Harold Frederic's Satanic Soulsby: Interpretation and Sources

Abstract

EOUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE NATURE of Theron Ware's transformation in The Damnation of Theron Ware remains clouded. While literary historians have tended to read the novel in light of functional precepts of society and human psychology that define American literary realism, a lesser number of critics continue to emphasize the moral ambiguities and judgmental sense of the novel which dissuade such classification. New clarity and a more confidently moralistic interpretation of The Damnation are available to the reader who will focus on what first appears a figure of secondary importance: Sister Candace Soulsby. Her presence pervades the novel with a thematic significance disproportionate to her number of actual appearances. She insinuates and motivates the crucial actions of Theron Ware, and in so doing draws upon herself, and Theron, the most coherent judgments we may be able to find in this designedly ambiguous and problematic novel. To a systematic examination, Sister Soulsby reveals herself the agent of a damnation that has moral as well as social reality. Since Paul Haines's thesis on Harold Frederic in 1945, The Damnation of Theron Ware has been called, in turn, comic realism, tragic irony, and stern moral drama. Haines's decision that Frederic was nominalist, empirical, and opportunist has been refined by such later commentators as John Henry Raleigh, Ralph R. Rogers, Thomas F. O'Donnell and Hoyt Franchere. This view, with its