Novel Faiths: Nonsecular Fiction in the Late-Nineteenth-Century U.S
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
NOVEL FAITHS: NONSECULAR FICTION IN THE LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY U.S. BY CHRISTINE HEDLIN DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Justine Murison, Chair Professor Jonathan Ebel Professor Stephanie Foote Professor Gordon Hutner ABSTRACT My dissertation, “Novel Faiths: Nonsecular Fiction in the Late-Nineteenth-Century U.S.,” presents a new theory of the novel genre using an archive seldom put to such ends: late- nineteenth-century America’s outpouring of popular religious fiction. For many scholars, the novel form and the period after the Civil War share a defining trait: they are uniquely modern, and that modernity rests in part upon their secularity, or turn away from shared religious worldviews. I argue instead that the mid- to late-nineteenth-century U.S. novel could be, and often was, consciously oriented toward modernity and the nonsecular. My theory of the novel centers on the genre’s formal and epistemological flexibility, its ability to represent characters’ experiences of multiple possible realities, both worldly and transcendent. I contend that, for this flexibility, the novel was a key testing ground for new Protestant beliefs emerging in the late nineteenth century—beliefs that responded experimentally to social and intellectual upheavals like the rise of Darwinian evolution, the death toll of the Civil War, and the social ills of industrialization. Using the characters’ patterns of belief as models, the religious novels taught their readers how to move between faith and empiricism, straddling knowledges and hybridizing worldviews that might otherwise seem at odds. These arguments about religious fiction have two implications for literary study. First, my project underscores how white Protestant traditions have historically asserted—and still assert—exclusionary power in the U.S. public sphere. I ask literary study to confront the reasons that the Protestant center of U.S. culture and literary-religious histories has endured for so long. At the same time, I also consider nineteenth-century religions as meaningful generators of worldviews, whose political consequences and cultural resonances were far from uniform. To ii this point, my project showcases how marginalized demographics, including women and racial minorities, have long used faiths to resist oppressive social structures and build communities. In Chapter One I examine Protestant responses to midcentury theories of natural selection through novels published just before and after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Oliver Wendell Holmes. In these two texts, questions of theological and genetic determinism intertwine. I analyze the complex storytelling techniques that allow the texts to promote liberal Protestant over orthodox Calvinist responses. In Chapter Two, I focus on Spiritualism, an immensely popular movement devoted to speaking with the dead that gained new appeal after the Civil War. I read the sequels to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Spiritualist bestseller The Gates Ajar (1868) alongside novels on Spiritualism by canonical realists Henry James and William Dean Howells. I argue that Phelps reworks conventional theories of literary realism to acknowledge both material and spiritual realities. In Chapters Three and Four I shift my focus to the turn of the twentieth century. As I show in Chapter Three, American literary histories often present a personalized, eroticized “spirituality” as the modern alternative to organized religion. I counter this picture of religion in the U.S. by confronting, through Charles Sheldon’s bestselling Social Gospel novel In His Steps (1896), the sociopolitical power of organized Protestantism and Protestant fiction at the turn of the century. Finally, as a counterpoint to this focus on white Protestantism’s power, in Chapter Four, I theorize a popular African American religious movement, Ethiopianism, as it responds to questions about turn-of-the-century African Americans’ fitness for future leadership. The Ethiopianist novels I analyze imagine the glorified Africa of biblical tradition being radically restored in their own day. In doing so, I argue, they present a radical alternative to visions of the U.S.’s secularization, creating a nonsecular basis for African American pride and solidarity. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am humbled by the generosity of the people who have supported me in this project. First and foremost, I am grateful for my dissertation committee. I have said countless times over the past few years that I am lucky to have the dissertation committee members I do. And I’ll say it again here. I am incredibly lucky—for Jon Ebel’s thoughtful discussions of my work and holistic support of my well-being (including letting me get to know his wonderful family); for Stephanie Foote’s nuanced feedback on my writing, which somehow always managed to hearten and affirm me even as it found exactly the problem spots in my arguments; for Gordon Hutner’s ability to breathe life into my prose and keep me focused on my longer professional goals; and, finally, for Justine Murison, whose wisdom, energy, intellect, and attentiveness are everything I could ask for in an advisor, and then some. I am a stronger writer, reader, teacher, presenter, and colleague for her guidance and example. I am grateful for the fellowship support I have received at the University of Illinois, including from the English Department, the Graduate College, the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, and the INTERSECT Network for Neuro-Cultures. Without the funding and feedback I received through these programs and institutions, the scope and depth of this project would not have been possible. I am grateful for the members of my writing group, Brandon Jones, Benjamin O’Dell, and Rebecah Pulsifer. They have read basically every word of this dissertation, sometimes multiple drafts of the same words, and they often knew what I was trying to say before I did. The project stands on firmer intellectual ground for their patience, good spirits, and critical insights. iv I am grateful for the community that I have found here at the University of Illinois and in Champaign-Urbana. Seven years could feel like a long time in graduate school, but, with the company I’ve kept, it hasn’t. The women in my cohort, the people I have met through Campus Recreation, the members of my reading group, the friends who proofread my drafts in exchange for dinner and drinks—all of these have sustained me in the course of completing this project. And, finally, I am grateful for my family, Dave, Carol, Kim, and Abby. There’s nothing I can say that would adequately sum up the gifts they have given me. They are models of creativity, careful thinking, open-mindedness, and unconditional love, and I love them for it. As Elizabeth Stuart Phelps puts it so well, “What pleasure in the proud knowledge that all one’s success is one’s doing, and the sum of it cast up to one’s credit upon the long ledger of life! To this exhilarating self-content I can lay no claim.” v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: NOVEL FAITHS .................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE: EVOLVING FAITHS IN STOWE AND HOLMES: AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY AND THE ENDURING POWER OF PROTESTANTISM ......26 CHAPTER TWO: EMPIRICAL FAITHS, MATERIAL SPIRITS: THE LITERARY REALISM OF ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS .............................................................63 CHAPTER THREE: LITERARY HISTORY AND THE VARIETIES OF TURN-OF- THE-CENTURY U.S. PROTESTANT EXPERIENCE ...................................................96 CHAPTER FOUR: ETHIOPIANIST NOVELS AND THEIR NONSECULAR AFRICAN AMERICAN FUTURITIES ..........................................................................151 vi INTRODUCTION: NOVEL FAITHS The eponymous protagonist of Augusta Jane Evans’s religious novel Beulah (1859) is an unlucky soul. An orphan who the narrator describes as “sad,” “sickly,” and “decidedly ugly,” Beulah endures trials that include being separated from her only sister, watching a close friend die slowly of consumption, being courted by an unwanted suitor, and, ultimately, sacrificing her financial independence to become a wife.1 The drama of that succession of events, though, is nothing compared to Beulah’s internal crises of faith. Once an avid reader of religious texts, Beulah becomes absorbed with the work of philosophers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, G.W.F. Hegel, and Thomas Carlyle. Now she senses that all systems of thought are “different, nay opposed” and that perhaps, as one of her mentors suggests, “there is no criterion of truth; all is merely subjective.”2 Beulah seems well on her way to a life as a religious skeptic. But that’s not the end of the story. In the final chapters, Beulah returns to her Protestant faith, as do several of the other doubt-ridden characters. What saves them, the narrator suggests, is witnessing Christian truths at work in Nature and other believers’ lives. As one of the characters expresses it, “If I am not [an infidel] now, it is because my wife’s unpretending consistent piety has taught me to revere the precepts of a revelation which I long ago rejected.”3 Beulah, for her part, realizes she has spent too much time in the “cold, misty atmosphere” of the metaphysicians, and not enough time in the soul-sustaining realms