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

Maurice Lee

When writing about a canonical figure, one hopes for a measure of interest. And when writing about a novel by a canonical figure, one might almost assume a willing audience. Even further still, when the novel at hand engages with subtlety the issue of race, it would be a surprise not to encounter an abundance of critical work about that text. But though the presence of Du Bois in literary journals no longer requires justification, and though valuable scholarship has recently treated the question of Du Bois and other minds, we pay his novels scant attention, despite our current occupation with racial politics, intellectual influence, and popular narrative form. Perhaps Du Bois the novelist must wait his turn behind Du Bois the philosopher, historian, and editor. Perhaps The Souls of Black Folk (1903) demands the spot allotted to Du Bois on syllabi. But what if the truth is altogether less decorous: What if his novels are not very good? Or, in this time of uncertain aesthetics, what if his novels do not speak to our concerns?

Du Bois's first novelistic effort, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), is largely regarded as a failure. The novel, we are told, "suffers" generic confusion (Rampersad 127). Its "contradictory" musings are intellectually lax (Kostelanetz 175). Its politics are finally "problematic," though Du Bois's progressive intentions are clear (Byerman 128). This article will argue the contrary: that Du Bois's mediation of romance and realism is skillful and strategic; that The Quest of the Silver Fleece engages and challenges major American texts; that, with careful, even subversive, attention to issues of language and form, Du Bois appropriates novelistic discourse for his own artistic and political ends. In short, The Silver Fleece is immensely interesting, not only because it suggests new ways to read Du Bois's work, but also because it reveals a very literary figure critics have yet to acknowledge - a serious novelist with ambitious designs for the United States and its literatures.

Summarizing The Quest of the Silver Fleece is no insignificant task. Set in Tooms County, Alabama, but with visits to Washington, D.C., and New York, the narrative traces the love and labor of Bles Alwyn and Zora, the "child of the swamp" (44). Quickly, however, subplots emerge. A double-marriage between pairs of siblings ties the Southern, aristocratic Cresswells to the Northern, industrialist Taylors. Bles travels north and becomes embroiled in political elections and appointments. Back in Tooms, the yankee Sarah Smith fights to maintain her free school, while the Cresswells and Taylors jointly run an exploitative cotton mill. Through it all, Zora seeks "The Way" to romantic love, spiritual rebirth, and the redemption of her people. Time and again, we return to "The Fleece" - a cotton crop of symbolic import that Zora raises in the swamp. Scholars generally agree that this wide-ranging plot yanks the story between romance and realism, yet no one has detailed how Du Bois plays with genre - how he uses contemporary literary conventions to oppose conventional views of race.

Du Bois wrote a draft of The Silver Fleece between 1904 and 1906, not long after The Souls of Black Folk's remarkable experiment in form. Such experimentation continues in The Quest of the Silver Fleece: Whether we call it signifyin' or a deformation of mastery, Du Bois subverts novelistic tradition and its politics at the turn of the century. That is, by resisting the very tropes Du Bois ostensibly adopts, he escapes the bounds of romance and realism to wage battles on grounds of his own.

Most critics no longer agree with Richard Chase, but some still believe in genre. And though Hawthorne, James, and Thomas Dixon all wrote what they called "romances," we still insist on their obvious differences, even while admitting that Dreiser and Norris share a somewhat similar "romantic" urge.(1) As I see it, this puzzle is not one to be solved. Texts are unstable; terminology slides; and authors violate critical taxonomies, just as critics are quick to embarrass authors who shirk professed formal dicta. The game of genre remains open-ended. But by defining realism - and subsuming naturalism - in the context of late-industrial capitalism, recent work invokes the social forces of class instability, ethnic anxiety, changing notions of value, unfamiliar urban space, and the centralization of power.(2) Nonetheless, these distinctions blur and cross in sectional, racialized narratives, or as James wrote in 1907 in his preface to The American: "It is as difficult ... to trace the dividing-line between the real and the romantic as to plant a milestone between north and south" (13). If there is, as Eric Sundquist argues, a "country of American romance" ("Country" 3), and if the city is the place for realism, then what do we make of a story set in New York, Washington, and Tooms? Indeed, what do we make of the many novels in which Northern city folk and unreconstructed Southerners come together to talk about race? And can generic definitions based on cultural experience apply equally to disparate groups? Other scholars voice similar concerns (see Ammons, Kaplan, and Jameson), and while admitting the explanatory power of genre, I still maintain this sense: Whether in Howells's time, Chase's day, or our own postmodern instance, the romance versus realism debate seems most fruitful for the "old canon" - an opinion Du Bois himself suggests by confounding such distinctions.

