Melville’s “Bartleby” as Parable

Whereas Hawthorne needed to subtitle his story “The Minister’s Black Veil” as a parable, Melville was content to nuance the metaphorical dimension of “Bartleby” by alluding to the Bible and expecting readers to connect the dots.

Perhaps the most obvious reference is to Matthew 25, where God acknowledges the righteous by associating their kindness to the downtrodden as kindness to him. For this reason, the narrator is tormented by guilt that he has not done right by Bartleby, who is the “forlornest of mankind,” or (according to Matthew) the “least of these.” The notion that ignoring Bartleby’s fate might be the equivalent of ignoring God is reinforced by the narrator’s denial of responsibility for his former employee. When a lawyer asks what he ought to do about Bartleby’s refusal to vacate the premises of the narrator’s old office, the narrator replies: “I am very sorry, sir,…but, really, the man you allude to is nothing to me–he is no relation or apprentice of mine, that you should hold me responsible for him.” As the footnote in our text observes, this denial resembles Peter’s denial of Christ, driving home the principle of Matthew 25 that kindness or indifference to the poor carries moral or ethical weight.

And, not surprisingly, Melville finds American Christianity wanting on the question of morality.

The narrator would not follow Bartleby to the prison house if he were not consumed with guilt. He would not meditate on the book of Job in his reference to Bartleby’s death if he felt that this miserable scrivener’s plight were not somehow the plight of all. “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!,” the elegiac punch line of the story, suggests that Bartleby’s death has archetypal significance.

What is the meaning of the closing line? It may invite readers to consider death as an equalizer that carries everyone back to the earth, which William Cullen Bryant styles as “the great tomb of man.” Certainly the narrator’s reference to “kings and counsellors” as Bartleby’s companions indicates as much. But the notion of dead letters is perhaps the most sobering theme in the conclusion. The narrator extends Bartleby’s former occupation in the “Dead Letter Office” to the profession of writing itself in his sad acknowledgement that ”[o]n errands of life, these letters speed to death.” The writer might be speaking into the void, as Parson Hooper was preaching to a sea of terrified faces that refused to hear his message or take it to heart.

And the narrator, after all of his legalistic moralizing, realizes that he will join Bartleby. They are both “sons of Adam,” not only the in Calvinistic sense of depravity, but also as mortals who must face a bitter end. The narrator will reap what he has sown, and what he has done to Bartleby will be done to him, which is the reason why he trembles as he denies any knowledge of or responsibility for the ”forlornest of mankind.” 

Clues and Sleuthing in “Young Goodman Brown”

While Edgar Allan Poe is generally credited with inventing the detective story, the rational thrust of narratives based on logically connected clues is the mature outgrowth of the Enlightenment period, so it should come as no surprise to find glimmerings of this style in other narratives. While Hawthorne wished for readers to imagine his stories as “romances,” where the “Actual and Imaginary may meet,” the effect of his romances requires a reader to do some sleuthing. In other words, if the reader is not trying to make coherent sense out of Hawthorne’s elusive nuances, then he/she is missing the dramatic effect that Hawthorne hoped his ambiguity would have. Perhaps the most essential difference between Poe and Hawthorne is that the former provided satisfactory punch lines to his tales that tied up loose ends for the reader, whereas the latter preferred to leave the puzzles unsolved.

Evidence of clues, or invitations to rational thinking, is sprinkled throughout “Young Goodman Brown.” Hawthorne provides a rational transition out of Goodman’s hallucinatory vision in the forest, describing a plausible scenario in which “he found himself amid calm night and solitude, listening to a roar of the wind, which died heavily away through the forest…, while a hanging twig, that had been all on fire, besprinkled his cheek with the coldest dew” (2266). But the close reader realizes that there was no sudden transition INTO the dream, which sends him/her searching back to the beginning of the text, where evidence of supernatural events (the speedy travel of his companion from Boston to Salem, the pink ribbons falling out of the sky) seems to cast doubt on the narrator’s reliability from the very beginning.

