Longfellow’s Poetic Heroines

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most quintessentially American of all American poets, wrote an entire corpus inspired by early and medieval Christian theology.

Longfellow drew his literary symbolism and characters’ virtues from early Church Fathers such as St. John Chrysostom. In current discourse on his work, overshadowed by blanket patterns of domestic-sphere ideology and gender essentialism, the theology of the first through fifth centuries tends to be mistaken for sentimental piety. His portrayals of women appear antiquated and sickly-sweet, constricted to the roles of spiritual creatures without worldly ambition or desire. Longfellow, however, began a lifelong, if quiet, literary dialogue with the texts when an Italian monk introduced them to him during his education in and tour of Europe in the 1820s. Combined with the mediation of the Fathers through Dante’s medieval lens, a theology of deification and light gradually influenced and even came to define Longfellow’s creative output, which was a much more scholarly response to non-American and ancient ideas than his immense influence in popular culture led interpreters of his work to believe. Tropes such as light and angels associate with divine transfigurations of the soul, rather than with Victorian repression, and his female characters are free to create art and wander far from their home hearths.

Timothy Bartel is a professor of great texts and writing at Saint Constantine College, an Orthodox liberal arts school in Houston, founded in 2016. In this, apparently his second academic monograph, he seems to be addressing an audience of students and faculty, particularly those at an Orthodox college. For professors, the second book, especially after a new hire, tends to be the tenure granter. The Heroines of Henry Longfellow: Domestic, Defiant, Divine lives up to its title while showing what Bartel’s pedagogy looks like and how he is pitching his talents to his colleagues.

While I was initially afraid that the focus on Orthodox theology would detract from the textual analysis of primary sources, Bartel keeps most of the references to contemporary Orthodox thinkers such as Elizabeth Behr-Sigel and Valerie Karras to the introduction and to the recapitulating peroration. The concept of Orthodox feminism itself provides a substantial counterargument to claims that Longfellow’s heroines are insipid period stereotypes.

Because Longfellow’s strength in grounding his heroines in his ideals grew with the progress of his career as a professor and writer, and with his increasingly tragic personal life, chronologically organizing the analysis enhances Bartel’s argument.

He begins with Preciosa, a dancer from the dramatic poem The Spanish Student (1843), the morality of whose profession comes into question by men both secular and religious. Even her suitor casts aspersion and thinks to confine her to the idea of a woman whose “world of affections” is her only world. The plot, though, proves him wrong. Preciosa receives sanction from the Catholic Church to continue her dancing, which Bartel points out shows the “potential harmony between art and dogma,” not only for men but for women. Preciosa might be pure and save her affections, unaltered by brief and wayward passions, for her life’s main purposes (art and marriage), but it is her ability to see into souls – her “perspicacity” – that best shows the nature of her love. Wise and proficient in both the matters of the heart and of her life’s work, Preciosa’s story indicates that Christianity can tolerate a feminism inclusive of qualities other than those encompassed by the 19th-century American domestic sphere.

Longfellow’s avoidance of denominational sectarianism and sympathies towards Unitarianism made him particularly open to non-popular ideals. While he was reluctant to rate the literature of his day based on moral and social values, choosing instead to remark on the literary qualities, he cherished the idea of interdenominational dialogue, which he embodied in the voices of his poetic characters. Among Protestant and other mainstream voices, Catholic, Quaker, and Native American spiritualities make their way into the panoply.

Longfellow’s historical consciousness made him comfortable with dealing in the niceties of lives that differed from his own, both ethnically and religiously. Choosing women to be the main voices for many of his long poems shows again the fascination he had with states of Otherness, to use the current postmodern jargon, or, to be more American about it, with populism, equality, and democracy. It was through women’s stories in particular that he could explore themes such as that of the freedom as necessary for personal growth in the attainment of sanctity.

Women’s roles and the metaphors Longfellow uses change based on cultural nuances in his poems. Priscilla, the Puritan heroine who speaks her mind in The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858), is an industrious homemaker like many women from the Old Testament, quite different from the independent journeyer Evangeline, the eponym of Longfellow’s most epic poem (1847). (As Homer does in The Odyssey 1.1, and Virgil in The Aeneid 1.8, Longfellow invokes a Muse [see II.I. 68]; and he references other tropes of the epic genre.) Evangeline, from Acadia to the wilds of Louisiana, traces a trail in search of her lost love, and finally finds him on his deathbed during her time of service to the poor as a nun. Bartel points out that Longfellow celebrates the capabilities each woman finds in her immediate environment. Regardless of whether their deeds can be recognized as “heroic” by their cultures, they have achieved particular manifestations of holiness given their time and place.

Longfellow seems to think that affection is destiny: it is how one reacts to one’s calling that makes one courageous. In the sense that one dies to one’s lesser inclinations, accepting the “labor of love” (a phrase Longfellow uses more than once) as a lifelong goal makes one a martyr. Longfellow compares his heroines to martyrs more than once. Notably, the naïve Elsie of The Golden Legend (1851) actively wants to sacrifice her life for that of her ruler, and Vittoria Colonna, the friend of Michael Angelo, who was Longfellow’s historically-based last heroine,

 “knew the life-long martyrdom,
The weariness, the endless pain
Of waiting for some one to come
Who nevermore would come again.”