As Arnold Rampersad best shows, The Silver Fleece has elements of realism. Du Bois once called it "an economic study" (Dusk 751); Norris's unfinished Epic of the Wheat may have been influential (Rampersad 117); politics and Wall Street, mills and monopolies, exploitation and graft - all reflect fears of late-industrial capitalism and the incorporation of life. Bles says," Death and pain pay for all good things'" (127). Zora despairs, "'God! it was money, money, always money'" (359). By rejecting Bles's "Quixotic ideas" (315), Caroline Wynn tragically chooses salary over romance, whereupon Tom Teerswell calls her" 'Carrie!'" (322), recalling another materialistic Carrie, who wins riches but not love. We should also anticipate The Financier (1912) in Du Bois's chapter "The Cotton corner," for just as Dreiser represents fate as a "horrific spider spinning his trap" (501), Du Bois imagines that "away to the north a great spider sat weaving his web" (193). Moreover, in Norris's Octopus (1901), a town is "sucked white" by a railroad system that Norris describes as "a giant parasite fattening upon [its] life-blood" (289). In Tooms, the Taylor cotton mill seems to "devour" employees with "its black maw open, drawing in the pale white mites, sucking their blood and spewing them out paler and ever paler" (391).

Like Norris and (for the most part) Dreiser, Du Bois bemoans the relentless materialism his novel sets in play; but unlike them, he does not depict a world of grim determinism. Bles and Zora are joyfully engaged; Smith's school is saved by a happy inheritance; the "free community" Zora founds survives its white attackers (362). For all the text's economic savvy, capitalism does not conquer love. For all the forces that buffet Bles, he remains "A Master of Fate" (312). This ultimately makes political sense, for as a reformer who, like Zora, exhorts his people to "'free yourselves!'" (370), Du Bois rejects the ruthless law propounded by Norris and Dreiser. In the wrong hands (and there were many), social Darwinism led to political quiescence and theories of black inferiority (Degler). Norris's racism is painfully obvious; Dreiser's fatalism is so profound he describes Herbert Spencer as "liberal" (Sister 87). Though Du Bois, at times, speaks highly of Spencer - Zora even has one of his books on her shelf - he clearly rejects the racist claims often construed from Spencer's thought. Thus Harry Cresswell callously notes that life is "'a case of crush or get crushed'" (116), while the foolish sociologist Temple Bocombe flatly states, "'Race is undoubtedly dying out'" after glancing at some black children's heads (179).

"The Way" for Zora and Du Bois is not this implacable path, and yet the author of The Silver Fleece is also no romancer. Bocombe is engrossed by a novel he calls" 'clever, but not true to life'" (174). Cresswell prefers a light romance to Jane Addams's Newer Meals of Peace (1906). Even the pairing of Bles and Zora, the romantic core of the book, resists convention when Bles rejects the "innocent," "sweet and good" Emma (418). Except for her race, Emma could star in any number of white romances; as a sexually pure, light-skinned black, she might pass for Harper's Iola Leroy or Hopkins's Dianthe Lusk. The younger Bles is surely influenced by such sentimental models: After learning of Zora's notorious past, he thunders, "'You should have died!'" (170). But Zora endures, Bles learns better, and the fallen woman wins her man. In fact, by redeeming Zora's purity, Du Bois envisions a happy ending few romancers would dare.

Such resistance to romance is especially evident in the double-marriage plot, for Du Bois denies this central device of reconciliation romances. As Nina Silber has thoroughly shown, North-South marriages came to stand for national reunion, while nuptial vows between pairs of siblings avoided the awkward gendering of sections. Too often, however, such tropes ignored the failure of Reconstruction, and so Du Bois depicts his cross-sectional marriages as flawed, oppressive unions. Harry is a" 'nasty brute!'" (354) and Taylor a "scrawny iron man" (197). While Helen Cresswell lies languidly bored, Mary Taylor loses a child, martyrs herself to the randy Harry, and finally wishes in her domestic misery for the "reality and prose of life" (287). All is foreshadowed in the wedding ceremony where "either bridegroom looked gladly at the flow of his sister's garments and almost darkly at his bride's" (231), suggesting that incestuous, sectional interest enforces their conjugal bonds. Harry aptly proves this fact, and when his courting becomes a seduction, Du Bois debunks the cavalier hero of so many Southern romances. Harry's "'aristocratic pose and pretensions'" charm the innocent Mary (180), but "gentlemanly as he was by rule of his clan... underneath raged unappeased fires" (196). Clan is hardly a neutral word, especially in the context of "unappeased fires," and the message rings clear when Harry admits he had acted "too cavalierly" (311). We are thus not surprised by Harry's debauches or Colonel Cresswell's relation to Emma. In fact, the patrician Cresswell line may have a drop of black blood.(3)