Aside from one innocuous passage where Goodman leaves the village and walks alone in the forest (suggesting that there would have been no other eyewitnesses to corroborate his vision), Hawthorne sweeps the reader almost seamlessly into the dream. The nuances are subtle. Brown is on a “dreary road” that is as “lonely as could be,” and “there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveller knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that, with lonely footsteps, he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude” (2259). Ichabod Crane was also disturbed this way while walking alone at night, though he resorted to singing hymns in order to cope with his fear. Ichabod is a dismissable fool. Goodman Brown becomes downright dangerous, more “hideous” than the devil himself. But in both cases, the rational reader is invited to piece together evidence of the protagonist’s delusions.

Irving does this through hyperbole, either insisting so vehemently on the story’s “scrupulous accuracy” or defending the unquestionable authority of the text so urgently that a reader grows suspicious. But Hawthorne does it with a little sleight of hand here and there. When Brown meets Satan in the forest, Hawthorne reminds the rational reader that this could all be a dream when he interjects to explain that the slithering staff, which “might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself, like a living serpent,” should probably be regarded as “an ocular deception, assisted by the uncertain light” (2259). When Brown imagines Faith flying overhead, he hears “a confused and doubtful sound of voices” (2263), and at the climax of the story, when Goodman Brown and the woman who is ostensibly Faith are about to baptized into sin in an ironic twist on the Edenic fall from grace, Hawthorne interjects once again to describe a mysterious liquid in a rock basin: “Did it contain water, reddened by the lurid light? or was it blood? or, perchance, a liquid flame?” (2266). And later he invites the reader to consider whether or not Goodman Brown had simply “fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting” (2266), which sends him/her back to the beginning of this causal chain of doubt.

The thing to notice here is the tension between superstition and reason, which is an outgrowth of Enlightenment thinking. Might Hawthorne be inviting the reader to question appearances here? Certainly Goodman Brown does. However, a more serious challenge to the reader is to establish careful judgments. This is a muted message in Hawthorne’s story, and his wish to merge the Actual and the Imaginary in romance often frustrates cold logic, but one implication of “Young Goodman Brown” is the warning implicit in the conclusion. To avoid becoming like Brown, Hawthorne suggests, one ought to rely on more than just the imagination to construct one’s reality. Perhaps if Brown had stopped to ask some of the questions that Hawthorne embeds in the narrative, he could have had his epiphany about human nature without so thoughtlessly judging others without evidence.

Perhaps Brown’s silent judgments of everyone else are no better than the superstitions that led to the judgment of accused witches in the “real” Salem? The fact that Brown becomes the “chief horror of the scene” (2263) is significant. One might wish, at least, to avoid becoming such a horror oneself and inquire into the ways by which such a gloomy fate might be avoided.

Rip Van Winkle and American Mythology

 Washington Irving was credited with introducing the short story as a new genre in American literature, as William Hedges observes, yet I find it surprising that this story could have been taught as utterly original. As Emerson and the Transcendentalists were able to synthesize the mystical aspects of Puritan thought with the rational and secular facets of Enlightenment thinking, so Irving weaves a new tapestry out of many existing threads of American experience. “Rip Van Winkle” is a mature version of Franklin’s short fictional sketches, such as “The Speech of Polly Baker,” and if one were to read isolated passages from Irving and Franklin aloud, it could be difficult to identify the source, as both develop a muted sarcasm and rely heavily on irony to develop their narratives. Perhaps more surprising, however, is the fact that Irving is most indebted to the older tradition of Native American literature that he references in the postscript to “Rip Van Winkle.” It might be either ironic or entirely unsurprising (depending on one’s frame of reference) to learn that American literature comes of age (as Irving is poised at the beginning of the American Renaissance) by deliberately embracing the mythological tradition as its thematic base.

The obvious difference between “Rip Van Winkle” and an oral narrative like “Wohpe and the Gift of the Pipe” is the gratuitous and satirical preface, which claims that the narrative is characterized by “scrupulous accuracy” and must be read as an historical account with “unquestionable authority” (2154). These are the first nuances of sarcasm, alerting the reader to differences between Irving’s text and the explicitly historical documents of the Puritan and Enlightenment tradition, such as Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation and Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia. Whereas earlier texts commingled myth and history without acknowledging the interface between the two genres, Irving deliberately toys with these ironies in order to prepare the reader for a symbolic, rather than literal, reading of his text. It might not be too radical a conclusion to suggest that reading “RVW” like literal history is like trying to stick to the literal six-day creation interpretation of Genesis: the narrative undermines the literalist view at every turn.

