply to her and her situation, she wills herself to reassess her view of God, again using biblical language: I must not think of God as if he were lying in wait for me to take such terrible vengeance on me . . . I will go softly all the days of my life until it please God to take me where I have so much treasure.39

For Mrs Oliphant, as for Kirsteen, the Bible retains its importance as a text for guidance and encouragement. However, unreflective application of specific verses to all situations is heavily critiqued, and Kirsteen herself is not presented as having special insight. The use of biblical texts and images in all three novels is an important aspect of each, but with different outcomes. The narratorial voice in Adam Bede takes a rather more detached and critical view than North and South and Kirsteen, which both offer different yet direct responses from characters to the biblical language and ideas which are expressed. The focus on the role of parables in the first two of these novels has now brought us to a consideration of the parable of the Prodigal Son in all three. I will argue that each novel offers a different interpretation of the parable in terms of its attitude towards change and stability, tradition and innovation, dependence and autonomy. This is expressed in its perspective on the meaning of home, and its implied answer to the question: was the younger son right to leave? The Prodigal Son in Adam Bede The parable of the Prodigal Son looms large visually and textually in Eliot’s earlier novel, The Mill on the Floss (). As a child, Maggie 39 Margaret Oliphant, The Autobiography of Margaret Oliphant, ed. Elisabeth Jay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. . See my Scottish Fiction as Gospel Exegesis, pp. – for a discussion of the biblical references in this passage.

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identifies with the ‘remarkable series of pictures representing the Prodigal Son in the costume of Sir Charles Grandison’40 when she realizes she has allowed her brother Tom’s rabbits to die. The scene is comic in the multiple levels of attempts to appropriate the parable, from the incongruous pictures, to the character Luke’s reflection about the hopelessness of the Prodigal Son, and Maggie’s comment that ‘she wished much that the subsequent history of the young man [the Prodigal] had not been left a blank’.41 The adult tone of the comment foretells the later influence of the parable on Maggie’s life, in which her return home, an apparent Prodigal, is thwarted by her brother, and her eventual acceptance is only possible in death. The parable is reread and revised in The Mill on the Floss, and its inadequacies as a paradigm for humanity are highlighted. In Adam Bede, the connection with the Prodigal Son is on a different level and is signalled more obliquely. Adam may be read either as a failed Prodigal Son, or as one who successfully resists the temptations into which the biblical character falls.42 That Adam will become the Prodigal Son, and leave home, is a fear in the Bede family which is established very early. His mother begs him, when he reacts angrily to the news that his father has forgotten to finish making a coffin, and has gone drinking instead, that he ‘wouldstna go away an’ break [his] mother’s heart, an’ leave [his] feyther to ruin’.43 Seth prays with his mother that ‘Adam might never be called to set up his tent in a far country, but that his mother might be cheered and comforted by his presence all the days of her pilgrimage’,44 the reference to ‘a far country’ making the connection with the parable explicit. As he works on the coffin which his father has abandoned to go out drinking,

40 George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. . 41 Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, p. . 42 Although it should be noted that the only direct reference to the parable relates to Hetty rather than Adam. Dinah prays for her in prison, asking God to ‘make her cry with her whole soul, “Father, I have sinned” ’ (p. ). The prayer effectively leads to Hetty’s ‘confession’. However, while Hetty is clearly identified with the lost lamb of the earlier parable, which introduces notions of sacrifice and innocent vulnerability, her culpability is problematized in the novel which means she resists an easy identification with the Prodigal Son. 43 44 Eliot, Adam Bede, p. . Eliot, Adam Bede, pp. –.

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Adam’s memory of the time when he was  and he had left home because of the ‘vexation’ of his father’s turn to drink is detailed: then he had decided that ‘he would go and seek his fortune, setting up his stick at the crossways and bending his steps the way it fell’.45 However, the day after his departure he is overcome with guilt at the thought of his mother and his brother enduring ‘everything’ without him. Following the narrator’s description of the memory, Adam’s thoughts are revealed as he invokes multiple biblical verses and country sayings to bolster or convince himself of the appropriateness of his resolve: ‘Nay, nay, I’ll never slip my neck out o’ the yoke, and leave the load to be drawn by the weak uns.’46 Later in the novel, his mother will be described as ‘opening the door to look out’ for her sons’ return from work,47 very much in the pattern of the father in the parable, watching for the Prodigal, her fearful longing explained by the terror she experienced at the time of Adam’s ‘failed’ escape. Adam’s refusal or inability to leave home is implicitly judged by the episode which follows, which reveals how his hardness of heart towards his father, now he has forced himself to return, has affected his willingness and ability to accept forces beyond his control. While he briefly asserted his independence and left home, he had chosen to follow the random direction the fall of his measuring stick indicated. However, on the night when his father dies, he decides to ignore the rapping on the door he hears, as if caused by a ‘willow wand striking the door’, despite remembering his mother’s warning that such a sound was ‘a sign when some one was dying’.48 It causes him to think ‘uncomfortably’ of his father, but ‘to Adam, the conception of the future was so inseparable from the painful image of his father, that the fear of any fatal accident to him was excluded by the deeply-infixed fear of his continual degradation.’49 When he and Seth discover their father ‘against the willow’, his first thought is to remember the omen, and to realize that while he had been thinking of his father ‘with a sort of hardness . . . as certain to live to be a thorn in his side, . . . [he] was perhaps even then struggling with that watery death’.50 The significance of this episode is

45 47 49

Eliot, Adam Bede, p. . Eliot, Adam Bede, p. . Eliot, Adam Bede, p. .

46 48 50

Eliot, Adam Bede, p. . Eliot, Adam Bede, p. . Eliot, Adam Bede, p. .

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revealed near the end of the novel, when a repentant Arthur meets Adam. Adam admits: I’m hard—it’s in my nature. I was too hard with my father, for doing wrong . . . I’ve known what it is in my life to repent and feel it’s too late: I felt I’d been too harsh to my father when he was gone from me—I feel it now, when I think of him. I’ve no right to be hard towards them as have done wrong and repent.51

In terms of the parable of the Prodigal Son, Adam had failed both as an assertive, independence-claiming son and as the loving father who watches and waits for the return of the repentant wanderer. However, his awakening to new sympathy and understanding is described in the scene before Arthur’s return, in his response to Hetty and her trial, and is couched in similar terms to the resolution of the parable. In chapter , ‘The Morning of the Trial’, Adam’s hesitancy to see Hetty is explained in terms of his ‘powerless[ness] to contemplate irremediable evil and suffering’. As the narrator comments, ‘Energetic natures . . . will often rush away from a hopeless sufferer, as if they were hardhearted.’52 At this stage, Adam continues to be unable or unwilling to believe in anything he cannot control or change. However, the narrator argues that his ‘deep, unspeakable suffering . . . the struggling appeals to the Invisible Right may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state’: compare Luke : ‘thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found’.53 Adam emerges from his anguish with ‘a soul full of new awe and new pity’,54 and a determination to support Hetty through her trial, commenting: ‘We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves. I used to be hard sometimes: I’ll never be hard again.’55 Beyond his presence, there may be nothing he can do to save her, but he is able to empathize with her without being able to help her or change her circumstances: this is a deep change in his self-understanding. The change is completed, in terms of the novel, by his marriage to Dinah, although it comes at some cost to her autonomy, and the reader is not encouraged to consider this move towards resolution in entirely positive terms. Dinah is presented as a character without a 51 53 55

Eliot, Adam Bede, p. . Eliot, Adam Bede, p. . Eliot, Adam Bede, pp. –.

52 54

Eliot, Adam Bede, p. . Eliot, Adam Bede, p. .

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home or parents, who moves around the country wherever she believes she is drawn to help. From the start of the novel, she takes on the role of preacher, and her ministry is effective and impressive. Much could be made of the way she is perceived by other characters, and her independence of thought and action, but it is the change in her character and status through her interaction with Adam on which I shall focus here. When his mother suggests to Adam that Dinah is in love with him, ‘[i]t seemed as if there were a resurrection of his dead joy’,56 further echoes of the resolution of the parable of the Prodigal Son. As he travels to persuade her to marry him, he comments, ‘I shall look t’her to help me to see things right . . . And it’s a feeling as gives you a sort o’liberty, as if you could walk more fearless, when you’ve got more trust in another than y’have in yourself.’57 Adam’s freedom from the hard and self-sufficient aspects of his nature comes at the cost of Dinah’s liberty, however. Dinah describes herself in relation to Adam in rather different terms, but very much in line with the Genesis  picture of the creation of Adam and Eve before the fall: ‘It is the Divine Will. My soul is so knit to yours that it is but a divided life I live without you.’58 The clergyman Mr Irwine emphasizes this connection: with approval, he notes that Dinah’s ‘strong gentle love was to be Adam’s companion and helper till death’.59 The Epilogue reveals that four years later, Dinah has taken on the role of Adam’s mother, specifically in her role as the one who watches for Adam’s return: Seth makes the comparison explicit, and remembers the way his mother, like the father in the parable, ‘was always on the look-out for Adam, and could see him sooner than other folks, for all her eyes got dim’.60 Moreover, she has been silenced, along with the other women preachers, and Adam comments that he agrees and approves of her decision to submit to the Methodist Conference’s edict. The connection between the novel and the parable of the Prodigal Son is oblique but illuminating. Points of reference include Adam’s abortive attempt to leave home, his mother’s obsessive watching out for his return, and the images of new life which accompany his ‘return’. 56 58 60

Eliot, Adam Bede, p. . Eliot, Adam Bede, p. . Eliot, Adam Bede, p. .

57 59

Eliot, Adam Bede, p. . Eliot, Adam Bede, p. .

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Adam’s ‘coming to himself ’, achieved by the opposite of youthful rebellion, enables him to create a new ‘home’ which integrates innovation and tradition, enables him to accept that which is beyond his control and to be deeply empathetic towards others, very much an Eliot ideal. However, it comes at the expense of the freedom of Dinah, who in becoming his wife is silenced and contained within that home. Whether this is defended or condemned by the author is difficult to establish. Josephine McDonagh has commented that for Eliot, [t]he ideal family, like the ideal society is constituted on the basis of bonds of mutual love, and, specifically not unquestioned, hereditary duty. An issue which becomes increasingly prominent in her work is how to balance a proper respect for hereditary or familial duty with the desire to be a free and self-determining individual. This fundamentally domestic formulation comes to be the form in which George Eliot articulates the dilemma explored in all her work: that is, how to reconcile tradition with innovation, stability with change?61

Intertextual echoes with the parable of the Prodigal Son have provided a connection between the familiar and the new in Eliot’s treatment of these themes in Adam Bede. However, the parable is certainly not used uncritically, and its message is not guaranteed either by a higher religious power or by an omniscient narrator. The question is left open: was Adam’s decision to stay rather than to leave the right one, for himself and for characters such as Dinah? The Prodigal Son in North and South One of the few explicit references to the parable of the Prodigal Son in North and South is made by the narrator in a description of Margaret. When her mother’s illness is revealed to be serious, Margaret demands to become her chief nurse in place of the faithful servant Dixon, thus ‘assuming her rightful position as daughter of the house in something of the spirit of the Elder Brother, which quelled the old servant’s officiousness very effectually.’62 The capitalized title makes the connection 61 Josephine McDonagh, ‘The Early Novels’, in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed. George Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. –, pp. –. 62 Gaskell, North and South, p. .

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obvious, although the comparison is not a favourable one. The elder brother in the parable complains somewhat peevishly that he had had no reward for staying at home, while his younger brother is treated to a party on his return from a profligate life. He refuses to join the celebrations, and his father is forced to come out both to reassure him of his rightful place (‘all that I have is thine’ (v. )), and to explain the lavish response to his brother’s return (‘thy brother was dead and is alive again’ (v. )). The allusion may function to remind Dixon she is not a member of the family (the older brother speaks first to a servant, to find out what is happening (vv. –)). It scarcely emphasizes Margaret’s longstanding presence with the family, as she had been sent to stay with her mother’s wealthy sister and her family for much of her childhood. As the scene goes on, however, the implicit anxieties in the parable are addressed, which the elder son’s presence emphasizes. When Margaret explains why she wants to nurse her mother, her earlier fears involved in her removal from home are revealed: ‘I used to fancy you would forget me while I was away at Aunt Shaw’s.’ Her mother replies, ‘And I used to think, how will Margaret bear our makeshift poverty after the thorough comfort and luxury in Harley Street.’63 Margaret moves from being assigned the role of elder brother to assuming the role of the exiled son, fearful that his position in the family has disappeared. Her mother’s fear, she reveals, was that she would not want to return, so attractive was the alternative. Finally, her mother describes herself in Prodigal Son terms when she bemoans the fact that she will never return to the place she calls home: ‘while I was there, I was for ever wanting to leave it. Every place seemed pleasanter. And now I shall die far away from it. I am rightly punished.’64 Margaret’s mother’s understanding of home has been changed by her experience of exile, just as her relationship with Margaret has been refined by the same experience. The parable’s echo, then, is fluid and changeable in this scene. It is open to reinterpretation, and adds poignancy to the parent–child relationships which form such an important part of the novel. A contrast might be made between this scene and a later one between John Thornton and his mother. Mrs Thornton waits for him to return 63 64

Gaskell, North and South, p. . Gaskell, North and South, p. .

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with news of his engagement to Margaret. However, Margaret has rejected his proposal. Mrs Thornton reflects that he is ‘her son, her pride, her property’, and on hearing that he is not engaged to Margaret as she had feared, replies, ‘Mother’s love is given by God, John. It holds fast for ever and ever. A girl’s love is like a puff of smoke—it changes with every wind.’65 Quickly following this declaration of parental love, she returns to her usual ‘frigid indifference of demeanour’.66 The rigid and unchanging nature of this relationship, to the exclusion of all others, is emphasized in a much later scene when Thornton explains to her that the business is in great peril, and under threat of collapse. He asks her to reassure him with ‘pious prayers’ but she is unable to do so. He admits, ‘I, too, have been rebellious, but I am striving to be so no longer. Help me, as you helped me when I was a child.’ For his mother, ‘all worldly mortification sank to nothing before the consciousness of the great blessing that he himself by his simple existence was to her. She thanked God for this, and this alone, with a fervour that swept away all rebellious feelings from her mind.’67 The central message of the parable of the Prodigal Son, the all-forgiving love of the father for his wayward and rebellious son, is twisted here into a parody which is somehow unnatural. After the first incident, Mrs Thornton is described as ‘set [ing] her teeth; she showed them like a dog for the whole length of her mouth’:68 regarding the second, her focus on her son (in contrast to her daughter, who is shown to be of little consequence to her) comes close to a religious conviction, his existence the one thing she is able to thank God for, and the force which expels all rebellious thoughts. The relationship between the two, from the perspective of the mother, is both animal-like in nature, and verging on the idolatrous. From the perspective of the son, more not less ‘rebellion’ is needed to free himself from the closed and damaging aspects of this relationship, which an openness to new possibilities, and the offer of a more equal relationship with Margaret, enables. The parable here is pushed to its literal conclusion in the character of Mrs Thornton, the parent who loves excessively, and the benefits of escape are positively promoted. 65 66 67 68

Gaskell, North and South, p. . Gaskell, North and South, p. . Gaskell, North and South, pp. –. Gaskell, North and South, p. .

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A final interaction between the parable and the novel is in the relationship between Margaret and her absent brother Frederick. Although he is the older brother to whom she is never able to compare favourably in the eyes of her mother and Dixon, he is the sibling who takes risks and is drawn to danger. Having been convicted of mutiny in his absence, due, according to his family, to his sense of justice and loyalty to the crew with whom he served, Frederick returns from selfimposed exile in Spain to see his dying mother. Although Frederick appears for only a short time in the novel, much is revealed about him from Margaret’s perspective. She notes his ‘latent passion’ and ‘the instantaneous ferocity of expression that comes over the countenances of all natives of wild or southern countries’, which might make her ‘fear the violence of the impulsive nature thus occasionally betrayed, but there was nothing in it to make her distrust, or recoil in the least from, the new-found brother’.69 The association of Frederick with faraway lands, and his designation as ‘new-found’, makes the identification of him with the Prodigal Son more secure. However, this is a short-lived return, what Margaret calls a ‘stolen visit . . . [with] all the charm which the Frenchwoman attributed to forbidden pleasures’. The ongoing link between Frederick and temptation to sin is made in Margaret’s earliest memory of him being in disgrace for stealing apples: ‘some one had told you that stolen fruit tasted sweetest, which you took au pied de la letter, and off you went a robbing.’70 Frederick represents the opposite of Margaret in terms of independence and freedom, and her attraction to his way of life is obvious, if suppressed in a positive way by duty and a commitment to reading beneath the surface of things for their deeper meaning: hers is a world of thought as well as action. Frederick and his exotic tastes cannot be contained within the world Margaret inhabits: there is no permanent return home for him. The Prodigal Son in Kirsteen Adam Bede had failed to leave home; John Thornton is presented as a son who must rebel against his loving mother in order to attain 69 70

Gaskell, North and South, p. . Gaskell, North and South, pp. –.

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independence; Frederick is the Prodigal who finds the far country amenable to his character rather than a place of alienation. Margaret plays different roles at different points in the narrative, but finally redefines the character of the elder brother by making a home for herself through being open to change and development, based on both experience and reflection. Although there is not space here to consider our third novel in detail, we will see that Kirsteen offers another perspective on the parable, by being actively sent from home by her father, and by creating a new home for other ‘prodigal sons’ which is welcoming and accepting. The exiled ‘son’ becomes the loving ‘father’ in a way which redefines family in terms of need and compassion. When Kirsteen realizes her father has arranged a match with the elderly Glendochart, she offers to speak to him to explain her situation. Her father responds: You’re not of the least importance . . . A creature of no account . . . . Say what ye like, or do what ye like, it will never alter a thing I’ve fixed upon . . . if you say a word to him . . . I’ll just kill you where you stand! I’ll drive you from my doors. Neither bite nor sup more shall ye have in this house. Ye may go and tramp from door to door, with a meal-pack on your shoulder.

Kirsteen replies: I would rather do that . . . far rather than make a false promise and deceive a good man. O father, I’ll do anything ye bid me. I’ll be your servant, I’ll ask for nothing; but dinna, dinna do this!71

The most obvious reference to the parable is in Kirsteen’s mention of placing herself in the role of a servant; otherwise, the connection is by contrast. This father is ready to send his child away, and to consider her as a person of no account. There is no suggestion of generosity, but rather of reducing her to begging. A further contrast is made in the next scene, when Douglas goes out to search for Glendochart, rather than to watch for Kirsteen, who has by now left the house and begun making her escape to London. She will only be welcomed back, many years later, to redeem the land which was once owned by her father’s family, and this encounter leads indirectly to her father’s death when he suffers some sort of stroke. Although the rest of her family scarcely 71

Oliphant, Kirsteen, pp. –.

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appreciate her role in the saving of their inheritance, deploring ‘the miserable way of life [she] had chosen, and that she had no man’,72 her fate is to become a society figure with a large house in Edinburgh, ‘well-known not only as the stand-by of her family, but as the friend of the poor and the struggling everywhere’.73 Her generosity, like that of the father in the parable, involves food and welcome: [She] gave dinners in which judges delighted and where the best talkers were glad to come. Her hospitality was almost boundless, her large house running over with hordes of nephews and nieces.74

In this novel, the father in the parable has been replaced by a childless woman, whose experience of exile has enabled her to transcend the bonds of family to offer welcome to all strata of society. The parable has been universalized and transformed, but its influence remains perceptible. Conclusion The three novels considered in this chapter, all by nineteenth-century female authors, demonstrate a range of sophisticated and perceptive engagements with the parable of the Prodigal Son. Family, independence, openness to change, and the meaning of home are all explored in the interaction between the narratives and the parable. The novels wrestle with questions which the parable leaves open: what causes the son to leave home; is his going positive rather than negative; what does his return home mean for those who have stayed; and in what ways has his leaving changed him and his father? The perspective of female characters in these novels, I have suggested, brings a new dimension to the reading of the parable, and enables an iconoclastic approach to the merits of homecoming that others have shied away from. The contrasting religious convictions of Eliot, Gaskell, and Oliphant add a further level of exegetical complexity to the significance of the Prodigal Son paradigm in each novel.

72 74

Oliphant, Kirsteen, p. . Oliphant, Kirsteen, p. .

73

Oliphant, Kirsteen, p. .

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5 The American Short Story and the Prodigal Son

While the role of the parable of the Prodigal Son in the nineteenthcentury novels considered in Chapter  is arguably oblique, it is well established that the parable is significant in much American literature from the same period and beyond. Manfred Siebald offers a comprehensive overview of instances of the parable which appear in the literature of the Puritan settlers, American children’s literature, folk art, religious, political, and psychological writing, and modern and postmodern literature, amongst others.1 Chapter  of this book introduced the work of Geoffrey Proehl and Leah Hadomi which focused on the Prodigal Son paradigm in American domestic dramas of the mid-twentieth century. For both, the parable represents a ‘comfortable myth [which] has become [an] alienating literary reality’ to varying degrees.2 Both suggested that the focus of these dramas lies on the family who wait for the Prodigal to return, rather than on the Prodigal himself. This chapter will argue that we find the literary roots of this alienation from the familiar myth in the earlier short stories from the American tradition, although the narrative focus in these stories is generally on the Prodigal rather than on the waiting family members. However, both traditions share a sense that ‘something is not quite

1 Manfred Siebald, Der verlorene Sohn in der amerikanischen Literatur (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, ). 2 Leah Hadomi, The Homecoming Theme in Modern Drama: The Return of the Prodigal (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellon Press, ), p. .

