Veronica T. Watson

Penned when George A. Newman Sr. was approximately twenty-one years old, A Miserable Revenge is a byzantine tale of romantic longing; revenge; stolen, mistaken, and disguised identities; attempted murder; and, ultimately, forgiveness. It was written in 1876 and 1877, only eleven years after the end of the Civil War and coinciding with the end of Reconstruction as marked by the Compromise of 1877. But given this date of composition and its historical context, interestingly, Newman’s novel does not foreground slavery or reference the difficult postbellum work of rebuilding a nation after the abolition of the institution. Instead, this genre-bending narrative is set in the early 1840s and unfolds within the intimate contexts and connections of several white families of differing class and regional backgrounds. There are only a few Black characters in the story—enslaved and free, the latter “hired out” to the white families—and they are largely relegated to the periphery of the narrative. This almost exclusive focus on white characters would make A Miserable Revenge the earliest “white life” novel known to date, over a decade earlier than Clarence and Corinne: or, God’s Way (1890) by Black Canadian author Amelia E. (A. E.) Johnson.

White life literature, as it is often termed, consists of “novels that were written by African Americans and yet are not about African American protagonists.”^[1] But African American reflections on the meaning and impact of whiteness are also present in “practically every conceivable written genre—including short fiction, sermons, journalism, essays, drama, critical texts, and poetry.”^[2] It is a rich and diverse body of literature, including canonical African American writers like Charles Chesnutt, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ann Petry. There are also many other pieces that offer significant representations of whiteness even when the totality of the writing has a different focus. This category might include narratives by the self-emancipated authors Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, historian and writer W. E. B. Du Bois, and novelist Toni Morrison. Long considered race-neutral or “assimilationist,” white life literature did not begin to garner sustained attention until the 1990s with the expansion of critical whiteness studies in the academy and the publication of David Roediger’s collection Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (1998), which identified a sustained African American tradition that examined and critiqued whiteness from the nineteenth century onward. Some white life texts, as evidenced by scholars such as John C. Charles, Stephanie Li, and myself, are charged with a desire to challenge the moral authority, assumed superiority, and centrality of whiteness in North American culture.^[3] They are written to turn a sociological and psychological magnifying glass on whiteness, offering analyses that uncover the maladaptive, disconnected, and often violent ways that whiteness is performed and maintained in particular historical moments. Penned by Black Americans with an eye to unveiling whiteness to itself, these narratives often hold a “disagreeable mirror” up to readers in hopes of initiating an awakening in white Americans that would lead to personal and social reformation.^[4]

Other white life novels, however, “may feature white characters” without “offer[ing] a critical view of Whiteness or seek[ing] to explore the meaning of that racial identity for those who so identify.”^[5] The story of these novels is often driven by other interests, with the whiteness of the characters being incidental to the unfolding of plot, the development of character, or the reader’s experience of the novel. For instance, according to Robert Fikes Jr., author of “The Persistent Allure of Universality,” Johnson’s Clarence and Corinne, which centers on a poor white family and the reunion of an orphaned brother and sister, was “essentially an extension of Johnson’s work of Christian witnessing with the assistance of the white religious publishing establishment.”^[6] Another novel that seems to offer little insight into the whiteness of the main characters is Richard Wright’s crime thriller Savage Holiday (1954), which is often read as a tale of repressed and misdirected sexuality. A Miserable Revenge may in fact be a similar type of novel: On the face of it, it seems to have little to say about how the whiteness of the characters shapes their identities, interactions, or world views. However, as careful contemporary readers we can glean important insights into the mechanisms that enabled national reconciliation in the late 1800s, played out specifically as a reconciliation within whiteness, that was underway at the time Newman was writing.

