The Adulterer, Part VIII: Blood and Gore, contd.

            At this stage, one might fairly question the nature of Warren’s sanguinary fixation. As a function of style, it certainly sets apart her literary efforts from those of her fellow Founders. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, used the word “blood” once in the course of his A Summary View of the Rights of British America, once in his Kentucky Resolutions, and three times – counting the use of the word “bloody” – in his First Inaugural Address.  The eighty-five essays that make up the Federalist Papers – penned by  Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – meanwhile contain the word “blood” or “bloody” a scant fifteen times. The Adulterer comparatively makes use of these same words a staggering thirty-two times over the course of five acts. The figurative image of blood was clearly of value to Warren, in a way that simply wasn’t the case for some of her more prominent compatriots among the Founding Generation. And while the various implications and symbolic significances utilized within the text of The Adulterer have been thus far discussed at length, it perhaps remains to be determined what, if anything specific, Warren was driving at. Why, in short, was blood such an important motif for her? Was it merely a matter of taste, or was there a point which she felt its rhetorical use helped her to make?

            To begin, it certainly bears repeating the obvious. As writers and artists have been aware of since time immemorial, audiences can be made to react very strongly to imagery that taps directly into their physical sensitivities. Show someone the image of a severed head, and they while almost certainly respond more instinctually or emotionally than they would if presented a picture of, say, a felled tree. Similarly, descriptions that play upon common feelings of vulnerability, fear, or repulsion often seem to resonate more powerfully with people than their more abstract or plainly descriptive equivalents. Warren’s use of blood, gore, carnage, and general physical suffering no doubt sprung in part from this idea. The subject of her first attempt at explicitly political theatre was of tremendous significance to the daily context of its intended audience, though not everyone who happened to read a copy of The Adulterer was likely to approach the topic with the same passion quite clearly nurtured by Warren herself. As is all too familiar here at the dawn of the 21^st century, there were doubtless people living in Massachusetts in the early 1770s who did not consider themselves to be politically engaged. Content to live their lives concerned only with the needs of the moment, they doubtless determined to leave matters of policy and political economy to those possessed of the training, interest, and inclination.

At the same time, it also bears remembering that no small portion of the population considered their loyalty to the Crown and to Parliament as holding greater personal sway than any fears they might have entertained as to the status of their rights and liberties. Thus confronted with indifference and hostility, Warren may simply have determined to deploy certain rhetorical devices within the text of The Adulterer in order to better reach her countrymen. Not everyone cared about the purported behavior of the Governor or his supporters, or about the edicts of Parliament upon the taxation of a relatively short list of goods. But most people could be made to feel insecure, or horrified, or disgusted. They could be shown a severed head, in short, and made to despise the party responsible. Granted, this sort of sensationalism is hardly foolproof. Sometimes people are cynical; sometimes they are detached. Sometimes they don’t like feeling as though their emotions are being manipulated. But, more often than not when shown something visceral, they simply react. While her exact intentions almost certainly ran deeper than that, it would nonetheless be short-sighted to hold Mercy Otis Warren as being entirely above the use of such a time-tested tool of artistic expression.

That being said, her aim was almost definitely more than to achieve a degree of “shock and awe.” As her later work strongly attests, Warren was both engaged with the political and social events unfolding around her and eager to affect the outcome of the same. She did not write simply to convey information – she was not a journalist, in short. Rather, she wrote in order to express a particular point of view, promote a particular course of action, and generally move the world she inhabited in what she believed to be a constructive direction. The Adulterer was surely in keeping with this attitude. The events represented therein – the killing of Christopher Seider or the Boston Massacre – were already well-known by the time of its publication in 1773. For that matter, so were the various transgressions of colonial governor Thomas Hutchinson. The purpose of the play, therefore, was assuredly not to inform – not to point to something that people might not have seen – but rather to offer a potential course of action. In so doing, Warren effectively wove together the events of recent years into a kind of object lesson in moral behavior. Blood was perhaps the most prominent figurative element therein, doubtless chosen for its ability to elicit an emotional response.