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working in the way it should: even though the prodigal son comes home, life in that household will never quite be the same’.3 The American short story tradition While the origins of the short story form may lie in fable and folktale from a multitude of different contexts and cultures, the short story itself, as a genre, is often assumed to have been invented in America in the s and s. Washington Irving’s Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent,4 published in –, included three contributions which would now be identified as short stories or tales, as they were more commonly known: ‘Rip Van Winkle’, ‘The Spectre Bridegroom’, and ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’. Although rooted in German folklore, these stories gained wide appeal through Irving’s work, and spoke to the foundational notion of modern American society. Out of this tradition, in which a fantasy or a semi-supernatural world is the setting for a moment of psychological or moral crisis, grew the short stories of the more famous Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Bret Harte, and Henry James. In this chapter we will see that in a surprising number of the short stories of these American writers, and others, from the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, the parable of the Prodigal Son proved to be an important and defining motif. In the publishing world of nineteenth-century America, it was hard for American writers to break through the barrier constructed by the cheap imports of British novels. Instead, short pieces for the growing and home-grown magazine culture were more likely to generate income and notice for struggling American authors. The fast-moving American culture with its varieties of backgrounds, the focus on the individual, and the impatience to succeed responded well to the flexibility of the short story form, with its responsiveness to change and its democratic offering of immediate individual experience to all. It was the short story, rather than the extended serialization of the

3 Geoffrey S. Proehl, Coming Home Again: American Drama and the Figure of the Prodigal (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, Inc., ), p. . 4 Washington Irving, The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., ed. and introd. Susan Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ).

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novel, which caught the mood of the time and the place, and took hold in the literary landscape of America. Many definitions of the genre of the short story exist, but most centre on the notion of a single guiding idea, rather than the multiple narrative strands which may make up a novel.5 The focused expression of an idea within the confines of a limited number of words lends itself to the employment of a shared biblical allusion, which gives breadth and depth to the story in an economical way. The prevalence of biblical knowledge in the America of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been well documented by Robert Alter in his Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible.6 In the work of early short story writers such as Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe, a sense of freedom regarding the everyday was allied with an appeal to the universal, which a liberal use of symbolism, allegory, and metaphorical meaning all promoted. The Bible offered a wealth of such shared symbols and metaphors, and the Prodigal Son was a particularly potent metaphor for the American context. As Susan Manning comments in her Introduction to The Sketch-Book: Having rejected the father—as America symbolically did in the colonies’ rebellion against King George III, and as Irving himself had in fleeing from a steady career in Law to the unsettled prospects of literature—the son yearns again and again to identify with an idealized father/fatherland, a ‘good past’, only to find himself held at arms’ length as often as he seeks the embrace. The parental image would always be a particularly ambivalent one for American literature, whether projected onto an individual, a nation, or a physical landscape.7

Filial rebellion and the ambivalent yet powerful pull of parental figures lie at the heart of the short stories I shall consider in this chapter. These form only a representative sample of the many which might have been chosen, with Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’ offering the opportunity for extended discussion about the particular importance of 5 See Martin Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), pp. – for a concise discussion of the issue of definition. 6 Robert Alter, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). 7 Susan Manning, Introduction to The Sketch-Book, p. viii.

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the parable in the American short story. We shall see that anxiety particularly about what might have been, had the moment of rebellion not taken place, will be a frequent theme in these texts, as will the presence of an older brother figure at home, often resentful and accusing. The notion of return home is not always, in these stories, a cause for redemptive and unalloyed rejoicing. We might note in passing that the parable and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe have been read together as important influences on the American literary consciousness of a slightly earlier period. Jay Fliegelman has argued that Robinson Crusoe (first published in London in ) was hugely popular in America, and its Puritan stress on the need to leave the family home behind for the state of one’s soul had far-reaching consequences: [it] clarifies the moral, political, and spiritual significance the drama of filial disobedience held for the American reader on the eve of the Revolution. Defoe’s novel offered nothing less than a theologically and hence politically acceptable model for precisely such disobedience.8

The novel resists a literal reading of the parable of the Prodigal Son which privileged a moral message about obedience to parents, promoting instead the spiritual truth of the parable, which demanded a return to the embrace of God. Crusoe justifies leaving home through his obedience to providence rather than the will of his father. The storm which begins the train of events which leads to him being shipwrecked on an apparently uninhabited island is viewed as the agent of the divine. He is not destroyed by his exile, as the Prodigal is, but gains new self-sufficiency in practical terms, through suffering, and a new understanding of God: this conversion is the return of the Prodigal, and releases him from the obligation to return to his parent. For Fliegelman, the original edition of Robinson Crusoe suggested to its American readers that the ‘guilt attendant on abandoning parents may be relieved by embracing a works-oriented capitalist Protestantism emphasising a self-sufficient and self-justifying individualism (under God), pitted eternally against the challenge of affliction’.9 In later, post-war 8 Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, – (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . 9 Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, p. .

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editions, the portrayal of parental control in the novel is less starkly negative, mirroring perhaps the ambivalence in political and psychological terms of the debate about mutual obligations between the old colonial power and the new entity of the American states. This same ambivalence, and doubts about ‘self-sufficient and self-justifying individualism’, are echoed in the short story tradition to which we now turn. The Prodigal Son in nineteenth-century short stories: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bret Harte We begin with a story from Washington Irving’s Sketch-Book, itself, on one level, the record of an American’s return ‘home’ to England, on a sort of pilgrimage journey around literary sites. The narrator is a rootless figure with no children or older relatives, hoping to identify with the literary figures he seeks out on his journey. His experience mirrors Irving’s own: in  Irving had left New York, where he had yet to establish himself (Manning calls him ‘something of a dilettante’10), to visit his brother Peter who had spearheaded the family importing business in Britain. The business promptly went bankrupt and he found himself in England with no means of support. Resisting the attempts of his family to find him new employment, Irving decided to tour the literary sites of Britain, writing up his experiences for publication in instalments in the USA. The result, the Sketch-Book, achieved great popularity in both the USA and Britain,11 at a time when American fiction was not held in high regard in the ‘home country’. Experimental in style, the Sketch-Book is a playful collection of stories and reports of the adventures of the vacillating character of Crayon as he encounters literary gossip, memories, and characters from the past. Significantly for our purposes, the Sketch-Book opens with a quotation from Lyly’s Euphues, an immensely influential Elizabethan Prodigal Son text we have already discussed:

10

Manning, Introduction to The Sketch-Book, p. ix. The book appears in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (), which is set in the late s/early s: Maggie looks to ‘this charming Geoffrey Crayon’ along with her mother’s custards to distract her from her feelings of discontent, although the book is left unread on her lap (p. ). 11

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I am of this mind with Homer, that as the snaile that crept out of her shel was turned eftsoons into a toad, and thereby was forced to make a stoole to sit on; so the traveller that stragleth from his owne country is in a short time transformed into so monstrous a shape, that he is faine to alter his mansion with his manners, and to live where he can, not where he would.12

This ambivalence about the effect of leaving home is echoed in Crayon’s explanation for his journey to Europe: ‘I will visit this land of wonders, thought I, and see the gigantic race from which I am degenerated.’13 Expectations are high, the effect of the original leaving is negative (‘degenerated’), but there is something ironic, even sinister, about the use of ‘gigantic’ to describe his forefathers which suggests that all is not going to be straightforward. In a reversal of the Euphues quotation, it is the forefathers left behind who are viewed as ‘monstrous’, rather than the one who has left. The perspective has shifted to that of the Prodigal Son and his understanding of the life left behind. The narrative focus will shift again in later American domestic dramas to the waiting family members, but here, and in many of the short stories we shall consider, it is the Prodigal Son himself and his changed, askance, reaction to ‘home’ which is significant. A tale which is told in ‘The Voyage’ section of the collection is particularly closely related to the parable of the Prodigal Son: ‘The Spectre Bridegroom: A Traveler’s Tale’. Set deep in Germany, in a world where the aristocracy presides over society in each local area, ancient feuds still affect relationships between ruling families, and the clear-cut characters of fairytale are established from the start. Baron Von Landshort is introduced as ‘the oracle of his table, the absolute monarch of his little territory, and happy, above all things, in the persuasion that he was the wisest man of the age’.14 His one child, a daughter, is a ‘prodigy, . . . a pattern of docility and correctness’ due to her careful upbringing.15 A match between the daughter and a neighbouring count has been arranged, and in preparation for the Count’s arrival to marry the daughter, ‘the fatted calf had been killed’16 and vast quantities of wine had been prepared. The precise relationship between these characters and the parable has not yet been firmly established, but 12 13 15

Washington Irving, The Sketch-Book, p. . 14 Irving, The Sketch-Book, p. . Irving, The Sketch-Book, p. . 16 Irving, The Sketch-Book, p. . Irving, The Sketch-Book, p. .

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the notion of redemptive welcome has been associated with the story through the clear allusions offered. As the guests await the delayed arrival of the Count, the scene shifts to a different part of the country, where the Count meets a longestablished friend, Herman Von Starkenfaust, whose family has been involved in a feud with the Baron which ‘rendered the families hostile, and strangers to each other’.17 The men are attacked by robbers and the Count is killed, but first he manages to beg his friend to go to the Baron to explain what has happened. Back at the wedding feast, the Baron has been watching anxiously from a tower for the arrival of his soon-to-be son-in-law, an echo of the father watching for his lost son. He hears someone approach with ‘an air of stately melancholy’, and before the man can speak he bombards him with the ‘courtesy and eloquence’ for which he prides himself, while the stranger ‘suffered it to flow on’.18 The festive dinner begins, the daughter is entranced by the stranger, who everyone assumes is the groom. The Baron tells the company the story of the goblin horseman who carried away the fair Leonora, after which the man, to everyone’s surprise, announces he must leave as he has an appointment in Wurtzburg with his grave, as he has been slain by robbers. However, this ‘spectre bridegroom’ continues to appear at night-time and the daughter eventually disappears, it is assumed carried away, like Leonora, by the goblin. Some time later both reappear, and explain what has happened: the hostility between the families meant they had to be covert, and they are now in fact married. The narrator comments that the Baron would have been inflexible, for he was tenacious of paternal authority . . . but he loved his daughter; he had lamented her as lost; he rejoiced to find her still alive; and though her husband was of a hostile house, yet thank Heaven, he was not a goblin.19

His friends persuade him that love excuses otherwise immoral behaviour, and ‘the baron pardoned the young couple on the spot. The revels at the castle were resumed.’20

17 19

Irving, The Sketch-Book, p. . Irving, The Sketch-Book, p. .

18 20

Irving, The Sketch-Book, p. . Irving, The Sketch-Book, p. .

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A reader alert to the wording of the parable of the Prodigal Son and its narrative patterns will find much that connects it with the story: love, lament, the oppositions of loss and finding, death and life, and the father’s expression of rejoicing in the generosity of a feast all feature here. The introduction of the story of Leonora and the goblin horseman, which inspires the actions of the ‘groom’, acts as a knowing intertextual teaser, reminding the reader of the fictionality of the story they are reading, and its slippery relationship with another, biblical, story they are guided to remember. This short story is typical of Washington’s playful reworking of folktale from the old country, taking nothing seriously. The Baron is a gullible, blustering fool; the daughter is a paragon of virtue who finds courage to break from her father’s control, although it takes the apparent intervention of the supernatural to enable her to do so. The groom is a trickster, taking advantage of circumstance but also making his own narrative luck. Society seems to resume normality along with the feast, but in fact much has changed, and the Baron’s power and reputation is diminished. There is reconciliation, but it comes at the expense of the father-figure, who has had to accept change rather than a continuation of his paternal control. That the parable of the Prodigal Son has been put to use in the cause of American independence is not hard to argue here. The focus has shifted from the compassionate acceptance of the benign father to the shrewd and active initiative of the ‘returning’ son(-in-law). The parable clings to the father, who is shown to invoke it and embody it, and offers him a way to accept the changes which occur around him. It is the groom who flits around the parable paradigm, happy to slot into it when it suits his purposes, but equally willing not to be defined by it, and to take inspiration from other stories too. The result is a new world order in which the way of the returning ‘son’ is in the ascendant, and his perspective on the world of the father is critical rather than repentant. Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Thou Art the Man’, from , offers a more oblique perspective on the trope of the Prodigal Son.21 The story is a

Edgar Allan Poe, ‘Thou Art the Man’, in Comedies and Satires, ed. and introd. David Galloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin, ), pp. –. 21

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parody of a detective story, in which a con man befriends his rich elderly neighbour, murders him, and attempts to implicate the man’s nephew in order to inherit his wealth. The nephew had been about to be disinherited, and is introduced as ‘a young man of very dissipated habits, and otherwise bad character’.22 The narrator sets up an elaborate scheme to catch out the murderous neighbour, as well as the reader, and on the successful conclusion of his detective endeavours comments, ‘I believe there is nothing more to be explained. Mr Pennifeather [the prodigal nephew] was released upon the spot, inherited the fortune of his uncle, profited by the lessons of experience, turned over a new leaf, and led happily ever afterwards a new life.’23 The rehabilitation of the Prodigal is thus viewed not from the perspective of the son or his father, but from the perspective and by the actions of an apparently detached narrator/observer/detective figure. The title of the story, from the parable told by the prophet Nathan to King David in  Samuel :, echoes the words that the corpse apparently addresses to the murderer in the story. It reflects one of the most effective uses of fiction in the Bible. Nathan draws his audience into a simple but affecting story about a poor man and his lamb, has David pronounce judgement on the rich man who takes the lamb from its rightful owner, then famously convicts David of the murder of Uriah, the husband of his lover Bathsheeba. The story has led David to accuse himself. In Poe’s short story, the narrator acts as prophet-detective and the murderer is caught out by the plot he constructs. The prodigal nephew is peripheral to this, but the reader is drawn to question the judgement he or she has made of his character, both before and after the murderer is revealed. In his pursuit of the control of the plot to its satisfying conclusion, the narrator offers a reading of the nephew which suits his ends: the Prodigal repents once justice is satisfied. Again, human compassion is absent from this allusion to the parable and the voice of the returning young man is not heard. The story sits lightly to the parable and the parallel use of the Old Testament story encourages the reader to be suspicious of the perspective offered. Once again, in this short story from deep within the American tradition, the parable is used in an indirect and thoughtprovoking way. Nostalgia for the parable’s apparent emphasis on the

22

Poe, ‘Thou Art the Man’, p. .

23

Poe, ‘Thou Art the Man’, p. .

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possibility of return to the father’s loving embrace following rebellion is not indulged. This indirectness and refusal to offer a fixed narrative position is reflected in a later American short story, despite its use of a direct reference to the parable in its title and throughout the text. Bret Harte’s ‘Mr Thompson’s Prodigal’ was published in , and its opening lines assert its relationship to the themes of the biblical text: We all knew that Mr Thompson was looking for his son, and a pretty bad one at that. That he was coming to California for this sole object was no secret to his fellow-passengers; and the physical peculiarities, as well as the moral weaknesses, of the missing prodigal were made equally plain to us through the frank volubility of the parent.24

The father is described in unflattering terms by the detached and ironic narrator, who speaks as the representative of those who encountered Mr Thompson as he embarked on his search for his son. The father is the subject of satire for the abrupt and imperious way he demands to know if any of the likely suspects he hears about might be his son. But he admits his own failings, the way he had driven his -year-old son to sea, and the abrupt way he had ‘experienced religion’. As a result of this, the reader is informed that despite the father’s lack of evidence and his ‘indifferent recollection of the boy of twelve, he now [set out and] expected to identify the man of twenty-five’.25 Mr Thompson is apparently successful in his search, and two stories are offered to explain the reunion. The first involves Mr Thompson, on a visit to a hospital, hearing his son sing a favourite childhood hymn: this version, ‘as told by the Rev. Mr. Gushington on his return from his Californian tour, never failed to satisfy an audience’. The narrator also offers the less simple version, as it ‘deserves more elaboration’.26 In this version, a ‘surly, youthful and savage’ young man attacks Mr Thompson; gives his name as ‘Thompson’ when asked, and the older man assumes he is his son, Charles. The narrator comments 24 Bret Harte, ‘Mr Thompson’s Prodigal’, in Stories and Poems by Bret Harte, ed. and introd. William Macdonald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), pp. –, p. . The story was later expanded into a play, ‘The Two Men of Sandy Bar’. 25 Harte, ‘Mr Thompson’s Prodigal’, p. . 26 Harte, ‘Mr Thompson’s Prodigal’, p. .

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that ‘there was nothing in the young man’s appearance or manners’ to justify this belief, but that the young man ‘assumed the emoluments and responsibilities of his new condition with a certain serious ease’.27 However, this new arrangement does not bring Mr Thompson the happiness he had hoped. He reflects that despite fulfilling his religious requirements, he has not gained the sanctification he had expected, and on rereading the parable, realizes he has not sealed the act of restitution with a feast, which the story apparently demands. Quoting the parable, although mixing the words of the elder son with those of the father, he tells Charles to ‘invite everybody . . . who knows that I brought you out of the wine-husks of iniquity and the company of harlots; and bid them eat, drink and be merry’.28 Meanwhile, a poignant note is struck by the comment that he hoped Charles would find a wife and have a son whom he could love: and a scene is offered in which he longs to take a visiting child in his arms, but the child flees from him. At the party in Charles’s honour, Mr Thompson tells the assembled guests that he could have waited for his son to come back to him, and ‘justified [him]self by the Book of books, but [he] sought him out among his husks’. Meanwhile, a stranger comes into the room, and ‘with a gleam of childlike recognition . . . darted forward and literally fell upon the prodigal’s breast’.29 ‘Charles’ admits that this is indeed Mr Thompson’s son, an old and dissolute acquaintance of his, and that he had taken the chance to find a home and a family by not contradicting Mr Thompson when he assumed he was his son. He goes on that he is now aware of how to make his living honestly, and he will leave. Mr Thompson will not take the impostor’s offered hand, but the impostor returns and kisses his ‘father’ twice on his head before leaving. Mr Thompson calls to him and follows him to the open door, but ‘there came to him the awakened tumult of a great city, in which the prodigal’s footsteps were lost forever’.30 In this short story, just about every aspect of the parable of the Prodigal Son is inverted. The father seeks out the son, out of religious duty rather than graceful compassion; the one who searches for a 27 28 29 30

Harte, ‘Mr Thompson’s Prodigal’, p. . Harte, ‘Mr Thompson’s Prodigal’, p. . Harte, ‘Mr Thompson’s Prodigal’, p. . Harte, ‘Mr Thompson’s Prodigal’, p. .

