1. âA Holy Terrorâ
The earliest and longest of the nineteen tales collected in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, âA Holy Terrorâ appeared in the San Franciscoâbased Wasp on December 23, 1882.1 Because of this early date of first publication, the inclusion of the story in the 1892 collection initially appears problematic since the remaining stories all appeared in print within a five-year span from December of 1886 through April of 1891. In fact, despite its early appearance, âA Holy Terrorâ is thematically linked to many of the tales in the 1892 collection and Bierceâs decision to include it in the collection is readily defensible. As will become clear, the story is also a particularly appropriate and illustrative opening subject for this study.
A central feature of Bierceâs treatment of âA Holy Terrorâ concerns the way he used his editorial position at the Wasp to carefully integrate the story into its host publication through the publication of related material over a span of many months. Of particular interest is the fact that the elaborate staging of the story anticipates Bierceâs subsequent treatment of many of his tales destined for Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. While the elaborate prepublication groundwork for âA Holy Terrorâ appears to have been directed at regular readers of the paper, Bierce also took steps to make the story more accessible to new readers. Thus, assuming that many people would be reading the publication for the first time, the Christmas editorial of the Wasp pointedly albeit cryptically warned new readers that they needed to pay careful attention to the details of things. Even though Bierce deliberately introduced the subject matter of the story and embedded subtle hints as to its meaning in the Christmas editorial, many readers must inevitably have extracted uninformed interpretations. Bierce apparently had these flawed interpretations in mind when in the months that followed the December 23, 1882, appearance of the story he continued to provide retrospective material with clear connections to âA Holy Terror.â While it seems unlikely that Bierce deliberately planned out the full details of his multifaceted presentation and even though he did not entirely reprise the performance while he was at the Wasp, understandings gained by carefully examining Bierceâs staged presentation of âA Holy Terrorâ remain instructive when and where his later tales are considered.
As touched on earlier, despite their best intentions, most Wasp-based readers of âA Holy Terrorâ must have extracted readings that, whether grossly wrong or simply incomplete, Bierce would have judged uninformed. As we shall see, many of Bierceâs tales elicit similarly uninformed readings by modern readers, and in light of this general fact it is useful to begin discussing each story by providing a deliberately cursory reading. In the case of âA Holy Terror,â once an unenlightened reading is established, we can turn our attention to restoring the original context of the story as it appeared within the Wasp both by making extensive use of âPrattleâ excerpts and other material, and by noting and analyzing significant textual differences between the initial and subsequent versions of the story. This process of recontextualization allows the recovery of additional details, meanings, and interpretations missed during the initial reading, and, ultimately, out of these various strands of inquiry a much more fully realized close reading of âA Holy Terrorâ emerges.
âA Holy Terrorâ is subdivided into five sections or chapters. The first section of the story begins with a cryptic introduction of âthe latest arrival at Hurdy-Gurdy,â a small abandoned mining camp in California. After a brief summary of the tawdry history of the camp, which concludes with a vivid description of its present advanced state of ruinous decay (in short, Bierce takes pains to point out that the camp is dead), Bierce begins the second section by describing the actions of the still unnamed man âwho had now rediscovered Hurdy-Gurdyâ as he paces off and stakes a claim in the cemetery of the decaying camp. At the end of this section we learn that the man is named Jefferson Doman. In the third section Bierce explains how Jefferson Doman has come to be in Hurdy-Gurdy. Six years previously Doman came west from New Jersey in search of gold, leaving his girl, Mary Matthews, behind; left to her own devices, Matthews falls into bad male company in the form of a gambler and after the gambler catches her stealing he bestows upon her a disfiguring facial scar. Matthews, craftily playing all her cards, duly informs the still faithful Doman of her disfigurement in a letter, complete with a revealing photograph, albeit attributing the scar to a fall from a horse and omitting any mention of the manâs role in the affair. Predictably, the faithful and rather naĂŻve Doman reacts to the news by cherishing Matthews all the more. Turning again to Domanâs more immediate story, Bierce explains that after years of failure, thanks to a revealing letter sent by a friend, Barney Bree, then living in Hurdy-Gurdy, Doman looks to be on the verge of striking it rich. The letter, which Doman has inadvertently misplaced for two years, during which time Bree has expired from overindulgence in drink, explains that Bree had found gold in the graveyard. Specifically, Breeâs letter reveals that a rich gold vein is located at the bottom of a grave that holds a certain âScarry,â a local woman of some repute for her exploits.