Keith Byerman also suggests Du Bois's critique of Southern romance, but the author's irony takes political force when coupled with his censure of Booker T. Washington and the Southern pursuit of Northern capital, particularly in Tooms, where we see a hellish picture of New Slavery in the New South. Taylor explains how he will use his monopoly to "'club European manufacturers into submission'" (64). With a twist of Washington's famous speech from the Atlanta Exposition, he describes his Northern cotton trust as "'the whip-hand of the industrial world'" (111). Moreover, the Cresswells learn from Taylor that "'the code of the Southern gentleman won't work in Wall Street'" (192), while at the same time workers, some of them children, suffer the hardships of the mill. A white woman declares, "'Durned if I don't think these white slaves and black slaves had ought ter git together'" (395) - not only emphasizing Du Bois's point that Northern industry had mastered the South, but challenging a popular political strategy Taylor explicitly names: "'We'll... use whites to keep niggers in their place, and the fear of niggers to keep the poorer whites in theirs'" (391). By setting Southern agrarian interests against the industry of the New South, Du Bois lays bare the ideological rifts in a politically regressive alliance that combined Southern racism with Northern exploitation - an alliance that Washington hoped to join with the promise of Southern black labor. Du Bois also hints (though with serious misgivings) at fusing poor whites with blacks - a powerful coalition in the hey-day of Populism that attempted, albeit unsuccessfully, to make class a political base. Du Bois, in his novel, as in his life, is unsure about working-class whites. Thus he defends black political power by pitting Cresswell's Southern Democrats against Taylor's Northern Republicans, for minority interests in a two-party system gain leverage from party strife. Or, as the powerful Mr. Easterly explains, "'In a close election the Negroes ... choose the President'" (266).(4)

In this way, Du Bois's departure from romance is neither a mistake nor coincidence. By refusing to privilege light skin and passivity, he argues instead for black unity and activism. By speaking against a national double-marriage, he fights reconciliation at the expense of black rights. Finally, by setting cavaliers against captains of industry, he exposes the self-interest of sectional politics and advances a progressive agenda: support of child labor reform (the Keating-Owen Act, passed in 1916), support of antitrust legislation (the Clayton Act, passed in 1914), leverage from the threat of blacks voting Democratic (as many, including Du Bois himself, did in 1912), and a refutation of his nemesis Washington and the logic of accommodationism. To quote again from James's preface:

The balloon of experience is in fact of course tied to the earth, and under that necessity we swing, thanks to a rope of remarkable length .... the moment that cable is cut we are at large and unrelated .... The art of the romancer is, "for the fun of it," insidiously to cut the cable, to cut it without our detecting him. (10-11)

Du Bois, however, does not cut his cable in The Quest of the Silver Fleece: "One thing alone lay in [Zora's] wild fancy like a great and wonderful fact dragging the dream to earth and anchoring it there. That was the Silver Fleece" (215). Despite a tendency for wild fancy, Du Bois is no romancer. He does not drift away from solid reality; he is seldom unrelated; swinging from a rope is no extravagant metaphor for African Americans at the turn of the century.

Thus Du Bois is anchored by "wonderful fact," an apt description for his use of genre in The Quest of the Silver Fleece. On the one hand, he invokes the wonderful - the power of love and human freedom. On the other, he is concerned with fact - with the Realpolitik of power and difference that affected African Americans. Neither mode alone is sufficient, and so Du Bois deploys a type of twoness. With a realist's eye for social critique, he condemns Northern industry and Southern mythology. With a romancer's faith in possibility, he rejects social Darwinism's fatal universe and theories of scientific racism. Critics may regret this generic confusion, but we should not mismeasure Du Bois's text against inappropriate standards. As he once wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, regarding a larger confusion: "The black man's turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made his very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness, - it is the contradiction of double aims" (365).