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father’s acceptance is not returning to his home after rebellion, but a figure damaged by the lack of any knowledge of familial love, and willing to accept humiliation rather than welcome in order to experience it at all. Instead of the joy of return there is profound sadness and regret, and the roles of the father and the son have been reversed: the impostor has taken on the role of the father, showing him the meaning of acceptance and forgiveness for the harsh and transactional way he has appropriated the parable. Significantly, the real Charles’s response to the impostor, falling on his breast like a child, also suggests that the stand-in was a father-figure to him. Also important is the role of the narrator here: detached and ironic at the start, but much more sympathetic by the end; attempting to satisfy the audience just as the Revd Mr Gushington is reviled for attempting to do, but ultimately showing the compassion towards Mr Thompson that had been denied him in the opening pages. In this story, the parable is abused and subverted by all of the characters, and the narrative voice, but by the end its understanding of redemptive love powerfully reasserts itself, and affects all of them. While there may be a satire on American business society at play here, and on organized religion which results in the sort of conversion Mr Thompson has undergone, the reader is left with a more positive sense that the usurper’s experience has changed him for the better, as has Mr Thompson’s. Certainties have been undermined, not least for the reader, and while the resulting mood is sombre, there is a hope that although homecoming may not be possible for all, the impulse towards it may be positive. In our survey of the influence of the parable of the Prodigal Son on American short stories, there has been a concentration on the scenes of leaving and return, but the final act of the parable is reflected in Hamlon Garland’s ‘Up the Coolly’, from . Several of the stories in the collection from which this short story comes, Main Travelled Roads,31 refer to personal impressions about leaving and returning to the harsh environment of the rural Midwest states of America, written in Garland’s distinctive and unsentimental style. In ‘Up the Coolly’, a successful actor and playwright, Howard, returns to the small town in Wisconsin where he grew up. His ailing mother and resentful brother Hamlin Garland, ‘Up the Coolly’, in Main Travelled Roads (New York: Harper & Row, ), pp. –. 31

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have sold the family house and moved to a smaller one, further up the valley. When Howard offers to buy back the house, sensing he has neglected his family, his brother refuses, sounding somewhat like the querulous elder brother from the parable of the Prodigal Son: I mean life ain’t worth very much to me. I’m too old to take a new start. I’m a dead failure. I’ve come to the conclusion that life’s a failure for ninety-nine per cent of us. You can’t help me now. It’s too late.32

In his reference to the  per cent who have failed in life there might be an echo of the parable of the lost sheep, which precedes the Prodigal Son in Luke . Howard has escaped but this has proved to be a positive opportunity rather than a disaster. The one left behind feels neglected and trapped, unwilling to accept help when it is offered. In their interaction we go beyond the parable, and are offered a moment of intimacy denied to the readers of the Luke chapter, in which the two brothers never interact. The closing response of Howard to his brother’s intransigence and closed sense of possibilities is tender rather than judgemental, seeing his brother as: tragic, sombre in his softened mood, his large, long, rugged Scotch face bronzed with sun and scarred with wrinkles that had histories, like sabre-cuts on a veteran, the record of his battles.33

The validity of the one who stays at home and struggles is affirmed here, rather than judged, as the older brother often is in the parable. The notion of home as a place of comfort and acceptance is also questioned, and the reality of the hardships of the agrarian life is given significance, all within the context of the American dream which has brought success to the one who ran away. Both experiences are given weight and worth here. The Prodigal Son in Henry James’s ‘ The Jolly Corner’ From the beginning of the next century, Henry James’s short story ‘The Jolly Corner’34 continues to focus on the contrast between the 33 Garland, ‘Up the Coolly’, p. . Garland, ‘Up the Coolly’, p. . Henry James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, in Complete Stories – (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, ), pp. –. This section of the 32 34

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fate of the one who leaves and what might have been had he stayed, and it will be considered in depth here as offering a very distinctive retelling of the parable. Although not as popular as The Turn of the Screw, ‘The Jolly Corner’ has been critically acclaimed as one of James’s finest ghost stories. Whether it is a ghost story or not is open to question, however, as the supernatural presence which haunts the story is more of a psychological possibility than an apparition of a soul from beyond the grave, although the setting and atmosphere are certainly filled with suspense and horror. Published first in December  in The English Review, it concerns the homecoming of Spencer Brydon from Europe to New York, to review the fate of the properties he has inherited. One is being redeveloped, but he has a great emotional attachment to the other, the house on the ‘jolly corner’ where he grew up. He is drawn there at night, haunted by the possibility of knowing who he might have been had he stayed in New York and gone into business rather than leaving at a young age for a less disciplined life in Europe. Eventually in a moment of deep distress and fear he encounters a presence in the house, which he takes to be the person he would have been, unrecognizable to him and with a grotesquely maimed hand. His friend Alice Staverton, who has waited patiently for him to return, discovers and rescues him. They share a moment of new understanding, including a kiss, which seems to augur a changed life for them both. The wealth of biblical images in ‘The Jolly Corner’ has often been noted: Jason Rosenblatt, for example, asserts that the text is ‘weighted with the purposefulness of scriptural implication’.35 The movement of the narrative from uncertainty and lack of fulfilment to resolution and redemption certainly has a strong biblical undertone. In more specific terms, various connections have been made to particular biblical texts and narrative. For Terry W. Thompson, for example, there are many ‘understated’ references to the Gospel Passion narratives in ‘The Jolly Corner’, the aim of which referencing is to ‘underscore the theme of chapter is adapted from my article ‘Henry James’s “ The Jolly Corner”: Revisiting the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke .–)’, Journal of the Bible and its Reception . (): pp. –, and is used with permission. 35 Jason P. Rosenblatt, ‘Bridegroom and Bride in “The Jolly Corner” ’, Studies in Short Fiction . (June ): pp. –, p. .

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self-knowledge gained through suffering, be it physical or spiritual’.36 In this reading, Brydon is a Christ-figure whose suffering leads to resurrection in terms of his revived self-awareness. For Rosenblatt, the parable of the wise and foolish virgins in Matthew  offers a way to read the story which finds spiritual realities behind the material qualities of the world and associates Alice as the wise virgin who is prepared for the return of the bridegroom.37 I suggest that while Alice may be identified with one of the wise virgins of Matthew  at the beginning of the story, by the end she has taken on a much more significant role. The parable of the Prodigal Son offers another way to read the short story which makes more sense of the shifting dynamics between each of its main characters. This is not to say that every aspect of the parable correlates with the ‘The Jolly Corner’, or that every detail of ‘The Jolly Corner’ may be mapped onto the parable. Rather that this parable is specifically highlighted in the narrative, and its powerful human message of rebellion, homecoming, and reaction is at the heart of the story; and that the story offers imaginative responses to questions left unanswered by the parable. These questions include: why did the younger brother leave the family home in the first place? What would have happened if he had stayed? And what might have happened after the abrupt ending of the parable as we have it? In ‘The Jolly Corner’ there are many verbal clues which lead the reader towards the parable of the Prodigal Son, in addition to the similarities on the level of metanarrative. Brydon muses that on his return from his long sojourn in Europe, made possible by the inheritance of property, he had expected change, but he realizes he had ‘allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he would never have imagined’.38 While in the parable we are not given access to the thoughts of the Prodigal Son on his return home, the parable has carefully set up his expectations. We see the Prodigal Son rehearsing what he is going to say to his father,

Terry W. Thompson, ‘ “A Knife in his Side”: Evoking the Passion in Henry James’s “The Jolly Corner” ’, South Caroline Review . (Spring ): pp. –, p. . 37 Rosenblatt, ‘Bridegroom and Bride’, pp. –. 38 James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . 36

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and it is stressed that he hopes only to be welcomed back as a hired servant, rather than as a son (Luke :–): in fact, he is not given time to recite his whole speech before his father is arranging a party to celebrate the return of his son. Both Brydon and the parable’s Prodigal Son have their expectations turned on their heads. Brydon’s experiences while in the ‘far country’ (Luke :) of Europe are in stark contrast to those of Alice, who has stayed in New York: Brydon’s life has been ‘overlaid . . . by the experience of a man and the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange and dim to her’.39 Later, he describes his experiences in a similar way to the description offered by the older son of his brother’s fall from grace. Brydon tells Alice: I’ve not been edifying—I believe I’m thought in a hundred quarters to have been barely decent. I’ve followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods. It must have come to you again and again—in fact you have admitted to me as much—that I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And you see what it has made of me.40

In the same way, the older brother castigates the Prodigal to his father as ‘this thy son . . . which hath devoured thy living with harlots’ (:): how he knows this is not explained in the parable, but in his short story James makes an explanation explicit. Later Brydon will speak of his ‘shame . . . the deep abjection’,41 and while the issue of the Prodigal Son’s repentance in the parable is a debated one, there is no doubt that he accepts that he has sinned against God and before his father (:). The scene of reconciliation with Alice after the terrifying confrontation with his alter ego has further powerful associations with aspects of the parable. Brydon’s ‘rich return’ leaves him ‘abysmally passive’,42 just as the Prodigal’s return is described from the perspective of the father, and he seems to have no role to play in the drama unfolding around him. Brydon has been on a ‘prodigious journey’ which had ‘brought him to knowledge’, just as the Prodigal Son had to ‘c[o]me to himself ’ (:) before he

39 40 41 42

James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. .

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could make the journey home. Alice, like the parable’s father (:), had ‘thought he was dead’;43 she kisses him44 and draws him to her ‘breast’,45 and Brydon asserts that in her presence ‘he was as much at peace as if he had had food and drink’:46 a clearer network of associations could scarcely be made with the father’s response in Luke :, , with the embrace, the kiss, and the call to prepare the fatted calf. Echoing the Prodigal, Alice explains to Brydon that he ‘came to [him] self ’; while to him her ‘clearness . . . was like the breath of infallibility’:47 she is touched with the association of the father in the parable with God himself. Equally significantly, she ‘accepts’ and ‘pities’ the figure Brydon has confronted in the house, just as she accepts him:48 the father in the parable shows concern for both brothers, the one who has gone and returned, and the one who has stayed. Alice’s steadfast love for both is one of the clearest indications that she, at least in the end, plays the role of the parent/God in the story, as she has patiently longed for Brydon’s return, and refuses to judge the image of what he would have been had he stayed. One of the puzzles of the parable is the impetus behind the younger son’s decision to leave, often described as a scandalous act. James offers a suggestion in his short story, although it is characteristically shrouded in ambiguity. As Brydon contemplates what he might have been like, had he stayed, he wonders: Not to have followed my perverse young course—and almost in the teeth of my father’s curse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so, ‘over there’, from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang . . . some variance from that, I say, must have produced some different effect for my life and for my ‘form’.49

The reflection suggests a falling out with his father as well as his own ‘perversity’ or inability to settle where he was expected; later he speaks of being too young to judge if it would have been possible for him to have stayed. But the role of his father and his curse, ‘almost in the 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. .

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teeth’ of which he left, is left very open. The comment ‘as I may say’ also throws the reader back upon Brydon’s uncertain perspective and recollection. ‘The Jolly Corner’ opens up the possibility of friction between the generations, and specifically between the father and the younger son, about which the parable is silent. That the story moves the identification of the patient watcher from the shadowy figure of the father to the more concrete figure of Alice suggests that the father’s role in the parable may also be split and a duality detected. The spirituality rather than physicality of the reunion, which Rosenblatt emphasized, may be a nod to the familial aspect of the echo of the parable, rather than a pointer to the metaphysical depths of the story. Furthermore, the parable does not address the question of what would have happened to the younger son had he stayed, except in its portrayal of the older son, but the story certainly offers an answer which horrifies Brydon, if not Alice. The image Brydon offers is of the ‘fullblown flower . . . in the small tight bud’ which he took to a climate that ‘blighted him [his alter ego] for once and for ever’.50 Alice’s response that such a flower would have been ‘splendid, huge, monstrous’51 suggests that the image is inadequate as it produces something incongruous and unnatural. The older brother in the parable is a much more real figure, with his simmering resentment, although his father’s words of approval (‘Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine’ (:)) suggest that he has lived the life expected of him in a way that the younger son has not. The character of the older son in the parable, as a representative of what staying rather than leaving might do to a person, problematizes Brydon’s obsessive searching for the person he might have been, and its result. In the story, the reader is offered a glimpse of a potential confrontation between the two brothers in the parable, which again the parable abruptly avoids, and an effect of reading the two texts together is to raise questions about the nature of the confrontation. When the figure apparently hunts Brydon down in the house at night, Brydon describes it as ‘the prodigy of a personal presence’:52 for a reader aware of the character of the older brother in the parable, the temptation is 50 51 52

James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. .

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strong to understand this presence as a projection of the younger brother’s anxieties, to which Brydon’s tormented wonderings may be aligned. And so, a reader aware of the connection between the parable and the story may justifiably retain some scepticism about the nature of the presence Brydon eventually ‘sees’. The confrontation certainly occurs on the boundary between reality and the supernatural, or perhaps between reality and the psychological. The figure is ‘rigid and conscious, spectral yet human’53 and Brydon greets it with ‘revulsion’ and a sense of deep disjunction: ‘such an identity fitted his at no point, made its alternative monstrous . . . the face was the face of a stranger’.54 Here the story shakes off the constraints of the parable and enters an alternative world of its own which is horrifying and mysterious. The two stumps of the missing fingers over the face of the brother/alter ego figure speak of something beyond conscious imagination, but not necessarily beyond the unconscious or psychologically explicable. For this the parable is no guide, and the story quickly retreats from the ‘darkness’ into which Brydon falls, back to the fragrant presence of Alice and her patient and accepting love, a resolution which the parable promotes, at least on its surface. The role of the parable of the Prodigal Son in ‘The Jolly Corner’, I have suggested, is a complicated one which both offers a metanarrative springboard for new ideas, and questions the experiences of the main character as they are described through his consciousness. The story also offers new ways to read the parable. The key figures in the parable find representations in the story, and their thoughts and fates are explored from angles which the parable does not attempt to cover. The reach of the parable does not extend into the supernatural, which the story certainly offers as one explanation of what ‘happens’, but the parable’s psychological realism questions the supernatural experiences which Brydon believes he has had. The relationship between the parable and faith, and its relationship to theological truth, is open to debate, and the easy identification of the fatherfigure with God is challenged by the shifting role of Alice Staverton as the one who waits and welcomes. Throughout the story, in parallel to this and in typical Jamesian style, James’s language resists clarity of 53 54

James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. . James, ‘The Jolly Corner’, p. .

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understanding, perhaps reflecting his well-established lack of certainty about matters of faith and belief. However, the connections between the parable of the Prodigal Son and this story speak positively of hope in human relationships and the power of graceful waiting for the return of those who run away. While some biblical echoes may offer gateways to deeper spiritual reflection, the parable of the Prodigal Son, which itself works beautifully as a story about the complexity and redemptive quality of family relationships and the power of home, offers a way to read ‘The Jolly Corner’ which resists the pull of the supernatural or, indeed, theological. Before we leave ‘The Jolly Corner’, we might note the repetition of the word ‘monstrous’ by both Alice and Brydon to describe what he, the Prodigal, would have become, had he stayed. This aligns the story with Irving’s description of home in his Sketchbook from the perspective of the Prodigal, shifting the focus of negative judgement found in Euphues from the one who leaves onto the one who stays. It is not possible to prove a direct dependence on this earlier short story tradition in ‘The Jolly Corner’, but a shared element in many American short stories from this broad period is an acceptance that the decision to leave is natural, even heroic, whether or not the return is successful.

The Prodigal Son in twentieth-century short stories: Willa Cather and Thomas Wolfe The parable of the Prodigal Son, as we have seen, features strongly in American short stories of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the notion of return in the parable complicated by doubts and fears, and often turning out to be a complicated experience for all concerned. Two further, and later, short stories will be discussed briefly, as they offer contrasting perspectives on the use of the parable in the short stories from this context. In Willa Cather’s early short story ‘Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament’,55 written in , the return home of the troubled teenager who steals money from his employer in order to live the high life in Willa Cather, ‘Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament’, in The Short Stories of Willa Cather, introd. Hermione Lee (London: Virago Press, ), pp. –. 55

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New York is prevented by his decision to commit suicide. His need to escape the constraints of his father’s middle-class existence is dealt with with some sympathy, but the inner confusions which lead him to take the step to leave, and then to end his life, are powerfully presented also. Following the example of Henry James, Cather sought to offer in her fiction not overwhelming realism but the ‘inexplicable presence of the thing not named’.56 This allusiveness extends to the story’s relationship with the parable of the Prodigal Son. The story refuses to offer the reader a clear perspective on whether or not Paul was justified in leaving his safe but dull existence—and ultimately whether or not Paul believed his actions were justified. The constant tension he carries with him is revealed in the descriptions of him by the teachers he apparently unwittingly aggravates: ‘I don’t really believe that smile of his comes altogether from insolence; there’s something sort of haunted about it,’ comments one.57 Apparently like the Prodigal Son, Paul has no mother to nurture or plead for him. Home for him invokes a ‘shuddering repulsion for the flavourless, colourless mass of everyday existence; a morbid desire for cool things and soft lights and fresh flowers’.58 The young man his father hopes he will emulate, an older brother figure, who had followed advice and married young, is presented as trapped by domesticity but with the potential to travel which Paul finds deeply appealing. But the existence he craves is offered by musical theatre, and it is to the local theatre he escapes at every opportunity, finding surrogate father-figures there who recognize in him ‘something akin to what churchmen term “vocation” ’.59 However, the possibility of experiencing this theatrical world in his home town is ended by his father, and Paul is forced to leave school and go to work in a stock company. His decision to steal money and leave for New York is not described until his lavish lifestyle there is established. Significantly, it is not the world of music which entrances him there but an enjoyment of the sensory pleasures which are available to him

56 Willa Cather, ‘The Novel Démeublé’ (), reprinted in Not Under Forty (New York: Knopf, ), pp. –, p. ; quoted in Lee’s Introduction to The Short Stories of Willa Cather, p. vii. 57 Cather, ‘Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament’, p. . 58 Cather, ‘Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament’, p. . 59 Cather, ‘Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament’, p. .

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while he has money to pay for them. When the money runs out and he hears that his theft has been discovered, his father has paid back the money, and is coming to New York to find him, he has a moment of ‘clear-headedness’: ‘He saw everything clearly now. He had a feeling that he had made the best of it, that he had lived the sort of life he was meant to live.’60 This certainty is undercut when he is in the very act of jumping in front of a train, and ‘the folly of his haste occurred to him with merciless clearness, the vastness of what he had left undone’,61 which includes the possibility of travel beyond America. The closing sentence perhaps suggests an overarching purpose in the world, but little of the welcoming compassion of the parable: ‘Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.’62 This short story has many elements of the parable present: a father who runs towards his wayward son, even before the son himself has made the decision to return (a much more compassionate figure than Harte’s Mr Thompson, and motivated by paternal concern rather than religious zeal); a son who leaves the security of his home with a fortune which he squanders; and an older brother figure who acts responsibly under the direction of his elders. The concepts of home and of the ‘far country’ are the aspects of the parable which are indirectly developed and changed. Home for Paul is offered as a place of constriction but also with its own elements of escape, and it is only when these are denied to him that it becomes unbearable. The ‘far country’ to which Paul escapes offers temporary delight, even temptations which divert him from his ‘calling’, but he realizes, too late, that he has not fulfilled his potential and life beyond the United States was still to be explored. If America is home, then life beyond it is presented, tantalizingly, as a place of freedom and attraction. The ‘immense design of things’ to which Paul returns is a poor, impersonal substitute for a notion of home in a religious sense, which readings of the parable have tended to promote. In this story, and in its connection with the parable of the Prodigal Son, an oblique commentary is offered on the shortsightedness of seeing America as the boundary for adventure, but there is also sensitivity towards the inner confusions of the young and 60 61 62

Cather, ‘Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament’, p. . Cather, ‘Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament’, p. . Cather, ‘Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament’, p. .

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perhaps a lament for the loss of hope in a narrative which privileges positive homecoming, particularly within a religious context. Finally in this chapter, and continuing the shifting perspectives on the parable which Cather’s ‘Paul’s Case’ introduced, we turn to a related duo of short stories by Thomas Wolfe, published under the title ‘The Return of the Prodigal’.63 In the first, ‘The Thing Imagined’, written in , writer Eugene Gant prepares to return to his home town. Having written about his boyhood experiences, he discovered the townspeople had risen up against him and he ‘became an exile and a wanderer’.64 Yet he thinks about home every night and wonders what reception he would receive, until ‘his feelings built up in his mind an image which seemed to him more true than anything that he had ever actually experienced.’65 There follows a description of ‘a man’s’ return at night to his hometown and the ‘dismal bleakness of the dark old street’ where he lived.66 He knocks on a door where a woman sits within, ‘remembering’, and when she answers he tells her he is ‘almost a stranger’.67 His voice is familiar to her, and by his gaze ‘she felt vaguely comforted’.68 The house is cold and uninviting, and the man shudders when he is shown into his old bedroom. He hears the footstep of his long-dead brother in the room above him, calling to him, and asks himself, ‘Is it the terror of cold silence that makes of my returning no return, and of an alien in this house, where my very mother has forgotten me?’ The reply comes from his brother: ‘What did you come home for? . . . You know now that you can’t go home again!’69 The second story, ‘The Real Thing’, was written slightly later, in , and offers a strong contrast with the purely imagined version. Gant’s determined debate with himself about his return is offered in very similar terms to the parable: ‘I will go home again. I shall lay bare my purposes about the book, say my piece, speak so that no man living in the world can doubt me. Oh, I shall tell them till the thing is crystal Thomas Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, in The Hills Beyond, ed. Edward C. Aswell (New York: Sundial Press, ), pp. –. 64 Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. . 65 Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. . 66 Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. . 67 Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. . 68 Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. . 69 Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. . 63

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The Prodigal Son

clear when I go home again.’70 In his musing ‘he heard his mother’s voice echo across the years: “Son! Son! . . . Where are you, boy?” ’71 All is not perfect, however, and as he makes his way home via the places of his childhood memories, as he also has a memory of his Uncle Bacchus in Zebulun, whose voice is ‘as hateful as the sound of good and unctuous voices that speak softly while men drown. It was the very death-watch of a voice, the voice of one who waits and watches, all triumphant, while others die.’72 And on the journey, as he passes through Zebulun, he witnesses a murder, and hears his mother’s voice regretting, ‘The wild life has all gone now.’73 Once he is home, he discovers that ‘nothing was the way he had imagined it. Indeed, there was very little that was even as he had remembered it.’74 Far from being upset about their portrayal in his book, the townspeople tell him that ‘The only ones who are mad today are those you left out! . . . We are all proud of you, son. We’re glad you came home. You’ve been away too long. Stay with us now.’75 Gant is a minor celebrity, and is inundated with requests for him to read the work of others, and speak at their various social events. The narrator comments: ‘The return of the prodigal, and the whole town broken into greetings, while the on-coming, neverceasing younger generation just gaped, curiously a-stare.’76 His mother closes the story with a long list of people who have phoned, wanting to speak to him, and her commentary on their motives. In many ways this second story is as disturbing as the first, and its overwhelming detail is perhaps one of the major contrasts with the parable. The suffocating relentlessness of the attention paid to Gant and the demands placed upon him here, in sharp distinction to the cold forgetful indifference of his imagined return, might be an echo of the father’s extravagant welcome in the parable, itself for some an ominous sign. In both stories, the return of the son who has escaped the confines of home is problematic from his perspective. In the 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. . Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. . Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. . Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. . Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. . Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. . Wolfe, ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, p. .