In the framework of The Adulterer, blood – in whatever context – arguably represents life itself. It is the most precious thing any individual can possess, and the most costly thing anyone stands to lose. Care must be taken, then, preciously how and when blood is shed. A person who bleeds willingly for the sake of principle thus demonstrates both the depth of their conviction and the value of the thing itself. Conversely, someone who extracts the blood of the innocent in the name of ego is guilty of destroying something of unparallelled value. Just so, the blood shed by a forebear in order to secure a legacy for their offspring represents a tremendous responsibility for all those that claim to enjoy the fruits thereof. And when faced with a such a tyrant as would callously snuff out human life, it may become just to bleed them dry – precious though even their life might be in essence, the loss of it could well save many more. What Warren was driving at, therefore, was arguably the characterization of the struggle then ongoing between British authority in Massachusetts – as represented by Governor Thomas Hutchinson – and the increasingly radical and organized political opposition as a matter, not of taxes and legislative prerogatives, but of life and death. To that end, The Adulterer seems designed to shift the debate away from notions of law, and precedent, and inherited rights – though rights do form a large part of the vocabulary of Patriots resistance to Rapatio’s machinations – and towards a far more fundamental moral quandary. People had died, Warren pointed out – and they were dying, and they would yet die. The only question that mattered, therefore – the only question worth answering – was what were the people of Massachusetts going to do about it?

In fact, The Adulterer seems to provide an answer. Upon the aforementioned massacre of Servian civilians, Brutus attempts to rouse an assembly of his countrymen in in Act III, Scene I by describing what stands before them in their quest for justice. “We’ll rescue freedom,” he says,

            Yes, thy wounds my country

            Shall soon be closed and from the precious gore,

            Which stains the streets shall spring a glorious harvest.

            Now is the crisis; if we lose this moment,

            All’s gone forever – Catch the happy period,

            And boldly hurl oppression from her basis.

Here, it seems, Warren’s bloody visions of self-sacrifice, suffering, obligation, and revenge cohere into a kind of moral imperative. While acknowledging the blood that has been shed already – a loss of life which cannot be undone – Brutus recasts the horror of, “The precious gore, / Which now stains the streets” as the possible prelude to something “glorious.” Just as he and Cassius feel the weight of the sacrifice rendered by their ancestors and endeavor to see it justified, Brutus here seems to be expressing a similar sense of obligation as concerns the innocents slain at the hands of Rapatio and his minions. Fulfilling that obligation, he asserts, will summon forth a “harvest” – i.e. the bountiful realization of much time, and effort, and suffering – which will serve to ensure that all who died in the course of its achievement will not have perished in vain.

            The period within which this harvest might be realized, however, is unfortunately a fleeting one. “Now is the crisis [,]” Brutus asserts, “If we lose this moment, / All’s gone forever [.]” The significance of this exhortation seems quite plain enough. Rather than simply chronicle the suffering and lamentations of her fellow citizens of Massachusetts, or draw attention to the iniquities and moral lapses of the ruling elite thereof, Warren sought to spur her countrymen to action. Much had been lost, she admitted – through the medium of Servia and her ill-starred Patriots – but that loss could be made good by those who yet drew breath. As of 1773, many people in Massachusetts had been harshly disabused of their former loyalty to the British Crown – by being taxed, garrisoned by soldiers, and shot down in the streets. And while the resulting anger would surely have lingered a good deal longer with those already inclined to doubt British intentions – Samuel Adams (1722-1803) for example, and his infamous Sons of Liberty – it was almost certainly bound to fade among the general population in the absence of further incidents. Notwithstanding that the so-called Boston Tea Party (December, 1773) and its disastrous aftermath were yet on the horizon, it surely appeared to Warren as though something needed to be done before her fellow countrymen no longer felt so keenly that their repeated injuries were in need of redress. Act, she therefore insisted, before the opportunity has passed – “Catch the happy period,” and make good the suffering that Massachusetts has been made to endure.

As to what the moment required, however, Warren’s hero was somewhat more equivocal. “Boldly hurl oppression from her basis [,]” he declares to his fellow Servians in a rather bloodless directive compared to his and his cohorts’ usual fare. And yet, context again supplies a deeper meaning. As Portius declared his intention to drench his sword in the blood of a tyrant, and as he, Cassius, Brutus, and Junius jointly pledged to pave the streets of Servia “with many a human skull” in quest of liberty for their homeland, there would seem to be no mistaking the intention behind the phrase “boldly hurl oppression.” If Rapatio was the seat of oppression in Servia, then Brutus was commanding his fellow citizens to seize the man and cast him from his lofty perch by whatever means they could. In consequence, the cited plea effectively joined together three of the moral implications Warren attached to the image of blood in the context of The Adulterer – i.e. it acknowledged the horror of innocent suffering, characterized that suffering as a form obligation, and located the fulfillment of that obligation in the justifiable infliction of additional suffering upon the party (or parties) ultimately responsible.