The mythical elements of the narrative are most obvious when Gothic elements begin to creep in. As Rip hears his name echoing in the woods, but can “see nothing but a crow winging its solitary flight across the mountain,” Irving tugs gently on the thread of the Salem trials, suggesting that the supernatural is afoot in the woods. The crow sighting is not incidental here, either, as Crow or Raven would signal the onset of a trickster narrative in oral literature. Irving nudges readers toward the mythical reading, in part, by endearing them to Rip, who could hardly be accused of witchcraft. The choice, in other words, that Irving forces readers to confront is whether to make fools of themselves by trying to explain the entire episode as factual history (thus perpetuating the Salem nonsense) or sink into the metaphorical complexities of the story. And, like a good myth, the story doesn’t really leave much choice in the end, but casts its own spell that carries the reader where it will.

From the postscript, readers know that the narrative is a synthesis of German folklore and Indian legends. Irving explicitly demonstrates knowledge of the Trickster figure by citing the “Manitou or Spirit…who kept about the wildest recesses of the Catskill Mountains, and took a mischievous pleasure in wreaking all kinds of evils and vexations upon the red men.” Based on such a clear articulation of his debt to Native literature, it is difficult to see how Irving can be classified as the sole innovator of the short story anymore than Emerson can be credited with introducing the idea of non-conformity that Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson, and Thomas Morton had championed much earlier, and with more at stake. What we find in “RVW” is typical of many other developments in colonial and post-colonial culture: as European ideas mature, they begin to take on characteristics of the indigenous culture that Europeans originally sought to replace. Linda Hogan explains this in “The Department of the Interior,” as she cites James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis (the notion that the Earth is unified as a large self-regulating organism named for the mythical goddess of the earth) as an example of Indian ideas touted as “genius” when they are reitereated in scientific terms.

Why was Irving touted as a “genius” in the literary tradition? His subtle humor, playful metaphors, and evocative descriptions surely play a role, but I would argue that the truly distinct elements of “RVW” come from Irving’s reappropriation of very old literary techniques. He borrows and steals from the tradition of myth, and this is what gives his writing authority. Such a fact does not diminish Irving’s stature as a writer; on the contrary, it elevates the oral literature significantly and suggests, as Craig Womack has argued, that there is no American canon without Native American literature.

Extending the mythical reading of “RVW” is not difficult for the reader well versed in the colonial and Enlightenment texts. There are subtle allegorical references to Salem in many places, most specifically in Rip’s reappearance in the town square, where people are “seen to wink at each other, and put their tongues in their cheeks” while listening to his tall tale. Had the average American not made the transition from literalism (or fundamentalism) to the metaphorical view of the world that Deism invited in the Enlightenment period, Rip would surely have been tried and hanged as a witch after returning from the “howling wilderness” with such a suspicious story.

Irving’s description of the players of nine-pins invoke Puritan characteristics, since “they maintained the gravest faces” while going about their sport. It is as if the countryside is haunted by these forbears, who remind Rip “of the figures in an old Flemish painting, in the parlor of Dominie Van Shaick, the village parson, and which had been brought over from Holland at the time of settlement.” The magic of the narrative here is that Irving doesn’t spell out the Puritan connection for readers, but invites thought experiments about the implications of this comparison. Why would Puritans be playing at ninepins in the wilderness? Could this be a dig at colonial America, a miniature history of those sober folk condensed into one satirical metaphor? What might the irony of his bewitchment suggest, if this is the case? Irving invites readers to ponder such questions, and as a good myth invites the hearer to make meaning of it actively by participating in the narrative, so Irving provides room for more than mere entertainment here, particularly for readers who know something about the historical allusions and can play with their implications.

The scene in the woods is also reminiscent of Thomas Morton’s famous maypole celebration, since Rip helps the stranger hoist a flagon of liquor up the mountain. The Kaatskill mountains here are larger than Merry Mount was, but the associations are possible. It is as if Rip meets the combined version of Morton and Bradford in this paradoxical party on the mountaintop.

