Surrogate Scriptures: American Christian Bestsellers and the Bible, 1850-1900

Home , Charles Sheldon, Christian novel, Commonplace book, Harold Frederic, Hur (Bible), Inspirational fiction

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

John Thomas Acker

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2017

Dissertation Committee:

Dr. Jared Gardner, Advisor

Dr. Elizabeth Hewitt

Dr. Hannibal Hamlin

Copyrighted by

John Thomas Acker

2017

Abstract

This dissertation examines four bestselling Christian novels published in the

United States between 1850 and 1900: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher

Stowe, The Gates Ajar (1868) by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Ben-Hur (1880) by Lew

Wallace, and In His Steps (1896) by Charles Sheldon. These four books reached millions of readers in a time when many Christians refused to read novels at all, helping to launch what is today a $4B Christian merchandise industry. More importantly, amid what

Nathan Hatch has called the “democratization of American Christianity,” popular

Christian novels offered a measure of cultural unity, despite splintering churches and increasing skepticism.

To explain these novels’ literary popularity and religious impact, I approach them as what I call “surrogate Scriptures.” Just as surrogates are both representatives and substitutes, in a sense these novels can both replace the Bible and point readers back to it.

All four novels confirm the Bible’s centrality and authority in Christian theology and practice, but they also showcase changing attitudes toward reading, understanding, interpreting, and applying Biblical content. The four novelists I study here stake out very

ii different positions on these issues, but they all contribute to a vibrant and fascinating

Christian literary culture.

Each of my four chapters evaluates one or more of three related theological concepts: revelation, hermeneutics, and exegesis. Chapter 1, on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, examines the role of Bible reading in Augustine St. Clare’s conversion. I show how

Stowe transforms the “take and read” scene from St. Augustine’s Confessions to link

Bible reading to social action. In Chapter 2 I evaluate intertextuality in The Gates Ajar, in light of the novel’s diary-like structure. I track several of Phelps’ allusions and quotations, and show how she uses a range of artistic and theological resources to offer her readers both comfort and creativity. Next, in Chapter 3 I analyze the Magi’s origin stories in Ben-Hur, in light of doctrines of Christian supersessionism. These narratives, I argue, promote the idea that the Magi’s respective cultures and religions must inevitably give way to Christianity. Finally, Chapter 4 examines the role of writing and ethics in In

His Steps. I contend that even though the characters ask “what would Jesus do?” to inform all their ethical decisions, they actively avoid studying or even reading any texts, especially the Bible.

iii or even mislead believers. Evaluating their strategies in terms of Biblical authority, not just doctrine or content, gives us a flexible and sophisticated framework for understanding a range of Christian fiction, both historical and contemporary.

To Esther, with all my love.

“The Lord hath been good to me in many ways; but thou, Esther, art the sovereign

excellence of his favor.” –Ben-Hur

Acknowledgments

Many people have helped make this dissertation possible, and I’m both pleased and humbled to acknowledge their support in what has been a long and strenuous journey.

First, I benefited greatly from the institutional support of the Department of

English at Ohio State University. Dr. Jared Gardner, my thesis advisor, has mentored and encouraged me throughout my PhD, and has taught me a lot about balancing personal and professional responsibilities. My other thesis committee members, Dr. Beth Hewitt and

Dr. Hannibal Hamlin, likewise shared their advice and expertise, and challenged me to produce my best work. Dr. Steve Fink suggested the title for this study, offered valuable insight on Chapter 1, and served on my candidacy exam committee. During my MA and

PhD coursework, Dr. Susan Williams and Dr. Elizabeth Renker capably advised me and helped me develop my seminar papers and thesis plans. Likewise, Dr. Wendy Hesford,

Dr. Eddie Singleton, Dr. Scott DeWitt, and Dr. Jonathan Buehl oversaw my pedagogical training, which not only funded the first four years of my PhD research but helped me secure another teaching job when that funding ran out. I’d also like to thank the excellent

Department of English staff, especially our superlative Graduate Coordinator Kathleen

Griffin. She fielded hundreds of questions and processed endless piles of paperwork to keep the grad program and the department running smoothly.

Second, I am grateful for the communities that facilitated my professional and intellectual development, and for those that provided vital social and emotional support throughout my graduate career. The users and administrators at Phinished.org offered a bounty of resources that helped me adjust to graduate school, including daily accountability and a safe space to vent. The Christian Graduate Student Alliance, led by

Bob Trube, invited me to deliver several talks about my field and my research, and reminded me that there is a great big university outside the English department. My academic colleagues on the ChristLit and C19 listservs provided timely research advice and stimulating discussion, while discussions with my colleagues in the Editors’

Association of Earth improved my writing skills and broadened my expertise. From 2006 to 2012, my fellow denizens of Denney Hall helped me cope with graduate seminars, office hours, recalcitrant copiers, conference papers, panicked students, Bagel Tuesdays, and all the other little joys of graduate life.

At the dissertation stage, feedback from Dr. Chad Allen’s dissertation writing seminar and from a Dissertation Writing Group organized by the OSU Writing Center helped me improve Chapters 1 and 4, respectively. Larry Paarlberg and his staff at the

General Lew Wallace Study and Museum generously gave me access to Wallace’s personal library of religious books, which significantly enriched Chapter 3. Larry also introduced me to Wallace scholar Howard Miller, who provided several useful leads on

Wallace’s religious views. For Chapter 2, Dr. Shirley Samuels helped me clarify a tricky

vii passage in The Gates Ajar, and pointed me toward a valuable essay on the novel. The staff of the OSU Graduate School walked me through the process of completing and formatting my dissertation, while the OSU Libraries provided timely and consistent access to books and other research materials. I’m also grateful to my editing clients, who taught me a lot about organizing arguments and structuring dissertation chapters. My greatest debt, however, is to the members of my dissertation writing group: Anne

Langendorfer, Nora McCook, Cate St Pierre, and Marion Wolfe. For the past two years they have helped me set goals, celebrate victories, rail at setbacks, apply to jobs, meet deadlines, and most importantly just keep writing. As Cate put it during one of our group chats, “you guys make me feel so much less alone.”

Last but not least, my family has consistently encouraged my intellectual curiosity and supported my academic goals. During my dad’s MA and PhD they showed me how to live on a graduate stipend, and during my own they reminded me that there’s life outside one. They cheerfully tolerated visits and phone calls that were far too sporadic, and they never complained when I interrupted Thanksgiving or Christmas “break” to do battle with a paragraph or two. My cats Chapter and Draft were rather more vocal when my dissertation work delayed their meals, but their companionship made the work far more rewarding. Finally, this dissertation is dedicated to my beautiful fiancée Esther.

Without her in my life I would never have graduated: her steady faith fuels me, her patient ambition inspires me, and her gracious love gives me far more than I’ll ever deserve.

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Vita

2000...... Acker Christian Academy, summa cum laude

2006...... B.A., English & Comparative Literature, magna cum laude, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

2008...... M.A., English, Ohio State University

2006-2012 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of English, The Ohio State University

2013-2015 ...... Instructor, Department of English,

Columbus State Community College

2006-present ...... Academic & Business Editor, Acker Editing

and Consulting

Publications

Review of David Lyle Jeffrey and Gregory Maillet, Christianity and Literature:

Philosophical Foundations and Critical Practice. Christianity and Literature 62.1

(Autumn 2012), 145-148.

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments...... vi

Vita ...... ix

Table of Contents ...... xii

Introduction ...... 1

I.1 Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Novels? ...... 1

I.2 From Substitute to Surrogate ...... 7

I.3 Bestsellers and Bible Reading ...... 11

I.4 Dissertation Structure, Limitations, and Opportunities for Future Work ...... 18

Works Cited...... 23

Chapter 1: ...... 25

Take and Read: Augustine’s Bible Reading in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) ...... 25

1.1 Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Purity and Presence ...... 25

1.2 Literature Review ...... 31 xii

1.3 The Bible and Slavery ...... 41

1.4 Augustine’s Boxes, or, Pragmatism and the Picayune...... 47

1.5 Take and Read: Augustine’s Confessions ...... 56

1.6 From Saint to Sinclare: Adapting Confessions ...... 62

Works Cited...... 78

Chapter 2: ...... 82

“Spiritooal and scripteral lines”: Intertextuality in The Gates Ajar (1868) ...... 82

2.1 Introduction ...... 82

2.2 Literature Review ...... 90

2.2.1 Part One: 1880-1980 ...... 93

2.2.2 Part Two: 1980-2000 ...... 99

2.2.3 Part Three: Criticism Since 2000...... 107

2.3 The Little Green Book...... 112

2.4 Scraps of Comfort ...... 121

2.5 Appropriate Words ...... 127

2.6 Beautiful Heresies ...... 132

Works Cited...... 141

Chapter 3: ...... 148

Superseding the Caesars: Evolving Religious History in Ben-Hur (1880)...... 148

xiii

3.1 Introduction ...... 148

3.2 Ben-Hur’s Sources and Composition ...... 157

3.3 Literature Review ...... 167

3.4 An Old, Old Story: The Magi’s Arrival ...... 180

3.5 Meeting the Magi: Races and Faces ...... 196

3.6 A Purpose in the Particularity: Conversion and Supersession ...... 205

Works Cited...... 220

Chapter 4: ...... 228

Striking Sentences: In His Steps (1896) and the Textless Gospel ...... 228

4.1 Introduction ...... 228

4.2 Literature Review ...... 236

4.2.1 In His Steps and the Social Gospel Movement ...... 237

4.2.2 The Social Gospel Novel ...... 243

4.2.3 Biblicism, Literacy, and Ambivalence ...... 248

4.3 The Bible and the Social Gospel ...... 251

4.4 Henry Maxwell’s Striking Sentences ...... 259

4.5 What Would Jesus Do? ...... 265

4.6 The Source of Our Knowledge...... 271

Works Cited...... 287

xiv

Bibliography ...... 290

List of Figures

Fig 1. Wallace's annotations of The Life and Words of Christ, p. 153...... 188

Fig. 2. Cover of the first edition (facsimile) of In His Steps...... 242

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Introduction

I.1 Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Novels?

In the early 1850s, Charles Wesley Andrews undertook a systematic study of the popular religious literature of his day. Andrews, a conservative Episcopal clergyman fiercely devoted to Christian evangelism and to colonizationalist solutions1 to American slavery, was especially distressed with the “rapidly-growing element” (3) of fiction in this genre, and eventually published an extended critique entitled Religious Novels: An

Argument Against Their Use (1856). The problem, as Andrews saw it, was that certain books designed to teach Christian doctrine or conduct, especially those books distributed by Sunday schools, often included “a feigned plot, incidents or conversations written in the style of truth, and liable to be received as truth” (8). These “cunningly executed counterfeits,” which easily outsold similarly themed books of church history, biography, or theology, threatened to create a generation of Christians poorly “conformed to the

1 Colonizationalists, best represented by the American Colonization Society (founded 1816), argued that free African Americans should “return” to Africa. Most famously, the ACS helped found the colony of Liberia in 1821-22, and though its ranks included many abolitionists, it was more directly interested in mollifying civil unrest after what it saw as the inevitable end of slavery. Interestingly, several of the major slave characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (George Harris and his family) embark for Liberia at the end of the novel, a fact that complicates reading the novel in purely abolitionist terms. 1 pattern given by our blessed Redeemer, and as well fitted to perform its part in the actual world” (6). And to Andrews’ “energetic horror,” novels drew neither on reality nor pure imagination, but used “mechanic facts, hewed and shaped, and made to happen as to teach such dogma” (14).

Andrews goes to great pains to distinguish mere invented fiction from Biblical stories (e.g. Christ's parables) and from allegory (e.g. John Bunyan's much-loved

Pilgrim's Progress (1678)), and repeatedly warns against heterodox authors and content.

But his main objection to religious novels is that they distract Christians (and potential converts to Christianity) from actual Biblical content—at least of the type friendly to orthodox Christianity. At one point, for instance, he approvingly cites correspondence from a like-minded teacher, who describes a novel that “speaks…of prayer, and purity, and ministering angels, and God, and heaven; but nothing about Christ, nothing about the

Mediator, nothing about the atonement, nothing about the corner-stone of Christian hope.

It might have been written by a Unitarian” (36). Based on such examples, Andrews concludes his tract with a stern warning: “[D]o not depend upon a tale and story religion, do not depend upon short processes, but depend on solid instruction, drawn as directly and simply from the word of God as possible; depend on his Spirit to make it understood, accepted, and loved, and you shall in no wise lose your reward” (43).

In retrospect it’s easy to dismiss Andrews’ objections as futile and fundamentalist, much the same way we might treat similar religious objections to cinema in 1900, jazz in

1930, or rock and roll in 1960. After all, in the early 19th century Christian publishing houses “led America into the modern era of mass publication and systematic distribution

2 of printed material” (Nord 5), including religious fiction. More to the point, Harriet

Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) had already sold millions of copies by the time Andrews started his work, and Christian fiction continued to dominate American bestseller lists for nearly a century afterwards. Some of this success arose from Protestant emphases on reading as a theological activity, built on the Reformation ideal of sola

Scriptura (“the Bible alone”) and buttressed by rich traditions of reading the Bible during personal devotions. As Nord puts it, 19th-century American Christians put “great faith”

“in the sheer power of reading...[they] seem to have had no doubt that reading alone could save lives and souls– or destroy them” (114). But the novel had also taken hold of the American literary market. Not only did increased literacy and technological advancements drastically increase the availability of novels, but novels “allowed for a means of entry into a larger literary and intellectual world and a means of access to social and political events from which many readers (particularly women) would have been otherwise largely excluded” (Davidson 10). In the case of the Christian novels in this study, that access extended to theological and doctrinal debates, as well as to popular religious practices.

So far, this story fits a popular stereotype about 19th-century American culture: as society became more diverse and enlightened, literature became more secular, until finally hardline Calvinism gave way to modern secularism and Christian doctrine faded away to a series of ethical precepts. David Reynolds’ book Faith in Fiction exemplifies this perspective. After 1835, he writes, religious fiction exhibited a “convergence of orthodox and liberal fiction in a secular center” (5) as “[i]ntellectual doctrine gave way in

3 many circles to a simpler affectionalism, Calvinist constraint to evangelical persuasion, passive expectancy of divine grace to active preparation for it” (2). Ultimately, Reynolds contends, religious fiction is “an exercise in wish fulfillment, in compensatory affirmation, and especially in the evasion of the kind of shattering self-scrutiny and intellectual inquiry which, if carried too far, threatened to bring one up on the side of doubt” (215). If this were true, then we would expect concerns like Andrews’ to be drowned in a wave of feel-good fiction, where even the most devoutly Christian characters content themselves with being nice, occasionally saying grace, and of course voting Republican. Likewise, we would expect Christian authors and publishers to shrink from thorny theology and divisive doctrine, perhaps because they recognize “the painful suspicion, underlying much of these Americans' surface cheer, that the otherworldly religion in which they ostensibly had faith was a fiction” (Reynolds 215).

In terms of this broader secularization narrative, my study joins several others

(notably those by Candy Brown, Tracy Fessenden, and Greg Jackson) to demonstrate the theological sophistication of postbellum American Christian fiction, even in texts that do not debate the finer points of soteriology, eschatology, or transubstantiation. As

Fessenden puts it,

From Emerson and Matthew Arnold to Robert Scholes and Gerald Graff, the story told of literary studies’ emergence as a discipline is a supersessionary tale, in which religion cedes authority to forms of truth and suasion that no longer require its grounding. To scholars of American literature, in particular, secularization in this teleological sense functions as both a story line and a professional credo (“Religion, Literature, and Method” 185). This disciplinary context certainly informs my own work. But it’s also significant that

Andrews’ anxieties about Christian fiction did not simply vanish when novels like Uncle 4

Tom’s Cabin achieved commercial success. In 1902, for instance, Charles Sheldon published an essay in The Independent, a Congregational magazine once edited by Henry

Ward Beecher, entitled “The Use and Abuse of Fiction.” Sheldon and Andrews were opposites in many ways: Sheldon was a theologically liberal Congregational preacher and a wildly successful novelist, whose bestseller In His Steps (1896) outsold even Uncle

Tom’s Cabin. Yet he sounds a similar note of caution when it comes to the proper role of fiction. Using fiction “for the purpose of inspiration,” he says, can be “the highest office of fiction,” but not if “the literary style and plot and the situations are divorced from some kind of inspirational purpose” (967). Like Andrews, Sheldon takes the Bible for his model, claiming that “[a]ll the stories told by Christ as fiction were designed for the express purpose of rousing human action. [...] I do not see why the same test should not be applied to those who write purpose novels” (967).

Although Andrews focuses on doctrine and Sheldon focuses on social action, they both apply a religious test to these novels, and they both express concern that even explicitly religious content may have deleterious effects on readers. More to the point for my study, they both consider the Bible the gold standard for storytelling: Andrews insists that even the small parts of Scripture which may be considered fictional (mainly Jesus’ parables) do not justify novelists’ attempts to replace the Bible with a fictional story, while Sheldon demands that Christian novels faithfully reproduce the activist effect of

Bible stories, which he would likely see in terms of social reform. Obviously, Sheldon would approve far more novels than Andrews would, but given the 45 years of radical changes to the landscape of American Christianity between them, they ask remarkably

5 similar questions. This similarity suggests an abiding concern not just with Christian novels’ belletristic literary quality, but with how they reflect Biblical content, beliefs, and values.2 As Gutjahr points out, even in the late 20th century “influential conservative elements within American Protestantism” expressed “a vibrant opposition to novels with overtly Christian content, echoing long-standing arguments declaring that fact and fiction cannot be profitably commingled” (“No Longer Left Behind” 210). Gutjahr mainly explores this process in terms of twentieth-century Fundamentalism and conservative

Evangelicalism, but rightly notes that Fundamentalist complaints had their intellectual roots in the 19th century.

In these 19th-century arguments, novels were not only seen as false and potentially inflammatory (alas, poor Madame Bovary), but also as representing a direct threat to

Biblical superiority:

[Conservative critics] protested that novels were dangerous because they took time away from more worthy activities, principal among these being Bible reading and other devotional practices. Further, they feared that novels, even more dangerously, might so influence American reading tastes that the Bible would come to seem nothing more than “a wearisome book” (211). 19th-century antinovel critics, like their Fundamentalist and Evangelical counterparts, typically reserved their strongest criticism for novels that they judged to be morally or

2 The same impulse, I would argue, animates many contemporary critiques of Christian art, especially those in Evangelical circles. Does the dubious theology of The Shack, for instance, make it unsuitable for communicating truths about God? Does the graphic violence in The Passion of the Christ overshadow its Gospel message? And just how “Christian” can a pop song be if it sounds just like everything else on the Top 40? These issues do involve a measure of personal taste, especially in terms of genre: just as Andrews insisted in 1856 that novels could not communicate Biblical truth, similar arguments might claim that rap or abstract art or action films also lacks that ability. But these critiques also hinge on claims about whether certain content can be Christian. More often than not, they compare the book (or film, song, painting, etc.) to the Bible to make this determination, especially in terms of storytelling.

6 religiously harmful to readers. Theoretically, these texts could compete with the Bible in terms of readers’ time and energy, and their lurid and exciting plots could certainly make the Bible seem boring in comparison. But if the underlying concern is that novel-reading might replace Bible-reading, then religious novels– especially those that dramatized

Biblical events– would actually represent the more insidious threat. Readers who were already interested in the Bible and/or religion would likely gravitate toward religious novels, especially if they considered secular novels to be morally inferior. For instance,

Andrews admits that The Prince of the House of David (1855) is “a book of very extraordinary power and interest to a healthy religious mind” (5), but a few sentences later, he asserts that “the effects of truth can not be reached by its most cunningly executed counterfeits” (6). Fiction, in other words, should be acknowledged and treated as such, but “repentance and faith are to be explained in the plain and Bible way” (43).

I.2 From Substitute to Surrogate

Andrews’ metaphor is instructive. A counterfeit is only convincing if it is sufficiently similar to the true article, but it’s also more dangerous the closer it is to genuine. But Reynolds’ thesis in Faith in Fiction uses the same binary logic: religious novels must inevitably supplant religious practice, he claims, even if both are allegedly built on fiction. It is true that secularization created profound and complex challenges for

American churches in the 19th century, especially as higher criticism and Darwinism undermined traditional understandings of the Bible. However, Reynolds’ reductionist model of religious fiction overlooks a significant amount of theological and rhetorical sophistication, especially in terms of evangelical goals. In the latter half of the 19th

7 century, Candy Brown points out, “Evangelicals became increasingly optimistic that the

Holy Spirit could reveal the pure Word through a wide range of linguistic styles, genres, and forms. The distinction between sacred and profane language came to rest less on the kinds of words adopted than on their usefulness in interfacing the Word with human experience” (4). Novels were one print-based tool among many that 19th-century

Evangelicals used to “work through alternatives and tensions” in their faith, as they (and other Protestants) “reconfigured their religious landscape” (16). Though these texts did contain secular elements, a fact that frustrated Andrews and similar critics, Brown argues that

Rather than accommodating religion to advancing capitalism, evangelicals reconfigured commerce as a religious instrument. Writers, publishers, and readers self-consciously and strategically developed marketing strategies and narrative styles to bring orthodox doctrine to bear on everyday experience. Innovative packaging and advertising, instead of subverting textual authority, enhanced the power of the printed word to direct the currents of American culture (19). While Brown’s valuable study explores the production, marketing, and consumption of what she calls “evangelical print culture” (1), my interest here is in how individual Christian novels represent and interact with Biblical content and authority.

Brown suggests that Evangelicals balanced purity and presence in their efforts “to sanctify their own pilgrim community and redeem American society without allowing themselves to become worldly” (1). For Christian novels, interaction with Biblical content includes both purity and presence: faithful Christian novelists did not want to dilute or obscure the Bible’s message, especially in fictional retellings of Bible stories

(e.g. Ben-Hur), but at the same time they tried to create compelling plots and characters to meet their own artistic, commercial, and religious goals. As in secular literature, this 8 diversity creates the very possibility of art, even among writers with substantially similar beliefs about doctrine or theology. For instance, both Stowe (in Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and

Sheldon (in In His Steps) take an activist view of Christianity, in which personal faith finds its fullest expression in social reform. Yet they hold radically different views of the

Bible’s role in that activism: Stowe’s characters cannot effect reform without carefully consulting Scripture, while Sheldon’s characters only start changing the world when they stop reading the Bible. Indeed, all the novels I study in this dissertation foreground the complex relationships among faith, reading, Biblical authority, moral choices, and human action.

To analyze these relationships and the corresponding literary representations, I approach Christian novels as what I call surrogate Scriptures. In one sense, a surrogate is a representative: someone who speaks for a person, an organization, or an administration in some official capacity. For instance, MacManus and Quecan labeled 2008 “the year of the spouse as surrogate” based on the frequency with which Michelle Obama and Cindy

McCain spoke on behalf of their respective husbands (337). Likewise, during the 2016 primaries Nora Kelly noted in The Atlantic that “surrogates can bring both political savvy and celebrity to the table,” and are often “used to target a particular community of voters or speak to a specific policy area” (“The Gamble of Using Campaign Surrogates”).

Similarly, a Christian novel may represent the text of the Bible through allusion, quotation, imitation, satire, parody, or even direct rewriting. Particularly given the

Evangelical Protestant emphasis on Biblicism, which I will return to later in this chapter, these techniques could also be seen as representing Christianity as a whole. Theological

9 emphases on personal holiness and evangelism often stress this type of relationship, following Paul’s statement in 2 Corinthians that he and Timothy “are ambassadors for

Christ, as though God did beseech you by us” (5:20). This goes back to Brown’s point about purity and presence. In other words, if a novel (or any form of creative expression, really) represents the Bible in a particular way, regardless of the tenor or purpose of that representation, then it arguably reflects similar ideas about the church and/or individual

Christians.

At the same time, however, we can also view surrogates as substitutes. To a point, all representatives are substitutes, in that they are vested with rhetorical authority to speak for someone or something that is absent. But I have in mind a more literal substitution, as in the practice of biological surrogacy when “a woman carries a baby for a couple who intend to be the parents” (Emery, “How Does Surrogacy Work?”). As Emery explains, in traditional surrogacy the surrogate mother is “artificially inseminated with the intended father’s sperm…so the surrogate has a genetic tie to the baby,” while in gestational surrogacy the baby’s genetic material comes from donor sperm and/or egg, often but not always from the intended parents. In modern medicine, of course, this process is accomplished through in-vitro fertilization, but several women in Genesis were “given” as surrogate wives, notably Hagar (to Abram) and Bilhah and Zilpah (both to Joseph). By analogy, a surrogate Scripture could fill a discursive space normally reserved for the

Bible itself, as when we say that a reference book is “the Bible” for its field. This potential relationship seems to have animated much of the 19th-century opposition to religious novels, especially novels that re-present Biblical events and characters, as they

10 were seen as potentially usurping Biblical authority. My contention in this study is that

Christian novels, especially bestsellers, filled both roles at once: as representatives they could potentially point readers to Christ and the church, but as substitutes they could potentially threaten the Bible’s supremacy and sufficiency.

I.3 Bestsellers and Bible Reading

This study analyzes Biblical engagement in four surrogate Scriptures, all published between 1850 and 1900 in the United States: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by

Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Gates Ajar (1868) by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Ben-Hur

(1880) by Lew Wallace, and In His Steps (1896) by Charles Sheldon. All four were bestsellers in their time, and several have had substantial cultural afterlives in the 20th and

21st centuries. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the best-known of the four, both because Stowe’s explicitly Christian critique of slavery influenced millions of readers and because the novel generated dozens of imitations and adaptations. Along similar lines, Ben-Hur was not only wildly popular as a novel, but its theatrical and cinematic adaptations– including silent films in 1907 and 1925, the blockbuster 1959 film starring Charlton Heston, and remakes in 2003 and 2016– produced compelling plots and groundbreaking cinematography. In His Steps had its own revival in the 1990s and 2000s, mainly within

Evangelicalism, when ubiquitous merchandise (especially bracelets) repeated the novel’s central question: what would Jesus do? Gates has had less impact on popular culture, but it has played a significant role in Americanist studies of “woman’s fiction” (to use Nina

Baym’s phrase) during the last 30 years.

I have limited my study to bestsellers for several reasons. First, bestsellers tend to generate more contemporary press coverage and reviews, which makes it more likely to find relevant material in print and digital archives. For instance, Stephen Railton’s incomparable website Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture

(http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/) documents hundreds of 19th-century responses to the novel, along with selections from contemporary criticism. This highlights another benefit of studying bestsellers: they are more likely to attract scholarly attention, which helps contextualize new studies and identify gaps in the research. This approach can complement recovery studies, both by offering a richer context for lesser-known works and by exploring how a given text’s content and presentation may have affected its popularity. Third, although popularity does not guarantee literary quality by any stretch of the imagination, bestsellers can tell us a lot about readers’ and publishers’ expectations. More specifically, religious bestsellers often speak to popular religious beliefs and practices, often because they provide intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and/or psychological support to their readers. In one of the few extant studies of 19th-century religious bestsellers, Ralph Carey points out that “[p]opular religious thought in America cannot be adequately assessed through printed sermons, denominational literature, or the polemic literature of college and seminary writers. The limited audience of such intellectual contributions would suggest the need for sources more representative of popular culture” (1). While I argue in this study that popular novels also include

“intellectual contributions,” I agree with Carey that popular culture must complement

12 formal theology in any study of 19th-century religion, if only to reflect believers’ actual lived experience.

Lastly, and most importantly, I have selected these four novels because they each demonstrate intriguing and intellectually significant engagements with the Bible. In one way or another, all four examine the theological concepts of revelation, hermeneutics, and exegesis. These concepts are complementary: revelation examines how God communicates with humans, hermeneutics establishes an interpretive framework for understanding that communication, and exegesis applies that framework to interpret and apply specific instances of revelation. But they are also dynamic, especially when one or more elements seem inadequate to the task at hand. For example, during 19th-century debates over slavery, proslavery activists noted that Old Testament law included specific instructions for acquiring and managing slaves. Based on this data they argued that slavery was morally permissible in 19th-century America, and specifically that Christians could practice it without violating the Bible. Among other things, this argument assumes that (a) Old Testament law is a legitimate source of revelation, (b) using a “literal hermeneutic” is an appropriate way to interpret the relevant passages, and (c) applying

Old Testament law to contemporary settings is a legitimate application of Scripture.

While some antislavery activists (notably William Lloyd Garrison) rejected all three of these assumptions, more commonly they argued that slavery was contrary to a proper understanding and interpretation of Scripture. Especially in popular culture settings like

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, academic arguments about the meaning of particular Greek or

Hebrew terms took a backseat to more sweeping (and often more sentimental) claims

13 about what it means to be a good Christian. Indeed, even though Stowe was more than capable of understanding and expressing theological intricacies, throughout Uncle Tom’s

Cabin she emphasizes human connections, not logical syllogisms.

In a similar way, while none of the novels in this study claim divine authority for their respective stories, as surrogate Scriptures they do challenge both ecclesiastical and popular understandings of revelation, hermeneutics, and exegesis. In each of my four chapters I examine a different element of these challenges, in order to track broader trends in how Christian readers understood the Bible. This is not to say, of course, that

Stowe, Phelps, Wallace, and Sheldon spoke for their millions of readers, or even for the thousands of religious novels produced during this period. But given that their books sold well enough to stay in print for centuries, with generally positive contemporary reviews, it’s safe to say that both their methods and messages resonated with their respective audiences. More importantly, amid what Nathan Hatch has called the “democratization of

American Christianity,” popular Christian novels offered a measure of cultural unity, despite splintering churches and increasing skepticism. As Hatch, Noll, and Gutjahr have shown, 19th-century American Christians held a wide range of beliefs about the Bible’s authority, nature, reliability, and applicability. Overall, I find that the earlier novels rely more on direct Biblical quotations and allusions than the later ones do, and that theologically liberal writers tend to downplay the Bible. At the same time, all four novelists clearly value the Bible as a source of wisdom, truth, and comfort, even as they suggest similar roles for their own fiction.

To understand the significance of reading surrogate Scriptures, it’s helpful to review the role of Bible reading within Evangelical Protestantism. The Bible has long been the cornerstone of literacy for Christians, both as a common text (or more accurately, a collection of texts; Bible is from the Greek ta biblia, meaning “books”) and as the basis for theologies of reading. Developing partly from Jewish reverence for and intimate knowledge of the Torah, orthodox Christian teachings have consistently emphasized the Bible’s centrality, truth, divine inspiration, and sufficiency. In the

American context, reading the Bible almost always means reading in English translation, because fluency in the Bible’s original languages (Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic) has been typically limited to seminary-educated readers and because the dominant Protestant theology emphasizes using vernacular translations. More to the point, 19th-century

American Protestants held strongly to the Reformation principle of sola Scriptura, “the

Bible alone,” which places the Bible as the final authority on matters of faith and morality, above and beyond any church government (e.g. The Vatican) or theological tradition. This did not guarantee doctrinal agreement by any means, as Section 1.3 on the

Bible and slavery will illustrate, but it did establish a series of parameters for expressing and potentially resolving disagreements. The Bible, in other words, set the terms of theological and doctrinal conversation in the United States, and naturally worked its way into both American literature and American speech in innumerable ways.

Then as now, Evangelical Protestants promoted a high degree of Biblical literacy among both clergy and non-clergy, often by encouraging regular, structured personal

Bible reading. By this term, I mean the practice of an individual reading his or her Bible

15 outside of a formal ecclesiastical (church) structure, as part of that individual’s private devotional life. These were not the only contexts in which Americans read the Bible, of course, and many Christians used standardized reading schedules for their personal reading, some based on a given church’s or denomination’s liturgy. But my point here is that for many Evangelicals, this private reading offered unique opportunities to study, interpret, and apply the Bible’s teachings and examples. They held this to be a spiritually transformative process, as a way to experience God through his living word. Hatch has shown how increasingly populist understandings of both the Bible and Christian theology often came at the expense of formalized theology and central denominational authority, and groups that tapped such populism exploded in numbers and influence. As he argues, the resulting “populist hermeneutics” were based on “the assertion that private judgment should be the ultimate tribunal in religious matters,” an “approach to Scripture [that] also dared common people to open the Bible and think for themselves” (Hatch 182). This process was not without its difficulties, of course, but overall “common people, Bibles in hand, relished the right to shape their own faith and submit to leaders of their own choosing” (183). Based on Hatch’s chronology, the initial impulse toward democratization had calmed down by 1850, partly because the myriad of new denominations launched in the first half of the century had established their own roots and sometimes hierarchical authority structures. Yet the focus on personal Bible reading has persisted in American Christianity to the present day partly as a legacy of this ferment, a way to combine Emersonian self-reliance with sola Scriptura. That is, for the

Evangelical Protestant Christians among these novels’ readers, regular devotional Bible

16 study simultaneously expressed individual interpretive privilege and humble submission to God’s leading.

Here especially, orthodox Christian doctrines of Scripture’s absolute reliability and authority butted heads with American Protestant emphases on individual privilege, especially as inflected through the dominant republican political thought. Mark Noll notes that like “their Protestant predecessors,” 19th-century American theologians

“continued to treat the Scriptures as a uniquely inspired revelation from God that provided essential explanations, motives, and guides for life. Much more than their

Protestant predecessors, however, they also held that the Bible was the only reliable source of religious authority and that personally appropriated understanding of Scripture was the only reliable means of interpretation” (America’s God 231). By midcentury, he argues, a “Reformed and literal hermeneutic” had come to dominate Evangelicalism, resting heavily on a “pervasive” assumption “that the people had the right to read all of the Bible for themselves…Such assumptions fed upon the characteristic hermeneutic of the age, for it was compounded of a distinctly Reformed approach to the scope of Biblical authority…and a distinctly American literalism that privileged commonsense readings of scriptural texts” (AG 376). In other words, the Bible was simple enough for an average

Christian to read and interpret rightly, an act that demonstrated both the Bible’s accessibility and its relevance to each Christian’s life. Alexander Campbell, an important early 19th-century theologian and a founder of the Restoration Movement, made this link between personal interpretation and anti-institutionalism explicit: “I have been so long disciplined in the school of free enquiry, that, if I know my own mind, there is not a man

17 upon the earth whose authority can influence me…I have endeavored to read the

Scriptures as though no one had read them before me” (qtd. in Noll 380).

As more and more Christians (and more and more denominations) championed the sufficiency of human interpretation and human will, what Noll has called the “Puritan canopy” of established churches—and established interpretations—gave way to “anti- institutional moralism, populist intuition, and democratic biblicism” (Scandal 62). Of course, this transition did not stop individual Christians, congregations, and denominations from taking specific interpretive stands, or from enshrining those stands as official doctrine. Similarly, denominational splits were often precipitated by divergent readings of a single verse, and if each Christian could potentially interpret the entire

Bible for himself or herself, the potential for further splintering was infinite. In practice, then, individual interpretive privilege was always held in tension with its institutional counterpart, especially as denominational power solidified later in the century.

I.4 Dissertation Structure, Limitations, and Opportunities for Future Work

The remaining chapters in this study offer case studies of each of the four novels.

Chapter 1, on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, examines the role of Bible reading in Augustine St.

Clare’s conversion. I show how Stowe transforms the “take and read” scene from St.

Augustine’s Confessions to link Bible reading to “right feeling” and to social action. In

Chapter 2 I evaluate intertextuality in The Gates Ajar, in light of the novel’s diary-like structure. I track several of Phelps’ allusions and quotations, and show how she uses a range of artistic and theological resources to offer her readers both comfort and creativity.

These resources, I argue, may themselves represent surrogate Scriptures insofar as they

18 fill emotional needs that in Phelps’ view were unmet by Calvinist interpretations of the

Bible. Next, in Chapter 3 I analyze the Magi’s origin stories in Ben-Hur, in light of doctrines of Christian supersessionism. These narratives, I argue, promote the idea that the Magi’s respective cultures and religions must inevitably give way to Christianity.

They also represent an interesting twist on the Biblical novel: Wallace organizes the section’s plot and characters around evidence from the Gospels, but he clearly privileges his own imagined Magi over their Biblical models. Finally, Chapter 4 examines the role of writing and ethics in In His Steps. I contend that even though the characters ask “what would Jesus do?” to inform all their ethical decisions, they actively avoid studying or even reading any texts, especially the Bible. My analysis focuses on Rev. Henry

Maxwell, who arguably represents Sheldon in the novel. Specifically, I argue that

Maxwell’s move away from reading and writing reveals Sheldon’s anxieties about relying on the Bible to accomplish social reform.

Overall, my study contributes to the existing scholarly literature by enriching and complicating our understanding of Christian bestsellers, and of 19th-century attitudes toward reading and applying the Bible. These four novels, though only representing a small portion of 19th-century Christian fiction, demonstrate diverse and sophisticated ideas about reading, faith, and imagination. Christian readers, writers, and publishers approached cultural engagement cautiously, especially with art forms that could distract or even mislead believers. Evaluating their strategies in terms of Biblical authority, not just doctrine or content, gives us a flexible and sophisticated framework for understanding a range of Christian fiction, both historical and contemporary. However,

19 this study also has some limitations, which may require adjusting my model for future work or revisiting it in light of further evidence. First, I limit my inquiry to four novels, which requires leaving out potentially significant genres like hymns, poetry, magazine fiction, and sermon illustrations. There were of course many other popular 19th-century novels with religious elements, such as Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850),

Joseph Ingraham’s The Prince of the House of David (1855), Mary Augusta Ward’s

Robert Elsmere (1888), and Harold Frederic's The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896).

Future work could put these works in conversation with Stowe, Phelps, Wallace, and

Sheldon. It would also be valuable to establish a more theoretical grounding for how the form of the novel represents and potentially replaces the Bible in ways that less expansive forms cannot.

Second, most of my analysis focuses on a single character and/or scene, rather than reviewing the novel’s broader arguments about the Bible, Christianity, or religious practice. By necessity this strategy omits some potentially relevant material, particularly since most of the characters I examine develop over the course of the novel. For example, in Chapter 4 I focus on how Rev. Henry Maxwell approaches reading and writing, partly because his activities connect most directly to ecclesiastical and devotional practices. But two other characters in In His Steps also engage with print and writing: the newspaper editor Edward Norman and the novelist Jasper Chase. Particularly since Chase is the only major character to abandon the WWJD pledge, I would like to examine these dynamics in a future article or book chapter. In a similar fashion, future work could survey multiple

20 works from particular authors or on particular topics, which may be a more practical approach for book or journal publication.

Finally, my own religious background and perspective has certainly affected my analysis, both in terms of the material I select and the arguments I make about it. Like many scholars who have contributed to the “religious turn” in literary studies, I grew up in a religious family, where much of my exposure to the Bible was in devotional contexts. In fact, the conservative Evangelical churches we attended had much in common with their 19th-century counterparts, and my (informal) education in Christian theology and doctrine shared many assumptions with the authors I study here. That experience is still an important part of my own religious identity, and overall I believe it gives me an advantage in noticing and analyzing religiously significant elements of

American literature. At the same time, it has certainly colored my interpretations of certain ideas and passages, and may make some of my arguments difficult to understand.

Wherever possible, I have tried to clarify the theological concepts I invoke, especially those that would be less familiar to non-Evangelicals. Other scholars would notice (and have noticed) different theological elements in these and similar texts, and would likely interpret them according to their own knowledge and their own biases. Panel discussions or co-authored articles could help alleviate some of these weaknesses, by presenting productive disagreement on significantly complex ideas.

If nothing else, the novels I analyze here testify to the richness and diversity of

19th-century engagement with Christian beliefs about how the Bible could or should relate to fictional narrative. Some of the questions they raise may seem esoteric,

21 especially from the secular perspective that many Americanists assume: as Lawrence

Buell put it in his remarks at the 2013 MLA Convention, we are trained to “avert our eyes from religion” (Buell, “Fault Lines in American Literary History”). Indeed, many academics find it difficult to discuss religion in professional contexts, especially if they’d rather keep their own beliefs (or lack of belief) private. But doing so impoverishes our field and our discipline, just as it would to leave out discussions of race, ethnicity, gender, class, or sexuality. In 1995, Jenny Franchot pointed out in American Literature that Americanists had “produced very little work of interest on religion and American writing,” despite the field being “rich in studies that foreground gender, race, [...] ethnicity and class” (834). Rather than dealing with religious elements of the texts and lives we study, “scholars often either write 'around' the belief (as if belief stays bottled up within a denominational container and never tinctures a person's greater reality) or isolate it as a deviant element to be extracted for diagnostic analysis” (837). As scholars we have made some progress in this area, both by highlighting explicitly religious content (as I do here) and by being more willing to “engage intensively with the religious questions of the topic at hand as religious questions (Franchot 839, emphasis in original). But we can and should do much more to make religion more visible in 19th-century studies, so that we may better understand the cultures we study and the parts of those cultures that survive in us all. In some small way, I hope this dissertation advances that goal.

Works Cited

Andrews, Charles Wesley. Religious Novels: An Argument Against Their Use. New

York, NY: Anson D.F. Randolph, 1856. Print.

Brown, Candy Gunther. The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and

Reading in America, 1789-1880. The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.

Print.

Buell, Lawrence. “Fault Lines in American Literary History.” 2013 MLA Convention, 5

January 2013, Boston, MA. Panel Discussion.

Carey, Ralph. Best Selling Religion: A History of Popular Religious Thought in America

as Reflected in Religious Best Sellers, 1850-1960. Diss. Michigan State

University, 1971. Print.

Davidson, Catherine. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New

York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.

Emery, Lea Rose. “How Does Surrogacy Work? The Difference Between Traditional and

Gestational Surrogacy.” 22 June 2017. Bustle. 24 June 2017,

https://www.bustle.com/p/how-does-surrogacy-work-the-difference-between-

traditional-gestational-surrogacy-65775. Web.

Fessenden, Tracy. “Religion, Literature, and Method.” Early American Literature 45.1

(2010): 183-192. Print.

Franchot, Jenny. “Invisible Domain: Religion and American Literary Studies.” American

Literature 67.4 (1995): 833-842. Print.

Gutjahr, Paul. “No Longer Left Behind: Amazon.Com, Reader Response, and the

Changing Fortunes of the Christian Novel in America.” Book History 5.1 (2002):

209-236. Print.

--. An American Bible: A History of the Good Book in the United States, 1777-

1880. 1st ed. Stanford University Press, 2002. Print.

Hatch, Nathan O. The Democratization of American Christianity. Yale University Press,

1991. Print.

Kelly, Nora. “The Gamble of Using Campaign Surrogates.” 24 May 2016. The Atlantic. 5

July 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/surrogates-

clinton-trump-sanders/484031/. Web.

MacManus, Susan A, and Andrew F. Quecan. “Spouses As Campaign Surrogates:

Strategic Appearances by Presidential and Vice Presidential Candidates’ Wives in

the 2004 Election.” PS: Political Science & Politics 41.2 (2008): 337-348. Print.

Noll, Mark. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Oxford UP,

2002. Print.

--. The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1995. Print.

Nord, David Paul. Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in

America. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2004. Print.

Reynolds, David S. Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America.

Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1981. Print.

Sheldon, Charles. “The Use and Abuse of Fiction.” The Independent 54 (1902): 965-970.

Print.

Chapter 1:

Take and Read: Augustine’s Bible Reading in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

1.1 Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Purity and Presence

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (serialized June 1851-April 1852; published March

1852) is likely the best-known novel in this study, and offers particularly rich ground for exploring Brown’s purity-presence tension and the broader phenomenon of surrogate

Scriptures. The novel traces the fate of two slaves: Eliza Harris, who flees north to escape her young son’s being sold to a slave trader; and the title’s Uncle Tom, a pious middle- aged man who is carried south by the same trader, first being sold to the St. Clare family in New Orleans and later to the egregiously cruel Simon Legree. Both plots feature copious commentary on Christianity’s relationship to slavery—Stowe vehemently opposed slavery in all forms, and argued for an abolitionist reading of Scripture—as well as a heaping serving of sentimentality, especially in Tom’s sacrificial death at the hands of Simon Legree. This combination proved both rhetorically powerful and prodigiously marketable. As Sarah Meer and more recently David Reynolds have shown, Uncle Tom’s

Cabin not only shattered American sales records but launched an entire industry of literary imitators, stage (and later film) productions, political debates, and merchandise.

During its initial serialization (June 1851-April 1852) in the National Era, for instance, the magazine’s readership “jumped from 17,000 to 28,000” (Robbins, “Influence”), and within a year of the book version’s first print run (late March 1852), publisher John P.

Jewett announced that sales had surpassed 300,000 copies (Parfait 99). No other novel came close to these figures in the 1850s, and only the Bible surpassed Uncle Tom’s Cabin in overall sales in the 19th century.

Much useful scholarship on the novel has focused on its controversial representations of gender, race, slavery, and sentiment. Indeed, in her introduction to The

Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe Cindy Weinstein classifies Uncle

Tom’s Cabin as “another leviathan in the canon of American literature,” not so much as a hieroglyphic “bearer of interpretive capaciousness, but rather as an object to be spatially isolated (in terms of her career), hermeneutically contained, and thereby classified once and for all” (5, 6). Perhaps as part of their attempts to “contain” it, most scholars recognize the importance of Christian concepts and vocabulary to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but surprisingly few have closely examined the novel’s engagement with the Bible.

Doing so, I argue, is not simply important because of Stowe’s own deep (if complex) faith or because she portrays a mutually reinforcing relationship between Christianity and antislavery efforts. Rather, I’m interested here—and throughout the study—in parallels between how and why 19th-century American Christians read the Bible and how and why they read Christian fiction.

Additionally, the fact that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not just read widely but adapted to form a “profuse variety of texts in many genres and several languages” (Meer

1) suggests provocative parallels with Scripture itself. Reynolds, in fact, labels Uncle

Tom’s Cabin “the gospel according to Stowe” and argues that the novel “was widely seen as a new Bible, with its ideal expression of religion for the era” (Mightier 1). Given his earlier scholarship on religious fiction, Reynolds may well imagine this as another step towards secularization, such that the novel’s emotional force and political timeliness allowed it to take the Bible’s place as a culturally and morally defining document. Of course, neither Stowe nor her readers imagined Uncle Tom’s Cabin as divine—Stowe would consider such a claim blasphemous—but Reynolds is right that the novel, like the

Bible, both occupied a central place in 19th-century American Christian thought.

Accordingly, Stowe walked a fine line between acknowledging Scripture’s supremacy and claiming her own measure of moral authority.

This balancing act makes Brown’s ideas on purity and presence especially valuable for analyzing the Bible’s place in the novel. Stowe makes her evangelical purposes for the novel abundantly clear, most strongly in the “Concluding Remarks” that form her final chapter, and is equally clear about how Bible-believing Christians ought to respond to slavery. Yet because she bases her abolitionist argument squarely on her understanding of the Bible’s inherent authority and reliability, she must simultaneously maintain a credible connection to Scripture (purity) to form a convincing witness to the evils of slavery (presence). As I will show in greater detail later, however, such antislavery appeals to the Bible were complex, and required both exegetical subtlety and a very particular understanding of Biblical interpretation. Stowe could not simply point to

“thou shalt not have slaves” and consider the matter settled.

These difficulties have led some critics to conclude that Stowe rejected the

Bible’s authority as insufficient to convince her readers. Catherine O’Connell, for example, claims that Stowe’s use of sentiment “suggests the limitations of religious authority in dealing with the slavery crisis” and that for Stowe, “arguments against slavery from ‘the word’ of the Bible…finally falter on the vagaries of interpretation” (18,

29). Indeed, there are, as O’Connell notes, a few religious authority figures in the novel who preach proslavery interpretations, and at one point even Simon Legree insists while thrashing Tom that the Biblical phrase “Servants, obey yer masters” (Stowe 325; cf.

Colossians 3:22 and Ephesians 6:5) justifies the beating. But rather than attempting to supersede the Bible with a more direct emotional appeal, I argue that Stowe uses the novel to rehabilitate the Bible’s authority. Specifically, I will argue in this chapter that she uses scenes of personal Bible reading and interpretation to show how slavery advocates read the Bible badly, and to correct those mistakes by showing their grave moral consequences. This emphasis on method over content allows Stowe to maintain

Biblical centrality, both in her novel and in her argument, and to attempt to unify the

Christian church on the common ground of abolitionism.

This chapter focuses on how and why Stowe’s character Augustine St. Clare reads and interprets the Bible, and on what these techniques reveal about Stowe’s own view of

Bible reading. In particular, I examine St. Clare’s critique of his wife’s proslavery exegesis and his own attempts to read and believe the Bible, against the backdrop of early

Christian models of reading and conversion. While many scholars have recognized the importance of Biblical precedents and paradigms to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and to the 19th-

28 century reading public, none have specifically examined St. Clare in these contexts, despite the fascinating complexity of his views and practices. Unlike the characters of

Tom and Eva who read Scripture in an orthodox if childlike fashion, St. Clare confronts several genuine interpretive and spiritual difficulties facing American Christians of his day. He can neither embrace the proslavery exegesis that dominated the South nor outrun the sentimental legacy of what he calls his “mother’s book” (167, emphasis in original).

In fact, his pronounced lack of religious conviction—at least for the bulk of his subplot— gives Stowe the leeway to explore the thorny relationship among Bible reading, slavery, exegesis, and conversion. Doing so, I argue, allows Stowe to reconfigure conventional

Christian models of reading and interpreting the Bible, and specifically to show the inadequacy of a merely personal faith—or a merely personal reading practice—to overcome slavery’s threat to the soul of the nation.

Though he initially criticizes the Bible’s apparent malleability in the hands of proslavery Christians (see Section 1.3), arguing for a more pragmatic view of slavery divorced from Biblical justifications, after his own conversion to Christianity Augustine

St. Clare is quick to tie his Evangelical convictions to an abolitionist political stance. In her accounts of Augustine’s critiques and conversion, I argue, Stowe shows both the benefits of reading the Bible in community with “right feeling” and the consequences of reading it individually or without that feeling. At the same time, she works in interesting ways with St. Augustine’s Confessions (c. 397 AD): though Augustine St. Clare’s conversion differs from St. Augustine’s, using Confessions allows Stowe to combine her convictions about proper Bible reading with a normative model of Christian conversion.

This schema, I conclude, helps us understand how Stowe might have imagined Uncle

Tom’s Cabin to appropriate some of the Bible’s emotional and spiritual power.

1.2 Literature Review

Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a lightning rod for both praise and criticism as soon as it was published, thanks to Stowe’s outspoken views of race, slavery, religion, and politics. The Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture archive includes more than 500 newspaper and magazine responses published between 1851 (when the novel was first serialized) and 1865, as well as dozens of “anti-Tom” stories and novels. One contemporary ad published in the New Orleans Picayune, for instance, starts by listing two versions of the novel for sale (a deluxe illustrated version for $4, and a cheap paperback for 50 cents), then recommends six proslavery books as “an antidote to the above” (The New Orleans Picayune, 20 March 1853). Alongside four novels, mostly published shortly after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the ad recommends two extensive scholarly studies: Bible Defence of Slavery (1852) by Rev. Josiah Priest, and Studies on Slavery

(1852) by John Fletcher. Priest’s book was originally published in 1843 as Slavery, As It

Relates to the Negro, Or African Race, and uses a reading of the “Hamitic curse” (see

Chapter 4, note 16) to argue that black people are both inferior and destined to be slaves.