The fourth section of âA Holy Terrorâ begins with Doman standing over Scarryâs grave and reminiscing about the woman he has never had a chance to meet due to his âvagrantly laborious lifeâ as a prospector. Subsequently, after rather gleefully pronouncing that Scarry âwas a holy terror,â Doman quickly sets about excavating her grave. As darkness descends, Doman reaches Scarryâs casket, finds it has no handles, feverishly enlarges his mining shaft around it, and levers it onto one end in the open grave, which is now illuminated only by the light of the recently risen full moon. Throughout this section Bierce has painstakingly established the intricately layered elements of the scene that conspire to facilitate Domanâs undoing. Doman is not merely in a cemetery located in a deserted and decaying mining camp at night: at this point in the affair he is standing, âup to his neck,â next to a coffin in a relatively recently occupied newly reopened grave, near the overhanging âblack branches of the dead treeââa hanging treeâwith a âweather-worn rope that dangled from its ghostly hand.â Further heightening the moonlit sceneâs oppressive atmosphere, readers next learn that Doman is being serenaded by â[t]he monotonous howling of distant wolves, sharply punctuated by the barking of a coyote.â And yet more ill omens confront Doman: first an owl âflapped awkwardly above him on noiseless wings,â and then, with âhis senses all alert,â âduring this lull in the battle,â which we are told occurs as â[t]he Assassin was cloaking the sword,â Doman âbecame sensible of a faint, sickening odor.â Doman attributes the odor to a rattlesnake,2 and Bierce uses this misinterpretation to introduce another traditional harbinger of death into the scene. Thus, as Doman looks into the âgloom of the graveâ surrounding his feet for the imaginary rattlesnake, â[a] hoarse, gurgling sound, like the death-rattle in a human throat, seemed to come out of the sky, and a moment later a great, black, angular shadow, like the same sound made visible, dropped curving from the topmost branch of the spectral tree, fluttered for an instant before his face, and sailed fiercely away into the mist along the creek. It was a raven.â
Only after this litany of this worldly as opposed to otherworldly horrors does Bierce allow Domanâs attention to focus again on the coffin. Fully primed for the Assassinâs sword, Doman now discovers that the casket has been put into the grave upside down. After momentarily trying to read the words engraved on the identifying metal plate of the coffin from his end of the open grave, the thought that Scarryâs remains are facing him, separated from his sight only by the rotting redwood boards of the casket, takes hold of Doman and soon he is imagining the âlivid corpse of the dead womanâ and a possible connection between her descriptive name and his own beloved Mary Matthewsâs disfiguring scar. A long paragraph documents Domanâs futile struggle with the Assassin, a struggle that revolves around Domanâs attempt to determine if the woman known as Scarry could possibly be Mary Matthews. Emerging from this âagony of anticipation,â which threatens to kill him even before his curiosity can be gratified âby the coup de grĂące of verification,â in the next paragraph Doman initially believes that the coffin has moved toward him. When he realizes that his enemy had not advanced upon him, but rather âhe had advanced upon his enemy,â Doman smiles because he realizes the coffin cannot retreat and strikes the metal plate on the decayed coffin lid with the hilt of his knife. With âa sharp, ringing percussion, and with a dull clatterâ the wood shatters and falls away to reveal to the now âfrenzied, shrieking manâ the âwoman standing tranquil in her silences.â Confronted by the womanâs remains, Doman dies of terror.
Bierce concludes âA Holy Terrorâ with an appropriately pithy final section. Some months after Domanâs demise, a party of travelers on their way to Yosemite Valley from San Francisco stops in Hurdy-Gurdy for dinner. Paying a visit to the hanging tree and the cemetery, they find the opened grave containing the skeletal remains of two bodies. While the men are entertaining themselves with the graveâs contents (including the discovery of iron pyrite, or foolâs gold, in the grave), one of the women, Mrs. Porfer, wanders away, ostensibly because of her inability to âendure the disagreeable businessâ of the grave looting, and finds Jefferson Domanâs abandoned coat. After assuring herself that she is not being observed, Mrs. Porfer âthrust[s] her jeweled hand into the exposed pocketâ and is rewarded with the discovery of a pocket book. In the book are a bundle of letters from New Jersey, a lock of blond hair, and photographs of Miss Matthews before and after her disfigurement. Not long after Mrs. Porferâs discovery, the other members of the party make a discovery of their own: Mrs. Mary Matthews Porfer has âhad the bad luck to be dead.â
In including âA Holy Terrorâ in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians, Bierce was clearly aware that the story, despite its origins in the Wasp, was appropriate for a collection consisting largely of tales published in the Examiner. Beyond a subtle literary link to âAn Heiress from Redhorse,â3 the concluding tale in Bierceâs 1892 collection, two key elements of âA Holy TerrorâââDomanâs altered mental state prior to his demise and his death from an excess of irrational fearâconnect it thematically to many of the other stories included in Tales of Soldiers and Civilians. Although all the stories in the 1892 collection involve elements of an altered mental state, Bierce most obviously reprised or expanded upon the implications of Domanâs altered mental state in the following stories: âA Horseman in the Sky,â âAn Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,â âOne of the Missing,â âA Tough Tussle,â and âThe Man and the Snake.â Furthermore, Jefferson Domanâs death from an excess of irrational fear or terror is echoed by similar deaths in âOne of the Missing,â âA Tough Tussle,â and âThe Man and the Snake,â and, with slight variations, in the deaths of characters in several additional tales: âA Watcher by the Dead,â âThe Suitable Surroundings,â and âThe Middle Toe of the Right Foot.â
Beyond these thematic links, âA Holy Terrorâ and Bierceâs Examiner-based stories are similar in that they are carefully fit into their host publications. Although the weekly Wasp, with its emphasis on literary and political concerns, lacked the full range of supporting material that Bierce was able to draw upon or make use of when writing stories for publication within the Examiner, Bierce as the editor of the paper was able to stage the story with a great degree of control. Critics and readers lacking familiarity with the storyâs original host publication have thus been at a significant interpretive disadvantage. Indeed, to read âA Holy Terrorâ as Bierce meant it to be read by those who could unlock its secrets, it is essential that the Waspâs role as the storyâs original host publication be understood; moreover, in exploring the storyâs staging in the Wasp, we gain a great deal of general insight into the hidden complexities of Bierceâs art.