Du Bois and William James. Du Bois and Hegel. Du Bois and Adams, Crummell, Marx, Santayana, and Emerson.(5) We have only begun to plumb the depths of Du Bois's intellectual influences. But of all the thinkers listed here, none is regarded as a novelist. They are not, of course, irrelevant to The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Du Bois's conflation of doing and being recalls William James's pragmatism. Zora's search for "the mighty ideal" (296) echoes Emerson's "Experience" (1844), so much that her dreamy state resembles that of Emerson - even so much that we might compare "wonderful fact" with "true romance" (492). Be that as it may, it would be a surprise if so studious and self-conscious an author did not engage a novelist, for although Du Bois manages genre with a trenchant literary sense, we may yet find harder satisfactions to the question of novelistic influence.

Rampersad writes with some disappointment that, despite Du Bois's extensive knowledge of African American literature, "there is no evidence that Du Bois learned much from his predecessors in the field of the black novel" (116). Sutton Griggs's Pointing the Way (1908) is an exception that proves this rule. The title anticipates Du Bois's "Way"; the authors may have met at a 1908 convention (Lewis 376); Griggs's novel speaks of the "color-line" (223) and adopts the trope of "the veil" (233). But though Zora's commune might resemble that of Imperium in Imperio (1889), and though both books have chapters titled, "The Parting of Ways," there seems little commerce between Griggs and Du Bois in The Quest of the Silver Fleece, especially when compared with The Souls of Black Folk's lively engagement of Washington.

There is, however, another literary history implicated by Du Bois - a history that warrants a few disclaimers, for reading The Silver Fleece in light of the Puritans may prove a dubious business. Dubious because transmission points will remain, for skeptics, speculative, though no more speculative than the cultural contexts we assume by fiat of "discourse." We may also risk critical colonization by introducing the New England Mind, though as Shamoon Zamir has written, "to deny a black writer a catholicity of procedures and resources is, in effect, a kind of racism" (17). With these caveats noted - and with the reminder that Du Bois was as voracious an intellect as the United States has witnessed - there is ample evidence, both biographical and textual, to invoke the Puritans (and one latter-day novelist).

Du Bois grew up in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and attended the First Congregational Church. David Lewis describes his early beliefs as "anchored in the rigorous Calvinism of New England Congregationalism" (48). According to Rampersad, he was "directly exposed to the fundamental doctrines of New England Puritanism" and "the iron of Puritan ethics" (5). Both scholars describe an initial faith giving way to philosophical uncertainty: Du Bois was neither the first nor the last to doubt his God at college. Still, his autobiographical works aver an early Calvinism, and for a yankee who tended to keep a watchful eye on influence, the weighty Puritan legacy may have caused him some anxiety, at least enough to justify a few words in his first novel.

"'John is nothing but cotton'" (84), Mary says of her brother - a coincidental pun, perhaps, except for other clues: more pairings of "John" and "cotton," allusions to John Cotton's work, and Du Bois's rewriting of a famous dispute between Cotton and Roger Williams. In 1635, after much discussion, Cotton and the Magistrates exiled Williams into "the swamp" of Rhode Island on the grounds that he had sinned, not against law, but rather against his conscience. Williams later surfaced in England with The Bloudy Tenet of Persecution (1643-44), a tract that denied Cotton's charges and argued that ordinance, not conscience, was the proper standard for sin. Cotton answered in two well-known works: The Bloudy Tenet Washed and Made White in the Blood of the Lamb (1647) and his classic account of New England Congregationalism, The Way o[the Congregational Churches Cleared (1648).(6) Du Bois may have had this later title in mind when Zora discovers a communal "Way" that, like Cotton's, negotiates between separatism and non-separatism. Even further, Zora's "Way [is] opened" by a preacher's cry from a Northern church, "'Behold the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sin of the world' " - a cry repeated one page later in a powerful Jeremiac sermon (294-96). Thus Du Bois refers to both Cotton texts at this crucial moment in his narrative, and he holds with Cotton that sin violates conscience and that ignorance mitigates sin.

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).