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parable, neither the change in the son caused by his experiences in the far country, nor any notion of change in the father, makes his return difficult: although the new situation brought about by the return is certainly problematic for the older brother. However, in Wolfe’s short story, as in all of the American short stories we have considered in this chapter, change is a key feature and homecoming, because of it, is fraught with turmoil, whether for the son or sometimes the fatherfigure. In some of the stories, as we have seen, there is a confrontation between the stay-at-home and the returning brother which dramatizes the profoundly destabilizing effect of these changes. In ‘The Thing Imagined’, the older brother even appears from beyond the grave to announce that meaningful return is impossible. However, in none of the stories considered is there a suggestion that the original urge to leave was misguided or unnatural. All of the characters are presented, however obliquely, as having understandable reasons for getting away from the pressures of home, often focused on the flawed character of the father-figure or on the desire to make something of themselves. As Susan Manning had commented, it is the return which is problematic: ‘the son yearns again and again to identify with an idealized father/ fatherland, a “good past”, only to find himself held at arms’ length as often as he seeks the embrace.’77 Conclusion Washington Irving had begun his Sketches with a quotation from Lyly’s Euphues, warning that leaving home brings unnatural change to the very being of the Prodigal which makes return impossible: he has become ‘monstrous’. In his commentary on this quotation, Irving had shifted the perspective of the quotation to that of the Prodigal and his changed perception of where he had come from. It was now ‘home’ which was gigantic, monstrous, unattainable. It may be tempting to see in the repetition of this motif in American short stories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries an echo of the American experience of revolution and independence. There might also be a link with a peculiarly American Protestant individualism in the focus of many of 77

Manning, Introduction to The Sketch-Book, p. viii.

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these stories on the search for personal redemption and individual happiness, demanding a breaking with the past. As Martin Scofield comments, with reference to John Updike but with wider applicability too, ‘the short story, with its roots in parable and exemplum, seems particularly suited to the examination of the tests and sustenances of faith’: we might add, on the individual.78 While the parable has not provoked particularly theological reflections in the short stories under discussion, it has raised questions about self-belief and changing perceptions of identity in the person of the Prodigal rather than, as in the later American dramas, the members of the family who watch and wait for his return. The Prodigals in these short stories have to leave home to experience everything they hope life has to offer but, once they are grown-up, home may never be the same again.

78

Martin Scofield, The Cambridge Introduction to the American Short Story (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. .

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6 Prodigal Ministers in Fiction

In Chapter , the presence of the parable of the Prodigal Son in the American short story tradition was affirmed as a key indicator of the notion of home as monstrous and unattainable. In these stories, the American experience of revolution, independence, self-belief, and the search for redemption is focused through the lens of the experience of the Prodigal Son in an economical yet significant way. In this chapter, the relationship between the parable and a twenty-first-century American novel is explored, in contrast with two novels from the Scottish literary tradition. Here the focus has shifted towards a theological understanding of homecoming in different contexts. In the American context at least, despair and lostness, as well as homecoming and foundness, are shown to be aspects of the religious experience even of those who do not leave home. What connects all of the novels considered in this chapter is the presence of an ordained minister as the lead character. Such ministers in fiction are an important sub-set of literary Prodigal Son types, although under-explored in comparison to the place of the parable in the American short story tradition. When these ordained characters take centre stage in a novel, they often take on the role of one of the characters in the parable: the welcoming father, the resentful older brother, or the Prodigal himself. The living up to—or not—of expectations in terms of staying at home and serving the ‘family’ is a recurring theme, and the parable is often explicitly referred to in this context. Sometimes a woman is involved when it is a prodigal minister who runs away from the parish or from the role he is expected to fulfil. The perspective offered may be internal or external, of an outsider looking in or of the struggling protagonist himself, or a combination of the two.

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I will argue that being lost and being found, being dead and being alive, are most often the verbal and conceptual bridges between these novels and the parable, and the ways in which the novelists understand these terms theologically may explain something of the variations in their significance in each text. That the key characters are ordained ministers focuses this theological freighting, and adds a public dimension to the working out of the parable’s dynamics. In this chapter the three novels which, it is argued, integrate Prodigal Son themes with the portrayal of a minister as the lead character are, from the American tradition, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (),1 and, from the Scottish tradition, James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack ()2 and J. G. Lockhart’s Adam Blair ().3 I will also include reflections on James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (),4 but as I have written about this novel extensively elsewhere, it will not form the basis of the discussion here. The protagonist of that novel is not an ordained minister in the traditional sense of the others, although he does believe he has a calling to a ministry of sorts.5 As these novels may not be familiar to all readers, a brief summary of their context and plot will be offered before their interaction with the parable is considered. J. G. Lockhart’s Adam Blair Adam Blair was written and published in  by a thoroughly respectable figure in the literary world of Edinburgh and beyond, J. G. Lockhart, who would go on to become editor of The Quarterly Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (London: Virago, ). James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack (London: Penguin, ). 3 J. G. Lockhart, Adam Blair, introd. Ian Campbell (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, ). 4 James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. and introd. Peter Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ). 5 After his election is deemed assured by the Rev. Mr. Wringhim, Robert undergoes a mock ordination, which involves his ‘reverend father laying his hands upon [his] head and blessing [him], and then dedicating [him] to the Lord in the most awful and impressive manner’. Robert comments, ‘From that moment, I conceived it decreed, not that I should be a minister of the gospel, but a champion of it, to cut off the enemies of the Lord from the face of the earth’ ( James Hogg, Confessions of a Justified Sinner, p. ). 1 2

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Review. He had already established himself as a journalist of renown in Blackwood’s Magazine by the time the novel was published. In The Annals of the Parish (),6 John Galt had offered the internal view of a Church of Scotland minister, but so imbued with comedy and irony that much remained obscure about Balwhidder the minister’s inner life. This is particularly the case in terms of his relationships with his successive wives, and where his needs around intimacy and self-worth were met. In Adam Blair, these relationships and needs are explored in depth. The movement of the novel in its opening pages is from edenic bliss in the relationship between Adam and his young wife, to affliction: three of their children have died, leaving one young daughter only, and swiftly Adam’s wife also passes away. He devotes himself to the education of his daughter and to the needs of his parish, where his father before him had been the minister. But his life of duty is interrupted by the arrival of a friend of his wife from her younger days, Mrs Charlotte Campbell. In contrast to his wife, Charlotte has made poor choices in her relationships and has returned to Scotland in somewhat mysterious circumstances, but clearly scarred by her experiences. Adam attempts to bring her back to faith and seems innocent to the potentially compromised situation she has placed him in. When she is forced to return to her marital home, Adam fears she is in danger and seeks to explain her innocence by going to find her. On his arrival, Charlotte plies him with alcohol and, out of pity and loneliness, he ends up in bed with her, woken in the morning by the servant who stumbles across them. Adam flees in horror at what he has done and is saved from an attempt at suicide by Charlotte, who nurses him back to health from the sickness he succumbs to. However, she dies and her husband, remorseful now for the way he had treated her, tells Adam he forgives him. Adam is unable to forgive himself, however, and announces his sin to the Presbytery before taking his daughter to a cottage in his former parish, where they live the secluded life of peasants. His congregation long for him to return as their minister, and eventually he is persuaded to come back to his ‘father’s place’.7 6 John Galt, The Annals of the Parish, introd. Ian Campbell (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, ). 7 Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. .

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The Prodigal Son

Leaving and returning home after a fall from grace, repentance, and a seeking of forgiveness form the narrative structure of the novel, and make the connection with the parable of the Prodigal Son. What is significant here is that it is the minister who is the Prodigal, his rebellion or fall from grace is described with sympathy and discretion (any description of the sexual act is subsumed under a line of asterisks in the novel) and it is his congregation who take the role of the father, seeking him out to welcome him ‘home’. This is a far cry from the response which might have been expected in the Calvinist Scotland of the novel’s setting. However, on closer inspection it takes seriously and sensitively Calvin’s understanding that ‘the recognition of the divine mercy must be the beginning of our repentance and stir us up to a good hope’ in his commentary on v.  of the parable.8 When the elderly and paternal minister who had taken care of Adam’s parish dies, the kirk session, with the saintly John Maxwell as their spokesman, attempt to give Adam what Calvin describes as ‘trust in his father’s pity to seek a reconciliation’.9 This, for Calvin, is what the Prodigal Son came to believe in the depths of his despair as part of his ‘coming to himself ’. The members of the kirk session take on the earthly father’s role in the parable, in their willingness to welcome Adam back, and are conduits of the graceful action of the heavenly father in prompting and enabling the return. James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack sits squarely in the tradition of Lockhart and James Hogg, interacting with the religious soul of Scotland through the persona of a man who takes on the role of an ordained minister. The novel self-consciously mirrors Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner in its nested structure, introducing and concluding the first person narrative of Gideon’s self-justifying ‘Testament’ with the voice of several third person editors and eyewitnesses. Questions of belief and unbelief, appearance and reality 8 John Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke, trans. A. W. Morrison and T. H. L. Parker, vol. : Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: A New Translation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, ), p. . 9 Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels Matthew, Mark and Luke, p. .

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are at the heart of both novels, with the peculiarly Scottish appearance of a mysterious devil-like figure driving the narrative forward. Gideon describes his childhood in a manse, his experiences at school and university, and his loss of faith. He reflects on his relationship with the woman who will become his wife, and her death, and the woman who will become his lover. He traces the process whereby he decides to train for the ministry, like his father, and his first parish and all that is involved in maintaining the fiction of faith while leading the church. The turning point in the book is an accident in which he falls down a gorge, the Black Jaws, into the river below and is given up for dead. However, he describes an experience of being rescued by a man who appears to live within the gorge, who has miraculous powers of healing, and who talks to him about God, faith, and the futility of life. After three days, Gideon is pulled from the water and returns to his parish, although physically and spiritually changed, convinced he has seen the devil. Despite the advice of fellow ministers and friends, he reveals what he believes to his congregation, gathered for the secular funeral of an elderly woman in the community. He then leaves the parish and writes his testimony to explain his experience, before disappearing, ostensibly to meet up with the devil figure on Ben Alder. A literary editor is given a copy of the Testimony by a journalist, who carries out further investigations in the town, which cast doubt on some of the details from Gideon’s perspective. The reader, like the journalist in the end, is left to wonder what actually ‘happened’, or if it is possible ever to know the truth, spiritual or temporal. The novel invites comparison with the parable of the Prodigal Son in its exploration of what ‘home’ means, its insistence on the importance of the figure of the father, and the running motifs of lostness and foundness/life and death. There is perhaps less explicit appeal to any specific theological position in this novel than in Adam Blair or Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, but the search for a place to be valued and loved, as a person with emotional as well as physical needs, connects with a timeless aspect of the parable. Leaving home and returning home after significant and lifechanging experiences is a key structural device in the novel, expressed in terms reminiscent of the parable. After his father’s stroke, while Gideon is still at school, he describes his ‘present’ as ‘a mere waiting

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The Prodigal Son

room for the future; that was where I would really begin to live’.10 His childhood is something he longs to escape from. As an adult, Gideon’s descent into the gorge, although not by his own volition, is a movement into a ‘far country’ indeed, deeply alien and yet to him it seemed ‘both a refuge and a prison’ from which he needs to ‘come to himself ’ in order to escape and return to his familiar world.11 To persuade him to return home, the devil figure raises the possibility of his connecting with his mother, who is in a residential home for the elderly, and his need to address ‘all the lies and denials in [his] life’.12 At the end of the novel, the devil figure’s alternative to the home Gideon longs for appears to be a parody of the homecoming demonstrated by the parable, as it is transitory, elusive, and involves disappearing on a hillside rather than presence among the community. ‘I feel as though I am standing on the edge of eternity’13 are the words with which Gideon closes his Testimony but the perspectives offered by those who have apparently ‘seen’ him after this, on Ben Alder, are conflicting and mysterious. The ‘edge of eternity’, and eternity itself, are not revealed to be consonant with the homecoming of the Prodigal Son, to which the novel has earlier established a connection through the repetition of the ‘lost’ and ‘found’, ‘life’ and ‘death’ references which will be considered further below. The contrast is a troubling one and aligns more closely to postmodern secular rather than religious concerns. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, in comparison, is more theologically aware and concerned, and more confident in its offer of hope in religious ideas and beliefs. Its connection with the parable is more explicit than it is in Gideon Mack, with several references made to the Prodigal Son in the text. In this it aligns itself with the American short story tradition and its frequent references to the Prodigal Son. Significantly, while both Adam Blair and Gideon Mack are easily identified with the figure of the Prodigal Son himself, John Ames 10 11 12 13

Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. .

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identifies himself explicitly with the older brother, the one who stays at home. It is his father who follows his apparently prodigal brother and leaves the safety of the place and the faith they have called home.14 The novel itself is in the form of a letter written by John Ames, an elderly minister, to his son, who has been born to him late in life. Ames reflects on his own childhood and family history, stretching back in ministry to his father and grandfather, and on current episodes, including, especially, his reaction to the return of his friend Robert Boughton’s son. This son, Jack, is his godson, given to him to baptize after the death of his own wife and child many years before. Jack had rebelled against life in Gilead, and had left in some disgrace. His return, and his attempts to reconnect with Ames and his new family, cause Ames some anxiety and a struggle, which he documents in terms of his beliefs and his feelings, not least about the acceptance of those who have strayed. The novel concludes with a reconciliation of sorts, in which Ames, having understood better what Jack’s circumstances are, is able to see the grace of God within him, echoing the Calvinist theology by which he has sought to live his life. As he comments, referring to Calvin’s Institutes, ‘the image of the Lord in anyone is much more than reason enough to love him, and that the Lord stands waiting to take our enemy’s sins upon Himself ’.15 At the end, he describes a moment of revelation, or transfiguration, in which he understands his love for Jack as the ‘eternal breaking in on the temporal’.16 The perspective offered here is more theologically complex than in Adam Blair or Gideon Mack, and the relationship between the protagonist and the parable of the Prodigal Son shifts and develops, as Ames’s self-understanding changes. This development in selfunderstanding is noted by Rebecca F. Painter in her article on the relationship between the parable and both Gilead and Robinson’s next novel, Home. For Painter, Robinson’s novels ‘offer . . . seasoned contemporary explorations of the mysteries of scripture, by means of

14 As Ames asserts, ‘I was the good son, so to speak, the one who never left his father’s house—even when his father did, a fact which surely puts my credentials beyond all challenge.’ Robinson, Gilead, p. . 15 16 Robinson, Gilead, p. . Robinson, Gilead, p. .

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characters who embody nuanced variations on biblical roles’.17 In particular, Painter argues that Ames’s embodiment of the role of the parable’s father in the novel shifts. In Ames and Boughton Senior, Painter suggests, Robinson demonstrates one of her ‘compelling variations on the Prodigal Son parable: instead of God as the symbolic father who receives his wayward son, she presents two earthly fathers devoted to serving God but failing to show mercy when it is due’.18 Initially, Ames cannot accept the sincerity of Jack’s return: his theology of forgiveness is tested beyond its limit. However, as Painter argues, Ames’s memory of his own, unexpected passion for his wife, and his new understanding of Jack’s story of prodigal passion and loyalty towards his wife Della, leads to a new openness to mercy towards Jack. He is moved even to offer him, if he could, his own wife and child, an act of selfless generosity. For Painter, Ames’s developing embodiment of a parable character is firmly rooted in the figure of the father, and the reading of the novel she offers is a powerful one. However, I will argue that Ames embodies multiple characters in the parable and that his understanding of all of these roles changes and develops. He explicitly self-identifies with the older brother, and he invites comparisons at various stages with the father, in his final welcome of Jack (and, indeed, his relationship with his own father, which has its own complexities). But he also, finally, embodies the Prodigal Son, as he ‘comes to himself ’ through agents of grace such as his wife and his son. What unites these various embodiments is the theme of ‘home’ and what it means to leave and return. Home in Gideon Mack and Gilead Home is a significant concept in both Gideon Mack and Gilead, both as a place to want to stay or to be keen to leave: the same dichotomy as is expressed in the characters of the older and younger sons in the parable. For Gideon, his childhood home is dominated by his father, whose demeanour makes it an uncomfortable, threatening place. 17 Rebecca F. Painter, ‘Loyalty Meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction’, Christianity and Literature . (Winter ): pp. –, p. . 18 Painter, ‘Loyalty Meets Prodigality’, p. .

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He describes his father as ‘the minister’, ‘grave, forbidding, slow to anger but fearsome when roused . . . a man, to my childish eyes, so fashioned in what I presumed was the image of God that God, looking at him, might have momentarily thought himself in front of a mirror’.19 It is a commonplace to identify the father-figure in the parable of the Prodigal Son with God, but here the dangers of such an association are made clear. The self-reflecting nature of the fatherhood of God when refracted through the childhood experience of a fearsome father is both terrifying and full of repercussions for the meaning of home. In this environment, Gideon has nowhere else to turn to find a different perspective. When he relates a memory of his mother reading to him, he talks about ‘one of the few children’s books my parents had had in their house—our house’,20 the need for the correction making a telling point about the extent he felt at home there. Gideon focuses on writing his Testimony in his own manse home, after he has returned from his experience in the Black Jaws. As he remembers his childhood, he freely associates around the biblical phrase ‘foxes and birds have homes’ (Matthew :), adding, ‘but the son of the manse hath nowhere to lay his head. A joke. Of course I do . . . settled and cosy. But I am restless. There is someone out there with the foxes and birds, and I am waiting for him . . . he will not come till I have finished writing this. And so I write.’21 It is significant that the devil figure is being associated with Jesus here, who is the one, as the Son of Man, who has nowhere to lay his head and who compares himself to the foxes and birds. Little wonder that an alternative to God and his father, in the figure of the devil as an intermediary, with echoes of Christ, offers strong appeal to Gideon. Gideon goes on that he must remember back to his childhood, ‘back to that other manse at Ochtermill, where I first became conscious of the world, and of that empty vessel in which my spirit, like the genie in the lamp, was condemned to dwell, and which went by the name of Gideon Mack’.22 Here the two manses are associated with the ‘empty vessel’ which Gideon identifies as his body: the manses and his body are dead shells compared 19 20 21 22

Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, pp. –. Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, pp. –. Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. .

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with the living, animating force which is his ‘spirit’. Both will have to be abandoned in order to follow the devil figure, just as Jesus commanded that his followers leave everything to follow him, the one without a home. This is the adult Gideon speaking, however. He remembers himself, in his childhood home environment, as a ‘lonely boy politely storing up rebellion until it would least inconvenience his parents, probably after they were dead’.23 An image of Gideon as a boy is being built up which clearly alludes to the parable of the Prodigal Son, but he is a figure cowed by the threatening force of his father. His act of rebellion ends up being to choose the way of life his father had followed, although he does so in the defiant knowledge that he does not believe in God. His experience in the far country of the depths of the Black Jaws forces him to reconsider his role in the drama, so that out of his lostness comes, from his perspective, a foundness by a new figure who offers him an alternative home for his restless spirit, in a belief system he had previously dismissed. Home for John Ames in Gilead is a similarly shifting concept, which contributes to an understanding of the parable of the Prodigal Son as a guiding narrative in the novel. From the opening pages, home is a key idea, almost haunting Ames’s thoughts. He describes telling people in the past who asked him what death is like: ‘I used to say it is like going home. We have no home in this world.’ The understanding, he implies, came from his experience of being alone in his own house: ‘I didn’t feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact.’24 But, he goes on, ‘Now I do,’ the change having been brought about by the presence of his son and wife. The shift in perspective is indicated by his description of his imagining he is speaking after his death, praying for his son as he did in life, and the comment, ‘if that is how things are in the next life’.25 Now that he knows what home means in this life, Ames is less certain about the lack which his heavenly home will fulfil. It is only at the end of the novel that the extent of this change is clarified, and its connection to the narrative of the parable is highlighted. When Jack tries to identify with Ames by commenting, ‘It is an enviable thing, to be able to receive your identity from your father,’26 23 24 26

Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . 25 Robinson, Gilead, p. . Robinson, Gilead, p. . Robinson, Gilead, p. .

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Ames admits to himself and his reader that he is a ‘little touchy on that point’, claiming God would have given him the same vocation whatever his father had done. Only later is the reader given a fuller explanation for this touchiness. It lies not in the difficult relationship between his father and his father’s father during his childhood: Ames witnessed his father rebelling against his grandfather’s use of violent means to further abolitionism by embracing pacifism. Rather, it lies in the fractured relationship between Ames and his father caused by his father leaving Gilead to live with Edward, the older son who had gone to Germany to study and returned an atheist. The church in Gilead falls to John, but his father returns to try to persuade him to leave and seek out a ‘larger life’. Gilead, from the perspective of his father in the far country, seems ‘a relic, an archaism’.27 Ames reacts by asserting his intellectual independence and scope, but finds himself made ‘homesick for a place [he] never left’.28 A later letter from his father brings even greater ‘loneliness . . . and darkness’, and he comments that ‘my father threw me back on myself, and on the Lord’.29 On one level, Ames has experienced the despair of the Prodigal Son, without ever leaving home. His father’s attitude towards him, and towards the place they have both called home, has alienated him rather than brought him back to his earthly father, although it has elevated his relationship with his heavenly father. While those around him have played the part of the Prodigal Son, but not come home, Ames has stayed, suspecting he ‘never left because [he] was afraid [he] would not come back’.30 He self-identifies with the role of the ‘good’ son (rather than the ‘elder’ son, from the text of the parable itself ), and as ‘one of the righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained. And that’s all right.’ But he goes on that ‘[t]here is no justice in love, no proportion in it . . . it is only a . . . parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality’:31 he has now experienced this love in the same way as the Prodigal Son does, as an ‘embrace’. He has come to know the embracing love of God, identified with the father of the parable of the Prodigal Son, through his experience of being a father to his young son, as well as, as Painter 27 29 31

Robinson, Gilead, p. . Robinson, Gilead, p. . Robinson, Gilead, p. .

