Kathleen Howard ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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© [2013] Kathleen Howard ALL RIGHTS RESERVED A LANGUAGE “BURNING AND GOD-GIVEN”: THE CREATIVE FORM OF RELIGIOUS WRITING IN AMERICA, 1790-1865 BY KATHLEEN MARY HOWARD A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in English. written under the direction of Gregory S. Jackson and approved by ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ ____________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “A LANGUAGE ‘BURNING AND GOD-GIVEN’: THE CREATIVE FORM OF RELIGIOUS WRITING IN AMERICA, 1790-1865” BY KATHLEEN M. HOWARD Dissertation Director: Gregory S. Jackson My dissertation describes how religious ideas shaped aesthetic innovation in popular American literature from the early national moral novel to racial uplift fiction. Nineteenth-century writing, particularly fiction, was shaped by conflicting pressures, including historicism (the belief that history reflected social forces rather than divine intentions), romanticism (which celebrated artistic originality), and the resurgence of evangelical religion. As a result, I argue, traditional religious ideas about writing as a revelation of the divine in art persevered well into the century, shaping genres that simultaneously responded to growing interest in historicism and aesthetic ingenuity. I trace the adaptations that evolved in this context as contemporaries transformed mimetic fiction and autobiography—genres grounded in historical representation—into new forms with avowedly religious and even doctrinal ambitions: moral novels, tract tales, Christian best sellers, slave narratives, and didactic tales about slavery. Describing how these works converted the aesthetic form and historical matter of fiction and autobiography into vehicles for spiritual and moral ideals, my dissertation reveals the religious dimension of modern literature’s evolution in America. i In describing religion’s importance to American literature, I characterize modernity as a site of epistemological contestation rather than religious recedence. Drawing on recent criticism that has broken with traditional secularization theory, which proposed the diminishment and privatization of religion as a feature of the modern era, my project understands modernity as a proliferation of epistemologies that spoke imperfectly to one another. Combining this definition with narrative theory, book history, and reader-response criticism, I describe the generic adaptations that marked religion’s encounter with modern historicism and aesthetic theory. Chapters one and two argue that fiction was used for moral purposes, conceived as an alternative to doctrine, in the early national moral novel, and for evangelical ends in antebellum tract tales. In chapters three and four I explain how best selling Christian novels and slave narratives grappled with contemporary political problems, transforming history into an autonomous source of meaning rather than the sign of God’s will. Describing antebellum literature’s underappreciated literariness—its combination of the reflexive form and historical matter of modern literature with religious and moral ideas—my project illuminates modernity’s complex debt not only to historicism and theories of aesthetics, but also to older and still influential ideas of incarnational art. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my director, Gregory S. Jackson, as well as the members of my committee: Cheryl A. Wall, Myra Jehlen, and Sarah Rivett. Many thanks also to my parents, Jeanne Bull and Kevin Howard, for their support during this process. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract, i-ii. Acknowledgements, iii. Introduction: The Form of Truth, 1-24. Chapter One: The Experiment of the Early National Novel, 25-73. Chapter Two: Form, Time, Truth: The Evangelical Tract Tale, 74-114. Chapter Three: Form, Epiphany, and Christian Best Sellers, 115-156. Chapter Four: Morality, Slavery, and the Representation of Reality, 157-208. Conclusion, 209-214. iv 1 Introduction: The Form of Truth Seven years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was serialized in The National Era, Harriet Beecher Stowe submitted a review of contemporary popular literature to the New York Evangelist that argued against Dickens’ moral usefulness. Though “he had a vein of original matter and imagery,” his laudation as “a sort of literary Martin Luther” by the American public was, in her view, deeply misguided. Had they treated him simply as an “agreeing and amusing writer” who did no particular harm, the invidious confusion would have been avoided: But when he was elevated to the rank of an instructive writer, and a profound moralist, our steady and reflective people began to put on their spectacles, and address themselves to look into the matter, and we are sorry to say that our agreeable friend “Boz” was as ill-fitted to bear a scrutiny of this kind, as most of his brethren in the fictitious line.1 His admirable qualities—an opposition to “meanness and oppression” and attention to the poor and neglected—do not make him a true moralist. Even Walter Scott, no more religious than Dickens, is better at portraying the faithful without ridicule “as he would any other phase of human nature”—a contrast to Dickens’ drunken pontificators. Conceding that most “light literature” would be found wanting if tried by a “strictly religious standard,” Stowe concludes that the prevailing question ought not to be “Who does the most good?” but “Who does the least harm?” Under this rubric Dickens would appear admirable—but only as an alternative to Bulwer or Sue. Stowe’s reference to a religious standard of reading suggests an analogous standard in writing. Yet isolating religious writing as a critical object in the period between the Revolution and the Civil War poses certain challenges given the ubiquity of religious and moral subjects across genres. Instead of identifying religious writing in 1 Harriet Beecher Stowe, “Literary Epidemics.—No. 2,” New York Evangelist 13 Jul. 1843, 14. 2 generic terms, however, it is possible to think about form or what happens when religious and moral subjects are developed in language. Read this way, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is comprehensible as a novel, evincing the historical detail and attention to psychological interiority characteristic of the genre, and as a prophetic argument against slavery, distinguishable from contemporary novels such as The Scarlet Letter (1851).2 Religion in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an active force determining the shape of the narrative and its outcome—not simply a historical curiosity, as is Puritan theology in The Scarlet Letter. To get at the differences between these novels requires a description not of genre but of the evolutions in plot, characterization, and narrative rhetoric that produced two distinct worldviews—the prophetic and the historical. Such description would address how Uncle Tom’s Cabin, despite beginning with the same materials as any contemporary novel, arrives at visionary conclusions about contemporary history. Central to this narrative development is the character of Tom, who acquires nuance through experience only to lose his distinctive qualities toward the novel’s close, becoming a type of Christ. Rather than eroding the possibility of allegory the body of the novel provides the material for its development: Tom is a Christ because, 2 On the novel see Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merin Press, 1962) and Studies in European Realism: A Sociological Survey of the Writings of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, Tolstoy, and Gorki, and others, trans. Edith Bone (London: Hillway Publishing Co., 1950); Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth- Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990); Lennard J. Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Mikhail Bakhtin, “Epic and Novel: Toward a Methodology for the Study of the Novel,” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 3-40. 3 like Christ, he has had a historical life in the body of the novel.3 The conclusion absorbs the preceding narrative and the history from which it draws into a cosmological scheme: Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian church has a heavy account to answer. Not by combining together, to protect injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin is this union to be saved—but by repentance, justice, and mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!4 It is possible to read this moment as a break with fiction that asserts history and external biblical verities over the world the novel has created. Yet it belongs to the structure of the novel as much as descriptions of Tom’s spiritual struggles and St. Clair’s regrets. Rather than breaking with fiction the lesson is where narrative leads. Key to understanding this pedagogical moment and the form of the novel is thus the relationship between