These parallels are striking in language and theme, but Du Bois, at times, leaves Hester behind to refer to Anne Hutchinson directly. Zora's schooling is "a revelation of grace" (124); she preaches a visionary sermon; she founds a community of spirited exiles outside the pale of society. This Hutchinson-figure is more radical, less repentant, and (in some ways) more accurate than Hawthorne's. The "real" Anne Hutchinson was a powerful leader who took followers with her into banishment - a female who dared give religious instruction based on her own revelations of grace.(8) Hutchinson never returned to Massachusetts and came to a (reportedly) tragic end, but she did transgress traditional boundaries of geography, ideology, and gender. Du Bois's heroine does the same and is not, like Hester, safely relegated to the margins of dominant culture. When Zora goes into the swamp to establish her community, Smith's "shrewd New England reason asked: 'What can a half-taught black girl do in the wilderness?'" (335). A similar question lay behind the Puritan mission in America, famously articulated in Samuel Danforth's "Errand into the Wilderness" (1670). But when Smith directs the question to Zora, Du Bois suggests that the New England project is now carried forward by black dissenters - by a new oppressed people seeking spiritual freedom (and not prospering in the trade of slaves and rum). Hester nearly convinces Dimmesdale to run "into the wilderness" - to escape beyond "the white man's tread" where they can be "free!" (174). Zora does not linger for Bles's approval. She goes to the swamp; he finally follows; and together they join a "free community" quite unlike the private departure Hester urges on her minister.

In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois denies the primacy of the Puritans: "Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed, we were here" (545). In The Silver Fleece, he does the same by reworking the novel James had called "the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country" (Hawthorne 111). Hawthorne's achievement rests, in part, on his own revision of the Puritans, and yet The Scarlet Letter remains politically inert - mainly moral, deconstructive, marked by self-canceling allegory. In a profoundly ambitious and revolutionary gesture, Du Bois departs from this foremost novel. He refashions Hester as a political activist; he does not retreat from the wilderness; he appropriates a Puritan ideology of nation-making potential. "Shall I be Walt Whitman?" Du Bois wrote in 1889 (Zamir 57). His novel is not Song of Myself (1855), but it does share Whitman's epic aspirations; for to wake a nation, The Silver Fleece repossesses a powerful tradition of dissent by advocating a new national errand - this time with blacks as the chosen people, this time not as a city on a hill, but on land redeemed from the swamp.

We have thus far viewed Du Bois the novelist as an expert subverter of genre and text. But when influence recedes to the background of the book, and Zora and Bles stand alone in the swamp - when sponsors are gone, marauders defeated, and texts revised to good use - Bles asks, "'The battle's over, isn't it?" To which Zora responds, "'It's just begun'" (430). In this final section, let us examine how Du Bois's novel escapes the boundaries of prevailing (and largely white) influence to explore a space of alternative expression that is relatively and ambiguously free. This quest for artistic and political autonomy ultimately leads to the swamp, and on the way it touches needful topics: Du Bois's use of mysticism, his relationship with the novel, and his treatment of African American experience in terms of literary convention. First, however, this implicit claim: Du Bois is wary of influence. He rejects the constraints of romance and realism and finds fault with Hawthorne and the Puritans. He also called early for a black aesthetic he himself tried to exemplify (see Turner, Moses, and Sundquist, Wake). The Silver Fleece has no musical notation, but Du Bois does register his formal concerns. He mocks those who "know beauty by convention only" (124), and when Bles presses Zora about her literacy, she naively asks with devastating irony, "'Don't white folks make books?'" (46). Du Bois knows that literature is no neutral system; he knows the limits of white patronage. With these concerns he ruminates over how one might tell a free story.

In 1911, according to Wilson J. Moses, Du Bois knew less about African cultures and more about a myth tradition Moses calls Ethiopianism. More recent criticism links such spiritualist leanings to racialist theory (Appiah), nationhood (Sundquist, Wake), and the psychical research of William James (Schrager) - all of which cohere with my present contention that Du Bois in The Quest of the Silver Fleece uses mysticism to create a space for African American voices. In the swamp, the "'voodoo woman'" (371) Elspeth provides the "'wonder seed, sowed wid the three spells of Obi in the old land ten tousand moons ago'" (75). In the swamp are "strange power" (14), "huge bronze earth-spirits" (375), and "thick memories of some forgotten past" (209). Scholars have interpreted this mysterious realm as everything from "loving" (Elder 358) to "evil" (Rampersad 120), but just as Elspeth sows the "holy" Fleece while threatening Zora's purity (215), the swamp resists easy reduction to univocal symbolic structures. It harbors pure love and immoral revels, African roots and a future black community. Its "virgin and black" soil is cleared and furnished with Tennyson, Balzac, and Plato (78). It is an emblem of twoness where voodoo meets Christianity - where the spirit of Elspeth is dispelled by Old Pappy, "'a preacher, and some folks say a conjure man, too'" (37). Among all these things, the swamp is also a place for potentially free expression, for its boundless, shifting, liminal nature cannot be contained by traditional forms. When Bles casts his eyes on Washington, D.C., "somehow it looked like the swamp" (318). Zora says of New York, "'I knew the city was like the swamp, always restless and changing' ";" 'it is moving - always moving'" (245-46). Caroline Wynn advises Bles that" 'the line between virtue and foolishness is dim and wavering, and I should hate to see you lost in that marshy borderland'" (277). Indeed, the swamp is like the novel - a moving, mixed, wavering borderland neither real nor romantic, neither North nor South. Mystical and, as Du Bois writes, "formless" (371), the swamp holds a sanctity he defends with a veil.