28 30

Robinson, Gilead, p. . Robinson, Gilead, p. .

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argued, his love for his wife. This new experience of the nature of incandescent divine love has enabled him to be a welcoming and forgiving father-figure to Jack, demonstrated in the moment of blessing which redeems his troubled baptism. It is this actual and figurative fatherhood which has brought him a new understanding of what being at home means in spiritual terms. He has identified with the older brother, but through the motif of home, the reader is also drawn to identify him with the younger brother, whose experience of distance from home makes the return, the ‘embrace’, all the more significant and life-giving. Ames has learned how to love through his wife and child; he has also learned how to be loved. And it has brought him peace for the journey to his heavenly home, with the new conviction (it has ‘got to be true’) that ‘the Lord loves each of us as an only child’.32 The parable, ultimately, is only one way to imagine the relationship between God and his children, but by the end of the novel Ames’s perspective has gained a new focus as he faces an eternal homecoming. This particularly positive use of the parable in Robinson’s novel, it may be argued, reflects her commitment to a liberal yet Calvinist faith position, in opposition to the more strident voices of American Evangelicalism. Home is both something to be yearned for, and a place to which return is possible: the experience of the Prodigal Son, the novel may be read as suggesting, is open to all who read with understanding. Personal and sustained reflection on the biblical text, with the possibility of space for debate and discussion from a committed perspective, leads to new insights.33 The association between home and the figure of the father in both novels is clearly established and, in both, each minister comes to a new understanding of the sort of home to which they seek to return. This is based on a new appreciation of fatherhood and its meaning and implications for them as a son. For them to reach this point has involved a process of being lost and found: in Gideon’s case, being presumed dead Robinson, Gilead, p. . A helpfully clear expression of Robinson’s theological perspective is to be found in her article ‘Onward, Christian Liberals’ in American Scholar . (Spring ): pp. –. I have explored this area in more depth in ‘Barth’s Reading of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead: Exploring Christlikeness and Homecoming in the Novel’, Literature and Theology . (March ): pp. –. 32 33

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and then being discovered alive; for John Ames, a more spiritual process of being homeless and then at home in Gilead. This dichotomy is also found in Adam Blair, both literally and as a metaphor for the process of repentance Adam undergoes. We now turn to explore the contrast between being lost and being found in Adam Blair and Gideon Mack. Being lost and found in Adam Blair and Gideon Mack In Gideon Mack the concept of lostness is introduced at the point when Gideon reflects on the moment his father suggests he might think about the ministry as a career: ‘Do you never think of following in your father’s footsteps?’ It sounded almost as if he were speaking of someone else, not himself, . . . my real father having gone off on an expedition and got lost—telling me it was my duty to go and find him.34

The double is a familiar theme in Scottish literature, along with the split personality of characters such as Jekyll and Hyde, and Robert Wringhim and Gil-Martin. When Gideon, a few paragraphs later, comments that thirty years on from that discussion, he has ‘become’ his father,35 he is accepting he has shared his father’s mental struggle to contain his unbelief while acting as a figurehead for religious belief in his community. This split or double aspect of his father’s life Gideon has only come to understand through the revelation offered by the devil figure, who asserts to him that his father had lost his faith in the horrors of warfare. In other words, Gideon finds his ‘real’ father by undergoing a similar journey, an experience of lostness which leads to his being ‘found’ by the devil figure. The reaction of others to this experience of being lost and found continues to echo with the vocabulary and imagery of the parable’s closing words, which themselves are repeated from the middle of the parable narrative. Elsie explains to the rescued Gideon that ‘the next day’s papers carried the news of the lost minister, who had died rescuing a fellow minister’s pet dog’.36 Lorna, the minister whose 34 35 36

Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. .

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dog he had attempted to rescue, tells him, ‘And then on Tuesday, when they said you’d been found! I mean, the joy of it! The sheer joy of it, Gideon!’37 One way to understand his return from lostness is presented by Lorna’s straightforward delight, echoing the response of the parable’s father-figure. An alternative is prompted by the devil figure in his suggestion that Gideon returns to his mother in the residential home to find the answers he is seeking. Gideon couches this in reversed Prodigal Son terms: as he contemplates visiting his mother, he notes that she is ‘presumably blissfully unaware that her only son had died and come back to life in the space of a week’.38 When he does visit her, he finds there is ‘absolutely nothing there’, and she is mentally ‘wandering empty rooms in bewilderment’.39 Instead of human welcome representing divine acceptance, Gideon returns to what he perceives as the ‘hell’ of his mother’s existence. This is the perspective on the significance of his return which he chooses to accept, rather than that of Lorna, and which draws him towards reading the devil figure’s promise of companionship as the one to which he must return. Lorna, when questioned by the journalist who is investigating Gideon’s disappearance in order to verify the Testament, comments that ‘I like to think he lost his way rather than his faith’, and asserts he had gone into the hills at the end ‘to find it’.40 She may be presented as slightly delusional, but her relentless optimism is a rare beacon of positive energy in the novel. Her advice to Gideon not to speak publicly about what he believes happened to him in the gorge on the grounds that ‘It’s . . . deluded, foolish, unpleasant and blasphemous. You are clearly not well at all’41 has a ring of sense to it.42 However, the devil figure’s biblical promise to Gideon that he will ‘always be with [him]’43 Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . 39 Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . 40 Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . 41 Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . 42 Her role may be compared to that of Robert Wringhim’s mother, who is the only one to express concerns about Gil-Martin, but is silenced by the Rev. Mr. Wringhim’s implacable commitment to a single doctrine. See Hogg’s Confessions, pp. –. 43 Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . 37 38

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exerts a stronger pull on him, and it is to this apparently accepting presence that he chooses to return, with consequences which are left open rather than fully spelled out. The experience of the journalist, Harry Caithness, which closes the novel, accentuates the underlying loss of belief in the possibility of a positive redemption narrative in the novel. As he stands at the spot where Gideon fell into the Black Jaws, he describes seeing an image of a falling man, and that ‘it was as if I’d fallen, I felt like I’d lost part of myself ’ and he was watching himself ‘go to his own death’.44 Lostness and death are contagious themes in the setting of the novel, with little evidence of the balancing qualities of foundness and life which the parable celebrates. Rather, the theme of being lost is a developing thread which has been taken from another influential metanarrative on Gideon Mack, Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. There, Robert Wringhim is first described as lost by the Editor, who reports a search party going to his home to find him, but despite a thorough and violent search, ‘Robert Wringhim Colwan was lost once and for all. His mother was also lost.’45 As described in Robert’s Confession, Gil-Martin warns him that if he falls into the hands of the officials who are seeking him, ‘you are inevitably lost’.46 During his desperate flight, when he takes shelter in the house of a weaver, but finds his clothes taken and a dagger appear among his things, he gives himself up ‘for lost’.47 From the moment Robert is persuaded to utter the ‘tremendous prayer’, as he says himself, ‘What I now am, the Almighty knows’:48 but he is effectively ‘lost’ both spiritually and in terms of the narrative. Like Gideon, his rare appearances from this point are shifting, elusive, and open to different interpretations. His ultimate fate is a subject of debate and puzzlement to others, and to the reader. In the Confessions, the Almighty may indeed know what Robert has become; in Gideon Mack, even this omniscient presence is silenced, whether for good or ill. The contrast could not be starker with Lockhart’s Adam Blair, in which resistance to being found and welcomed home is shown to be futile, although the process may not be immediate. At first the novel seems to be suggesting that Charlotte Campbell is the focus of a 44 45 47

Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, p. . 46 Hogg’s Confessions, p. . Hogg’s Confessions, p. . 48 Hogg’s Confessions, p. . Hogg’s Confessions, p. .

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Prodigal Son overlay. Her flight from home and experiences in a literal and spiritual far country are described in similar terms, with a memory of summers in her Scottish home still present: throughout all the years of wandering that had intervened—amidst her gaieties and revellings, her follies and her frailties—the picture of those quiet and gladsome summer months had remained . . . [an] image of ancestral piety within a Scottish mind.49

However, the identification is undercut by the comment that follows: hers was ‘a mind astray, but not lost’.50 Her return to Cross-Meikle prompts moments of repentance, rather than the return itself being the result of a ‘coming to herself ’ in the terms of the parable. A visit to the grave of her dead friend and memories of the innocence of their friendship brings her ‘the voice of repentant misery’ and the realization she had ‘sought refuge where the foolish seek it, and . . . found what they find’.51 Significantly, rather than accepting blame for her own mistakes, the moment of repentance propels her to wish she had been what Isobel was, the wife of Adam Blair. This homecoming, it is suggested, has an ulterior motive. Her spiritual state is also uncertain. ‘Far from being an infidel’, nonetheless ‘there were moments in which she could scarcely be said to be a believer’, and expressions of doubt ‘gave pain to the unsullied purity of Blair’s religious feelings’.52 Adam’s optimism that she is ‘returning’ to faith under his guidance provokes ‘momentary feelings of exaltation’53 and perhaps propels him towards his own ill-guided flight from home towards her once she has been forced to return to her husband’s home. At this point, it is Adam who assumes the role of the Prodigal Son in a more conventional manner, rebelling against convention to leave home and family. If Charlotte’s motives have been at all undermined by the subversion of Prodigal Son themes, then the moment when Adam commits adultery with her, appropriately in a far off place from his home, may well fit with the older brother’s assessment that his brother had been with ‘harlots’. This is emphasized by Adam’s reaction to discovery, which is to leap from the bed ‘as if he had been wreathed in the coils of 49 51 53

Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. . Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. . Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. .

50 52

Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. . Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. .

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a serpent’; and by his later command to her to ‘go and sin no more’,55 echoing the words of Jesus to the woman caught in adultery ( John :). Charlotte’s culpability is fully expressed in Adam’s perspective of events, although his own is not shirked. The moment of the act is obscured with asterisks, but the experience of his ‘coming to himself ’ in repentance is fully described. Contemplating throwing himself down a ravine, he calls himself ‘useless, worthless, miserable, lost, lost forever’.56 The depth of his misery provokes both repentance from Charlotte (‘God have mercy on me a sinner . . . hear the cry of a bruised heart’57)—and an acceptance that Adam is ‘lost to [her] forever’.58 It also initiates a move towards self-realization for her husband, Captain Campbell, who tells Adam he should not worry about exposure from him.59 While all around him are ‘coming to themselves’ in a traditional Prodigal Son manner, Adam’s return to Presbytery and then to his parish presents him as a Prodigal Son who cannot accept the welcome and forgiveness which is clearly offered to him. In the first scene after his return, he confronts the ministers met in Presbytery. The ministers are ready to believe his mind has been disturbed: he however, unlike the Prodigal Son, recites the whole of his pre-prepared speech, resigning his charge and deciding to return to the lot of his ancestors, who were ‘peasants’, adding, ‘would I were worthy of them’.60 The Presbytery kneels in prayer, accepting his changed status. On two further occasions a Prodigal Son echo is heard. Seeing Adam approach, John Maxwell calls him ‘My son’ and comments, ‘We have all wept for you . . . this day, I hope—almost, I rejoice.’61 However, Adam is not yet ready to accept a homecoming, telling Maxwell’s family, ‘Would I were worthy to live among you as my fathers did!’62 On a second occasion, approaching Dr Muir on his deathbed, Adam hears him say, ‘I bless God that I have lived to see this day. Adam Blair, my son, draw near, and kiss my lips ere I die.’ When Muir tries to persuade him to ‘come back to the vineyard’, Adam responds, ‘I am not worthy . . . I am contented where I am—I fear 54

54 56 58 60 62

Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. . Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. . Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. . Lockhart, Adam Blair, pp. –. Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. .

55 57 59

Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. . Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. . Lockhart, Adam Blair, pp. –. 61 Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. .

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change.’63 It is Muir’s death, and Adam’s honouring a promise to conduct the funeral, which initiates a visit from the kirk session to ask Adam to return as their minister. In one sense, death has preceded, if not enabled, Adam’s ‘restoration’,64 as it does in the parable. From believing himself lost to the congregation, Adam is found by them, and persuaded to return. The direction of travel is the opposite of the parable, and the time-frame is extended, but the elements are there. For Adam, if not for Charlotte, whose death conveniently removes her from the equation and, like Muir’s death, enables the eventual return, in this novel there is a narrative movement which works against a popular view of judgemental Calvinist piety,65 and takes seriously the parable of the Prodigal Son. Adam asserts God has ‘abandoned’ him,66 but believes the prayers of others will be heard. In spite of his lostness, he allows himself to be found in the end. His calling to the ministry has given his embodiment of the Prodigal Son a very public aspect which he accepts with utter seriousness. Conclusion In these novels about men who are ministers, the parable of the Prodigal Son has particular resonance. Called to be the older son who maintains a spiritual home for others, and to empathize with rather than embody the returning younger son, they must also represent the cause of the father to the congregation they minister among. The tension involved in holding these three characteristics together often lies at the heart of the narrative treatments of ministers such as Adam Blair, Gideon Mack, and John Ames. Of the three, it is only John Ames who self-consciously refers to the parable of the Prodigal 64 Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. . Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. . As Ian Campbell points out in his Introduction to the Saltire Society edition of the novel (Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. xx), Douglas Gifford is wrong to assert that Adam’s ‘Calvinist village and parishioners, after insisting on years of exile and atonement, allow him to return to his ministry’ (in Douglas Gifford, ‘Myth, Parody and Dissociation: Scottish Fiction –’, in The Nineteenth Century, ed. Douglas Gifford; History of Scottish Literature, vol. , ed. R. C. Craig (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, ), pp. –, p. ). The drama is played out in the soul of Adam. Meanwhile the villagers are shown to be keen to see Adam return to their pulpit from the moment he takes up residence in nearby Sargard. 66 Lockhart, Adam Blair, p. . 63 65

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Son, both as a source for his preaching, and as a means of selfidentification. As Painter argued, in the character of Ames, Robinson offers ‘seasoned contemporary explorations of the mysteries of scripture’, in the portrayal of characters ‘who embody nuanced variations on biblical roles’.67 I have suggested that Adam Blair and Gideon Mack also embody subtle variations on the biblical roles of the father and his two sons in the parable, offering explorations of scripture from the contrasting perspectives of their authors. In starkest terms, John Ames embodies the shifting significance of every aspect of homecoming: to God, to others, and to himself. This is in sharp contrast to the use of the parable in the earlier American short story tradition, and reflects Robinson’s commitment to a particular faith position. Meanwhile, Adam Blair offers an exploration of the biblical notion of being found; and Gideon Mack demonstrates the bleakness of being lost. All of the literary worlds created reflect the masculine thought-world of the parable: a corrective is offered in Robinson’s next two novels,68 in which the perspectives of two of the female characters in Gilead are given and the parable is refracted somewhat differently. However, neither of these characters is ordained, which is what gives Ames, Blair, and Mack their particularly public and pointed emphasis.

Painter, ‘Loyalty Meets Prodigality’, p. . Marilynne Robinson, Home (London: Virago, ); and Lila (London: Virago, ). 67 68

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7 The Prodigal Son in Poetry Elizabeth Bishop and Iain Crichton Smith

In Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, John Ames writes from an American theological context which finds homecoming a positive outcome of sustained reflection on the parable of the Prodigal Son and its interaction with the experience of an individual. In this chapter, it will be argued that the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (–) finds homecoming, stripped of any theological significance, a much more troubled and troubling concept, one which is much closer to the American short story tradition and its exploration of the monstrous aspects of home. Meanwhile, the Scottish poet Iain Crichton Smith (–) seems to search for a middle way between the humane Calvinism of Adam Blair and the anxiety-filled agnosticism of The Testament of Gideon Mack in his coming to terms with ‘home’. On many levels, the poets Elizabeth Bishop and Iain Crichton Smith share more dissimilarities than similarities. While both are firmly rooted in the twentieth century, their life experiences were very different. Bishop was raised between the poles of American life represented by Nova Scotia and Boston, was independently wealthy, at least until the end of her life, and travelled widely, living for long periods in Brazil. Smith, although born in Glasgow, was raised in straitened circumstances on the Hebridean island of Lewis, was a teacher for many years before earning enough from his writing to support himself, and he made Scotland his lifelong home. What makes them both of importance and interest here, however, is their choice of the Prodigal Son as the subject of at least one poem

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(and in Smith’s case, two). In this they are not alone, of course, and it is striking that so many poets have explicitly reworked the Prodigal Son’s story. Such poets include Christopher Smart, Bernard Barton, Christina Rossetti, Rudyard Kipling, E. Nesbit, David Ignatow, Robert Bly, Louis MacNeice, and Anne Stevenson.1 The character of the Prodigal, his rebellion, ensuing plight, and hopeful return, finds many poetic reiterations from different perspectives and points in his narrative journey. The focus here, however, will be on the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Iain Crichton Smith as they offer both contrast and comparison from a similar time period. Both also wrote poems from the perspective of Robinson Crusoe, a type of the Prodigal Son in literature, which allows us a further angle on the paradigm. Bishop’s poem, ‘The Prodigal’, was written in the second of two periods she spent in an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, during which time she was being treated for alcoholism. Completed in , it was published in The New Yorker in , and appeared in her second collection A Cold Spring (which was published along with a reissue of her first collection, North and South).2 Both of Smith’s Prodigal poems come from the middle period of his life, at the end of his teaching career while he was living in Oban. One, subtitled with the first line ‘Under the stars of grief ’, was his translation of his own poem written in Gaelic and published in  in The Permanent Island.3 The other, also published in , appeared in the collection The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe and Other Poems,4 and is subtitled ‘“All day,” he said, “I’ve been trying to write a play” ’. 1

The parable in American poetry alone is given a chapter to itself in Manfred Siebald’s Der verlorene Sohn in der amerikanischen Literatur (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, ), pp. –. 2 Elizabeth Bishop, North and South: A Cold Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, ). The poem is to be found in Elizabeth Bishop, Complete Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, ), p. . All quotations from Bishop’s poetry are reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and the Random House Group. 3 Iain Crichton Smith, The Permanent Island (Loanhead: Macdonald Publishers, ), p. . The poem is to be found in Iain Crichton Smith, New Collected Poems, ed. and introd. Matt McGuire (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd, ), p. . All quotations from Smith’s poetry are reprinted by permission of Carcanet Press (). 4 Iain Crichton Smith, The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe and Other Poems (London: Victor Gollancz, ), pp. –. The poem is to be found in Smith, New Collected Poems, p. .

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These poems will merit further discussion, but deeper exploration of the similarities and contrasts between these poets will offer an illuminating context for their readings of the character of the Prodigal Son and his narrative. The themes which have recurred throughout the chapters of this book are strongly echoed here, with emphases which are firm reflections of the concerns of the twentieth century. It could easily be argued that both poets identified with the Prodigal Son and offered in their poetic retellings, as in other texts, their own struggles with the notion of homecoming. For both, it is the perspective of the younger son on whom the focus dwells, rather than on the father or on the older son, and it is the difficulty, even the impossibility, of return which is explored. Elizabeth Bishop: context For both poets, ‘home’ was a problematic concept. Bishop’s father had died when she was a baby, and her mother’s mental ill-health following his death led to her being unable to care for her daughter, and eventually to her permanent removal to hospital. At first Bishop was cared for by her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia, but later she was taken by her paternal grandparents and other relatives to Boston, where there was much more disposal income available. She continued to return to Nova Scotia for holidays, but spent her later teenage years at the exclusive boarding school for girls, Walnut Hill. She was to comment later: ‘my relationship with my relatives—I was always a sort of guest, and I think I’ve always felt like that’.5 Little wonder that ‘home’ was an ambivalent term, and the almost throwaway comment at the end of the later poem, ‘Questions of Travel’ ()6—‘home | 5

From Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, ed. George Monteiro (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, ), p. , quoted in Linda Anderson’s Elizabeth Bishop: Lines of Connection (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), p. . Anderson goes on to quote from a conversation Bishop had had with Anne Stevenson, in which she warns, ‘Although I think I have a prize “unhappy childhood”, almost good enough for the text-books, please don’t think I dote on it’ (Prose: Centenary Edition (London: Chatto and Windus, ), p. ), p. . 6 Published in Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel (New York: Farrer, Straus and Giroux, ), and found in the Complete Poems, pp. –.

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Wherever that may be?’—might appropriately be added each time the term appears in her work, as Victoria Harrison has commented.7 This includes at the end of ‘The Prodigal’, in which ‘home’ is one of only two end-words in the poem with no corresponding rhyme. This later poem, ‘Questions of Travel’, asks questions about home which ‘The Prodigal’ might also be read as raising in a particularly pointed manner, and answering rather differently. At its heart, ‘Questions of Travel’ explores the meaning of imagination and how it might best be employed to lead to the truth. The poet asks, ‘Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?’, but goes on, ‘But surely it would have been a pity | not to have seen’ all that has been encountered through travel. ‘Is it lack of imagination that makes us come | To imagined places, not just stay at home?’ she goes on. ‘Continent, city, country, society: | The choice is never wide and never free’, but there is a ‘No’ before the closing question: ‘Should we have stayed at home, | Wherever that may be?’ Anne Stevenson comments that the last line suggests for Bishop ‘home’ was the sacrifice she had had to make in order to become the woman and artist she was. Because she had chosen to be independent, because it had been open to her not to compromise with convention and not to marry . . . of her own volition she had blown up all her routes home. The world of her past in Nova Scotia and even in Massachusetts was gone for ever. Unless, of course, she could recreate it in imagination, in art.8

In contrast, in ‘The Prodigal’, home remains a place to which the speaker may indeed return, although its meaning has been re-defined by his experience of apparently self-imposed exile in a pig-sty. The perspective is of the Prodigal Son whose sense of pain, guilt, and alienation, fuelled by alcohol, nevertheless longs for the connection and redemption associated with home. Although brought to the depths of despair by his addiction, even in the pig-sty he is able to find images of home: in the ‘Ark’ of the barn safely filled with the animals by the farmer at night, and in the way the puddles ‘seemed to 7 ‘When one reads the word home in Bishop’s writing, one is always tempted to shrug and add, as Bishop did later in “Questions of Travel”, “wherever that may be” ’, Victoria Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), p. . 8 Anne Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, ), p. .