Its 1852 rebranding responded directly to Stowe’s antislavery reading of the New

Testament, as part of a larger argument that abolitionism was anti-Biblical. Similarly,

Fletcher’s encyclopedic Studies on Slavery devotes considerable time to critiquing

Biblical and theological arguments against slavery. Notably, the publisher’s preface emphasizes Biblical hermeneutics: “[Fletcher's] exegesis of biblical passages, in the original languages in which they were communicated by inspiration to the world, shows his sound scholarship, as well as his reverence of the literal sense and specific meaning of

God's holy and unimpeachable standard and rule of life and action” (iv). As I explore in

Section 1.3, this literalist understanding of Biblical content significantly complicated

Biblical debates over slavery. From the very beginning, then, critiques of Stowe’s novel were at least partly concerned with her use of Scripture and her severe criticism of slaveholders’ Christian faith.

Scholarly interest in Stowe and in Uncle Tom’s Cabin has grown rapidly in the past 30 years: data from Worldcat suggests that roughly 250 book-length studies of the novel have been published since 1980, along with more than a thousand journal articles and book chapters. Likewise, the annual reviews in American Literary Scholarship typically contain 10-15 new articles on Stowe. Much of this work analyzes Stowe’s religious beliefs and her representations of Christianity, both in terms of Uncle Tom’s

Cabin and of her explicitly religious writings (e.g., Footsteps of the Master). It would be impractical to review all of the relevant material for this chapter, particularly since most readings of the novel grapple in some way with its religious content. Accordingly, with the exception of the sources by Douglas and Tompkins, each of which represents a major scholarly approach to sentimental fiction like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I limit this review to sources that specifically engage Stowe’s use of the Bible. During the 1980s and 1990s, many scholarly treatments of this topic tried to mediate between Douglas’ and Tompkins’ perspectives, as Americanists established critical frameworks for understanding sentimentalism in general and sentimental religion in particular. For the past 15 years, however, religious scholarship on Stowe has been more specialized, likely because her work is now firmly established in the literary and critical canon.

As was the case with Phelps’ The Gates Ajar (Chapter 2), 20th-century scholarly interest in Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin was sparse until the 1980s. The novel was well- known, of course, for its popularity and its influence on antebellum slavery debates, but few scholars took it seriously as a work of art. For instance, in The Feminization of

American Culture (1978) Ann Douglas wrote that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a great book, not because it is a great novel, but because it is a great revival sermon, aimed directly at the conversion of its hearers. […] Stowe conducted the most brilliant exploration of New

England Calvinism as a theology and a lifestyle ever conceived by an American” (245).

For Douglas, in fact, the death of Little Eva is “the archetypical and archetypically satisfying scene” in 19th-century Victorian fiction, precisely because Eva’s “sainthood is there to precipitate our nostalgia and our narcissism. We are meant to bestow on her that fondness we reserve for the contemplation of our own softer emotions” (3, 4). The problem with such scenes, in Douglas’ view, is that “their debased religiosity” and “their sentimental peddling of Christian belief for its nostalgic value” cheapened both fiction and theology (6). In other words, books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin were culturally influential and even enjoyable, but they ultimately distracted readers from more “serious” authors like Hawthorne and Melville.

Jane Tompkins takes a radically different view of Stowe in Sensational Designs

(1985), arguably the first major scholarly treatment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She groups the novel with “works whose obvious impact on their readers has made them suspect from a modernist point of view, which tends to classify work that affects people’s lives, or tries to, as merely sensational or propagandistic” (xi). Although she admits that these

33 novels share “a certain set of defects that excludes them from the ranks of the great masterpieces,” Tompkins focuses on how they “provid[ed] men and women with a means of ordering the world they inhabited,” including the religious elements of those worlds

(xii-xiii). Like Tompkins, in this dissertation I also emphasize how “literature…connects with the beliefs and attitudes of large masses of readers so as to impress or move them deeply” (xiv). For instance, she notes that Stowe’s portrayal of Little Eva “had power to move hundreds of thousands of readers in the nineteenth century because they believed in the spiritual elevation of a simple childlike idiom, in the spiritual efficacy of ‘sudden burst[s] of feeling, and in the efficacy of what is spiritual in general” (xviii). Although

Eva plays a relatively minor role in my analysis here, as I argue below, her death profoundly affects Augustine St. Clare’s approach to Bible reading.

Tompkins’ chapter on Uncle Tom’s Cabin challenges the “male-dominated scholarly tradition” that dismisses sentimental fiction in order “to supplant the tradition of evangelical piety and moral commitment these novelists represent” (123). Instead,

Tompkins argues that Uncle Tom’s Cabin “is the summa theologica of nineteenth-century

America’s religion of domesticity, a brilliant redaction of the culture’s favorite story about itself– the story of salvation through motherly love” (125). Indeed, such religious beliefs “organiz[e] and sustai[n]” crucial ideas about family, gender, power, and politics.

Like Douglas, Tompkins calls attention to Eva’s redemptive influences on Topsy and

Augustine. However, whereas Douglas dismisses Eva’s death as campy “art that is too excessive to be taken seriously” (Douglas 4), Tompkins reminds us that the scene succeeds precisely because of the spiritual and religious beliefs that Stowe shares with

34 her readers. In her words, the “notion that historical change takes place only through religious conversion…is dramatized and vindicated in Uncle Tom’s Cabin by the novel’s insistence that all human events are organized, clarified, and made meaningful by the existence of spiritual realities” (133). Accessing and even reproducing these realities relies to a great extent on Bible reading, and specifically to a typological schema in which

“every character in the novel, every scene, and every incident, comes to be apprehended in terms of every other character, scene, and incident” (136). While Tompkins does not explore this phenomenon specifically in terms of Biblical hermeneutics, it bears a striking resemblance to models of interpretation in which, as 17th-century Methodist theologian

Richard Watson put it, “Scripture is to be its own interpreter” (30).

Anne-Janine Morey draws on both Douglas and Tompkins to compare Stowe’s use of Biblical allusion and interpretation to similar techniques in Mary Wilkins

Freeman’s short fiction. Though Morey mentions Uncle Tom’s Cabin several times during the essay, for the most part she focuses on Stowe’s later New England novels: The

Minister’s Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), Oldtown Folks (1869), and

Poganuc People (1878). However, some of Morey’s observations can apply equally well to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, particularly her opposition between sentimental (or domestic) novelists and regionalists or local colorists. She contends that sentimentalists like Stowe

“were often critical of the workings of religious institutions and found the Bible to be their ally against official interpretations. These women encountered the scriptures as uniquely applicable to their situation of domestic and cultural confinement.” By contrast, local colorists “supersede or perhaps complement the ancient text by providing their own

35 parabolic forms and literary visions of kingdom” (744). This latter category is closer to my definition of surrogate Scriptures in the present study, particularly in terms of the tension between representation and substitution that I explore in my introductory chapter.

At the same time, I find that Stowe and especially Phelps (Chapter 2) also used alternative discourses– including alternative readings of Scripture– to work “against official interpretations.” Morey’s larger point is that both sentimentalist and regionalist women writers “must often live under the reign of man’s theological system-building”

(747). In this, her work resembles Stansell’s analysis of The Gates Ajar, as both authors emphasize the subversive feminist potential of their authors’ respective engagements with the Bible.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese offers another perspective on feminism and religious scholarship in her essay “Religion, Meaning, and Identity in Women's Writing.” This undated essay was discovered in Fox-Genovese’s papers after her death in 2007, and was published with minor revisions in 2008. She argues that while feminist theologians have tried “to transform women’s relation to religion by transforming religion, feminist literary critics have substituted an insistence upon the erasure of religion from women’s lives, or, more properly, its erasure from women’s identities — from their sense of the meaning of their lives” (17). Specifically, these critics tend “to endow the work of art or literature with its own divinity” in order “to relocate a dethroned and omnipotent deity in the consciousness of the individual” (18). The problem, as Fox-Genovese sees it, is that feminist critics can only conceptualize religion in terms of male dominance and female oppression, so they must assume that women’s faith is either an elaborate con or false

36 consciousness: “Any author who could represent a woman’s willing agreement to her own submission cannot have been writing what she meant” (19).

However, writers like Stowe countermand this assumption, not just because of

Stowe’s personal dedication to her faith but because what Douglas labeled the feminization of American religion actually gave 19th-century women more political power. As Fox-Genovese puts it, “Women did not directly shape theology, which remained the preserve of the male divines. But male theology offered women new ways to understand their own relations to religion both as women and as individuals” (21).

Ultimately, she concludes, “we display an extraordinary failure of respect if we assume that women were not interested in or could not understand theological questions” (23).

While my own analysis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not directly engage gender dynamics,

Fox-Genovese makes an excellent point about scholarly blind spots when it comes to writing about religion. It is certainly true that Stowe and other women writers use religion instrumentally in their fiction, both to highlight social injustice and to assert personal autonomy. But it is profoundly unfair, not to mention historically inaccurate, to assume that these women did not really believe what they professed.

Mason Lowance’s 1994 essay, published in a collection of essays on Stowe’s rhetorical strategies, examines Stowe’s “employment of specific strategies of biblical hermeneutics: typological figuralism, rhetorical tropes, prophetic and millennial modes of discourse, and allegorical character representation” (159). These techniques, he suggests, account for the controversy over Stowe’s seeming reliance on stereotype to represent her black characters. According to Lowance, Stowe “employs the Bible…as a rhetorical

37 control, one that gives her text the authority of Scripture by recapitulating biblical characters and figures, and by renarrating episodes from the Bible that allow the reader to recognize predictable future events” (160). In doing so, she continued a tradition among

New England writers of describing their own history (and predicting future events) in terms of Biblical typology, by “associating the experience of America with literal, historical movements in ancient Israel” (161). For instance, in Stowe’s “Concluding

Remarks” at the end of the novel, she invokes the jeremiad form to warn readers that “the

Christian church has a heavy account to answer,” and that further “injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!” (Stowe 408, italics in original).

Because Stowe drew both on Biblical content and on Biblical rhetoric, Lowance concludes, her novel was all the more effective for readers steeped in both traditions.

Moving on to scholarship produced in the last decade, Patricia Hill’s 2007 essay evaluates “the religious culture that produced Uncle Tom's Cabin precisely because that text— thoroughly grounded in evangelical religion— rendered a verdict that produced a political explosion” (Hill, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a Religious Text”). This essay derives from a conference presentation, and appears on the Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American

Culture website. Like Candy Brown, Hill is more interested in “evangelical culture more broadly in its trans- or extra-denominational dimensions” than in ecclesiastical practice or formal doctrines. She points out, for instance, that although Protestant ideals pervaded many public institutions (e.g. public schools) at this time, Evangelicals typically relied heavily on private devotional practices that transcended or even contradicted official denominational positions. Hill also traces Stowe’s main theological and philosophical

38 influences, including Lyman Beecher’s liberal Calvinism (which Stowe rejected),

Scottish Common Sense philosophy, German Romanticism, and the holiness doctrine of perfectionism. This theological smorgasbord, in Hill’s reading, gave Stowe the aesthetic and philosophical resources to critique American Christians’ complicity in slavery, from a position “apparently outside the churches.” Much like Winifred in The Gates Ajar,

“Stowe ultimately formulated a religious epistemology in which the divine is known through the emotions” (“Religious”).

Hill’s description of antebellum Evangelical devotional practices is especially relevant for my purposes. While Stowe did attend church, Hill writes, her “religious life centered on practices pursued in the privacy of domestic spaces: reading and discussion, singing and prayers.” Likewise, as Nord, Jackson, and Brown have also explored, “the boundaries between the religious and the secular were porous indeed in print media.

Religious newspapers contained news of the day as well as religious commentary, while fiction frequently treated serious religious matters” (“Religious”). These porous boundaries are not only relevant to Stowe’s decision to make her case for abolitionism in novel form, but to her specific representations of reading and writing within Uncle Tom’s

Cabin. For example, as I show in Section 1.4 below, Augustine St. Clare equates the proslavery sermon that his wife praises with secular material he could just as easily get in the Picayune newspaper. More to the point, unlike Gates and In His Steps, Uncle Tom’s

Cabin features very few clerical characters: “this novel situates religious discussion in conversations among the laity.” At the same time, though, Stowe shares Phelps’ and

Sheldon’s convictions that private beliefs should have public effects, balancing

“individual regeneration and the collective social (and spiritual) power of a growing body of regenerated individuals within the public” (Hill, “Religious”). This is consistent with

Stowe’s representation of Bible reading in the novel: it can be an intensely personal and private practice, but ultimately its efficacy depends on sharing both the act of reading and the moral responsibility for applying the Bible’s words.

Finally, Ashley Barnes examines Bible-reading practices in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Gates Ajar, identifying a balance of Catholic and Protestant methods that significantly expanded both novels’ appeal to Christian readers. Barnes labels this approach “the exhibitional style” (179), and argues that both novelists “attempt to find a middle ground between competing models of human contact with God: private reading that goes deep between the lines, or a public sacrament that relies on the sharable, visual, and material” (180). Similarly, Protestant practices privilege individual, autonomous reading while their Catholic counterparts emphasize community and hierarchy. By using elements of both traditions, exhibitional style highlights the pleasures of reading in company, as when Tom and Eva read together in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Mary and

Winifred discuss the meaning of a prophetic image in Gates. But it also “solicits us to enjoy what the text shows without requiring it to harbor secret meanings” (182). In other words, it emphasizes surface reading and interpretation over deep meditation. As Barnes demonstrates, these techniques are not necessarily theological, as many secular authors showcased similar models of reading in their work. However, she argues, for Stowe and

Phelps the method of reading comes to bear on a significant theological question: “how and whether people can access God, or at least goodness, through a book” (184).

More specifically, Barnes applies Tompkins’ observation that Stowe’s characters,

“like the figures in an allegory, do not change or develop, but reveal themselves in response to the demands of a situation” (Tompkins 135). Though this approach can be frustrating to readers and critics who expect more psychological depth and character development, Barnes points out that it actually enhances Stowe’s ability to portray emotional continuity among characters. For example, in Chapter 9 of the novel, the escaped slave Eliza seeks shelter with the family of John Bird, a white Senator who voted for the Fugitive Slave Act. John’s wife Mary wants to help Eliza based on her own

Christian principles, which Eliza shares, but John is hesitant. However, their shared grief unites the two families: when Eliza learns that Mary has also lost a child, she insists,

“Then you will feel for me. I have lost two, one after another,– left them buried there when I came away; and I had only this one left” (Stowe 76). This scene arguably glosses over significant differences in race, class, and culture, but it demands that readers likewise “feel for” Eliza and her fellow slaves. In much the same way, Barnes points out that “whereas Protestant reading depends on focused solitude, Stowe’s novel makes understanding an event that functions through and with an audience” (188). Her case study shows how Eva and Tom “reimagine and visualize the Bible text together,” an approach “tinged by Catholic practice” (190, 191), but a similar reading could inform

Augustine’s Bible reading, as I argue later in this chapter.

1.3 The Bible and Slavery

Amid bitterly polarized public debates over slavery, often along regional lines, both legislators and clergymen turned to the Bible for answers, as both proslavery and

41 antislavery partisans recognized the Bible’s moral and cultural authority. Unfortunately, between populist insistence on personal interpretive autonomy and larger doubts about the Bible’s reliability and applicability to 19th-century American politics, consensus was rare, resulting in a complicated hermeneutical impasse over the Bible’s view of slavery.

Stowe rehearses some of these debates in the pages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, particularly in the exchanges between Augustine and Marie, which I cover in more depth later in this chapter. But unlike many other commentators, she does not try to settle the debate on strictly logical grounds, but rather uses the novel to point to the insufficiency of arguing for or against slavery exclusively from the Bible. In other words, her coverage of the

Bible’s relationship to slavery, while certainly weighted toward antislavery interpretations, always returns to human emotion and human relationships, regardless of exegetical gymnastics.

Stowe was intimately familiar with the primary proslavery and antislavery interpretations of the Bible, especially since the controversial 1834 slavery debates at

Lane Seminary took place while her father Lyman Beecher was seminary president. Yet while she alludes to several of the main arguments, and of course paints proslavery readings with a thick coat of narrative sarcasm, a detailed antislavery exegesis is notably absent from the novel. Omitting these details implicitly argues for a particular model of

Bible reading and interpretation, one that simplifies an immensely complex text and that insists on an intuitive and straightforward application of Biblical ethics and morality. The

Bible, in this model, does not impact human relationships and society based on a series of logical proofs—as Stowe’s Calvinist forefathers would have argued—but on a gut level,

42 as individuals choose to translate God’s love for them to a love for those around them.

Such an approach potentially undermines a strictly literal reading of Scripture, but at the same time it reinforces the Bible’s potential to change the world, one person at a time.

The books comprising the Bible were written in cultures where slavery was both legal and fairly widespread, and both the ancient Israelites and at least some first-century

Christians seemed to own slaves. For instance, before his son Isaac is born, Abraham notes that his servant “Eliezer of Damascus” will be his legal heir (Genesis 15:2), while the apostle Paul counsels reconciliation between Philemon (in the New Testament epistle of the same name) and Onesimus, Philemon’s runaway slave who had converted to

Christianity. Similarly, there are certain regulatory provisions in OT Mosaic Law (e.g.

Leviticus 25:45-46) about manumission and how to treat slaves, and in the NT both Peter and Paul use the Greek term doulos (meaning slave, but often translated “bondservant”) to describe their relationship to Christ. Strictly speaking, none of the Bible’s authors explicitly condemn slavery as an institution, a fact that proslavery apologists used to great rhetorical effect in the first half of the 19th century. In some cases, this silence drove a wedge between the Christian church and abolitionism, as in William Lloyd Garrison’s fiery insistence that “the [human] mind sits in judgment on every book. […] All reforms are anti-Bible” (Gaylor, “William Lloyd Garrison”) or Theodore Parker’s more direct declaration: “If the Bible defends slavery, it is not so much the better for slavery, but so much the worse for the Bible” (122).3

3 By 1850, Hill notes, many mainstream Protestant churches had retreated from explicitly antislavery positions, leaving “divided churches and a scriptural debate over slavery which led contemporaries and historians to conclude that Christianity could render no decisive verdict.” However, John McKivigan’s The War Against Proslavery Religion (1984) demonstrates the complexity of Northern churches’ attitudes 43

Noll helpfully outlines each side’s main exegetical arguments in The Civil War as a Theological Crisis, and I draw heavily on his summary here. Though sustained Biblical attacks on and defenses of slavery had appeared as early as the 1770s, Noll points out that proslavery arguments “became more elaborate and more definite when other Bible believers took up Scripture to attack slavery,” especially given that “by the mid- nineteenth century, the force of the biblical proslavery argument had weakened everywhere except in the United States. There, however, it remained strong among Bible believers in the North as well as among Bible believers in the South” (33-34). An appeal to literal readings of the Bible had great force in 19th-century America, especially among the theologically conservative populations in the South. The most direct Biblical precedents for slavery, apologists argued, were in Leviticus and Philemon, but Paul also

toward slavery. Converting “the churches to the cause of immediate emancipation was the earliest and most persistently pursued goal of the American abolition movement,” and abolitionists “demanded that the churches testify to slavery’s inherent sinfulness by barring slave owners from their communion and fellowship,” believing “that by threats of church discipline the denominations could coerce slaveholders to manumit their slaves” (13). However, even clergymen sympathetic to antislavery causes were hesitant to denounce and expel individual slaveholders from their congregations, especially in the border states. (Stowe’s historical novel The Minister’s Wooing, published in 1859, dramatizes the severe social consequences of denouncing slavery from the pulpit, though she set it in 18th-century New England rather than in her own day.) This hesitation created “serious deficiencies in the northern churches’ antislavery testimony…thereby dramatically undermining their ability to condemn the morality of slave owning” (14). As a result, by “[a]pplying strict, evangelically defined standards of moral responsibility, the abolitionists believed that the northern as well as the southern churches were guilty of sanctioning slavery and should be branded as exponents of a proslavery religion” (15). Eventually, McKivigan argues, the abolitionists’ “continuing agitation and carefully enunciated principles” prompted “the northern religious community in general” to grow “more outspoken in its disapproval of slavery during the 1850s” (17). Stowe reserves most of her venom for the explicitly proslavery southern churches, of course, but notably she concludes Uncle Tom’s Cabin with a sweeping judgment: “Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian church has a heavy account to answer” (408, italics in original). 44 addressed both slaves and masters in several of his epistles (1 Corinthians 7:21; Romans

13:1, 7; Colossians 3:22, 4:1; I Timothy 6:1-2; see Noll 35)4. To cite a few examples:

• Genesis 17:12: “And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you

[Abraham], every man child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or

bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed.” If slavery was

sanctioned (and regulated) for Abraham, and Christians are “the children of

Abraham” (Galatians 3:7), then it was likewise sanctioned for Christians. This

passage also suggests that slaves could be Christianized (by analogy with

circumcision).

• Leviticus 25:44: “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have,

shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen

and bondmaids.” This instruction to buy slaves from the surrounding nations was

regularly used to justify the African slave trade, though several commentators

raised questions about defining “heathen” in a 19th-century context.

• Colossians 3:22: “Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh;

not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God.” This

was a very popular text for sermons directed toward slaves. Here servants is a

translation of doulos, the same term that Paul and Peter use to refer to their own

relationships to God.

4 More abstractly, many proslavery writers criticized radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison for their vitriolic personal “attacks on slavery, slaveholders, and slave society,” and Garrison’s sometimes extreme “antibiblical rhetoric” didn’t help matters either (Noll 36). 45

These precedents, coupled with the fact that Jesus “never said a word against slaveholding” (Noll 34), built a strong case for the legitimacy of slavery as a practice, even if (as even some of its apologists admitted) it was prone to certain abuses.

While the vast majority of abolitionists held traditional Christian views of Scripture’s authority, along with traditional Evangelical views that the Bible was comprehensible to the common reader, they could not cite chapter and verse condemning slavery as an institution. Accordingly, antislavery interpretations of the Bible relied most often on

“common sense, the broadly accepted moral intuitions of American national ideology, and the weight of ‘self-evident truth’” (Noll 40). The political version of these arguments is familiar: slavery cannot co-exist with freedom, if “all men” are really “created equal.”

As Noll demonstrates, to apply this combination of Christian and republican principles to

Scripture, antislavery writers like Stowe relied on similar appeals to moral principles.

Thus, for instance, during an 1845 debate abolitionist Jonathan Blanchard “returned repeatedly to ‘the general principles of the Bible’ and ‘the whole scope of the Bible,’ where to him it was obvious that ‘the principles of the Bible are justice and righteousness’” (Noll 41). This is not to say that abolitionists did not engage in more sustained study of verses and passages related to slavery, but rather that they emphasized and most often communicated this simpler argument. That is, if proslavery interpreters assumed a cultural continuity between the worlds of the Bible and their own world, antislavery interpreters insisted that larger moral failings disqualified 19th-century slavery from Biblical sanction.

1.4 Augustine’s Boxes, or, Pragmatism and the Picayune

I turn now to Augustine St. Clare. He is hardly the most pious character in the novel, which may be why critics have largely ignored his spiritual meditations. As we will see, however, he voices the most significant objections to prevalent (and in Stowe’s view, harmful) views of the Bible. Moreover, as I will show later, the similarity of St.

Clare’s conversion to that of his namesake, St. Augustine of Hippo, reiterates the importance of Bible reading in Stowe’s model of both personal and societal repentance and conversion. If St. Clare represents, as Stowe claims in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

(1854), “the fairest picture of our Southern brother” (35), he also exhibits a complex ambivalence, often marked by sarcasm and irony, about slavery’s moral status and the simplicity with which Southern slaveholders claimed Biblical warrant. Indeed, he condemns his northern cousin Ophelia’s “horrid New England directness” (167) when she asks point-blank whether slavery is right or wrong, and he only half-jokingly wishes that “all [he wants] is that different things be kept in different boxes” (168). This thoroughly pragmatic solution—to remove the Bible from the whole discussion, and simply view slavery as the result of human will—threatens Stowe’s ideal of Biblical integration, even as she uses his scenes to show the importance of reading the Bible correctly. Indeed, the fact that St. Clare’s personal and sincere conversion and his subsequent promise to free Tom is ultimately ineffective, and that after St. Clare’s death

Tom is given over to the cruel and ultimately murderous Simon Legree, underscores the need for a national repentance and reformation.

Surely St. Clare’s most significant scene is his banter with his wife Marie and his

Northern cousin Ophelia over the value of attending church. Since Ophelia opposes slavery, and more importantly since Marie’s preacher Dr. C had offered a typically proslavery interpretation of the Bible in that week’s sermon, it’s not surprising that the conversation soon turns to the proper relationship between the Bible and slavery. While some of this conversation covers familiar arguments about race and hierarchy, I am most interested here in St. Clare’s remarks about the Bible’s permanency. Indeed, when Marie sniffs that Dr. C had debunked “all this ridiculous fuss that is made about slavery,” St.

Clare retorts wryly that he could “learn what does [him] as much good as [a proslavery sermon] from the Picayune, any time” (167). This attitude both marks him as a skeptic and highlights how easily Biblical truth could be reduced to political talking points. At least from Augustine’s effectively agnostic perspective, the Bible seemed too easily pliable to be reliable, and its officially sanctioned interpreters far too given to expediency: “Is that which can bend and turn,” he asks, “and descend and ascend, to fit every crooked phase of selfish, worldly society, religion?” (167).

Augustine’s complaint is a common one, and it suggests that giving anyone— individual or group—free interpretive rein on Scripture tends toward pragmatic and ultimately self-serving applications. Here, he puts proslavery exegesis on the same level as a newspaper editorial: George Wilkins Kendall and Francis Asbury Lumsden launched the New Orleans Picayune in 1837, and like most Southern papers of the time the

Picayune both defended slavery and ridiculed Stowe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For instance, an unsigned October 1852 article on a legal dispute involving Stowe

48 characterizes her as a “lady authoress who applied herself with so much perverted talent to write, for hire, a revolting picture of the lives and morals of the Southern people”

(“More Sequels to Uncle Tom’s Cabin”).

Naturally, naming the Picayune specifically in this scene won Stowe no friends among the editors or readers, and doing so certainly contributed to the rancor of the paper’s later treatment of the novel. But her point in this scene seems to be less about the

Picayune’s representative political stances and more about the contrasting natures of sacred writ and a mere newspaper. Within Christian theology, the Bible’s uniqueness and reliability stem partly from its unchanging and unchanged character. Though specific doctrines of Biblical inspiration differ on how the individual parts of the Bible were constructed and how divine inerrancy relates to the human authors’ potential for fallibility, they all explicitly link Scripture’s constancy to God’s. (This is one reason why higher criticism posed such a threat: it posited a completely human origin for all of

Scripture, including multiple rounds of redaction as political and cultural circumstances changed.) The Picayune, by contrast, not only parroted the dominant political ideology, whatever it happened to be that week, but arguably had to be ideologically flexible in this way to function. In fact, during the previous scene, Augustine wistfully remarks that

“God made [his daughter Eva] an evangel to me,” but then promptly “felt a moment; and then he smoked a cigar, and read the Picayune, and forgot his little gospel” (166).

Augustine’s jab at the Picayune suggests that proslavery exegesis was not a matter of careful and conscientious study, but rather of changing what ought to be a stalwartly

49 sacred text into a local gossip rag. He heightens the sting a few paragraphs later, satirizing a sudden re-enlightenment:

“Well,” said St. Clare, “suppose that something should bring down the price of cotton once and forever, and make the whole slave property a drug in the market, don’t you think we should soon have another version of the Scripture doctrine? What a flood of light would pour into the church, all at once, and how immediately it would be discovered that everything in the Bible and reason went the other way!” (168) Clearly, Augustine cannot quite bring himself to rely on official ecclesiastical interpretations that too easily conform to political and economic realities. His pragmatism is certainly complicated by his mother’s devotion to the Bible, which he recalls in an important speech. For now, though, I want to focus on what prompted Augustine’s complaint: an account from his wife Marie of the proslavery sermon she’d heard (and agreed with) that morning. In Marie’s words, the “splendid sermon…expressed all [her] views exactly” “about society, and such things” (166). Given how unpleasant Marie is as a character, and how viscerally she reacts against her daughter’s affection for Mammy and the other slaves on the plantation, it’s not surprising that these views include unquestioning support for slavery, allegedly built on the Bible.

Two elements of this exegesis are particularly relevant for understanding Stowe’s representation of Bible reading in the novel. First, note that this interpretation explicitly takes place in a corporate, not an individual, setting. Earlier in the chapter, Augustine had derided Marie’s “fashionable church” as part of “the dead sea of…respectable churches”

(164-5), echoing Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees as “whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones, and of all uncleanness”

(Matthew 23:27). Based on Marie’s experience, the congregation seems to fit the bill. By 50 all indications, Marie’s role is intrinsically passive: she does not study or engage the

Biblical text personally, and she only values it insofar as it already agreed with her views. Stowe gives no indication, in fact, that Marie cares about church or the Bible beyond its social capital: Marie “made a point to be very pious on Sundays,” and because she “patronized [!] good things,” she went to church “to be very religious” (164). It’s appropriate, then, that the preacher, one “Dr. C-----,” focused on showing “how all the orders and distinctions in society came from God,” rather than on unpleasant notions of individual sin or repentance.

While Marie does not detail precisely how Dr. C came to this conclusion, what we do learn about his process of interpretation deserves attention here as well. Given Stowe’s abiding interest in the Biblical (and more precisely, the Christian) view of slavery, one might well expect her to use this scene to tackle a part of Scripture that mentions slavery explicitly.5 Here Brown references Colossians 3:22 (see also Ephesians 6:5): “Servants

[Gk. doulos], obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God.” While the multiple meanings of doulos and kurios (“masters”) imply broader applications than legal ownership, this verse served as a convenient proof text, especially given the doctrinal link between serving one’s master and serving God. Accordingly, it would be a natural passage for Marie’s esteemed Dr. C to use to “prov[e] distinctly that the Bible was on our side, and supported

5 As a slave character in William Wells Brown’s novel Clotel (1855) sarcastically notes after a proslavery sermon, “de people dat made de Bible was great fools…'Cause dey made such a great big book and put nuttin' in it, but servants obey yer masters” (100). 51 all our institutions so convincingly” (Stowe 166). After all, what could be better suited for maintaining social order than a clear endorsement of obedience and dedication?

In fact, Stowe does reference this passage in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but only once, late in the novel. There, the brutal Simon Legree rails at Tom for refusing to flog Cassy:

“Here, you rascal, you make believe to be so pious, -- didn't you never hear, out of yer

Bible, 'Servants, obey yer masters'? An't I yer master? Didn't I pay down twelve hundred dollars, cash, for all there is inside yer old cussed black shell? An't yer mine, now, body and soul?” he said, giving Tom a violent kick with his heavy boot; “tell me!” (325).

Legree’s abuse (and later murder) of Tom is far removed from the relatively benign St.

Clare plantation, both geographically and ideologically. Yet Stowe chooses this scene, and only this scene, to quote what many considered to be the strongest Biblical defense for the institution of slavery. Obviously she disagreed with that defense, but it should not be lost on readers that the alleged Biblical warrant for slavery makes very little difference in Legree’s behavior, or ultimately in Tom’s fate. More importantly for the broader spiritual dynamics of the novel, here knowing the text of the Bible does nothing to improve Legree’s morality or attitude—that must wait until he witnesses Tom’s Christ- like death.

With this in mind, let’s return to the Louisiana sermon that vindicates Marie and further annoys Augustine. As Marie notes, her preacher’s text was “He hath made everything beautiful in its season” (Ecclesiastes 3:11; the KJV reads “in its time”). This verse appears directly after a well-known poem about temporal cycles, and in the context of a broader meditation on the telos of human labor. This context could conceivably

52 relate to slavery, as the speaker reports buying “servants and maidens” (2:7) earlier in the narrative, but the link is tenuous, particularly given the admonition in 3:13 that “every man should eat and drink, and enjoy the good of all his labour, it the gift of God.” Unlike the Colossians reference, it would be difficult to apply this verse convincingly to any specific social action, let alone interpret it as sanctioning slavery, especially since 3:9—

“What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?”—may well raise some uncomfortable questions about slavery’s labor relations.

Not surprisingly, then, Dr. C does not specifically present this verse as giving permission for slavery, but rather as showing “how all the orders and distinctions in society come from God; and that it was so appropriate, you know, and beautiful, that some should be high and some low, and that some were born to rule and some to serve”

(166). In other words, while defenses of slavery based on Col. 3:22 drew specific parallels between institutional slavery in the first and nineteenth centuries, here the preacher makes a much broader argument: slavery is a natural and inevitable result of an intrinsically hierarchical created order. Conveniently, of course, the categories of high, low, ruler, and servant are thoroughly fixed in this interpretation, so the moral universe imperatively “supported all our institutions so convincingly” (166, my emphasis).

Though Marie skimps on the argument’s details—perhaps to emphasize her passivity in accepting fashionable theology—the expansiveness of this vision highlights an important implication of proslavery Biblical exegesis. While justifying slavery based on Biblical example was certainly a major part of these defenses, they also tended toward larger, often essentialist claims about race and social structure. For instance, Dr. C’s sermon may

53 well have supported or alluded to the theory that blacks descended from Noah’s son Ham and were thus subject to Noah’s curse of Canaan, Ham’s son (see Genesis 9:20-27).

Though there is no solid evidence for this assumption, the so-called “Hamitic hypothesis” gained traction in 19th-century as proslavery politics and racial science “provided a seemingly cogent ideological framework for colonial expansion and exploitation”

(Sanders 529). From a theological perspective, it was thus necessary not only to establish racial hierarchies but also to present them as part of the natural order—not as a result of a sinful and fallen world.6

Even aside from its specific conclusions about race, Dr. C’s logic here is flawed, as Augustine’s rejoinder points out. If “religious talk on such matters” can explain away what Marie calls “all this ridiculous fuss that is made about slavery” (166), Augustine asks,

why don’t they carry it a little further, and show the beauty, in all its season, of a fellow’s taking a glass too much, and sitting a little too late over his cards, and various providential arrangements of that sort, which are pretty frequent among us young men;-- we’d like to hear that those are right and godly, too (167). Naturally, Augustine is not being entirely serious here, but he seems to speak for Stowe about Marie’s faulty logic: shall we sin on more, that proof-texting may abound? Indeed, though he is characteristically evasive when Miss Ophelia asks him point-blank whether he “believe[s] that the Bible justifies slavery” (167), Augustine’s position in this scene

6 Several biographers have mentioned Stowe’s adult conversion from conservative Calvinism, which emphasizes human depravity and argues that God alone can predestine (choose) whom to save, to a relatively more liberal Arminian theology focusing on good works and God’s mercy. Her theological views are more complex than either extreme, of course, but it’s interesting that here she associates racial hierarchies with a utopian world—perhaps to highlight that racism and slavery result from individual sinful human decisions, and not from an inherently good creation. 54 does not merely highlight the hypocrisy of attributing slavery to an all too tidy

Providence. Rather, he objects to the institutional nature of proslavery apologetics. To

Augustine, “the whole of…all this sanctified stuff amounts to” a denial of slaveholders’ economic advantage: “If I was to say anything on this slavery matter, I would say out fair and square, ‘We’re in for it; we’ve got ‘em, and mean to keep ‘em—it’s for our convenience and our interest’” (167). Despite the plural pronouns, this model is limited specifically to slaveholders, and it makes no claims about the universal nature of reality—or even of Christianity. For Augustine, both the benefits and the morality of slavery must be assessed on an individual level, using what he calls later “strong, clear, well-defined language” with “the respectability of truth to it,” contra those who “put on a long face, and snuffle, and quote Scripture” (168).

This is a difficult passage to parse in terms of Stowe’s attitudes about slavery and the Bible, especially given Reynolds’ claim that the novel features a “democratic redefinition of Christianity” that featured an “all-embracing gospel” (1). Since Augustine is irreligious and lampoons both the institutional church and standard Evangelical hermeneutics, it’s unlikely that he functions here exclusively as Stowe’s mouthpiece, especially since he personally approves of slavery until after his conversion (several chapters later) to Christianity. At the same time, though, his logic is sound, and his conversation with Marie, Ophelia, and Eva is the longest debate in the novel over

Scripture and slavery. These tensions, I contend, suggest that Stowe is not interested in rehashing the same old debates about whether or not the Bible condones slavery, but rather that she has a larger point to make about the role of Bible reading in both religious

55 and political conversions. To that end, I turn now to Augustine’s conversion—and that of his historical predecessor, St. Augustine of Hippo—to try and unpack the complexities of

Stowe’s ideal role for the Bible.

1.5 Take and Read: Augustine’s Confessions

As I suggest above, Augustine St. Clare bears a striking similarity to St.

Augustine of Hippo, the author of Confessions and one of the most influential early

Christian theologians. Beyond the shared name, both men were strongly influenced by

Christian mothers, and both initially exhibit substantial misgivings about the Bible’s authority and reliability—though of course they express those misgivings in radically different historical and cultural contexts. Here, though, I am most interested in the parallels between the characters’ respective conversion experiences, especially in terms of Bible reading. This similarity comes to bear not only in the Bible’s explicit instrumentality in each experience, but in the relationship between knowing the Bible and obeying its calls for repentance and allegiance. More to the point for my broader dissertation, Augustine’s meditations on the potentially transformative power of reading dovetails in interesting ways with viewing Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a surrogate Scripture.

Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, St. Augustine’s Confessions is a densely Biblical work.

As its title suggests, Augustine’s primary conceit is a series of confessions addressed to

God (the “you” throughout most of the book), which take the reader through his dissolute youth, his embrace of and later disillusionment with the gnostic Manichean heresy, his struggles with the proper roles of rhetoric and truth, and his eventual conversion to

Catholic Christianity.7 Much like Mary Rowlandson does in The Sovereignty and

Goodness of God (1682), Augustine constantly weaves Scriptural phrases and allusions into his prose: nearly every sentence quotes the Bible (most often, the book of Psalms) directly, and he regularly places himself in the Biblical speaker’s place. Doing so gave

Augustine an opportunity to clarify some of his theological positions and to verify his orthodoxy, which was under suspicion given his previous Manichean dogmatism. Indeed,

Henry Chadwick argues that Confessions “took some of its impetus from a wish to answer critics both inside and outside the Catholic community,” especially in light of the monasteries he wished to found (xii). This fusion of didactic theology and at times intense personal revelations has made Confessions an enduring classic of Christian devotional literature, and Augustine’s voluminous theological writings (he published more than a hundred books) have had far-reaching influence in Catholic, Orthodox, and

Protestant theology.

Under these circumstances, it’s not surprising that Augustine’s conversion forms the climax to his narrative, and that he gauges the rest of his life’s spiritual progress in terms of his proximity to conversion. The actual moment of conversion occurs in Book 8, after Augustine had completed his formal studies of literature and rhetoric and had begun to teach full-time in Milan.8 Like St. Clare, Augustine’s conversion starts with “a

7 Of course, Augustine lived many centuries before the Protestant Reformation, but he uses the term “Catholic” to distinguish orthodox Christianity from Manichaeism. 8 As much as the scene’s emotional drama and personal repentance might have appealed to the Evangelicals of Stowe’s day, overall Augustine presents his conversion as an incremental process. Both in his professional life and in his extensive personal studies of philosophy and theology, Augustine naturally developed expertise in textual analysis and interpretation, though after his conversion he was ambivalent about whether “the secularity of contemporary oratory and the teaching of pagan literature” were appropriate subjects for a Christian to study (Chadwick x). Accordingly, he marks conversion not just by 57 profound self-examination” that “dredged up a heap of all [his] misery and set it ‘in the sight of [his] heart’” (152; the last phrase is from Psalm 18:15). Earlier in life, he notes, he “had known [his sin], but deceived [himself], refused to admit it, and pushed it out of

[his] mind” (145). In Stock’s model, this is the first time Augustine could read himself fully and accurately, though within Augustine’s theology such a reading is only possible through God’s direct intervention. By this point in the scene Augustine has gone off into a garden by himself, eventually landing under “a certain figtree [sic]” (152).9 Here, in the midst of “weeping in the bitter agony of [his] heart,” a remarkable scene unfolds:

[S]uddenly I heard a voice from the nearby house chanting as if it might be a boy or a girl (I do not know which), saying and repeating over and over again ‘Pick up and read, pick up and read.’ […] I checked the flood of tears and stood up. I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find. […] So I hurried back to the place where Alypius was sitting. There I had put down the book of the apostle when I got up. I seized it, opened it and in silence read awareness of the Bible but by reading it in a particular way, such that his conversion “was the climax of his reading experience” (Stock 75). It’s also worth noting here that Augustine describes a similar relationship between reading and conversion in his account of two other conversions in Book 8. First Victorinus, a prominent pagan orator and scholar, “read holy scripture, and all the Christian books he investigated with special care,” and “[a]fter examining them he said to Simplicianus [who tells Augustine the story], not openly but in the privacy of friendship, ‘Did you know that I am already a Christian?” (136). Later in the chapter, immediately before the account of Augustine’s own conversion, Ponticianus tells Augustine of the conversion of two minor bureaucrats. Again, reading prompts their conversion to Christianity, though this time the immediate spur is the hagiographical Life of Antony. Reading it causes one of the men to question the “motive of [their] service to the state” and to contrast Christianity with the long and hazardous path to imperial favor: “if I wish to become God’s friend, in an instant I may become that now” (143). As we will see, Augustine’s own conversion incorporates facets of both stories, as it is both the result of many years of study and of an immediate and dramatic repentance. More broadly, Brian Stock argues, thematizing reading in this way represents Augustine’s attempt to understand his own life (compare Ben Franklin) as a narrative. But for Augustine, reading that narrative accurately, even by paralleling it to Scripture—a common move in many American texts—requires a measure of authority unavailable to sinful humanity. 9 The fig tree is a resonant Biblical symbol, and is common in the Middle East. Most famously, in Genesis 3:7 Adam and Eve “sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons” after “the eyes of them both were opened” thanks to the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. More provocatively, Jesus withers a fig tree in Matthew 21 (see also Mark 11), because “he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only” (21:19). Here, Augustine emphasizes that his own sin echoes Adam’s original sin, a key theological point in much of Confessions. In doing so he also alludes to his story in Book 2 of stealing a pear from a neighbor’s tree, not because he wanted “to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake” (29). 58

the first passage on which my eyes lit: ‘Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts [Romans 13:13-14].

I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled” (152-3). Much has been written on this scene; I focus here on the specific place of Bible reading, as it is most relevant to understanding Augustine St. Clare’s conversion in Uncle

Tom’s Cabin. Certainly, by now Augustine knew the Bible well. As a dedicated

Manichee and gifted rhetorician he had regularly debated the Bible’s authenticity and the nature of God, and more recently as a student of Ambrose (then the Catholic Bishop of

Milan) he had been immersed in exegesis. Yet as much as Augustine credits God with changing his thoughts and mental attitudes so that he recognized the depth of his own sin, his despair does not simply bring a verse to mind or even prompt some sort of voice from

God. Rather, he is commanded—or at least he interprets what he hears as a command— specifically to repeat the act of reading. Interestingly, in a line not quoted above he wonders whether the phrase he hears (“tolle, lege,” sometimes translated as “take and read”) is merely part of a children’s game, a chant with no more lasting meaning than “fe fi fo fum.” Yet he cannot recall any games that feature that phrase, so in a crucial act of interpretation he returns to his friend Alypius (who had followed him to the garden) to retrieve the book.

Augustine’s hesitation highlights the importance of authoritative commands— both spoken and written—and whether that authority is absolute or ascribed. Given the emotional intensity of Augustine’s “bitter agony” (152) he may well be more susceptible

59 to calls to action, a fact that rhetoricians have exploited for many centuries. But this particular call must come in some sort of a sacred context. As Chadwick notes, the

“oldest manuscript reads…‘from the house of God’” instead of “from the nearby house”

(152, note 21). If the older reading is accurate, then Augustine may have conceptualized

“tolle, lege” as a prophetic (if not exactly divine) utterance, a scenario that would only increase the strangeness of his initial interpretation. Regardless, though, Augustine emphasizes that repentance requires both divine command and human interpretation.10

Upon hearing the words, he “began to think intently,” and he “could not remember having heard of [a game chant].” Thus, he “interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I might find” (152-3). This structure does not go so far as to present salvation solely through human effort, especially given

Augustine’s earlier insistence that original sin prevents man from saving himself, but it does highlight human agency in both reading and interpretation.

This brings us, of course, to Augustine’s actual act of reading. According to his narrative, the bare command to “pick up and read” required him to “open the book and read the first chapter that [he] might find” (153). This extrapolation is logically tenuous, as the imperative read could as easily mean “read from the beginning,” but it is clearly

10 Stock helpfully points out that Augustine foreshadows this dynamic in a previous story in Book 6. Alypius, then Augustine’s student, chanced to sit in on a lesson during which “it seemed opportune” for Augustine to “use an illustration from the circus games,” and to be “bitingly sarcastic about those captivated by this folly.” At this point Alypius was indeed addicted to the games, but “at that moment [Augustine] had no thought of rescuing Alypius from the plague” (99). Yet “upon hearing those words [Alypius] jumped out of the deep pit in which he was sinking by his own choice and where he was blinded by an astonishing pleasure. With strict self-control he gave his mind a shaking, and all the filth of the circus games dropped away from him, and he stopped going to them” (100). Though Augustine later recounts that Alypius’ conviction did not stick, perhaps to contrast the efficacy of human and divine words (or of speech and writing), the interpretive process is the same as in Augustine’s own conversion. 60 deliberate, and it makes important claims about the process and value of Bible reading.

Pieter van der Horst argues that Augustine’s method treats the Bible as an “instant oracle,” a common practice in antiquity.11 Augustine’s views on the relationship between divine providence and human will are complex, especially in the context of repentance and conversion. But just as his interpretation of the voice led him to take up and read “the book of the apostle [Paul],” here the specific text depends on what he “might find” rather than a truly random selection (153).

Not surprisingly, the Romans 13 verse seems perfectly tailored to Augustine’s life: he often references his struggles with sex (including a longstanding affair and an illegitimate child), and indeed his eventual vow of chastity played an important part in his conversion to Christianity. Likewise, since Confessions is intended both as a record of

Augustine’s life and as a didactic witness to God’s provision, it’s important for him (as it is for Stowe, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin) to establish Scripture’s sufficiency and applicability to change his life. At the same time, Augustine is an attractive model for Stowe partly because it balances human action in response to divine grace. Note especially

Augustine’s unusually terse explanation of the text’s effects: “I neither wished nor needed to read further…All the shadows of doubt were dispelled” (153). Both verbs, wish and need mark his conversion—a single verse is sufficient not just because it is part of an

11 Horst identifies this approach as part of “cleromancy,” and defines it as “the art of acquiring knowledge of the will of the gods or a god by means of Sacred Books, not by reading them as texts, but by consulting them as lot oracles, either by opening at random a copy of these books and interpreting as prophetic the first line upon which the eye settled, or by randomly choosing one of several slips upon which verses from these books were written” (144). 61 absolutely authoritative (and crucially, absolutely relevant) text, but because it changes his very will.

Unavoidably, this single scene of reading oversimplifies Augustine’s decade-long search for wisdom and truth, as well as his complex engagement with the Bible. But the fact that Stowe adapts much of Confessions into her account of Augustine St. Clare’s conversion suggests that she treats the Confessions model as normative, especially in terms of the centrality and potential power of Bible reading. Stowe offers no particular evidence that St. Clare had studied the Bible as intensely or intellectually as St.

Augustine did, but before their respective conversions they both seem to have relegated

Scripture to a dead letter office. Yet just as crucially, the conversion modeled in

Confessions does not focus on greater academic or even intellectual understanding of the

Biblical text, but on a sudden, transformative application of that text to one’s own life.

The “instant oracle” technique, in other words, verifies Scripture’s efficacy by its personal emotional relevance, above and beyond any formal study.

1.6 From Saint to Sinclare: Adapting Confessions

With this in mind, I want to consider how St. Clare’s conversion scene both repeats and complicates Augustine’s. Specifically, I argue that while both conversions emphasize the divinely-driven efficacy of Bible reading and treat the Bible’s words as authoritative, Stowe revises Confessions to privilege a communal and emotion-based model of reading aimed explicitly at social action. St. Clare’s reading results not just in his personal conversion but to his “throwing the whole weight of his being against this monstrous system of injustice [i.e. slavery] that lies at the foundation of all our society”

(286). In St. Clare’s case, of course, this newfound passion is cut short by his senseless yet sacrificial death—foreshadowing Tom’s own death a hundred pages later—but not before he utters the novel’s strongest condemnation of “the apathy of religious people on this subject” (286). Stowe’s not-so-subtle link between genuine Christianity and abolitionist politics repeats familiar themes. Here, though, I am most interested in how she reconfigures the act of reading Scripture to match her own goals for applying its content in the world.

Shortly after Augustine appears in the novel, Stowe casually informs the reader that St. Clare was “commonly contracted” to Sinclare among their New England neighbors (143). Though neither the narrator nor the characters reference the pronunciation again, it highlights the linguistic play between saint and sin[ner], both key terms if we are to read Augustine St. Clare as a Protestant echo of St. Augustine. A surface reading of Augustine St. Clare’s name might simply conclude that he is a hypocrite—a merely nominal saint whose tacit approval of slavery bespeaks the moral bankruptcy of American Christianity. Along similar lines, a reader committed to the progressive secularization narrative that David Reynolds espouses might read the character as a necessary replacement for failed Christian attempts to excuse slavery, perhaps one anticipating the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Or, more charitably, one could read Augustine as a potential saint, lacking only a suitable evangelist to sanctify his moral code.

These readings, however, fail to take into account the complexities of Stowe’s theological background. Orthodox Christian soteriology—the branch of theology

63 concerned with salvation and redemption—requires would-be converts to recognize their own sinfulness before joining “them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints” (I Corinthians 1:2). For instance, the apostle Paul identifies himself as both

“chief” among “sinners” (I Timothy 1:15) and “less than the least of all saints”

(Ephesians 3:8). Thus, while some of Stowe’s readers may have associated saint with the vaguely vilified Roman Catholic Church, most would recognize the KJV’s equation of saint with Christian. Further, they would recognize the necessity of personal, heartfelt repentance to move from sinner to saint, especially in the revivalist atmosphere of the mid-19th century. Certainly, Christians disagree about the extent to which repentance and conversion guarantees sanctification and even perfection—a debate that Stowe knew quite well, having rejected her childhood Calvinism—but especially those 19th-century readers conversant with Confessions would have recognized the centrality of recognizing one’s own sin.

