Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 1999 by Maurice Lee

When Zora reflects on her impure past, she asks, "'He's a fair God, ain't He?'" And Bles replies," 'Yes - He's fair, He wouldn't take advantage of a little girl that did wrong, when she didn't know it was wrong'" (95). Young Bles, like Cotton, factors knowledge into his definition of sin, but after learning the truth about Zora, he cannot (until later) support her:

"You - you told me - you were - pure ...."

"But, Bles - you said - willingly - you said - if - if she knew - "

He thundered back in livid anger: "Knew! All women know!" (169-70)

Bles is no John Cotton figure, anymore than is John Taylor. But Du Bois reenacts a simplified version of the Cotton/Williams debate, and he sides - after citing the appropriate texts - with Cotton's version of sin. Indeed, just as Williams accused his opponent of eliding human depravity, Du Bois argues that no person (or people) is inherently irredeemable - an answer to the (not wholly unrelated) fatalism of Calvin and Dreiser, as well as a rebuttal of Bible-based racism that survived the Civil War in only slightly altered form.

Cotton proves useful to Du Bois in this sense, but his politics are not always exemplary. Behind Cotton's lengthy debate with Williams, and lurking in both The Bloudy Tenet Washed and The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared, is the legacy of the Antinomian Controversy and Cotton's infamous pupil Anne Hutchinson. By privileging individual conscience, Cotton subordinated the authority of law to the ecstasy of the spirit. But when Hutchinson claimed an "immediate revelation" and began to preach herself (Antinomian 337), she offered a grace unbounded by law - a grace outside church and state hierarchy that Cotton could not (or did not) support. Du Bois does not enter this complex debate through a seventeenth-century text, but he offers another view of Hutchinson with a specific book - indeed, a novel - in mind.

Fifteen miles from Great Barrington, Massachusetts, is a house called "The Scarlet Letter," named by Hawthorne after his first major novel, and the site where he wrote The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Du Bois's proximity to Hawthorne's home, his extensive reading and intellectual breadth, Hawthorne's prominence in American letters at the turn of the nineteenth century - all suggest that The Scarlet Letter (1850) may be a pre-text for The Silver Fleece, a claim strengthened by Du Bois's allusions to Cotton, because Hawthorne created Hester Prynne with Anne Hutchinson as a model.(7) Zora, in turn, follows Hester s footsteps, and though (like most) Du Bois may lack Hawthorne's allegorical zeal, he does refashion the Antinomian Controversy and the politics of The Scarlet Letter. Du Bois first conflates Hester and Pearl in his own fallen protagonist. Zora is an "elf-girl" (15), Pearl an "elfish child" (88). Zora's "birdlike laughter" (45) echoes Pearl's "bird-like voice" (83). Both girls are mystical daughters of sin; both are pagan, passionate children. Both represent untutored goodness and befuddle their betters with innocent questions. They do, that is, until Zora grows up and turns into Hester Prynne. When Zora first enters Sarah Smith's school, she stands on the "threshold" in a "scarlet gown" (53) made in "the mills in New England" (50). Compare this scene to our first view of Hester on the "threshold" of the prison-door (48). Hester is "haughty" (49), just as Zora stares "defiantly" (53). Both women are dark and beautiful. Both stand before reproachful eyes in blazing scarlet cloth. Moreover, when Zora embroiders the Fleece, she "wilfully... sewed into the cloth something of the beauty in her heart" (227). Hester, too, is a wilful artist, and there is "'not a stitch in [her] embroidered letter, but she had felt it in her heart'" (50). Most importantly, perhaps, Hester is allowed to "work out another purity than that which she had lost" (73), just as Zora re-makes herself" 'more than pure'" by laboring in the swamp (433).