While it may be somewhat irregular – by the terms previously set for discussions herein undertaken – a brief glance past the publication of The Adulterer into the 1780s would seem to bear out the characterization presented above for Mercy Otis Warren’s particular interpretation of all things sanguinary. Specifically, the pamphlet entitled, Observations on the New Constitution, and on the Federal and State Conventions – written by Warren in response to the proposed constitution presented by the Philadelphia Convention in September, 1787 – exhibited a similar rhetorical fixation with blood, suffering, self-sacrifice, and obligation. In laying forth her position against the adoption of said constitution, for example, Warren described her countrymen as a people, “Who have braved the power of Britain, weathered the convulsions of war, and waded thro’ the blood of friends and foes to establish their independence and to support the freedom of the human mind [.]” These, “Brave Sons of America,” she continued,

Have purchased it with their blood, and have gloried in their independence with a dignity of spirit, which has made them the admiration of philosophy, the pride of America, and the wonder of Europe.

Capping off this paean to heroic self-destruction, Warren further declared that,

On these shores freedom has planted her standard, dipped in the purple tide that flowed from the veins of her martyred heroes; and here every uncorrupted American yet hopes to see it supported by the vigour, the justice, the wisdom and unanimity of the people [.]”

Whether weaving allegory or polemic, it seemed, Mercy Otis Warren conceived of the struggle between liberty and tyranny in terms of life, and death, and blood, and suffering.

In the cited passages of Observations, as from the lips of Brutus and his Servian brethren, blood is invoked alongside words like “brave,” “freedom,” “glory,” “dignity,” “pride,” “martyr,” and “justice.” Thus, like her creation Brutus, Warren seems inclined to characterize the suffering of her fellow Americans in the cause of liberty as a heroic, ennobling thing. The “standard of freedom,” she rhapsodized, was, “Diped in the purple tide that flowed from the veins of her martyred heroes [.]” There is in this a distinct echo of the Act V, Scene I lament of Brutus, who, “Waked and wept and would have fought for thee, / And emptied every vein, when threatened ruin.” But whereas Brutus offered to make this noble sacrifice, Warren reminds her readers in Observations that the defenders of America already have, and it thus fell to their countrymen to see that their suffering was justified. In this, and in her contention that the veterans of the late Revolutionary War had, “Purchased [independence] with their blood [,]” Warren also echoed the claims of characters like Cassius’ ghostly father that bodily sacrifices – i.e., bloodshed, suffering, and death – in the name of noble causes constituted a form of obligation. As the forebears of the Servian Patriots built a legacy for their offspring out of blood and toil – “Behold this fair possession [,]” the aforementioned spirit exhorts his son, “I struggled hard to purchase, fought and bled / To leave it your unsullied – Oh defend it – so too did Warren’s Observations portray the suffering and death endured by the “martyred heroes” of the Revolution as a form of moral debt that only, “The vigour, the justice, the wisdom and unanimity,” of their countrymen could pay off.

Further on in Observations, in the midst of a numbered list of specific objections to the proposed constitution, Warren again made use of the image of blood as a rhetorical device. In this case, in the seventeenth of eighteen resolves, she declared that the provision ensuring the adoption of the new system of government upon the ratification of only nine of thirteen states represented, “A subversion of the union of Confederated States,” and in fact, “May be a means of involving the whole country in blood.” The most obvious implication of this phrase is that Warren believed the imposition of the proposed constitution upon the whole of the United States after only a fraction of its citizens had approved of the same would likely result in some manner of civil unrest, further needless suffering, and death. Consider, by way of comparison, the cited assertion of Brutus that Rapatio, “Imbues his hands in blood” by prizing his own position above the lives and liberties of his fellow Servians, or the way that Junius describes soldiers responsible for killing innocent civilians as having their garments, “Stained with blood [.]” As the protagonists of The Adulterer used blood as a metonym for the unnatural cruelties that the Servian ruling elite were willing to indulge, their creator Warren appeared to use the same terminology to lay the responsibility for further suffering squarely at the feet of those who would support the ratification of the proposed constitution. The country would be “involved in blood,” she declared, and the most dedicated supporters of the proposed constitution would be the cause.  
    

            Granting that it may not represent conclusive validation for the assertions put forward herein as to the symbolic significance of blood in Mercy Otis Warren’s The Adulterer, the cited passages from her later Observations present a potentially intriguing coda to the call to arms evidently embodied by the former. Not only, it appears, was Warren inclined to characterize the mounting struggle between Crown authorities and the local political opposition in pre-Revolutionary Massachusetts as a matter of life and death, but she seemed disposed to adopt the same basic moral framework when later discussing the post-Revolutionary contest between supporters and detractors of the proposed federal constitution. In both instances she was almost certainly endeavoring to utilize a particular rhetorical technique to move her countrymen to action, though this should not necessarily be taken to render moot the personal or cultural significance of the act. That in at least two instances fifteen years apart Warren was given to describe the crises she perceived facing her countrymen as a matter of the utmost importance – of blood, and suffering, and sacrifice – may well indicate that she tended to view what others characterized as political, economic, or philosophical questions through a distinctly moral lens. Furthermore, that she believed her countrymen would respond to what she wrote in the manner she intended would seem to suggest – unless she was wholly and completely out of touch with the people whose passions she confidently attempted to rouse – that a moral characterization of the events of the American Revolution and its aftermath could and did coexist with more abstract examinations of philosophy, or law, or history.