Another irony to consider is the ways in which Irving anticipates many of Thoreau’s ideas. Long before the retreat to Walden Pond, Irving introduces Rip Van Winkle as “one of those happy mortals, of foolish, well-oiled dispositions, who take the world easy, eat white bread or brown, whichever can be got with the least thought or trouble, and would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound.” When Thoreau later urges readers to cultivate “[s]implicity, simplicity, simplicity” and to “keep [their] accounts on [their] thumb nail[s],” he is not suggesting anything that Rip does not represent. And Rip’s Transcendental hike to “one of the highest parts of the Kaatskill mountains” anticipates Thoreau’s claim to be “the monarch of all [he] survey[s].” Rip is an unwitting Transcendentalist, yet Irving grants him the mountaintop view, the interaction with the sublime (via his transformation), and the characteristics of a thoroughgoing non-conformist all before Emerson popularized these ideas in “Self-Reliance.” Surely Rip is not the mythical ego-in-isolation (Emerson and Thoreau added much more arrogance to non-conformity than Irving did), and he does not represent the ambition of Fuller’s project for social reform. The world changes without Rip’s intervention. He is not a poet come down from the mountain to emancipate the masses with knowledge of the sublime, as per Emerson’s later call for just such a poet. His farm is in a pathetic state of disrepair. It would seem that Rip represents everything the American is not or should not be, and yet a close look sees that Rip’s character and the entire story develop a mosaic of themes that were already thriving when Columbus made contact. It just took four hundred years for European culture to realize that “archetypal” was more a more appropriate moniker than “savage” for these indigenous traditions, though even then it is debatable whether Irving is giving credit where it is due in his postscript or attempting to subordinate Native tradition to his own bid for literary greatness.

Harriet Jacobs and the Tightwire of Reform

When I first read Jenny’s response to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which stressed her impatience with the apologetic tone and her desire for a stronger protagonist than Linda Brent, my first reaction was to think of all of the exceptions to that rule: Linda Brent crawling around in an attic for seven years, lying there silently suffering the torture of fire ants to be near her children without exposing her hiding place, Brent’s refusal to simply give in to Dr. Flint’s sexual advances, and so on. My first thought was that if Mary Rowlandson is “ridiculously strong,” as a former student put it, then Linda Brent is moreso. She is, in the words of another student, “legit.”

There is a submissive tone throughout the narrative. Brent refers to herself more than once as “poor,” and includes phrases such as “I know I did wrong” in order to placate her more judgmental readers, who might have looked askance at her affair with a white man as a way of avoiding the lecherous Dr. Flint. But this is not the first time we’ve heard language of this sort, is it? Cabeza de Vaca bemoans his fate repeatedly throughout La Relacion, stressing the fact that sacrifice and service are the only things he has left to offer after returning “naked” from his failed expedition. Bradstreet strokes the fragile egos of her male readers by reassuring them that they are the “high flown quills” who deserve the prestigious laurels or “bays,” whereas she asks only “thyme or parsley wreath,” since her “mean and unrefined ore” will only enhance the “glist’ring gold” of her male counterparts by comparison. We have only a brief interlude of references to Greek mythology in Bradstreet’s “The Prologue [to Her Book]” to signal her subversive purpose, which is to gain a place at the literary table (a feat in itself for the 1600s).  On the contrary, Jacobs embeds much more powerful language throughout her narrative to counterbalance the obsequious portions. Double voicing is no hidden message in this text when we read that Linda Brent “pitied Mrs. Flint” (the slave pitying the master!) or that her grandmother described Dr. Flint, her stony master, as a “[p]oor old man” after his death (2036, 2050). Jacobs allows Brent to vent openly about the ironic necessity of a Christian slave avoiding churches where she might be discovered and returned to her owners. We get her rational yet poignant observation that she was not as capable as her grandmother of simply forgiving Dr. Flint’s “odious” crimes against her (2050).