While Eva’s death establishes the spiritual and emotional context for her father’s conversion, it is his clarity of thought and expression—especially in exposing the hypocrisy of championing both slavery and Christianity—that fits best with Stowe’s political goals. Accordingly, while she adapts from Confessions the centrality of Bible reading in personal conviction and repentance, she insists that the goal of such repentance is social activism. Thus, while St. Augustine retreated into the garden for a solitary conversion experience, driven almost exclusively by personal Bible reading, Augustine

St. Clare comes to Christian faith in an explicitly communal context, linking his conversion to his society-focused applications of Christianity. By doing so, Stowe inverts

64 the logic of 19th-century Evangelical Protestantism—much like she inverts St.

Augustine’s name—turning its emphasis on individual conversion outward, and foreshadowing the postwar emphasis on reform.

As befits her status as Christ figure, Eva’s redemptive influence transforms

Augustine’s attitude toward the Bible. While he seems to reverence the Bible in his critique of Marie’s proslavery exegesis, as I argued earlier he also holds the Bible above the fray of the entire slavery question. In that scene, he sidesteps Ophelia’s “horrid New

England directness” (167) by linking the Bible to his apparently saintly mother, but he also favors a pragmatic defense of slavery’s economic advantage—not to mention convenience—over anyone who “begins to put on a long face, and snuffle, and quote

Scripture” (168). Yet if both the Bible and his mother are moral exemplars for Augustine, they are also both safely remote from his own ethical and moral choices. Eva’s death changes all that. Like her grandmother, Eva both read the Bible constantly and lived by it, to such an extent that her life and death deliberately echoed Biblical narratives.

Augustine’s conversion, I would argue, begins with his attempts to read Eva’s Bible, which functions here both as a physical remembrance and a potential spiritual link. But in his grief, Augustine has lost his characteristic clarity: Tom discovers him “sitting, so pale and quiet, in Eva’s room, holding before his eyes her little open Bible, though seeing no letter or word of what was in it…there was more sorrow to Tom in that still, fixed, tearless eye, than in all Marie’s moans and lamentations” (274). Though Augustine’s previous speeches demonstrate his knowledge of Biblical tropes and stories—not

65 surprising, given his presumably religious upbringing—it’s significant that this, his first recorded attempt at reading the Bible, fails.

Stowe’s repetition of ocular imagery here both measures the depth of Augustine’s mourning and relies on Biblical tropes of spiritual blindness. Most directly, she references the story of Saul of Tarsus in Acts 9: on the now-proverbial road to Damascus,

Saul is struck blind by “a light from heaven” and hears the voice of Jesus saying “Saul,

Saul, why persecutest thou me?” (Acts 9:4). After three days (but of course) of blindness,

Saul is healed by a Christian named Ananias, sent by God “that [Saul] mightest receive

[his] sight, and be filled with the Holy Ghost” (9:17). Once Saul regains his sight, he is baptized, is mentored by the local Christians, and is transformed into Paul, Christianity’s first major theologian and missionary. In this context, Augustine’s figurative blindness would have resonated with Stowe’s Evangelical readers not just because it showed the insufficiency of “a light wholly of this world” (135) but because Saul’s metamorphosis to

Paul suggests that Augustine may likewise be redeemed. To further appeal to Evangelical sensibilities, Augustine’s redemption hinges upon his act of personal Bible reading—as it did for St. Augustine in Confessions. This is not to say, of course, that Stowe or her fellow Evangelicals believed the mere act of reading to be salvific, but to emphasize the centrality of reading in this model of conversion: like his predecessor, Augustine St.

Clare must “take and read,” but he must also trust and obey.

At least by the logic of Confessions, the fact that he can “hol[d] before his eyes her little open Bible, though seeing no letter or word of what was in it” suggests that St.

Clare still maintains a psychological barrier between the Bible and his real life (274). But

Stowe also tweaks the Confessions model here, to put both Bible reading and Christian faith in her own political and theological contexts. Recall that St. Augustine sought progressively more isolation as he moved closer to conversion: first his visitor tells him stories of conversion, then he and his friend retreat to the garden to process the emotional impact of these stories, and finally he goes off by himself to pray, read, and ultimately come to faith. Initially Stowe’s Augustine seems to be on the same path, having eschewed Marie’s “moans and lamentations” (274) and withdrawn to Eva’s room. Yet he still cannot bring himself to read Eva’s Bible, let alone believe it, and as usual his thoughts remain hidden and unexpressed. Notably, while Tom observes this scene, he does not participate in it—a key distinction, as we shall see, in Stowe’s model of communal conversion.

After a brief narrative interlude, during which the St. Clare family returns to New

Orleans, Augustine makes another solitary attempt to read the Bible, this time in his library. When Tom discovers him, Augustine is “lying on his face, with Eva’s Bible open before him, at a little distance” (275). In this case Stowe does not specify what Augustine can or cannot see in that Bible, but the first part of the conversation reprises the theme of spiritual sight:

“O, Tom, my boy, the whole world is as empty as an eggshell.” “I know it, Mas’r,--I know it,” said Tom; “but, oh, if Mas’r could only look up,-- up where our dear Miss Eva is,-- up to the dear Lord Jesus!” “Ah, Tom! I do look up; but the trouble is, I don’t see anything, when I do. I wish I could” (275). Though this metaphor retains much of the earlier scene’s symbolic resonance, especially since Saul “fell to the earth” (Acts 9:4) and thus presumably had to “look up” as well, I find it interesting that Augustine goes from literally looking at the Bible to 67 metaphorically looking for a spiritual or supernatural realm. The children’s exhortation in

Confessions to “take up and read” prompted St. Augustine to open himself to the Bible’s specific truth and authority, and thereby correct his Manichean understanding of spirituality. But Augustine St. Clare’s problem is critically different: he has conceptualized both morality and community in an exclusively naturalistic context, and within that context he simply cannot cope with Eva’s death. Tom’s instruction to look

“up where our dear Miss Eva is,-- up to the dear Lord Jesus” (275) identifies both Eva and Jesus as evidence for supernatural reality, complementing the multiple references to

(and common reading of) Eva being an evangelistic and intrinsically spiritual character.

As Tompkins shows, representing Eva in this fashion fit snugly within the cultural logic of 19th-century American Evangelical Protestantism, as Eva’s story represents “a transformation of stories circulating in the culture at large.” In all these stories, a dying child “can be the instrument of redemption for others, since in death she acquires over those who loved her a spiritual power beyond what she possessed in life” (545). St. Clare certainly recognizes Eva’s spiritual power: “Was all that beautiful love and faith only one of the ever-shifting phases of human feeling, having nothing real to rest on, passing away with the little breath? And is there no more Eva,-- no heaven,-- no Christ,--nothing?”

(276). Lumping Eva in with other marks of a supernatural realm suggests Stowe most likely conceived of Eva as a signpost: though Eva’s example and death was certainly

Christ-like, and though it arguably “converted” Topsy and Ophelia as well as Augustine, in itself it was not salvific. Instead, Eva serves as a model to bridge Biblical principles and everyday life—perhaps the same role Stowe imagined for Uncle Tom’s Cabin—and

68 to show the insufficiency of merely reading the Bible without applying it to particular political and spiritual ends.

If Stowe were only trying to link sentimental domesticity with Christian conversion, then at this point in the scene we might expect St. Clare to break down in tears, happen upon John 3:16, and vow to follow his “little Evangelist” to heaven. But neither St. Clare nor Stowe’s view of the Bible is quite so one-dimensional. Yes, Stowe does carry over the Bible’s centrality from the Confessions model, which in turn draws on both Old and New Testament accounts of reading prompting conversion.12 But she

12 Of course, these Biblical accounts necessarily involve partial readings, while later Protestant models of Bible reading emphasize both the completeness of the Bible’s revelation and the ability of a given reader to grasp the whole narrative. Still, the thematic link between reading and conversion/repentance runs throughout both testaments. In the Old Testament, reading the Law is often couched in terms of reminders or rediscovery—hence the book Deuteronomy, literally “second law”—because its authors assume that the Israelites already have access to God’s revelation. The most dramatic example comes in 2 Kings 22-23, during the reign of Josiah (ruled 640-610 BC) over the kingdom of Judah. According to the text, Josiah ordered that the Temple be renovated, and during the renovations the high priest “found the book of the law in the house of the LORD” (22:8). Josiah’s scribe then read the book to the king, and “when the king had heard the words of the book of the law, that he rent his clothes” in grief. He later declared that “great is the wrath of the LORD that is kindled against us, because our fathers have not hearkened unto the words of this book, to do according unto all that which is written concerning us” (22:11, 13). In response, Josiah read the book aloud to the people of Judah, and they embarked on a massive campaign of public repentance and cleansing, earning high praise from the story’s narrator: “And like unto him was there no king before him, that turned to the LORD with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; neither after him arose there any like him” (23:25).

New Testament accounts of sacred reading retain some of this focus on remembering or rediscovery, since the central contention of Christian theology is that Jesus is the Messiah described throughout centuries of Jewish prophecy. Thus there are many references in the Gospels to fulfilled prophecy, including a well- known account where Jesus publicly reads a Messianic prophecy in Isaiah 61 and then declares “This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears” (Luke 4:21). Accordingly, much first-century Christian theology challenged Jewish readers to compare the text of Mosaic law with Jesus’ life and person, most strikingly in John’s metaphor of the Word becoming flesh (cf. John 1:1-17), such that written and lived Gospels became inextricably linked. In specific terms of reading and conversion, the most detailed NT model is the story of the Ethiopian eunuch recorded in Acts 8:26-39. When the apostle Philip encountered him in the desert south of Jerusalem, the eunuch was “sitting in his chariot read[ing] Esaias the prophet,” in this case Isaiah 53:7 (“he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth”). Philip asks if he understands the passage, the eunuch in turns asks Philip who the prophet is talking about, and Philip “opened his mouth, and began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus” (8:35). Evidently the interpretation was quite effective, as a few verses later the eunuch professes faith in Christ and is baptized. Stowe may well have had this specific story in mind as a model for her 69 inverts St. Augustine’s model of solitary reading, such that speech must supplement reading and community must trump solitude. In the specific context of Augustine St.

Clare’s conversion, prayer is the catalyst. Three times in this scene alone, Tom counters

St. Clare’s lapses into nihilistic doubt with exhortations to pray: initially in the orthodox language of the Bible (“Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief” [275, Mark 9:24]), but later with strong feeling distinct from any given text. Indeed, according to Tom, he believes in God because he “[f]elt Him in [his] soul, Mas’r,-- feel Him now!” (276). Even when Tom does quote Scripture, it is to celebrate “the love of Christ, that passeth knowledge” (Ephesians 3:9), leading St. Clare to marvel that “the story of a man that lived and died eighteen hundred years ago can affect people so yet” (276). In fact, right after saying this, St. Clare returns to his earlier view of the Bible as his “mother’s book”:

“O, that I could believe what my mother taught me, and pray as I did when I was a boy!”

(276).

Stowe’s turn from reading-based rationality to prayer-based emotion echoes the revivalists of her time, and draws on centuries of various Christian theologies of prayer.

But my point here is not that she replaces Bible reading with prayer, but rather that she insists the two must work together. This relationship is well-illustrated when Tom—in the same library scene—abruptly asks St. Clare to read the Bible aloud to him, commenting that he “[d]on’t get no readin’, hardly, now Miss Eva’s gone” (276).

Naturally, the passage Tom chooses, “the touching account of the raising of Lazarus” in

account of Augustine St. Clare’s conversion, as both the Acts 8 account and Uncle Tom’s Cabin emphasize a combination of reading, evangelistic witness, repentance, and action. 70

John 11, resonates with St. Clare: he “read it aloud, often pausing to wrestle down feelings which were roused by the pathos of the story” (277). Given Augustine’s two apparently unsuccessful attempts to read the Bible alone, coupled (more importantly) with a lifetime of struggles to believe it, what’s changed here?

Certainly, the content of this reading is important, as the characters in the Bible story (Lazarus’ family and friends) experience the same grief that Augustine was coping with. But I find Augustine’s manner far more significant here. In a deliberate contrast with St. Augustine, St. Clare successfully reads the Bible only when he embraces the distractions that his predecessor avoids. Even in the library, the quintessential locale for reading unfettered by social obligations, he must interact with Tom before he can read, and even then he is reading to Tom. This not only interjects speech into the act of reading, but like prayer it emphasizes performance and emotion. Recall, for instance,

Stowe’s description of how Eva reads the Bible to Tom: “At first, she read to please her humble friend; but soon her own earnest nature threw out its tendrils, and wound itself around the majestic book; and Eva loved it, because it woke in her strange yearnings, and strong, dim emotions, such as impassioned, imaginative children love to feel. […] [S]he and her simple friend, the old child and the young one, felt just alike about it” (236).

Though calling Tom an “old child” here problematically infantilizes both him and his ability to understand the Bible on an intellectual level, Stowe actually intends such emotion-based engagement to be read as a positive model of Bible reading. In a sense,

Augustine must himself return to this child-like view of the Bible, one driven by pathos and wonder, before he can truly understand it. The story of Lazarus’ resurrection, while

71 an important foreshadowing of Jesus’ own resurrection (John 20), emphasizes human grief and mourning more than the miracle itself. Lazarus and his sisters (Mary and

Martha) were evidently close friends of Jesus and his disciples, giving the story a deeper emotional context than many of the other healings recorded in the Gospels. Specifically, the narrator highlights Mary’s weeping—something that Augustine had not yet done for his daughter—and even states that Jesus himself “wept” (11:35) when he saw Lazarus’ tomb. The rest of the story is familiar: Jesus prayed, “cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come forth,’” “he that was dead came forth, bound hand and foot with graveclothes,” and

“many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him” (11:42-25).

This would seem to be the ideal time for Augustine St. Clare to break down in tears and beg for God’s forgiveness, both in terms of the Confessions model and of hundreds upon hundreds of sentimental conversion narratives. Just as St. Augustine put himself in the place of Paul in his determination to “make no provision for the flesh in its lusts” (Augustine 152, Romans 13:14), Augustine St. Clare could logically take Mary’s role—distraught with grief, but confident that he could see Eva again in heaven. Yet instead, he returns to the theme of knowledge vs. belief: though he claims “a great deal more knowledge than you [Tom],” he clings to his doubt: “I don't disbelieve, and I think there is reason to believe; and still I don't. It's a troublesome bad habit I've got, Tom.”

Once again, Tom recommends prayer, and this time Augustine asks him to “show me how,” with similarly pathos-driven results: “Tom's heart was full; he poured it out in prayer, like waters that have been long suppressed. One thing was plain enough; Tom

72 thought there was somebody to hear, whether there were or not. In fact, St. Clare felt himself borne, on the tide of his faith and feeling, almost to the gates of that heaven he seemed so vividly to conceive. It seemed to bring him nearer to Eva” (277). Yet almost is the key word here: one ingredient is missing.

During the remainder of Augustine St. Clare’s plot arc, Stowe reinforces her theory that truly effective Bible reading must include an emotional connection, and that true Christian conversion must include (and result in) specific political actions. After his encounter with Tom, Augustine continued to “read his little Eva’s Bible seriously and honestly”—and more to the point, he “commence[d] the legal steps necessary to Tom's emancipation, which was to be perfected as soon as he could get through the necessary formalities” (279). Though Stowe makes it clear earlier in this chapter that Augustine was not yet a Christian at this point, her use of perfected here suggests a parallel between

Tom’s freedom and Augustine’s conversion. According to the OED, one meaning of the verb perfect at this time was “to complete or finish successfully; to carry through, accomplish.” In this sense, the paperwork to free Tom was in progress, but perhaps lacked some official seal of approval or other legal standing. But the term also calls to mind the doctrine of Christian perfection, especially as popularized by the Wesleyan

Methodist movement.13 Briefly, Wesley defined perfection (also called entire sanctification) as “that habitual disposition of the soul which, in the sacred writings, is

13 The precise nature of perfection has been subject to vigorous theological debate. According to Wesley’s 1742 summary essay on the subject, perfection explicitly does not entail “freedom from ignorance, mistake, temptation, and a thousand infirmities necessarily connected with flesh and blood,” and likewise it does not “[imply] any dispensation [i.e. excuse] from attending all the ordinances of God, or from doing good unto all men while we have time” (364). As such, it is not a prerequisite for faith or salvation, but rather a potential result of ongoing sanctification. 73 termed holiness; and which directly implies being cleansed from sin, ‘from all filthiness both of flesh and spirit’; and, by consequence, being endued with those virtues which were in Christ Jesus.” Conceptually, the emphasis here is on perfection as a process effected on a Christian believer, “one whom God hath ‘sanctified throughout in body, soul, and spirit;’ one who ‘walketh in the light as He is in the light, in whom is no darkness at all; the blood of Jesus Christ his Son having cleansed him from all sin.’”

Given the explosive growth of Methodism during Stowe’s lifetime, many of her readers would no doubt have noticed the allusion here, and perhaps also the stark contrast between the slave Tom (whose “perfection” depends on the whim of his master) and the free man Augustine (who suffers no such limits). This link also anticipates Augustine’s actual moment of conversion, which as we will see is inextricably linked with abolitionist politics.

Augustine’s final scene of Bible reading—on what turns out to be his last night alive—again intermixes speech and reading. Upon seeing Tom “busily intent on his

Bible, pointing, as he did so, with his finger to each successive word, and whispering them to himself with an earnest air” (284), Augustine offers to read another passage to him. This time, though, the theme is not mourning but judgment: Augustine reads (and

Stowe quotes) Matthew 25:31-45, the apocalyptic parable of the sheep and goats. Stowe calls our attention to the last four verses, which Augustine “read…twice,-- the second time slowly, as if he were revolving the words in his mind”:

Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me 74

not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not. Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee? Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me. In Augustine’s words, this passage is convicting precisely because the damned

“seem to have been doing just what I have,-- living good, easy, respectable lives; and not troubling themselves to inquire how many of their brethren were hungry or athirst, or sick, or in prison” (284). Though his response is far more contemplative and less demonstrative than St. Augustine’s was, the mechanics of conviction and repentance are the same. But note two differences here. First, while St. Augustine responded strongly to the Romans 13 passage specifically condemning personal lust (his favorite sin, judging from the first seven books of Confessions), St. Clare responds to a broader moral call.

Second and more importantly, while St. Augustine’s repentance emphasized personal repentance (though with far-reaching ecclesiastical consequences), St. Clare immediately applies his decision to institutions—most directly, of course, to the institution of slavery.

As he puts it a little later in the chapter, “no man can consistently profess [Christianity] without throwing the whole weight of his being against this monstrous system of injustice that lies at the foundation of all our society; and, if need be, sacrificing himself in the battle” (286).

For Stowe, Christian conviction and abolitionism went hand in hand, to such an extent that a faithful Christian must oppose slavery under any circumstances. But as she knew all too well, simply appealing to the bare Biblical text had proven disastrously ineffective among many American Christians. Accordingly, she used Augustine St.

Clare’s conversion narrative paradoxically, to show both the necessity of Bible reading 75 and the insufficiency of reading it outside the proper “atmosphere of sympathetic influence” (404). Even though he had a moral head start on many of his fellow slavers despite—and even because of—his aversion to Christianity, he cannot arrive at the right place by Bible reading alone. Overall, Stowe adapts Confessions partly to argue for the necessity of supplements to reading: even Augustine cannot quite get from moral conviction to abolitionist polemic without returning to another book: his mother’s arrangement of the Dies Irae (wrath of God). It is here, in the midst of “vivid sympathy” and “deep and pathetic expression,” that he “seemed to hear his mother’s voice leading his” (285). It is this hymn—recasting yet supplementing the very passage he’d read that afternoon—that he resumes on his deathbed, returning once and for all to his mother’s book.

In closing, I contend that Uncle Tom’s Cabin functions as a surrogate Scripture both by applying Protestant principles of Biblical interpretation to real political circumstances and by calling attention to the dangers of transforming personal interpretations into immoral public policy. In the two scenes of Bible reading that I examine above, one reader (Dr. C) takes a generic statement about social structure and applies it specifically to defend slavery and racial hierarchies, while the other reader

(Augustine St. Clare) takes a specific theological claim about judgment and is inspired first to trust in Christ and later to free his slaves, “throwing the whole weight of his being against this monstrous system of injustice that lies at the foundation of all our society”

(286). Obviously Stowe prefers the second result, and ultimately exhorts her readers to take much the same action. But both interpretive practices apply the same methods, and

76 the same understanding of Scripture’s centrality and efficacy in human society. Like the

Bible, Stowe presented Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a guide to life—one to be read, internalized, and applied—and she doubtless saw her abolitionist ethic as reinforcing

Biblical morals. But she knew all too well that the Bible had been used to justify monstrosities of cruelty, and made it a point to leave her readers no such option.

Works Cited

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Brown, Candy Gunther. The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and

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Chadwick, Henry. “Introduction.” Confessions. Edited by Henry Chadwick. New York,

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1850s. Athens, GA: U of Georgia Press, 2005. Print.

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Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mary E. Wilkins Freeman.” Journal of the American

Academy of Religion 55.4 (Winter 1987): 741-763. Print.

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Carolina Press, 2006. Print.

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Competing Rhetorics of Authority.” The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in

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Chapter 2:

“Spiritooal and scripteral lines”: Intertextuality in The Gates Ajar (1868)

2.1 Introduction

In February 2017 Family Christian Stores, then the largest brick-and-mortar

Christian merchandise chain, announced that it was going out of business, two years after filing for bankruptcy. The company’s press release cites familiar reasons: “Despite improvements in product assortment and the store experience, sales continued to decline.

In addition, we were not able to get the pricing and terms we needed from our vendors to successfully compete in the market” (Harger, “Closing”). That is, while FCS made some efforts to broaden its customer base beyond mostly conservative Evangelical Christians— particularly those who prefer to patronize local explicitly Christian businesses— ultimately its niche sales could not compete with larger retailers. But The Babylon Bee, a

Christian satire site that regularly lampooned FCS (e.g., “Family Christian Introduces

New Protective Christian Bubble™ For Children,” “Family Christian Stores Introduces

New False Teaching Section”), offers a sharper explanation for the store’s demise:

GRAND RAPIDS, MI-After 85 years in business, Family Christian Stores is closing all 240 stores nationwide, citing a lack of roundtrips to heaven in recent years.

“Those were the moneymakers, there’s no doubt about it,” spokesman Cliff Sickelman told reporters, referring to bestsellers like Heaven Is for 82

Real (2010). “Our readers just loved learning about the eternal state from imaginative young kids.”

Not even Jesus Calling paraphernalia could stop the financial bleeding once the heavenly tourism business dried up.

“Sarah Young helped us big time, but she’s no imaginative 4-year-old boy.”

“If I learned anything over the years,” Sickelman added, “it’s that Christians will spare no expense to learn about heaven from books outside the Bible” (“Recent Shortage Of Heaven-And-Back Trips Puts Family Christian Stores Out Of Business”).

The thrust of this satire, of course, is that “learn[ing] about heaven from books outside the Bible” is a foolish endeavor, and that attempts to do so rely far more on the trendy “heavenly tourism business” than on serious theological study. While these critiques may be valid, Todd Burpo’s devotional Heaven is for Real was astoundingly popular: “By 2011, less than a year after its release, it had already crossed the 1 million sales threshold and was awarded the Platinum Sales Award [from the Evangelical

Christian Booksellers Association]” (Challies, “The Bestsellers: Heaven Is For Real”).

Like its bestselling predecessors in the heaven tourism genre, it purported to share a personal vision of heaven, this one from the perspective of four-year-old Colton Burpo, the author’s son. Colton’s vision allegedly came during an emergency appendectomy, and according to his father it not only meshed with Biblical representations but also included details about the family that Colton could not have known. Many readers evidently found the combination of childlike imagination and premillennial eschatology appealing, as in 2014, the same year a film adaptation was released, Heaven “sold its 10

83 millionth copy and received the Diamond Sales Award, becoming one of only 6 books to achieve that feat” (Challies, “Heaven”).

Predictably, several high-profile Christian theologians criticized the Heaven is for

Real phenomenon. According to John MacArthur, the book not only offers readers “a twisted, unbiblical picture of heaven” but those same readers “also imbibe a subjective, superstitious, shallow brand of spirituality. Studying mystical accounts of supposed journeys into the afterlife yields nothing but confusion, contradiction, false hope, bad doctrine, and a host of similar evils” (MacArthur, “Are Visits to Heaven for Real?”).

Similarly, David Platt laments that “there is money to be made peddling fiction about the afterlife as non-fiction in the world of Christian publishing today” (“Heaven is For Real

According to the Bible”). Both MacArthur and Platt attribute the popularity of “these postmodern accounts of heaven” (MacArthur, “Visits”) to a lack of discernment among contemporary Christians. Most relevant for this study, however, is a remark that John

Piper makes in a podcast responding to the genre: “if books go beyond Scripture, I doubt what they say about heaven. […] And since doubted claims are of little use for living our lives, I don’t bother to read these books since I have my Bible, which already tells me what I can know for sure about heaven” (“How Real Is the Book ‘Heaven Is for Real’?”).

Although Piper’s critique engages Burpo’s specific truth-claims about heaven, it also highlights the central problem of fictional surrogate Scriptures: if the Bible is both inerrant and sufficient, then what value can fiction hold for Christian readers? The subject of this chapter, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ novel The Gates Ajar (1868), does not quite qualify as heaven tourism as none of the characters claim direct experience of heaven.

However, Phelps’ protagonists (Mary Cabot and her aunt Winifred Forceythe) do speculate widely about the nature of heaven, particularly in terms of how closely it resembles life on earth. Whereas Uncle Tom’s Cabin demurs to the Bible as a solidly authoritative text, partly by highlighting the role of personal Bible reading in Augustine’s conversion, Gates foregrounds human speculation—filling in the gaps, as it were, in the

Bible’s picture of heaven. Winifred has no compunctions about departing from sola scriptura to support her characterizations of heaven: she also draws on hymns,

Swedenborgian mysticism, secular poetry, and most of all human feeling and experience.

Though this approach does not necessarily undermine the Bible’s ultimate authority, it does hold up alternate authorities as legitimate and even efficacious for Mary’s return to

Christian faith.

Unlike the other three novels in this study, The Gates Ajar (1868) uses a semi- epistolary structure to frame the main narrative. The narrator, Mary Cabot, is 24 when her brother Royal (Roy) is killed in the Civil War, and she comes across her childhood journal a week after his death. Her journal entries, which cover roughly sixteen months of time at uneven intervals, both document her grieving process and recount the novel’s plot and dialogue. However, they also constitute an anthology or commonplace book, as she often embeds excerpts from poems, hymns, sermons, essays, and theological treatises.

Furthermore, even though the novel was published as a single volume (by Fields,

Osgood, & Co, formerly known as Ticknor and Fields), the diary form and the variety of genres resemble serial publication. As I will argue later in this chapter, this format plays a

85 significant role in Phelps’ hermeneutical strategies, as these embedded texts– along with the novel as a whole– represent potential surrogate Scriptures.

Most of Mary’s early entries express her anger and frustration with her town’s

“condolence system,” which she deems “that most exquisite of inquisitions” (5).

Specifically, she rejects the Calvinist notion that she must resign herself to the immutable workings of Providence, rather than grieve openly for Roy. Furthermore, she cannot bring herself to believe that her brother is unreachable and unknowable in heaven, ostensibly because his earthly loves and desires have been subsumed into worshiping

God. Accordingly, she isolates herself as much as possible, at least until her aunt

Winifred Forceythe arrives with Mary’s cousin Faith in tow. Winifred, whose husband died of consumption three years before the story opens, drastically alters Mary’s ideas about death and heaven and gradually restores her faith in God. She has an equally significant effect on Mary’s neighbors, partly due to her uncommon intellect and her controversial views of heaven, but ultimately because of her feminine pastoral care.

Winifred’s main theological argument involves the materiality of heaven.

According to the Calvinist orthodoxy in which Mary (and Phelps herself) grew up, those in heaven lead a primarily spiritual existence, unencumbered by human desires, pleasures, struggles, or relationships. Likewise, they are inextricably separated from their loved ones back on earth, and indeed have been so transformed that their earthly relationships pale beside the chance to worship God for all eternity. Based on these two beliefs, Mary’s fellow church members and especially her minister not only believe that

Roy (if he was saved) is in a substantially better place, but also that Mary is “behaving

86 con-trary to the will of Providence” (8) by prolonging her grief. Implicit in this critique is the idea that earthly experience is so insignificant compared to heaven as to be almost beyond notice, especially if one believes that God has foreordained everything.

By contrast, Winifred insists that heaven very much resembles earth, with a tangible materiality and a faithful continuation of human activities. For example, she tells

Clo (a little girl in her Sunday school class), “if you will be a good girl, and go to heaven,

I think you will have a piano there, and play just as much as you care to” (82). Likewise, she reassures Clo’s older cousin Bin that his “fancy for machinery will be employed in some way. […] God will give you something to do, certainly, and something that you will like” (102). More importantly, she connects this materiality with a relational continuity: Mary, she insists, will see Roy in heaven “as you saw him here.” When Mary objects that “Roy is an angel,” Winifred replies, “he is not any the less Roy for that,—not any the less your own real Roy, who will love you and wait for you and be very glad to see you, as he used to love and wait and be glad when you came home from a journey on a cold winter night” (31). As Baym points out, the details of Phelps’ “materially specific afterlife…came directly from prior Spiritualist writings,” but her theological expertise let her “assure people that Spiritualist ideas about the afterlife comported with Holy Writ”

(ix).

Most of the rest of this fairly short novel (it totals about 52000 words) consists of conversations between Winifred and Mary, which Mary records in her journal. Two other plot events are worth mentioning, however. First, a few chapters from the end of the novel, the minister’s wife Mrs. Bland dies in an accidental fire. Up to this point, her

87 husband Dr. Bland had consistently been the voice of Calvinist orthodoxy in the novel, and he and Winifred debated theology on more than one occasion. Yet two weeks after his wife’s death, she manages to convince him that her “pleasant things about heaven”

(122) were worth serious theological consideration. Around the same time, however, it becomes clear that Winifred is terminally ill with breast cancer. In the October 16 entry she reveals to Mary that she had been receiving treatments from a specialist for several months, but that even surgery could not save her life. She eventually dies on March 29, leaving Faith in Mary’s care. For her part, Mary learns to be content “waiting for the morning when the gates shall open” (138): not quite resigned in the Calvinist sense, but confident that both Winifred and Roy are with her always.

Piper’s dichotomy of “books [that] go beyond Scripture” vs. “my Bible, which already tells me what I can know for sure about heaven” (“How Real”) leaves no room for such a diverse set of spiritual authorities, yet Phelps’ version of heaven—and of gaining both comfort and certitude without benefit of (male) clergy—proved immensely appealing to postwar readers. A significant part of that appeal, I believe, relates to the novel’s intertextual strategies. Phelps integrates non-Biblical sources into both her narrative and the theological arguments within it, and at the same time she uses the diary’s anthology-like structure to produce creative and emotional resources unavailable in traditional Calvinism. Although her characters do hold up the Bible as the gold standard for theological questions about life and death, more often than not they turn to secular literature for emotional comfort. In this sense, both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gates raise similar questions about the role of sola Scriptura in human experience: Stowe

88 shows the inadequacy of Biblical prooftexts to overcome slavery, while Phelps suggests similar inadequacies for comforting the bereaved. Taking these features into consideration, I argue that Phelps embeds her own critique of Calvinist hermeneutics in her intertextuality, and by doing so she establishes a legitimate discursive space for her own fiction. Though these tactics do not automatically undermine the Bible’s theological or even moral authority (as Reynolds might suggest), they do suggest a complex and nuanced view of how Scripture might function within a matrix of texts and ideas—a stark contrast from Puritan views of Scripture’s absolute sufficiency for all areas of life.

Alongside these similarities, though, Gates exhibits an important difference from

Uncle Tom’s Cabin in terms of Scripture’s relationship with explicitly fictional creative texts. As I argued in Chapter 1, Stowe places great emphasis on the act of Bible reading, and though her account of Augustine St. Clare’s conversion is complex it clearly turns on his reading the right (Biblical) texts in the right way. In fact, nearly all of the scenes of reading in Uncle Tom’s Cabin are scenes of Bible reading, with the notable exception of newspaper reading: novels and poetry are nowhere to be seen. Gates offers an instructive, and I believe important, contrast to this model. Mary Cabot never mentions reading the

Bible herself, but she constantly reads both poetry and novels—in fact, she shows little interest in Scripture until nearly halfway through the story. Similarly, though Winifred’s extensive arguments about heaven naturally involve some direct exegesis of Scripture, she too is constantly quoting and citing extra-Biblical texts to make her point, and it is this combination that ultimately convinces Mary to renew her trust in God.

As we will see, Phelps deploys this mélange of texts in a nuanced and occasionally ambivalent fashion. But my point here is how readily she associates both belief and comfort with fictional texts—the very type of “surrogate Scriptures” at the center of this study. Both in Mary’s journey from despair to faith and in her own text- making through her diary, the Bible itself gives way to poetry, popular novels, hymns, philosophy, and letters. Even on the level of plot, it is Winifred’s human speculation about the nature of heaven that triumphs over the clergy’s literal understanding of the

Bible’s imagery, even though she repeatedly claims allegiance and faithfulness to

Scripture. As often as not, Phelps draws on commentaries or other nonfiction to make her exegetical points, but unlike Stowe she highlights the emotional and spiritual impact of secular literature. Doing so, of course, calls attention to the potential spiritual role of

Gates itself, whose very title (referencing heaven’s pearly gates being left “ajar”) provocatively suggests some sort of revelatory knowledge. Phelps’ schema, then, not only allows for literary texts—including her own—to coexist with the Bible, but conceptualizes spiritually and emotionally profitable reading much more broadly than

Stowe.

2.2 Literature Review

Although The Gates Ajar is rarely read outside of graduate seminars, it has generated a significant body of scholarly literature. Part of this attention stems from the novel’s original popularity: according to Hart, 100,000 copies sold “within a few years” of its original publication (121). Helen Smith offers a more conservative estimate,

90 claiming that Gates “sold 80,000 copies in America and passed the 100,000 mark in

England before the end of the century” (vi, note 1), but she also suggests that it was

“popular to such an extent and in such ways as to indicate that it answered a crucial need of hundreds of thousands of readers” (vi). Mott includes Gates in his list of “Better

Sellers” (321) for 1868, but excludes it from the bestseller list for the 1860s because it did not sell 300,000 copies (1% of the US population at the time). These overall sales are considerably lower than those of the other novels in this study, but still represent a significant cultural influence. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur, for example, Gates inspired several musical and literary responses (including a 1909 parody by Twain,

“Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven”14), a popular topiary in St. Paul, Minnesota’s

Como Park, and even a luxury floral arrangement.15 Phelps also capitalized on the book’s popularity with Beyond the Gates (1883) and The Gates Between (1887), though neither

“sequel” involved the original characters or setting. She eventually published “more than

14 Several studies of Gates mention Twain’s parody, along with his assertion (in the Autobiography) that Phelps “imagined a mean little ten-cent heaven about the size of Rhode Island” (277). While Twain labeled “Captain Stormfield” a “burlesque of The Gates Ajar” (277), however, Robert Rees suggests that Twain actually “borrowed important ideas from [Phelps] in composing Captain Stormfield” (197). For instance, both Twain and Phelps ridicule the idea of “singing hymns and waving palm branches through all eternity,” since it's “as poor a way to put in valuable time as a body could contrive” (Twain 41, qtd. in Rees 198). Likewise, in Gates Winifred tells Abinadab that he will use his mechanical talents in heaven, while Twain's character Sandy “tells Stormfield that he will only be happy doing those things he is used to or suited for” (Rees 199). Based on these and other similarities, Rees suggests two possibilities for Twain's inaccurate claim that “Captain Stormfield” is a burlesque of Gates. First, Twain could have recalled satirizing certain elements of Gates without remembering his other debts to Phelps' ideas. Alternately, he “may have been trying to disavow any debt he owed to so sentimental a book,” perhaps to reinforce his image as a skeptical bomb-thrower (202). 15 FTD (Florists’ Transworld Delivery), the largest floral distributor in the US, holds the copyright to this arrangement, though it is no longer available on FTD.com. According to the product description on FTD affiliate websites (e.g. http://www.keepsakesflorals.com/product/the-ftd-gates-ajar-tribute/display), “The FTD® Gates Ajar™ Tribute is a beautiful display of hope's eternal light. White chrysanthemums form the shape of heaven's gate accented with white Oriental lily blooms and lined with a bright yellow ribbon to create a warm and comforting display of enduring faith at their final farewell service.” Prices for the arrangement range from $140-$340. 91 fifty-five books– novels, stories, poems, children’s tales, essays, biographies, an autobiography, and religious fiction,” cementing her place “among the most important of a generation of literary women active from the 1870s to the end of the nineteenth century” (Baym vii).

As Baym’s remark suggests, much scholarship on Phelps compares her to other later 19th-century women writers, especially those whose work explores domesticity, work, religion, and gender. 16 For example, in her book Writing for Immortality Anne

Boyd juxtaposes Phelps with Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Constance

Fenimore Woolson in terms of their emerging ideas of professional and artistic identity.

According to Boyd, Phelps was “part of a new generation of women writers who committed themselves to lives as artists and exhibited the highest aims available to them, dreaming of immortality as members of America’s emerging high literary culture” (2).

Gates is on the periphery of Boyd’s analysis since it was Phelps’ first book, but its commercial success both allowed Phelps to write more and encouraged critics to compare her later work to Gates. Jennifer Cognard-Black takes a similar approach in her transatlantic study of Phelps, Stowe, and George Eliot. While her chapter on Phelps analyzes “competing femininities” in The Story of Avis (1877), she argues that Gates allowed Phelps not only to establish her professional identity as an author, but also to

16 Phelps’ own mother Elizabeth (Phelps later adopted her name as a literary pseudonym, and maintained it even after she married Herbert Dickinson Ward in 1888) published one such popular novel, entitled Sunny Side; or, The Country Minister’s Wife (1851). In Baym’s words, Sunny Side “told about the pains and pleasures of ministerial life from the back side of the tapestry, as a wife would experience it” (xiii). Gates is less concerned with domesticity, partly because neither of the lead characters is married, but Winifred’s character certainly highlights the gendered aspects of doctrinal and ecclesiastical authority. For example, even though she does not aspire to formal church office, she directly challenges both Dr. Bland and Deacon Quirk about their understandings of heaven. 92 embrace the commercial aspects of her success. Specifically, Phelps “amalgamated the market role of the professional within her own aesthetic vision,” and “had less difficulty commodifying her artistry and selling it to the group of readers she most hoped to influence: those ‘helpless, outnumbering, unconsulted’ women” (117). Although none of

Gates’ female characters fancy themselves authors or artists, the idea of publishing a diary– making public a private and feminized text– could speak to Phelps’ professional ambitions. The literature specifically on Gates tends to focus on mourning, femininity, and religion. All three themes are interconnected: both Mary and Winifred explore theological and artistic resources to help them process their grief, and both must deal with societal and religious standards of femininity. Accordingly, while the novel’s religious aspects are most relevant to my analysis in this chapter, I have organized the rest of this section chronologically.

2.2.1 Part One: 1880-1980

Like most bestselling authors, Phelps attracted significant attention in her lifetime, most of it positive. For example, an 1884 anthology entitled Our Famous Women dedicates twenty pages to Phelps’ life and works, including a section on religious themes in Gates. The section author, Elizabeth Spring, praises the novel’s “positive and helpful influence” (567), and claims that it negotiates theologically between Dante and

Swedenborg to produce “practically a new gospel” (568). This gospel both “attempts to show that the heavenly life must provide for the satisfaction of the whole nature” and reminds the world “that through womanhood it is to receive some essential revelation of

Christianity” (568, 569). In fact, she quotes “an officer of rank in the Prussian court” as

93 saying that Gates “has made more Christians than all the preachers” (567). This last anecdote is especially interesting for my study, since it suggests that readers subsumed the novel into populist religious practices.

Few scholars engaged with Phelps’ work during the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps because F.O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance shifted

Americanists’ focus to more skeptical male writers. In 1939 Mary Angela Bennett published a literary biography of Phelps, in which she characterized Gates as “not so much a story as a study of Mary Cabot’s reaction to the death of her brother.” Many of

Phelps’ readers, she suggests, “had let go their faith in the certainties of orthodoxy and had not yet found consolation in a more liberal theology…The Gates Ajar came as an answer to their perplexities” (45). Bennett also devotes several pages to cataloging the novel’s plentiful allusions, an element of the novel that most subsequent scholars ignored.

Overall, though, she focused much more on biographical facts than on literary interpretation, perhaps because at that point the chapter in Our Famous Women was the only critical examination of Phelps’ novels.

Despite Bennett’s excellent work it was not until 1964, when Helen Sootin Smith published a scholarly reprint of Gates, that Americanist scholars started to take Phelps’ work seriously. Smith’s influential introduction explores Phelps’ cultural and theological contexts and professional development, especially in terms of contemporary critiques of

Calvinism. She also analyzes the novel’s engagement with liberal theology, its complex mix of genres (including sermons, local color fiction, sentimental fiction, and allegory), and its characterization and literary style. While Smith acknowledges that the novel’s

94 appeal “was related to the tensions created by the Civil War,” she contends that it “was addressed to the spiritual disquiet created by the advance of science and the erosion of traditional Christianity.” More specifically, she argues,

The Gates Ajar, in familiar but simple and undemanding Christian terms, reassured those who had come to doubt the immortality of the soul and who found cold comfort in their ministers’ vague assertions that life after death was a reality. The book was a bridge between the high citadel of Calvinist orthodoxy and the most inarticulate uncertainties of popular faith; and while it was constructed of materials that could not endure, for a time it enabled its audience to maintain a viable Christianity. Offering without dogma a kind of personal immortality denied by science and Protestant orthodoxy alike, The Gates Ajar proved irresistible to believers drawn to materialism, attractive to sentimentalists, and comforting to the bereaved (vi). Smith’s claims about the novel’s role in popular faith are intriguing. It is worth noting, however, that Phelps’ own account of the novel’s genesis (in her 1900 autobiography Chapters from a Life) focuses far more on grief and comfort than on theological critique. When she started the book in 1863, she notes, “our country was dark with sorrowing women...[t]he drawn faces of bereaved wife, mother, sister, and widowed girl showed piteously everywhere” (96-97). In this setting, she “wished to say something that would comfort some few– I did not think at all about comforting many, not daring to suppose that incredible privilege possible– of the women whose misery crowded the land” (97). This does not necessarily mean that Phelps did not have a specifically theological agenda, or that she was naïve about her novel’s theological implications. As

Duquette points out, one pervasive theme of Phelps’ work is “the need for religious practices that would comfort [women] more fully” (xix), and some of those practices challenged doctrines as well as interpretations. But Phelps’ account does suggest a more instrumental role for her claims about heaven: she used them as a tool for comforting her 95 ideal audience, and not as an attempt to revolutionize Christian doctrine or practice. In fact, even in Winifred’s fiercest debates she insists on Scriptural authority and on the importance of orthodoxy, even as she exposes the emotional inadequacy of Calvinist dogma.

Building on Smith’s recovery work, several studies published in the late 1960s and 1970s offer contrasting readings of Phelps’ theology and psychology. Most offered positive evaluations of Gates, often from a feminist perspective. Elmer Suderman’s 1969 article, however, departs from both trends by offering a far dimmer view of Phelps’ sophistication and artistic abilities. He implies that most readers find Gates to be

“aesthetically perverse and theologically and intellectually obtuse,” but he analyzes how it and nine similar novels about heaven “reflect popular America’s interior landscape” and he speculates on the novels’ emotional effects (92). Like St. Armand, Suderman reads Phelps’ heavenly landscape as a variety of wish-fulfillment, in which “[t]he ordinary life of the citizens is much like late nineteenth-century rural New England life with some improvements brought in from New York City and Boston” (98).17 This utopian vision, he points out, conveniently excludes poverty, racial strife, or much of anything outside the novelists’ privileged experience. The larger problem, however, is that these novels oversimplify or simply gloss over the uncertainties and anxieties of

“death and eternity,” instead being “satisfied with imprecision of feeling” (103). As a result, while some readers accepted this vision “as something very nearly equivalent to a

17 Ann Douglas makes a similar argument in The Feminization of American Culture (1977): “All the logic of The Gates Ajar, as of the consolation literature of which it is the culmination, suggests to the reader: you are going to end up, if you are well-behaved and lucky, in a domestic realm of children, women, and ministers (i.e., angels), so why not begin to believe in them now?” (224). 96 direct revelation from the Holy Spirit,” Suderman complains that “enveloping them in a warm glow of complacency” is ultimately counterproductive, and even emotionally harmful, precisely because it “shu[t] out the pressing problems of the world in which they lived” (103).

Christine Stansell’s 1972 article is a representative radical feminist reading of

Phelps’ life and work. She labels Phelps “a spokeswoman for the more subterranean currents of female rebellion,” and describes Gates as “a fictional polemic against patriarchal religion.…Concealed beneath the shabby plots and platitudinous melodramas of her fiction is a devastating analysis of the nature of heterosexuality and its implications for the liberation of women” (239). Much of Stansell's reading is biographical. She claims, for instance, that Phelps' parents had no “strong affection” for each other, and even that Austin Phelps caused his wife's death by forcing her to “return to the town

[Andover] which oppressed her” (239, 240). In Stansell’s summary, “The Gates Ajar was for Miss Phelps a personal rejection of the death-oriented, patriarchal, unfeeling religion, embodied by Austin Phelps and his cold professionalism, which had warped her childhood and smothered her mother” (243). Smith had made a similar point, noting that in Gates “no mere man can show the way; it requires a woman full of sensibility and free of dogma to recreate a God of love” (xxi). Stansell, however, presents Phelps’ religion as antagonistic, not complementary, to Christian dogma. Phelps’ “woman’s heaven” is “a paradise ordered on the small scale of a woman's life,” such that “religion serves not only as a vindication and solace for the female, but as a kind of emancipation...Woman has the power of God’s elect, and power, however oblique, is a form of deliverance from

97 subjugation” (244, 245). This religion—and of course the royalty checks from her publisher—ultimately allowed Phelps to escape both her father and his “barren male orthodoxy” (245).

Whereas Stansell views Phelps’ representations of heaven primarily as a tool for her political goals, Barton St. Armand evaluates them in terms of cultural and literary influence. Specifically, he posits a “literary parallel between Dickinson's and Phelps' idea of heaven,” and suggests that “the latter can be used as a gloss on the former” (55-56).

This does not necessarily mean that Dickinson drew directly on Gates for her poems, particularly since the evidence of a “personal relationship” between Dickinson and

Phelps “remains circumstantial” (56, note 3), but it does “illuminate the relationship between popular ideas and high art of the same period” (56). Specifically, St. Armand contends that “the searching exploration of the nature of the heaven to come and the substitution of a warm domestic paradise for the cold orthodox stereotype of a city of pearl and jasper which make The Gates Ajar increasingly relevant to the parallel development of Dickinson's poetry” (59). Like Mary Cabot, Dickinson was intensely dissatisfied with Calvinist explanations of providence and resignation, though her

“reaction to the orthodox heaven is most often parody and satire, a kind of reductio ad absurdum which eventuates in that ephemeral paradise depicted in poems such as 'I went to Heaven' (J 374)” (61). Along similar lines, St. Armand suggests that Dickinson came to see personal immortality in a material heaven as an opportunity to unite with her lover, a consummation they could not achieve on earth. While his article is far more concerned with Dickinson’s work than Phelps’, he does demonstrate how ideas like those in Gates

98 could not only influence Dickinson personally but make her otherwise heretical imagery seem “natural and forthright to liberated readers familiar with The Gates Ajar and its paradise of personal fulfillment” (78).

2.2.2 Part Two: 1980-2000

Scholarly interest in Phelps grew during the 1980s and 1990s, spurred on by influential studies such as Nina Baym’s Woman’s Fiction (1978) and Jane Tompkins’

Sensational Designs (1986). While Baym and Tompkins only mention Phelps in passing, their engagement with similar novels encouraged other scholars to analyze both Gates and Phelps’ later work in more detail. For the purposes of this review, I have chosen five representative scholarly texts from this period: monographs by Carol Kessler (1982) and

Lori Kelly (1983) and articles or chapters by Nancy Schnog (1993), Gail Smith (1998), and Beth Olivares (1998). These texts show the breadth of Phelps scholarship before

2000 and set the stage for more recent scholarship on Gates, with which I will conclude this section.

Kessler’s monograph Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, part of the Twayne United States

Authors Series, surveys and interprets Phelps’ novels from a psychological perspective.

Like Baym and Tompkins, Kessler laments that “we have tended to ignore women’s writing unless clearly superior in its belletristic attributes” (ii). While she readily admits that Phelps’ “work provides no model of stylistic excellence,” she insists that “her social content was ahead of her time. She saw clearly the depth of the chasm between women and men and creatively imagined alternative modes of living as relief” (133). To explore this process, Kessler seeks to explain the “psychoemotional functions” of Phelps’ writing

99 while stressing her political commitment to 19th-century “women’s causes” (ii).

Accordingly, she retains previous critics’ emphasis on Phelps’ biography, especially in terms of her grandparents’ and parents’ views of religion and gender. She characterizes these views as both oppressive and neurotic, and like Stansell she concludes that a combination of neglect and abuse poisoned Phelps’ own psyche. Phelps’ literary career, thus, represents for Kessler a progression “from possible self-fulfillment as a writer of the first rank to disappointed alienation as the conditions of her life made the achievement of that promise impossible to her.” This frustration drove Phelps’ “critique of women’s lives…and her insistence upon self-fulfillment as a right and possibility, given a supportive environment” (iii).

Kessler reads the Gates novels in terms of American Utopianism. Unlike later

Utopian fiction (e.g., Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, 2000-1887), however,

Phelps’ vision “stressed not social structure or technological power, but emotional structure– the extent to which self-fulfillment was encouraged” (21). Phelps’ own disappointments, notably the death of her close friend (and possibly her fiancé) Samuel

Hopkins in the battle of Antietam (1862), heightened her “desire for independence in a society that encouraged the reverse for its women” (23). Despite Phelps’ claim in

Chapters that she wrote Gates mainly to “comfort some few…of the women whose misery crowded the land” (97), Kessler argues that the novel’s “implicit social criticism” makes labeling it “consolation literature…inadequate.” Specifically, Winifred’s intellectual prowess and rhetorical success “must have appealed to politically powerless women because, though not contradicting religious convention, it implied serious

100 criticism of women’s earthly status” (32). For her part, Mary learns to be autonomous in both her theology and her emotional life, rather than relying on men or male-dominated institutions. However, Kessler suggests, this “hopeful emphasis upon otherworldly rewards may have had the dubious result of easing accommodation to an unrewarding present” (32). As Kessler goes on to show, Phelps’ later work was more realistic and politically forceful, perhaps indicating a shift from imagining women’s heavenly fulfillment to demanding it here on earth.

