Reading Methodist Characters the Figure and Politics of Popular Evangelicalism in American Fiction, 1790-1860
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Reading Methodist Characters The Figure and Politics of Popular Evangelicalism in American Fiction, 1790-1860 by Christopher A. Barnes A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2014 Doctoral Committee: Professor Gregg D. Crane, Chair Professor Susan M. Juster Professor Kerry C. Larson Associate Professor Susan S. Parrish © Christopher A. Barnes 2014 ii Dedication For my parents, Victoria and Herbert Barnes, and my grandmother, Mary Carmel Colombano iii Table of Contents Dedication ii Abstract iv Introduction The Character of an American Methodist 1 Chapter One Evangelical Caricature and the Necessity of Literature in the Early American Picaresque 27 Chapter Two Calvinist Tyrants, Methodist Mothers, and Judicious Sympathy in A New-England Tale 64 Chapter Three Sympathy for the Story Teller; or, Methodism in our Portrait of Hawthorne as a Young Man 90 Chapter Four Those Shouting, Singing, Moaning Methodists: Romantic Racialism and Religious Characterization in Stowe’s Antislavery Novels 141 Conclusion 176 iv Abstract Reading Methodist Characters examines the imaginative appropriation of Methodist and anti- Methodist discourse by U.S. fiction writers working within the Calvinist tradition between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars. From the early national novels of Brackenridge and Sedgwick to Hawthorne’s romanticism and Stowe’s sentimentalism, this dissertation establishes and decodes Methodism’s central yet ambivalent significance within American literary history. Whether metonymically representing all evangelical upstarts or metaphorically evoking the enthusiastic, illiterate, and emotional character that distinguished them from their establishment counterparts, Methodism was the figurative vehicle through which authors depicted the dramatic rise of popular evangelicalism and its ramifications for the development of American letters. Controversial from its inception in the 1730s, John Wesley responded to the mockery of his reform movement by declaring the distinguishing mark or “character” of a Methodist to be emotional rather than doctrinal or liturgical. Their emphasis on religious affect set Methodists apart in Britain and would continue to do so in America, but it was the paradox of Methodism that made it so appealing to nineteenth-century fiction writers. “Illiterate” in their lack of literary training or formal schooling, Methodists nevertheless were eloquent and powerful preachers. Often extravagantly emotional, they were also known, as their name implies, for the methodical way they went about securing salvation. Unrepentantly enthusiastic, Methodists nonetheless exhibited an unswerving commitment to practical piety and experimental Christianity. Finally, their fierce opposition to fiction was waged while skillfully employing narrative, imagery, theatricality, and a keen understanding of human psychology in their mission to evangelize every person in the rapidly expanding republic. The Methodist characters this dissertation examines, from Teague O’Regan to Uncle Tom, embody these paradoxical qualities and reflect their creators’ conflicting opinions about Methodism’s miraculous rise to dominance in the nineteenth-century United States. Reliance on a monolithic evangelicalism has prevented literary scholars from discerning the complex ways these writers employed the ongoing competition and confrontation between Methodists and Calvinists to critique emerging religious attitudes about v literature, inspiration, education, and the means of appealing to a mass audience. Reading Methodist Characters rectifies this critical oversight by recovering the literary and political significance of Methodist identity. 1 Introduction The Character of an American Methodist Pleased with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously, Pleased with the primitive tunes of the choir of the whitewashed church, Pleased with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, or any preacher….looking seriously at the camp-meeting (ln. 775-77) Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” (1855) 2014 marks the twentieth anniversary of Jenny Franchot’s path-breaking Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism. Like many other works of American literary history published in the last twenty years, this dissertation has been greatly influenced by Franchot’s compelling argument that “anti-Catholicism operated as an imaginative category of discourse through which antebellum American writers…indirectly voiced the tensions and limitations of mainstream Protestant culture” (xvii). Through readings of popular and elite cultural productions ranging from novels and poems to works of history and travel literature, Roads to Rome persuasively describes how, in “the three decades prior to the Civil War” and especially in the Northeast, American authors used “Romanism” as a “metaphoric construct and surrogate for Roman Catholicism” (xvii) that frequently captured the simultaneous attraction and repulsion which the “foreign faith” elicited from antebellum Protestants. While affirming Franchot’s central claims and modeling its methodological approach on Roads to Rome, Reading Methodist Characters complicates this influential account of the “Protestant” imagination by recovering a division within American Protestantism that was as culturally pervasive and artistically influential as its encounter with Catholicism. Since before the American Revolution, Calvinists and Methodists confronted one another from across a theological, political, and literary divide that made them fierce opponents despite a shared commitment to evangelicalism. Throughout the nineteenth century they competed for members and contested each other’s claims to national religious leadership. Scholars have tended to treat American evangelicalism “as a 2 monolithic cultural force” (Coleman 286) and, as a result, have missed the many ways in which authors appropriated the controversy between Methodists and Calvinists1 for their own disparate artistic and political ends. A recent surge in historical studies of early American Methodism makes it an ideal moment to recapture its distinctive character and function within the imagination of the early national and antebellum United States. Before anti-Catholicism experienced its midcentury renaissance and came to serve the wide variety of imaginative purposes that Franchot discusses, anti-Methodism was a more prominent cultural discourse and offered writers the rhetorical raw materials with which to fashion a creative response to the rapidly changing religious landscape of the early republic. Methodists were at the forefront of the democratization of Christianity that radically altered the Protestantism inherited from the colonial period, making it more evangelical, enthusiastic, and, most importantly, more popular. The religious free market that emerged as a result of the gradual separation of church and state meant that the people, rather than the clergy, came to control and shape the kind of Protestantism that would sweep across and keep pace with a United States rapidly expanding in geographic size and population. As historians such as Nathan Hatch, John Wigger, Christine Heyrman, Roger Finke and Rodney Stark have demonstrated, Methodism’s miraculous rise to dominance signaled the victory of the “upstart sects” over the established denominations of the colonial era, Calvinists chief among them. Congregationalists and Presbyterians were not willing, however, to cede their position as the nation’s spiritual and cultural leaders just because Methodist and Baptist churches eclipsed theirs in size. Calvinists had provided the Revolution with its religious rationale and were not about to hand over guidance of the ship of state to people they believed to be illiterate enthusiasts and corrupt demagogues despite evangelical affiliation. Calvinists still controlled the academies, colleges, newspapers, and other institutions through which a unique national identity was being constructed and disseminated. And as we have been taught by a long line of literary historians from Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch to Ann Douglas, Lawrence Buell, and Gregory 1 Throughout this dissertation I use the term “Calvinist” to refer to those denominations within the Reformed tradition which comprised the colonial-era religious establishment, primarily Presbyterians and Congregationalists but also Anglicans. This word choice reflects the way early national and antebellum Americans consistently wrote and thought about the relationship between up-and-coming Methodists and the establishment “Calvinists” who strove to maintain their privileged position in the new nation. Likewise, I use the term “Methodists” to refer to Wesleyan Methodist denominations espousing an Arminian theology. The divide between Methodists and Calvinists was as much about class and politics as theological or denominational affiliation and my terminology is meant to recover that dynamic. Baptists, for example, were mostly Calvinist in their theological orientation but here are grouped with other “popular” evangelicals because Baptists, like Methodists, opposed the 3 Jackson, American literature emerged from the intellectual, literary, and Calvinist tradition of New England Puritanism. Given such facts it is little wonder that scholars of eighteenth and nineteenth-century U.S. culture have been slow to discern the indirect and ambivalent ways that Methodism