In the end, I’m not convinced that Linda Brent is necessarily passive as a character; in fact, we have more evidence of her strength than we do for many of the other writers in the American tradition who have sought to address a resistant audience. Cabeza de Vaca groveled more thoroughly before the Spanish crown in an attempt to win respect after his mission of conquest failed, and Anne Bradstreet prostrated herself more pathetically before male readers, certainly, than Linda Brent does before her intended audience of white Christian women. However, we have the dismal image of the conclusion to consider, because for all of Linda Brent’s strength, she still ends up as a servant who feels obligated by moral shackles, if not literal chains, to devote her attentions to her “liberator,” the venerable Mrs. Bruce, who was able to secure Jacobs’s freedom for the paltry sum of $300–admittedly a greater sum in the late 1800s, but still not even as great as the $1,000 fine imposed on those who interfered with the Fugitive Slave Act. If Linda Brent is so strong, why does she still end up as a servant? The text’s conclusion suggests that we ought not be satisfied with the notion that freedom is won so easily.

In considering this question, it occurred to me that a troubling thread runs throughout the history of American reform. The truly courageous souls, those who stood up and refused to couch their true message (or double voice) in a subversive tone of apology, have rarely achieved the reforms they sought as effectively as those who have nodded in some way to the majority. Anne Hutchinson was a groundbreaking figure for her outspoken opposition to the theology of Puritan ministers like John Winthrop, more courageous than any one of us, yet her earnest efforts simply got her banished from Massachusetts Bay. What good could she do as a reformer if she was shut out of the very society that she wished to reform? In fact, one might argue that as noble as Hutchinson’s aims were, she contributed nothing to the eventual downfall of Puritan New England: rather, it self-destructed through the Salem trials. Likewise, Thomas Morton had the right idea with his egalitarian society at Merry Mount, which liberated servants before the slave trade even began. However, he was too saucy for his own good in satirizing the “precise Separatists” and brought down the wrath of the uncompromising Miles Standish upon his head, as Hawthorne so comically illustrates in “The May-pole of Merry Mount,” where he maintains that ”jollity and gloom were contending for an empire.” Roger Williams left a mark on Providence, Rhode Island that remains to this day; he might be seen as one of the few reformers of this period that really made a difference in his own time. Despite the enticing imagery of defiant and self-reliant non-conformists in the mythology of the American West, the most successful reformers in the American tradition have often been those who found compromise more effective in getting the attention and sympathy of their audience than outright defiance.

Case in point: whom do more Americans remember and celebrate as a hero, Martin Luther King, Jr. or Malcolm X? The obvious answer to this is no coincidence. MLK, Jr. was an advocate of nonviolence, and as such was much less threatening to his white audience than was Malcolm X. Spike Lee begins his biopic Malcolm X with the audio of one of Malcolm X’s speeches (read by Denzel Washington), which provides indirect commentary on video clips of white police beating Rodney King nearly to death. In one line, Malcolm X declares that the history of America is not democracy, but hypocrisy. It’s hard to disagree when I think about Winthrop and Bradford and even Thomas Jefferson. All of the so-called liberators were, themselves, guilty of some kind of oppression. But that is not a popular message. The “I Have a Dream” speech was more palatable to its audience because it did not directly confront the grave injustice of white America. It invited, but did not force, the audience to introspect. Does this mean that MLK, Jr. was more effective as a reformer merely because he now has a national holiday in his honor? Maybe he was simply mainstreamed, like a band that has signed a million-dollar record contract that undermines its principles. Maybe there is more integrity on the fringes. But too much truth, as Christ himself discovered, can make people tune out the prophet.

Crevecoeur gives us another glimpse of this pattern of mob resistance against the aggressive reformer as Farmer James witnesses a minister trying to convince his hearers that they ought to be more compassionate toward their slaves. Aside from the obvious irony that real compassion would amount to liberation, the minister is trying to speak up against cruelty (a baby step toward justice perhaps). He is silenced by one of his hearers, who says, “Sir…we pay you a genteel salary to read to us the prayers of the liturgy and to explain to us such parts of the Gospel as the rule of the church directs, but we do not want you to teach us what we are to do with our blacks” (938). Never mind that slavery is utterly incompatible with Christ’s teachings. James informs us that from that point onward, the minister “found it prudent to withhold any farther admonition” (938). Another would-be reformer silenced. So what was Jacobs’s alternative? If she had grown one decible louder in her opposition to hypocrisy, she could have been dismissable to her audience, which in turn could have rendered her utterly powerless as a reformer. How does a person with a message make sure that it gets not only aired, but actually heard?

