Du Bois, Nineteenth-Century Prophetic Culture, and the Anti-Liberal Literary Tradition

Laura Thiemann Scales analyzes Du Bois’s choice to cast himself as a new John Brown in a climate of crisis, and shows how Du Bois was influenced by several nineteenth-century strains of prophetic thinking besides Brown’s,... [ view full abstract ]

Laura Thiemann Scales analyzes Du Bois’s choice to cast himself as a new John Brown in a climate of crisis, and shows how Du Bois was influenced by several nineteenth-century strains of prophetic thinking besides Brown’s, including the religious prophecies of Nat Turner, spiritualist clairvoyance, and Theosophy. Du Bois’s work, Scales argues, illuminates the fate of nineteenth-century ideas of narrative mediumship. In John Brown, Du Bois suggests that the divided, mediated state—the prophetic state—does not need to be repaired, but is instead the source of real political power. Rejecting capitalism and its attendant principles of ownership and debt, Du Bois depicts John Brown as a prophet not indebted to the divine, but as one who co-creates and interprets his own future. Prophetic figures like John Brown enabled new modes of narrative voice and new ways of thinking about authorship. As literary theory has pushed toward secularism and anti-authoritarianism, it has become difficult for critics to allow any elision of author and god. As Roland Barthes put it, “[w]e know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” Yet this critical wariness to admit considerations of divine authority into literary study, Scales argues, fails to account for modes of narration that emerged in the nineteenth century, and limits our ability to understand narrative power.