A Miserable Revenge is, at times, an uneasy amalgamation of several genres of writing, most prominently gothic fiction and the sentimental novel, both of which were popularized by the mid-nineteenth century by texts such as Harriett Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno (1855). Additionally, the twists and tangles of plot and story lines, melodramatic revelations at the end of the novel, and central themes of crime, guilt, shame, and restoration all track with the rising public interest in criminal detection and mystery that were well established in England and beginning to gain footing in the US with the popularity of writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Louisa May Alcott, and the currently less-well-known Metta Victoria Fuller Victor. These themes were especially evocative in the 1870s, when the work of Reconstruction had the nation at large, and white Americans in particular, contemplating (1) what gets counted as “criminal” and (2) the balance between punishment and forgiveness that leads to individual and social restoration once the transgression has been ended and order restored.

In linking “miserable” and “revenge,” the title suggests a grounding in what I term the gothic sentimental, which points both inward and outward. As it is a tale steeped in the sentimental, we are privy to the innermost contemplations of several characters, and their emotional responses to the events of the novel are often indications of their moral character, social status, and worthiness of admiration and social inclusion. Joshua Sowers, the character who sets the tangled story in motion, is sporadically tormented by his actions, his private emotional state unsettled enough that his family notices, on occasion, his shakiness and lack of color. Sowers laments, “I wish I had never done it . . . from 1820 up to the present time . . . my heart gnawed with a guilty conscience all for revenge,” but his anxiety is made more acute when he contemplates the possibility of his actions being discovered and the “degradation of him and his family” that would follow (18, 59). Though he does not cease his attempts to cover up his decades-long crime and does not often express remorse for his actions, Sowers’s conflicted feelings about the revenge he has pursued are a touchstone throughout the narrative.

However, as my yoking of “gothic” and “sentimental” suggests, Sowers’s interior struggle is only part of the picture. There can be no mistake that his actions have profoundly disrupted the lives of several families, representatives of every echelon in the Winchester, Virginia, community where the story takes place. He plotted and committed an assault on the nameless nurse caring for the two-year-old child of a prominent white family, overdosed the child on a drug that simulated his death, recovered the child from his grave, allowed him to be taken and raised by a convicted murderer living under a false identity, and worked tirelessly to conceal his crimes from the community in order to maintain the stature and respect granted to him as a Southern businessman and gentleman. As a result, the abducted child (later revealed to be William Reed) is cut off from his inheritance and raised in a home that is more modest and less loving than he would have experienced as the eldest son of Dora and John Beverly. He is cared for by a woman he knows is not his biological parent, leaving him feeling largely bereft of maternal love and care, and his birth parents are left to suffer, believing their firstborn son has died. Sowers’s own family members are also victims of his actions, their sense of identity and comfort intimately tied to his prominence in the community, and the largely unseen, voiceless community is invested in his continued success as the driver of economic opportunity. With so many people potentially impacted by his actions, the novel could offer a realist-leaning exposé on the “cultural and religious conventions of the group” that would lead a white Southern gentleman to the sustained criminal behavior exhibited by Sowers.^[7] What we get instead is a complete absence of compelling inquiry into the social structures that enable Sowers’s sense of entitlement in his society. In short, there is no interrogation of how he understands and performs his whiteness; it is unmarked and seemingly unremarkable. Critical whiteness studies has done much to illuminate the ways in which whiteness is facilitated and perpetuated by strategies that render it invisible and normal, the standard against which all other racial categories are judged.^[8] In Newman’s novel, the very absence of interrogation into white social structures in general, and white, masculine, aristocratic privilege in particular, offers an entry into a deeper consideration of the functioning of whiteness in his narrative.

 

Genre, Whiteness, and Readerly Expectations

Joshua Sowers is painted using many of the traditional strategies for representing elite white men of the South in the literature of this period. He is shown as a master and leader, someone who commands, and perhaps even deserves, respect. He is closely associated with his profession and status as a successful businessman, “the owner of the Brookland Mills,” and when the novel opens, we learn that, though it was “beginning to look ‘rickety,’” in fact, “a finer estate than that of Joshua Sowers could not be found in all Virginia” (11, 3). His physical description is limited to his age (about sixty), muscular physique, and gray hair, but he is so in tune with the work and workings of the mill that it is clearly as important as his physical attributes for establishing his identity. Additionally, we meet enslaved people who are loyal to him, and we learn that he has acquired them to save them from a “hard master” (35). The disagreements that exist on his property are between the enslaved and free Black people who occupy the same space rather than either group holding negative feelings toward Sowers himself. Our readerly expectations to see him as the upstanding, beneficent protagonist of the narrative are upheld by these textual details.