In some of the journals this past week, I wrote that I often feel some sympathy for the minister that Farmer James describes, because many of my attempts to apply the readings from early American history to our present time inspire resentment. Reform is one of the themes that I think is the most encouraging in American history, perhaps even a central facet of American identity. The day that we stop reforming is the day that we stop caring about liberty, because caring about liberty requires the sense of urgency inherent in the famous line from Rousseau’s essay “The Social Contract”: “Man was born free; and everywhere is in chains.” To me, the true patriot is the American who is never satisfied with the existing state of freedom and never stops asking the question “Who is still in chains in our nation, and what can be done to set them free?”

Perhaps this extends to Darfur, as well, but we have an ongoing battle to fight at home with immigration reform, ongoing indifference toward Native American reservations (the fact that we still have legally recognized ”reservations” is shameful, I think, and a sign of cultural degeneracy), racial profiling in criminal justice, the exploitation of domestic laborers and the outsourcing of social injustice through international sweatshops, and on and on. When students want to say that we’re so much better than we were in the nineteenth century, I think, “Well, yes, it’s good that we’re not literally selling people on the auction block. But isn’t the point of Jacobs’s conclusion that winning legal freedom is just the start? What about our present society suggests that we have achieved universal justice or that we ought to simply give up on the pursuit of it?” To me, it is no stretch to read Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as a parable for our time.  It is a small stretch to substitute words like “insurgent” for “savage” in Columbus’s diary and entertain the notion that the same patterns of conquest in the name of democracy/salvation are ongoing. Yet those are aggressive statements of dissent, and I often wonder if they have as much effect as more cautious statements might. How can I, as an educator, get the attention of my audience about issues that I believe are ethically urgent without falling off the tightwire of reform? Do I not have a civic obligation to voice arguments against war, to ask Christian students what evidence exists in the New Testament to support the use of violence for any cause (and how it is that so many churches support the war effort), and to expect that all students might recognize the potential for contradictions in present-day ideology by reading a text like Jacobs’s? I see it as my patriotic duty to perform some acts of dissent, since this is perhaps the oldest assertion of national ethos that we have. Dissent is not the same as complaint. Dissent has as its goal cultural reform; that is, it is an attempt to make a difference, to do something.

It is also crucial to defend freedom of speech, which is why the personal views articulated above are more productively expressed in a forum like this, where other views are not directly stifled or subordinated to the power structure of a classroom. My purpose is not to tell students what to think, but to encourage them to consider provocative questions and grapple toward their own answers. In the end, the reformer’s ideas are useless if the audience does not have an internal aha that makes the notion of reform an individual truth and not a top-down mandate. So, we carry on with open forum discussions, and I do not lead marches around the town square in Pella, because I recognize the principle that Harriet Jacobs was fully aware of, which is the necessity of some caution while tiptoeing over the tightwire of reform.

I close with an admonition from Thomas Jefferson, which is that the effect of coercion has been “[t]o make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites” (1008). Rather, he argues, “Reason and persuasion are the only practicable instruments. To make way for these, free enquiry must be indulged; and how can we wish others to indulge it while we refuse it ourselves” (1008)? This is why the classroom must be centered on dialogue. This is why the open forum, which we try to foster in this class, is so important. If I believe that I have the final truth, that my understanding of cultural reform is so thorough and impenetrable that I have nothing to gain from hearing anyone else’s perspective, then I cannot expect others to respond charitably or receptively, because I myself have become miserly and unreceptive. Thomas Paine risks this very characterizaiton when he begins to deride the “Christian mythologists” for their misguided perceptions, because Paine comes across as if he has the corner on truth. I have watched class after class tune him out and immediately shift into defense mode because of his confrontational tone, which is a shame, since Paine’s application of reason to the discussion of religion is one of the most thorough and courageous projects that we have in American literature.

Perhaps this is what Jacobs has to teach us, not to grovel before a resistant audience, but to suspend impatience for a time and try to wedge one’s foot in the door so that the conversation with the audience keeps rolling, because if the audience slams the door, the project of reform is utterly lost. And if the reformer is incapable of experiencing mental and personal reform him/herself, then the cause is in jeopardy. Is some element of humility not also essential to Jefferson’s notion of “free enquiry”? Might the tightwire of reform be the tenuous space between the void of conformity and the pit of deafness to others?