Bearing this in mind, The Adulterer would appear very much of a kind with Common Sense by Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Like Warren, Paine was given to expressing his disdain for the reigning political order in distinctly moral terms. And while Common Sense attacked the very concept of monarchical government rather than a particular manifestation thereof – i.e. the administration of Thomas Hutchinson in Massachusetts – and brought to bear a number of logistical arguments in attempted to make a case for American independence, its author was given to a form of expression not at all unlike that seen in the text of The Adulterer. On the subject of monarchy, for example, Paine declared that it was, “A form of government which the word of God bears testimony against, and blood will attend it.” In a similar vein, avowing that America only stood to suffer by being dragged into conflicts between European powers, Paine asserted that, “The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'TIS TIME TO PART [.]” And on the subject of reconciliation between Britain and America, Paine avowed that his heart had turned against it after the Battles of Lexington and Concord (April 19^th, 1775), whereupon,  

I rejected the hardened, sullen tempered Pharaoh of England for ever; and disdain the wretch, that with the pretended title of FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE, can unfeelingly hear of their slaughter, and composedly sleep with their blood upon his soul.

Warren might well have struggled to craft a more fitting pronouncement from the lips of her own Brutus or Junius. And while there is much more besides in Common Sense that unites it in tone and outlook with Warren’s The Adulterer – Paine’s description of Britain as a “Barbarous and hellish power,” for example – their shared use of blood as a signifier of life itself, and its loss, and the villainy of those who would discount its value, would seem more than adequate to make the case.

            The Adulterer, as its fixation upon blood, and gore, and sacrifice, and revenge arguably attest, was therefore likely intended to function as an instrument of moral persuasion – to act upon the sentiments of its audience, rather than their reason. And like Common Sense, it was written at a time of great turmoil – i.e. the aftermath of the Boston Massacre – which it sought to harness for the purpose of achieving redress for injuries sustained by the people of Massachusetts. As Brutus exhorted his fellows to, “Catch the happy period [,]” so Warren doubtless sought to rouse her own suffering countrymen by means of visceral imagery and emotive language. In this, The Adulterer stands distinctly apart from certain other publications of the period whose focus and tone were decidedly academic. By way of example, Jefferson’s aforementioned Summary View – published in 1774, in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party – or even the Declaration of Independence – published in 1776, after over a year of open conflict between Britain and the Colonies – appear somewhat more concerned with the nuances of English legal history and Enlightenment political theory than with attempting to provoke a moral reaction to decidedly immoral behavior.

And yet, though the authors of the Declaration seemed inclined to characterize the separation of the Thirteen Colonies from Great Britain as resulting from the breach of a long-established contract while Warren compared Hutchinson and his supporters to cannibals and murderers, their respective efforts should not be seen to stand opposed to one another. Both approaches – the intellectual and the emotional – served to forward the cause of protecting and promoting the lives and liberty of the contemporary American people. Polemicists like Paine and Warren made use of language, and rhetoric, and the sensibilities of their audience to rally the people to a realization of the true stakes of the crisis then unfolding around them. They blasted complacency and unthinking loyalty, mourned the suffering and the losses that had callously been inflicted, and exhorted their fellow citizens to salvage what they knew to be their birthright. At this stage, a theorist like Jefferson – or John Dickinson or James Wilson, for that matter – steps forward and offers to an audience now much inflamed a potential plan of action. “Boldly hurl oppression from her basis [,]” Warren’s Brutus declared, and well that he might have done so. But such an appeal required structure and direction if ever it were to be acted upon. Jefferson’s Summary View, Wilson’s Considerations, or the Declaration itself thus provided the legal and philosophical framework for redress. By channelling the popular moral condemnation aroused by works like Warren’s The Adulterer, these explorations of theory and precedent helped give form to the exhortations raised by the former. In consequence, while The Adulterer ought indeed to be thought of as a thing apart from some of the more theoretical or academic works of the period – in which philosophers were quoted and grievances were itemized – it was also distinctly complimentary to the same.