Lori Kelly’s The Life and Works of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Victorian Feminist

Writer was published only a year after Kessler’s book, and draws on many of the same sources and arguments. Like Kessler, she analyzes Phelps’ novels in terms of women’s rights and feminist politics. In her summary, Phelps’ fiction “detailed the frustrations and difficulties often found in the married state,” at a time when most popular female writers

“celebrated the domestic virtues and dwelt on the joys and satisfactions of domestic life”

(vii). Unlike Kessler, however, Kelly also covers Phelps’ nonfiction, presenting it as “a clear call to arms for a generation of women who had been raised to think that their place was limited, by virtue of their genders, to Kirche, Küche, und Kinder [church, kitchen, and children]” (vii). Although Phelps’ nonfiction is outside the scope of my study, I find this approach a useful way to clarify her evolving ideas and beliefs, both in terms of politics and religion. As Kelly points out, Phelps regularly contributed magazine articles in the 1870s, at the same time she “was producing her most radical portraits of women in her fiction” (49). Given that some of these pieces appeared in the same magazines that published Phelps’ short fiction, they are certainly relevant to her reception and reputation.

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Along similar lines, Kelly examines Gates in the context of Phelps’ theological influences and her other religious writings. By “minister[ing] to women’s special religious needs,” she suggests, “Phelps achieved a quasi-clerical status, and in the role of lay minister, she carved out a niche for herself in a profession which, in her time, was all but closed to women” (26).18 Given that Winifred fills a similar role, it’s not surprising that she is the focus of Kelly’s analysis. Not only is Winifred highly educated and articulate, but she can assuage Mary’s grief because she “has experienced its effects firsthand…unlike her male counterparts, she is able to ‘teach…through the kinship of her pain’ (p. 37)” (33). This grants her significant emotional authority to complement her intellectual knowledge, which she uses both to defeat Quirk and Bland and to accomplish

“what her male counterparts could not– the redemption of a lost female soul” (34). These feats, Kelly suggests, make Winifred “a surrogate for Phelps herself”: not only did Phelps

“distil[l] the fruit of years of her own theological studies” into Winifred’s character, but

“like Phelps, Aunt Winifred picks and chooses among religious authorities to formulate a theology compatible with her own needs” (34). As I will explore later in this chapter, these sources do include formal Biblical scholarship, but overall “Phelps has a marvelous knack for minimizing the importance of scholarly erudition to Biblical studies” (Kelly

35).

Moving on to 1990s Phelps scholarship, Nancy Schnog’s 1993 article attempts “to reconsider the sources of this vision's once felt textual and cultural power” (127). To do

18 In this role, Phelps did present a starkly different view of God and heaven than her father Austin. However, Kelly attributes these conflicts at least partly to generational differences, rather than as “an attempt to revenge herself on her own father and on all New England male divines in the name of all female believers” (30). 102 so, she offers a middle ground between readings focused on psychological escapism (e.g.

Helen Smith, Douglas) and those focused on political action (e.g. Stansell, Kessler).

Specifically, Schnog contends that “Phelps's book nurtured its audience through its explicit and penetrating analysis of a culture that actively disrupted one critical area of female psychosocial experience: namely, middle-class women's responses to loss.” In this process, Phelps “used her protagonist's private journal as her primary vehicle through which to examine the problematic binds and controls placed on female affect by nineteenth-century religious and social ideologies” and “attempted to re-imagine cultural stereotypes of women's affective nature, while liberating female emotion from the constraining power of dominant social and religious ideologies” (129). Mary’s journal is a private and safe discursive space, shielding her from the painful and ritualistic condolence system while letting her express the guilt and doubt she dare not voice in public.

As Schnog shows, even though bereavement was a culturally sanctioned site for showing strong emotion, Mary was constrained both by Calvinist expectations of

“resignation” and broader Christian standards of female moral perfection. Winifred recognizes and “speaks to this problem by applying religious debates about the nature of heaven to Mary's premier emotional concerns” (138). For instance, whereas Mary’s acquaintance Meta Tripp descends on her parlor within a week of Roy’s death, insisting that Mary talk about Roy, Winifred offers emotional support by respecting Mary’s privacy and allowing her to grieve on her own terms. More importantly, she gradually draws Mary back to Christian faith by emphasizing the imaginative and emotional

103 resources that orthodox Calvinism ignored or even condemned. In doing so, “Winifred's theology authorizes in its place the psychic pleasures gained through imaginative license and the expression of personal desire” (148). While Gates promotes these emotional benefits in a specific theological context, Schnog contends that they were far more valuable– and influential– than Phelps’ views of heaven.

Beth Olivares shifts the focus from psychology to pastoral counseling, and couches Phelps’ career in clerical terms: her dissertation chapter compares the “literary ministries” of Phelps and Stowe. Both Gates and Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing (1859), she argues, “represent a valorization of individual experience over abstraction” (14), showing that “Christianity can be a force which allows woman's full development” (19) despite the “subordination and rejection of women” allegedly “inherent in traditional

Christianity” (15). These observations, of course, are also present in other studies of

Phelps’ religious goals, particularly those with an explicitly feminist framework.

However, whereas most accounts of Phelps’ theology suggest an antagonistic relationship between “masculine” Calvinism and Phelps’ “feminine” liberalism, Olivares posits a broader focus:

Some would argue, indeed, have argued, that the religious practice and belief systems propounded by both Phelps and Stowe are feminized, rather than humanized. I prefer the latter term: it recalls to us that this religious practice was not meant merely for the comfort or pleasure of women—it embraces both men and women alike, and would heal and console members of both sexes. By the end of both books, both the female protagonist and her male theological sparring partner have come to a fuller understanding of Christian practice (22). Olivares makes an excellent point here. Recall, for instance, Winifred’s response to Mrs.

Bland’s tragic death toward the end of Gates. Even though Winifred had mocked Dr.

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Bland’s theology and argued with him regularly, she also helped assuage his emotional helplessness in the face of his wife’s death. In response, he symbolically burned the manuscript for his previous sermon on heaven. This fits with Olivares’ claim that Phelps sought to “heal and console members of both sexes,” rather than just trying to undo female oppression. Although Olivares ultimately deems Gates “a radical and deeply feminist work” (63), her analysis offers a useful and far more flexible framework for understanding the importance and impact of Phelps’ ministry.

Finally, Gail Smith’s impressive article highlights and addresses an important shortcoming in much scholarship on Phelps and her contemporaries. In Smith’s words, scholars have tended “to portray evangelical women writers either as subversive heroines in an age bent on repressing them, or as agents of the degradation of formerly rigorous literary and theological standards” (99). Doing so may advance particular political goals or cement particular narratives about 19th-century Christianity, but it also “obscure[s] the complexity and subtlety of the relationship of women’s writing to popular religion and culture in the nineteenth century” (100). To correct this weakness, and to historicize

Gates’ religious elements more accurately, Smith examines Phelps’ rhetorical and hermeneutical sophistication, to show “the extent to which Phelps’ novel is invested in hermeneutic issues” (108). Whereas most critics characterize Gates as anticlerical and/or anti-intellectual, Smith instead contends that Phelps explains and popularizes important elements of “biblical interpretation and Christian rhetorical theory” (101). This not only showcases Phelps’ theological education at a time when American women had

105 effectively no access to seminaries, but also highlights “the need for revision in our prevailing pictures of nineteenth-century popular religion” (102).

Specifically, Smith debunks two related criticisms: that Phelps’ anti- intellectualism leads her to dismiss biblical and theological scholarship, and that she eschews Biblical evidence in favor of personal speculation. On the first charge, Smith calls attention to Winifred’s careful engagement with previous scholarship, as well as her rigorous standards for her own arguments. For example, at one point Winifred laments how “that frowning ‘original Greek’” contradicts one of her interpretations of Revelation

(52). Other critics have used this passage as evidence of anti-intellectualism, but Smith points out that Winifred actually uses the Greek text herself, even though she is clearly annoyed at “the scholars’ elitism and sexism” (Smith 104). Similarly, she challenges the second charge by highlighting Phelps’ attention to metaphor and her distinction between theological and pastoral language. Just as Winifred uses qualifying phrases to acknowledge the limits of her own interpretations, she explains that the most controversial features of her heaven (e.g. pianos and gingersnaps) are not necessarily literal copies of earthly items but rather heavenly substitutes that fulfill the same needs.

More importantly, she deploys these metaphors specifically in pastoral contexts, in which she is not attempting to define strict doctrine but rather to minister to individual needs.

While these elements do not eliminate the novel’s theological controversy, they do offer a useful and convincing framework for understanding how Phelps uses a range of theological and artistic resources to make her case.

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2.2.3 Part Three: Criticism Since 2000

As a group, these studies have both legitimized Gates as an object of critical inquiry and enriched our understanding of Phelps’ contexts, techniques, and influence. As a result, new articles and book chapters on Gates have appeared regularly since 2000, though popular demand for the novel remains minimal.19 Scholarship on Phelps has likewise broadened to include lesser-known works. For instance, in 2014 Elizabeth

Duquette and Cheryl Tevlin published an anthology of Phelps’ shorter works with

University of Nebraska Press, while Hamdan, Long, and Carrión recently published articles on Beyond the Gates and Within the Gates. The work specifically on The Gates

Ajar follows similar thematic paths to the books and articles reviewed above, though only one monograph exclusively on Phelps (Ronna Privett’s Art for Truth’s Sake, published in

200320) has been published since 1983. Accordingly, in this section I review three contemporary articles that offer particularly useful insight into Phelps’ representations of faith and religious practice.

Lucy Frank’s 2009 article explores the relationship between materialism and commodification in Gates, both in terms of how Phelps represents heaven and of how she

19 For instance, as of June 2017 Amazon.com offered only one print edition from a major publisher: Nina Baym’s collection Three Spiritualist Novels by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, published in 2000 by University of Illinois Press. A few facsimile and e-book editions are also available, but they don’t seem to be generating many sales. 20 Since Privett attempts “a comprehensive study” of Phelps, particularly in terms of “American reformist issues” (2), she offers only a brief reading of Gates. Most notably, she connects Phelps’ philosophy to that of Friedrich Schleiermacher, particularly since both Phelps and Schleiermacher “stres[s] individual self- fulfillment as a major goal.” Likewise, “by allowing the presence of God to be fixed in every person and giving each individual a certain social power in his or her community, Schleiermacher also gives each individual a stronger relationship to deity than had been allowed by most other Biblical scholars” (30). In Privett’s reading, the characters in Gates similarly “have an inner awareness of the spiritual and feel themselves qualified to interpret the Bible to fit their needs” (31). 107 marketed the Gates brand. She labels the novel a “consolatory commodity” that

“provides a compelling instance of how mass-market systems of reproduction and dissemination can act as a conduit for the expression and circulation of intensely felt emotion” (167-8). The concept of a keepsake is vital to this commodification. Roy’s last letter to Mary plays such a role, both because it is a physical reminder of his life and because it details his religious conversion. Interestingly, Mary keeps this letter private, even when Deacon Quirk questions Roy’s salvation, which suggests that it is a commodity for her own grief. Phelps extends the metaphor by having Winifred suggest that Roy himself was a keepsake of Christ’s love, such that his “physical traces” act “as interconnected reminders of his ongoing, materialized spiritual being and of God’s presence” (Frank 174). In much the same way, “Phelps gives her readers a heaven filled with consumer goods because, on its own, faith was not—quite—enough to compensate for the losses people had suffered” (178).

Yet this phenomenon did not simply connote wish-fulfillment or compensation for luxuries (e.g. Clo’s piano) unattainable on earth. Instead, Frank argues, it illustrates how postbellum 19th-century culture used commodities to express and circulate their emotions, especially in terms of bereavement and sympathy. In her words, “the commodity was assuming a mantle of consolatory power that had earlier been the exclusive province of religion” (180). The novel itself served as just such a commodity:

Phelps reported receiving thousands of letters from grieving readers. As she responded to these letters, Frank notes, she extended the chain of consolatory commodities, allowing genuine emotional expression through the unexpected medium of commerce.

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More relevantly to my study, Ashley Barnes examines Bible-reading practices in

Gates and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, identifying a balance of Catholic and Protestant methods that significantly expanded both novels’ appeal to Christian readers. Barnes labels this approach “the exhibitional style” (179), and argues that both novelists “attempt to find a middle ground between competing models of human contact with God: private reading that goes deep between the lines, or a public sacrament that relies on the sharable, visual, and material” (180). Similarly, Protestant practices privilege individual, autonomous reading while their Catholic counterparts emphasize community and hierarchy. By using elements of both traditions, exhibitional style highlights the pleasures of reading in company, as when Tom and Eva read together in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or Mary and

Phelps the method of reading comes to bear on a significant theological question: “how and whether people can access God, or at least goodness, through a book” (184).

As Barnes points out, in Gates Mary’s return to faith “takes shape mostly outside the visual register, through shared reading and dialogue” between Mary and Winifred.

However, she suggests, “Winifred trains Mary to exchange her deep private consciousness for a publicly sharable one…Mary ends by accepting a selfhood that is de- individualized and communally integrated” (192). Barnes contends, and I agree, that

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Mary’s diary represents a conflict between these two models of selfhood: it offers both privacy and control, neither of which Mary had in the traditional condolence system, but at the same time it limits her personal depth to the words on the page. At one point, late in the novel, Mary even states, “I write little now, for I am living too much” (133). More significantly, her final entry “no longer records her inner pain, only her anticipation of a heavenly union with Jesus and her brother” (Barnes 194). Ultimately, Barnes concludes, both Stowe and Phelps were invested “in a faith that promises that reading offers access to sacred truth” (197). But they also found value, as well as profound spiritual potential, in reading (and writing) communally, to try to capture the best of both Catholic and

Protestant worlds.

Lastly, Rory Dicker’s 2004 essay evaluates female spirituality in Gates and in

Elizabeth Prentiss’ Stepping Heavenward, in the context of the postbellum privatization of religion. The 1860s, she argues, “mark a shift during which religion became more

‘contemplative’ and ‘innerly spiritual’” (130), especially in terms of healing and mourning. According to Dicker, Phelps’ and Prentiss’ novels “depict female religious experience as a way for women to gain autonomy, self-worth, and self-determination.

Their novels reveal that women’s role as the spiritual guardians of others is subordinate to their involvement in the search for spiritual meaning for themselves” (132). Like other feminist readers of Gates, Dicker claims that Phelps replaced Calvinism’s “abstract explanation of the afterlife” with “an alternative, female version of bliss.” In Dicker’s reading of Chapters from a Life, “Phelps sees the masculine attitude of Calvinism as preventing the consolation of grieving women”: because its creeds and doctrines were

110 formulated by men, Calvinism “does not grapple with grief” (145). More to the point, Dr.

Bland’s heaven stresses a “lack of individuality” by subsuming all aspects of individual identity to worship (146).

As Mary Cabot comes to accept Winifred’s alternative heaven, which appeals to her “not only because of its resemblance to earth but also because of the opportunities for loving contact that it offers” (Dicker 147), she starts to rebuild her own individual spirituality. Early in the novel, for instance, Mary deliberately “absent[s] herself from the

Communion Table,” an act that Deacon Quirk declares “rebellious” and contrary to

Mary’s “duty, as a Christian and a church-member” (Phelps 10-11). She likewise tries to avoid condolence calls, a culturally sanctioned and highly religious activity. More significantly, she declares in her third entry, “Death and Heaven could not seem very different to a Pagan from what they seem to me” (7). In Dicker’s reading, these attitudes indicate that Mary’s entire religious identity is institutional– and when that institution offered her no effective emotional support, she had nothing to fall back on. Winifred’s material heaven “rejuvenates” Mary’s faith, she suggests, because “the perfection that

Mary notices and admires in heaven not only reveals her unhappiness about ‘this world’ but also indicates a goal for which she can strive” (Dicker 148). By the end of the novel, when Mary becomes Faith’s guardian, she has “nurture[d] herself into a position of happiness and security,” revealing “the interconnectedness of the projects of personal and public spiritual rejuvenation” (150).

Overall, previous scholarship on Phelps and Gates has been fruitful, both in terms of exploring the novel’s major themes and of highlighting the complexity of its contexts,

111 techniques, and cultural influence. As religious content and contexts have become more acceptable to scholars of 19th-century American literature and culture, studies of Phelps’ religion in particular have become more sophisticated and nuanced. Likewise, more and more scholars are putting Gates in conversation with other novels, both to illustrate cultural trends and to contrast Phelps’ approach with those of her contemporaries. My own interests overlap with those of several scholars represented in this review, particularly Helen Smith, Gail Smith, and Kelly. However, few previous studies have examined the role of intertextuality in the novel, and none have explored Phelps’ use of non-Biblical sources in light of the novel’s adaptation of the diary structure. Accordingly,

I believe my analysis contributes positively to this dissertation project as well as to the larger body of scholarship on the novel.

2.3 The Little Green Book

Winifred does not officially explain the novel's title until very late in the book, when she claims that God “has obviously not opened the gates which bar heaven from our sight, but he has as obviously not shut them; they stand ajar, with the Bible and reason in the way, to keep them from closing” (133, italics in original). In the context of hermeneutics, e.g., how to interpret the Bible's writings on heaven, this phrase suggests that at least partial knowledge of heaven is possible. However, it also calls attention to other forms of incomplete textual knowledge, a significant theme throughout the novel.

For instance, when Deacon Quirk visits Mary soon after Roy’s death, he implies that Roy is not in heaven because “he never made a profession of religion” and that “[i]t is very

112 unsafe for the young to think that they can rely on a death-bed repentance” (12). Quirk does not know, however, that Roy actually did make such a profession, in a private letter to Mary written a few months before his death. Significantly, Mary refuses to tell Quirk about her “sealed and sacred treasure” (12), forcing Quirk’s “stolid efforts to be consolatory” to flounder in uncertainty (13). The irony of the whole scene, to which I will return later in more detail, is that Quirk and his fellow Calvinists are confident to the point of arrogance about the nature of heaven and the proper response to death. Quirk dismisses Mary’s assertion that Roy “is happy and safe” (11) as wishful thinking, just as he later dismisses Winifred’s material heaven as heretical, precisely because of how he reads and interprets the Bible.

While Roy’s letter does not come up again in the novel, the scene’s placement near the start of the narrative highlights the difficulty of reading and interpreting texts reliably. This is compounded by the novel’s diary-like format, which gives it a complex if somewhat convenient structure. Specifically, even though diaries contain necessarily partial and selective narratives, we often associate their private nature with a genuine or authentic representation of the author’s reality. Unlike a letter, which is explicitly constructed using certain rhetorical and stylistic expectations, and which more importantly has a specific addressee, a diary is typically written for the benefit of the author. As Isaac D’Israeli put it in Curiosities of Literature (1793, revised 1817), “We converse with the absent by letters, and with ourselves by diaries” (“Diaries—Moral,

Historical, and Critical”). Without an external audience, diaries can not only record events but also offer ostensibly unfiltered commentary on them, especially in terms of

113 their emotional impact. In her study of diaries in 19th-century British fiction, for instance,

Catherine Delafield remarks that “[t]he fictional diary operates as a second self, acting as both internal personal narrative and a separate, secretly performed life” (1). This potential for special access to otherwise private thoughts makes the diary form an attractive stylistic choice for sentimental novels, especially those like Gates that grapple with intensively private feelings and experiences. As Delafield puts it, the diary “derives some of its power from its assumed veracity,” along with “the immediacy with which it is believed to be composed” (119).

Along these lines, it’s worthwhile to consider the potential distinction between a diary and a journal. Both terms derive from the Latin dies (“day”), but journal arrived in

English through the “Old French jornel,” meaning “a day; time; a day's travel or work”

(Online Etymology Dictionary, “journal (n.)”). The Oxford English Dictionary likewise associates both words with daily written records, but defines diary as “a daily record of matters affecting the writer personally, or which come under his personal observation”

(“diary, n.,” my italics) and journal as “ A record of events or matters of personal interest kept by any one for his own use,…usually implying something more elaborate than a diary” (“journal, adj. and n.,” italics in original). As Gannett points out, however, many associate diaries with “triviality, excessive sentimentality, or femininity” (107), whereas journals more often connote commerce, record-keeping, and of course professional publications. Moreover, a significant strain of genre criticism associates diaries with femininity. Juhasz, for instance, declares the diary “[t]he classic verbal articulation of dailiness,” and suggests that like women's lives, diaries “show less a pattern of linear

114 development towards some clear goal than one of repetitive, cumulative, cyclical structure” (223-224). Phelps consistently uses journal to describe Mary’s “little green book” (15), though scholarship on the novel uses diary just as often. It’s unlikely that diary had the same feminine connotations in the 1860s as it does today, but Mary does jokingly refer to her book as “an elegantly constructed and reflective journal” (35) and notes that the local newspaper is the Journal. Furthermore, late in Chapters from a Life she states, “It is not my purpose to turn even one chapter of these recollections into an invalid's diary” (229). In the same volume, she mentions her grandfather's “written journal” detailing his alleged house-possession, “as recorded by the victim from day to day” (7). Taken together, these passages suggest that she considered journals more reliable and personal than diaries, though as we will see she ultimately rejects both genres.

Though Mary’s diary entries in Gates become more sporadic as the story progresses, countermanding Juhasz’s emphasis on “dailiness,” we might easily see her diary as a more realistic glimpse into her grief and her feelings for Roy. After all, the diary gives her a private discursive space into which neither religious duty nor social obligation may intrude, even if they do occasionally interrupt her writing. However, in the very first entry she undermines the notion of a diary as a faithful daily record of her true thoughts and feelings, instead presenting it as a deliberate distraction from her unpleasant reality. A week after Roy’s death, she reports, she

was tossing my paper about,– only my own: the packages in the yellow envelopes I have not been quite brave enough to open yet,– when I came across this poor little book in which I used to keep memoranda of the weather, and my lovers, when I was a school-girl. I turned the leaves, 115

smiling to see how many blank pages were left, and took up my pen, and now I am not smiling any more (3).

Mary never specifies the contents of the packages that she rejects in favor of her childhood journal. Susan Williams interprets them as “packets of her brother’s letters,” contending that Mary rejects “not only letters but reading in general,” including newspapers and books, and that “Mary uses writing not as an entrance into authorship but rather as an escape from it” (162). Letter writing, she goes on to argue, “is presented as problematic, either because the letters are too personal and emotional, fail to reach their intended recipient, or are not as conducive to truth telling as oral conversation or private journal writing is” (162-163). Along similar lines, in her 2016 essay Samuels wonders if the packets contain Roy’s personal effects (“Mourning and Substitution” 223, n. 23), and she suggests in a later email that Roy’s “diary has been returned to [Mary]” (personal communication, June 13, 2017).

Unpacking any of these items could certainly be traumatic to Mary. However, given that “Roy used to say that he did not believe in journals” (Phelps 15) and that Mary treasured his letters, Williams’ and Samuels’ explanations seem unlikely. If anything,

Mary is more likely to cling to artifacts of Roy’s life and his love for her, especially if they can distract her from her social and religious obligations. Overall, then, I find

Henderson’s interpretation most convincing: she suggests that the packets contain

“sympathy cards” (141) from friends and neighbors, cards which Mary would associate with the “hundred little needles” (Phelps 6) of the ritualized condolence system.

Henderson highlights two important contrasts in this scene: one between the painful cards

116 and the distracting diary, and the other between “the original use of the book and its new function” (141). Evidently Mary had not written in her journal for many years, and at first her nostalgic review of its contents offers a pleasant distraction. Perhaps she thought that writing in it again would help her recapture her happy life with Roy, but filling the “blank pages” soon left her “not smiling any more” (Phelps 3). In Henderson’s words, Mary must “acced[e] to the idea that her future will be characterized by mourning,” despite her attempt to avoid the condolence cards and calls (141).

In this emotionally volatile scenario, we might expect Mary’s diary to be a coping mechanism, a way for her to work through her grief while producing her own narrative and perhaps growing more able to deal with Roy’s death. This would certainly be consistent with feminist readings of the novel, especially those that explore female authorship as a potential vehicle for autonomy and creative authority. As Henderson puts it, in this “conventional role...Mary can be seen to take control over herself and her emotions by rendering them as texts” (141). The diary format could potentially facilitate this process. In Delafield’s model, “the main features of the diary as a piece of evidence are its confidentiality, its truthfulness, its dating and its record of passing events reinforced by the sense of a narrative occasion” (119). In many diary novels these characteristics create a stable and consistent narrative, allowing the female narrator to share her insight and comment freely on the events of her life. However, Mary’s diary seems to have the opposite effect in Gates. She rarely writes every day, and by the end of the novel entire months pass without an entry. More importantly, writing seems to intensify her grief instead of serving a therapeutic purpose, to the point that on several

117 occasions she declares that she should stop writing altogether. Early on, she remarks that

“the little green book has become an outlet for the shallower part of pain,” and that she found only “a wretched sort of content” in her writing (15). The wordplay here, in which

“content” could indicate satisfaction (i.e., contentment) or the verbal content of the diary itself, implies a far darker view of diary-writing, even if Mary’s diary retains confidentiality and truthfulness.

Besides these emotional considerations, the end of Mary’s first entry suggests a theological element to her diary. Phoebe, Mary’s longtime servant, finds her “when I had left my unfinished sentence to dry, sitting there with my face in my hands,” and insists that she is “rebellin’ against Providence”: “Put away them papers and come right along!”

(5). Phoebe’s accusation, which Deacon Quirk repeats verbatim during his visit a week later, may well reference the content of Mary’s entry. Among other things, Mary had written that “there has been Hell in my heart” (5) and that “God just stretched down His hand one morning and put [the world] out” (4). However, her command to “put away them papers” also suggests a thematic conflict between the act of writing and the act of submission. Time and again, the Calvinist mouthpieces in Gates tell Mary to “be resigned” to God’s will, by subordinating her personal grief (and her free will in general) to her “duty, as a Christian and a church-member” (11). As later scenes make clear, they define that duty based strictly on their interpretation of the Bible, and by and large they refuse to consider any non-Biblical ideas or imagery. Mary’s diary and Winifred’s later interpretations threaten that monopoly, not because they claim special divine revelation for their own words but because they seek comfort and truth outside predefined

118 ecclesiastical structures. In Mary’s case, the threat is compounded: not only does she refuse to “become resigned in an arithmetical manner, and comforted according to the

Rule of Three” (9), but she actively crafts an alternate textual narrative. At this point in the story, putting away “them papers” (5) would mean surrendering what’s left of her own authorial agency, and stifling her own rebellious grief.

Gates’ diary format offers important insight into its characters and their priorities, not to mention Phelps’ early views of authorship. For the purposes of this chapter, however, I am mainly interested in how the diary comes to function as a commonplace book, and how Phelps builds her theology around an assemblage of sacred and secular texts. The commonplace book, as Jenkins has recently argued, exhibits a “taxonomic impulse”: “gaining intellectual and authority control over vast bodies of knowledge by collection, description, and organization.” More importantly for my study, they represent

“highly personal examples of selection and repurposing of printed texts to construct a new collection that reflects an examined or constructed mental life” (1374). Much like contemporary social media, though with fewer opportunities to make “collecti[ng] and repurposing a seen and shared creative act” (1388), 19th-century commonplace books offered writers and collectors the chance to preserve and comment on a wide range of texts, whether by transcribing them or by literally cutting and pasting them into the scrapbook. This process often blurred lines between genres, especially as literacy increased and the cost of writing supplies decreased. Zboray and Zboray point out that although “the folks who created these literary items recognized each one’s distinct form and purpose…, in practice they often merged formats, so that a diary, for example, could

119 easily morph into a scrapbook or a scrapbook into a commonplace book” (102). Since commonplace books are partly rooted in personal devotional literature, and since they sometimes served to commemorate lost loves, it’s likely that Mary’s inclusion of letters, sermon notes, poetry, philosophy, theology, and Scripture would have seemed normal to

Phelps’ original readers.

In her reading of Gates as conduct fiction, a genre which “harnesses novelistic devices for the purpose of outlining appropriate social behavior” (140), Henderson interprets Mary's intertextuality as “a breakdown in the conventional use of a diary to record the author's private thoughts and the emergence of a new textual authority” (142):

Mary's initial attempts to record herself are supplanted by the interjection of other, competing voices. As the novel progresses, Mary's individual voice is impinged upon by the words of other writers that are copied into, or inserted between, the pages of the diary. In fact, Gates Ajar suggests that Mary's practice of diary keeping is a dangerous one that requires the corrective force of an external authority (141). I agree with Henderson that Mary’s diary does eventually break down, as the transition from single-voiced diary to a polyphonous anthology undercuts the ideal of a single narrative voice. However, I believe the “words of other writers” do not represent threats to “Mary’s individual voice” but tools that she uses to overcome her relatively safe but ultimately selfish isolation. While Phelps later experimented with a full-fledged diary novel in Confessions of a Wife (1902)21, in which the epistolary journal entries (addressed to the narrator’s drug-addicted husband) tell the entire story, Gates instead explores the relationships between and among texts, particularly in terms of their potential spiritual

21 Phelps published this novel under the pseudonym Mary Adams, perhaps to mask the potentially autobiographical elements of its dim view of marriage. Phelps had married the much younger Herbert Dickinson Ward in 1888, but her biographers concur that their relationship was strained at best. 120 and emotional resources. Ultimately Mary does submit herself to an external authority, insofar as she returns to the church and embraces her new role as Faith’s guardian, at which point her diary seems to have outlived its usefulness. But the collection of texts she presents, and more importantly her strategies for integrating them into a more flexible model of death, mourning, and Biblical authority, not only resonated with thousands of readers but gave them a valuable alternative to monologic Calvinist orthodoxy.

2.4 Scraps of Comfort

In the remainder of this chapter I will consider three pivotal instances of intertextuality in the novel, one each from Mary, Deacon Quirk, and Winifred. This section will examine the February 26 entry, which includes Mary’s first sustained use of intertextuality. Section 2.5 turns to Mary’s encounter with Deacon Quirk that I mentioned at the beginning of Section 2.3. Both Mary and Quirk use poetry to express themselves, but with very different methods and goals. Finally, in Section 2.6 I consider how

Winifred uses intertextuality in her argument that those in heaven will “liv[e] under the conditions of organized society” (79). While these three samples cannot capture the full range of Phelps’ intertextual strategies and materials, they do give a clearer picture of how her novel offered readers a diverse set of surrogate Scriptures.

It’s not surprising that Mary introduces poetry into her diary so early. Deacon

Quirk, of course, encourages Mary to turn to Biblical texts for emotional support, echoing recommendations in many contemporary mourning books.22 But as Schnog points out,

22 Henderson notes, for instance, that “readers are told that mourning is an appropriate response to loss and that tears are acceptable displays of grief; repeatedly Jesus's tears at Lazarus's death are cited as precedence for human behavior” (133).

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Gates stresses “the psychic pleasures gained through imaginative license and the expression of personal desire” (148), as opposed to the cold comfort of systematic theology. Accordingly, although Mary later praises “hymns and hymn-like poems” for their ability to “hol[d] us fast without a spoken word” (21), the first poem she copies into her diary is anything but orthodox:

“Be calm, my child, forget thy woe, And think of God and Heaven; Christ thy Redeemer hath to thee Himself for comfort given.

“O mother, mother, what is Heaven? O mother, what is Hell? To be with Wilhelm,– that’s my Heaven; Without him,– that’s my Hell” (8, quote marks in original).

Mary labels this excerpt a “scrap from the German of Bürger,” but Phelps adapted it from

Julia Margaret Cameron’s 1847 translation of Gottfried August Bürger’s Gothic ballad

Lenore (1774).23 In this scene, Lenore’s lover William has not returned from battle with

23 J. T. Stanley published the first English translation of Lenore in 1796, perhaps in response to the 1795 publication of M. G. Lewis’ novel The Monk (Emerson 14). According to Emerson, Sir Walter Scott’s 1796 translation was “the most commonly read [in 1915], as it has been the most readily accessible” (46). Phelps would likely have read Scott’s version, entitled “William and Helen,” but she evidently opted for Cameron’s because it matched her novel’s themes more closely. Scott translated the relevant stanzas this way:

“O say thy pater noster, child, O turn to God and grace! His will, that turn'd thy bliss to bale, Can change thy bale to bliss.”—

“O mother, mother, what is bliss? O mother, what is bale? My William's love was heaven on earth, Without it earth is hell (“William and Helen,” lines 49-56). 122 the rest of his regiment, and his fate is unknown. Like Mary, Lenore rails against God for this unfairness, so her mother tries to comfort her with thoughts of “God and heaven.”

Even though these lines appear only a few pages into the novel, readers can already see a link between Lenore’s position and Mary’s. What’s interesting, though, is that Phelps strategically alters Cameron’s original version, which reads as follows:

“Be calm, my child, forget thy woe, And think of God and heaven; God, thy Redeemer, hath to thee Himself for bridegroom given.”

“Oh! mother, mother, what is heaven? Oh! mother, what is hell? To be with William, that's my heaven; Without him, that's my hell (lines 81-88).

Phelps leaves the second stanza mostly untouched, only changing William to Wilhelm,24 changing Oh to O, and making a few adjustments to capitalization and punctuation. In the first stanza, however, she makes two major alterations to Cameron’s translation, both of which are significant for interpreting Gates. First, she substitutes “Christ” for “God” in line 3. Orthodox Christian theology holds that both God and Christ are equally divine, and that both participate in redeeming mankind from sin. However, whereas Deacon

Quirk and Dr. Bland consistently emphasize God’s sovereignty (e.g., Deacon Quirk’s assertion that “Afflictions come from God” [11]), Winifred focuses on Christ instead. In

24 Bürger’s original, of course, uses Wilhelm, so Phelps may have retained that spelling to make it seem like Mary was translating the poem directly instead of relying on Cameron. Interestingly, though, Bürger contrasts Hölle (Hell) not with Himmel (sky/Heaven) but with Seligkeit (bliss/salvation). It’s possible that Phelps knew enough German to read the original poem, since much 19th-century Biblical criticism relied on German sources. So, if she recognized that Lenore’s claim (i.e. that William, not God, could grant her salvation) was blasphemous, she may have opted to use Cameron’s theologically milder translation instead. 123 fact, of the 46 instances of “Christ” in the novel, only one mention is associated with

Calvinism, and even that one appears in Mary’s paraphrase of Dr. Bland’s sermon. As several critics have recognized, Phelps clearly prefers Winifred’s emphasis, and several later scenes explicitly link Christ with both Roy and with Mary’s happiness.

Phelps’ second adjustment to Cameron’s translation is more oblique, but equally significant to the novel’s biographical context: she changes “bridegroom” to “comfort” in line 4. In the original poem, Lenore’s mother suspects that Wilhelm has abandoned her daughter for a woman in Hungary, where he had gone to fight in the Seven Years’ War.

So, in this section of the story she encourages Lenore to take God as her figurative bridegroom. The metaphor is Biblical: Jesus refers to himself as a bridegroom in the

Gospels (Mt. 9; Luke 5), Paul compares marriage to the union between Christ and the church (Eph. 5; 2 Cor. 11), and Revelation both references the “marriage supper of the

Lamb” (19:7) and describes “the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband” (21:2). The advice to Lenore, then, would seem fairly conventional to Christian readers.

For Phelps, however, “bridegroom” would have an additional, likely painful connotation. Samuel Hopkins Thompson, an Andover native close to Phelps’ age,

“enlisted within two weeks of his graduation” but was killed shortly afterwards, at the battle of Antietam in October 1862 (Bennett 43). According to Bennett, “there was on her part at least a very deep attachment. That one so young and full of promise and on whom she had set her hopes should be cut off so suddenly stunned her” (44). Although there is no evidence that Phelps and Thompson were formally engaged, a 1911 retrospective on

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Phelps’ life stated that she “was only seventeen when her first deep attachment was formed. The object of her affection, a handsome and spirited boy of nineteen, a son of Dr.

Thompson of Hartford, enlisted in the Civil War and was killed” (qtd. in Williams 221, note 9). Phelps’ short story “The Oath of Allegiance” (1894) treats Thompson’s death directly, but several scholars have speculated that Phelps also told the story in Gates, shifting the dead young man from a lover to a brother. Given that Phelps did not end up marrying until 20 years after Gates was published, she likely had at least hoped to marry

Thompson. Changing “bridegroom” to “comfort” may have allowed her some emotional distance (and plausible deniability that Gates contained a theme of incest), while still honoring Thompson’s memory for especially attentive readers.

Both Cameron’s published translation and Phelps’ altered version, of course, foreshadow Mary’s vexed relationship with Christianity. At this point Winifred has not yet arrived (or written to suggest a visit), so despite the shift from “God” to “Christ” the speaker in stanza 1 is best read as Mary’s friends and neighbors. A few days before, for instance, Meta Tripp had “observed…that I shouldn’t feel so sad by and by. She felt very sad at first when [her brother] Jack died, but everybody got over that after a time” (6).

Mary, of course, is in no position to “forget [her] woe.” The February 26 entry, with which the Bürger quote ends, includes one of Mary’s most despondent statements:

“Death and Heaven could not seem very different to a Pagan from what they seem to me”

(7). When she tries to explain this statement in the rest of the entry, her sentences are reduced to fragments: “—Roy snatched away in an instant by a dreadful God, and laid out there in the wet and snow,—in the hideous wet and snow,—never to kiss him, never

125 to see him any more! ….” (7). The ellipses, which are rendered as asterisks in some 19th- century editions, indicate that Mary stopped writing, likely because she was overcome by emotion. When she resumes, she notes that she “know[s] nothing about Heaven. […] In my best and happiest days, I never liked to think of it” (8). This line echoes Lenore’s question in the second stanza (“O mother, mother, what is Heaven?”), but Mary fears that even a reunion with Roy would be empty: “[I]f by chance I should see him standing up among the grand, white angels, he would not be the old dear Roy” (8).

Before moving on to Mary’s conversation with Deacon Quirk, I want to highlight one last aspect of the Bürger excerpt: how Mary physically integrates it into her diary entry. As shown above, Mary’s writing becomes less and less coherent as she tries to reconcile Roy’s death with what she has been taught about God’s goodness and sovereignty. This pattern re-emerges in the last paragraph before the poem:

I should grow so tired of singing! Should long and fret for one little talk,– for I never said good by, and– I will stop this.

A scrap from the German of Bürger, which I came across to-day, shall be copied here (8).

The spacing and punctuation are particularly significant here. Earlier in the entry, we saw how Phelps uses ellipses to indicate trailing off, while the dashes (ala Dickinson) mark staccato-scribbled thoughts, often fragments of memories. Such a fragment nearly ends the entry, but Mary seems to catch herself and resolve to “stop this.” The immediate referent is likely her panic about Roy’s fate, but it is worth remembering that she soon resolved to stop writing altogether.

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The blank line following that declaration is rare in Mary’s entries, as she typically only inserts one at the end of an entry. An entry in Chapter 4, however, offers some insight:

Upon reflection, I find that I have really passed a pleasant evening.

She knocked at my door just now, after I had written the last sentence, and had put away the book for the night (27).

In this case, the narration suggests that a blank line means that Mary originally considered the entry complete, but came back later to write more. If the same rule holds for the Chapter 2 passage, then Mary evidently meant to end the entry, but for some reason came back to add the Bürger quote. Perhaps she filled that silence with tears, or with reading, or with a fierce inner debate about whether she could write about Roy at all.

But when she returns, her tone has changed drastically: there is no mention of Roy, no explanation for her absence, and an almost forced casualness to her explanation for the poem. Had Phelps simply inserted the excerpt as Cameron published it, one might dismiss this allusion as a simple act of collection. But the “copying” only disguises

Mary’s voice: despite her seeming calm, she is still crafting her little green book, and still creating her own reality inside it.

2.5 Appropriate Words

In the February 27 entry, Mary narrates a visit from Deacon Quirk, who is there not to offer his condolences but to “confer with [Mary] as a Christian brother on [her] spiritooal condition.” Specifically, since Mary had not attended the church’s Communion service, an important ritual focusing on self-examination and repentance, he is concerned 127 that she has “had some unfortoonate exercises of mind under [her] affliction.” Mary’s response does not satisfy him: “God does not seem to me just now what He used to. He has dealt very bitterly with me. […] I think, Deacon Quirk, that I did right to stay away”

(10). Their subsequent discussion about Mary’s allegedly “rebellious state of mind” makes it clear that Quirk acts as a mouthpiece for orthodox Calvinism. For example, he states that it’s “natural” for Mary to be fond of Roy, since “poor human nature sets a great deal by earthly props and affections” (11). This is consistent with the Calvinist doctrine of total depravity, i.e. that humans in their natural fallen state are incapable of appreciating or understanding divine or heavenly things. Of course, Winifred spends much of the novel arguing that “earthly props and affections” are not only present in heaven but are an integral part of it. Although Mary recognizes that Quirk “came under a strict sense of duty, and in the kindness of all the heart he has,” she ends the entry convinced that “Roy, away in that dreadful Heaven, can have no thought of me. […] I am nothing any more to Roy” (13-14).

While these theological and emotional considerations are important for the novel as a whole, here I am most interested in the sources Quirk uses to define and defend his position. Unsurprisingly, his main source is the Bible: “Afflictions come from God, and, however afflictin’ or however crushin’ they may be, it is our duty to submit to them.

Glory in triboolation, St. Paul says; glory in triboolation” (11). Here he quotes from

Romans 5, part of Paul’s extended theological analysis of the thorny relationship between faith and works. The phrase launches a series of promises: “And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also: knowing that tribulation worketh patience; And patience, experience;

128 and experience, hope: And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Romans 5:3-5, KJV).

The word translated “glory” (Gk. kauchaomai) here literally means “boast,” but other versions translate it as “exult” or “rejoice.” Though the Romans passage does not directly counsel submission to suffering, as Quirk does, he clearly associates resignation with the resulting “patience.”

A few sentences later, Quirk alludes to another Bible passage: “To be resigned, my dear young friend. To say ‘Abba, Father,’ and pray that the will of the Lord be done”

(11). This allusion is to Christ’s prayer before his arrest and crucifixion: “And he went forward a little, and fell on the ground, and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. And he said, Abba, Father, all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me: nevertheless not what I will, but what thou wilt” (Mark 14:35-36). The passage is well-known, and of course the scene fits tidily within Quirk’s argument about submitting to God’s will.

It’s worth considering, in fact, just how tidy and straightforward these allusions are. As I showed in Section 2.4, Mary’s inclusion of the Bürger poem is emotionally fraught and rhetorically complex, especially given the changes Phelps makes to the published translation. Mary resolutely refuses to interpret its meaning for her life, or even to explain why she copied it down in the first place. By contrast, Quirk’s Biblical allusions could hardly be blunter: he not only expects Mary to go along with his repeated calls for resignation, but he holds the verses to be self-evident: if you want to be like

Jesus, then clearly there’s only one option. Granted, his allusions come in 129 extemporaneous speech, not in a crafted diary entry, but they still circumscribe the very possibility of complexity and interpretation. More to the point, they reinforce his hermeneutical assumption that the text of the Bible is both necessary and sufficient to handle any human emotions. Much like “What Would Jesus Do?” magically resolves every ethical quandary in In His Steps (see Chapter 4), Quirk seems confident that merely quoting Scripture will return Mary to the straight and narrow.

Given this context, it’s interesting that Quirk’s final allusion in the scene is not to the Bible, but to a poem. He ends his visit with what Mary calls “one of his stolid efforts to be consolatory”: he states that if Roy really “was saved at the eleventh hour,” then “he doesn’t rebel against the doings of Providence. […] He doesn’t think this miser’ble earthly sphere of any importance, compared with that eternal and exceeding weight of glory” (13). This is again textbook Calvinism, right down to the nearly verbatim quote from 2 Corinthians 4:17. At the last moment, however, Quirk adds one more text to the pile:

In the appropriate words of the poet,–

‘O, not to one created thing Shall our embrace be given, But all our joy shall be in God For only God is Heaven.’

Those are very spiritooal and scripteral lines, and it’s very proper to reflect how true they are (13).

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The “poet,” in this case, is Philip Bailey (1816-1902), a contemporary of Phelps who published Festus (the source of the quote) in 1839 and revised it in 1845.25 These lines come from a hymn that Festus’ beloved Clara sings to him, in the midst of a long theological discussion thinly disguised as flirtation. The hymn itself looks to be original with Bailey, and was reprinted widely: even today, Google Books includes about two dozen reprints in various periodicals and collections of verse. In fact, the original setting is similar to the Bürger poem, in that Clara tries to convince Festus that an eternity in heaven will outshine any earthly relationships. She tells him that “none...can/ Love thee as I do-- for I love thy soul;/ And I would save it” (Bailey 71). Festus rather misses her point: “I know that thou dost love me. I in vain/ Strive to love aught of earth or Heaven but thee.” This adds a level of irony to Quirk’s praise, as what he considers “appropriate words” that are “very spiritooal and scriptural” (13) in fact represent a failed argument for the supremacy of heavenly affections.

Festus survives in a few scanned 19th-century volumes and print facsimiles, including one for the Making of America project, but Worldcat records only nine scholarly mentions of the poem since its publication. Given how much more popular the hymn was than the rest of the poem, it’s possible that Phelps was not familiar with the

25 A capsule biography of Bailey published in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica notes that Bailey “is known almost exclusively by his one voluminous poem, for though Bailey published other verses he is essentially a man of one book” (Chisholm 217). Festus draws heavily on the Faust legend, and presents “a vast pageant of theology and philosophy, comprising in some twelve divisions an attempt to represent the relation of God to man and of man to God, to emphasize the benignity of Providence, to preach the immortality of the soul, and to postulate 'a gospel of faith and reason combined.' It contains fine lines and dignified thought, but its ambitious theme, and a certain incoherency in the manner in which it is worked out, prevent it from being easily readable by any but the most sympathetic student” (217). While contemporary reviewers praised some elements of the poem, they all noted its sprawling length and its incoherency. One, for instance, concludes that although Bailey has great potential as a poet, “[w]e cannot call Festus a great poem. It is rather a great mistake” (433). 131 larger plot, or that she had seen Bailey’s hymn reprinted by itself. However, given that

Lenore was both popular and influential (especially on Gothic novels like Rutledge

(1860), which May mentions in a later entry), it seems likely that the Festus quote is also intended to reveal Quirk’s poor literary taste. Social class is certainly a factor here:

Phelps reproduces Quirk’s drawl consistently in words like “spiritooal,” and generally portrays him as uncouth but well-meaning. Notably, in a later scene Mary describes his

“obstinate old face with its stupid, good eyes and animal mouth” (87), while Winifred lumps him in with “[u]ntrained Christians” of “uneducated, neglected, or debased mind.”

According to her, Quirk is an “amusing” “representative of a class” who “‘can understand nothing which is original’” (89). His attempts at allusion certainly conform to this stereotype, as does his insistence that “we’d out to stick to what the Bible says” and not

“trouble ourselves about these mysteries of a future state” (88). In other words, Phelps deploys allusions in Gates not just to demonstrate her own knowledge and intellectual curiosity, but to present her theological opponents as narrow-minded and mentally impoverished. More to the point, she presumes a certain level of cultural and theological literacy on her readers’ part, particularly if they are to imitate Mary’s search for surrogate

Scriptures.

2.6 Beautiful Heresies

As I have argued in the previous two sections, Mary’s allusion to Lenore operates primarily on emotional terms, while Quirk’s allusions to Scripture and Festus are more intellectual. Neither approach, however, seems to comfort Mary effectively. She compares her conversation with Quirk to his “holding [her] on the rack,” and specifically

132 says that his final allusion “hurts,– it cuts,–…because I suppose it must be true” (13).

Likewise, while poetry initially offers a potential outlet for her grief, she soon remarks that “[a] mind must be healthily reconciled to actual life, before a poet– at least most poets– can help it. We must learn to bear and to work, before we can spare strength to dream” (21). The classics in her library, she notes, “are filled with Roy’s marks,” while the popular novels her friends send prompt this commentary: “She had far outlived the passion of ordinary novels; and the few which struck the depths of her experience gave her more pain than pleasure” (21-22).26 In other words, she recognizes that escapism alone will not help her deal with Roy’s death: just as Biblical reassurances ring hollow without emotional engagement, fiction lacks the grounding in reality that she needs to process her grief.

Winifred’s entry into the plot, which conveniently occurs the same day Mary complains about the inefficacy of novels, addresses this problem by bringing together

Biblical source texts, theological commentary, literature, and most importantly her own speculation. Through Winifred’s various conversations with Mary and her neighbors

Phelps showcases the breadth and depth of her own intellectual and theological knowledge, even though formal seminary training was unavailable to women at the time.

Bennett identifies some two dozen nonfiction sources for Winifred’s arguments, though overall she holds a dim view of Phelps’ intellectual integrity: “She supported her wishful

26 Mary claims that this line is something “not unlike” a quote by “the author of ‘Rutledge,’” Miriam Coles Harris (22). To my knowledge no one has identified a source for Harris’ alleged quote, so the line may be original with Phelps. If this is the case, attributing the quote to another novelist is an interesting tactic. Perhaps she did not consider Gates an “ordinary novel,” or perhaps she anticipated criticism that her work encouraged impressionable young women to lose themselves in novel-reading. 133 thinking with quotations from authorities, but she had a very natural way of making much of those who agreed with what it was pleasant to her to believe, and of dismissing almost with contempt those whose opinions she could not share” (46). In particular, based on a scene in Chapter 7, Bennett claims that Winifred “prefers an inaccurate translation from which she may extract a pleasing verse to the acceptance of the conclusions forced upon her by the true rendering of the original tongue. In this spirit, it is to be feared, Miss

Phelps sought consolation through books and passed it on in her book to others” (47).

As I note in the literature review above, Gail Smith specifically defends Phelps from these charges. According to Smith, Winifred carefully distinguishes established facts from her own proposals and suppositions, and is actually “grudgingly respectful”

(103) toward Biblical scholars. More importantly, Winifred’s ongoing “[e]xplanations of metaphor, simile, analogy, conjecture, and literal and figurative language” testify to her

“personal exposure to currents in biblical hermeneutics” (108). Overall, Smith concludes,

“The Gates Ajar is an argument for correct distinctions between literal and figurative, in order that the Bible may have the fullest pastoral use for the reader” (116). Winifred’s use of intertextuality is significant for both halves of Smith’s conclusion. Most of her challenges to specific interpretations of heaven hinge on the role and meaning of metaphors and similes, especially when she exegetes parts of Revelation. Likewise, she explains some elements of her broader project– especially the speculative parts about a material heaven– in terms of counseling and pastoral care. That is, she justifies her more controversial teachings based on their positive emotional impact, despite her interlocutors’ insistence on orthodox hermeneutics and interpretive rigor.

134

Since two-thirds of the novel revolves around Winifred’s theology, it would be impractical to examine all her uses of intertextuality. Accordingly, I will focus this section on a representative sample: her conversation with Mary in Chapter 10, as reported in the June 20th entry. Not only does this scene show the pastoral impact of Winifred’s approach, but it specifically engages with how her “conjectures” (79) relate to the text of the Bible. In doing so Phelps anticipates the main objection to her novel, while simultaneously showing that Winifred’s unorthodox techniques can offer a “deal o’ comfort” (81) to her target audience.

