"A thing of heaven, and yet how frail": Herman Melville's Clarel and the American Religious Climate

The recent emergence of postsecular criticism has opened up new avenues for cultural and literary studies by questioning the veracity of the secularization narrative and challenging its ubiquitousness, yet postsecular... [ view full abstract ]

The recent emergence of postsecular criticism has opened up new avenues for cultural and literary studies by questioning the veracity of the secularization narrative and challenging its ubiquitousness, yet postsecular criticism continues to commit the sin of only granting the complexity of religious belief to the current age. As Tracy Fessenden has argued, much of the work done under the name of postsecularism falls into the same pattern of thought, privileging versions of religious faith that are compatible with secularist claims.  Through analysis of Herman Melville’s epic poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land, a text written in a time where Holy Land tourism was at its height, I argue that the depictions of landscape and ecological events in Melville’s poem give voice to the lost complexity of debates around religious belief in the late nineteenth century and offers perhaps uncomfortable challenges to secularism’s guarantees of social progress. I put Melville’s literary text in context with the cultural ephemera surrounding the issues of belief in the face of scientific advancements, the separation of church and state, and the rise of spiritualism in order to show how attending to the vocabularies of climate in 19^th-century literature can advance postsecular criticism’s ambition to reorient our understanding of religious belief in American from a perspective outside of the secular.