However, early in the text we also get suggestions that do not easily fit the picture of the mythical Southern gentleman. Newman includes a revealing instance of Sowers being in a “very bad humor” and almost immediately determining that his “faithful servant Jack” needed to be whipped (12). While not beyond the pale of the prerogatives that white slaveholders exercised, Sowers’s decision in this moment seems more about his “bad humor” than it does about Jack’s presumed offense, raising questions about this master’s motivations and judgment. In a passage that is in close proximity to this scene, and is perhaps the catalyst for it, we learn that Wilson Reed (aka Matthew Barton, aka Fred Lambert; referred to as Wilson Reed or Wilse Reed hereafter) “held a secret {po}wer over Mr. Sowers” (11). The revelation is both unexpected and ominous, becoming more troubling throughout the narrative as readers witness the secretive interactions between this prominent landholding citizen and someone well below his social circle.

Finally, but still early in the text, “Joshua Sowers nearly fainted,” only moments later to fall “as if dead” when he fears someone has overheard a conversation between him and Wilse Reed (15–16). Although we are told Sowers has an “iron constitution and a nerve to be envied” (21), the statement is contradicted by his proclivity for collapses brought on by high emotion and nerves, both of which were more closely associated with the emotional constitution of women than men in this historical period. As if to punctuate this misalignment, Newman juxtaposes the reactions of Sowers and his wife, Mary, when later they are brought to the bedside of their daughter, Mattie, who has been stabbed. Sowers “staggered, reeled, and fell,” was caught by Jack, and “laid . . . on a sofa that was in the room” (51). His wife, on the other hand, “glanced at her daughter’s breast and saw the blood,” but was “not overcome . . . for she had nerves of iron” (54). The reversal of expected gender roles here, combined with the previous details of his impetuous actions, secretive meetings, and unmanaged emotional state, suggests that Sowers, although bestowed all the privileges and benefits of his status as a wealthy white man, is also compromised, weak, and ruled by untamed emotions. His suitability for the social and economic status he enjoys seems to be on shaky ground. In fact, one might wonder what basis he has for the privileged position he occupies in the society.

More disturbingly, we learn that Sowers’s descent into criminality is set in motion because the woman he had been pursuing, the young Dora Beverly, née Maltby, rejects his advances when he “got drunk and insulted her” (236). Though seemingly the stuff of escapist fantasy, the elaborate plans Sowers concocts after she makes this decision—including killing her husband and abducting her to “make her his wife”—appear much less juvenile and far-fetched when weighed against the fact that he executes one of them for more than twenty years (237). Instead, readers are made uneasily aware of how fully Sowers has been socialized to believe in his right to reshape the world to his will. According to literary convention, Sowers is supposed to be the hero; however, by the end of the novel, when all his schemes are revealed, there is much that establishes him as an antihero despite the social position he occupies.

Thus, confounding (white) readerly expectations seems to be a strategy that Newman uses to respond to “theories [of race], and the institutions they underwrote” that dominated his time.^[9] In destabilizing the myth of the white male hero through whom the society finds stability and legitimacy, Newman positions readers to reevaluate other assumptions they hold about the value and merit of their world. At a time when he might have believed it to be particularly callous, and ultimately dangerous, to call attention to the ways in which white supremacist thought was being allowed to reemerge as the political and social order of the South, he could do this subtle recalibration work covertly, without directly offending the sensibilities of readers. Simultaneously, the surprise and frustration readers of his day likely experienced are weaponized as the emotional catalyst for deeper reflection and action.