Winifred and Mary start off the scene by discussing the role of memory in heaven, and then discuss the relationship between Biblical authority and personal conjecture. Immediately, Phelps foregrounds a quote by Valérie de Gasparin: “I think thee, my God, the river of Lethe may indeed flow through the Elysian Fields,– it does not water the Christian’s Paradise” (75). In Greek mythology, the first two sites appear in the underworld: drinking from the river of Lethe caused one to forget one’s life, while dead heroes occupied the Elysian fields. This line appears in The Near and the Heavenly

Horizons (1861), which is also the source for one of the novel’s epigraphs: “Splendor!

Immensity! Eternity! Grand words! Great things! A little definite happiness would be more to the purpose” (Phelps 2). Predictably, Gasparin’s view of heaven has much in common with Winifred’s, especially in terms of personal continuity after death. At one point, for instance, she states, “if to love [God] I must have a living soul, I keep my humanity, I keep my individuality, I keep them there, and more ardently than ever-- there beyond the skies” (286).

135

What’s particularly interesting, though, is how Phelps integrates the quote. After reproducing the quote, Mary reports that

Aunt Winifred was saying that over to herself in a dreamy undertone this

morning, and I happened to hear her.

“Just a quotation, dear,” she said, smiling, in answer to my look of inquiry,

“I couldn’t originate so pretty a thing. Isn’t it pretty?”

“Very; but I am not sure that I understand it” (75).

Although Winifred does not cite the quote specifically, she does self-deprecatingly acknowledge that she “couldn’t originate so pretty a thing.” Rhetorically, this is comparable to Mary’s inclusion of poetry in her diary, both in terms of authorship and of aesthetics. At two other points during this scene, in fact, Winifred refers to particular ideas as “pretty.” Yet at the same time, she also references “pretty little memories” (75) and “pretty things in heaven” (80), and her daughter Faith complains that her doll (which has had an unfortunate encounter with “Kitty”) “don’t look very pretty” (78). This repetition suggests an aesthetic dimension to theology, such that good doctrine is attractive and pleasant in the same way earthly experiences are attractive and pleasant.

But Winifred also goes beyond these aesthetic dimensions, to argue that de Gasparin’s premise is Biblically sound. More importantly, she applies the idea to Mary’s potential reunion with Roy, telling Mary that “[r]emembering this life is going to help us amazingly, I fancy, to appreciate the next” (76-77). This approach not only comforts

Mary, as is consistent with Winifred’s pastoral focus, but also glosses over potential counterarguments.

136

As Gail Smith points out, Winifred often uses phrases like “I fancy” to hedge against absolute truth-claims, and perhaps to present her ideas as harmless imagination. A couple pages later, in fact, she says that “they [i.e., houses in heaven] seem to me as supposable as anything can be which is guess-work at the best; for what a homeless, desolate sort of sensation it gives one to think of people wandering over the ‘sweet fields beyond the flood’ without a habitation and a name” (78). The embedded quote plays an interesting role here. Winifred presents it as a summary of the traditional position, associating it with the same negative sensations that she and Mary associate with orthodox Calvinism. However, the quote is not from the Bible, but from the Isaac Watts hymn “There is a Land of Pure Delight” (1707). Watts compares death to the Jordan

River dividing the Israelites from Canaan’s “[s]weet fields beyond the swelling flood” (l.

9), and the last stanza argues that “Could we but climb where Moses stood,/ And view the landscape o’er,/ Not Jordan’s stream nor death’s cold flood/ Could fright us from the shore” (ll. 21-24). In this metaphor, of course, Canaan stands in for heaven, but Watts’ point is that Christians should not fear dying, just as the Israelites crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land. In this case, at least, Phelps deliberately misreads the hymn to contrast her vision of an “organized [heavenly] society” (79) with what she sees as the plain and purposeless orthodox heaven.

Faced with these arguments, Mary raises a significant objection:

“Now, Aunt Winifred!” I said, sitting up straight, “what am I to do with these beautiful heresies? If Deacon Quirk should hear!” “I do not see where the heresy lies. As I hold fast by the Bible, I cannot be in much danger.” “But you don’t glean your conjectures from the Bible.”

137

“I conjecture nothing that the Bible contradicts. I do not believe as truth indisputable anything that the Bible does not give me. But I reason from analogy about this, as we all do about other matters” (79).

Given Mary’s previous encounters with Deacon Quirk, her complaint about Winifred’s

“beautiful heresies” is likely tongue-in-cheek. But she does anticipate a major criticism of

Gates: that since Winifred does not explicitly base her arguments on Biblical evidence, they are necessarily heretical. Both parts of Winifred’s response are significant to Phelps’ overall goals for the novel. First, she confirms the Bible’s special status in theological arguments: none of her conjectures, she claims, directly contradict Scripture. At several points in the novel she highlights gaps in Biblical descriptions of heaven, for instance, but she never flat-out denies that a particular passage is accurate. However, the wording of the next sentence is tricky. It seems to confirm the Bible’s inerrancy, insofar as it limits

“truth indisputable” to Biblical sources, but the phrase “anything that the Bible does not give me” is not necessarily equivalent to “anything not in the Bible.” For instance, at one point she tells Deacon Quirk that since harps are mentioned in Revelation, there is nothing “‘unscriptural’ in the idea that there will be [other] instrumental music in heaven” (86). This argument from silence could elevate conjectures to the authority of sacred writ, as long as they ostensibly draw on the Bible.

Winifred’s other defense, that she reasons from analogy, also involves intertextuality. To defend arguments from analogy to Mary, Winifred literally goes “to the bookcase” (80) and shows Mary two passages from Isaac Taylor’s Physical Theory of

Another Life (1836), which Mary of course reproduces for us in her diary. The first passage suggests that arguments from analogy are critical to “every kind of abstract 138 reasoning,” including “any principle of natural theology,” while the second passage encourages would-be philosophers “not to allow the most plausible and pleasing conjectures to unsettle our convictions of truth…resting upon positive evidence” (80, ellipses in original). To build on this argument from authority– she offers no explanation or application of Taylor’s words– Winifred also acknowledges that her specific claims about a material heaven have Platonic roots: “You remember Plato’s old theory, that the ideal of everything exists eternally in the mind of God. […] I do not see how it can be otherwise.” Heavenly equivalents of flowers and grass, she argues, will not “be less real than these [on earth], but more so. Their ‘spirituality’ is of such a sort that our gardens and forests and homes are but shadows of them” (81). Unlike earlier in the scene, here she is less concerned about the emotional effects of the sources she cites, but does use them to buttress her own intellectual authority. This combination not only offers readers an emotional justification for Phelps’ beliefs about heaven, but a readily accessible prooftext for their own logical arguments.

As we have seen, Phelps deploys intertextual references throughout Gates, to serve a range of artistic, emotional, and intellectual purposes. Just as Mary’s diary functions both as a plot device and a commonplace book, the novel functions both as a story and an anthology of supporting evidence. Not every source is given the same weight, and some are even denounced later in the novel. For instance, when Winifred sees the Bürger poem I analyzed in Section 2.4, she declares, “I believe Satan wrote that.

[…] I mean that he inspired it. They are wicked words. You must not read them over.

You will outgrow them sometime with a beautiful growth of trust and love. Let them

139 alone till that time comes” (34). Eventually Mary does follow her advice, and not only reforms her reading but writes less and less often in her diary. By the last paragraph of the novel, she views her life in Biblical terms: “Our hour is not yet come. If the Master will that we should be about His Father’s business, what is that to us?” (138). In this sense, Gates has much in common with other Christian novels, as it seems likely that the

Bible once again plays a major role in Mary’s thoughts and beliefs. But unlike Stowe’s

Augustine St. Clare, Mary works out her salvation not by reading a single book the right way, but by sampling an entire library.

140

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Chapter 3:

Superseding the Caesars: Evolving Religious History in Ben-Hur (1880)

3.1 Introduction

Despite their manifest differences in tone, subject matter, and setting, Lew

Wallace’s Ben-Hur (1880) and Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) share similar cultural trajectories. After their initial publication, both bestselling novels were not only adapted into other genres, including stage plays and films, but reimagined in commercial contexts far removed from their respective plots. This high level of cultural integration certainly helped popularize Wallace's epic tale of Judah Ben-Hur's quest for vengeance, but most audiences encountered it onscreen rather than in the 200,000-word novel. In addition to the well-known 1959 film starring Charlton Heston, Ben-Hur was the basis for two silent films (1907 and 1925), a 2010 television mini-series, and a 2016 reboot. The latest film underperformed at the box office and garnered few positive reviews—one critic lambasted its “awkward combo of modern-day grotesquerie and fluffy romantic exoticism”—but its release does suggest the ongoing appeal of the novel’s plot and characters.

Wallace enjoyed a measure of celebrity even before he published Ben-Hur, thanks to his family’s political power and his own extensive military, political, and diplomatic 148 service. During the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) he rose to the rank of first lieutenant, and he played a prominent role in organizing and leading Indiana soldiers during the Civil War (Warner 536). His regiment won a morale-boosting skirmish against a much larger rebel force in Romney, Virginia in June 1861, and he was likewise instrumental in key defenses of Cincinnati (Sept. 1862) and Washington DC (July 1864).

Wallace was promoted to brigadier general in September 1861 and major general in

March 1862, but a controversy during the Battle of Shiloh (April 1862) significantly stalled his military career.27 Some scholars view Ben-Hur as Wallace’s attempt to reclaim his lost pride after Shiloh, even though by that time he had also served honorably on the commission investigating Lincoln’s assassination and in several political offices, including governor of the New Mexico Territory.28 Whatever the reason, Wallace’s authorial fame went well beyond his military and political fame (or infamy): by one scholar’s count, “Harper Brothers sold a million copies of the novel between 1880 and

1912; in 1913, Sears, Roebuck ordered a million more, at the time the largest book order ever placed” (Morsberger & Morsberger, as cited in Swansburg, “The Passion of Lew

Wallace”).

27 Briefly, Wallace and his troops were guarding Crump’s Landing while the main Union army, led by General Ulysses S. Grant, engaged the rebel army in Pittsburg Landing, about six miles away. Two roads connected the sites: the River Road and the Shunpike Road. Grant issued a verbal order (transcribed by his quartermaster) for Wallace to reinforce the army’s right flank, expecting them to travel via the River Road (Boomhower 60-61). However, since it was in better condition, Wallace took the shorter Shunpike Road instead. Unfortunately, Grant’s army was pushed back while Wallace’s division was marching, and the Shunpike route left them in a poor position dangerously close to the Confederate forces. By the time Wallace’s troops arrived they were too late to help. Though the Union soldiers eventually gained back the ground they’d lost, their “triumph came at a tremendous price”: the 20,000 casualties “exceeded by far the losses suffered in all the previous battles of the war” (Boomhower 64). Grant later admitted in his memoirs that his order did not specify which road to take, but many scapegoated Wallace for this bloody result, and he was effectively sidelined for the rest of the war. 28 See Victor Davis Hanson, Ripples of Battle and Gail Stephens, Shadow of Shiloh. 149

Ben-Hur is divided into eight books, perhaps to mimic earlier Christian epics like

The Inferno and Paradise Lost, and stretches across roughly 40 years of narrative time.

Each book has an ordinal title, e.g. “Book First,” but none of the individual chapters have separate titles. All eight books were published and sold together, though “in 1899 Harper sold separately the first book as The First Christmas, followed in 1912 by The Chariot

Race, as separate volumes” (Solomon 68). Books First and Eighth interact most directly with Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry: the former includes Jesus’ birth and the visit of the Magi, while the latter includes Jesus’ crucifixion. Most of the novel’s action, however, runs parallel to the Gospel account: except for the brief scene in Book Second where Jesus gives a badly-beaten Judah a drink of water, Jesus does not emerge as a character until relatively late in the story. This is consistent with the Gospel narratives, which include only one event in Jesus’ life (his studying at the Temple at age 12; Luke

2:41-52) between his birth and the start of his public ministry at age 30. Indeed, though

Ben-Hur was controversial at the time for portraying Jesus as a character in an explicitly fictional novel, almost all of Jesus’ direct appearances stay conscientiously close to the

Gospel accounts.

Despite the novel’s subtitle (“A Tale of the Christ”), Judah Ben-Hur’s actions— particularly his quest for revenge against Messala—drive the plot. Though the two were boyhood friends in Jerusalem, when Book Second opens Messala’s Roman education has driven a wedge between them: Messala constantly mocks Judah’s faith as naive, and in response Judah insists that since Romans can never understand Jews, he and Messala must part ways. Despite this conflict Judah resolves to join the Roman military, but

150 before he can enlist an accident brings tragedy on his entire family. Valerius Gratus, the newly-appointed Roman procurator of Judea, is parading through Judah’s neighborhood, and Judah is watching the spectacle from his rooftop. As Judah leans over to get a better look, his hand accidentally dislodges a cracked tile, which strikes the procurator and severely wounds him. The other spectators, incorrectly assuming that Judah had thrown the tile deliberately, take up their own projectiles and attack the Roman soldiers. In the ensuing riot, none other than Messala identifies Judah as “the assassin” (120) and arrests the entire household.

Judah’s mother Miriam and his sister Tirzah are led away to prison, and the

Romans take possession of the family’s substantial estate for their own enrichment. For his part, Judah is sentenced to a lifetime as a galley slave, with the full expectation that the hard labor would kill him inside of a year. En route to the galley, Judah and his captors encounter Joseph and a teenaged Jesus; Jesus gives Judah a drink and a silent blessing, but the two do not speak. Three years later Judah has gained a reputation as the strongest rower on his ship, and in Book Third he attracts the attention of Arrius, the wealthy Roman magistrate (Lat. duumvir) in charge of the battle fleet. Arrius learns of

Judah’s accident and unjust imprisonment and seems sympathetic, but before they can converse again most of the galley is destroyed in battle. Judah manages to save himself and Arrius from drowning, and in gratitude Arrius adopts him as his son and heir, giving him access to considerable wealth and Roman education. He leverages both to pursue his two main quests: find out what happened to his mother and sister, and get revenge on

Messala for betraying the family in the first place.

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Judah’s quests take him to Antioch as Book Fourth opens, where he learns that his father’s chief steward Simonides has retained much of the family’s wealth despite

Messala’s treachery. He meets with Simonides, where he finds himself instantly attracted to Simonides’ daughter Esther, and reveals himself to be the lost son of Hur. However, he does not claim his family fortune, partly because he inherited Arrius’ fortune and partly because he cannot prove his Jewish lineage with his mother and sister gone. From there he visits the pagan but enticing Grove of Daphne, where he meets the Magi Balthasar and his exotic daughter Iras. Predictably, Iras plays the cruel temptress for the rest of the novel: she is as worldly and calculating as Esther is wholesome and trusting. Judah also discovers that Messala is in the city to compete in a high-stakes chariot race, and decides that it would be the perfect venue to humiliate his rival.

With the help of Simonides and his ally Sheik Ilderim, Judah trains intensively with Ilderim’s prized horses, and uses Simonides’ commercial network to goad Messala into betting a fortune on himself. The race itself is probably the best-known scene in the entire novel, and certainly the greatest spectacle in the dramatic adaptations. It occupies several chapters of Book Fifth. Initially Messala takes the lead, partly by savagely beating Judah’s horses during a difficult turn. Judah recovers, however, and in the race’s final critical moments he destroys Messala’s chariot and takes first place. Messala is nearly trampled to death by his own horses, and financially ruined by his unwise bet. In response he tries to have Judah assassinated, but Judah kills one of the assassins, bribes the other to tell Messala that they had succeeded, and escapes to Jerusalem.

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Book Sixth opens with a change in Roman governance, and reveals that Miriam and Tirzah had been imprisoned in a secret cell for the past eight years. The new tribune frees them promptly, but unfortunately they contracted leprosy in jail. Their release corresponds with Judah’s return to Jerusalem, and in fact they see him sleeping on the steps of the family’s old house, but since Miriam is unwilling to risk infecting Judah, she takes Tirzah to live in the leper colony outside the city, as required by Jewish law. (They are eventually healed by Jesus and can thus reunite with Judah, but not until nearly the end of the novel.) Meanwhile, Judah takes up with a militant Galilean group, in an attempt to overthrow Roman control of Israel, and by the start of Book Seventh has become their leader and reunited with Balthasar and Iras. At this point, the novel’s plot resumes its interaction with the Gospel narrative, as Judah observes Jesus’ baptism (Mt.

3:13-17) and starts to follow Jesus’ ministry closely. But unlike Balthasar, Judah’s goals are strictly political: he believes that the Messiah will be a political leader akin to King

David, so he focuses on protecting “the Nazarene” from his powerful enemies. At this point Judah has no settled religious opinions about Jesus, but as Book Eighth opens Jesus

“became daily more and more a mystery to [Judah], and by prodigies done, often before his eyes, kept him in a state of anxious doubt both as to his character and mission” (475).

The climax of the novel, of course, is Jesus’ arrest, trial, and crucifixion, parts of which Judah witnesses firsthand. Most notably, when Jesus is arrested Judah offers to attack the Roman soldiers, much like Simon Peter actually does in the Gospel accounts

(John 18:10-11). Jesus does not respond, and Judah barely escapes the mob himself—in fact, “[t]he hands snatching at him as he passed tore his garments from his back, so he ran

153 off the road naked” (530). In this, Wallace identifies Judah with the unidentified disciple mentioned in Mark 14:51-52. Something similar happens at the Crucifixion: Judah takes the role of the man “who took a sponge, and filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave [Jesus] to drink” (Mt. 27:48). More significantly, Jesus’ death—and the resulting earthquake and period of darkness—finally convince both Judah and Simonides to “henceforth speak of him as the Christ” (552). Interestingly, Wallace does not cover the Resurrection. Finally, in a brief epilogue we learn that Judah and Esther married and started a family, that Iras abandoned Judah at the Crucifixion to join forces with Messala, and that Judah has invested much of his fortune to promote the early Christian church at

Antioch. The novel closes with one last intriguing intersection between fact and fiction, which I treat at greater length later in this chapter: Wallace claims that Judah’s final investment is to finance the “Catacomb of San Calixto…Out of that vast tomb

Christianity issued to supersede the Caesars” (558).

Ben-Hur fits my model of surrogate Scriptures particularly well, both because of its popularity and because many readers came to consider it proof of Jesus’ historical reality. Not only were the novel and its later stage adaptation endorsed by many Christian denominations and organizations—this despite widespread distrust of both novels and theater among Evangelicals—but hundreds of readers explicitly credited the novel with their own conversions to serious Christianity. Wallace himself stated that he wrote Ben-

Hur to counteract his ignorance and uncertainty about his childhood faith, and credited the writing process with his own conversion from agnostic indifference to Christianity.

Unlike Stowe, however, he shied away from formal church membership. Perhaps for the

154 same reasons, although several of Ben-Hur’s lead characters convert to Christianity by the end of the novel, Wallace is generally subtle about trying to convert readers directly.

Instead, he uses an astounding level of geographical, cultural, religious, historical, and even linguistic detail to recreate first-century Israel for his readers, perhaps in order to make the Bible’s theological claims seem more plausible.

Part of the novel’s consistent popularity results from Wallace’s integration of the

Bible into his narrative. Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which it surpassed as the best-selling

American novel of the 19th century, Ben-Hur assumes that its readers are Biblically literate, especially in terms of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth, life, death, and resurrection. But unlike the other three novels in this study Ben-Hur is historical fiction, set largely in first-century Judea during Jesus’ lifetime. Judah, the protagonist, is roughly the same age as Jesus, and becomes one of his followers partway through the novel. The two characters also interact directly in several scenes, as I note above. Likewise, several of the novel’s characters witness or participate in several Gospel narratives, including

Jesus’ birth, the visit of the Magi, several of Jesus’ teachings and miracles, and of course the Crucifixion. Wallace is careful to make most of his Biblical scenes line up with the

New Testament narratives, to avoid presenting Jesus directly until near the end of the story, and to stay well away from most doctrinal controversies.

Much of the literature on Ben-Hur considers the novel’s religious content and the cultural context of late 19th-century American Christianity, both to analyze Wallace’s ideas about religion and to try and account for the novel’s unusual popularity. In this chapter, I first review several key studies on these themes, both to identify understudied

155 areas and to situate my own work on what has come to be called “the Ben-Hur tradition”

(Miller, “Charioteer” 153-154). Next, I explore Wallace’s account of the novel’s motivation and composition, particularly focusing on his own embedded conversion narrative. These contexts are especially relevant because the Magi narrative in the opening section of the novel, on which I focus my reading, was composed quite a while before the rest of the story, and for different purposes. From there, I move on to my main analysis, emphasizing the Magi’s respective backstories and Wallace’s representation of their meeting. Though scholars of the novel often mention this scene in passing, usually to argue that Wallace’s gospel is generic and uncontroversial, very few examine it in detail.

As my chapter title suggests, I read this scene primarily in terms of historical progression, taking my cue from the novel’s final lines: “If any of my readers, visiting

Rome, will make the short journey to the Catacomb of San Calixto, which is more ancient than that of San Sebastiano, he will see what became of the fortune of Ben-Hur, and give him thanks. Out of that vast tomb Christianity issued to supersede the Caesars”

(558). This direct narrative address combines the story world with historical record, a fitting end given the novel’s exhaustive historical detail, and encourages readers to consider Ben-Hur as a real historical figure.29 But it also identifies a broader goal for

Judah’s investment, and by extension for the novel as a whole: to topple the mighty

Roman Empire from beneath, by force of historical inevitability. Though not quite as

29 There is a Catacomb of Callixtus in Rome, which at one point held the remains of sixteen popes and many other martyrs. As it was rediscovered in 1854 by Giovanni Battista De Rossi, and visited by Pope Pius IX soon thereafter, it’s possible that Wallace read the story but simply misremembered the name. “San Calixto” could also be the modern Italian equivalent of the Latin “Callixtus.” 156 dramatic, the Magi’s narratives in Book First operate under a similar logic: each of the three men recounts his own philosophical and theological quest, leading (of course) to their meeting outside Bethlehem. Given Wallace’s longstanding interest in comparative religion, and especially in the Magi’s origins and motivations, this section of the novel is fertile ground for understanding his views of history and religion, and the Bible’s role in both.

3.2 Ben-Hur’s Sources and Composition

Wallace’s earliest efforts on Ben-Hur date back to 1873, shortly after he had finally published his first novel, The Fair God, after thirty years of intermittent work

(Morsberger and Morsberger 298). Both novels are historical fiction; The Fair God dramatizes Cortes’ conquest of the Aztecs, and like Ben-Hur it also emphasizes religious contact and conflict. At this time “historical fiction…was practically extinct in America,” and most American critics “were beginning to find the elevated style of Cooper, Scott, and Prescott old-fashioned, cumbersome, and unrealistic” (Morsberger and Morsberger

237). Perhaps discouraged by The Fair God’s poor reception, Wallace initially intended to “[turn] the story of the magi [in the Gospels] into a magazine serial with illustrations”

(Morsberger and Morsberger 298). In “How I Came to Write Ben-Hur,” an 1893 essay later reprinted in his Autobiography (1906), Wallace claims that the account of the Magi in Matthew 2 “took a hold on [his] imagination beyond every other passage of Scripture.

How simple they are! But analyze them, and behold the points of wonder!” (“How I

Came to Write Ben-Hur” 1). To perform this analysis, he undertook “extensive research

157 at the Library of Congress, and completed the 20,000-word booklet that year”

(Morsberger and Morsberger 298).

It seems likely that Wallace conceived of the larger story before he completed this booklet, particularly given the volume of research it required. In fact, in a letter to his sister the next year, Wallace mentioned working on the story of Judah Ben-Hur

(Morsberger and Morsberger 298). Yet he claims in “How I Came to Write Ben-Hur” that “[i]n the time of writing, down to the hour [he] laid the manuscript by…never once did the possibility of a formal book occur to [him].” Instead, he “finished the proposed serial and deposited it in [his] desk, waiting for a season of courage in which to open communication with the Harpers,” his publisher (“How” 4, 3). When the Magi narrative was published separately as The First Christmas in 1902, Wallace offered a similar timeline in the preface, crediting the transition from magazine piece to novel to a

“fortuitous circumstance” (The First Christmas iii). The key event, he claims, was a chance encounter in 1876 with Robert G. Ingersoll, a well-known agnostic and skeptic of the day. In The First Christmas, Wallace says that Ingersoll initiated the conversation while Wallace picked the subject of religion, while in the Autobiography Wallace claims less precisely that he “had been listening to discussion which involved such elemental points as God, heaven, life hereafter, Jesus Christ, and His divinity” (4). Both accounts, however, emphasize that this encounter prompted Wallace to regret and reexamine his own agnosticism and theological ignorance. More significantly for this study, he decided not only to extend his story to the Crucifixion, forming “a book” that would “compel

[him] to study everything of pertinency” (The First Christmas iv), but to fill the “lapse of

158 eighteen or twenty years…between the remarkable appearance of the Holy Child in the

Temple…and His reappearance [as] a man with a mission” (“How” 5).

Though many critics mention Ingersoll’s role in the genesis of Ben-Hur, according to historian Justin Clark the details of the train ride are “near apocryphal to scholars of both Ingersoll and Wallace” (Clark, “Legendary”). Much of this skepticism is based on a letter Ingersoll wrote in 1887 to Joseph Vardaman, a journalist (and later governor of Mississippi) who had asked Ingersoll directly whether the meeting took place. Ingersoll flatly denied it: “I was never well acquainted with [Wallace]-- do not remember ever to have had a conversation with him on the subject of religion...all that your letter contains in reference to my having done anything in concert with Gen'l

Wallace, or by agreement, is without the slightest foundation” (“To Jos. K. Vardaman”).

Given that Ingersoll had built much of his reputation on his rationalist critiques of

Christianity, and that by 1887 much of Wallace’s fame came from Ben-Hur, it is understandable that Ingersoll would try and distance himself from Wallace. After the novel was published, in fact, a rumor arose that Wallace was an atheist when he started

Ben-Hur, and wrote the novel in an explicit attempt to disprove Christianity.30 Some versions of that rumor persist today, especially the claim that Ingersoll and Wallace planned the project together, but that Wallace was miraculously converted by the time he finished the novel.31 In any case, Wallace and Ingersoll served together at Shiloh, both

30 Wallace explicitly denies this idea in a 1905 interview: “I began the book and carried it out for the one purpose of making plain to modern readers the humanity of Christ, and proving his divinity also. [...] I learned Christianity at my mother's knee” (Margaret Sullivan Burke, “General Wallace's Story,” The Inter Ocean, 15 Oct 1905, Page 28). 31 For example, in an August 2016 column on Ben-Hur, reprinted on the conservative news sites WND and Townhall, Jerry Newcombe claims that Ben-Hur 159 were heavily involved in Republican politics, and Ingersoll “spent considerable time and energy in [Wallace’s home state of] Indiana[.] […] From giving lectures throughout the state to influencing some of Indiana’s well-known historic figures, Ingersoll left a profound impact on the state and its development during the Gilded Age” (Clark,

“Legendary”). So however Wallace encountered Ingersoll’s critique of religion, the two men certainly knew each other and Wallace’s account in The First Christmas is at least plausible. For the purposes of this study, however, I am far more interested in how

Wallace’s conversion narratives may shed light on his attitude toward the Bible and his goals for the Biblical elements of Ben-Hur.

Right before he alludes to Ingersoll (though not by name) in “How I Came to

Write Ben-Hur,” Wallace explicitly compares his “confession” to “the commencement of the part designated Book Second,” stating that the reader “cannot fail to be struck with its

didn’t begin as a Christ-honoring work at all. According to writer E. A. Rowell, Ben-Hur was initiated as an attempt to demote Christianity. In the latter half of the 19th century, one of America’s best known unbelievers, Robert Ingersoll, was talking with a friend, General Lew Wallace, about theology. They both agreed Christianity was nonsense. Ingersoll encouraged Wallace, since he was a writer, to take up the pen and debunk Christianity once and for all by showing it rested on a weak foundation and by showing the fallibility of Jesus Himself. Wallace agreed to take up the challenge. But his research into the historicity of Christianity led him to come to see that he and Ingersoll had been wrong and that indeed the Christian faith was based on solid historical fact. He wrote a book all right, but it wasn’t the kind he initially set out to write (“'Ben-Hur': The Inspiring Story Behind the Book.”).

Along similar lines, several preachers have falsely attributed this quote to Wallace: “After six years given to the impartial investigation of Christianity as to its truth or falsity, I have come to the deliberate conclusion that Jesus Christ was the Messiah of the Jews, the Savior of the world and my own personal Redeemer” (Mead 59). Tim LaHaye, in his introduction to the 2003 Signet Classic version of the novel, suggests that two high-profile 19th-century conversions from atheism to Christianity—those of lawyer Robert Greenlief and archaeologist William Albright—were “repeatedly and mistakenly transferred to Wallace” (vii). Still, LaHaye also argues that “the two hours that Robert Ingersoll spent with General Lew. Wallace did more to advance the Christian faith than Ingersoll’s entire lifetime of campaigning against God, Christianity, and the supernatural did to destroy it. This illustrates the power of a single book with a message” (ix).

160 similitudes to the opening of a novel. Such, in fact, it was” (4). Indeed, in The First

Christmas Wallace characterizes Ingersoll much like he does Messala, emphasizing verbal wit and mental agility. Ingersoll replies to Wallace’s questions about theology

“[q]uick as a flash,” and Wallace “sat spellbound, listening to a medley of argument, eloquence, wit, satire, audacity, irreverence, poetry, brilliant antitheses, and pungent excoriation of believers in God, Christ, and Heaven, the like of which I had never heard”

(iii). By comparison, Messala wears a “habitual satirical expression” (89) during his interactions with Judah, and the narrator remarks that “[a]s philosophy was taking the place of [Roman] religion, satire was fast substituting reverence; insomuch that in Latin opinion it was to every speech, even to the little diatribes of conversation, as salt to viands, and aroma to wine” (84). Indeed, the juxtaposition of philosophy and religion, and of satire and reverence, effectively summarizes the conflict between Messala and

Judah. But while Judah is hurt and infuriated by his friend’s cutting remarks, partly because his own faith is so fervent, Wallace is “spellbound” and “in a confusion of mind”

(First iii-iv). Ingersoll, he says, had “made me ashamed of my ignorance: and then---here is the unexpected of the affair--as I walked on in the cool darkness, I was aroused for the first time in my life to the importance of religion” (iv). This ignorance, he similarly states in “How I Came to Write Ben-Hur,” “was painfully a spot of deeper darkness” (4).

So far, Wallace’s story structurally resembles most Christian conversion narratives, insofar as Ingersoll’s argument challenged his beliefs and shook his confidence. Yet Wallace is not convicted of his own sin, exactly, but rather his indifference and ignorance. In his words, when he started the magazine story on the

161

Magi, he “was not in the least influenced by religious sentiment. I had no convictions about God or Christ. I neither believed nor disbelieved in them” (2). Similarly, even though he is distressed by Ingersoll’s critique, in both versions of the narrative he does not fear damnation but ignorance: being unable to give an informed opinion about theology. What he labels his “punishment of spirit…ended in a resolution to study the whole matter, if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another” (4). Though Wallace is likely exaggerating his ignorance of religion, given that his first novel (The Fair God) required substantial historical research into

Aztec culture as well as 17th-century Spanish Catholicism, he may well have had no strong personal theological opinions. According to historian Howard Miller, Wallace

“escaped almost entirely the domestic influence of the evangelical Protestantism that, in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, was quickly becoming religious orthodoxy in Protestant America. In his youth and throughout his adult life, he attended organized worship services very irregularly. And, as far as I know, no one ever pressed him to enlarge upon his views of religion” (Miller, personal email). Still, it’s interesting that

Wallace conceptualizes his conversion not as a move from sin to salvation, but from ignorance to information. If Wallace uses his conversion narrative as

“a very clever, and quite effective, bit of marketing” (Miller, personal email), however, he also markets some important ideas about literature and salvation.

Though neither of Wallace’s narratives repeats Ingersoll’s specific arguments against Christianity, it is safe to assume that they focused on logic and reason, and presented religious belief as logically inconsistent and/or irrational. In response, one

162 would expect Wallace to study Christian apologetics (i.e., logical defenses of doctrine and theology), so that he could make more substantive rebuttals in future debates. Yet surprisingly, the opposite happens: Wallace deliberately avoids formal theology or even published sermons in favor of Bible reading. As he reports in “How,” he had initially planned to “study the whole matter” of Christian theology on an intellectual level, but soon changed his mind:

Forthwith a number of practical suggestions assailed me: How should I conduct this study? Delve into theology? I shuddered. The theology of the professors had always seemed to me an indefinitely deep pit with the bones of unprofitable speculations. There were the sermons and commentaries. The very thought of them overwhelmed me with an idea of the shortness of life. No; I would read the Bible and the four Gospels, and rely upon myself. A lawyer of fifteen or twenty years of practice attains confidence peculiar in its mental muscularity, so to speak (“How” 4). As I argued in Chapter 1, many Evangelicals have emphasized the centrality of personal Bible reading, both as a devotional practice and as self-education. Indeed, David

Paul Nord credits early 19th-century efforts to print and distribute Bibles and tracts with

“the birth of mass media in America” (iv), and both Greg Jackson and Candy Brown analyze the late 19th-century literary products of those efforts, including Ben-Hur.

Furthermore, Wallace’s determination to “rely upon [himself]” reflects the common

American Evangelical belief that understanding and interpreting the Bible requires no special training or expertise, and that its plain meaning will be evident to the devout reader. Perhaps more significantly, Wallace objects to theology, sermons, and commentaries not because they are difficult—after all, he cannot resist referencing his own “mental muscularity”—but because they are “unprofitable” and time-consuming (4).

Given the extensive research Wallace completed to ensure his novel’s historical and

163 cultural accuracy, including attention to theological detail, his intellectual efforts went well beyond “read[ing] the Bible and the four Gospels” (4). He even documents some of this research in the essay, asserting that “[o]f the more than seven years given the book, the least part was occupied in actual composition. Research and investigation consumed most of the appropriated time” (8). But in terms of psychological and emotional impact, arguably the vehicle through which Wallace “became a believer in God and Christ” (10),

Scripture itself reigned supreme.

At the beginning of the essay Wallace quotes Matthew 2:1-2, and remarks, “Far back as my memory goes of things read by or to me, those lines took a hold on my imagination beyond every other passage of Scripture. How simple they are! But analyze them, and behold the points of wonder!” (1). Similarly, he later rhapsodizes about the whole story of Christ’s birth: “Could anything be more beautiful? As a mere story, the imagination of man has conceived nothing more crowded with poetry, mystery, and incidents pathetic and sublime, nothing sweeter with human interest, nothing so nearly a revelation of God in person” (5). And despite his alleged “indifference” toward “religious sentiment,” he notes that he found himself writing the Magi narrative “reverentially, and frequently with awe” (2). Of course, many authors have praised the Gospels’ literary quality, and likewise implied a link between aesthetic appreciation and Christian faith.

For Wallace, however, the “points of wonder” lay not only in the recorded narratives but in the gaps between them, the material left to the reader’s imagination. He imagines

Balthasar, for instance, this way:

Think of riding with Balthasar on his great white camel to the meeting appointed beyond Moab; of association with the mysterious Three; of 164

breaking fast with them in the shade of the little tent pitched on the rippled sand; of hearing the ‘grace’ with which they began their repast; of listening as they introduced themselves to one another, telling how and when and where they were severally summoned by the Spirit; of the further guestship in the final journey to Jerusalem, the star our guide! (3). None of these incidents, of course, appear in the Gospel narrative, though all feature in Wallace’s version in Ben-Hur. Reminding his readers of those events helps publicize the novel, and encourages readers to immerse themselves in the story world: by the end of the quote, the star is not simply their guide but ours. But it also suggests a theological warrant for novelizing the life of Christ, an activity Wallace knew would be controversial. Later in “How,” Wallace explains that he “was determined to withhold the reappearance of the Savior until the very last hours,” and that “He should not be present as an actor in any scene of my creation,” except the brief scene where Jesus gives Judah a cup of water (7-8). This sensitivity extended to the sanctioned stage and film adaptations: the 1899 Broadway play produced by Marc Klaw and Abraham Erlanger had “Jesus appear only once at the end of the play—as a dazzling phosphorescent light behind a scrim,” while the 1925 silent film mainly portrays “parts of [Jesus’] body—usually a hand, never his face” (Miller, “Charioteer” 162, 164). Even the well-known 1959 film, starring Charlton Heston as Judah, “does not show Jesus’s face in the film, but uses characters around him as evangelists to bring the charioteer to belief” (Miller,

“Charioteer” 169). This approach is in line with Wallace’s indirect portrayal of Jesus in the novel: while Jesus’ birth, ministry, miracles, and death all have profound effects on the main characters, there is almost no direct interaction until the Crucifixion scene.

In addition to these artistic techniques, Wallace makes a significant comment on his use of the Biblical source material: “Finally, when [Jesus] was come, I would be 165 religiously careful that every word He uttered should be a literal quotation from one of

His sainted biographers” (8). Note first that his standard for religious accuracy is not on the level of action or motivation but utterance. Wallace has an advantage here, as there is relatively little dialogue in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth. Still, none of the other

Biblical characters in the novel are held to this standard: though the basic plot events match up, Wallace freely incorporates extra-Biblical speech, events, backgrounds, and characteristics. Perhaps more provocatively, on two occasions Judah directly participates in Biblical plot events, taking the role of a character not specifically named in any of the

Gospels.32 Privileging Jesus’ specific words no doubt alludes to the Christian belief that the Bible is the inspired Word of God, and Wallace’s attention to “literal quotation[s]” would satisfy more conservative audiences concerned about the purity of the Biblical text. Interestingly, however, he also labels the Gospel writers Jesus’ “sainted biographers.” Though this description may be tongue-in-cheek, it again highlights the

Gospels’ literary nature: they are not just a source of sublime inspiration but also a deliberately constructed genre. Overall, the rules Wallace ostensibly set for himself suggest that the novel treats Scripture as sacred, but that it serves as a plausible literary

32 The first event draws from Mark 14: “And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him: And he left the linen cloth, and fled from them naked” (Mark 14:51-52). Some scholars have speculated that the young man was Mark himself, and that the incident is intended to verify that he was an eyewitness to Jesus’s arrest. If Wallace knew of this theory, and he most likely did, then making Judah the (reluctant) disciple who flees naked may be a wink to the audience regarding the novel’s interaction with the Bible. The second event has more thematic resonance: at the Crucifixion, “Ben-Hur thought of the draught he had had at the well near Nazareth; an impulse seized him; catching up the sponge, he dipped it into the vessel [of sour wine], and started for the cross. […] [H]e ran on, and put the sponge to the Nazarene's lips” (55). In this case, the Gospel accounts (Matthew 27:48, Mark 15:36, and John 19:29) only say that a bystander or perhaps a Roman soldier offered the wine, so Wallace’s account does not necessarily contradict the Bible story. 166 supplement, filling in gaps in the Biblical story while keeping Jesus “before the reader, the object of superior interest throughout” (7).

Given that Biblical novelizations were almost unheard of in 1880, and that many

Christian readers of the time considered novels morally dubious, Wallace had to walk a fine line in publishing and publicizing Ben-Hur. He does so, both in this essay and in The

First Christmas, by emphasizing the novel’s evangelistic potential, not its historical accuracy or swashbuckling plot twists. “Long before I was through with my book,” he writes at the end of “How I Came to Write Ben-Hur,” “I became a believer in God and

Christ” (10). His confession is even more forceful in The First Christmas, where he cites

“a conviction amounting to absolute belief in God and the Divinity of Christ” (viii). This represents a clear reversal of his earlier doubt and ignorance, and it comes about not by debating theology or researching the historicity of the Gospels, but by reading and creatively engaging with the Gospel narratives. Perhaps Wallace imagined that his readers might face similar obstacles to faith, and might undergo a similar process in reading Ben-Hur. Perhaps, as Miller suggests, Wallace shrewdly used Christianity to broaden the novel’s commercial appeal—to strengthen the Ben-Hur brand, as it were— regardless of his personal beliefs or lack thereof. In any case, his apologia models a surrogate Scripture that need not undermine basic Christian belief, even if it takes some creative liberties in the name of evangelism.

3.3 Literature Review

Wallace’s personal fame certainly bolstered Ben-Hur’s popularity, as did the wide range of theatrical and film adaptations and merchandising tie-ins. Compared to novels

167 like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, Ben-Hur has received little attention, even though both Wallace and Stowe effectively combine romance, realism, and Christian piety. Ryan and Shamir attribute this gap to different institutional and disciplinary expectations for antebellum and postbellum fiction:

If antebellum fiction was dominated by romantic and sentimental styles, the postbellum sort was shaped by realist sensibilities. If antebellum fiction was concerned with ideal forms and subjective sensations, the postbellum sort was committed to objectivity and empiricism. If fiction such as Stowe’s and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s was inspired by spiritual and/or religious truths, that of William Dean Howells and Theodore Dreiser scrutinized the growing regard for wealth and conspicuous consumption that defined the Gilded Age (10). While these generalizations are perhaps convenient for organizing anthologies and survey courses, and comforting for scholars who equate progressive modernity with secularization, they overlook “the abiding importance of religious and spiritual themes in postbellum literature. […] Uncritical belief in the unequivocal triumph of realism ensures that a vibrant literary tradition of evangelical fiction (with huge crowd appeal) has rarely been a topic of study” (Ryan and Shamir 11). In a similar vein, Howard Miller argues that

Ben-Hur “took up a unique position between the sacred and the secular” that enabled

“Americans in the late Victorian era and well into the twentieth century [to embrace] many aspects of modernity without rejecting religion. They maintained their religious identities while feeling free to take part in the emerging marketplace of American consumer culture” (“Charioteer” 161, 154). As I argue throughout this dissertation,

Christian bestsellers’ representations of the Bible play an important role in this negotiation, because the Bible was central both to Evangelical readers’ standards of good literature and to their broader reading experience.

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For the purposes of this review, I focus on two themes: Ben-Hur’s popularity among readers, and Wallace’s engagement with the Bible and Christian theology. To some extent these themes are mutually reinforcing, since the novel’s religious content arguably drove much of its popularity, especially among Evangelical readers who would otherwise avoid reading novels. This phenomenon certainly extended to the stage adaptation of the novel: according to Miller, “[m]inisters encouraged their congregants to view the play—just as they had urged them to read the novel—setting aside any reservations they might have about the morality of attending the theater” (“Charioteer”

162). It’s plausible that the 1925 and 1959 film versions had a similar religious appeal since both films retain some of the novel’s Christian elements, and it’s likely that at least some filmgoers purchased and read the novel. However, since 20th-century Evangelical attitudes toward film differed significantly from 19th-century Evangelical attitudes toward novels, and since the section of the novel I am analyzing (the Magi’s meeting in Book

First) does not appear in either of the films, this section does not specifically engage with theater or film studies scholarship on Wallace or Ben-Hur.

Since Ben-Hur directly reimagines so much Biblical content, Wallace had to negotiate carefully between fiction and sacred writ. As he was among the first novelists to present Jesus as a central literary character (J.H. Ingraham’s The Prince of the House of David did so in 1855, but in an epistolary format), surveys of 19th-century religious fiction often use it to mark the transition from Victorian to Modernist Christian fiction.

Predictably, many critical responses to Ben-Hur consider the novel’s religious contexts, both to address its literary themes and to situate it as a Christian bestseller. Indeed,

169 though the book’s early sales were lower than expected, by early 1885 “[s]ales averaged seventy-five copies a day” (Thiesen 35) and by 1912 a million copies had been sold

(Swansburg). Moreover, in an 1893 survey 83% of public libraries reported high demand for Ben-Hur (Hart 183). Early reviews of the novel often cited its religious content, whether to explain its popularity or dismiss its literary quality, though until the 1940s few scholars deliberately engaged with Wallace’s ideas and techniques. The earliest substantial criticism of Ben-Hur appeared in Carl Van Doren’s The American Novel

(1921), an expansion of his contributions to The Cambridge History of English and

American Literature (1907-1921). Van Doren situates Wallace as a literary descendent of

Cooper and Stowe, specifically as part of the “Evangelical sentimentalism” of the late

19th century. By this time, he argues, “the old suspicion of the novel was nearly dead, even among those petty [religious] sects and sectarians that so long feared the effects of it” (122). Sentimental novels, he suggests, hastened this process because they offered

Evangelical readers morally acceptable fiction, often steeped in Christian theology or at least conventional piety. Ben-Hur partly utilized this formula, but it won “practically the ultimate victory over village opposition to the novel” because of its “larger pretensions and broader scope” (123).

While Van Doren praises Wallace’s “vitality which probably has a touch of genius,” he focuses on Ben-Hur’s popular appeal, claiming that “thousands have read

[Ben-Hur] who have read no other novel except perhaps Uncle Tom’s Cabin and have hardly thought of either as a novel at all” (123). This last phrase is particularly interesting in terms of these novels’ roles as Christian fiction. Stowe went to great lengths to defend

170 the authenticity and accuracy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: she claims in the novel’s preface that it represented “not the half that could be told of the unspeakable whole” (xiv), and subsequently published The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin to present “the Original Facts and

Documents Upon Which the Story Is Founded.” In a similar way, Wallace’s essay “How

I Came to Write Ben-Hur” tries to connect his novel to trusted Biblical narratives, and to emphasize its historical, cultural, and geographical accuracy. Stowe’s claims may relate more closely to her social and political activism than to religion, insofar as she tried to represent slavery accurately to encourage its abolition, but both authors were heavily invested in readers’ seeing their novels as both moral and true. That is, if Evangelical readers considered novels a waste of time because they were mere stories—and often lurid stories at that—then Wallace may have succeeded partly by distancing himself from the genre. He does refer to Ben-Hur as “a novel with Jesus Christ as its hero” (“How” 7), perhaps because he had already published The Fair God, but overall he presents it as an imaginative supplement to the Bible, rather than a wholly new creative text.

Henry Van Slooten offers another perspective on Wallace’s success. He considers the “story of [Ben-Hur’s] success with recognized literary critics” as well as “its development as a popular novel,” to consider how artistic quality and commercial popularity interact (1). In doing so, he partly anticipates Jane Tompkins’ argument in

Sensational Designs (1986) that popular but critically denigrated books “provid[ed] men and women with a means of ordering the world they inhabited,” and that understanding their popularity requires “a grasp of the cultural realities that made these novels meaningful” (xiii). Specifically, Van Slooten considers the effects of Wallace’s family

171 background, education, and military experience on his writing, focusing on Wallace’s status as “an amateur in the pure sense of the word.” Because Wallace “was under no economic pressure [to write] and because his interest was so well sustained...he put forth his very best efforts at all times, [so] he was able to come very near to reaching the limits of his abilities” (64). Still, most pre-1950 responses to Ben-Hur disparaged Wallace’s writing skill, even as they acknowledged the novel’s popular appeal on religious grounds, so “to most critics Wallace's style kept him from being a literary novelist” (Van Slooten

95).

Van Slooten also points out the novel’s regular placement on recommended reading lists for children, as well as the popularity of the stage and film adaptations.

While he contends that the novel’s subtitle (“A Tale of the Christ”) “had little to do with” its overall popularity (98), he also suggests that similar titles—and similar content—in midcentury Sunday school books enhanced Wallace’s popularity. According to one critic he cites, Ben-Hur “is an epochal book because it was the first American novel to break through the rustic and village opposition to popular fiction. ‘Ben Hur’ rode that gilded chariot through the front door to enter the homes of the Hard-Shell Baptists and

Methodists and other non-reading sects, and to an eager welcome” (Leisy 97, qtd. in Van

Slooten 99). Indeed, some readers “came to the novel because it was sanctioned by religious groups, who were unwilling to grant such sanction to other novels” (Van

Slooten 137). Overall, Van Slooten attributes Ben-Hur’s popularity to a combination of its action-packed plot and its religious content, though it was “so simple in its religious theme that few sectarian thinkers could do other than approve what they read in it” (137).

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Critical interest in the novel waned33 after 1950, perhaps because it fit poorly within the “American Renaissance” model of religious skepticism, democratic individualism, and intense psychological realism. The advent of New Historicism in the

1980s, however, contributed to “the growing interest in the Ben-Hur tradition since 1990”

(Ryan et al., “Selected Bibliography” 249). A good example of this is Paul Gutjahr’s

1993 article on the novel’s cultural appeal, later reprinted in his 1999 book An American

Bible. Gutjahr acknowledges the difficulty of reconstructing any novel’s full cultural context, but focuses “on the Protestant intellectual milieu” of Wallace’s day to analyze how Ben-Hur was “able to encourage a Protestant reading public to make peace with a form of literature that it had long decried as insidious and corruptive” (“Historicizing”

54). In particular, he argues that “the success of Ben-Hur was partly a ‘textual’ matter of its conjunction of history and romance and partly a ‘reader response’ matter of how it could be used by Protestant readers in an attempt to contend with the scientific challenges to the credibility of the Bible and Christian faith” (55). Put another way, Wallace’s combination of adventure and piety made Ben-Hur an attractive story, but it also potentially equipped 19th-century Protestant readers with the tools to respond to contemporary challenges to their faith.

Gutjahr stresses the influence of Darwin and Comte on late 19th-century philosophy and theology, particularly the demand for “the causal proof needed to validate the Bible and its claims” (58). While earlier models of Christian epistemology relied on

33 A notable exception to this trend is Robert and Katharine Morsberger’s extensive biography, Lew Wallace: Militant Romantic (1980). While the book includes several useful details on Wallace’s religious beliefs and their role in Ben-Hur, the authors naturally focus on historical data rather than literary analysis. 173 vertical causation, e.g. God creating the world ex nihilo, both Darwin and Comte demanded strictly horizontal explanations, e.g. natural selection over millions of years.

One result of this tension, Gutjahr argues, was the “doctrine of separate spheres of influence” (59), the idea that religion “had to do with the spiritual, with the heart, with religious experience, and with moral sense and moral action--areas not open to scientific investigation” (Marsden 20, qtd. in Gutjahr 59). While parts of Ben-Hur do present faith as mainly emotional and moral, particularly in the contrast between Judah and Messala,

Wallace’s attention to geographical and cultural detail offered readers a historical basis for the Bible’s theological claims. For instance, Wallace often uses genealogies and historical details to situate his characters and plot events, perhaps in a deliberate imitation of the Gospel of Luke. Protestant readers responded enthusiastically to this technique, linking the Bible’s historical reality to the trustworthiness of its moral and theological teachings. Overall, Gutjahr argues, “the initial religious readers of this novel probably read it not simply because it was educative or entertaining, but because it was both […]

Protestant readers were won over because the more edifying characteristics of the book allowed them to hide their pleasure in reading a revenge romance.” More importantly, however, they “accepted Wallace's book because its historical accuracy and depictions of the Holy Land interfaced with their already present concern with the way that issues of biblical authenticity required historical precision” (64, 65).