When Mary enters "the deep shadow of the swamp," there is a "certain brooding terror." The earth is "black and burned," but she continues on "with the hush of death about her, and the silence which is one great Voice" (202). Here a white New Englander meets slavery's legacy: the impenetrable shadow of the Negro, the earth black and burned like a lynching victim, the brooding terror of the Great Dismal Swamp where Nat Turner and other maroons sought refuge. Most powerfully, the silence which is one great Voice describes the lost link to an African past and the voices lost in slavery - untold stories we hear whispered again in Elspeth's cabin, "too far for words" (203), and in Bles's painful "unspoken story that lay too deep for words" (262). Du Bois may not reclaim these narratives, but he does suggest their power. Moreover, he protects their hard-bought freedom from the prying eyes of white influence, for when Mary eventually comes upon Zora, the black's face is "mask-like, regular and comely; clothed in a mighty calm, yet subtly, masterfully veiling behind itself depths of unfathomed misery and wild revolt. All this lay in its darkness" (203-04).

Cynthia Schrager has recently argued that Du Bois's mysticism tends to mystify scholars, in part because he sets it against the discourse of scientific reason. This point is well-taken in The Silver Fleece, for although the swamp is deconstructive and (to some extent) free, a necessary, troubling question remains: If Du Bois is uneasy with literary form, why write a novel at all? We can begin with any number of critics - Henry James, Ian Watt, Georg Lukacs, Mikhail Bakhtin - and still conclude (albeit hastily) that the form of the novel is grounded in things insofar as it is materialistic, temporal, and socially grounded. As such, the novel is quite amenable to Du Bois's political goals, though he also, here and throughout his career, possesses a counter-impulse. Call it mysticism, spiritualism, or his search for "the mighty ideal," Du Bois, like Zora, is often most interested, not in things, but in the" 'worlds on worlds of things'" (49). He was, of course, exceedingly versed in idealist philosophy; and in 1892, he sketched the plot of a novel he would never complete - a project titled "Shattered Ideals," though he later drew a line through "Shattered" (Against Racism 25). Perhaps this novel was never finished because Du Bois knew what I am hoping to suggest: that the temporal, material form of the novel tends to resist idealism. Or perhaps Du Bois's outline, with its heroine "Z," was actually written as The Silver Fleece in an attempt to reconstruct shattered ideals in the form of an idealist novel. If so, The Quest of the Silver Fleece is a narrative of double aims, for Du Bois confronts the political world while also resisting its worldliness.

In "The Transcendentalist" (1842), Emerson writes that "mankind [has] ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists" (193). Later, these paradigms collide in the mind, and Emerson calls it "double consciousness" (205). In this sense, Du Bois and The Silver Fleece display a powerful twoness. As a reformer with political burdens, Du Bois does not disregard the material world of the novel. But he also imagines a higher calling, for as Zora says of whites, "'They just got things .... We black folks is got the spirit'" (46). This is, as I take it, the fundamental tension in The Quest of the Silver Fleece, manifested in its turning between romance and realism and in the borderland twoness of the swamp, manifested in Du Bois's simultaneous urge to shun and adopt novelistic convention. Moreover, this form of double consciousness extends the dialectic of The Souls of Black Folk into the forum of genre, and, just as with that remarkable text, it shows that contradiction need not be weakness - that political imperatives will sometimes engender formal, allusive, ideological striving.