Bartel carefully addresses reservations about the motivations behind martyrdom: Elsie in particular, who, in addition to her goal of saving another’s life, laments that women toil “on and on and on,” and misses her dead sister. Elsie’s complaints cannot be read as strictly heroic, even combined with her ambition to emulate Christ. Bartel glosses over this messy issue without deciding whether Elsie fits the larger pattern, and notes that Longfellow was simply trying to portray religious fervor.

Indeed, the conflict among death wish, grief, and spiritual ambition in a martyr is not unique to this poem: since the first Christian martyrs, there has been controversy over the degree to which it is appropriate to want to die for God, in imitation of Christ’s not fleeing death. St. Apollonia, for example, is said to have actively thrown herself into flames in order to prevent her captors from sinning by killing her, and St. Ignatius’ zeal for being ground by lions’ teeth in parallel to how wheat is ground to make bread for the Eucharist pales in comparison to would-be martyrs who proudly announced their faith without provocation. I think that Bartel’s conclusion that Longfellow was reflecting on an overall trend in the religious tradition makes sense; however, it is safe to assume that, given the fallibility of human nature even or especially when it is striving to be heroic, the behavior of some martyrs errs on the side of misguided enthusiasm. As Longfellow’s Heroines is likely to be read by or taught to students, it makes sense that Bartel chose to forego a paragraph on context, but I still do think that exceptions to the rule are worth examination, and in this case, I think that a closer look only vindicates Longfellow more in his historicity and drawing of character.

Religious themes center the plots of Longfellow’s later poems, including Judas Maccabeus (1872), John Endicott (1857), and the Theologian’s tale from Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863) (a parallel to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). Here, Longfellow shifted his focus from romance to death. As role models of perseverance and steadfastness, his heroines embody a virtue that Bartel does not examine in great depth, but certainly mentions along with the themes of stillness, affection, light, and hearths many times in his piercingly close readings: patience. With the idea that simply living can be martyrdom, time and decay become a silent background for Longfellow’s work, in my opinion. There is something to be said for this unsung endurance.

Bartel does examine the quality of silence throughout Longfellow’s work, arguing that it does not indicate that women should be submissive to men, but that there is an authority in following one’s true heart. Edith, the heroine in John Endicott, encapsulates this in her lines,

 ‘Let us, then, labor for an inward stillness, –
An inward stillness and an inward healing.”

It is in an individual consciousness, she goes on to say, that God’s will can find us,

 “So doth the virtue and the life of God
Flow evermore into the hearts of those
Whom He hath made partakers of His nature.”

For Edith, silence isn’t about a lack of command: it’s about gaining divine authority to the degree that one’s essence changes to be more Godlike. As Bartel explicates clearly over the course of four pages, this is a Biblical concept that Longfellow had found, translated from Dante’s Convivio, and put in his notes in his own translation of The Divine Comedy. One of the qualities of God’s nature is light, and in the Christian tradition, those who are holy shine with it, not just Jesus on Mount Tabor during the Transfiguration. Inner light is a mark of sainthood, and Evangeline’s (1847) heroine was radiating it as she tended the sick, indicating that she is a “partaker” of God’s authority as she does her work.

By the time Longfellow was writing Tales from a Wayside Inn (1863), his Theologian’s tale features a heroine, Elizabeth, with an “atypical boldness” whose “frankness is no longer apologized for” as Priscilla’s was in The Courtship of Miles Standish, but celebrated as a virtue. Bartel writes, “It is all, the poet suggests, that we have in this life: a brief moment beside the beloved to express our love. Elizabeth is a heroine because she is ready to speak when she needs to speak; her frankness is her virtue.” 

Longfellow’s consistent appreciation of virtues, whether or not they fit with the standards of his era, grew stronger with the test of time. His early heroines demonstrated his belief that art and ordinary life, and romantic love and love of God, were not only compatible but symbiotic. His later poems, written when he himself was withstanding the trials of losing two wives and feeling lonely, exonerate the sanctification of work,

“For work is prayer,”

to quote Vittoria Colonna, and therefore art, including Longfellow’s art, is prayer. Ideally, an artist

“. . . . consecrates his life
To the sublime ideal of his art,
Till art and life are one; a man who holds
Such place in all men’s thoughts, that when they speak
Of great things done, or to be done, his name
Is ever on their lips.”

Longfellow wanted to be like his heroines who subsumed their lives in their art, who became holy through their dedication to the talents with which they had found themselves. He seems to hope that it is a “great thing” – a heroic virtue that could live in a quiet American poet who never loudly promoted any belief and couldn’t bring himself to believe in either Unitarianism or Christianity, but enthusiastically dialogued with the tradition of theology and literature in his inner stillness.

Although Bartel ends Longfellow’s Heroines with a touch of Orthodox theology, few contemporary theologians, Eastern or Western, would disagree about the value of the virtues that he highlights. In general, Longfellow’s Heroines could be a to-the-point reference book for classes on theology in literature and for academic journal articles. To me, having particularly studied nineteenth-century American fiction, the domestic-sphere argument seems most important. To the general reader, Longfellow’s creative responses to history and theology might prove the most interesting.

The Heroines of Henry Longfellow: Domestic, Defiant, Divine
By Timothy E.G. Bartel
Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022; 127 pp.

Print