At the time âA Holy Terrorâ was first published the Wasp was a weekly journal that was then remarkable for its brilliantly cynical and satirical editorial style, a style that, from early 1881 through the summer of 1886, was personified by Bierce, the paperâs editor and most important and prolific contributor. In late 1882, under Bierceâs idiosyncratic editorial hand, the Wasp was thriving: a year earlier, less than seven months into his tenure, the editorial for October 7, 1881, proudly announced that the circulation of the paper was âupwards of 11,000 copies,â which the Wasp thought âthe largest circulation ever obtained by a weekly paper in California,â and then reproduced two official letters testifying to its rapidly increasing circulation. The first letter, officially notarized, proclaimed that âthe circulation of the Wasp since April 15th last has increased more than twenty-one hundred (2100) copies by actual count.â In the second letter, the paperâs subscription agent, having just completed a âtour in the southern countiesâ of California, announced that in âabout seven weeksâ he had added âfive hundred and fifty-six (556) new subscriptions to the Wasp, of which most were yearly.â According to the same editorial, the Wasp was
Similarly, five months after the publication of âA Holy Terrorâ the paper continued to thrive. On May 26, 1883, the Wasp, claiming to reach âevery part of the Pacific Coast,â reported that its circulation was ânearly 14,000â and that it had added â1,107â new subscriptions since March 1, 1883. In other words, by December 23, 1882, the Wasp had in effect become a public stage for Bierceâs wide-ranging performances: he typically penned the lengthy and often diverse editorials that appeared in the paper, and his famous and devastatingly satirical âPrattleâ column usually filled the following page; in addition, in almost every issue, either under his name or initial(s) or pseudonym(s), or even at times anonymously, he contributed other works ranging from serious critical commentaries about contemporary issues, to installments of his âDevilâs Dictionaryâ or âLittle Johnnyâ columns, to poems and other pieces of variously satirical, cynical, and sardonic prose fiction and commentary. In short, having taken up the editorial reins of the journal in March 1881 after his frustrating foray into the Black Hills, by December 1882 Bierce had quite literally become the human embodiment of the Wasp, and in the mold of Juvenal, Addison, and Swift he was rapidly becoming the most influential literary journalist on the West Coast. Thus, when Bierce placed âA Holy Terrorâ in the journalâs Christmas number that year, he arguably did so with a well-developed and fully-conscious intent to both reward his more perceptive regular readers with a richly ironic holiday feast of cynicism and satire, and to concurrently afflict his less perceptive readers with a holy terror.
Given its demanding nature, âA Holy Terrorâ has long been more widely successful at befuddling its less perceptive readers than it has been in entertaining its more perceptive ones. Certainly, less perceptive or uninformed readers of âA Holy Terrorâ are unlikely to comprehend the many hidden intricacies and ironies of the tale even though the elements that cause them to stumble are often the clues and keys to understanding. For example, if they are wholly unable to penetrate Bierceâs system of grammar, readers and critics may never realize that the woman whose grave is violated was in life a whore. Recent critics who have unwittingly fallen into this popular category of readers have somewhat understandably but nevertheless erroneously concluded that the story has no significant literary depths. But this is as Bierce meant it to be: only informed and careful readers were expected to unlock the storyâs secrets, and few recent critics or readers are up to the task. As already touched upon, in 1882 the situation faced by Wasp-based readers was somewhat more promising. Some, for example, presumably possessed valuable personal experience gained in the mining camps of the region, experience that would have taught them much that could be useful in reading âA Holy Terror.â On the other hand, within the context of the Wasp, it is not necessary to be a forty-niner to unseal the tale. Bierce knew that the Waspâs regular readers were well versed in the need to read carefully where his satirical writings were concerned, and he clearly intended that some of them would discover the secrets of his tale on the strength of their own probing intellects. Helping to facilitate this outcome, in the months leading up to the publication of âA Holy Terror,â Bierce in his roles as editor and author had brought several instructive examples of holy terrors to the attention of this audience. Additionally, knowing that the well-promoted Christmas issue would attract new readers, Bierce employed the paperâs editorial page to pointedly warn new readers (and old) whose âunconsidering orbs persist in seeing things not as they are, but as they should be,â that the Wasp saw things with a greater degree of clarity. Nevertheless, despite even this last warning, it is evident that many Wasp-based readers, like their more recent counterparts, must still have come away f...