SOURCE: "Economics, or the Bosom Serpent: Oliver Wendell Holmes's Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny" in American Transcendental Quarterly, N. S., Vol. 2, No. 1, March, 1988, pp. 57-68.

In the following essay, Dalke examines Holmes's intent in Elsie Venner: A Romance of Destiny, in which he argues that human beings cannot be held accountable for misdeeds because of their heredity.

Oliver Wendell Holmes's first novel, Elsie Venner, has three prefaces, each allowing the reader less license than its predecessor. In the first, Holmes describes the book as a "romance," and leaves the reader to "judge for himself what "actually happened," what is "possible" and what "more or less probable" (vii). In the second preface Holmes much more pointedly explains that the aim of his story is "to test the doctrine of Original sin' and human responsibility." The thesis of the story is here presented in the form of a question...