 

The Anxieties of Class Mixing, Class Passing, and Class Descension

Newman shares with Mark Twain an interest in the questions animated by literary doppelgangers. In fact, the most interesting and provocative details of the story are connected to the ways in which Sowers is painted as the figurative twin of his “low-bred” criminal accomplice, Wilson Reed (137). Though their partnership is strained in the text (Wilse Reed is blackmailing Sowers), in fact, they are equal contributors to the long-standing criminal enterprise and deception at the center of the story. Sowers contrives the revenge plan and enlists Reed to assist with its execution. Reed remains in the Winchester community to raise the abducted child. The two of them interact publicly and regularly in addition to their secretive late-night meetings in remote locations. And, at various moments, the person who wields the most power in the relationship shifts from one man to the other, making it unclear who is actually responsible for the continuation of this crime over time.

But while the parallels between Sowers and Reed are readily evident, the novel also seems at pains to deflect attention from those similarities, suggesting a discomfort with the unmasking of Sowers as an unrepentant criminal on par with his lower-class counterpart. In fact, lurking beneath the domestic mystery and revenge plot lies the possibility that the novel itself is an elaborate disguise. It showily announces its concerns with crime, vengeance, and forgiveness, but the subtler narrative seems to be manifesting a different anxiety, one that was very much alive in white Southern society when Newman was composing.

In the wake of the Civil War, the fortunes and status of wealthy, white Southern men had been deeply shaken, and in many cases obliterated. Mark Sawin’s essay in this volume, “The World of George Newman and A Miserable Revenge,” provides a valuable window into the socioeconomic and political realities of Newman’s times and contexts, particularly as they played out in the state of Virginia. He notes that there were cultural, social, and political repercussions in Virginia from many factors: “the secession and division of the state, war and the burning of the Valley, slavery and emancipation, and reunification and Reconstruction” (339). The end of slavery meant the end of an enslaved Black presence that had long provided a psychological and emotional salve to lower-class white people,^[10] who were socialized to align their aspirational identities with wealthy whites rather than the enslaved and oppressed Black people with whom they had more in common economically. In the absence of that enslaved presence, questions about the often extreme differences within whiteness—in terms of education, property, wealth, and opportunity—threatened to undermine the foundation of racial capitalism, a system that benefited upper-class white people more than any other group. According to sociologist Matt Wray, “The period from the 1840s to the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s was a time when social observers began to actively debate the reasons for the impoverished condition and poor treatment of people described” by the term “poor white trash.”^[11] These identity-shattering transitions, contested cultural discourses, and the possibility of an emerging sociopolitical restructuring along class lines rather than racial allegiance unsettled many white Southerners enough that they sought to reassert long-practiced racial and economic hierarchies, however debilitating they might be for the majority of (lower-class) white individuals and for the nation as a whole.

The destabilization of white class distinctions that was happening in Newman’s contemporary world is nowhere more evident than in the coziness and familiarity that exists between differing classes of characters in his novel. We are told that Wilse Reed, who purportedly “works” for Sowers, “always boarded at Old Sowers’ house . . . whether there was company or no company at the house,” and that he has liberal access to the property, including entering the home for meals (14). His general ease of traversing the boundaries between the “story and a half high” house he shares with his wife, daughter, and stolen “son” and the Sowers homestead is so notable that it must be explained in the narrative: He has such freedom on the property because he has blackmailed Sowers (37). But the boundary-crossing is not limited to the blackmailer. We also learn that Sowers visits the home of Rebbecca King, the widow of a “hard working honest man” whose provision of a home allowed her to live “with ease and comfort” (41). Although she has a “nice little house,” she still rents out a room and clearly is not of the same economic stratum as Sowers (41). His presence at her home, therefore, seems unusual at a time when those of middle and lower classes might have been expected to travel to the locations of the upper classes rather than the reverse. The fluidity of movement across class lines reveals the complications of the period, but it also raises potentially disruptive possibilities. Are we witnessing Wilse Reed successfully elevating himself into the same class as Sowers, or are we witnessing class debasement as Sowers becomes more comfortable moving in spaces that are marked as being beneath his status?

The hallmark of the American dream is class ascension: Someone not born into wealth and status can transition into a higher socioeconomic class through individual effort and diligence. Associations that elevate one’s perceived status are comprehensible, acceptable, and even tacitly encouraged in a system that holds out the promise that anyone can become financially successful and move in a different social circle as a result. Thus, Wilse Reed’s interactions with Sowers (and others of that class) would be necessary for his movement into the new social group, a type of class passing that would enable him, eventually, to be seen as worthy of acceptance into the more elite class. Read through this lens, white class passing is the necessary labor of someone who aspires to be seen as more than an interloper or fraud in the more socially desirable group.