Charles Lippy, a religious studies scholar, takes a more sociological approach to the novel’s popularity. His book Being Religious, American Style (1994) explores what

174 he terms “popular religiosity” throughout American religious history, including how it is expressed in creative works like novels. For Lippy, religiosity

takes in both beliefs and practices associated with official religion as well as those that come from other sources. It appreciates individual blends of belief and practice without claiming that any one mix is normative. Religiosity accepts what people actually think and do without a priori judgments as to whether a specific belief or practice is really religious or not. Religiosity highlights what people are about in creating and maintaining worldviews that give meaning to life (9). While these “blends of belief and practice” are often unique to an individual, and may hold little value outside that individual’s attempts to “give meaning to life,” Lippy argues that there is enough overlap to track larger trends, especially using evidence from mass media consumption. Specifically, he contends that there “is a central zone of religious symbols, values, and beliefs—many of them provided by official, formal religious traditions—that comprises the totality of religion in a culture” (10). For instance, many of

Wallace’s readers shared similar convictions about the existence of God, the centrality of the Bible, and the divinity of Jesus, whether or not they officially joined a Christian church. However, as individuals draw both on “this central zone and subsidiary zones,”

Lippy notes, “they erect for themselves worlds of meaning, they create identities for themselves, they engage in the age-old task of religion by finding a way to make sense out of their lives” (10). Put another way, popular religiosity both supplements and applies official religion, both by drawing on formal beliefs/structures and by exploring the philosophical and theological ground outside them for personal use.

Within the context of the late 19th century, Lippy highlights the growing role of novels in popular religiosity, both as vehicles for particular religious ideas and as tools with which individuals could shape their own religiosity. Unlike formal theological 175 study, which often required specialized training and education, “novels provide a vital source for discerning ideas and ways of thinking to which ordinary people had access.”

Naturally, Lippy focuses his attention on popular religious novels, including The Gates

Ajar, Ben-Hur, and In His Steps. Such novels, he claims, “represent an important entrée into the religious consciousness of ordinary people” (147). Lippy classifies Ben-Hur as

“historical fiction with a biblical base” and “on one level,” “a fictional biography of

Jesus” (150, 151). While he suggests that the novel’s adventure elements ultimately outshine its religious message for most readers, he also stresses its importance as a source of popular religiosity:

[W]hat is vital about Ben Hur and cognate works is the way they strip Jesus of the centuries of christological doctrine that mark formal Christianity and make Jesus accessible to ordinary men and women. It is easier to believe in the Jesus of historical fiction than in the Jesus of the New Testament. The Jesus of fiction cannot be identified as a Baptist or a Methodist or a Catholic; such labels are irrelevant. The Jesus of fiction, as in Ben Hur, is one whose power common folk can grasp, understand, and use. […] Ben Hur’s Jesus is one who comes alive in the mind and imagination of the reader or viewer, one who can be fashioned into the kind of Christ that one wants or needs in the continuing pilgrimage to give meaning to life (151). While it is true that relatively little of Ben-Hur dwells on doctrine or theology, perhaps reflecting Wallace’s own lack of interest, Lippy underestimates Wallace’s commitment to orthodox Christology and the extent to which 19th-century readers used the novel to reinforce their own formal Christian beliefs. According to Wallace’s own account in

“How I Came to Write Ben-Hur” (1893), he painstakingly limited nearly all his representations of Jesus to details present in the New Testament, and in response many

Christian denominations and organizations explicitly endorsed Ben-Hur and its dramatic adaptations—rare praise for a novel at the time. 176

Shaun Lighty uses Lippy’s framework to engage with 19th-century popular religion in terms of Ben-Hur’s popularity, but offers a more explicitly biographical reading of Wallace’s goals and motivations. Specifically, he argues that much of

Wallace’s life was a quest for legitimacy, in terms of “manhood, popular religion, and celebrity” (5). Though Wallace set aside his youthful “artistic and literary pursuits” because they “were not then viewed as legitimate or manly full-time occupations,” Lighty claims, a series of “professional, financial, and personal failures…prompted him to reevaluate the manly identity to which he had aspired. He resumed his artistic and literary passions as therapy for the pain of failure” (5). The resulting celebrity allowed Wallace to reclaim personal and cultural legitimacy, in large part because Ben-Hur “tapped into a popular religious yearning for certainty in faith matters” (5). Lighty’s second chapter, on popular religious sentiments in 19th-century America, is most relevant to this study.

Based on Wallace’s conversion narrative in his Autobiography, Lighty argues that

Wallace’s return to religion and to writing represent an attempt “to rediscover childlike or feminine characteristics” (39), but that Wallace reasserted his manhood by basing his novel on self-reliance and scientific research.

As I also argue elsewhere in this chapter, Wallace’s conversion narrative was unconventional, insofar as it emphasized ignorance and investigation rather than sin and grace. Yet it was also in line with conventional Protestant emphases on emotion, Bible reading, and individualism. For Lighty, the most significant detail is that “Wallace became a Christian from outside the church” (45, Lighty’s emphasis). Because he bypassed traditional ecclesiastical structures and, to a large extent, specific doctrinal or

177 theological debates, Wallace thus represents the “popular religiosity” of his day (46). Yet

Christians like Wallace still felt an intense “need to experience faith,” even outside church, and Ben-Hur’s historical realism gave them that opportunity (Lighty 49). Overall,

Lighty argues, the combination of an exciting plot, scientifically reliable detail, and comfortable piety let “Wallace populariz[e] his conclusions through a mass medium,” while “those who read Ben-Hur appropriated Wallace’s conclusions in turn for their own spiritual benefit” (54).

Howard Miller, a prominent Wallace scholar whose work focuses on the history of American religion, has produced several articles on Ben-Hur, as well as periodic invited lectures at the General Lew Wallace Study & Museum. Much of Miller’s work considers the novel alongside other cultural manifestations of the Ben-Hur tradition, from dramatic performances to licensed commercial merchandise. For this review, I focus on his 2008 article “The Charioteer and the Christ: Ben-Hur in America from the Gilded

Age to the Culture Wars.” Using Ben-Hur as a “lens through which to view American culture,” in this article Miller seeks to “illustrate and explain the peculiar way in which the United States became ‘modern’ in the century-and-a-quarter since the book’s publication” (153-154). While most narratives of modernization emphasize secularization, Miller argues that “Americans in the late Victorian era and well into the twentieth century embraced many aspects of modernity without rejecting religion. They maintained their religious identities while feeling free to take part in the emerging marketplace of American consumer culture” (154). Ben-Hur played a central role in this negotiation, both as a popular religious novel and as a cultural icon that penetrated

178 everything from sermons to Broadway plays to a mid-1920s “Ben-Hur line of toiletries”

(167). Wallace accomplished this, Miller argues, by placing his novel (and the later dramatic adaptations) “between the sacred and the secular” (161).

As his title suggests, Miller focuses his analysis on how the relationship between the charioteer (Judah Ben-Hur) and the Christ “resonated with some of the most significant issues in late Victorian culture: gender and family; slavery and freedom; ethnicity and empire; and nationhood and citizenship” (155). For example, he reads both

Judah and Jesus as complex amalgams of masculinity and femininity: both are portrayed as physically beautiful and initially sensitive, but Judah “quickly develops the masculine attributes” necessary to defeat Messala, while Jesus “dies the death of the Victorian hero”

(157, 158). Along similar lines, while the novel’s conversion narrative is recognizably

Christian, Miller emphasizes

the irenic, non-sectarian way in which [Wallace] told his “tale of the Christ.” The three Wise Men who appear in the novel’s opening pages each reject fanaticism, sectarianism, and bigotry in favor of a shared belief in the One True God. Judah’s conversion, which begins at the well in Nazareth, proceeds slowly and cautiously; the accounts that he offers of Jesus’s miraculous powers are not based on emotion or faith; they are simply factual, almost clinical reports of what he has repeatedly observed with his own eyes (158-160).34

34 David Reynolds makes a similar argument about the novel’s religious non-specificity, in his 2013 conference presentation: “The century saw not only a surge in evangelical churches but also the tremendous growth of Catholicism, plus a great splintering of sects and offshoots, from Mormonism to Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventism. In the face of this welter of faiths, Wallace creates a pandenominational novel that holds appeal to people of all outlooks. He opens the novel in extremely panreligious fashion, emphasizing the conflicting religious backgrounds of the three Magi, who are unified in their devotion to Christ. Also under the Christian umbrella come devout Jews like Ben Hur and Simonides, and we see many pagans affected by Jesus as well” (“Between Dime Novel and Sacred Scripture”). Dr. Reynolds kindly sent me a copy of his conference script, as the conference proceedings were not published.

179

Wallace’s emphasis on fact and logic are equally important here in terms of Ben-

Hur’s role in negotiating modernity. As Gutjahr points out, many 19th-century critiques of Christian belief rested on charges that it was irrational, and many liberal theologians responded by emphasizing emotion rather than reason. Ben-Hur offered Christian readers the emotional satisfaction of Judah’s revenge and romance, but simultaneously gave them a realistic and highly detailed setting for the historic events of their faith. Moreover, as the broader Ben-Hur tradition developed culturally and commercially, the various stakeholders skillfully “combined unprecedented spectacle and action with deep spirituality, the whole of which was then skillfully sold in the marketplace to a wide general audience…a negotiation among sacred and secular themes, calculated to reach the largest number of potential viewers” (171). In Miller’s reading, this process not only guaranteed Wallace’s pervasive influence on American religious culture, but paved the way for other texts (e.g. The Passion of the Christ) to tell unabashedly religious stories in an explicitly modern (or even postmodern) cultural marketplace.

3.4 An Old, Old Story: The Magi’s Arrival

As the first plot event in Ben-Hur, the narrative of the Magi’s meeting (Book

First, Chapters 1-5) holds natural rhetorical importance. It is Wallace’s first chance to establish his major themes, to set the tone of the narrative and the pace of the plot, and perhaps most importantly to demonstrate his ostensibly reverent attitude toward the

Biblical setting and content. This last task is even more important given that Wallace originally planned to send the entire section “to the Harper Brothers,” believing that “they might be pleased to publish it as a serial in their magazine” (“The First Christmas” iii).

180

As Gardner points out, serial novel publication often brought with it a series of negotiations between author and readers, both in terms of plot and characterization. In his words, the “unique practice and pleasures of serial production and consumption…invited an ongoing and interactive relationship with readers” (290). In this case, seeing a cherished Bible story rewritten could easily offend the magazine’s more devout readers, and enough complaints about the subject matter—or for that matter, about Wallace’s dense and at times overblown writing style—could doom the 26,000-word novella to a very short publication run. In short, even though Book First eventually proved popular enough with readers to be reissued separately as The First Christmas (1902), it also represented a risky and potentially controversial approach to sacred writ.

In one sense, Book First is the most explicitly Biblical part of the entire novel: nearly all the major characters also appear in the New Testament, most of the plot details match the Gospel accounts,35 and the narrative incorporates several direct quotes from

Matthew and Luke. Likewise, by and large it expresses orthodox Christian views about

35 A notable difference involves the question of when the Magi see Jesus and present their gifts. In Wallace’s account, as in many popular versions of the story, the visit occurs twelve days after Jesus’ birth, in Bethlehem. Matthew 2, the only Gospel account to mention the Magi, does not specify a timeframe for the visit. However, Hodge and Chaffey highlights several textual details that suggest that it took place at least a year later. First, when the Magi arrive they enter a “house,” where they see “the young child with Mary his mother” (Mt. 2:11). It is plausible that Mary and Joseph would have moved from the inn to a house within twelve days of Jesus’ birth. However, the Greek manuscript specifically refers to Jesus as a paidion (infant) rather than a brephos (newborn). More to the point, in Mt. 2:7 Herod meets secretly with the Magi and “inquired of them diligently what time the star appeared.” Soon afterwards, he ordered the genocide of all male children in the region who were two years old and under, “according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men” (Mt. 2:16). Hodge and Chaffey suggest that Herod “may have at least doubled the time from when the star first appeared to the wise men, thinking this would guarantee that the child would be killed, even if the information was off” (“Christmas Timeline”). For the purposes of Wallace’s narrative, such a long delay would be problematic: he states that the Magi initially met together “on the afternoon of…the twenty-fifth day of December” (31), that Jesus was born that night, and that the Magi meet with Herod eleven days later. There would be no good reason for them to stay in Jerusalem for a year or more, so Book First conveniently ends with the Magi finding Jesus and “worship[ing] without a doubt” (76). 181

Jesus’ birth and nature, particularly in terms of divine interventions such as the miraculous star and the various angel messengers. Wallace even goes so far as to claim that the Magi met together on December 25, perhaps in an attempt to establish historical continuity between the Biblical events and traditional Christian observance.36 These similarities between the novel and the Gospel accounts may even account for the relative lack of attention to this scene in Ben-Hur scholarship. However, I focus here on

Wallace’s departures from his New Testament sources—in other words, on how the

Magi’s meeting serves as a highly un-Biblical pocket of speculation and imagination, especially in terms of comparative religion and religious history. Wallace portrays the

Magi not as Persian mystics or as “kings of Orient,” but rather as representatives of ancient religions and civilizations. Some see their claim that “Heaven may be won…by

Faith, Love, and Good Works” (30) as evidence of Wallace’s “nonsectarian and quite secular” agenda (Reynolds 2). But their origin stories fit more consistently within a model of Christian supersessionism, particularly the idea that other cultures and religions find their perfect expression in Christian faith. If, as Wallace claims at the end of the novel, Ben-Hur’s investment in the Roman catacomb can “supersed[e] the Caesars,” then this scene suggests that the Magi’s nascent Christian faith—and perhaps postbellum

America—is destined to overshadow its own cultural forerunners.

36 Neither Matthew nor Luke specifies the date (or even the time of year) of Jesus’ birth, though some interpreters suggest a September birth. These interpreters argue that the shepherds would not be “abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” in December (Luke 2:8), and that Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist, who was six months older than Jesus, was born in December or January. According to historian Andrew McGowan, by AD 200 a letter by Clement revealed that “several different days had been proposed by various Christian groups,” and December 25 was not among the dates listed (“How December 25 Became Christmas”). 182

Supersessionism attempts to define the relationship between the Mosaic covenant and the New Covenant, and by extension between the Christian Church and Orthodox

Judaism. According to Michael Vlach, it “is the view that the New Testament church is the new and/or true Israel that has forever superseded the nation Israel as the people of

God,” such that “the church has become the sole inheritor of God’s covenant blessings originally promised to national Israel in the OT” (60). Supersessionism is often associated with “replacement theology,” though more recent adherents use the term

“fulfillment theology” to downplay the idea that the church has outright replaced the

Jews as God’s chosen people. Because they influenced early Christian thought, especially once Gentile Christians became the majority, supersessionist beliefs have been blamed for anti-Semitic attitudes and actions, including the Holocaust. In response, during

Vatican II the Catholic Church distanced itself from supersessionism, and a 2001 publication of the Pontifical Biblical Commission states that the church “understands her own existence as a participation in the election of Israel and in a vocation that belongs, in the first place, to Israel, despite the fact that only a small number of Israelites accepted it”

(The Jewish People and Their Sacred Scriptures in the Christian Bible). Contemporary

Protestant attitudes toward supersessionism vary by denomination, though some mainstream Protestant denominations have explicitly denounced it. As with most elements of Christian theology and doctrine, Wallace does not specify whether he personally believed in supersessionism, though certain elements of Judah’s conversion

(outside the scope of this chapter) suggest at least modest support for it.

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In “How I Came to Write Ben-Hur,” Wallace notes that the Biblical account of the Magi “took a hold on [his] imagination beyond every other passage of Scripture” (1).

The story certainly inspired much of his research for the novel. According to Larry

Paarlberg, director of the Lew Wallace Study and Museum, Wallace relied heavily on

John Geikie’s two-volume encyclopedia The Life and Words of Christ (1877) for his historical research. In fact, an April 1887 article in the Crawfordsville Saturday Evening

Journal reprinted a letter from Wallace’s wife Susan, who stated “that Geikie's Life of

Christ was the reference book most used after the Bible in the writing of Ben-Hur”

(Spragg, “Gen. Wallace on the Home Front”). Like Wallace, Geikie highly valued historical verisimilitude: his preface states that he “tried in this book to restore, as far as

[he] could, the world in which Jesus moved; [...] the events, social, religious, and political, not mentioned in the Gospels, that formed the history of His lifetime, so far as they can be recovered” (viii). Similarly, at the end of the preface he hopes “that [his] book, as a whole, presents a reliable picture of the Life of Our Lord in the midst of the world in which He moved, and that it will throw light on the narratives in the Gospels, by filling up their brief outlines, where possible” (ix).

Given that Geikie’s book was considered “the best in Christological literature”

(qtd. in Gatrall 56) and that a one-volume reprint appeared only two years before Wallace published “How I Came to Write Ben-Hur” in The Youths’ Companion, it’s possible that

Wallace deliberately mimicked Geikie’s approach in his own account. There, he states that “after weeks of reflection, at last [he] decided to use the blank [between Jesus’ birth and the start of his ministry] to show the religious and political condition of the world at

184 the time of the coming” (6). In other words, like Geikie, Wallace explored “the world in which Jesus moved” that “was not mentioned in the Gospels” (Geikie viii). By doing so he could legitimize his fictional efforts, demonstrating both his own intellectual rigor and his fidelity to his Biblical sources, as long as the result “demonstrate[d] a necessity for a

Saviour” (“How” 6).

In terms of the Magi specifically, Wallace paid especially close attention to

Geikie’s analysis. His personal copy of Life and Words includes several marginal notations in Chapter XI (“The Magi”), though he does not always agree with Geikie’s conclusions. For example, like many scholars, Geikie portrays the Magi as Persian and suggests that an astrological interpretation of a comet, combined with “the prophecy of

Balaam, one of their own caste” (146; cf. Numbers 22-24) prompted them to seek the

Messiah. Later in the chapter, Geikie argues that Jewish theologians had also concluded that “a great star would appear in heaven when the Messiah came” (148), and summarizes some of the later legends that arose about the star. Wallace added this note beside the first quote: “The ‘star’ however did not tell them where the Messiah was born.

How did they know that?” As we will see, on this point Wallace prefers a more fanciful explanation– that the Holy Spirit led each of the Magi from their respective homelands– perhaps because it allowed for more complex origin stories.

If Wallace did adapt Geikie’s strategy of supplementing the Gospels to make them more believable, then starting his novel with the Magi is an interesting choice. In general, authors of historical fiction must craft their plots and characters around established facts, to establish a believable connection between the real world and the

185 story world. Wallace’s Biblical subject matter compounded this challenge: most of his readers considered the Bible both historically and religiously authoritative, especially when it came to the words and actions of Jesus. In this context, Wallace notes, he was

“religiously careful that every word He [Jesus] uttered should be a literal quotation from one of His sainted biographers” (“How” 8). By contrast, only Matthew’s gospel mentions the Magi at all, and his account includes only one direct line of dialogue (Mt. 2:3) and only the barest details about their origins and motivations. This lack of detail offered

Wallace significant poetic license to develop the Magi’s stories, and eventually to integrate Balthasar into the novel’s other plots.

As I will argue in later sections, Wallace used that license to advance a supersessionist view of history and culture. However, I believe he focused on the Magi for another reason: popular legends about them formed a type of surrogate Scripture, one that most American Christians not only acknowledged but embraced. Technically,

Matthew’s account does not identify the Magi as kings, does not give them names, does not associate them with any country more specific than “the east,” and does not even specify that there were three of them. Yet by 1880, their extra-Biblical mythology was highly developed and integrated into Christian traditions. For example, John Henry

Hopkins’ popular carol “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” first composed in 1857 and published in 1862, included three solos about the Magi’s gifts, one each for Gaspar

(gold), Melchior (frankincense), and Balthasar (myrrh). Geikie likewise mentions some of the popular legends about the Magi, including an account from Bede about their physical appearance. As shown in Figure 1, Wallace annotated this section fairly heavily,

186 suggesting that he used it to craft his own characters. Interestingly, while Geikie mainly relies on historical and Biblical sources in this chapter of Life and Words of Christ, here he acknowledges that details about the Magi “are as entirely passed over by the

Apocrypha as by the Gospels, but later tradition abundantly atones for the omission”

(153). The noncanonical contributions to the myth of the Magi may have been particularly attractive to Wallace, as they too imaginatively fill gaps in the Biblical account. While tracing Wallace’s specific sources for the Magi in Ben-Hur is outside the scope of this study, it is worth remembering that he wrote in response to multiple traditions—both canonical and otherwise—involving the Magi’s history and purpose.

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Fig 1. Wallace's annotations of The Life and Words of Christ, p. 153. It is unclear how Wallace used the numbers in his annotations, but they may correspond to sections of his notes for Ben-Hur.

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As the novel opens, Wallace’s first task is to establish some degree of continuity between his readers and his story world. Mitchell and Parsons suggest that “[t]he historical novel can be considered an act of memory, as Mieke Bal describes it, designed to bring the past into the present and to shape it for present purposes” (13). This “cultural memory,” Bal and colleagues contend, is “the product of collective agency rather than the result of psychic or historical accident” (vii). That is, memory is not merely an individual narrative but a process of communal interpretation, both in terms of the historicity of a given event and of its significance to the audience’s present. The Judeo-Christian tradition relies heavily on this process to organize and interpret human history, both in terms of historical drivers and of historical purpose. For example, much of the Old

Testament emphasizes God’s covenant with Israel, and its authors use events like the

Exodus to show divine control over Israel’s fate and prosperity. This is particularly evident in Israel’s religious rituals, many of which reference or even repeat events recorded in the Pentateuch. Christianity takes a similar approach to Messianic prophecy, and likewise adapts some rituals (particularly baptism and Communion) that repeat

Biblical events. More to the point for this study, supersessionism hinges on the idea that

Judaism’s primary purpose was to create the conditions for the emergence of Christianity.

These dual processes of repetition and interpretation are evident in Wallace’s epigraphs for the novel and for Book First. The latter starts with a selection from Milton’s

1629 poem “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” (published in 1645), while the former is a quote from the German Romantic writer Jean Paul Richter: “But this repetition of the

189 old story is just the fairest charm of domestic discourse. If we can often repeat to ourselves sweet thoughts without ennui, why shall not another be suffered to awaken them within us still oftener” (Wallace 3; italics in original).37 In its original context,

Richter’s quote has no particular religious significance. However, for Wallace the

“repetition of the old story” clearly alludes to his retelling of the Gospels, and the quote implies that repeating Bible stories can likewise “awaken [sweet thoughts] within us still oftener.” The Milton excerpt similarly evokes tranquility: “But peaceful was the night/

Wherein the Prince of Light/ His reign of peace upon the earth began” (ll. 3-5). More significantly, it locates this particular repetition within a Western and Anglophone

Christian tradition, much like the other Books’ epigraphs.38 This paratextual content suggests a cultural and literary continuity between East and West, and encourages readers to find something familiar in the otherwise foreign setting.

Wallace continues this pattern in his description of Balthasar and the Judean desert surrounding him: the setting is far removed from his American readers, but he grounds his description in more familiar Biblical references and allusions. The first paragraph alone, for instance, mentions “the vine-growers of Jericho,” the Euphrates, and

“the pasture-lands of Moab and Ammon” (5). Genesis 2:14 identifies the Euphrates as

37 The quote is from Hesperus (1795), which was translated into English as Hesperus, Or Forty-five Dog- post-days: a Biography (1865). According to the translator, Hesperus was “the first of Richter’s romances which took hold of the German public,” and it “brought Richter to Weimar” (iii). 38 The other epigraphs are from American, English, or European literary sources. Book Second quotes Childe Harold, Book Third quotes Antony and Cleopatra, Book Fourth quotes Schiller's Don Carlos, Book Fifth quotes poems by Wordsworth and James Shirley, Book Sixth quotes Coleridge, Book Seventh quotes Thomas Aldrich, and Book Eighth quotes Keats as well as Jesus (“I am the resurrection and the life,” John 11:25).

190 one of the rivers originating in Eden, and Moab, Ammon, and Jericho all figure prominently in the Israelites’ attempts to conquer and control the Promised Land.

Similarly, the narrator characterizes Balthasar’s face as “brown as a parched coffee- berry” and “almost negro in color,” highlighting his racial otherness (6, 9). Yet Balthasar too is familiar: when he first appears, his face is “so hidden by a red kufiyeh (as the kerchief of the head is at this day called by the children of the desert) as to be but in part visible” (6). On the balance, these descriptions create some strategic distance between the reader and the story: though Balthasar’s kerchief may be recognizable, he himself is clearly foreign.

In the very next paragraph, however, Wallace introduces a striking anachronism:

It may be doubted if the people of the West ever overcome the impression made upon them by the first view of a camel equipped and loaded for the desert. Custom, so fatal to other novelties, affects this feeling but little. At the end of long journeys with caravans, after years of residence with the Bedawin, the Western-born, wherever they may be, will stop and wait the passing of the stately brute (6). Technically, at this point in the narrative Wallace has not yet established the year, though between the epigraph from Milton and the book’s reputation many readers would recognize the first-century setting. Since there are of course no “people of the West” in the novel, this shift in perspective figuratively places Western readers in the middle of the scene. The chronology is important here. First, the construction “ever overcome” requires that the “first view” occurred in the past. No time is specified, but evidently it was long enough ago that “custom” would be expected to normalize the novelty. This suggests that the event was repeated, even to the point of “years of residence with the Bedawin,” yet it remains defamiliarized. The spectacle is so emotionally impactful that the camel not only

191 demands attention but deference, perhaps to renew the sense of wonder inherent in the primal first impression. As is his wont, Wallace does proceed to rhapsodize about the camel and its accessories, eventually comparing the “stately brute” to “the favorite camels of Job” (6, 9). His remarks about the West, however, also suggest a symbolic interpretation: the camel stands in for the Bible.

This metaphor acknowledges that nearly all of Wallace’s readers are already familiar with the Bible, especially with the Christmas story, and that in one sense Ben-

Hur represents merely a “repetition of the old story” (3). As I suggest above, this familiarity can be a two-edged sword for Biblical novels like Ben-Hur. On one hand, it can legitimize the fictional enterprise for Christian readers. Those who might otherwise see novels as frivolous or even sinful could assuage their doubts (and justify their reading habits) on the grounds that Ben-Hur confirmed the Bible’s historical authenticity. In particular, using Biblical subject matter—which many readers automatically accepted as true—could blunt the common complaint that novels were mere anthologies of lies. On the other hand, however, these readers’ intimate knowledge of the Gospels created a precarious position for Wallace’s own creative attempts. After all, he was trying to supplement the most canonical text in the Western tradition, to reach an audience that would be suspicious of any perceived alteration. At least in the Biblical scenes, he could perhaps fill in some narrative gaps, such as imagining the innkeeper’s conversation with

Mary and Joseph, but he could not change certain parameters or outcomes. More importantly, his characters’ interpretations of the Biblical material, such as the Magi’s responses to the star, could also be grounds for religious critiques.

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Perhaps to balance this familiarity, Wallace also uses the metaphor of the camel to stress the Bible’s foreign and even exotic origins. For something to make an “impression”

(6) in the first place it must be new or unexpected, either because its constituent elements are foreign or because it deploys otherwise familiar elements in a striking way. A combination of both scenarios seems to be at work in this metaphor. Throughout his description, the narrator emphasizes the camel’s Eastern origins: its physical proportions and manner “all certified its Syrian blood, old as the days of Cyrus, and absolutely priceless” (7). Similarly, “[t]he furniture perched on the [camel’s] back was an invention which with any other people than of the East would have made the inventor renowned.

[…] In such a manner the ingenious sons of Cush had contrived to make comfortable the sunburnt ways of the wilderness, along which lay their duty as often as their pleasure”

(7).39 Cyrus the Great, the ruler of Persia who conquered Babylon in 539 BC, is credited with releasing the Hebrew captives in the book of Ezra, allowing them to establish the

Second Temple period. The reference to Cush adds an element of racial difference: Cush is identified as the eldest son of Ham (Noah’s son) in Genesis 10:6, and the region named

39 In a similar way, Wallace emphasizes the desert (100 mentions) and wilderness (16 mentions) throughout the novel. Both terms are likewise important in the Bible, both as physical descriptors of the landscape and as symbolic reminders of the Israelites’ movement from captivity (especially in Egypt) to the Promised Land. In the Gospels, the wilderness is likewise the setting of Jesus’ temptation (Luke 4:1–13) and of John the Baptist’s initial ministry (Luke 3:1-20). Notably, all four Gospels (as well as Ben-Hur) connect John’s ministry with the “voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the LORD, make straight in the desert a highway for our God” (Isaiah 40:3). Many 19th-century American authors, preachers, and theologians picked up on this language to conceptualize the American wilderness, especially in terms of Manifest Destiny. Wallace also wrote part of Ben-Hur while he was territorial governor of New Mexico, which had its share of both desert and wilderness in 1880. In fact, Obenzinger points out that Wallace “noted the resemblance between the New Mexican landscape and the landscape of the Middle East, writing in a report: ‘the Rio Grande Valley is more nearly a duplication of the region of the Nile than any other of which I have knowledge’” (80). Such parallels, Obenzinger argues, “heighten identification [of the United States] with the Holy Land through popular narrative styles that had not previously been deployed in religious literature” (80). 193 after him is associated with Ethiopia and with blackness more generally. For 19th-century readers, both allusions would connote otherness, though not necessarily in a negative sense. That is, their affiliation with the Bible—in fact, most of Wallace’s readers had probably only encountered camels in Nativity scenes—likely blurred some of the lines between foreign and familiar.

By presenting the Bible in this way, Wallace complicates his epigraphs’ implication that Ben-Hur simply duplicates a familiar story to “repeat…sweet thoughts”

(3). Instead, it is a retelling with a difference, even if that difference is theologically consistent and narratively complementary. In fact, the metaphor of the camel suggests that both familiarity and foreignness are necessary to achieve the Bible’s “impression”

(6) on Western readers. Part of this dynamic may be attributed to cultural difference, as the Bible’s form and content naturally rely heavily on its authors’ cultural, linguistic, and religious assumptions. Both Wallace and Geikie explicitly try to make those assumptions explicit, both to make Scripture more legible to Anglophone readers and to create a more realistic setting for the Gospel narratives. However, in Wallace’s passage the striking element is not the camel itself, but rather “a camel equipped and loaded for the desert”

(6). If the camel does stand in for the Bible, this baggage may indicate the accumulation of historical, doctrinal, and cultural interpretations. Sometimes these are internal to the text, as when the author of Hebrews interprets Jesus as “a great high priest, that is passed into the heavens” (Heb. 4:14), but more often an institutional tradition imposes a certain textual interpretation. As I mention above, for instance, Wallace sets both Jesus’ birth and the Magi’s visit on December 25, following the longstanding (but Biblically unjustified)

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Western Christian tradition. Both of these interpretive methods can potentially improve audience appeal and readers’ understanding of the original text, but they also risk misrepresenting or even eliding the text’s intended meaning and context.40

Wallace may have intended this metaphor simply to reboot readers’ expectations about Biblical fiction, particularly since the chapters that follow speculate freely on the

Magi’s back-story and motivations. If readers approached Ben-Hur more as history than fiction, for instance, then the camel metaphor could refocus their attention on the emotional and artistic effects of the Biblical narrative. This might appeal to theologically liberal readers, many of whom had been strongly influenced by popular versions of

Darwinian evolution and higher criticism. At the same time, as Gutjahr points out, by

1880 theologically conservative Christians were also eager for a logical, scientific basis for their faith, even though they might be wary of supporting it with fiction. But

Christians on both sides recognized that the Bible’s emotional power played a major role in individual conversions, independently of a particular historical context. Apart from this potential benefit, however, the implied contrast between Eastern and Western cultures offers an intriguing transition into the next section of the narrative, which focuses on the

Magi’s individual origin stories. As I argue later in this chapter, these origin stories

40 This dynamic is particularly significant within American Protestant Evangelicalism, which inherited the Reformation’s focus on sola Scriptura. By 1880 some institutional elements of what Nathan Hatch calls the “democratization of American Christianity” had subsided, as small denominations coalesced into broader alliances. However, many American churches retained an emphasis on individual Bible reading and interpretation, often combining it with a distrust of formal creeds and extra-Biblical traditions. This line of thought did not necessarily eschew literary and cultural context in favor of strictly personal applications of Biblical content, but it often did try to “recover” the New Testament’s first-century meaning. Many churches in the Stone-Campbell movement, for example, studiously avoided both denominational labels and historical creeds, believing that individual Christians could and should read and understand the Bible afresh, without having to rely on institutionally approved interpretations. 195 suggest a progressive cultural and religious evolution, such that the characters’ respective quests for truth inevitably lead them to Christianity. Given this result, one might expect

Wallace to privilege Western perspectives far above Eastern ones, if for no other reason than because Christians already know how the story ends. But the Bible, in this metaphor, is more complex: no matter how many times Western readers encounter it, they can never quite reduce its mystery to everyday knowledge.

3.5 Meeting the Magi: Races and Faces

In Chapter 2 of Book First the other two Magi join Balthasar, and they share a meal with significant theological undertones. Most notably, they recite a brief prayer in unison, each in his own language. The result is miraculous:

With the last word they raised their eyes, and looked at each other in wonder. Each had spoken in a language never before heard by the others; yet each understood perfectly what was said. Their souls thrilled with divine emotion; for by the miracle they recognized the Divine Presence (14). This account, of course, consciously echoes the description of Pentecost in Acts 2:1-13.

About 120 Jewish Christians had assembled in Jerusalem, shortly after Jesus’ Ascension and promise that “ye shall receive power, after that the Holy Ghost is come upon you: and ye shall be witnesses unto me both in Jerusalem” (Acts 1:8). This prophecy is fulfilled early in the next chapter:

And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance. And there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation 196

under heaven. Now when this was noised abroad, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speak in his own language. And they were all amazed and marvelled, saying one to another, Behold, are not all these which speak Galilaeans? And how hear we every man in our own tongue, wherein we were born? Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians, we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God. And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this? (Acts 2:1-12) In response to these questions, Peter preached a famous sermon connecting Old

Testament prophecy with Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, and calling for repentance.

It got results: “they that gladly received his word were baptized: and the same day there were added unto them about three thousand souls” (Acts 2:41). Because this event dramatically increased the Jewish Christian population, and of course because the account in Acts explicitly credits the Holy Spirit for the apostles’ ability to speak in tongues, both Catholic and Protestant Christians have called Pentecost the “birthday of the church.”41

In the context of the novel, this Pentecost-like event confirms the Magi’s mission, much like their respective conversion narratives. Balthasar, for example, opens his narrative (the last in the series) with another Pentecost reference: “Your words, brethren, were of the Spirit…and the Spirit gives me to understand them” (22). All three conversion narratives repeatedly reference “the Spirit,” especially in terms of the star the

41 This opinion is not universal: some theologians contend that the church as a concept “existed before all things” and that Pentecost merely represents a particularly powerful movement of the Holy Spirit. Michael Willett Newheart, for instance, points out that none of Paul’s letters refer to Pentecost, and that “John has Jesus giving the Spirit on Easter Sunday night (20:22). Indeed, Easter, Ascension Day, and Pentecost Sunday are all rolled into one for John (see John 20:17)” (Massachusetts Bible Society, “Is Pentecost the Birthday of the Church?”).

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Magi follow, and all three likewise emphasize that people of all nations can access God’s love and forgiveness. More to the point for my analysis, this scene suggests that in some way, the Magi are already Christians when they meet, even if they don’t use specifically

Christian vocabulary. This anachronism makes perfect sense in terms of supersession: if the Magi represent the transition from Judaism to Christianity, as well as the ethnically and linguistically diverse future church, then they would already have progressed beyond

Judaism, so to speak. Since a large part of that framework concerns the results of religious and cultural development, in the rest of this section I consider the three characters’ physical descriptions, while in the next section I analyze Gaspar’s origin story. The sections under discussion, which comprise most of Chapters 3-5, present each of the Magi as a quintessential representative of his race and culture, even though each character deliberately abandons his national religion. Taken together, they strongly suggest a theological version of Manifest Destiny, drawing on Biblical ideals of global harmony while ultimately subordinating cultural and religious difference under Christian control.

Like many contemporary scholars, in Life of Christ Geikie identifies the Magi as astrologers, “[m]embers of the old priestly caste of Persia” (144). This caste, he argues, became familiar with Jewish Messianic prophecy during the last part of Israel’s exile in

Babylon. King Cyrus II captured Babylon in 539 BC, and the transition to Persian rule is documented in Daniel 5-6. Since Daniel 7 and 9 contain several Messianic prophecies, including a prediction in 9:25 of the exact timing of the Messiah’s arrival, some scholars suggest that the combination of prophecy and astrology prompted the Magi to travel to

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Bethlehem. Furthermore, many interpreters associate the Magi with Zoroastrianism, a monotheistic religion that originated in ancient Iran and was present in Persia at the time

Cyrus conquered Babylon. Since both religions were monotheistic, the argument goes, the Zoroastrian and Jewish faithful regularly interacted and perhaps influenced each other’s beliefs. Wallace certainly knew of this argument from his studies of comparative religions, and had probably encountered it long before he started his research for Ben-

Hur. However, though the origin stories in Book First do emphasize some continuity among religions, Wallace’s Magi are not from Persia but from Egypt (Balthasar), Greece

(Gaspar), and India (Melchior).

The initial physical descriptions of all three Magi stress their foreign origins, both in terms of their dress and their physiognomy. In his study of 19th-century literary portraits of Christ, Gatrall argues that Wallace utilized “the emergent, descriptive science of ethnography” to portray his characters (116). Whereas ethnology compares different peoples and interprets their differences, such as “dividing the ethnological record into evolutionary stages ranging from primitive to civilized” (Long and Chakov, “Social

Evolutionism”), ethnography “focused on nations and peoples in terms of customs, habits, and racial characteristics” (Gatrall 116). According to Gatrall, “Wallace brought an ethnographic approach to the portrayal of Jesus that was well suited to a realist cult of image,” popularizing what Gatrall calls “the Greco-Jewish Jesus” (117). While this descriptive focus does not rule out interpretation or judgment, it is consistent with

Wallace’s desire for historical and cultural accuracy. As Obenzinger puts it, “the details of Palestine’s geography and the ethnography of ancient Jews, Romans, and others were

199 crucial for establishing the verisimilitude of Wallace’s sacred fiction” (78). Furthermore, as I will argue later in this chapter, the Magi’s clear cultural differences play a theological role in Wallace’s supersessionist framework.

Balthasar, the first of the Magi to arrive, is said to have “a strong face, almost negro in color” (9); elsewhere, the narrator notes that his “face was brown as a parched coffee-berry” (6). Early medieval traditions likewise identified Balthasar as black, such as this description commonly attributed to the Venerable Bede: “The third, of black complexion, with heavy beard, was called Baltasar; the myrrh he held in his hands prefigured the death of the Son of man” (Fouard 67). In 1880, Wallace’s description might have raised readers’ hackles, especially proslavery readers who associated blackness with the Hamitic curse.42,43 Perhaps to blunt this potential criticism, Wallace instead introduces Balthasar alongside royalty:

[T]he low, broad forehead, aquiline nose, the outer corners of the eyes turned slightly upward, the hair profuse, straight, harsh, of metallic lustre, and falling to the shoulder in many plaits, were signs of origin impossible to disguise. So looked the Pharaohs and the later Ptolemies; so looked Mizraim, father of the Egyptian race (9-10).

42 The Hamitic curse derives from a misreading of Genesis 9:18-25. Shortly after the Flood subsided, Noah “drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without” (9:21-22). In response to this humiliation, Noah denounced Ham: “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren” (9:25). Because later passages suggest that Ham’s descendants settled in Africa, the “so-called curse of Ham” evolved into “a biblical justification for racial slavery” and, more broadly, for black inferiority (Haynes 6). 43 According to Larry Paarlberg, the director of the General Lew Wallace Study and Museum, Wallace supported equality for black Americans, and of course he fought on the Union side during the Civil War. However, Wallace also opposed radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison: Wallace believed that slavery should be addressed through Constitutional processes, whereas Garrison sought to bypass the Constitution altogether. For more detail on Wallace’s views of slavery, see Kasey Greer, “The Inner Battle of the Civil War.” 200

Wallace emphasizes here that Balthasar’s face and hair do not merely suggest his

Egyptian origins but make them “impossible to disguise” (10). This contrasts with Judah, whose “features more than his costume” confirm his “Jewish descent,” but only to “[a]n observer skilled in the distinctions of race” (82). Likewise, while Judah must eventually disguise his ethnic identity to pass for a Roman, that option is neither available nor attractive to Balthasar and the other Magi. In fact, the novel refers to Balthasar as “the

Egyptian” some 50 times, an epithet later applied to Balthasar’s daughter Iras. This frequency suggests that Balthasar is not merely one representative of Egypt, but the quintessential Egyptian. The comparison to “the Pharaohs and the later Ptolemies” similarly connects Balthasar to Egypt’s dynastic leaders, including those who witnessed the Exodus. Finally, the allusion to Mizraim44 implies that Balthasar possesses the original essence of Egyptian identity, even if labeling Mizraim the “father of the Egyptian race” relies exclusively on Old Testament sources.

The point of this description seems to be that racial characteristics, though grounded in a particular phenotype, also have historical weight and spiritual significance.

Though Wallace also describes the Magi’s respective outfits in somewhat essentialist terms, e.g. “[Melchior’s] costume was Hindostani” (12), he more consistently links race and spirituality to their physical characteristics and especially their attitudes. His description of Melchior particularly emphasizes this latter connection:

The air of the man was high, stately, severe. Visvamitra, the greatest of the ascetic heroes of the Iliad of the East, had in him a perfect representative.

44 Mizraim is the Hebrew word for Egypt, the source word for the Arabic counterpart Misr. According to Genesis 10 and 1 Chronicles 1, Mizraim (rendered “Egypt” in most modern Bible translations) was a son of Ham (see note 16) and thus considered the “father of the Egyptian race” (Wallace 10). 201

He might have been called a Life drenched with the wisdom of Brahma– Devotion Incarnate. Only in his eyes was there proof of humanity; when he lifted his face from the Egyptian’s breast, they were glistening with tears (13). Whereas Balthasar’s appearance linked him to historical and Biblical characters,

Melchior’s origins are literary and religious. Visvamitra is a prominent figure in Hindu mythology and portions of the epic Rig Veda are attributed to him, including a famous prayer to the sun-god called the Gayatri Mantra (Kumar, “The Story of the Gayatri

Mantra”).45 Brahma, of course, is the “first god in the Hindu triumvirate, or trimurti,” responsible for the “creation of the world and all creatures” (BBC, “Brahma”). By 1880 there was at least a partial English translation of the Rig Veda available, though of course

Homer’s Iliad would have been far more familiar to Western readers.

Though Wallace’s library included quite a few books on world religions, including Hinduism, the “literature produced [about Hinduism] at the time was divided into missionary critiques and romantic orientalism, and the Christian category of

‘heathen’ religions often conflated non-Abrahamic faiths” (Lucia 5). However, much like the midcentury Transcendentalist movement, the late-century interest in Spiritualism did prompt some more direct engagement with contemporary Hindu beliefs. Melchior’s conversion narrative does engage in more detail with these beliefs and their relationship to Christianity. In this initial description, however, he is a “perfect representative”

45 According to the myth, Visvamitra was a powerful king before he became a sage. On one of his military campaigns, he encountered Vasistha, a high-ranking sage who had a magic cow capable of producing an infinite amount of food. Visvamitra asked Vasistha for the cow so he could feed his army, and when Vasistha refused Visvamitra attempted to take the cow by force. Vasistha then used his spiritual powers to conjure an army that defeated Visvamitra, who was forced to retreat. Eventually Visvamitra gave up his kingdom to seek out spiritual power instead, and once he reconciled with Vasistha “he heard the mystical sounds of the Gayatri mantra inside his head and recited it” (Kumar, “Gayatri Mantra”). 202

(Wallace 13) of an imaginary and idealized type, not of a historical figure as in

Balthasar’s case. Wallace’s claim that only Melchior’s tears offered “proof of humanity” also relies on stereotypes of emotionally detachment and isolation, though the later narrative does complicate them.

The last character to arrive on the scene is Gaspar, the Greek Magi, who Wallace presents as a white European. By doing so, he follows medieval Christian traditions that the Magi represented “the three divisions of the earth as then known” (Geikie 153).

According to historian Richard Trexler, “[t]he groundwork for an ecumenical vision of the magi was laid by Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) who intimated that the three magi represented the whole gentile world. [...] In England the Venerable Bede (d. 735) sharpened Augustine's generalization, stating that ‘mystically, the three magi signify the three parts of the world, Asia, Africa, Europe’” (38). These traditions also informed pictorial representations of the Magi in Western paintings. In his copy of Legends of the

Madonna as Represented in the Fine Arts, an 1867 survey by Anna Jameson, Wallace wrote “Yes” in large letters beside Jameson’s suggestion that the Magi’s ethnic diversity

“indicate[s] that when the Gentiles were called to salvation, all the continents and races of the earth, of whatever complexion, were included” (338). Jameson also notes that “the difference of complexion is a modern innovation” (338), which supports reading

Wallace’s magi in terms of 19th-century ethnography and ethnology.

Because Gaspar is both white and Greek, two demographic categories familiar to

Wallace’s original audience, one might expect specific cultural allusions in his

203 description, as was the case for the other two Magi. Interestingly, however, Wallace takes the opposite tack:

The last comer was all unlike his friends: his frame was slighter; his complexion white; a mass of waving light hair was a perfect crown for his small but beautiful head; the warmth of his dark-blue eyes certified a delicate mind, and a cordial, brave nature. He was bareheaded and unarmed. […] Fifty years, probably more, had spent themselves upon him, with no other effect, apparently, than to tinge his demeanor with gravity and temper his words with forethought. The physical organization and the brightness of soul were untouched. No need to tell the student from what kindred he was sprung; if he came not himself from the groves of Athené, his ancestry did (13). While Melchior’s description specifically associated him with Brahma’s “Devotion

Incarnate” (13) and Balthasar’s associated him with “the Pharaohs and the later

Ptolemies” (10), here Gaspar’s “kindred” and “ancestry” are less precise. The only specific cultural reference, the “groves of Athené,” most likely connotes Greek civilization as a whole: Plato’s Academy originally met in “a public grove near the ancient city of Athens” that had “once been home to religious groups with its grove of olive trees dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, war, and crafts” (Gill, “What

Was Plato’s Famous Academy?”). Although Gaspar’s appearance might bring to mind

Alexander the Great or Apollo, or any of the dozens of Classical heroes familiar to 19th- century readers, I believe the lack of a specific referent is both deliberate and strategic.

Specifically, by keeping Gaspar’s origins relatively vague, Wallace encourages

Western readers to identify with him (Gaspar) more directly. Much American rhetoric imagines the United States as Athens’ political and cultural heir, and Greek influences on

American law, philosophy, architecture, language, and so on are far too wide-ranging to catalog here. Likewise, the vast majority of Wallace’s 19th-century readers were white, and would most likely recognize themselves in Gaspar’s white complexion, blue eyes, 204 and light hair. Even though Gaspar does not re-appear after Book First, this identification could keep readers closer to the action, not simply observing a familiar story but actively participating in it. As I pointed out earlier, in “How I Came to Write Ben-Hur” Wallace encouraged such immersive reading, and that goal certainly informed his extensive use of historical, geographical, and cultural details. In this case, Wallace took advantage of extra-Biblical traditions portraying Gaspar as European to place his readers closer to the

Biblical events. More broadly, he uses the Magi’s diverse backgrounds but common goals to craft their respective conversion narratives. Those narratives are the subject of the next section.

3.6 A Purpose in the Particularity: Conversion and Supersession

The Magi’s conversion narratives, which occupy most of Chapters 3–5 in Book

First, represent Wallace’s most extensive departure from his Biblical material. They likewise depart from apocryphal material about the Magi, most of which focuses on the

Magi’s lives after they met in Bethlehem. Accordingly, these chapters are a good source for elucidating Wallace’s view on how non-Christian religions and non-Western cultures contribute to the formation of Western Christianity. As Vlach points out, etymologically the word supersession “carries the idea of one person sitting on another’s chair, displacing the latter” (58). Since none of the Magi directly practice Judaism, the theologically technical meaning of supersessionism– that “the church has become the sole inheritor of God’s covenant blessings originally promised to national Israel in the

OT”– is not in play here. However, I argue that Wallace uses the logic of supersession to place other religions and cultures in an analogous relationship with Western Christianity.

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Each of the Magi’s narratives naturally focuses on the storyteller’s personal spiritual journey, as is the case in most Christian conversion narratives, especially those in the

Evangelical tradition. At the same time, however, each speaker also comments on his native country’s history, culture, and religion. Each story follows four stages: study of the national religion or philosophy, rejection of its limits, a call for revelation or redemption, and divine intervention. Because Gaspar’s story places these stages most directly within a supersessionist framework, I first use his narrative as a case study, then briefly show how the other two narratives compare to his account.

In his study of spiritual biographies in 18th-century England, Bruce Hindmarsh identifies “five concepts that figure largely in any analysis” of an Evangelical conversion narrative: “autobiography, narrative, identity, conversion, and gospel” (4). Narrative and identity are most relevant to my argument here; according to Hindmarsh, a narrative “has a structure that points inevitably beyond itself to higher moral ends that give it meaning” while identity “requires a larger framework…and is thus negotiated through language within a particular community” (16). The Magi’s narratives are not especially concerned with establishing or developing their individual identities– probably because only

Balthasar re-appears after the end of Book First– but they do strongly emphasize higher moral ends and community-based negotiations. They also include some elements common to other Christian conversion narratives, particularly the recognition of God’s providential care and a moment of supernatural clarity in which the speaker hears an audible voice. However, much like Wallace’s own conversion narrative in his account of the novel’s genesis, the Magi’s stories lack any acknowledgment of personal sin, and

206 likewise any moment of repentance. To be sure, there are moments of frustration and even despair. But any moral culpability is societal, not personal– and as with Wallace, the real threat is ignorance, not sin. To dispel that ignorance, each of the Magi strives to surpass his respective state religion, but also to find in it the kernel of the one true faith.

Throughout these passages Wallace does maintain the conceit that the Magi represent all of humanity, as well as the ubiquitous image of conversion as pilgrimage. But as I will argue in this section and the next one, he embeds them both in a supersessionist framework, such that the Magi’s journey toward Christendom is both progressive and inevitable.

The Magi tell their stories in reverse order of their arrival, so Gaspar starts and

Balthasar finishes. Gaspar opens his narrative by framing it as a spiritual mystery:

What I have to tell, my brethren, is so strange that I hardly know where to begin or what I may with propriety speak. I do not yet understand myself. The most I am sure of is that I am doing a Master’s will, and that the service is a constant ecstasy. When I think of the purpose that I am sent to fulfil, there is in me a joy so inexpressible that I know the will is God’s (15). The idea of subordinating human understanding to divine purposes is very common in

Biblical rhetoric as a whole, particularly in terms of explaining history.46 Similarly, some

Christian traditions hold that because humans are sinfully depraved, they are unable to play any role in their own salvation; instead, they can only recognize God’s saving grace.

