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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts PLACING RELIGION: THE SPIRITUAL GEOGRAPHY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS A Thesis in English by Carissa Turner Smith © 2007 Carissa Turner Smith Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2007 The thesis of Carissa Turner Smith was reviewed and approved* by the following: Deborah L. Clarke Associate Professor of English and Women’s Studies Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee Christine L. Gorby Associate Professor of Architecture Iyunolu F. Osagie Associate Professor of English Robin G. Schulze Professor of English Robert R. Edwards Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature Director of Graduate Studies of the Department of English *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School. ii ABSTRACT My project, Placing Religion: The Spiritual Geography of Twentieth-Century American Women Writers, explores the ways in which American women writers use narrative (both fictional and nonfictional) to construct a relationship between Christianity, family history, and place. More specifically, the writers I discuss portray a similar pattern: the protagonist returns to a geographical place associated with her mother and with maternal spirituality, and thus she is finally able to find her own “place” within an ostensibly patriarchal religion. This emphasis on particular places is by no means limited to writers dealing with Christian tradition; however, I narrow my focus to Christian writers because Christianity’s emphasis on the Incarnation of Christ—the entrance of the divine into a particular time and place—often affects the portrayal of spiritual geography in specific ways. In addressing twentieth- and twenty-first-century women’s writing about spirituality and place, then, I draw from a wide range of disciplines: ecocriticism, feminist geography, feminist theology, the theology of place, and literary theories about narrative. Using these tools, I suggest that, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, women writers have found space and place fruitful in negotiating their position within Christian religious traditions. The texts I explore cover a broad range of time (from 1943 to 2003) and genres (conversion narrative, memoir, novel, and short story) but they are linked by a similar narrative arc. Many of these writers portray a paradoxical return “home,” through tracing maternal roots, to a place within religion—a particular place, but not a static, fixed place—rather, a particular place always in flux. This narrative thread gains momentum iii when read in conjunction with feminist mobility theory, for it offers new possibilities to feminists who find problematic the theoretical trends encouraging them to construct themselves as “nomads.” In these works of spiritual geography, the protagonists manage to find a located, communally responsible, “mobile home” through writing and performing religion. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures . vi Acknowledgments . vii Chapter One. Introduction: Common Ground between Feminism and Spiritual Geography . .1 Chapter Two. Geographical Expatriation and Spiritual Re-matriation in H.D.’s The Gift . 31 Chapter Three. “Placing” the Spiritual Metaphors of Kathleen Norris and Sue Monk Kidd . .68 Chapter Four. The Southern Pilgrim Malgré Lui in the Works of Flannery O’Connor and Lee Smith . 107 Chapter Five. Women’s Spiritual Geographies of the African Diaspora: Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow . .150 Chapter Six. The Spiritual Geography of the Cloister . 181 Epilogue: Whither the Spiritual Geography of the City? . 211 Works Cited . 221 v LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. The U.S. Presidential Election of 2000 . .29 Figure 2. Religious Adherents as a Percentage of All U.S. Residents, 2000 . 30 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to all my doctoral committee members for their feedback and support, and especially to Dr. Deborah L. Clarke for reading many of these chapters several times. Thank you to my parents, Rev. John and Rev. Judy Turner, for charting the spiritual geography of my early life in Little Rock, Arkansas. Thank you to my husband, Stephen Smith, for helping me to set deadlines and helping me to take it easy—and for most likely being the only person who will ever shed tears while reading my dissertation. vii 1 Chapter One Introduction: Common Ground between Feminism and Spiritual Geography Since the election of 2000, and even more so since the election of 2004, we in the United States have accepted a new form of determinism: the determinism of geography. We toss around the terms ―Red State‖ and ―Blue State‖ as shorthand for certain political, cultural, and religious beliefs. We have accepted the generalization that the South, the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountain regions are both Republican and evangelical Christian, while the Northeast, the industrial Midwest, and the West Coast are Democrat and secular. Religion, politics, and place seem to have become fused in a monolithic muddle. If one looks at two maps—a map showing states voting Republican and Democrat in the 2000 presidential election (Figure 1), and a map showing concentrations of religious affiliation across the United States (Figure 2)—there does seem to be significant correlation between the swath of red on the political map (indicating states whose electoral votes were given to the Republican candidate, George W. Bush) and the maroon and salmon areas on the religious map (indicating areas where over 50 percent of the residents of a county considered themselves adherents of some religion). However, maps such as these hide the true heterogeneity of belief that can exist within, say, a single county in Minnesota or Arkansas. There you may find ―religious‖ people (and not necessarily all Christians) who vote Democrat for economic reasons, atheist Republicans, and all sorts of combinations that such maps render invisible. While the Red State/Blue State dichotomy has at least called our attention to relationships between place and belief, it has also led us to simplify and generalize our 2 view of those relationships. When I use the term ―spiritual geography,‖ then, an image of the religious adherents map conflated with the 2000 election map might initially spring to mind. I mean no such thing. I do, however, see in the Red/Blue language an indication of our need to resist simplistic associations between religion and place—by emphasizing particular places in which religious dramas unfold for individuals and communities. Furthermore, we need to clearly define and sometimes strategically redefine the words we use to describe religion and place. My project, Placing Religion: The Spiritual Geography of Twentieth-Century American Women Writers, explores the ways in which writers use narrative (both fictional and nonfictional) to construct a relationship between Christianity, family history, and place. More specifically, the writers I discuss portray a similar pattern: the protagonist returns to a geographical place associated with her mother and with maternal spirituality, and thus she is finally able to find her own ―place‖ within an ostensibly patriarchal religion. This emphasis on particular places is by no means limited to writers dealing with Christian tradition; however, I narrow my focus to Christian writers because Christianity‘s emphasis on the Incarnation of Christ—the entrance of the divine into a particular time and place—often affects the portrayal of spiritual geography in specific ways (ways that I will explain later in this chapter). In addressing twentieth- and twenty-first-century women‘s writing about spirituality and place, then, I draw from a wide range of disciplines: ecocriticism, feminist geography, feminist theology, the theology of place, and literary theories about narrative. Using these tools, I suggest that, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first 3 centuries, women writers have found space and place fruitful in negotiating their position within Christian religious traditions. The texts I explore cover a broad range of time (from 1943 to 2003) and genres (conversion narrative, memoir, novel, and short story) but they are linked by a similar narrative arc. Many of these writers portray a paradoxical return ―home,‖ through tracing maternal roots, to a place within religion—a particular place, but a not a static, fixed place—rather, a particular place always in flux. This narrative thread gains momentum when read in conjunction with feminist mobility theory, for it offers new possibilities to feminists who find problematic the theoretical trends encouraging them to construct themselves as ―nomads.‖ In these works of spiritual geography, the protagonists manage to find a located, communally responsible, ―mobile home‖ through writing and performing religion. Laying the Groundwork, Defining the Terms Before explaining how feminism, geography, and the Christian theology of the Incarnation interact in my project, I should first define ―spiritual geography‖ itself. I use the term to refer to the practice of creating narratives to explore connections between place and the divine. ―Spiritual geography‖ first began to garner attention with the publication of James S. Griffin‘s Beliefs and Holy Places: A Spiritual Geography of the Pimería Alta (1992), followed soon after by Kathleen Norris‘s Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993), one of the major works I address in this project. While Griffin‘s book is an anthropological study detailing the religious