Class descension, on the other hand, is not part of the national mythology of economic progress and achievement in the US. While the class divisions that existed within nineteenth-century white America were largely papered over by the “psychological wage” that lower-class white Americans got because of their whiteness, financial wealth still provided a relative ease of living and respectability that made it broadly desirable.^[12] Once wealth was attained, few wanted to lose their financial security or be forced into the harsher living conditions of the lower classes, a group that, by the 1880s, was frequently characterized in the literary imaginary by “markers of laziness, genetic inferiority, and ignorance.”^[13] Yet, this decline in resources and status was exactly what many upper-class white Southerners were facing as their fortunes dwindled during and in the aftermath of the Civil War. Sowers’s close association with his lower-class counterpart raises the nervous possibility not only that his position is tenuous, but also that he is degenerating, rendering all social relations around him equally unstable.

In the novel, the fear of racial intermixing that white Southerners readily expressed during this time is displaced by the unspoken anxiety of white class mixing and descension. As Allan Lloyd Smith explains of the gothic, “the terror of what might happen, or might be happening, is largely foregrounded over the visceral horror of the event.”^[14] Newman’s gothic-laden tale signals a different source of Southern terror than is typically acknowledged, one that is about the relations that exist within the boundaries of whiteness rather than outside of it.

 

The Price of White Forgiveness

As one might expect in a text that leans into the registers of the sentimental, A Miserable Revenge provides signals to guide the emotional responses and judgments of its readers. The cues push us to “have proper sentiments” and “an appropriate response to the scenes of suffering and redemption” that we encounter.^[15] The different direction in which readers are guided to think and feel about Sowers and Wilse Reed, and ultimately the fate the villains face at the conclusion of the narrative, gives insight into the subtle ways in which the novel highlights and comments on the moral economies of whiteness.

Though Sowers and Wilse Reed are criminal accomplices, the emotional responses of readers toward the two men are steered in contradictory directions. As we have seen, the person we expect to emerge as the hero of the story seems decidedly unheroic by the time the story has unfolded. The narrator comments that “Sowers had repented his evil deeds,” but the statement is followed by, “He would lie before he would tell what he had done years ago. He wasn’t brave enough to divulge a secret he had kept for years, and years” (137). Thus, readers are led to question whether Sowers’s contrition is sincere or credible, and ultimately are invited to withhold forgiveness from him because he has not taken responsibility for or chosen to remedy his past crimes. But rather than leave readers wondering if Sowers has gone far enough in his remorse to warrant our compassion and his redemption, the narrator is clear what would constitute a stance that was worthy of forgiveness: Sowers would need to “turn from his evil ways and try to lead a better life . . . clear of all hidden sin” (138). In the absence of reaching that bar, the narrative leaves us little room to mourn the destruction of everything Sowers cherished, including the mill that was his livelihood and that defined his character and stature at the start of the novel. It is washed away, having “stood as long as it could,” a fate that Sowers’s reputation logically should have faced as well once his nefarious deeds had been revealed (253).

Wilson Reed’s actions and motivations potentially position him as a more sympathetic character. He has, in fact, concealed a stolen child and raised him as his own as part of someone else’s elaborate revenge scheme. But, as he is careful to point out, “I have raised your son well. He is the soul of honor” (256). The convicted murderer has raised a son who is worthy of respect and the social position he will soon assume, suggesting that Wilson Reed is not irredeemable. Reed takes pleasure in tormenting Sowers with the threat of disclosing the latter’s criminal actions, but his desire to reveal to “the world and Virginia society” that Sowers “is a wolf in sheep’s clothing” seems almost principled given the harm Sowers has done (23). If it is possible that Reed’s actions are just and are motivated by a sense of social responsibility, then the possibility also exists that they are deeds with which we, as readers, should sympathize. In the final analysis, after all, Wilson Reed’s blackmail scheme is Sowers’s primary source of punishment, chastening the unrepentant mastermind and providing some semblance of justice in the novel, however unsatisfying it may be to readers.

