| Bertonneau, Thomas F. “Like Hypatia Before the
Mob: Desire, Resentment, and Sacrifice in The Bostonians (An Anthropoetics),”
Nineteenth-Century
Literature Vol. 53, No. 1 (June 1998): 56-90.
Bertonneau disagrees with the conventional contemporary reading of the scene in Hypatia where Hypatia is murdered by a Christian mob. Such reading is that the mob is a true representation of Christianity and that Kingsley is castigating the hypocrisy and brutality of the new religion. Rather, Bertonneau argues, just because the crowd thinks of itself as Christian and acts in the name of this religion, it does not mean that it is in fact truly Christian. “The truth, in Kingsley’s scene, is that the sacrificial impulse comes not from Jesus (not from Christianity) but from the mob, which is motivated by passion, not by compassion . . . . The mob enacts the very impulse, namely sacrifice, that Jesus would suspend” (89). Hypatia;
Catholicism;
History;
Henry
James.
Haralson, Eric. “James’s The American:
A (New)man is Being Beaten,” American Literature Vol. 64, No. 3
(September 1992): 475-495.
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