However, while Gaspar views his actions as “doing a Master’s will” and identifies himself with the “purpose that [he is] sent to fulfil,” neither sin nor depravity seems to be

46 The Old Testament, for example, explains Israel’s military success and failure primarily in terms of God’s sovereign control. Individual or corporate actions can play a role, but they are usually couched in covenantal terms: following God’s commandments results in success (e.g. conquering the Promised Land), while breaking them results in failure (e.g. being captured by a stronger nation). 207 the problem. In fact, his submission produces “joy” and “constant ecstasy,” despite his lack of understanding and the strangeness of the situation. This is consistent with

Hindmarsh’s contention that a conversion narrative “has a structure that points inevitably beyond itself to higher moral ends that give it meaning” (16). In fact, while all three Magi suggest logical connections between their national religions and their ultimate faith in

God, Gaspar’s preface suggests that their quests only make sense within a providential framework.

When Gaspar moves on to describe Greek history and religion, he focuses on two themes that recur in the other two narratives: cultural memory and a historical legacy.

Greece, he says, “is a land which may never be forgotten; if only because the world is too much its debtor, and because the indebtedness is for things that bring to men their purest pleasures” (15). At this point in history, of course, Greek culture still dominated the

Mediterranean region, and the Romans had only recently (31 BC) finished conquering

Alexander the Great’s holdings (Gill, “An Introduction to Hellenistic Greece”). In fact, the Greek “Grove of Daphne” plays a major role in the plot of Book Fourth. Accordingly,

I read the phrase “may never be forgotten” as a strategic anachronism, targeting

American readers who considered themselves the Greeks’ cultural heirs. Indeed, historian

Daniel Walker Howe posits that during the 19th century, “the Greeks seem[ed] to speak to

[Americans] more profoundly than the Romans, having originated many of the intellectual institutions we increasingly value as characteristically American: democratic politics, natural science, and free inquiry, to name a few” (36).

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Given that the novel generally portrays Romans negatively, perhaps to correspond with anti-Catholic sentiment at the time, this identification strengthens the link between

American political structures and Christianity, especially in light of Gaspar’s next statement: “I will say nothing of the arts, nothing of philosophy, of eloquence, of poetry, of war: O my brethren, hers is the glory which must shine forever in perfected letters, by which He we go to find and proclaim will be made known to all the earth” (15).

“Perfected letters” refers to the New Testament, most of which was written in Greek as it was the lingua franca of the original audience. This characterization fits well within a supersessionist framework. First, Gaspar explicitly presents the New Testament as

Greece’s main cultural contribution: Greek arts, philosophy, and so on may well “never be forgotten,” but the Bible’s “glory…must shine forever.” This strongly implies an instrumental view of Greek history and culture, such that its main purpose (like Gaspar himself) is to serve as a vehicle for the spread of Christianity. Second, the Greek words that will comprise the New Testament are “perfected,” a term historically associated with the “replacement theology” branch of supersessionism. Jenkins, for instance, defines supersessionism as “the theory that Christianity has perfected and replaced Judaism, which was therefore obsolete” (226). Along similar lines, Ann Coulter generated significant controversy in 2007 when she declared that “we [Christians] just want Jews to be perfected” and that “Christians consider themselves…perfected Jews” (Fox News,

“Columnist Ann Coulter Shocks Cable TV Show”). In other words, they are not only morally flawless but, one might say, they have reached the pinnacle of theological evolution.

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The remainder of Gaspar’s narrative concerns his exploration of Greek philosophy and his quest “for what every breath was a prayer– for revelation” (16). In these sections the language of supersession is not quite as explicit, but they do suggest a progression from polytheism to something resembling Christian faith. The key theme here, as in the other two narratives, is that the non–Christian religions and philosophies did offer something worthwhile to the Magi, but that they were ultimately incomplete without a two-stage process of revelation. Gaspar’s description of Greek philosophy is a good example:

My people…were given wholly to study, and from them I derived the same passion. It happens that two of our philosophers, the very greatest of the many, teach, one the doctrine of a Soul in every man, and its Immortality; the other the doctrine of One God, infinitely just. From the multitude of subjects about which the schools were disputing, I separated them, as alone worth the labor of solution; for I thought there was a relation between God and the soul as yet unknown (15). The first philosopher mentioned is most likely Plato, who records several of Socrates’

“arguments for the immortality of the soul, most prominently in the Phaedo” (Lorenz,

“Ancient Theories of Soul”). The second reference may be to Xenophanes, whose work

“has often been read as a pioneering expression of monotheism” (Lesher, “Xenophanes”), but Wallace could also be alluding to Aristotle’s concept of the Prime Mover. In any case, Gaspar highlights their insufficiency: they may be “worth the labor of solution,” but only because “there was a relation between God and the soul as yet unknown” (15). In other words, centuries of philosophy provided a potentially viable starting point for an explicitly spiritual inquiry, but even the “very greatest of the many” philosophers had not yet gotten to the truth.

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Initially, filling this gap seems to have been mainly an intellectual exercise for

Gaspar, a natural expression of his “passion” for “study.” Yet the very next sentence suggests the problem with this approach: “On this theme the mind can reason to a point, a dead, impassable wall; arrived there, all that remains is to stand and cry aloud for help.

So I did; but no voice came to me over the wall. In despair, I tore myself from the cities and the schools” (15). Although Wallace ostensibly wrote this part of the novel before his encounter with Ingersoll, he suggests here that reason alone, which would presumably allow him to answer Ingersoll’s challenging questions about Christianity, is futile without revelation. Gutjahr suggests that Ben-Hur was popular partly because “it could be used by Protestant readers in an attempt to contend with the scientific challenges to the credibility of the Bible and Christian faith” (55). This may be accurate in terms of

Wallace’s attention to historical and cultural detail (the main context for Gutjahr’s claim), but Gaspar’s narrative also suggests a limit to strictly rationalistic approaches to faith. It’s equally important that this prompted him to abandon “the cities and the schools,” a symbolic rejection of a civilization “given wholly to study” (15).

From there, Gaspar moves into the partial revelation stage, starting with a pilgrimage to a cave near Mount Olympus:

there I dwelt, giving myself up to meditation– no, I gave myself up to waiting for what every breath was a prayer– for revelation. Believing in God, invisible yet supreme, I also believed it possible so to yearn for him with all my soul that he would take compassion and give me answer (16). Both prayer and meditation are spiritual exercises, and given that they take place near the mythical home of the Greek pantheon, this could be interpreted as a provisional return to

Greek religion. However, the earlier emphasis on study and the monotheistic reference to

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“God, invisible yet supreme” mark this as a new religious practice. Whereas before

Gaspar pursued intellectual knowledge of philosophy in an effort to deduce “a relation between God and the soul as yet unknown” (15), here he explicitly seeks spiritual knowledge. The key concept is revelation, i.e. special knowledge only available through some sort of divine or supernatural communication. Christian theologians distinguish between general revelation, meaning “the knowledge of God that is revealed in creation,” and special revelation, meaning “the knowledge of God that comes to us supernaturally through prophetic words” (Challies, “The Essential: Revelation”). Doctrinal traditions differ on precisely what qualifies as these “prophetic words” and on what type/level of knowledge can be gained through general revelation, but most Christians agree that general revelation is insufficient for salvation. This is an important point in supersessionism, since it posits that all non-Christian religions are limited to general revelation, and that Judaism’s formerly special revelation has been superseded by

Christianity.

Gaspar’s experiences with revelation generally follow this model, though of course they occur before the Christian church exists. He rescues a Jewish man who was

“flung overboard from a ship sailing by” (reminiscent of the story of Jonah), and “from him…came to know that the God of [Gaspar’s] prayers did indeed exist, and had been for ages their lawmaker, ruler, and king.” More importantly, the man told Gaspar “that the second coming was at hand– was looked for momentarily in Jerusalem” (16). Gaspar is overjoyed at this news, believing that this was “the Revelation [he] dreamed of” and that his “faith had not been fruitless; God answered [him]!” In other words, he identifies this

212 as not merely general revelation but special revelation: a salvific solution directly from

God. However, the Jew insists that “the revelation of which he spoke had been for the

Jews alone, [and] so it would be again. He that was to come should be King of the Jews”

(16). This assertion countermands Gaspar’s hopes, as it relegates knowledge about God to general revelation while reserving special revelation explicitly for the Jews. In effect, this model is anti-supersessionism: rather than replacing Judaism with Christianity under the new covenant (or dispensation), it views the Messiah as a vehicle to restore Israel’s greatness.47

Given the directness of this claim, it’s not surprising that Wallace debunks it in supersessionist terms:

The answer did not crush my hope. Why should such a God limit his love and benefaction to one land, and, as it were, to one family? I set my heart upon knowing. At last I broke through the man's pride, and found that his fathers had been merely chosen servants to keep the Truth alive, that the world might at last know it and be saved. (16). Although Gaspar couches his objections in terms of universal access to God’s love, calling the Jews “merely chosen servants to keep the Truth alive” is very much in line with supersessionist theology. Vlach terms this “economic supersessionism,” and associates it with theologians Karl Barth and N.T. Wright. Barth, for instance, wrote that

“[t]he first Israel, constituted on the basis of physical descent from Abraham, has fulfilled its mission now that the Saviour of the world has sprung from it and its Messiah has appeared” (qtd. in Vlach 63). In Vlach’s words, “Israel is not replaced primarily because

47 Judah Ben-Hur takes this same perspective for nearly all of the novel, to the extent that he leads an army of Galilean rebels against Roman soldiers. He not only views Jesus as the ultimate leader of this military movement, but offers to attack the Romans when Jesus is arrested in Book Eighth. 213 of her disobedience but rather because her role in the history of redemption expired with the coming of Jesus. It is now superseded by the arrival of a new spiritual Israel—the

Christian church” (62). This is arguably a less confrontational view than what Vlach terms “punitive supersessionism” (i.e., “Israel is replaced by the church because the nation acted wickedly and has forfeited the right to be the people of God” [60]), because it both acknowledges and appreciates Israel’s unique role in guaranteeing “that the world might at last know [the Truth] and be saved” (Wallace 16). Still, both models require a changing of the guard, so to speak, such that Christianity takes over Judaism’s former role as the arbiter of God’s truth.

The last step in Gaspar’s conversion, his direct revelation from God, signals this transition in physical terms: “When the Jew was gone, and I was alone again, I chastened my soul with a new prayer--that I might be permitted to see the King when he was come, and worship him” (16). Whereas the Jew’s arrival initially answered Gaspar’s

“prayer…for revelation” (16), his departure refocuses Gaspar’s attention from knowledge to worship. The symbolism is clear: while Jewish teaching, and even Messianic prophecy, can help Gaspar evolve from his pagan ways and learn about God, in the new dispensation it is no more effective than the “dead, impassable wall” of human reason

(15). Sure enough, Gaspar’s meditative attempts “to get nearer the mysteries of [his] existence, knowing which is to know God,” bear the fruit of special revelation:

[S]uddenly, on the sea below me, or rather in the darkness that covered its face, I saw a star begin to burn; slowly it arose and drew nigh, and stood over the hill and above my door, so that its light shone full upon me. I fell down, and slept, and in my dream I heard a voice say: ‘O Gaspar! Thy faith hath conquered! Blessed art thou! With two others, come from the uttermost parts of the earth, thou shalt see Him that is 214

promised, and be a witness for him, and the occasion of testimony in his behalf. In the morning arise, and go meet them, and keep trust in the Spirit that shall guide thee.’ And in the morning I awoke with the Spirit as a light within me surpassing that of the sun (17). With this final step, Gaspar’s transformation is complete. He has recognized that while both human effort and general revelation can help him approach faith, neither one is ultimately sufficient without direct divine intervention. The “star in the East” (Mt. 2:2),

Wallace suggests, is transformed into the indwelling Holy Spirit, and as long as Gaspar

“keep[s] trust in” that Spirit, his “service [will be] a constant ecstasy” (15). This succession, in which not just knowledge but spiritual power passes from Jew to Gentile, at once presages the spread of Christianity (“the occasion of testimony in his behalf”) and requires that it supersede the old Jewish covenant.

Melchior’s and Balthasar’s origin stories follow a similar pattern to Gaspar’s account. Though the cultural details are of course different, both men praise their respective countries and identify philosophical similarities between Christianity and their national religions. Melchior, for instance, contends that “ages before [the Greeks] were known, the two great ideas, God and the Soul, had absorbed all the forces of the Hindoo mind” (18). He also suggests a Trinitarian analogy: “Brahm is taught, by the same sacred books, as a Triad– Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva” (18-19). Along similar lines, Balthasar claims that “[r]eligion is merely the law which binds man to his Creator: in purity it has but these elements– God, the Soul, and their Mutual Recognition; out of which, when put into practice, spring Worship, Love, and Reward” (23). He likewise traces Egyptian religion back to “our father Mizraim” (23, cf. Genesis 10:6), and suggests that the monotheism “cherished only by the priesthood” is “the glorious Truth,” “[l]ike a seed 215 under the mountains waiting its hour” (26). Both these arguments are consistent with economic supersessionism, as they highlight the positive aspects of the forerunner religions. In particular, Balthasar’s metaphor of the seed implies that the hidden Egyptian monotheism can only develop into Christianity once the “mountain” of false beliefs is removed.

Like Gaspar, both Melchior and Balthasar find their respective national religions dissatisfying, and all three men eventually retreat into solitude to seek God. However, while Gaspar sought “revelation” (16) to surpass the “dead, impassable wall” of human reason (15), Melchior and Balthasar instead call for “redemption” (21, 28). In Melchior’s case, revelation is less important overall, since he neither studies specific sacred texts nor encounters any vestige of Judaism. But Balthasar’s history is more complex. Not only does his story explicitly foreground written records, e.g. “the delicate papyri [to which] we intrusted [sic] the wisdom of our philosophers and the secrets of our religion” (22), but he retells the events of the Exodus, particularly the Ten Plagues (Exodus 7-12).

Immediately afterwards he tells Gaspar, “you spoke of revelation,” prompting Gaspar to exclaim that he “had the story from the Jew…[y]ou confirm it, O Balthasar!” Balthasar responds, “Yes, but through me Egypt speaks, not Mosche [Moses]. I interpret the marbles” (25).

This exchange certainly complicates the novel’s representation of revelation. As I argued earlier, Gaspar’s interaction with the Jewish man highlights the theological distinction between general revelation and special revelation, especially given his allusion to the “perfected letters” of the New Testament (15). While Balthasar does not

216 personally interact with Jewish law or prophecy, it’s clear that Israel’s long exile in Egypt strongly influenced his own spiritual quest. He also implies that the Exodus prompted the creation of the secret monotheistic religion among Egyptian priests, which he calls “the one unrecorded secret” (26). This is arguably analogous to the Jew telling Gaspar “the

Revelation [Gaspar] dreamed of” (16), yet Balthasar insists that he is “interpret[ing] the marbles” (25) of Egyptian history rather than simply repeating Moses’ words– that is, the

Torah. The process resembles special revelation insofar as it includes specific information from a divine source, but the secondhand information muddies the waters.

After all, while Gaspar’s information on Messianic prophecy came directly from a practicing and devout Jew, Balthasar admits that he “speak[s] from the records” (25), suggesting a historical basis more in line with general revelation. Furthermore, while

Balthasar enjoys more success than Melchior in his attempts to “restore the old

Mizraimic faith,” he ultimately “failed in the attempt to organize” his followers (28) on his own. It was not until he, like his companions, heard and followed “[a] voice, not of his earth” that he gained “an inward illumination not to be doubted” (29).

Taken together, these stories suggest that the Magi’s individual efforts, whether within existing religious structures or not, were doomed to failure without God’s direct intervention. Yet after all three men have told their stories, Balthasar suggests that these efforts were actually vital:

“I said there was a purpose in the particularity with which we described our people and their histories,” so the Egyptian proceeded. “He we go to find was called 'King of the Jews’; by that name we are bidden to ask for him. But, now that we have met, and heard from each other, we may know him to be the Redeemer, not of the Jews alone, but of all the nations of the earth. 217

[…] “Could anything be more divinely ordered?” Balthasar continued. “When we have found the Lord, the brothers, and all the generations that have succeeded them, will kneel to him in homage with us. And when we part to go our separate ways, the world will have learned a new lesson--that Heaven may be won, not by the sword, not by human wisdom, but by Faith, Love, and Good Works” (29-30). This seeming paradox– that the “King of the Jews” would in fact redeem “all the nations of the earth”– lies at the heart of supersessionism, no matter what the variety. Whether one sees Christianity as “fulfilling” Judaism or “replacing” it, much of the New

Testament grapples with the radical idea that God could save the whole world, not just members of the favored race. Indeed, the Magi’s stories suggest, God could still reach even thoroughly heathen people and places, whether or not they had any contact with

Jews or Judaism. Balthasar’s vision of the results, in which “the brothers, and all the generations that have succeeded them…will kneel to [Jesus] in homage” (30), likewise brings to mind the “great multitude…of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues” in Revelation 7:9. In short, these chapters suggest, the Magi’s histories and cultures are important not simply because they brought three individuals to a meeting in the desert– that event, Wallace shows, only came about because of God’s direct intervention– but because they allowed progress toward Christian perfection.

All this leads us back to Gaspar, and to the American readers most likely to identify with him. Gaspar’s narrative invokes supersessionism most explicitly, by moving methodically from reason to general revelation to special revelation. But he’s also the only one to start his story by admitting his own lack of understanding and control: “The most I am sure of is that I am doing a Master’s will, and that the service is a constant ecstasy” (15). If Gaspar does stand in for Western readers, then this disclaimer may 218 indicate that the West’s spiritual purpose is ongoing, in contrast to Melchior’s and

Balthasar’s completed missions. It also offers a measure of spiritual reassurance to postbellum Americans, by suggesting a blend of political and religious manifest destiny.

In the past four centuries thousands of sermons, speeches, and essays have promoted the idea of a religious American exceptionalism, often by presenting America, as Winthrop and many others did, as a “city upon a hill” that stood firm in a wayward world. This impulse certainly fueled American expansionism in the 19th century, and animated both sides of the slavery debate. But the Civil War shattered the illusion of a unified Christian

America, despite Lincoln’s claim that both sides “read the same Bible and pray to the same God” (“Second Inaugural Address”). Perhaps Ben-Hur was, in part, Lew Wallace’s attempt to re-imagine the United States’ place in providential history, and to hold out hope that God was still in control.

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Chapter 4:

Striking Sentences: In His Steps (1896) and the Textless Gospel

4.1 Introduction

As we saw in both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Gates Ajar, Evangelical

Christians value Bible reading both in terms of individual regeneration and social reform.

I argued in Chapter 1 that Stowe makes social action a prerequisite of effective Bible reading, and in Chapter 2 that Phelps uses surrogate Scriptures not just to convert Mary

Cabot but to comfort and improve the whole town of Homer. As Candy Brown suggests,

Evangelicals sought to maintain both “purity and presence” in their various engagements with broader 19th-century culture, and their efforts “to sanctify their own pilgrim community and redeem American society” consistently applied Biblical precepts and models to American life (Brown 1). Similarly, as David Paul Nord has shown, this impulse animated many Christian publishing companies, particularly those that valued spreading the Gospel more than making a profit. Despite widely divergent views of the

Church’s place in a secular society, and despite a thoroughgoing emphasis on individual salvation, American Evangelicals saw faith-based reform as the natural result of a sufficiently Christian culture.

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Because of these dual emphases on regeneration and service, both internal and external critiques of American Evangelicalism tend to evaluate individual Christians’ effects on the people, structures, and institutions around them. A true Christian, the argument goes, will not only seek to convert others but also to love and serve them, thereby showing Christ’s own character and improving the world around them.

Conversely, apathetic or insincere Christians—lukewarm is a favorite condemnation, alluding to a prophecy where believers who are “neither hot nor cold” will be “spit out of

[God’s] mouth” (Rev. 3:16)—will ignore or even promote cultural ills. Naturally, the impulse to improve society is not uniquely Evangelical, or uniquely Christian for that matter. However, noted historian David Bebbington uses such efforts—which he terms activism, “the expression of the gospel in effort” (2)—to distinguish Evangelicals from other types of Christians. Bebbington’s definition does not specify the aims of these efforts, and as he points out, many 18th-century Evangelicals tended to view and express activism mainly in terms of evangelism, believing individual conversion to be the most efficacious way to change the world. Yet in the reform-obsessed world of the 19th century, both in England and the United States, philanthropy and occasionally radical political activism—abolitionism is the best-known example in the US context—were more common outlets for Evangelical fervor. Bebbington estimates that “[a]mong charitable organisations of the second half of the century…three-quarters were

Evangelical in character and control. […] Evangelical activism carried over into social concern as an end in itself” (120).

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My interest here, as throughout this study, is in the Bible’s role in these efforts.

Specifically, this chapter examines Scripture’s place in Charles Sheldon’s bestselling novel In His Steps: What Would Jesus Do? (1897). Estimates of the novel’s total sales range from two million to thirty million copies. Near the end of his life, Sheldon estimated that eight million copies had sold in the US alone, though later critics, notably

Frank Luther Mott, contend that two million is a more realistic figure.48 Regardless, the novel’s influence on Christian culture has been substantial, both in Sheldon’s own day and a century later, during the mid-1990s “WWJD” (What Would Jesus Do?) movement.

WWJD merchandise launched in 1989 with a series of ubiquitously trendy bracelets, and still claims a spot in the $4B Christian retail industry. For instance, as of May 2017

ChristianBook.com offered two WWJD movies, three separate WWJD devotionals, the ever-popular WWJD sticker pack, and of course half a dozen different varieties of

WWJD bracelets. And if that isn’t enough, shoppers can choose from nearly 50 “What

Would Jesus [Verb]” books and songs, from The What Would Jesus Eat Cookbook to

What Would Jesus Post?: Seven Principles Christians Should Follow in Social Media to my personal favorite, What Would Jesus Deconstruct?

Whimsy aside, though, Sheldon’s famous question clearly resonated with readers and publishers, as did his ethical message. He made no claims to originality, as many of his precepts follow well-trodden paths in the imitatio Christi (imitation of Christ) tradition of Christian discipleship.49 Instead, Timothy Miller, Sheldon's biographer,

48 See Gary Smith, The Search for Social Salvation, p. 117, note 16. 49 Thomas à Kempis’ treatise De Imitatione Christi (1418) is the standard devotional text; the Catholic Encyclopedia calls it “perhaps the most widely read spiritual book in the world.” Sheldon does not specifically mention Kempis’ work in In His Steps, perhaps because Kempis was Roman Catholic but more 230 argues that he was a “popularizer, in the best sense of that term,” and that “he had an overpowering faith in the wisdom of the common people, and his writing was for them”

(xi-xii). But Miller also admits that

Sheldon was no artist; but his works were clear and readable and, if not always deep, at least consistently interesting. The creation of lasting literature was never his goal; he always saw his writing either as something to be used for spiritual uplift or as marching orders for social reform. Those goals his writing served adequately (36). Though I believe In His Steps demonstrates more sophistication than Miller gives

Sheldon credit for, his point about Sheldon’s goals is worth remembering. By the time

Sheldon composed In His Steps he had already read several “sermon stories” from his pulpit in Topeka, and though he later published many of them as novels, they mainly functioned as “serialized inspirational fiction” that was “directly related to his church work” (Miller 36). Furthermore, Sheldon shied away from many doctrinal debates in his fiction—despite the increasing tensions between Fundamentalists and Modernists—and advocated what he called “untheological Christianity,” believing that Jesus “had not formulated any theological system” (Miller 183). Indeed, though Sheldon’s surrogate

Henry Maxwell preaches a familiar message of salvation through faith in Christ, and though he ultimately credits the Holy Spirit for insight into what Jesus would do, he completely glosses over questions of cosmology, atonement, baptism, ecclesiology, and, perhaps most significantly, hermeneutics. As he puts it in his last sermon of the novel,

“[t]he call of this age is a call for a new discipleship, a new following of Jesus, more like

likely because his emphasis on the “Interior Life” (the subject of Book 2 of Imitatione) countermands Sheldon’s insistence on external charity and social reform. 231 the early, simple, apostolic Christianity when the disciples left all and literally followed the Master” (Sheldon 275-276).

This attitude sets In His Steps apart from more contentious Christian fiction, e.g.

The Gates Ajar, and partly accounts for Sheldon’s enduring popularity among a diverse range of Christian readers. More to the point, though, it raises interesting questions about the proper roles of writing and fiction in Christian discourse. For instance, what qualifies a book or an author as Christian? How can fiction potentially point to spiritual truth?

How might reading—whether fiction or nonfiction—play a devotional or even salvific role? As we’ve seen throughout this study, these are difficult questions, and later sections of this chapter will explore some of Sheldon’s complex representations of books and writing. Still, given Sheldon’s obsession with the proper application of Biblical principles, and thus with thornier questions of authority and interpretation, I contend that the novel’s portrayal of writing, speech, and authorship significantly trouble Miller’s summary.

The plot of In His Steps revolves around two groups of Evangelical Christians.

The first group, located at the First Church of Raymond, a setting likely based on

Sheldon’s hometown of Topeka, is led by Reverend Henry Maxwell. When a dying homeless man denounces church members’ pious luxury in a city where thousands “die in tenements and walk the street for jobs…and grow up in misery and drunkenness and sin” (15), Maxwell challenges his congregation to “pledge themselves earnestly and honestly for an entire year not to attempt anything without first asking the question,

‘What would Jesus do?’” (20). The Raymond section of the narrative, which takes up

232 two-thirds of the novel and which I focus on here, specifically follows Maxwell and a group of eight volunteers: Rachel Winslow, a gifted vocalist; Virginia Page, a young heiress; Rollin Page, her dissolute but ultimately repentant brother; Edward Norman, a newspaper editor; Alexander Powers, a railroad executive; Milton Wright, a merchant;

Donald Marsh, a college president; and Jasper Chase, a popular but rather unpleasant novelist. After fifteen chapters, the action moves to Chicago, adding three more characters to make an apostolically even dozen: Reverend Calvin Bruce, his supervising bishop Edward Hampton, and Felicia Sterling, Rachel’s recently orphaned cousin.

All of these characters try to apply their pledge to their personal and professional lives. Rachel, for instance, turns down a lucrative career as a professional singer to minister musically to the denizens of the Rectangle district, Raymond’s saloon-studded ghetto, while Donald forsakes his Casaubonian scholarly cocoon to take on the dastardly liquor interests that run Raymond’s politics. The characters meet with mixed results, but all their successes combine ostensibly Christ-like morals with specifically social actions.

That is, they do not simply serve and/or proselytize individuals, as (for example) Tom did for Augustine St. Clare in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but rather they seek to change institutions and social structures. For example, all three of the Chicago-based characters move into

“the center of the worst part of Chicago” (224) to operate halfway houses and to counteract the influence of crime and alcoholism. As I will discuss in more depth later, this sociological emphasis is central to Sheldon’s engagement with the Social Gospel movement, and to his critique of the Christian church.

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To examine this phenomenon in more detail, I focus the remainder of this chapter on Rev. Henry Maxwell, the lead character and the catalyst for the novel’s events. As a minister, Maxwell occupies an interesting position in terms of the thematic tensions I summarize above. Professionally, his main duty is to preach, which is itself a verbal, potentially dramatic performance. Indeed, throughout the novel Maxwell is very concerned with his performance as a preacher, especially as his audiences grow and change during his evangelistic efforts. But at the same time, he is deeply invested in

Biblical exegesis and application, initially using the text of the Bible to create his own written sermons. Given that Sheldon was a preacher himself, and that he initially delivered In His Steps as a series of sermons at his church in Topeka, Henry Maxwell offers a useful case study of Sheldon’s ambivalence toward writing and literature.

Specifically, in the remaining sections of this chapter I analyze three early but important scenes in the “great upheaval in [Maxwell’s] definition of Christian discipleship” (22). First, I consider Maxwell’s opening sermon, the one he is preparing when he first encounters the character of the tramp. This scene is replete with references to writing and logical structure, and offers a baseline for his attitudes toward the Bible. At the conclusion of this sermon, the tramp delivers his own manifesto, challenging

Maxwell and his congregation to enact what they claimed to believe about following in

Jesus’ steps. This impacts Maxwell’s preaching profoundly, so I turn next to his sermon from the following Sunday, in which he introduces the “What would Jesus do” pledge.

This is nearly a mirror image of his first sermon, and Sheldon strongly emphasizes

Maxwell’s move from writing and logic to speech and emotion. Finally, I conclude the

234 chapter by analyzing the prayer meeting that takes place immediately after the second sermon. This central scene includes Rachel Winslow’s question about “the source of our knowledge concerning what Jesus would do” (25), and lays out Maxwell’s (and

Sheldon’s) vision of moral epistemology and decision-making. Not coincidentally, it also includes one of the longest direct Scriptural quotations of the entire novel, but for very different reasons than one might expect.

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4.2 Literature Review

Like much Christian fiction, In His Steps has attracted scholarly attention from historians and theologians as well as from literary critics. Critics often cite it as an example of a popular Social Gospel novel, though most tend to downplay Sheldon's literary skill and focus instead on his ethical and religious ideas.50 Paul Boyer, for instance, opens his 1971 “reappraisal” of the novel by attributing the dearth of previous scholarship to “the abysmal literary quality of the novel” (61), while Larzer Ziff dismisses the novel’s “specious elevated tone” and complains that in Sheldon’s fictive world, “social details were made ultimately unresistant to the idealized display of absolute moral principles” (86, 87). Theologian James Smylie goes even further:

“Everybody recognizes that In His Steps is badly written and is not a great work of literature, but it is still being referred to by historians, and it is still being read by uncounted thousands, if the number of editions in which it appears is any gage of its circulation” (34). Admittedly, Sheldon’s technique often pales beside his American contemporaries, perhaps reflecting his utilitarian view of fiction. In this study, though,

50 Cara Burnidge argues quite strongly that Social Gospel historiography has undervalued Sheldon’s importance and the extent to which In His Steps articulates Social Gospel theology. According to Burnidge, “historians and literary critics set Sheldon apart from other social gospelers as a direct result of his popularity,” seeing In His Steps as influenced by but not necessarily representing the Social Gospel movement (Burnidge v). However, Burnidge contends that “bringing Sheldon fully into the social gospel movement” would allow scholars to “maintain its urban, industrial, and intellectual core while also allowing for less acknowledged areas of the social gospel movement like frontier, rural, and middle-brow reformers and reform movements” (v). More specifically, Burnidge finds in In His Steps a critical balance between progressive and conservative influences, often expressed in a “tension between social and individual responsibility” (7). Because the novel embraces these tensions and potential contradictions, Burnidge concludes that “In His Steps best reflects the historical intent and reality of the social gospel movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Above all else, Sheldon’s most famous social gospel novel expressed the central tenets of the social gospel, represented its variety of thought, and outlined the social gospel movement’s boundaries” (30). 236

I’m more interested in how In His Steps functions as part of the Social Gospel movement, and how Sheldon’s attitude toward writing and Scripture might complicate his participation.

4.2.1 In His Steps and the Social Gospel Movement

The novel’s popularity has earned it at least a passing mention in most histories of the Social Gospel movement. In Section 4.3, I examine that movement and its theology of Scripture more precisely. Modern historians typically follow Charles Hopkins’ chronology; Hopkins traces the movement between 1865 and 1915, and places its peak between 1890 and 1900. According to Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading Social Gospel theologian and spokesman, “the development of what is called ‘Social Christianity’ or

‘the Social Gospel,’ is a fusion between the new understandings created by the social sciences, and the teachings and moral ideas of Christianity” (qtd. in Graham 2-3). In

Graham’s summary, its proponents sought “to Christianize and humanize an industrial society…to bring religious meaning to the trauma of the new corporate, industrial society by emphasizing the social implications of religion as found in the teachings of the

Hebrew prophets and Jesus. The Social Gospelers saw the Christian message of salvation applying to the structures of society no less than to individuals” (1-2).51

Hopkins ranks In His Steps “among the greatest American tracts,” and notes that the “social-gospel novel achieved its greatest success in [Sheldon’s] hands” (140, 141).

51 This last idea is particularly important to Sheldon’s understanding of salvation. To be sure, his characters’ evangelical efforts, like his own, included orthodox emphases on individual repentance and behavior—Rollin Page, for instance, must turn from his dissolute debauchery to be counted a Christian and earn Rachel’s love (154). But when Rollin seeks to convert his friends, he speaks of them as a “class of people,” “the fashionable, dissipated young men around town, the club-men” (152). For him, as for nearly all the characters, activism is a crucial component of Christianity. 237

By the end of the novel, Hopkins notes, “a national revival of social religion seemed imminent” (144). White and Hopkins also summarize the novel in their chapter on

“Popular Culture and Social Religion,” identifying Sheldon as a centrist who rejected

Christian Socialism but imagined “social redemption through individual sacrifice”

(Gabriel 322, qtd. in White & Hopkins 146). Phillips reaches similar conclusions: “While

Sheldon preaches the value of the organization in bringing Christian compassion to the poor, he also emphasizes the personal element in Christian discipleship, in which each believer must individually follow in Christ’s steps to achieve overall social justice” (130).

Significantly, Phillips argues, “In His Steps reflects the essence of Social Christianity itself, with its various nuances and, at times, seeming contradictions” (131). In part, representing these nuances meant grappling with class-related challenges, including socialist skepticism (embodied in the character of Carlsen) and the main characters’ attempts to overcome their “middle-class limitations” (Phillips 131).

James Smylie describes the novel’s theological position more precisely, placing it

“theologically within the Christocentric evangelical tradition in which context the author was able to emphasize Jesus as the pattern of Christian life” (34). At the same time, In

His Steps “was published in the midst of much social concern in American society,” some of which involved Christianity’s response to industrialism, socialism, and organized labor (33). For instance, in 1889 W.D.P. Bliss, an Episcopal priest, founded the Boston- based Society of Christian Socialists, and his Encyclopedia of Social Reform appeared in

1897, the same year as the novel. Sheldon’s response to these pressures, Smylie argues, draws both on theocentric and Christocentric understandings of Christian ethics. The

238 theocentric ideas, which prevailed in both Calvinist and Arminian versions of 19th- century American Protestantism, “were based upon what God has done for the Christian and the world through Christ, and the application and appropriation of God's work in

Christ in a legal way. […] Both of these models are prescriptive in the sense that the measure of righteousness is God's law in personal and public affairs” (35). Conversely,

Christocentric ideas “placed an emphasis upon Jesus' sacrifice as an example of God's love for the Christian, and the Christian's love of the neighbor,” such that “Christ, the justifier and sanctifier, is now Jesus, the immanent revelation of God, who discloses the moral ideal and secures moral progress” (36). Importantly, while Sheldon’s case studies of ethical discipleship do involve personal suffering and sacrifice—the classic Christian idea of “taking up one’s cross”—they also require social engagement. This engagement does of course involve evangelism and some direct proselytizing, but Smylie views

Sheldon’s assorted “cases of conscience” as “genuine attempts to contribute to the public good, and not just attempts to insure a dominant role in the society” (43). In this, he concurs with Sydney Ahlstrom’s judgment that Sheldon “became a major apostle of not only the Social Gospel but of the broader liberal movement as well” (776-777).

Gregory Jackson’s influential study The Word and Its Witness presents a detailed theoretical model of postbellum religious narratives and their nuanced mimetic strategies.

Studies of American realism, he notes, have traditionally privileged the secular and realistic over the spiritual and idealistic, such that “material authenticity” (8) became the measure of reality. However, what Jackson calls “homiletic narratives” blur these category lines, by using traditional realist appeals to bind “an intensely optic imagination

239 with specific Protestant strategies for engaging visual, oral, and literary texts” (5). For

Jackson, this technique is intimately bound up with Social Gospel theory and practice. In his words, “the homiletic novel…reenergized Protestantism with a strange mix of practical application, liberalism, and otherworldly spiritualism, sparking a fury of social activism that would become hallmarks of the Progressive Era and have reverberations that last to the present day” (214). In contrast to secular realism, which dismissed spirituality as a mask for actual social and economic conditions, this movement recognized that all of physical reality was simply a representation of spiritual reality, and that reading and interpreting texts could potentially unlock this higher plane.

Jackson focuses on popular devotional works, which he characterizes as “a pilgrim's progress in which successive experiments in narrative form and medium were thought to lead believers ever closer to salvation” (4) by imaginatively recreating events of spiritual significance. Significantly, he suggests a continuity between these 19th- century practices and both earlier and later Protestant hermeneutics, as well as between homiletic and secular realism, such that “the homiletic novel's emphasis on acting as

Jesus would in this world—the thrust of the modern imitatio Christi— shades into the realist novel’s tendency to read the social as the product of individual ethical choices, and the realist novel’s attempt to capture a social totality, a world beyond the intellectual scope or experience of individual characters, bleeds into the homiletic gesture to a world elsewhere” (13-14).

As this last quote suggests, In His Steps is a touchstone for Jackson’s analysis of homiletic narrative and representational strategies. Sheldon’s novels, he argues,

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“provided virtual exercises and steps of graduated difficulty to strengthen Christians’ moral muscularity—their resolve, judgment, and will. Through controlled exposure, the texts forearmed their audience against sin by simulating experiences that would prepare them for their ground duty in salvation’s army as it morally rearmed the nation” (197).

Indeed, the cover of the first edition of In His Steps (Figure 1, below) portrays Jesus’

“steps” from Bethlehem to Calvary as an ascending staircase, suggesting a spiritual exercise in which suffering with Jesus is necessary to follow his moral example. Jackson argues that such simulations were both pragmatic and spiritual: Sheldon’s readers could both apply the “what would Jesus do” standard to their own daily decisions and figuratively re-enact the Stations of the Cross as they served others.

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Fig. 2. Cover of the first edition (facsimile) of In His Steps.

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4.2.2 The Social Gospel Novel

Beyond these historical surveys, In His Steps also features prominently in scholarship on Social Gospel novels. Several scholars point out that novels popularized

Social Gospel ideals and doctrines to a great extent, tapping into the tsunami of religious writing and publishing at the turn of the century. If, as David Paul Nord argues, pre-1850 religious presses “led America into the modern era of mass publication and systematic distribution of printed material” (5), then novelists like Sheldon, Charles Gordon, Edward

Bellamy, and Harold Bell Wright recognized this system’s enormous market and moral potential, and used both to good effect. As I discuss in this study’s introduction, studying bestselling religious novels is one way to identify which models, ideas, and genres appealed widely to American Christians. At the same time, limiting the study to four representative books necessarily oversimplifies genres, movements, and periods, not to mention the complexity of readers’ responses and beliefs. Robert Glenn Wright, for instance, catalogs a broad range of “Social Christian novels [that] dramatize some social evil and then propose a solution based on one or more aspects of Christian teaching” (1).

In this model, Wright categorizes In His Steps among “traditional social gospel novels that argue various forms of middle- and working-class self-help based on the Christian ethics of the New Testament” (36), but emphasizes that Sheldon’s fellow authors and likely influences represented a wide range of political and sociological perspectives.

Their works, Wright reminds us, are often stereotyped as being “tracts of middle-class piety that present moral lessons” in Sheldon’s mold (37), but in truth In His Steps adheres

243 to fairly moderate and decorous standards—which may account for its enduring popularity among conservative Christians.

The novel’s unusual production and distribution accounted for much of its popularity; John Ripley offers the fullest account of both processes, and seeks to debunk

“the myriad of myths about In His Steps” (241). For example, in Sheldon’s 1925 autobiography he reported that “[t]he publisher of the Advance,” the religious periodical that serialized In His Steps, “sent only a part instead of all the chapters of the serial publication to the Washington Copyright Bureau, instead of all as the law required. On account of that slight technical error the book copyright was declared defective” (qtd. in

Ripley 251). The real problem, Ripley explains, was that the Advance, following standard practice of the day, did not acquire a legal copyright on any of its material. Thus, since the novel had technically been published in a public domain periodical, Sheldon could not legally copyright it (Ripley 251). Regardless, Ripley notes, the novel’s runaway sales not only popularized “Sheldon’s brand of Christianity” (261) but, as was the case with

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, later inspired stage, radio, and film adaptations (263-265).

Turning from book history to literary analysis, Franklin Graham’s Half-Finished

Heaven devotes two chapters to Sheldon’s representation of Social Gospel concerns and his interaction with Social Gospel theology. Graham views the Social Gospel novels “as prime agents in animating further theological thought” (81), insofar as “the theology was developing as the novels were being written” (80). More specifically, novelists like

Sheldon “actually served the theologians by highlighting need and encouraging compassion not just for individuals, but by envisioning change in society’s structures and

244 institutions”—which according to Graham, is the defining impulse of the Social Gospel movement (51). Graham considers In His Steps to be “an enduring piece of evangelism, a consideration of the Church’s efforts at adaptation to changing times, and…a study of a populist effort to bring parts of the Social Gospel to a large audience in hopes that the effort’s aims would come to fulfillment” (69). However, Graham roundly criticizes

Sheldon for adhering to a basically conservative, individualist view of salvation and reform. Sheldon, he says, “was fixed in the older evangelism which centered on personal salvation. One redeemed soul at a time, he looked towards the refreshment and salvation of humankind” (60). Even worse, while “Sheldon’s individual characters are affected by evil,” “there is no consideration of unjust structures or oppressive situations as products of sin and evil…[h]is attention is turned to the promotion of charity, while ignoring issues of justice” (69-70). Graham is correct that Sheldon privileges revival over reform, as I will examine in more detail later in this chapter, though overall his complaint seems to be that Sheldon is insufficiently radical in his theology or his politics.

Paul Boyer’s article “In His Steps: A Reappraisal” places In His Steps in a “select company of books which in a peculiarly effective way both gave expression to and intensified some dominant current of popular feeling in their day” (60). Like Graham,

Paul Boyer finds Sheldon too bland when it comes to social reform, and too shallow when it comes to religion. Despite its common placement within Social Gospel scholarship, Boyer claims, the novel “is concerned only minimally with religion, social injustice or reform.” Instead, “it is concerned, almost obsessively, with certain psychological and emotional problems troubling the American middle class at the close

245 of the 19th century” (62). The general contours of Boyer’s argument about religion in the novel dovetail with some of my own arguments in this chapter. He points out, for instance, that the characters do not consult “the biblical record, or church history, or contemporary pronouncements by religious bodies on social and economic issues– to discover what, in fact, their social duty as Christians might be” (62). Instead, in his reading “each individual [in the novel] must determine his Christian duty by consulting his own conscience” (62). Similarly, he complains that the novel’s representations of social change are vague and moderate, except when it comes to Prohibition, “the one– the only– legislative reform which Sheldon tirelessly, unqualifiedly and passionately espouses (63).

But rather than indicating a shift in attitudes toward revelation and inspiration, as

I explore later in this chapter, Boyer believes these features mask “the fear which looms just below the surface of his novel: that the middle class, in an excess of individualism, is losing its sense of cohesion and common purpose and is seriously threatened with disintegration” (63). The main threat, in Boyer’s reading, is violence from lower social classes, most often represented by alcohol but also by a few scenes of “sudden flashes of violence” (68). Boyer claims that the middle-class characters’ discomfort with certain working-class people and settings (notably the Rectangle) actually indicate fear and anxiety, and that “[t]his revulsion is never abandoned, even when the middle class of

Raymond is in its loftiest philanthropic mood” (68). In response, the middle class tries to exert control, typically by exerting “superior moral authority” (69). Boyer puts little stock in the actual reform efforts– and none at all in the possibility of actual moral change– and

246 instead asserts that “In His Steps…holds out hope that the revolutionary potential of the slums though menacing and fearsome may be eliminated if the middle-class virtues are transmitted to the working class in time” (71). Interestingly, however, he still attributes these processes to “a major spiritual crisis” (78) among middle-class Americans, even though he evidently cannot imagine that those same Americans would take their faith seriously.

John Ferré offers a more useful view of Sheldon’s “popular culture gold mine”

(40). He places Social Gospel novels against a backdrop of internal and external

“challenges to orthodoxy,” and argues that these novels “can illuminate the relationship between mass-mediated messages and a culture’s value system” (1). Accordingly, much of his analysis concerns Sheldon’s moral standards: what counts as evil, what causes it, and how the story’s characters succeed or fail to promote Christ-centric morality. He notes, for instance, that while wealth is “a neutral tool that can support Christian activities…or oppose Christian activities” (24), “[m]ost of the evils in the novel are acts or attitudes that can be conquered only by the rich. […] From the beginning to the end of the novel, the poor must wait for the conversion of the rich” (27). Sheldon’s representation of alcohol, though, features no such nuance: not only is liquor “the most important link in the chain of poverty” (25), but its presence or influence (e.g. the dreaded “liquor interests” controlling Raymond’s politics) short-circuits the entire process of moral decision-making. Sheldon makes it clear that Jesus would neither rent property to saloons nor vote against “local option” (Prohibition), let alone imbibe the

“devilish drink” (Sheldon 110). Ferré argues, and I agree, that this moral structure

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“suggests that the poor cannot master their own destiny” (27), and that Sheldon ultimately seeks “to instill the values of community and sobriety into the unredeemed world at large, one individual at a time” (42).

4.2.3 Biblicism, Literacy, and Ambivalence

Beyond his keen observations on the nature of good and evil in Sheldon’s world,

Ferré also offers an intriguing though problematic interpretation of the Bible’s role in the novel, particularly in terms of moral decision-making. As he notes, the WWJD pledge “is voluntary and subject to individual interpretation” (34), though the only active opposition to the resulting decisions comes from those outside the flock. However, Ferré also claims, this new discipleship is also formulaic, requiring “three steps: prayer, Bible study, and fellowship” (34). I will return to the role of prayer as verbal performance later in this chapter, as Ferré’s account of Bible study is most relevant to my focus. Ferré admits that

“the importance of Bible study in this narrative…is more implied than stated” (35). He attributes this to the characters’ recognition of the New Testament’s cultural and historical limitations: “There are many perplexing questions in our civilization,” Rachel

Winslow muses, “that are not mentioned in the teachings of Jesus” (20). Indeed, despite the novel’s seemingly inherent dependence on the Gospels’ moral authority, “[n]ever does a character pore through the New Testament in search of biblical parallels to contemporary problems” (Ferré 35-36). Ferré excuses this absence on the grounds of the novel’s “numerous [Biblical] quotations and paraphrases” (36), but I don’t think that’s the whole story. Instead, as I will show in the remaining sections of this chapter, the near- complete absence of actual exegesis or even Bible reading—an equally stark contrast

248 with Stowe as with Phelps—indicates a retreat from textual authority, and a profound ethical reliance on human judgment and intuition.

Although mine is the first study to engage Sheldon’s complex attitudes toward reading and writing, Erin Smith’s article “The Social Gospel and the Literary

Marketplace” offers several useful observations about how Social Gospel novels represent reading and libraries. Smith contends that In His Steps, Harold Bell Wright's

That Printer of Udell's (1903), and Winston Churchill's Inside of the Cup (1913) all “are self-consciously about print culture, making clear that founding the kingdom of God here on earth depends on making appropriate use of books and literacy” (194). This attitude toward literacy supports Candy Brown’s assertions about Evangelical reading and publishing: maintaining both “purity and presence” (Brown 1) requires both recognizing the spiritual potential of novels and leveraging the act of reading for specific social and religious goals. Though Social Gospel novelists arguably focused on social reform while

Evangelical novelists stressed individual repentance, both relied on broader demand for novels to get their message out. Indeed, both Smith and Graham argue that novels played a more pronounced role in the Social Gospel movement than in previous Christian movements, due to their exponentially larger audiences. Smith, thus, uses the novels listed above to “uncove[r] the rules of reading and the networks of reading practices authors, ministers, and publishers urged on their social gospel readers in turn-of-the- century America,” but also to examine “some of the ways social gospel readers appropriated these texts as ‘equipment for living’ their everyday lives” (194).

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More specifically, Smith suggests that in Social Gospel novels, “appropriate use of books invariably moves readers to social action. […] In social gospel fiction, poverty, drunkenness, crime, and urban blight are no match for the right kind of books in the hands and minds of the right kind of readers.” Though each of the novels Smith analyzes presents a different model of reading and writing, she notes that they all “demonstrate the porousness of the boundaries between literature and life for good Christian readers”

(194). Because of this porousness, “[l]iterature in social gospel novels is not a self- contained, intertextual world of ideas, but a series of concrete transactions with the material world” (195). For example, Sheldon considered his sermon stories—In His Steps was his seventh—”to be continuous with the soul-saving work of the pulpit,” and thus

“did not imagine his work as part of a self-contained aesthetic world or as a finely wrought stylistic artifact, but instead as having what Tompkins called ‘designs on the world’” (Smith 201). In this vein, Smith reads In His Steps as “Sheldon's most searing indictment of the modern republic of letters” and “a specific meditation on religion and print culture in turn-of-the-century America” (202).

Not surprisingly, much of Smith’s analysis explicates the character of Jasper

Chase, the sole novelist in the original group from Raymond and “the only major character who reneges on his promise” to meet the WWJD standard. As Smith points out,

Jasper’s “first novel's heroine was an idealized Rachel and its hero an idealized version of him” (203-204), but once Rachel takes the pledge she rejects Jasper as being insufficiently serious about his faith. Notably, she complains that his attempts to woo her distract her from “her possession by the Holy Spirit…so she tells him that she does not

250 love him and that her heart is entirely engaged by her Christian mission” (Smith 204).

According to Smith, this juxtaposition fits a larger pattern by which professional aesthetic pursuits—Jasper’s novels, Rachel’s singing, and Professor Marsh’s scholarship—must be sacrificed in the name of deliberate social engagement. Indeed, as I will argue throughout this chapter, though Sheldon of course counted on a community of readers to popularize his ideas, he presents reading and writing—including Jasper’s “social novel” that “had no purpose except to amuse” (Sheldon 162) as distracting at best, and in Jasper’s case, as an outright betrayal of his faith.

4.3 The Bible and the Social Gospel

Because the Social Gospel movement crossed denominational lines, and because it featured liberal, moderate, and conservative articulations, defining its essential doctrines is difficult. In fact, at least some Social Gospel preachers and theologians saw strict doctrinal definitions as part of the problem with mainstream Evangelical

Protestantism, both because they divided Christians and because they distracted them from the kind of social outreach modeled in the Gospels. Sheldon in particular can be difficult to pin down, not because he lacked theological opinions but because he regarded them as secondary to social reform. Miller writes that Sheldon “eschewed theological adornments, focusing on Jesus, the one unifying center of all Christianity,” and lamented that “[n]o answer is readily apparent” about Sheldon’s “important convictions about anything except personal piety” (xii, xiii). Indeed, Sheldon himself insisted in an 1899 interview that “[t]he message is in my books—let people read it there. If they cannot

251 discover my motive by reading the books I have written, of what use are they, and why waste time talking about myself?” (qtd. in Miller xv).

Sections 4.4 through 4.6 attempt to do just that, in terms of Scripture’s role in

Sheldon’s reforms. First, however, I want to contextualize Sheldon’s fictional representations by reviewing an influential treatise by Social Gospel theologian

Washington Gladden: Who Wrote The Bible?: A Book for the People (1894). Given that

Sheldon “readily accepted higher criticism of the Bible” (Miller xiii), he would have likely read and agreed with much of Gladden’s bestselling book, which “insisted that the

Bible was not infallible historically, scientifically, or morally” (Boyer, “Washington

Gladden” 96). Furthermore, Gladden and Sheldon shared the goal of popularizing Social

Gospel ideals, and both targeted middle- and working-class audiences with those appeals.