Finally, and by way of a tentative conclusion, Du Bois may find symbolic resolution to his problem of influence and form, for when Zora's quest for the mighty ideal ends in the mystical swamp, Du Bois conjoins spirit and idealism to balance the world of things. By forming a nation in the swamp, he envisions a political, material body founded on higher principles. By writing a novel that demonstrates extreme sensitivity to difference and justice, he fashions two powerful, popular genres for specific ideological ends. Such work values artistic creation and the art of the possible. It maintains wonderful, fanciful hopes in the face of dominant facts. That is, without denying the force of culture, the book does what "real" work it can; for Du Bois explores an autonomous space, not to transcend the American present, but to deploy an alternative, liminal voice. Which is to say that The Quest of the Silver Fleece makes a strong political and literary case, for it is cognizant of, but not co-opted by, over-determined structures of language. To accomplish this, Du Bois grapples with a number of literary influences. And insofar as his learning spans centuries, disciplines, genres, and a wealth of associated texts, so much greater are the challenges and rewards of reading his first novel with sufficient attention.

What if, as Ross Posnock recently suggests, Du Bois's project to join politics and idealism is profitably viewed as a pragmatic one? When Richard Rorty writes that at the turn of the century "the opposite of realism was still idealism" (2), might we not guess that Du Bois's novel has both literary and philosophical interests - providing (against some literary opinions) that Rorty's "realism" is related to Howells's? There seems to me much more to say about The Quest of the Silver Fleece. Here, I have focused on Du Bois's ability to write within and against prevailing novelistic tradition. Among his many literary achievements, this seems a compelling concern, even if - as Zora suggests in the swamp - the work has only begun.

Notes

1. Kaplan notes the romantic aspects of Sister Carrie (140-60), as does Livingston (132-57). Chase calls Norris a romancer (20).

2. Of the many relevant works on realism, I find the following particularly helpful: Kaplan; Sundquist, "Country"; Trachtenberg 182-207; Livingston 132-57; Pizer, "Introduction"; Ammons; and Budd. Regarding my own terminology, I follow Kaplan and Sundquist by including naturalism under the broader term realism. In doing so, I emphasize (along with Budd) the continuities between what some scholars consider two distinct traditions.

3. No one, to my knowledge, discusses this possibility. The major clue is when Mary overhears that her child was born" 'Worse than dead!'" and the doctor remarks that "'the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation'" (337-38). Rampersad (118) and Byerman (123) attribute this to syphilis, but the chance of syphilis spanning three generations may be less likely than Harry's having African blood, especially considering that Du Bois discusses passing in the novel and describes "the crooked line of the Cresswell blue blood" (187). Of course, these theories are not mutually exclusive.

4. For historical accounts of the New South, including fusion and Populism, see Ayers and Woodward. Du Bois's conflicted views on class and race are perhaps most apparent in his relationship with socialism. He looked favorably upon it as early as 1904, and he briefly joined the Party in 1911 (a year after submitting The Quest of the Silver Fleece for publication). But the Socialist Party did not engage the question of race with sufficient urgency, and according to Lewis, he only dabbled in a "maverick socialism" at this time (447). Most Silver Fleece critics view the novel as ambivalent toward socialism (see especially Rampersad 121-22). For a later, but telling, example of Du Bois's relationship with white labor, see "The Black Man and the Unions" (1918) in his Writings (1173-75).

5. Du Bois's intellectual influences are broadly discussed by Posnock, Zamir, Lewis 56-149, and Rampersad 1-67. See also Gilroy 111-45; Bruce; Moses, "Conservation"; and West 138-50.

6. For the Cotton/Williams debate see Cotton, Ziff, and Miller.

7. For Hawthorne's nineteenth-century reputation, see Cady. The Hutchinson/Hester connection is widely acknowledged, perhaps most notably by Colacurcio (177-227). It should be admitted from the outset that treating The Scarlet Letter as a stable text to be confidently signified upon is severely to underestimate the text's ambiguity and resistance. At the same time, to attempt to locate the novel's politics would be to pursue another project. I therefore rely on what seem to me likely or, at the very least, plausible interpretations.

8. Hawthorne's departures from the history of Hutchinson also have their own thematic significance (Colacurcio 177-227). I write of a "real" Anne Hutchinson, because her history is muddled by differing accounts and agendas (Antinomian, Lang).

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Maurice Lee is a graduate student in English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is completing a dissertation on slavery, moral philosophy, and antebellum literature. Mr. Lee wishes to thank Martha Banta for her generous help with this article.

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