Yet, the novel does not end with these confessions or the arrest of both perpetrators. Rather, there are four additional chapters in which the future of the newly recovered families and recently restored lovers is narrated. These chapters are perhaps the most disconcerting to contemporary readers, for in these final sections an unsettling difference emerges in the outcomes of the two antagonists. Shortly after he reveals everything he and Sowers have done and admits his previous crimes, Wilse Reed escapes from the group (with his daughter, who has also attempted a murder) and runs to the mill during a strong storm. They die there in the middle of the night when “a tremendous rush of water caused the old mill to totter, reel, and fall with a deafening crash” (253). But even as the omniscient narrator explains that they were “knocked senseless by a falling beam,” he seems to anticipate that readers will not be satisfied with their relatively quick death outside of the formal processes of law. Echoing an incredulous reader’s exclamation, “Was that all?,” he reassures us, “Oh no!” (253). Their punishment is complete only in his final description, “the current carried them on eastward as if they were logs,” which strips the lower-class characters of their humanity and any potential sympathy (253). They are subject to the ultimate retribution, being removed from the circle of human recognition, sympathy, and forgiveness.

Sowers, on the other hand, seems to largely escape consequences for his acts after they are revealed. One after another, his guests and family—all victims of his crimes—absolve him, starting with his daughter who, when asked for forgiveness, responds, “Why, Father, you have never done anything to me to cause you to ask my forgiveness” (254). Similarly, William Reed (né Beverly), the person who had lost the most in the twenty years since the crime commenced, “knew he had been the victim of a vile conspiracy from his infancy, but he forgave all” (252). Everyone seems to be of a mind with Dora Beverly, who describes Sowers’s actions as “treachery in years past,” thereby justifying her decision to pardon the villain (258). Yet, the crime was in fact only discovered the day before, and would have continued had another victim not doggedly uncovered the truth. In light of this timeline, the forgiveness he receives seems rushed and unmoored from any act of redemption or responsibility from Sowers, as is evidenced by his comment when he learns that the mill has collapsed and killed Wilse Reed. He rhetorically shifts responsibility for his actions to his now-deceased co-conspirator, saying, “I suppose my evil genius was washed away with it” (254). Forgiveness, in this situation, seems particularly unsatisfying because it ignores the truth that Sowers would have continued in his corrupt actions had he not been stopped by an external force.

Forgiveness operates in a discomfiting way in this novel. Gothic elements of the text “register . . . [the] culture’s contradictions, presenting a distorted, not a disengaged version of reality,” resonating with and reflecting on Newman’s contemporary time.^[16] Sawin argues that the ease with which Sowers is forgiven for the “horrific things” he has done is one of “two obvious plot flaws” that would strike modern readers as odd (332). Primed on detective, gothic, and sentimental tales that were “willing to shock the reader in order to generate the desired intensity of feeling,” it is possible that Newman’s contemporary readers would also have chafed at the easy forgiveness that reunites white characters at the end of the novel.^[17]

Yet, this plot device and our discomfort with it as readers is perhaps the point. Like the real-world example unfolding in Newman’s time, forgiveness operates as a moral economy in A Miserable Revenge, lubricating the machinery of whiteness. The decision to extend or to withhold that commodity limns the borders of acceptance into the territory of whiteness. Newman is writing as federal troops are being withdrawn from the Southern Confederacy states; effectively, white Southerners were forgiven and invited to resume as fully participating members of the nation despite their unrepentant stance and clear indications that they would reinstate the terroristic reign of white supremacy in the South as quickly as they could. Black lives, political gains, and well-being were deemed inconsequential to the concerns of the nation, establishing the borders of whiteness by their exclusion. As readers are made uncomfortable, perhaps even angry, by the outcome of the novel, we are thrust into the lived experience and emotional reality of nineteenth-century Black people who were, like George Newman, on the front lines agitating for social change.

 

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