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reassure’. This is a pig-sty which offers him elements of homeliness, even in exile. Perhaps for this reason, ‘It took him a long time | finally to make up his mind’: but ‘to go home’ is his settled decision, and the parallels with the parable imply at least that he will be welcomed there. The horrifying image of the ‘sow that always ate her young’, who stares at him until ‘sickening, he leaned to scratch her head’, has perhaps two functions in the poem. It suggests something close to horror in terms of the potential for harm within family relationships, but it is also clear that the pig belongs firmly to the world of the speaker’s exile, rather than the place to which he might return. An intensely personal poem, rooted in the experiences of Bishop’s alcoholism, there is ambivalence about what home means and where it may be found. Nevertheless, there is a sense here that home is worth seeking and aiming for, which later poems, from a more settled and self-confident period in her life, are less certain about. Iain Crichton Smith: context Iain Crichton Smith’s understanding of ‘home’ is similarly shifting and ambivalent, and reflected in his poetry. Like Bishop, his father died when he was a baby, of the TB he had contracted on the mainland. The notion of exile as a place of contagion, and of return as a move which might endanger the settled community as much as the one who returns, may be traced in much of Smith’s writing about leaving and returning home.9 Unlike Bishop, home for Smith was firmly focused on one place and in the person of his very present mother. His mother was closely associated with the Free Church-going community on Lewis and was singlehandedly responsible for bringing up him and his brother on very meagre resources. A Gaelic speaker at home, at school he was forced to learn and speak English, a rupture which ‘One cannot run away, he thought to himself as he walked towards the house. Or if one runs away one cannot be happy anywhere any more. If one left in the first place one could never go back. Or if one came back one also brought a virus, an infection of time and place. One always brings back a judgment to one’s home.’ From Iain Crichton Smith, ‘An American Sky’, in The Black and the Red and Other Stories (London: Victor Gollancz, ), pp. –, p. , quoted in Carol Gow, Mirror and Marble: The Poetry of Iain Crichton Smith (Edinburgh: Saltire Society, ), p. . 9

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remained a source of anxiety and doubt. Nevertheless, education offered him an escape from the sense of joylessness and uniformity which his home life represented; he would later describe his schooling as ‘a secret world which I treasured and didn’t want tampered with at any cost’.10 When he left the island to attend university in Aberdeen, it was as if, he comments, ‘I had cast off chains, as the ship does when it leaves harbour. To leave the community was to emerge into one’s individuality, in to a future which seemed free and unjudged.’11 However, this freedom is tempered by guilt, and by the burden of the decision whether or not to return. ‘Home’ for Smith inevitably involves ‘exile’: The fact of the islands stronger than any other is that of exile: it is that which casts its guilt continually backwards like the rays of a setting sun. The islander has never had the chance of staying where he is: history has condemned him to departure, and afterwards to the choice of whether or not to return.12

Smith goes on to note that ‘[t]hus the home becomes for [the islander] more important than it does for others and the temptation to idealise it immense and almost forgivable’,13 but this is a temptation Smith studiously avoids. An element of ambivalence is heard in his English Prodigal Son poem, ‘“All day”, he said, “I’ve been trying to write a play” ’, in the description of the ‘useless growth’ which ‘barrenly blossomed’ at home. This is one of the ‘harvest of images’ which the playwright/speaker is given as he tries to imagine the return of the Prodigal Son. ‘Each new day’ reveals ‘more sparklingly unchanging essences’, but it ‘wasn’t possible’ that this would tempt back the Prodigal Son. Even if it did, he would not be able to ‘settle there after delirium’. In his Gaelic Prodigal Son poem ‘Under the stars of grief ’, home is imagined as ‘that golden distant country’, but it is also the place where his brother works away at ‘the troublesome soil of dislike’, and the neighbours ‘wink’ while asking about the Prodigal 10 Iain Crichton Smith, ‘Between Sea and Moor’, in As I Remember, ed. Maurice Lindsay (London: Hale, ), pp. –, p. . 11 Iain Crichton Smith, ‘Real People in a Real Place’, in Iain Crichton Smith, Towards the Human: Selected Essays (Loanhead: Macdonald Publishers, ), pp. –, p. . 12 Smith, ‘Real People in a Real Place’, p. . 13 Smith, ‘Real People in a Real Place’, p. .

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Son’s new-found wealth. There is deliberate ambiguity in the ending of this poem, in which the reader is told, ‘He got up and went home,’ but the first and obvious sense is that home is the place of exile, from which the moment is described. His sense of ‘loss’ is not strong enough to propel him to return to his original home, described with honesty rather than idealism. However, that leaves him in whom a ‘spark’ has been placed which has led to his departure, having to live with his choice to remain in a place of ‘uncultivated soil’. For Smith in his Prodigal Son poems, ‘home’ is a real place, its positive and negative aspects faced with honesty, and the choice of whether to return or not is much less influenced by the narrative pull of the parable than it is in Bishop’s Prodigal Son poem. Elizabeth Bishop: religious context That both poets should find the Prodigal Son trope a powerful one through which to explore a troubled response to home and homecoming is perhaps not surprising, given their early exposure to Christian practices. Both have written about the lasting influence of this exposure, while indicating that they have moved away from belief. This ongoing influence of faith coupled with deliberate exile from the source mirrors the dilemma both reflect in their poetic explorations of the significance of home. While Bishop could assert, ‘I’m not religious, but I read Herbert and Hopkins with the greatest pleasure,’14 her friend Richard Wilbur commented that ‘[t]hough she had no orthodox convictions, and wondered at such in others, Elizabeth Bishop had religious concerns and habits of feeling’.15 Thomas J. Travisano argues that she approached a Christian symbol as a ‘modern agnostic with a religious education and the spiritual expectations created by that

14 From Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop, ed. George Montiero (Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, ), p. , quoted in Frank J. Kearful, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s The Prodigal as a Sympathetic Parody’, Connotations . (/): pp. –, p. . 15 From Richard Wilbur, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’, Ploughshares  (): pp. –, p. , quoted in Kearful, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s The Prodigal as a Sympathetic Parody’, p. .

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education’. He goes on that her New England Baptist heritage, with its stress on individual salvation and on interpreting God’s message of providential care from one’s experience of the world, is a guiding force in poems such as ‘The Prodigal’ and its near contemporary, ‘Over , Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’.17 In the latter poem, the ‘serious, engravable’ elements of mainly biblical scenes (‘the Tomb, the Pit, the Sepulcher’) in a Bible from childhood are compared with the realities of foreign travel as a weary adult. Characteristically, ‘this old Nativity’ the speaker finds pictured within the text is both remarkable (‘an undisturbed, unbreathing flame’) and mundane (‘a family with pets’) to the eyes of the child she was when she first saw it. She asks ‘Why couldn’t we have seen . . . [it] . . . while we were at it?’, in the Holy Land itself, but the purpose of this experience would have been to ‘look, and look . . . our infant sight away’. In a world in which ‘Everything [is] only connected by “and” and “and”’, the speaker seeks connection and meaning in the past of religious literature and its relationship to the present and the future. Narrative in the form of the biblical text has been superimposed onto the experience of seeing the ‘old Nativity’ in the book as a child. However, while there is regret that this scene was not experienced directly while travelling in the Holy Land, with the benefit of the narrative, there is also a recognition that something would also be lost: that ‘infant sight’. The poem suggests that extra-personal truth is not to be found in direct experience, or in the narratives of the past, biblical or otherwise, and the ‘family with pets’ is perhaps the best interpretation possible. This acknowledgement of the draw of the biblical narrative, with an awareness of its limitations, is also reflected in ‘The Prodigal’. What Bishop offers us in her Prodigal poem is a secular parody of the parable which is nevertheless sympathetic: in the place of a theological emphasis on God’s unqualified love for the individual we are offered a psychological portrayal of an alcoholic’s estrangement in his addiction. The ache of human homelessness is imported into this retelling of a biblical story about a quintessential spiritual homecoming. Friends 16 Thomas J. Travisano, Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development (Charlottesville, Va: University Press of Virginia, ), p. . 17 Also published in the  collection, A Cold Spring, and found in the Complete Poems, pp. –.

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recalled that the poem brought Bishop ‘obvious pleasure’:18 it does so not by bringing the exile home, but by reworking the very idea of what home means through the experience of being without a home. The reader is invited to enter the inverted world of the alcoholic to appreciate the beauty of the ‘glass-smooth dung’, which is so almost lovely it makes it possible to stay. The disarray of the subject is contrasted with the tightness of the structure of the poem, and of the metanarrative of the parable. The result is a poem which waits in a place of pain, alienation, and bitterness, and which emphasizes, as the parable does not, the significance of the moment of the ‘long time’ before the ‘finally’ when the Prodigal ‘make[s] up his mind to go home’. Iain Crichton Smith: religious context Like Bishop, Iain Crichton Smith had a religious upbringing against which he rebelled, yet which gave him a powerful vocabulary. In Real People, he would write: On the island I had felt religion as a restricting force, but the fact that I have wrestled so much with a particular kind of religion in my poetry suggests that I do not have the ease to discuss it freely. Religion had been internalised in my personality whether I like it or not and its dilemmas will always be with me.19

In his introduction to the New Collected Poems, Matt McGuire notes the repressive nature of the culture of Smith’s childhood, so constrained by the influence of the Free Presbyterian Church. In ‘Highland Sunday’, Smith writes of those coming out of church as ‘Striped-trousered, hardblack-hatted, Sunday-sunned’, and of ‘A band of bounded black [which] defines the shore’.20 ‘They have no place for the fine graces | of poetry’, he laments in ‘Poem of Lewis’21—and yet, comments McGuire, ‘despite the rejection of Calvinism, a deeply religious rhetoric

18 Recollection of Ilse Barker, in Remembering Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography, ed. Gary Fountain and Peter Brazeau (Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press, ), pp. –, quoted in Kearful, ‘Elizabeth Bishop’s The Prodigal as a Sympathetic Parody’, p. . 19 Smith, ‘Real People in a Real Place’, p. . 20 Smith, New Collected Poems, p.  (). 21 Smith, New Collected Poems, p. .

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(of “grace”/“forgiveness”), informs ICS’s vocabulary’. Smith continues to explore the ‘great forgiving spirit of the word, fanning its rainbow wing’, in the same ‘Poem of Lewis’. He recognizes that the loss of faith brings other losses too, writing in ‘Real People’ that ‘It is the holiness of the person we have lost, the holiness of life itself, the inexplicable mystery and wonder of it, its strangeness and tenderness.’23 From this perspective, it is perhaps not surprising that the parable of the Prodigal Son offered Smith a powerful narrative to return to. The interweaving of biblical themes of grace and forgiveness with the notion of exile and home which were so important to him finds narrative expression in the parable. ‘Under the stars of grief ’ also offers insight into the strangeness and tenderness of the holiness of life, which adds a new focus to the story. The individual who is the subject of the poem is aware both of the ‘dance of the planets and the people’, and of the community from which he has come, a focus absent from the parable (although modern commentators such as Herzog have attempted to re-claim the implicit community aspect of the story).24 There is a telling distance between the expectations those in the community at home have for ‘the little boy of our song’, hopeful and idealistic, and the reality of his experience of ‘locks, the dangerous prison of lies’. God is invoked by the man, but God’s power to inspire is ‘in vain’. This absent God and the figure of the father (described as ‘running like a bird on tiptoe of joy’) are kept far apart rather than conflated as often happens in readings of the parable. The shattering of the glass in the man’s hand precedes the action of rising and going home, and the defiant response that ‘this place is as good as others’. In that act of shattering, the man is presented as a free agent, no longer bound to hold or look into the ‘foolish and thin glass’ which reflects a particular vision of himself. The context into which he shouts, ‘the untellable music and the planets of a million laughters’, suggests a holiness of sorts, inexplicable mystery and wonder certainly, and 22

Matt McGuire, ‘Introduction’ to Iain Crichton Smith, New Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd, ), pp. –, p. . 23 ‘Real People in a Real Place’, p. . 24 W. R. Herzog II, Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed (Louisville, Ky: Westminster John Knox Press, ). 22

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strangeness and tenderness. In this place of disjunction there is indeed the possibility of a new beginning which is spatially and spiritually a transformation of the parable of the Prodigal Son, although the vocabulary and the moment are shared. It is important to note that a similar moment of revelation is imagined in the poem ‘There is no Sorrow’ without the overlay of the parable. After describing the ‘dumb grief ’ of being an exile ‘among villages that have strange names’, the narrator promises: Poor lost exile For you there is nothing but endurance till one miraculous day you will wake up in the morning and put on your foreign clothes and know that they are at last yours.25

Finding peace in the place of exile is offered as a possibility worth waiting for and, again, there is something ‘miraculous’ about the moment. The theme is a recurring one for Smith, and the Prodigal Son is not the only intertext or image he uses to explore it. Smith’s second Prodigal Son poem, written in English, offers a much more detached perspective than that of ‘Under the stars of grief ’. The narrator describes the difficulties of a playwright who is attempting to construct a drama out of the moment of return of the Prodigal Son. Several options are attempted, positive and negative, and none is the same as the ending of the parable: in one, the son is successful, while the home farm has declined; in the other, the son gets to the gate but decides to turn round. At the heart of the poem is an admission (a ‘boulder I couldn’t climb or pass’) that literature is inadequate to the theme of forgiveness, particularly when it is focused on an individual. While the son walks with ‘the weight of failure on each dusty shoulder’, in contrast the day is ‘pure’ and the ‘large forgiveness of the simple weather’ takes away the writer’s power to ‘focus on the happy father’. The father is a fixed and irrelevant figure, while the son is ‘a changing ghost | A harvest of images that the autumn brought | home to wherever home is for the

25

Smith, New Collected Poems, p.  ().

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lost.’ Forgiveness comes not from an individual, but from an environment, and the need for the lost to find a home is both universal and a fertile source of poetic images. In this poem, the physical, original home is a place where both ‘useless growth barrenly blossomed’ and ‘lying diamonds | momently flourished’. As already noted, being able to settle in this place of conflict seems impossible, and the poem asks, ‘Would he not leave once more . . . ?’ The poem resists easy conclusions, narrative closure, a simple transposition of the parable into a new form (poem or play). As Bishop also demonstrated in her own way, the parable offers ‘a harvest of images’ rather than an overarching narrative for poetic expression. The need to explore ‘wherever home is for the lost’, and the moment when a decision is made whether or not to return, is effectively initiated by the familiarity of the parable. But the poet is demonstrably free to find new beginnings in a variety of ways according to their own experiences and beliefs, and a return to the waiting presence of the father is not always the resolution they choose. Robinson Crusoe as Prodigal Son So far the discussion has centred on poems which explicitly evoke the parable of the Prodigal Son. However, both Iain Crichton Smith and Elizabeth Bishop wrote poems about another character whose story has been mapped onto the parable: Robinson Crusoe. In the chapter on the American short story tradition, it was argued that the influence of Defoe’s text had given the parable of the Prodigal Son a particular spiritual and hence political twist. In its stress on the spiritual rather than moral message of the parable, Robinson Crusoe offered a justification for filial disobedience. For Bishop and Smith, the Puritan values which drove Crusoe to leave home are not the chief focus. Instead, it is the issue of identity in isolation and in community which draws both to the Crusoe narrative. Coincidentally, both Crusoe poems appeared in print within four years of each other, although they come from very different periods in the lives of their poets. Bishop had begun writing ‘Crusoe in England’ in , but it was finished in , as she was rereading Darwin and visiting the Galapagos Islands with a friend from Harvard. It was

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published that year in November in the New Yorker.26 Smith’s ‘The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe’ was the title poem of the collection in which ‘The Prodigal Son’—‘ “All day”, he said, “I’ve been trying to write a play” ’—appeared, from .27 Bishop’s poem shares with other examples of her work from this late period, such as ‘In the Waiting Room’, the search for language to express intimate relationships. As Harrison comments, ‘Bishop’s late poetry, especially, makes central the difficulty, the pain, and the rewards of those relationships, in all their dailiness.’28 In Smith’s Crusoe poem, there is an attempt to construct a new beginning to explain who the speaker really is: ‘Taking up the position of an outcast, freed from the Gaelic matriarch, Crusoe inhabits a desert island in an attempt to find a starting point which can begin to answer the question, “who?”’29 Identity in relation to others is at the heart of both poems, as it is in the parable of the Prodigal Son, and the perspectives offered on exile and the possibility of meaningful return home further root the poems in the parable’s concerns. A comparison of both in conversation with the parable will further illuminate the parable’s literary influence on both Bishop and Smith. The connection between Bishop’s ‘The Prodigal’ and her ‘Crusoe in England’ have not been overlooked. Stevenson suggests that the later poem ‘extends and deepens the parable-like technique Bishop employed in “ The Prodigal” ’, and that ‘[o]ne might even say that Bishop’s Crusoe is the Prodigal come home at last, settled, forgiven, and yet somehow disappointed, let down’.30 Writing about ‘The Prodigal’, Colm Tóibín comments that, for the Prodigal, ‘Like Crusoe, it was easier to dream of home than to be there.’31 The poem charts Crusoe’s detached reflections on his island experience, from a distance of many years and miles. The tone is mundane, descriptive: 26 Elizabeth Bishop, ‘Crusoe in England’, New Yorker  November : ; found in Bishop, Complete Poems (London: Chatto and Windus, ), pp. –. 27 Smith, The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe and Other Poems, pp. –; found in Smith, New Collected Poems, pp. – (). 28 Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy, p. . 29 Gow, Mirror and Marble, p. . 30 Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop, p. . 31 Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), p. .

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The island smelled of goat and guano. The goats were white, so were the gulls, and both too tame, or else they thought I was a goat, too, or a gull.

An implicit connection with the Prodigal Son, from the perspective of Bishop’s Prodigal poem, is made in the stanza about self-pity: I often gave way to self-pity. ‘Do I deserve this? I suppose I must. I wouldn’t be here otherwise. Was there a moment when I actually chose this? I don’t remember, but there could have been.’ What’s wrong about self-pity, anyway? With my legs dangling down familiarly over a crater’s edge, I told myself ‘Pity should begin at home.’ So the more pity I felt, the more I felt at home.

While pity is not emphasized in Bishop’s ‘The Prodigal’, the question of choice and the finding of homeliness in the place of exile are certainly present. But the experience is also unrepeatable and beyond the comprehension of the society in which he now lives: . . . my poor island’s still unrediscovered, unrenamable. None of the books has ever got it right.

‘Accounts’ of the arrival of his companion Friday ‘have everything all wrong’. Crusoe is the only witness to the experience of his exile and return, and this places him in an even more solitary position now he is alone at home on the new island which is England. Without his ‘dear Friday’, he is as lonely as he was on the deserted island, where he could not articulate the ‘solitude’ which was the completion of the Wordsworth quotation he recites to the flower-beds there (‘The bliss of what?’). His possessions, once so filled with meaning, are now faded and given the status of museum pieces. With no witness to his experience, he is imprisoned within the self, and home has lost its significance. Linda Anderson writes perceptively about the way in which ‘The Prodigal’ might be read to resist the narrative pull of the parable, and

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her comments are applicable to the interaction between the story of Robinson Crusoe and Bishop’s ‘Crusoe in England’. For Anderson, ‘The Prodigal’ ‘offers a version of a narrative impasse, a turning away by poetry from the teleology and closure of narrative’.32 The poem is modelled on a well-known story in which the movement is from exile to return, repentance/self-understanding to forgiveness. But the poem is paused in the moment between decision and action, stasis and change. The expected return is postponed, perhaps indefinitely. In ‘Crusoe in England’, the poem sits in the period after the well-known story ends, reflecting from a distance on the events which form its basis, and destabilizing the notion of home which the story’s end requires. The poem leaves open the question of ‘who decides?’ what is an island, and what is home. As Anderson comments, ‘[d]esire for the plenitude of the ending for a “homecoming”, may be deeply embedded not only in the original parable but in the idea of the story itself, which we read towards the culmination of meaning which the end can bring’.33 However, in Bishop’s work, time is not understood as an ‘end-directed narrative’, and there is a ‘recognition of the way time asserts difference, insists on variation and transforms any repetition or homecoming into something else, a movement away as well as a return’.34 Above I had suggested that the narrative drive of the parable, in the earlier poem, implies that home for the Prodigal still exists, although the impetus to reach it is undermined. In this later poem, home has become a construct with little content. It is in the playing with the notion of time and the guiding narrative in both poems which opens up the possibility that homecoming may be a loss as well as a gain, something to be desired but also regretted. Like his ‘The Prodigal Son: “All day,” he said, “I’ve been trying to write a play” ’, Smith’s ‘The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe’ 35 focuses on the construction of a narrative out of a familiar story, although here the subject of the familiar narrative is the one who seeks to construct something new. Crusoe, on the island, asserts ‘Today I wished to write a story.’ The story is his story, ‘of a man wrecked on an island many 32 33 34 35

Anderson, Elizabeth Bishop, p. . Anderson, Elizabeth Bishop, p. . Anderson, Elizabeth Bishop, pp. –. Smith, New Collected Poems, pp. – ().

