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Reconfiguring Religion, Race, and the Female Body Politic in American Fiction by Women, 1859-1911 Reconfiguring Religion, Race, and the Female Body Politic in American Fiction by Women, 1859-1911 Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Tanglen, Randi Lynn Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 25/09/2021 07:25:09 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/194933 RECONFIGURING RELIGION, RACE, AND THE FEMALE BODY POLITIC IN AMERICAN FICTION BY WOMEN, 1859-1911 by Randi Lynn Tanglen __________________________________ Copyright © Randi Lynn Tanglen 2008 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2008 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Randi Lynn Tanglen entitled “Reconfiguring Religion, Race, and the Female Body Politic in American Fiction by Women, 1859-1911” and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree o f Doctor of Philosophy _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 27 May 2008 Annette Kolodny _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 27 May 2008 Judy Nolte Temple _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 27 May 2008 Edgar A. Dryden _______________________________________________________________________ Date: 27 May 2008 Nicole Guidotti-Hernández Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. ________________________________________________ Date: 27 May 2008 Annette Kolodny, co-director ________________________________________________ Date: 27 May 2008 Judy Nolte Temple, co-director 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: Randi Lynn Tanglen 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT . .6 INTRODUCTION COMPLICATING FEMINIST CRITICAL APPROACHES TO RELIGION AND AMERICAN LITERATURE . .8 NOTES . .22 CHAPTER ONE “IN REFERENCE TO ETERNITY”: SLAVERY, ROMANTICISM, AND MILLENNIAL HISTORY IN HARRIET BEECHER STOWE’S THE MINISTER’S WOOING (1859) . 23 The National Romance, Romanticism, and Romantic Love in The Minister’s Wooing . 27 Samuel Hopkins, Disinterested Benevolence, and the Providential Role of Slavery in the New Republic . .41 “Look Right at Jesus”: Romantic Racialism and a Christ-Centered Theory of Salvation . 48 NOTES . .56 CHAPTER TWO “BEYOND MORTAL VISION”: RELIGION, RACISM, AND REDEMPTION IN HARRIET E. WILSON’S OUR NIG (1859) . .61 “Maltreated by Professed Abolitionists”: Slavery, Racism, and Christian Abolitionists in Our Nig . .69 Northern “Devils Dressed in Angels’ Robes” . .76 Regendering the Deathbed Scene . 86 “That Calvaries Are Everywhere” . 93 NOTES . .103 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS – Continued CHAPTER THREE “SOMETHING WORSE THAN DEATH WILL HAPPEN”: CATHOLIC PURITY AND PROTESTANT CAPTIVITY IN MARÍA AMPARO RUIZ DE BURTON’S WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT IT? (1872) . 108 María Amparo Ruiz de Burton: A Californiana Aristocrat Among the Boston Brahmins . 113 “I Hate Foreigners and Papists”: Ruiz de Burton’s Rebuttal of Anti-Catholic Rhetoric . 119 Remaining Pure in Protestant Captivity . .126 She Thinketh No Evil: The Fall of the Protestant True Woman . 133 NOTES . .146 CHAPTER FOUR TRANSFORMING WOMAN’S CHRISTIAN DUTY INTO WOMAN’S EUGENIC DUTY: CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN’S THE CRUX (1911) . .152 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Her Great-Aunt Catharine Beecher: Valorizing Women’s Role in the Nation’s Millennial Destiny . 161 “‘Marriage is for Motherhood’”: Woman’s Duty in The Crux . 170 “‘Our Girls Are Mostly Clean’”: The Millennial Implications of Female Sexual Health and Pleasure . 178 Notes . .186 EPILOGUE FEMINIST AND RELIGIOUS LEGACIES . 193 WORKS CITED . .198 6 ABSTRACT This dissertation demonstrates the ways in which nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century American women writers employ Christian discourse in order to affirm, contest, or even expand—sometimes concurrently—conceptualizations of power, race, and gender. Furthermore, this project argues that feminist critics need to integrate the examination of the encodings of religion in literature into already existing modes of analysis such as those that take into consideration the significance of gender, race, class, and sexuality. The four authors considered in this study all make use of religious discourse as a political strategy for manipulating positions of female cultural authority and white racial privilege. Each author uses inflections of Christianity in order to claim or contest the privileges of whiteness, assumptions about female sexual purity, and competing visions of women’s role in the nation’s putative millennial destiny. In her 1859 The Minister’s Wooing , Harriet Beecher Stowe develops mutually reinforcing theological, romantic love, and antislavery plots in order to valorize America’s Puritan heritage while attempting to establish a providential place for the problem of slavery in the nation’s millennial destiny. Harriet E. Wilson’s 1859 Our Nig; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black portrays a black woman with a tumultuous, but nonetheless profound, affiliation with Christianity. Wilson uses a religious framework to expose the national sin of racism and to hint at the latent redemption available to those oppressed by the racial prejudice of hypocritical, white Christians. In her 1872 Who Would Have Thought It? , María Amparo Ruiz de Burton inverts the structures of nineteenth-century nativist anti-Catholic rhetoric to make a case for her Mexican protagonist’s white racial 7 and aristocratic cultural purity. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s secular and scientific ideology of womanhood, which she articulated in eugenic narratives such as her 1911 The Crux , echoes the religiously-infused domestic ideologies of her great-aunt Catharine Beecher. Indeed, by foregrounding religious historical and cultural contexts, this dissertation offers comparative readings of these novels and authors and exposes the ways in which the manifestations of religion in American literature interlock with the social discourses of race and gender. 8 INTRODUCTION COMPLICATING FEMINIST CRITICAL APPROACHES TO RELIGION AND AMERICAN LITERATURE The appropriations of religion and the flexible political deployments of religion that are woven into nineteenth-century American literature are often overlooked by feminist literary critics. One possible reason for this oversight could be the feminist distrust of the notion that women can gain agency from or find a political voice through religious, particularly Christian, identities. To be sure, as feminist critics seeking to identify and respond to inequality, we are aware of the ways in which literature itself is used to propagate cultural authority and maintain social hierarchies. Since the ideologies of Christianity are knit into larger social systems, they have contributed to the asymmetrical dissemination of power in American society. This unequal distribution of power is a factor in the establishment and maintenance of hierarchies of gender and race. But as my dissertation demonstrates, some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women writers employ Christian discourse in order to affirm, contest, or even expand— sometimes concurrently—understandings of power, race, and gender. Indeed, it is precisely because religion is not static or always obvious in its use or implications that feminist literary critics need to develop strategies for analyzing the complexities of religion as they appear in American literature. I wrote this dissertation because I believe that the manifestations of religion in American literature create a multifaceted literary subtext with rich dimensions for feminist criticism. In fact, after the death of Jacques Derrida, Stanley Fish put forward the argument that religion would join race, gender, and class as the next category of 9 analysis in the fields of the humanities and the social sciences. 1 As I analyze the marks of Christianity imbricated in American women’s writing, I do not necessarily utilize religion as its own category of analysis. Rather, I look at the ways in which religious ideologies cut across, intersect with, and are entrenched in other organizing facets of identity and difference. I contend that we need to integrate the examination of the encodings of religion in literature into already existing modes of analysis such as those that take into consideration the significance of gender, race, class, and sexuality. In
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