Under the Sign of Donne - John Donne - Critical Essay

(47.) Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1946), 97. Donne, 28 March 1619, in Sermons, vol. 2, 197.

(48.) Vikram Seth, An Equal Music (New York: Broadway Books, 1999).

(49.) John Updike, Bech at Bay (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1998), 158.

(50.) John Updike, "The Future of Faith," The New Yorker (Nov. 29, 1999): 91.

(51.) Another novel that works through this harrowing, although in more straightforward terms, is Gaff Godwin's Father Melancholy's Daughter (New York: William Morrow, 1991). It is in some considerable measure imagined through Donne as well as Vaughan, making particular use of "Good Friday 1613: Riding Westward" and "The Crosse" in its portrait of an Episcopalian minister, Father Gower, and his daughter who "would like to be a writer and a priest" (402; she is moving incrementally, not unlike Donne himself, toward taking holy orders). The novel is both family romance and a revisiting of the Donne dilemmas of self-interest/selflessness, self-doubt/conviction (one senses the Divine Poems and the two Anniversaries as silent witnesses), as it traces the progress of the soul in its quest to burn off its rust and its deformities. Interestingly, though, little that is essential is changed here. This is seventeenth-century Donne alive and well in late twentieth-century Virginia.

(52.) Dayton Haskin, "When Performance Is at Odds with Narrative: The Designated Mourner as Wallace Shawn's Wager on John Donne," Narrative 8 (2000): 182-209.

(53.) Margaret Edson, Wit (New York: Faber and Faber, 1999), 76.

(54.) Marsden Hartley, The Collected Poems, ed. Gail R. Scott (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1987), 311.

JUDITH SCHERER HERZ
Concordia University

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