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The Prodigal Son in Poetry

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years’, but he realizes that when he runs to meet his rescuer, he would ‘run through him bone and sinew to the other side’. There is no substance to his literary creation. ‘[I]instead’, continues the narrator, he opened his Bible and ‘found written in faded ink on the leaf before Genesis the words, “To my dearest son from his mother” ’. Gow suggests that the poem opens with an attempt to make a fresh start, linking language and concrete reality, but moves to accept that the past cannot be ignored. She argues that, at first, Crusoe can only create ‘an “I” who has no substance who has become mere or more text’.36 He needs to confront the fact that he is unable to ignore his heritage, indicated by the Bible in which his history is already inscribed. His attempt to go behind the beginning represented by the Book of Genesis is doomed to fail: Taking up the position of an outcast, freed from the Gaelic matriarch, Crusoe inhabits a desert island in an attempt to find a starting point before the beginning, a starting point which can begin to answer the question, ‘who?’. Yet before the beginning, something is written. The text has already ascribed him son.37

For Gow, the poem offers the discovery that identity is not chosen but given, and language imposes it, in the witnessing or verification of others (as Crusoe says near the end of the poem, ‘Language is other people’). From a focus on ‘who’, the narrator moves to a focus on ‘where’, and the realization that he must leave the island for his life and work to have significance. He has faced the temptations of remaining on his own (‘Aware of my kingship here, I would not return to anonymity there . . . ’), but having accepted rescue, he looks forward to the ‘new dream’ of emerging ‘from the world of sparse iron into the vast cinema of sensation’. To be true to his calling as a poet he needs to accept that he may always be an outcast, with no home (there is no mention of ‘home’ in the poem): but he cannot escape who he is in relation to others. As in Smith’s two Prodigal Son poems, a larger narrative offers a familiar backdrop for the dilemma of the individual, the tension between the two mirroring the tension Smith has indicated he felt between the pull of his context and his desire for freedom from it. 36 37

Gow, Mirror and Marble, p. . Gow, Mirror and Marble, p. .

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Conclusion In its scepticism towards homecoming as something desirable or even possible, Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry is allied more closely to the American short story tradition discussed in Chapter  than to the resolved longing of Marilynne Robinson’s John Ames discussed in Chapter . Iain Crichton Smith’s poetry critically acknowledges the powerful hold of the theology of J. G. Lockhart’s Adam Blair on his very real Hebridean home, but finds a way to resolve his inescapable longing for home which is closer to that of Mrs Oliphant’s Kirsteen as explored in Chapter  than to the restless emptiness of James Robertson’s Gideon Mack (Chapter ). Like Kirsteen, an acceptance of both the shortcomings and the influence of home leads Smith towards a position in which he is free to create home on his own terms, without the need to remain or return. Whether its subject is the Prodigal Son or Robinson Crusoe, the poetry of Smith and Bishop interrogates the notion of exile, home, and homecoming. Gow sums up Smith’s mid- to late work as offering a narrative which finally refuses the simplicities of the story of the prodigal son, finding in the position of disjunction and dislocation a poetry of delicate balance . . . which speaks, not of endings, but new beginnings, and leaves the poet, once more, at the point of departure.38

A very similar claim could be made of Bishop’s interaction with the parable of the Prodigal Son, in her refusal to accept the ‘simplicities’ of the story: in particular its narrative arc from exile to repentance/return and finally forgiveness and homecoming. For both, ‘home’ is a complicated concept. For Smith, its location is fixed but it is in coming to terms with the relationships associated with home, rather than forcing a return, that brings resolution, and inspires ‘a poetry of delicate balance’. For Bishop, home is less fixed to a place, or to a set of people, and its importance and very existence shifts through her life and poetry. Crusoe’s question, ‘Who decides?’ resonates with the long period of indecision which inspires ‘The Prodigal’. Accepting ‘disjunction and dislocation’, rather than making a return in expectation of, or even need for, forgiveness, is a key theme for both poets.

38

Gow, Mirror and Marble, p. .

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8 Conclusion

The poet Felix Dennis asserts confidently: ‘Never go back. Never go back. | Never return to the haunts of your youth.’1 That advice is rarely heeded by the Prodigal Sons who appear in English, Scottish, and American literature, although they may wrestle with the temptation not to go back. While Dennis cautions at the end of his poem that ‘No-one is waiting and nothing is there,’ literary Prodigal Sons who do return home seem to experience many different receptions. Similarly, authors seem drawn to the story of the Prodigal Son, his waiting parent, and, to a lesser extent, his stay-at-home brother. Many writers have appealed directly or indirectly to the parable through their use of character and in the narrative tropes around homecoming they offer, presumably with the expectation that their efforts to ‘go back’ to the story will be met with recognition and understanding on the part of the reader. They go back to the story in the hope that we as readers are ‘waiting’, ‘there’ and ready to hear the significance of the echoes. Identifying the Prodigal Son In this study of the reconfiguration of the Prodigal Son in literature, the presence of the biblical character and his journey towards home has been identified in a variety of ways. He is explicitly referred to in some of the Elizabethan texts, tied to the literary characters by direct reference or connection with an established Prodigal Son drama tradition. Felix Dennis, A Glass Half Full (London: Random House, ), p. , reproduced by permission of the Felix Dennis Literary Estate. 1

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His story is invoked through specific passing reference in many of Shakespeare’s plays, and through the narrative arc of leaving and return which is alluded to and questioned by the actions and soliloquies of characters who share aspects of his features. The American short story tradition draws on a similar combination of explicit and implicit references, while the Victorian novels we considered are more restrained in making the connection obvious. Nevertheless, the conflicts provoked by the opposing possibilities of staying in (or returning to) and leaving the family home with all its comforts and demands are very much the stuff of these novels, and of particular relevance to the female characters within them. The figure might be expected to be more prominent in novels which feature ministers, preachers of the Word, as the main characters, particularly ones which abandon their charges or are tempted to do so. But, again, the relationship between the parable and these novels is generally more indirect than explicit. It is signalled by the movement of these characters towards a homecoming which is identified as a more true version of themselves at their lowest points. Finally, we have explored the work of two poets who have deliberately re-written the parable, setting it in new contexts as well as echoing its concerns in a range of their other poems. Throughout this book, the connection between the parable and the literary work has been established by exploring the significance of a reading which brings the two into conversation, rather than by setting criteria. The model has been similar to that offered by previous works of literary criticism, such as those discussing the parable in American twentieth-century drama. In Chapter  of this book, a variety of approaches to the parable were outlined. Exegetical readings focused on establishing meaning in context: the context of Jesus’ ministry, or of the literary and theological themes of Luke’s Gospel, or of the issues confronting the early Church. The shifting understandings of the ways in which the parable has spoken into and illuminated its contexts highlight its openness to multiple interpretations. Some scholars in biblical studies have acknowledged this, while others have sought to establish one understanding as definitive. Even some explorations of the reception history of the parable from this perspective have argued for interpretations to be controlled and the search for truth which leads to action to be the guiding purpose of the hermeneutical task. Homiletic uses of the parable perhaps bridge the gap

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

between readings which close the parable down and those which seek to understand its shifting meaning for readers in different times and places. The immediacy of the preaching moment roots these sermons in the concerns of culture, denomination, and life experience, promoting the identification of characters in the parable with their hearers and those around them, and with the God they have come to worship. Such contemporary concerns could provoke interpretations which are at odds with the theological tradition inherited by the congregation. Readings of the parable as it reappears in literature from critics with little background in biblical studies are even more open to the multiple ways in which it operates as a paradigm. It is in its persistence and complexity, its conventionality and its questioning of the conventional, that its paradigmatic strengths lie, from this perspective. The parable may speak of something universal, such as a longing for home which is unresolved, but it is heard in different ways in different genres and literary contexts. This book is an attempt to draw together the insights of biblical studies and an exegetical response to the parable with literary criticism’s lightness of touch and willingness to read flexibly, even against the grain of the parable. What follows is a brief summary of the directions taken and the conclusions reached in each chapter. I will then offer some concluding comments. The Prodigal Son in literature: a review of findings In the Prodigal Son fiction of the late English Renaissance, the rebellion of the young man against the advice of the older fatherfigure is often the focus. The one line in the parable about the younger son losing his inheritance in ‘riotous living’ offers dramatic opportunities to present a counter-cultural world of ultimately damaging excess. The contrast between the ordered world of the establishment and the rebellion of the wayward young is the focus, rather than the moment of repentance leading to a joyful reunion, the overwhelming forgiveness of the father-figure, or the brooding presence of the older brother. Indeed, the Prodigal’s return in these texts is often associated with punishment, sometimes even death, and at best a regretful acceptance of what has to be. The context is economic and civic rather than theological. The template of advice ignored and the leaving of the safety of ‘home’, with disastrous consequences, may have been a conflation of the

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The Prodigal Son

parable and classical comedic texts used in the classroom, under the influence of a Protestant focus on the importance of the Bible for personal faith. Nevertheless, the resulting works tend to address fears about societal change, including ecclesial allegiance, rather than about an individual’s relationship with God. There is some variation in the use of the parable across the time period under discussion (mid–late s), and the character of the Prodigal could encompass that of student, apprentice, prince, and lover rather than simply that of ‘son’. This allows the texts to invoke educational, political, economic, and romantic themes: the religious is less prevalent. But the parable proved to have a remarkably powerful and conservative narrative hold on the collective imagination of the time due to its apparent rejection of youthful rebellion. A common feature in the texts, which recurs in later literature also, is the identification of the writer with the prodigal figure. In an age in which writing for entertainment might be seen as a worthless vanity, or even as leading young readers astray, the parable could be ‘a mirror in which [the writers] found a reflection of their works and lives’.2 Authors might align themselves to the Prodigal Son and offer their experience as a warning to others through the portrayal of disastrous disregard for the advice of elders, followed by repentance. Near the end of his life, under critical attack, Robert Greene asks for forgiveness for leading the young astray, particularly in his works which had tended towards downplaying the negative effects of rebellion and which had given romantic love too prominent a role. He asserts that in his final text, Mourning Garment, ‘I have only with humanity moralized a divine history,’3 and, to make the point, he includes a plethora of features from the parable, such as the older brother, the fatted calf, and the pigs. There is no room for doubt that this is a Prodigal Son text, reasserting the negative effect of ignoring the advice of one’s elders, and signalling that the writer had indeed ‘come to himself ’.

2

Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), p. . 3 Robert Greene, The Life and Complete Works of Robert Greene, ed. Alexander B. Grosart,  vols (–; repr. New York, ), IX, p. , quoted in Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals, p. .

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In the work of William Shakespeare, the Prodigal Son continues to appear as a figure from a shared tradition, with the assumption that his story is known without the need for retelling or excessive signalling. Not every appearance has great moral, religious, or even narrative significance, but in several plays the paradigm of rebellion against authority is invoked, in what may be described as a creative commentary on the biblical text. The moment of reconciliation is more prominent in these plays than in the earlier Prodigal Son texts, in a way which scrutinizes the conventional use of the trope. In Henry IV Part , in the portrayal of Hal, the authority represented by the king is questioned as much as the motive for and completeness of the repentance of the son. The convention of the parable highlights the distance of the society created by the father-figure/king in the play from the world of grace-filled possibility in the biblical text. Hal assumes the role of the Prodigal Son to improve his standing with his father and the people, deceiving everyone in the process; while the king’s acceptance of Hal’s return to grace is highly dependent on his proving himself against their enemies. The play may be read as a critical exegesis of the parable and as a critique of the structures of power of the time. In King Lear, gender and generational roles are reversed, so that Cordelia is associated at first with the child but ultimately with the father, and Lear with the father and then the son in the parable. There is also a Christological overlay to Cordelia’s character of forgiving selfsacrifice, which brings the king/son to a moment of repentance for his actions. This accords with the play as a tragedy, but also prefigures later theological and Christological readings of the parable. When Edgar closes the play with an affirmation of Cordelia’s way of ‘speaking what we feel, not what we ought to say’,4 there is a rejection of the ways of the past, and the possibility of new life based on the values she has represented. The association of the parable with the play is oblique, fluid, and quite different from the Prodigal Son literary tradition of earlier decades. In the pagan world of the play, there is nonetheless a profoundly Christian, theological message as well as a political one in which rebellion against authority is implicitly affirmed.

4

William Shakespeare, King Lear, ...

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In the examples of nineteenth-century fiction by female authors discussed, characters’ changing responses to biblical texts such as the parable of the Prodigal Son mark stages in their development, as well as something of the narrators’ perspectives on traditional religious values. The novels may be read as contextual exegeses of the parable and of its apparent drive towards homecoming. In Adam Bede, Eliot is critical of Dinah’s random use of the Bible and detached from a perception of biblical categories mediated through Hetty’s experience of the natural world. In North and South, Gaskell offers Margaret many opportunities to engage in biblical interpretation, and to relate her understanding of texts such as the parable of the Prodigal Son to her experiences in Milton and the new relationships she makes there. Oliphant’s Kirsteen presents a central character who actively applies biblical texts to herself and others. Kirsteen’s exegesis is open to critique in places, but her assumption of a revision of the role of Prodigal Son, who leaves home without the possibility of return, is celebrated as a positive break from stultifying tradition. It enables her to offer a home to others which does not depend on the family structures which had forced her to leave in the first place. Eliot’s Adam Bede’s identification with the paradigm of the Prodigal Son is more complex still. The fear that Adam will leave the family is expressed by both his mother and his brother, and he makes an attempt to leave at the beginning of the novel, driven out by his exasperation with his father’s drinking. Guilt forces his return, although his resentment towards his father fixes his attitude to all others who fail. However, he undergoes a transformation very similar to that described by the father in the parable, from lostness to foundness, death to life, in his regeneration as a person with sympathy for the afflicted, in response to Hetty’s trial for child-murder. Unexpected external forces drive him to new understandings about himself and others. His marriage to Dinah completes the integration of innovation and tradition personified by ‘home’ in which he has empathy for others and is able to accept that which is beyond his control. In that relationship, Dinah takes on the role of the watchful parent, always looking out for his return. In the novel, the bonds of love and duty are worked out through free will and individual decision in response to experience of the world, rather than obedience to parental will or

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adherence to religious conviction. This is a position which is congruent with George Eliot’s philosophy of life. Mrs Gaskell writes from a very different perspective, informed by Unitarianism. In Gaskell’s North and South, Margaret is paradigmatically and specifically associated with the older brother in the parable. In her dutiful care of her dying mother, Margaret assumes ‘the spirit of the Elder Brother’5 and a contrast is made between her and her absent brother Frederick, who is the child favoured and idolized by her mother and their servant. Frederick returns home briefly but his character as well as circumstances mean he cannot stay. Margaret is the character who finds a way to adapt to and thrive in her new situation, in the industrial north, coming to a new understanding about herself, her place in the family, and the world of work which her suitor represents. In doing so, she inhabits and redeems the role of the older, stay-at-home brother. A further contrast is made between Margaret’s mother, anxious about the strength of the bond between them, and John Thornton’s mother, unnaturally protective, even idolatrous, of her son. Reconciliation through shared suffering marks Margaret’s mature relationship with her mother; Thornton meanwhile must reject his mother’s hold over him in order to marry the woman he loves. He must become the Prodigal Son in order to grow up and make a home for himself. Growing up for both means taking responsibility for themselves in the wider society of which they are a part, within a framework which is informed by a similar religious world view of social justice and personal responsibility to that held by Gaskell. And so, in each of the novels considered, the paradigm of the Prodigal Son is exegeted in a way which reflects the religious and ethical stance of their writers about what home and being at home means. The American short story tradition is wide ranging and diffuse, but it is striking how often the Prodigal Son is alluded to directly or indirectly within it. An element from the Elizabethan Prodigal Son literary tradition is developed and amplified in a new context here: the breaking away from the figure of authority representing ‘home’. In the American short story tradition exemplified by Thomas Wolfe’s duo of

5

Margaret Gaskell, North and South (London: Penguin, ), p. .

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stories under the title ‘The Return of the Prodigal’, the younger son is so changed by his experiences in exile that his return home is troubled or even impossible. Some stories, such as Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’, raise the question of what would have happened had the Prodigal Son stayed: how profoundly different things would have been, and not necessarily in a positive way. In others, such as Hamlin Garland’s ‘Up the Coolly’, the plight of the elder brother highlights the positive effect of leaving on the younger. The relationships within these families are complex, and moral certainty about the actions taken, even when they follow the paradigm, is not assured. The focus and narrative resolution generally belong firmly to the younger son rather than to the father in these stories, which marks a shift in understanding from the earlier Prodigal Son texts (and the parable itself ), in which the father has the last word. Also notable in some stories at least is a narrative stance which is detached and sceptical about the attempts of characters to align themselves within the Prodigal Son paradigm, even when they claim to do so. Bret Harte’s ‘Mr Thompson’s Prodigal’ is a good example of this. Conclusions may be drawn both about the role of the parable in the form of these stories, and about its fluid attractiveness to the American context in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First, the parable offers a shared narrative which sets up expectations and the possibility of surprise and deviation from those expectations in an economical way. The short story, like the parable, is well suited to focusing on the movement from rebellion to return and acceptance, without the need for subplots. Including the scene with the older brother, as several of these short stories do, leaves resolution characteristically open-ended. Second, as Susan Manning had observed with regard to Washington Irving, a common motif in American literature is the figure of ‘the son [who] yearns again and again to identify with an idealized father/ fatherland, a “good past”, only to find himself held at arms’ length as often as he seeks the embrace’.6 The urge to leave is not questioned, but the possibility of return is problematic. The history of the birth of the American nation, its ongoing relationship with its colonial past, an idolizing of personal independence, and the pursuit of individual 6

Susan Manning, Introduction to The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., ed. Susan Manning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), p. viii.

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happiness and fortune, potentially at the expense of family tradition, as well as a distinctively American Protestant search for personal redemption, might all play into this fascination with the parable of the Prodigal Son. It is a fascination which is fraught with potential disappointment and lack of fulfilment, acknowledged even as it is indulged. The three novels considered in Chapter  ( J. G. Lockhart’s Adam Blair (), James Robertson’s The Testament of Gideon Mack (), and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead ()) span an even wider timeframe than the works in Chapter . Their relationship to the parable of the Prodigal Son is through their central, ordained characters, who share a focus on the parable’s repeated emphasis on being lost and found. In their parishes, ministers might be expected to represent and preach the forgiving love of the father, while maintaining a spiritual home for believers, in the manner of the elder son if not in his spirit. They are called to welcome home the Prodigal Sons from among their flocks. In each novel, however, the minister who is the central character becomes a Prodigal Son, and is lost in some way to himself or others before being found and brought home, in a spiritual, emotional, or physical sense. For both Gideon Mack and John Ames, home is a troubled concept. Both undergo an experience of being lost: in Mack’s case, this is a physical experience which nearly kills him, in his fall into the Black Jaws and subsequent experience with a mysterious stranger he assumes is the devil; in Ames’s case, this is a longer, more diffuse set of mental and spiritual experiences following the death of his first wife, his father’s loss of faith, and later involving his failure to relate to his godson. For most of the novel, Ames resists identification with the Prodigal Son, however, and accepts the role of the older brother. In Adam Blair, the minister leaves his home for a night of passion with a woman who is not his wife: this leads to a profound personal sense of all that he has lost, and a conviction that he himself is lost to his old life and to God. From this position of lostness, each finds a different path towards home and being found. In Ames’s case, his experience of the love of others and of God’s love mediated through others leads to a new understanding of himself as the Prodigal Son rather than the older brother, and thus of homecoming to himself and to God. His proximity to his death, and his reflections on his final homecoming, promote the novel as a universal and theological exploration of the parable, perhaps

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The Prodigal Son

even an apologetic one. It is certainly a contrast to the understanding of homecoming which the American short story tradition had presented. For Adam Blair, his congregation assumes the role of the father in the parable, and actively reaches out to him to extend the forgiveness and acceptance he scarcely realizes he needs or is worthy of. The novel may be read as an exploration of what it means to be found in a biblical and theological, specifically Calvinist, sense. Gideon Mack’s experience of the Church is rather different, although the character of fellow minister Lorna Sprott offers the potential for return. However, Mack’s descent into the perceived world of the devil and his limited but attractive nihilism offers a bleak perspective on what it means to be lost in the contemporary world, with no sense of a divine presence underwriting the parable’s message of hope. These literary ministers set the paradigm in an ecclesial setting, but offer very different perspectives on where taking the parable seriously in public ministry might lead, depending on what ‘home’ means to them. In the poetry of Iain Crichton Smith and Elizabeth Bishop, home has shifted from being a place to be longed for, to a place which must be left behind. Both offer poems which refer directly to the Prodigal Son, and Prodigal Son themes echo in other poems too, specifically one from each poet from the perspective of Robinson Crusoe. For Bishop, the significance of ‘home’ shifts ambivalently through her work. In ‘The Prodigal’, the pig-sty of the speaker’s exile is both horrific and warmly familiar, and it is a struggle to decide to leave it for an unspecified and unrealized home. In place of theological reflection there is the psychological ache of human homelessness caused by addiction. In later poems, such as ‘Crusoe in England’, being at home after time away is a disappointing reflection of what had been hoped and longed for. The need for home is questioned using the language of lost faith. For Smith there is less ambivalence about where and who constitutes home, but no less of a struggle to come to terms with the need to leave its constraints. One of his two Prodigal Son poems, ‘“All day”, he said, “I’ve been trying to write a play” ’, imagines the possible outcomes of the return of the Prodigal, and the positive ending of the parable is not offered as a possibility. The particular of a return to the family is replaced by the universal welcome of the environment, although the parable offers the language needed to speak of such things. In the other

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Conclusion



Prodigal Son poem, ‘Under the stars of grief ’, the speaker considers the restrictions of home from the perspective of exile and finds wonder in the place of new beginnings. Smith’s poem ‘The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe’ reflects from a similar place of exile on the possibility of constructing a literary ‘I’ without reference to his past, and seems to accept that as a poet he cannot go home, but nor can he escape its influence upon him. In the work of these twentieth-century poets from very different contexts, the Prodigal Son and his moment of decision to return home are explored from multiple angles. The deliberate introduction of the language and themes of Luke  in these poems in startling and provocative settings undermines any easy identification with the usual interpretations of the parable. Referring to the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, like him no longer a believer, Colm Tóibín comments that ‘when faith disappears . . . then the language of transcendence can have a special power because it evokes something that was once familiar, once possible, and is now lost’.7 The use of the language of the parable here reflects this power but also highlights the sense of loss, both of faith and the possibility of home which the parable presents. Conclusion Felix Dennis had urged, ‘Never go back. | Never return to the haunts of your youth.’8 It is advice that was not heeded by the Prodigal Son, or by the many poets, playwrights, and novelists who have returned to the language of the parable, sometimes literally the language of their youth but not their maturity, and found there a way to express something significant. Themes which have resonated in this literature have been those of rebellion punished; the journey to adulthood; the longing for and impossibility of return; and what it means to be lost and found from perspectives of faith and unbelief. Homecoming is perhaps the overarching theme which connects all the others. It has been argued here that this literature may be read as creative exegesis of the biblical text, reflecting the concerns around homecoming of the time and the 7 Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ), p. . 8 Dennis, A Glass Half Full, p. .

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The Prodigal Son

author. On occasion, the author may self-identify with the figure of the Prodigal Son, self-consciously seeking to resolve similar issues through the sharing of the positive narrative direction of the parable, at least up until the arrival of the elder brother. Alternatively, the literature may stop at a particular point in the story, and offer variations on the positive trajectory it takes. Or else it may just stop in the place of exile and go no further, finding the hope of a forgiving welcome home too difficult to imagine, because ‘No-one is waiting and nothing is there.’9 To read literature as exegesis is to assume some insight into the perspective of the author, which is not always justifiable or even illuminating. However, the power of the language such writers use remains. Tóibín continues his reflection on ‘faithless’ language and the power of its evocation of the lost past in Bishop’s poetry: A sort of homecoming is enacted by allowing the image to transform itself, free itself from the shackles of the concrete, the positive, the world of things, and move like a boat sent to rescue someone, into an uneasy, shimmering, almost philosophical, almost religious space, using words with both freedom and restraint, suggesting something that has not been formulated or imagined by anyone before.10

The experience of loss and a yearning for homecoming are at the heart of the parable and of much of the literature which relates to it and shares its language and concerns. Sometimes these concerns sit within a world of belief and relate to a hope in a transcendent power; sometimes they do not. Nevertheless, a ‘sort of homecoming’ is shared between text and reader when the Prodigal Son is recognized in a new literary context, and that which might have been lost is found.

9

Dennis, A Glass Half Full, p. .

10

Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop, p. .

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Index

The Prodigal Son in English and American Literature: Index topics Abrams, M. H. 17 Acts, Book of 75 Albee, Edward 19, 21, 23 Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? 19, 21, 23 Alter, Robert 95 Anderson, Linda 140 fn 5, 151–2 Anon: Interlude of Youth 32 Nice Wanton 32 Pater, Filius and Uxor, or The Prodigal Son 32 The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth 55 The London Prodigal 33 Augustine 6, 24 Bakhtin, Mikhail 14–15 Bale, John 28 Barker, Ilse 146 fn 18 Barton, Bernard 139 Beck, Ervin 27, 31–4, 37, 45, 47, 55 Bible translations Authorised Version 1 fn 1, 4 fn 8, 51, 53, 54, 95 Bishops’ 52–3, 54 Coverdale 52 Douay-Rheims 53, 54 Geneva 1 fn 1, 52, 53–4 Great Bible 52, 53 King James Version see Authorised Version Matthew’s 52 New Revised Standard Version 4 fn 8 Tyndale 52, 53 Wycliffe 52 Bishop, Elizabeth 3, 138–42, 144–6, 149–52, 154, 164, 165, 166 A Cold Spring 139, 145 fn 17 ‘Crusoe in England’ 149–50, 152, 164 ‘In the Waiting Room’ 150

‘Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance’ 145 Questions of Travel 140 ‘Questions of Travel’ 140–1 ‘The Prodigal’ 139, 141–2, 145–6, 150–2, 154 Bloch, Ernst 26 Bly, Robert 139 Brontë, Jane 71 Jane Eyre 71 Brown, George Mackay 2 Calvin, John 15, 122, 125 Calvinism 122, 125, 130, 136, 136 fn 65, 138, 146, 164 Campbell, Ian 136 fn 65 Cather, Willa 112–15 ‘Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament’ 112–15 Chapman, G., Jonson, B., and Marston, J. 32 Eastward Ho 32 Chaucer, Geoffrey 27, 36 The Parson’s Tale 27 Christ 50, 65, 73, 76, 77, 107, 127 Chrysostom, John 7 Clement of Alexandria 6 II Corinthians, Epistle to 48, 65 Coté, Amy 79–80 Cromwell, Thomas 28, 51–2 Crossan, J. D. 17, 17 fn 33 Defoe, Daniel 96, 149 Robinson Crusoe 96, 139, 149–53, 154, 164 Dennis, Felix 155, 165 Derrett, J. Duncan M. 17 Dishonest manager, parable of see Parable Dives and Lazarus, parable of see Parable Dowd, Michelle M. 48, 60

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Index

Edward VI 52 Eliot, George 3, 69–70, 71–4, 80, 82–7, 92, 160–1 Adam Bede 69–70, 71–4, 82–7, 90, 160–1 The Mill on the Floss 82–3, 97 fn 11 Elizabeth I 35, 51, 52–3 Ephesians, Epistle to 31 Erasmus 28–9, 39–40 Euphues see also Lyly, John; and The Anatomy of Wit 28–9, 30, 34, 40–1, 58, 97–8, 112, 117 Exodus, Book of 81 Fliegelman, Jay 96 Galt, John 121 The Annals of the Parish 121 Garland, Hamlon 104–5, 162 Main Travelled Roads 104 ‘Up the Coolly’ 104–5, 162 Gascoigne, George 34, 37–40, 44 A Hundred Sundry Flowers 37–8 The Glass of Government 37–40 Gaskell, Elizabeth 3, 70, 74–80, 87–90, 92, 160–1 Mary Barton 77, 80 North and South 70, 74–80, 82, 87–90, 160–1 Genesis, Book of 48, 81, 86, 153 Gifford, Douglas 136 fn 65 Gnapheus 29 Acolastus 29–32, 38, 41 God 6, 7–9, 10–12, 17, 27, 38, 39, 50, 60, 63, 64, 67, 73, 82, 83 fn 42, 89, 96, 108–9, 111, 123, 125, 126–8, 129–30, 135–6, 137, 147, 157, 158, 163 Godspell 16, 16 fn 30 Gow, Carol 142 fn 9, 150, 153–4 Gowler, David B. 6–7, 14–17 Greene, Robert 34, 42–5, 47, 158 Card of Fancy 42–3 Mamillia: A Mirror or Looking Glass for the Ladies of England 42 Mourning Garment 44–5, 47, 158 Pandosto 43–4 Groves, Beatrice 50–1

Hadomi, Leah 3 fn 6, 16–20, 23, 26 fn 50, 93 Hamlin, Hannibal 26 fn 49, 51 fn 9, 59, 61, 67 fn 24 Happé, Peter 28 Harrison, Linda 141, 150 Harte, Bret 94, 102–4, 114, 162 ‘Mr Thompson’s Prodigal’ 102–4, 114, 162 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 94 Henry VIII 28 Helgerson, Richard 34–46, 47, 158 fn 3 Herzog, W.R. II 147 Heywood, Thomas 32 If You Know Not Me 48 The Wise Woman of Hogsdon 32 Hogg, James 120, 122–3, 132 fn 42, 133 The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner 120, 122–3, 132 fn 42, 133 Horbury, Ezra 1 fn 1 Ignatow, David 139 Ingelend, Thomas 31 The Disobedient Child 31 Irving, Washington 94–5, 97–100, 112, 117, 162 The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent 94–5, 97–100, 112, 117 ‘The Spectre Bridegroom’ 94, 98–100 Jack, Alison M. 6, 80 fn 33, 82 fn 39, 106 fn 34, 130 fn 33 James, Henry 94, 95, 105–12, 113, 162 ‘The Jolly Corner’ 95, 105–12, 162 The Turn of the Screw 106 Jerome 1, 6 Jesus Seminar 12 Job, Book of 67 Joel, Book of 75 Johnson, James Weldon 16 Jones, Geraint Vaughn 14 fn 25 Jülicher, Adolf 9 Kearful, Frank J. 144 fn 14, 146 fn 18 Kipling, Rudyard 139 LaPorte, Charles 73 fn 10 Levine, Amy-Jill 1 fn 2, 5 fn 9, 11

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/9/2018, SPi

Index Lockhart, J. G. 120–2, 123, 133–7, 154, 163 Adam Blair 120–2, 123, 133–7, 154, 163 Lost coin, parable of see Parable Lost sheep, parable of see Parable Luke, Gospel of 1, 4, 10, 12–14, 34, 48, 54, 65, 71, 76, 83, 85, 105, 108, 109, 156, 165 Lyly, John see also Euphues 30, 34, 40–1, 58, 97, 117 The Anatomy of Wit 40–1 McDonagh, Josephine 87 McGuire, Matt 139 fn 3, 146–7 MacNeice, Louis 139 Manning, Susan 95, 97, 117, 162 Mark, Gospel of 7, 81 Marks, Clifford J. 71, 73–4 Mary I 52 Marx, Stephen 54, 67 fn 24 Matthew, Gospel of 71, 81, 107, 127 Methodism 71 fn 4 Middleton, Thomas 33 A Trick to Catch the Old One 33 A Mad World 33 midrash 54–5, 59, 62, 64, 66 Miller, Arthur 19, 23 Death of a Salesman 19, 23 Milward, Peter 47, 64 ministers 3, 7, 38, 119–37, 156, 163–4 Nesbit, E. 139 O’Neill, Eugene 18, 21, 23, 24 Long Day’s Journey into Night 18, 21 The Iceman Cometh 23 Oliphant, Margaret 3, 70–1, 80–2, 90–2, 154, 160 Kirsteen 3, 70–1, 80–2, 90–2, 154, 160 Painter, Rebecca F. 125–6, 129, 137 parable: as allegory 6–7, 14, 95 as metaphor 10, 95 as metonym 12, 14, 19, 51 as simile 9–10 of Dives and Lazarus 75–8 of the Dishonest manager 5 fn 9 of the Lost coin 4

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of the Lost sheep 4, 13, 71, 105 of the Prodigal Son see Prodigal Son of the Rich fool 5 fn 9, 13 of the Sower 7 of the Unjust judge 5 fn 9 of the Unjust steward 13 of the Wise and foolish virgins 107 Parsons, Mikeal C. 3 fn 5 Pharisees 4, 13, 14 pigs 4, 22, 30, 44, 49, 53, 65, 158 Poe, Edgar Allan 94, 95, 100–2 ‘Thou art the Man’ 100–2 Prodigal Son, parable of allegorical readings of 6–7, 7–9, 13, 21, 40 fn 21, 65, 95 and the American Short story tradition 3, 93–118, 119, 124, 137, 138, 149, 154, 156, 161–2, 164 calf, fatted in 34, 44, 59, 60, 98, 109, 158 as Christ figure 50 and death 13–14, 18, 19, 20, 21, 66, 76, 83, 100, 123, 124, 128, 133, 135–6, 157, 160, 163 in Elizabethan literature 3, 27–46, 56, 155, 161 exile in 88, 90, 91, 92, 96, 115, 136 fn 65, 141–4, 146–8, 150–2, 154, 162, 164–6 far country in 8, 13, 83, 91, 108, 114, 117, 124, 128, 129, 134 father in 1, 2 fn 3, 4–5, 6, 7, 10–12, 13, 16 fn 30, 17, 18, 19, 20–2, 24, 27, 28–30, 32–4, 36, 44, 46, 55, 56, 57, 59–61, 62, 63–4, 65–7, 78–9, 83–6, 83 fn 42, 88–9, 91–2, 95–6, 99–100, 101–2, 103–4, 108–10, 111, 114, 116–17, 119, 122, 123, 125–6, 125 fn 14, 126–32, 136–7, 140, 147–9, 157, 159, 160, 162, 163–4 and forgiveness 13, 18, 20, 32, 34, 44, 61, 66, 104, 122, 126, 135, 147–9, 152, 154, 157, 158, 164 and foundness 3, 4–5, 13, 18, 65, 85, 90, 119–20, 123–4, 128, 130, 131–6, 137, 160, 163–5 God in 6, 7–9, 10–12, 17, 27, 67, 83 fn 42, 96, 108–9, 111, 126–8, 129–30, 135–6, 137, 147, 163

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 26/9/2018, SPi

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Index

Prodigal Son, parable of (cont.) the Gospel in 12–14, 61 harlots in see prostitutes in Hebrew Bible, relationship to 10, 101 homecoming in 2–3, 19, 25, 28, 34, 46–7, 57, 61, 63, 66, 67, 69, 74, 80, 92, 104, 106, 107, 115, 117, 119, 124, 130, 134, 135, 137, 138, 140, 144, 145, 152, 154, 155, 156, 160, 163–6 and justice 10, 12, 46, 101, 129, 161 and justification 28, 29, 96–7, 149 and the kingdom of God 10, 11 and life 5, 13, 18, 19, 22, 36, 37, 41, 45, 78, 83, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 98, 100, 101, 105, 106, 108–10, 113–14, 116, 118, 123–4, 128–9, 132–3, 147, 159–60, 163 as literary paradigm 3, 20, 23–5, 27, 34–7, 44–5, 48, 67, 69, 80, 83, 92, 93, 100, 139, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164 and lostness 2 fn 3, 4, 5, 8, 13–14, 27, 33, 38, 62, 65, 71, 72–3, 83 fn 42, 85, 99, 103, 105, 119–20, 123–4, 128, 130, 131–6, 137, 148–9, 160, 163–6 and mercy 13, 19, 27, 72, 85, 122, 126, 135 metaphorical readings of 10, 24, 25, 50, 95, 131 mother in 5, 17, 19, 23, 83–4, 86, 88–9, 90, 104, 113, 115–16, 124, 132, 133, 142, 153, 160–1 older brother in 3 fn 5, 5, 6–7, 8, 10–12, 13, 16, 22, 30, 34, 39, 44, 46, 62, 64, 70, 79, 87, 88, 90–1, 96, 103, 105, 108, 110, 113, 114, 117, 119, 125–6, 129–30, 134, 136, 140, 157, 158, 161–2, 163, 166 older son in see older brother in and perishing see and death and potential 21–4, 114, 142, 163–4 preaching on 7–9, 14, 27, 137, 157 prostitutes in 13, 45, 49, 103, 108, 134–5 in Rabbinic tradition see also midrash 11, 54–5 and rebellion 2, 21, 30–4, 36–7, 39–40, 41–4, 45, 46–8, 49, 57, 59,

61–4, 66, 87, 89, 90, 95–6, 102, 104, 107, 122, 128, 139, 157–9, 162, 165 reception history of 3 fn 6, 4, 12, 14–17, 25, 156 and reconciliation 11–12, 16, 31, 100, 108, 122, 125, 159, 161 and rejoicing 13, 30, 42, 96, 99, 100, 129, 135 and repentance 7, 10, 13, 14, 30–2, 33–7, 39–42, 44–6, 62–3, 85, 108, 122, 131, 134–5, 152, 154, 157–9 riotous living in 29, 31, 32, 41, 65, 78, 157 and Roman comedies 28–30, 31, 33 and rupture 18, 21–3 servant in 5, 87–8, 91, 108, 161 in Shakespeare 3, 27, 32–3, 37, 45, 47–68, 69, 156, 159 as simile 9–10, 49, 78–9 and sin 7, 8, 13, 17–18, 22–3, 42, 45, 80, 90, 121, 135 and travel 35, 41, 42, 48, 98, 113–14, 141, 145 in twentieth-century American drama 17–25, 93, 156 in Victorian novels 3, 69–92, 156, 160–1 younger brother in see also younker 1 fn 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 16, 25, 39, 49, 50, 64, 82, 88, 107, 109–11, 126, 130, 136, 140, 157, 162 younger son in see younger brother in prodigality 1 fn 1, 20, 23, 25, 34, 40, 48, 60 Proehl, Geoffrey S. 3 fn 6, 16–17, 20–4, 93–4 Psalms 48, 51, 52, 53 Pseudo-Jerome 7 Rembrandt 16 fn 31 resurrection 59, 63, 65, 86, 107 Revelation, Book of 17, 75 Rich fool, parable of see Parable Robertson, James 120, 122–4, 126–8, 136–7, 154, 163 The Testament of Gideon Mack 120, 122–4, 126–8, 131–3, 136–7, 154, 163 Robinson, Marilynne 120, 124–6, 136–7, 138, 154, 163

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 29/9/2018, SPi

Index Gilead 120, 124–6, 128–31, 136–7, 138, 154, 163 Home 125, 137 Lila 137 Rohrbaugh, Richard L. 10–12 Rosenblatt, Jason P. 106–7, 110 Rossetti, Christina 139 Ryken, Leland 2 fn 5 Samuel, Book of 101 Scofield, Martin 95 fn 5, 118 Scott, Bernard Brandon 10, 12 fn 23 Shaheen, Naseeb 53 Shakespeare, William 3, 27, 32, 33, 37, 45, 47–68, 69, 156, 159 All’s Well that Ends Well 47 As You Like It 49, 54, 65 Bible translation in 50–4 Henry IV Part 1 32, 47, 48, 53, 55–64, 66, 159 Henry IV Part 2 32, 47, 50, 55, 56, 57, 58, 63–4 Henry V 55, 64 King Lear 47, 64–7, 67–8, 69, 159 Richard II 55, 56 The Comedy of Errors 48 The Merchant of Venice 49 The Merry Wives of Windsor 50 The Taming of the Shrew 32, 47 The Tempest 47 The Two Gentlemen of Verona 33, 47, 49 Shell, Alison 54 fn 13, 67 Siebald, Manfred 2–3 fn 5, 93, 139 fn 1 Singleton, Jon 77, 80 fn 32 Smart, Christopher 139 Smith, Iain Crichton 3, 138–40, 142–4, 146–9, 149–50, 152–4, 164–5 ‘An American Sky’ 142 fn 9 ‘Between Sea and Moor’ 143 ‘Highland Sunday’ 146 ‘Poem of Lewis’ 146–7 ‘Real People in a Real Place’ 143, 146–7 The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe and Other Poems 139 ‘The Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe’ 150, 152–4, 165 The Permanent Island 139

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‘The Prodigal Son: “All day”, he said, “I’ve been trying to write a play” ’ 139, 143–4, 150, 152, 164 ‘The Prodigal Son: Under the stars of grief ’ 139, 143, 147–8, 165 ‘There is no Sorrow’ 148 Snodgrass, Klyne 2 fn 3, 4, 12, 14 fn 25, 16, 25, 76 fn 20 Snyder, Susan 65 fn 23, 67 Sower, Parable of see Parable Stevenson, Anne 139, 140 fn 5, 141, 150 swine see pigs Terence 27, 29–30, 35, 36, 40 Tertullian 6 Thielicke, Helmut 2 fn 3 Thompson, Terry W. 106 Tillyard, E. M. W. 56 Tissot, Yves 6 Tóibín, Colm 150, 165–6 Travisano, Thomas J. 144–5 typology 54–5, 56, 63–4, 66 Udall, Nicholas 40 Unitarianism 74, 80, 161 Unjust judge, parable of see Parable Unjust steward, parable of see Parable Updike, John 118 Vance, Norman 73 fn 10, 74 Volder, Willem de see Gnapheus Whetstone, George 36–7 The Rocke of Regard 36–7 Wilbur, Richard 144 Williams, Tennessee 23 A Streetcar Named Desire 23 Wilson, John Dover 28–30, 56 Witten, Marsha G. 7–9 Wolfe, Thomas 112–17, 161–2 ‘The Real Thing’ 115–17 ‘The Return of the Prodigal’ 115–17, 161–2 ‘The Thing Imagined’ 115, 117 Wright, Stephen I. 9–14 Yachnin, Paul 63–4 younker 37, 49 Zacchaeus 13