More to the point, both valued the Bible for its moral examples, but only insofar as those examples inspired contemporary ethical action.

As my literature review suggests, scholars disagree about how much—or even whether—Sheldon adhered to Social Gospel theology, and accordingly whether In His

Steps promoted a genuine Social Gospel message. Graham, for instance, credits Sheldon with a popular but unsophisticated version of the Social Gospel message, while Burnidge instead treats Sheldon’s work as the Social Gospel gold standard. Naturally, part of the debate involves defining the Social Gospel itself—a complex and loosely organized movement, which lacked precise theological definition until fairly late in its history, by which time its influence had waned considerably. That task is outside the scope of my chapter, partly because the plot of In His Steps avoids theological precision and partly

252 because its popularity arguably resulted from its practical, non-denominational focus.

However, both Sheldon and Gladden strongly emphasized the ethical applications of

Jesus’ teachings, and Gladden specifically privileged these applications over orthodox doctrines of Biblical accuracy and inspiration. Sheldon, I will argue, was not quite so willing to dispose of orthodoxy, but nonetheless valued action far more than reading, and had little patience for right interpretation if it did not lead to social reform.

Like Sheldon, Washington Gladden (1836-1918) spent much of his adult life as a

Congregational minister, preaching at the First Congregational Church of Columbus, OH from 1882 through 1918. Both men used their respective pulpits to promote social reforms, and both wrote prolifically: Gladden published some forty books and hundreds of articles, often based on his sermons. However, while Sheldon relied on his sermon stories to spread his ideas, Gladden wrote mostly political nonfiction, focusing especially on labor conditions and Christian approaches to unions and labor disputes. In an early pro-labor manifesto, Working People and Their Employers (1876), Gladden argued that labor issues “are not only questions of economy, they are in a large sense moral questions; nay, they touch the very marrow of that religion of good-will of which Christ was the founder. […] The pulpit must have something to say about them” (qtd. in Boyer,

“Washington Gladden” 92). For Gladden, “the key was always an appeal to individual conscience on both sides of the labor divide,” ideally leading to “a middle way rooted in a socially conscious Christianity” (Boyer, “Washington Gladden” 95, 91). Gladden’s politics grew more radical through the 1880s and 1890s, but he maintained the same optimism about human potential, at least when it was inflected through Christian values.

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In an 1895 essay, for instance, he proposed a simple ethical model similar to Sheldon’s:

“all that is needed [to bring forth the Kingdom of God] is that the work should be carried on to completion . . . as every man learns to do habitually the loving thing. Love is the only law; its force is irresistible; it solves all social problems” (qtd. in Boyer,

“Washington Gladden” 95).

Who Wrote the Bible?: A Book for the People strongly reflects this ethos, though its subject matter departs from Gladden’s work on social reform. Starting in the 1870s,

Boyer notes, Gladden “plunged into the religious controversies of his day, siding firmly with the so-called ‘modernists’ in rejecting the fundamentalist claim that the Bible was literally dictated by God and is inerrant in every detail” (96). These controversies involved some specific doctrinal claims, notably the historicity of Genesis, but for

Gladden the main issues were the textual/historical origins of Scripture and its application to modern life. His subtitle, A Book for the People, certainly fits his accessible and friendly prose, designed to present a century of theological research to a non-academic audience. Indeed, he defines his purpose as “put[ting] into compact and popular form, for the benefit of intelligent readers, the principal facts upon which scholars are now generally agreed concerning the literary history of the Bible” (1). Though Gladden arguably overstates the degree of consensus for his positions, he is also careful to separate himself from the more skeptical conclusions about the Bible’s origin and reliability. To do so, he asserts his belief that “the Bible contains supernatural elements” and that “other than natural forces have been employed in producing it,” but claims that

“we may study the origin and growth of the Bible”—which he labels its “natural

254 history”—“without attempting to decide the deeper questions concerning the inspiration of its writers and the meaning of the truths they reveal” (2).

At the same time, Gladden characterizes the Bible itself as a book for the people, one produced in large part by “natural and human agencies” (4) and including numerous

“human and fallible elements” (16). In his satiric version of the fundamentalist position

(though he prefers the term “traditional view”), the Bible is “a book that was written in heaven in the English tongue, divided there into chapters and verses, with head lines and reference marks, printed in small pica, bound in calf, and sent down to earth by angels in its present form” (3-4). The damning weakness of the traditional view, for Gladden, is its literally dogmatic insistence that God essentially dictated every word of the Bible— including the English translation, a view that some Fundamentalists hold even today— and delivered it to Earth. In fact, Gladden compares this perspective to the origin myth of

The Book of Mormon: that an angel told Joseph Smith where to find a buried box of golden plates, and that “a pair of supernatural spectacles” (Gladden 3) enabled Smith to read and translate the plates’ unknown dialect. In both stories, Gladden emphasizes the completeness of the sacred text, rendering human intervention and historical or literary construction basically unnecessary. This completeness even extends to bibliographical structure and format, perhaps alluding to the common practice of using paratextual instruction (e.g. passage headings and marginal notes) to encourage particular interpretations. More importantly, since both stories presuppose a divine origin for their respective texts, it’s easy to equate criticism of the text with criticism of the deity.

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To counter this argument, Gladden devotes most of his book to historical-critical accounts of the Bible’s construction, both in terms of source material and, later, canonization. While he stops short of claiming that the Bible’s human authors and/or editors automatically disqualify its divine origin, he does insist that certain parts of

Scripture have been made obsolete by human moral evolution—and in fact, that one purpose of Scripture is to present “the record of an inspired or divinely guided development…the goal to which we see the people steadily conducted in its vivid chapters is the goal which God has marked for human progress” (364). Unlike his Deist and Unitarian predecessors, however, Gladden deploys this argument to praise the

Bible’s “grand uplifting visions and purposes”: “It is in these great ideas that the value of these writings consists, and not in any petty infallibility of phrase, or inerrancy of statement” (16). That is, for Gladden the Bible’s ultimate purpose is not to demonstrate

God’s authority or power, but to inspire humans to become morally better versions of themselves.

Gladden fleshes out this model in his final chapter, “How Much is the Bible

Worth?”. There, he claims “the impossibility of maintaining the verbal inerrancy of the

Bible” given that “human ignorance and error have been suffered to mingle with this stream of living water throughout all its course” (351-2). These imperfections, he asserts, include historical “discrepancies and contradictions,” contradictions between Genesis and

“geological science,” and the fact that “portions of this revelation [i.e. the Old Testament] involve an imperfect morality” (352). Accordingly, for Gladden the Bible’s value lies not in its source but in its “righteousness”: “Righteousness is life; righteousness is salvation;

256 this is the one message of the Bible to men” (361). Despite the tendency of “modern

Christians” to “make the belief in sound dogma, or the performance of decorous rites, or the experience of emotional raptures the principal thing” about Christianity, he further argues, “the testimony of the Bible to the supremacy of character and conduct is clear and convincing, and the world is coming to understand it” (361-2). Indeed, a few paragraphs later he asserts that the Bible “is the record of the development of the kingdom of righteousness in the world. Man knows intuitively that he ought to do right; his notion of what is right is continually being purified and enlarged” (362).

Unfortunately, Sheldon wrote next to nothing about his specific theological influences, preferring instead to express his opinions in fiction. However, his representations of moral reasoning in In His Steps suggest that he also saw Scripture as a moral and ethical guidebook, and like Gladden he demands character and conduct with equal ferocity. Gladden expresses a basically optimistic and progressive view of human morality, in which humankind gradually but inevitably surpasses Biblical standards designed for “such a semi-barbarous people as the Hebrews were when they came out of

Egypt” (363). The result is a “higher morality,” one that ostensibly indicates “the goal

God has marked for human progress” (363, 364). The question, though, is whether humankind can reach those ethical heights alone, without supernatural help or redemption. Gladden does credit the Bible as being “a book of inspiration because it is the record of an inspired or divinely guided development” (363), but believes that same development allows humans to transcend the Bible’s specific moral and ethical

257 instructions. In other words, human achievement is his golden standard for moral action, not divine law.

Sheldon’s approach is more complex, but he does adapt an important element of

Gladden’s moral framework. Whereas Gladden mainly critiques the Old Testament as a regressive source of moral law, Sheldon reduces Biblical morality into a single question:

“what would Jesus do?” This could allow him to bypass several of Gladden’s objections to OT morality, if he holds to the popular view that Jesus’ moral teachings replaced

Jewish legalism. Gladden certainly takes this position:

Jesus Christ, who is himself the Word, toward whom these laws and prophecies point, and in whom they culminate, is indeed the perfect Revelation of God. [...] With his words all these old Scriptures must be compared, so far as they agree with his teachings we may take them as eternal truth; those portions of them which fall below this standard, we may pass by as a partial revelation upon us no longer binding (369). At the same time, Sheldon further distances his moral model from strictly Biblical content by posing the question in the subjective: he is not interested what Jesus did in first-century Galilee, but in what Jesus would do in nineteenth-century Raymond. At various points in the novel, several characters even make lists of things they believe Jesus would do in their places. Often they precede the list-making with prayer, which could be seen as seeking God’s moral guidance, but at no point do they actually study the Bible or offer specific Biblical justifications for their actions. This is a far cry from Henry

Maxwell’s careful exegesis in his first sermon of the novel, which I analyze in the next section. But as I will argue in the rest of this chapter, Sheldon strongly associates textual authority with moral degradation and social impotence, while linking self-reliance with moral certitude and divinely-sanctioned social reform.

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4.4 Henry Maxwell’s Striking Sentences

As I explain in section 4.1, Henry Maxwell is the catalyst for much of the novel’s action, insofar as he demonstrates and popularizes the WWJD pledge, including regular consultations with most of the other characters about just what Jesus would do in their shoes. In this role he often acts as Sheldon’s theological mouthpiece, but I argue in this section that he also expresses Sheldon’s anxiety and ambivalence about the value of reading and writing in evaluating ethical actions. As a Christian theologian, Maxwell gravitates toward written scholarship, including in his sermons, but as a preacher he must perform those sermons orally. Especially in the first couple chapters of In His Steps,

Sheldon strongly implies a conflict between Maxwell’s sermons, which emphasize action and imitating Christ, and his methods. Likewise, the more progress Maxwell makes in his movement and his own discipleship, the less he relies on writing. To show this progression, and to suggest how it might reveal Sheldon’s conflicted view of Scripture, I focus in this section on three of Maxwell’s speeches: the sermon the tramp interrupts, the

WWJD challenge sermon he preaches the next week, and the prayer meeting he leads after the challenge sermon.

The novel opens on a Friday morning52, as Henry Maxwell “was trying to finish his Sunday morning sermon” despite being “interrupted several times” (5). Sheldon repeatedly calls attention to writing and texts in his description of Maxwell’s efforts, and

52 This timing is symbolically important, as it echoes the Passion narratives in the Gospels: according to all four accounts, Jesus was tried early Friday morning and was crucified at “the third hour” (9AM; see Mark 15:25), and arose the next Sunday (Mark 16). This does not exactly portray Maxwell as a Christ-figure, especially compared to the tramp character, but it does tap into Christian notions of figuratively dying to one’s self (cf. Luke 9:23, Romans 6:1-11) and becoming a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17). 259 contrasts them with the “interruptions”—notably the visit from the tramp—that ostensibly require actual Christian charity. For instance, when Maxwell is finally left alone, he “settled himself at his desk with a sigh of relief and began to write. His text was from First Peter, ii:21: ‘For hereunto were ye called; because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you as an example, that ye should follow his steps’” (5)53. This is one of only a few times in the entire novel that a character actually quotes Scripture—a marked difference from Stowe’s deluge of Biblical quotes and allusions. More importantly, while

Stowe’s characters actively internalize, debate, and apply the text of Scripture, here

Maxwell seems to treat the 1 Peter passage more as a prop. This is not to suggest that he doesn’t believe it, but rather that his main task is explication, not application.

Furthermore, in contrast to the impassioned, personal appeals that characterize

Maxwell’s later sermons, this sermon seems to be tidy and logical, more a treatise than a call to action. The narrator describes Maxwell’s tripartite sermon much like a lecture, comparing “the Atonement as a personal sacrifice” to “the Atonement from the side of example,” and inexorably moving on to “the third and last point, the necessity of following Jesus in his sacrifice and example” (5-6). And in case we missed the structure, at the very moment Maxwell is interrupted by the doorbell, he “had just put down, ‘3

Steps: What are they?’ and was about to enumerate them in logical order” (6). At the door, of course, is the same tramp who would challenge Maxwell and his congregation

53 Throughout the novel Sheldon quotes from the English Revised Version (NT 1881, OT 1885), the only officially commissioned revision of the King James Bible (1611). The American Standard Version, which appeared in 1901 after the novel’s publication, was adapted from the RV, and in turn the ASV served as the starting point for several other translations, notably the Revised Standard Version (1971) and the New American Standard Bible (1995).

260 the following Sunday, yet when the tramp asks for help finding a job, the “very busy” (7) preacher is unwilling to interrupt his writing to do so. Even though, as we learn later,

Maxwell’s parishioners include several influential businessmen, here he makes a deliberate choice to privilege written words over charitable action.

In fact, when Maxwell’s wife returns home, the narrator reports, “the sermon was finished, the loose leaves gathered up and neatly tied together and laid on [Maxwell’s]

Bible, all ready for the Sunday morning service” (7). This final image, of the sermon itself becoming a mini-Bible—suitable to be read, but also limited to a single performance—is especially poignant because it highlights the disconnection between

Maxwell’s Christian message and his own actions. Specifically, when Maxwell declines to help the tramp, he insists that his referral “would be of no use” but tells the tramp, “I hope you will find something” (6-7). This dialogue deliberately echoes a warning in

James 2:14ff, a treatise on the relationship between faith and works: “If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the body; what doth it profit?” (2:15-16). Particularly since much of In His Steps, as well as the broader Social Gospel movement, emphasized meeting material needs through social reform, Maxwell’s response plays right into the Social Gospel’s stereotype of the well-meaning but ultimately useless Christian.

My point here, though, is not simply that Maxwell’s refusal marks him as a hypocrite, but to highlight how strongly Sheldon associates that hypocrisy with writing.

Simply put, in this scene writing competes with charity, and though the experience

261 clearly has an emotional impact on Maxwell, after he sends the tramp away he returns to his study and “began the writing where he had left off” (7). This deliberate move privileges comfort over risk, logic over emotion, and isolation over social engagement— the very dynamics that animate most of the characters’ subsequent moral dilemmas. For

Sheldon, it is not enough to present the irony of affirming “the necessity of following

Jesus in his sacrifice and example” (6) while strenuously ignoring that example in one’s own ethical conduct. He goes out of his way to associate that failure with the creation and presentation of another text, “gathered up and neatly tied together” (7). In this vein the allusion to James 2 is even more striking: immediately after illustrating the futility of encouragement without assistance, James asserts that “faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone” (2:17).

The next scene, when Maxwell actually delivers his sermon to the congregation, picks up on similar themes. In stark contrast to Maxwell’s “very dusty, shabby, and generally tramp-like” visitor (7), the First Church of Raymond “was filled with an audience of the best dressed, most comfortable looking people in Raymond.” They

“believed in having the best music that money could buy,” and like the bound-up sermon

“all the music was in keeping with the subject of the sermon” (8). Rachel Winslow, a gifted vocalist and one of the novel’s main characters, offers the main performance here, as she does at many subsequent revival meetings later in the novel. However, while the later performances magically soften the most liquor-hardened heathen heart, here she is more of a prop: “[Maxwell] generally arranged for a song before the sermon. It made possible a certain inspiration of feeling that he knew made his delivery more impressive”

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(9). Perhaps more damningly, none of Maxwell’s actual sermon appears in the chapter: instead, he is consumed with his church’s affluence and his own influence, and is so

“conscious of defining his position and his emotions as well as if he had held a soliloquy,” that “his delivery partook of the thrill of deep personal satisfaction” (10).

Once again, Sheldon’s description implies an insular, self-congratulatory stance—one reminiscent of Marie St. Clare’s proslavery church in Uncle Tom’s Cabin— that contradicts and even replaces the sermon’s ostensible message about following

Christ’s example. Likewise, just as Maxwell had to ignore the tramp to produce his book- like sermon, the narrator’s further description of that sermon returns to metaphors of refined writing:

The sermon was interesting. It was full of striking sentences. They would have commanded attention printed. Spoken with the passion of a dramatic utterance that had the good taste never to offend with a suspicion of ranting or declamation, they were very effective. […] [The congregation] congratulated itself on the presence in the pulpit of this scholarly, refined, somewhat striking face and figure, preaching with such animation and freedom from all vulgar, noisy, or disagreeable mannerism (10-11). One benefit, it seems, of these “striking sentences” is their ability to corral “the passion of a dramatic utterance” into a logical and manageable manuscript. Though Maxwell’s delivery seems effective, its effectiveness is contingent on moderation: passionate but not personal, and dramatic but not “ranting.” He insists on “the necessity of following Jesus in his sacrifice and example” (6), certainly a radical commitment for any Christian, but both he and his congregation evidently imagine such sacrifice in mainly respectable contexts. In fact, the sermon’s effectiveness derives from its decorum: Maxwell’s delivery, at least, offers no threat to his listeners’ intellectual, religious, or moral comfort.

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Declamation is a particularly interesting word choice here. To declaim, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, can mean “to speak loudly and vehemently” or “to deliver a formal recitation, especially as an exercise in rhetoric or elocution.” Both definitions are relevant to Sheldon’s thematic contrast between speech and writing. The first sense parallels the “vulgar, noisy, and disagreeable mannerism[s]” (11) at the end of the paragraph, a resonant phrase given the similar conditions in the Rectangle, and presents unfettered speech as a breach of decorum—in this context, strongly tied to economic and social class—and an assault on decency. But an elocutionary exercise or recitation is also suspect in this model. This type of declamation has a more ambivalent relationship to writing: on one hand it is typically performed without a manuscript, distinguishing it from Maxwell’s carefully written sermon, but on the other hand it often presents written content in oral form. Such a performance could well maintain the logical structure and finality of writing, yet still require a personal and physical investment. If both types of declamation are off limits, then the printed page must be the distinguishing variable. Maxwell, it seems, can simply let his written words efface and ultimately replace his actions, functioning not as an imperfect and morally responsible human being, but as a “somewhat striking face and figure” (11), reduced to his own sentences.

At the same time Sheldon contrasts Maxwell’s sermon with ranting and declamation, he solidifies its association with books by noting that the “striking sentences…would have commanded attention printed” (10). The manuscript itself, of course, already resembles a printed book, with its “loose leaves gathered up and neatly tied together” (7), and Maxwell’s central argument explicates a printed letter (1 Peter,

264 which was addressed to various persecuted Christians in Asia Minor) that was canonized into a sacred text. Adding another layer of text not only underscores the distance between the medium and the message—much like Maxwell’s refusal to help the tramp ironically echoes James 2—but makes the sermon’s efficacy dependent on being transformed to print. Maxwell’s listeners recognize his education, dramatic skill, and of course his respectability, but their appreciation does not seem to translate to attention, at least not enough to change their behavior.54 As the rest of the novel makes clear, Sheldon’s critique of American Christianity centers around this disconnection between Biblical content and ethical conduct.

4.5 What Would Jesus Do?

The tramp’s “remarkable interruption” (11) transforms Maxwell’s actions and his attitudes toward writing and texts, including the text of the Bible. Since these effects are especially pronounced immediately after the tramp’s death, I turn now to Maxwell’s primary WWJD challenge sermon, and to the prayer meeting (Section 4.6) he leads that same day with those willing to take the WWJD pledge. The tramp’s final words, uttered to Henry Maxwell as he lay dying in Maxwell’s spare room, anticipate his challenge to the congregation: “You have been good to me. Somehow I feel as if it was what Jesus would do” (17). This praise affects Maxwell profoundly, especially since he had initially denied the tramp’s request for help. Indeed, though he rarely references the tramp’s death

54 Here Sheldon may be contrasting Maxwell’s reception with Gospel accounts of Jesus’ sermons. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), the narrator records that “when Jesus had ended these sayings, the people were astonished at his doctrine: for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (Mt. 7:28-29). A similar statement appears in Mark 1:22, this time describing a reaction to Jesus’ teaching in the Capernaum synagogue. 265 in the remainder of the novel, Maxwell repeats and applies the WWJD mantra at every opportunity. Like many of the novel’s other characters, he mainly does this in his professional context, using his influence and expertise as a preacher. Accordingly, in this section I focus specifically on how the tramp’s challenge influences Maxwell’s preaching. His response sermon, I contend, challenges and in some ways reverses his earlier focus on writing and logic, which I explored in Section 4.4. Furthermore, as I will argue in Section 4.6, by the end of the first chapter Sheldon extends this reversal to critique the Bible-based epistemology of traditional Evangelical Christianity.

Though the narrator describes the Sunday of the response sermon as “exactly like the Sunday of the week before,” and notes that Maxwell “face[d] one of the largest congregations that had ever crowded First Church,” Maxwell’s personal transformation is evident in both his message and his delivery. The previous Sunday, for example,

Maxwell worried that inclement weather would reduce his audience, not because he was worried about his parishioners but because he “never preached well before a small audience” (10). Likewise, he did his best to “[make] his delivery more impressive,” so that once he became “absorbed in his sermon,” “everything else was forgotten in the pleasure of the delivery” (9). Yet this time around, when Maxwell advanced to the pulpit he “was haggard and looked as if he had just risen from a long illness” (17). This description, I believe, signals that Maxwell has abandoned his preoccupation with wealth and decorum, and that both his evangelistic methods and his attitudes toward textual interpretation have been figuratively reborn.

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The tramp had died earlier that morning, and Maxwell “had insisted on sitting up nearly all night” with him, so his gaunt appearance is not surprising (17). But the second half of the description takes on specific religious significance, echoing the New

Testament descriptions of resurrection. Risen, of course, appears several times in Jesus’ prophecies of his own death and resurrection, and likewise in the angels’ proclamations at the empty tomb in the Synoptic Gospels (Mt. 25:6-7, Mark 16:6, and Luke 24:6).

Furthermore, Pauline theology often compares conversion to resurrection, particularly in

Romans 6:1-11. Evangelical theology often picks up these metaphors to describe individual repentance and salvation. For instance, in Colossians 2:12-13 Paul compares the act of baptism, in which a new believer is immersed into water then lifted out of the water, to death, burial, and resurrection.55

Maxwell’s first message, i.e. “the necessity of following Jesus in his sacrifice and example” (6), arguably forms the theological basis for his subsequent efforts to improve the city of Raymond. But while Maxwell’s first sermon couches ethical action as a logical result of interpreting particular passages, his response sermon exhibits a markedly new approach to writing and performance. This time around, there is no careful preparation, no formal structure, and no occasion for pride in “the conditions of his

55 Not all Christian churches practice baptism in this way: those that practice infant baptism tend to sprinkle or pour water onto the individual’s head, rather than immersing him or her. However, John’s “baptism of repentance for the remission of sins” (Mark 1:4), in which Jesus participated, was clearly by immersion, and this method prevailed until at least the twelfth century (Fanning 262). Furthermore, in Colossians Paul bases part of his exhortation on the physical act of immersion: “Buried with him in baptism, wherein also ye are risen with him through the faith of the operation of God, who hath raised him from the dead. And you, being dead in your sins and the uncircumcision of your flesh, hath he quickened together with him, having forgiven you all trespasses” (Col. 2:12-13).

267 pastorate” (11). Yet this sermon contains the fullest exposition of Sheldon’s ethical system, and along with the subsequent prayer meeting scene (see Section 4.6) it best illustrates his break with orthodox Evangelical attitudes toward reading and the Bible.

Even before Maxwell starts speaking, the narrator again calls attention to the centrality of print in Maxwell’s sermon: Maxwell “could see [the tramp’s] face as he opened the Bible and arranged his different notices on the side of the desk as he had been in the habit of doing for ten years” (17). The stage seems set for another exegesis, perhaps one reducing the tramp’s tragic death to a sermon illustration. Indeed, Maxwell could easily marshal any number of Biblical exhortations about poverty and hospitality to make his point, or to reinforce his previous sermon’s message about following Christ’s example. But while his first sermon featured “striking sentences” that “would have commanded attention printed” (10), this one is remarkable for its lack of writing:

The service that morning contained a new element. No one could remember when the minister had preached in the morning without notes. As a matter of fact he had done so occasionally when he first entered the ministry, but for a long time he had carefully written every word of his morning sermon, and nearly always his evening discourses as well (17). It’s possible, of course, that Maxwell simply eschewed a written manuscript because he was too physically and emotionally exhausted to prepare one. But given that he had consistently written his weekly sermons for years, presumably despite comparable turmoil, it’s more likely that this change in behavior indicates a drastic change in

Maxwell’s attitudes and beliefs. Judging from his first sermon and his initial response to the tramp (that is, when the tramp comes to his home to ask for work), Maxwell values consistency and routine quite highly, perhaps because he found them safe and comfortable. For instance, before he meets the tramp, Maxwell “seldom exchanged” 268 places with other preachers for a week, and “was eager to be in his own pulpit when

Sunday came” (10). This routine, which the tramp’s “remarkable interruption” (11) soundly shattered, clearly involved careful, written preparation.

However, Maxwell’s response sermon does not simply break his habit of writing sermons, but also disrupts his ability to perform well. Contrasting the first sermon’s

“striking sentences” (10), “[i]t cannot be said that his sermon this morning was striking or impressive. He talked with considerable hesitation. It was evident that some great idea struggled in his thought for utterance but it was not expressed in the theme he had chosen for his preaching” (17-18). This description, particularly the image of a struggle between

“some great idea” and “the theme [Maxwell] had chosen,” suggests that Maxwell’s crisis hinges on his relationship to his subject matter. If before he could “defin[e] his position and emotions as well as if he had held a soliloquy” (10), tidily reconciling his (and his congregation’s) insular prosperity with Christ’s call for self-sacrifice, it is no longer an option. The message, it seems, is out of Maxwell’s control, as the “utterance”— suggesting a spoken rather than a written message—threatens to explode his reliance on texts and structures.

As I will explore in the next section, both Maxwell and his parishioners eventually attribute this conflict to the Holy Spirit, a choice with significant ethical and moral implications. This emphasis leads the characters to downplay the role of written

Scripture even as they ostensibly base their ethical choices on Jesus’ specific example.

Midway through his response sermon, Maxwell’s physical actions anticipate his rhetorical change: “It was near the close of his sermon that he began to gather a certain

269 strength that had been painfully lacking at the beginning. He closed the Bible and stepping out at the side of the desk, he faced his people, and began to talk to them about the remarkable scene of the week before” (18). Again, this reverses his earlier performative and epistemological patterns. Previously, he relied on the text of the Bible, and on his own ability to interpret it rightly, to shape his preaching—and presumably to determine his ethical beliefs. In fact, the more he focused on exegesis and logic, the better he preached and the more satisfied he was with his performance. But now his ability to

“gather a certain strength” depends on “clos[ing] the Bible” (18), symbolically rejecting its limits and replacing them with an ethics of character, reliant not on interpreting a text but on expressing an utterance.

My point here is not that Maxwell attempts to do away with Biblical authority, but that he presents exegesis as a potential obstacle to right action, rather than a vehicle.

His physical movement is reminiscent of the tramp’s speech (the previous week) from

“the open space in front of the pulpit,” and just as the tramp “turned about, facing the people” (11), Maxwell “faced his people, and began to talk to them about the remarkable scene of the week before” (18). The resulting speech does involve some interpretation:

Maxwell recognizes that the tramp’s words were “a challenge to Christianity as it is seen and felt in our churches,” and describes his response as “a satisfactory reply to much that was said here last Sunday” (19). But this time, Maxwell uses no notes, no outline, and no manuscript. More to the point, though his sermon’s “great idea” (17) certainly involves ethical application, just as his previous week’s sermon did, here he does not even mention a specific passage of Scripture or a specific Christian doctrine.

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Indeed, Maxwell’s words and actions in this scene are driven by intense emotion, not logic. While Maxwell may well have been emotionally engaged in his earlier sermon, recall that his audience responded best when he moderated those emotions to produce “a dramatic utterance that had the good taste never to offend with a suspicion of ranting or declamation” (10). This suggests that both emotion and performance were in the service of respectability, which was in no small part tied to textual explication. After the tramp’s death, Maxwell is understandably highly emotional and even agitated, and initially his response sermon suffers because “the theme he had chosen for his preaching” cannot sufficiently express those emotions (18). Yet as soon as he closes his Bible and moves from exegesis to ethics, everything comes together: “He continued slowly, taking time to choose his words carefully and giving the people an impression they had never felt before, even when he was at his best, with his most dramatic delivery” (20). Maxwell’s message, i.e. that his listeners should ask “what would Jesus do” before doing anything, raises several important questions about authority and epistemology, which I will consider in the next section. My point here is that Maxwell’s best sermon, one that not only stirs his parishioners to action but ultimately changes the course of Raymond’s history, comes about only when he is willing to close his Bible and tell his own story instead.

4.6 The Source of Our Knowledge

When Henry Maxwell first proposes his “What would Jesus do?” project, he remarks that it “ought not to appear unusual or at all impossible of execution” (20). Given the longstanding theological tradition of imitatio Christi, which draws on New Testament

271 calls to imitate Jesus’ actions and attitudes (e.g. 1 Peter 2:21, the source text for

Maxwell’s opening sermon), in one sense the project uses standard models of Christian ethics. Maxwell himself cites “a great upheaval in his definitions of Christian discipleship” (22), but at first glance this “dawn of a new discipleship” (185) does not seem to stake out any new theological ground. In fact, unlike the majority of 19th-century

Christian fiction, In His Steps not only avoids denominational rivalries (the affiliation of the First Church of Raymond is never revealed) but also stays well away from debates over doctrine, let alone thornier theological and philosophical questions about

Christianity’s major truth-claims.

Considering that Sheldon uses the opposite approach to social and political questions—his characters are quite outspoken about which specific sociopolitical positions Jesus would espouse—it seems likely that this omission was deliberate, and perhaps intended to broaden the novel’s readership. Judging by the novel’s continued

(albeit modest) popularity among 20th- and 21st-century Christians, especially

Evangelicals, this tactic seems to have worked. However, while the bulk of the novel’s plot is driven by individual ethical decisions, Sheldon uses the WWJD framework to make a subtle but potentially radical revision to Christian moral epistemology. As I will argue in this section, this revision follows naturally from Maxwell’s rejection of Biblical exegesis, and writing in general. At stake this time, however, is not merely the rhetorical effectiveness of a given sermon, but the crucial process of determining just how Jesus would act in the characters’ places.

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Sheldon explores this question most clearly in the prayer meeting scene in

Chapter 1, which comes right after the WWJD challenge sermon I discuss in Section 4.5.

The scene features the main characters for the remainder of the Raymond narrative (the setting switches to Chicago for the last third of the novel), all of whom have just accepted

Maxwell’s challenge. They raise and discuss various practical and theological aspects of the challenge, mainly focusing on two questions: how to determine what Jesus would do in a given situation, and how to handle differences of opinion about certain ethical actions. Interestingly, the prayer meeting also includes the longest direct Scripture quotation of the novel: Maxwell quotes John 16:13-15 to explain how to “study Jesus through the medium of the Holy Spirit” (23). Yet if Maxwell’s earlier quotation of 1

Peter 2:21 was intended to reinforce the connection between a Biblical command (to

“follow [Jesus’] steps”) and human morality, here the Bible’s role is muddy at best.

Indeed, the scene as a whole suggests that true ethical action requires removing Bible study from the equation altogether, and instead relying on prayer and the Holy Spirit’s guidance.

Maxwell enters the lecture room still in the throes of “a genuine crisis in his own life and that of his parish,” to the point that “[h]is face was pale and his lips trembled with emotion” (22). Though this physical reaction is consistent with his earlier attempt to communicate “something of the message he bore in his heart” (18), the scene presents

Maxwell’s emotion in a specific theological context, and even assigns it supernatural agency. In the narrator’s words, “No man can tell until he is moved by the Divine Spirit what he may do, or how he may change the current of a lifetime of fixed habits of

273 thought and speech and action” (22). Despite the unusual use of “Divine Spirit” (Sheldon consistently uses “Holy Spirit” in the rest of the novel), this gloss adds an important element to Sheldon’s earlier critiques of writing and texts: it suggests that intellectual processes like exegesis do not merely limit the moral efficacy of the Gospel message, but that they actively separate humans from God.

If reading and interpreting the Bible dominated Maxwell’s previous approach to discipleship, prayer and reliance on the Holy Spirit replace them in his new model. Gary

Smith notes that articles and sermons on the Holy Spirit, while always part of orthodox

Christian discourse, “reached flood stage during the 1890s,” partly driven by the emergence of the Holiness and Pentecostal movements (105). Sheldon’s emphasis thus appealed to a diverse group of Christian readers, particularly since he connected the Holy

Spirit to individual repentance and social reform. As Smith puts it, “Sheldon connected the Spirit’s presence and power with almost every significant challenge, temptation, or decision [the novel’s] characters face. While the Holy Spirit’s ministry took a variety of forms in the book, including inspiring the preparation and preaching of sermons, providing direction, assurance, and comfort, and preserving church unity, it was primarily associated with power” (106). As I will explore later in this section, several of these forms come to bear on the characters’ ethical decision-making.

Historically, orthodox formulations of Christian belief have identified the Holy

Spirit (or in some translations, the Holy Ghost) as the third person of the Trinity, equally divine with the Father and the Son. The Nicene Creed, for example, identifies the Holy

Spirit as “the Lord and Giver of Life; who proceeds from the Father and the Son; who

274 with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; who spoke by the prophets.” The Eastern Orthodox Church uses a different formulation, stating that the

Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father alone, but agrees with the Protestant and Catholic churches on the Holy Spirit’s divinity. Often, Christian pneumatology emphasizes the

Holy Spirit’s role as a helper or comforter (Gk. Paraclete), which is most prevalent in the

Johannine segments of the New Testament. Indeed, in the prayer meeting scene Maxwell quotes one of the key passages regarding this role, and in fact he instructs his parishioners to “[ask] the Spirit to tell us what Jesus would do” (24).

Many Christian denominations also believe that the Holy Spirit bestows spiritual gifts on believers, though opinions vary widely on the nature, purpose, mechanism, and even the duration of those gifts. Charismatic groups, notably the Pentecostals, emphasize sign gifts: healing, miracles, prophecy, and especially speaking in tongues—to the extent that some congregations equate speaking in tongues with receiving the Holy Spirit. On the other side of the spectrum, more conservative Evangelical denominations tend to emphasize equipping or service gifts, such as evangelism, teaching, leadership, or administration. These gifts are most often tied to specific, practical applications in the context of a church or parachurch ministry, though Christians of all stripes tend to agree that all spiritual gifts should serve the church in some way. Furthermore, in Galatians 5

Paul develops a contrast between the “works of the flesh” (5:19) and the “fruit of the

Spirit…love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance” (5:22-23, KJV). Some churches associate the development of these character traits with the Holy Spirit’s influence, though the phrase “spiritual gifts” more

275 often refers to unique individual empowerments than to moral character. Finally,

Christians differ over whether the gifts of prophecy, healing, and speaking in tongues ceased with the death of the Twelve Apostles (the cessationist view) or whether they are still available today (the continuationist view).

While several passages in the novel credit the Holy Spirit with clarifying or even amplifying the characters’ respective talents and abilities (such as Maxwell’s ability to preach), Sheldon avoids direct claims about more controversial individual spiritual gifts.

For the purposes of this section, I am most interested in the role the Holy Spirit apparently plays in the characters’ ethical decision-making. Most models of Christian ethics, especially those proposed by Evangelicals, emphasize the centrality of reading, interpreting, and applying the Bible. Thus, for example, Stowe’s narrator and characters both read and directly engage with the text of Scripture throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

More to the point, Stowe ties her characters’ moral authority to their adherence to

Biblical ideas and beliefs, at least as long as they read and interpret the Bible correctly.

Likewise, while Phelps (in The Gates Ajar) and Wallace (in Ben-Hur) approach the Bible more obliquely than Stowe, and perhaps with less outright confidence in its absolute authority, they both acknowledge its importance and assume that their readers (and in

Phelps’ case, her characters) approach the Bible as a reliable source for moral doctrine.

The participants in Maxwell’s prayer meeting exhibit a very different attitude, one which extends Sheldon’s distrust of texts to present an effectively humanistic approach to ethical choices. Despite the novel’s ongoing emphasis on acting as Jesus would, none of the characters cite or even seem to consider Jesus’ specific actions in the Gospels—let

276 alone commentary on His character in the rest of the Bible. And while the belief that the

Holy Spirit offers divine moral guidance is arguably in the mainstream of Christian theology, Sheldon goes out of his way to take Scripture out of the equation altogether.

This approach may well have increased his novel’s popularity, both after its original publication and during its revival in the 1990s, as it effectively sidesteps often rancorous debates about Biblical authority and interpretation. In fact, despite the novel’s explicitly

Christian context, including the repeated statements that these ethical actions represent

Christian discipleship, Sheldon’s Franklinesque ethical model requires little if any theological commitment, as long as it generates right actions.

Though Sheldon’s earlier passages about writing vs. speech were comparatively subtle, and generally relied more on gestures or actions than on intellectual argument, the prayer meeting approaches the debate much more directly. To start with, before the attendees discuss the pledge’s practical and theological implications, Maxwell decides that

the most fitting word to be spoken first was that of prayer. He asked them all to pray with him. And almost with the first syllable he uttered there was a distinct presence of the Spirit felt by them all. As the prayer went on, this presence grew in power. They all felt it. The room was filled with it as plainly as if it had been visible. When the prayer closed there was a silence that lasted several moments. All the heads were bowed. Henry Maxwell’s face was wet with tears. If an audible voice from heaven had sanctioned their pledge to follow the Master’s steps, not one person present could have felt more certain of the divine blessing (22). Several elements of this description warrant closer attention. First, and most obviously,

Maxwell identifies prayer as “the most fitting word to be spoken first” (22). While in this case he leads the group in prayer, there is no hint of liturgy or any sort of textual basis for his prayer. This is not to say that praying necessarily excludes using Scriptural content, 277 especially given how many prayers are recorded or codified in the Bible. In this case, however, Maxwell’s prayer is clearly both personal and highly emotional, and Sheldon specifically highlights the spoken utterances.

The description also echoes an important moment in the previous scene, during which Maxwell was able to “gather a certain strength that had been painfully lacking at the beginning” (18) of his challenge sermon. In that scene, once Maxwell closes his Bible and starts talking directly about the tramp’s critique, he is finally able to express

“something of his feeling” and of “the message he bore in his heart” (18). Maxwell’s prayer offers a similar emotional release, but with a crucial difference: this time, Sheldon explicitly attributes the effect to “a distinct presence of the Spirit felt by them all,” which

“grew in power” and filled the room “as plainly as if it had been visible” (22). In doing so, he clearly alludes to the story of Pentecost in Acts 2. According to that account, the

Apostles and other members of the early church “were all together in one place” when

“suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them tongues parting asunder, like as of fire; and it sat upon each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance” (Acts 2:1-4, ERV).

While Sheldon does not mention speaking in tongues, likely to avoid doctrinal controversy, his allusion presents the Raymond congregants as modern-day apostles, specifically empowered by the Holy Spirit to go and make disciples. Furthermore, the later reference to “an audible voice from heaven” (22) echoes the account of Jesus’

278 baptism in Matthew 3, which features “the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon him; and lo, a voice out of the heavens, saying, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Mt. 3:16-17, ERV). Both Scriptural passages connect spiritual empowerment with sound and speech—the “voice out of the heavens” is traditionally attributed to God—and both record specific divine endorsements of the characters’ actions and missions. Indeed, by the end of Maxwell’s opening prayer his congregants

“felt…certain of the divine blessing” (22), just as during his closing prayer “again, as before, the Spirit made Himself manifest” (25). Such certainty is critical in Sheldon’s ethical model not just because it assumes that the Holy Spirit inspires the characters’ decisions, but because it gives them direct access (so to speak) to the mind of God, without needing to mediate their moral knowledge through the Bible.

Invoking a divine blessing on a moral project is not unusual in religious contexts, particularly within the Social Gospel. But Sheldon does not stop with Maxwell’s prayer and the resulting outpouring of the Holy Spirit: his characters also grapple with the epistemological challenge of determining what Jesus would do. Despite Maxwell’s claim that he is “being led by the hand of divine love in all of this” and that “[t]he same divine impulse must have led [his congregants] also,” everyone involved recognizes the complexity of imitating Jesus’ actions in a 19th-century world. Rachel Winslow raises this point directly: “I am a little in doubt as to the source of our knowledge concerning what

Jesus would do. Who is to decide for me just what he would do in my case? It is a different age. There are many perplexing questions in our civilization that are not mentioned in the teaching of Jesus. How am I going to tell what he would do?” (23). Two

279 related issues arise here: (1) the relevance of the Bible in a drastically different cultural and historical context, and (2) the mechanism for gaining divinely inspired moral knowledge. As the midcentury debate over slavery (see Chapter 1) demonstrated, moral consensus was rare even on topics that the Bible addresses directly, and limiting oneself specifically to “the teaching of Jesus” further complicates things. Moreover, though the characters’ moral efforts often affect social structures—as befits the novel’s place within the Social Gospel movement—Sheldon presents these changes as a series of individual moral decisions. As the end of the scene makes clear, Maxwell’s model of discipleship must balance moral consistency with moral autonomy.

Rachel does not explicitly discount the Bible as “the source of our knowledge concerning what Jesus would do” (23), but as I suggested earlier, her question is highly unusual in an Evangelical Christian setting. Even the most Charismatic theologians recommend the Bible as a source of moral knowledge, and many Christians believe that the Holy Spirit works at least partly through reading and interpreting Scripture.

Considering the prominent role that poverty plays in both the novel and Jesus’ teaching,

Christian readers would expect Maxwell to answer Rachel’s question with at least some appeal to the Bible. In one sense, he does just that, but once again his attitude toward

Scripture is ambivalent at best: “‘There is no way that I know of,’ replied Mr. Maxwell,

‘except as we study Jesus through the medium of the Holy Spirit’” (23). One could argue, perhaps, that to “study Jesus” requires some engagement with the Bible, and indeed

Maxwell goes on to quote several lines from John 16. But given that none of the characters actually read the Bible when making moral decisions, and given Sheldon’s

280 earlier suggestions that texts interfere with both moral duty and divine inspiration, that intention is unlikely. Instead, I believe Sheldon is proposing an ethical model that bypasses the Bible altogether, but still maintains the veneer of divine justification.

The passage from John 16 that Maxwell uses to justify this model supports this reading. John 16 is part of an extended discourse that takes place on the night of Jesus’ betrayal, after Judas has left (John 13:21-30) but before Jesus’ arrest (John 18). Much of the surrounding material consists of Jesus’ predictions of his own death, as well as his attempts to comfort the disciples. In fact, one chapter earlier Jesus states, “But when the

Comforter [Gk. Paraclete, i.e. the Holy Spirit] is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall bear witness of me: and ye also bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning” (John 15:26-27, ERV). Immediately before the passage Maxwell quotes,

Jesus notes that “if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I go, I will send him unto you” (16:7) and “I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now” (16:12). Overall, then, these verses emphasize cooperation and consistency between the Holy Spirit and both the Father and the Son.

Maxwell quotes the next three verses in full: “Howbeit when He, the Spirit of

Truth, is come, He shall guide you into all the truth: for He shall not speak from Himself; but what things soever He shall hear, these shall He speak: and He shall declare unto you the things that are to come. He shall glorify me: for He shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you. All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine: therefore said I, that

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He taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you” (23-24; John 16:13-15).56 Given the dearth of direct Bible quotations in this novel, and the several dozen New Testament verses describing and/or characterizing the Holy Spirit, it’s worth comparing this passage to other options available to Sheldon. Most of these other verses relate in some way to

Trinitarian theology, i.e. the doctrine that God exists in three eternal, co-equal, and distinct Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. For instance, the verses from John quoted above specify that the Holy Spirit “proceedeth from the Father” (15:26) and that Jesus

“sen[t] him unto you” (16:7). Similarly, other verses speak of the “Spirit of God” and the

“Spirit of Christ” (Romans 8:9), state that the Spirit “intercedes [with God] for us” (Rom.

8:26-7), and describe “the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” (Mt. 28:19) as equals.

More relevantly for the present discussion, another dozen verses describe the Holy Spirit as teaching or speaking, including speaking specifically through the Bible (e.g. 1 Cor 2:6-

16, Heb 3:7-8).

Sheldon’s use of John 16:13-15 to establish “the source of our knowledge concerning what Jesus would do” (23) is not necessarily inconsistent with these doctrines, but he does use this passage strategically to support his model of textless inspiration. For instance, it represents the Holy Spirit as having access to “all the truth”

56 Here, as in most of the chapter epigraphs, he and him are capitalized when they refer to a deity. While this demonstration of reverence is common practice in many contemporary devotional materials, it is actually rare in Bible translations, mainly because Biblical Hebrew lacks capital letters and the earliest Greek NT manuscripts were written in all capital letters. Both my print copy (a facsimile of an 1897 printing) and an 1899 version on Google Books (http://bit.ly/29eGDBh) capitalize the pronouns, but the Project Gutenberg edition (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4540/4540-h/4540-h.htm), for instance, does not. Since Sheldon had very little control over the novel’s printing and distribution, partly since he neglected to secure a proper copyright, it’s difficult to say whether his original manuscript used this capitalization or whether the printer added it independently. In the case of this passage, capitalizing the pronoun references to the Holy Spirit could potentially emphasize his divine authority, but it’s unlikely that Sheldon’s original readers would question that authority in the first place. 282 but not “speak[ing] from Himself.” Specifically, Jesus states that the Spirit “taketh of mine, and shall declare it unto you,” suggesting authoritative and unimpeded access to

Jesus’ own knowledge and guidance. More relevantly for the novel’s context, the passage emphasizes direct speech without mentioning any sort of mediated knowledge, whether through the text of Scripture or through other sorts of human interpretation. In isolation, then, this verse suggests that the Holy Spirit offers immediate and trustworthy moral clarity, such that attentive listeners would not only know what Jesus did, as a Bible- centered model would emphasize, but presumably also the principles to determine what he would do in their situations. Indeed, after this point the novel’s characters rarely if ever directly consult the Bible for moral guidance (let alone theological truth), but they regularly “prayed for the divine presence and wisdom to direct [them]” (26).

According to Maxwell, listening to the Holy Spirit sets the stage for moral decision-making: “There is no other test that I know of. We shall all have to decide what

Jesus would do after going to that source of knowledge” (24). But while deciding requires some sort of active moral agency, even when deciding whether to follow clear instructions, the passage Maxwell quotes presents the Holy Spirit as more of a conduit than an active personality, rather like the ancient Greek Oracle without the unfortunate vagueness. Whereas other verses assert the Holy Spirit’s autonomy and personal authority, here its efficacy depends on repeating Jesus’ words: “He [the Spirit] shall not speak from Himself; but what things soever He shall hear, these shall He speak…He shall take of mine, and shall declare it unto you” (23). It’s hard to imagine a simpler ethical process, at least if one accepts Maxwell’s assertion that “when it comes to a genuine,

283 honest, enlightened following of Jesus’ steps, I cannot believe there will be any confusion either in our own minds or in the judgment of others” (24). In Sheldon’s ideal world,

Christians need not debate what the Bible says or how to interpret it rightly: they need only pray, and believe that the Spirit will spell out the singular Christian response to any given situation. In this way, they may gain not only moral certainty but divine imprimatur for their actions, confident that they do not speak from themselves but directly from

Jesus.

Earlier, I suggested that the simplicity of Sheldon’s model resembles Ben

Franklin’s chart of virtues in the Autobiography. Like Henry Maxwell, Franklin undertakes his own “bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection” after a sermon (this one on Philippians 4:8) utterly failed to promote “the kind of good things that [Franklin] expected from that text” (101). Similarly, while Franklin “conceiv[ed]

God to be the fountain of wisdom” and “thought it right and necessary to solicit his assistance for obtaining it” (107), his own moral choices are both autonomous and seemingly straightforward. But there is a crucial difference between the two models.

Franklin not only creates a chart to track his progress in each category, but expresses his entire moral enterprise in terms of texts: failings become “errata,” while keeping a line

“clear of spots” showed “the habit of that virtue strengthened, and its opposite weakened”

(106). In other words, even though Franklin departed from most of his countrymen by largely eschewing the Bible in his moral plans, he still defined both his virtues and himself in textual terms. Sheldon, by contrast, viewed writing as morally ineffective and

284 ultimately limiting, and so sought to maintain Christianity’s moral certitude without relying on its sacred writ.

After the scenes I analyze in this chapter, much of the plot of In His Steps is driven by individual moral choices. Newspaper editor Edward Norman, for instance, determines that Jesus would not issue a Sunday edition or print ads for tobacco, railroad superintendent Alexander Powers forfeits his job when he blows the whistle on the company’s fraud, Rachel Winslow turns down a lucrative singing career so she can perform at tent revivals, and college president Donald Marsh joins with Norman and

Maxwell to wrestle political power back from the saloon owners. These decisions are often challenging for the respective characters, and in several cases following (allegedly) in Jesus’ steps comes at great personal cost. Yet in an important sense none of the characters face a moral dilemma, in that moral dilemmas “involve conflicts between moral requirements,” where “an agent regards herself as having moral reasons to do each of two actions, but doing both actions is not possible” (McConnell, “Moral Dilemmas”).

For Sheldon and his characters, this sort of conflict is not only un-Christian but unnecessary: his moral universe is both straightforward and unambiguous, unburdened by any responsibilities save Christian discipleship, and by any standards save Jesus’ personal example.

Toward the end of Who Wrote the Bible, Gladden declares that “Man knows intuitively that he ought to do right; his notion of what is right is continually being purified and enlarged” (362). Sheldon shrinks from such a baldly humanistic view of moral perfection, but in the scenes I summarize above his characters still make moral

285 choices based on intuition, not inspiration. There is no need for debate or soul-searching, and certainly no place for study, because once they ask “what would Jesus do” the answer is both obvious and incontrovertible. This effectively reduces every moral dilemma to a simplistic binary choice, and in the story world making the right choices mechanistically unravels even the thorniest personal issues– and crucially, the most complicated social problems. Given these facts, the revival of In His Steps among Christian youth in the

1990s is not surprising, though it was driven far more by savvy merchandising than by close attention to Sheldon’s literary technique. Morally, Sheldon simplified Christianity’s complex web of beliefs and practices into a user-friendly focus on living ethically.

Religiously, he sidestepped the need to interpret or even read the Bible, proposing a textless Gospel based on lived experience. And socially, he assured readers that achieving a vaguely Christian utopia started with the individual, no matter how big the problem or how corrupt the institution. Though few if any of these transformations would stand up to intense theological scrutiny, particularly among theological conservatives who confess the Bible’s necessity and inerrancy, the combination was simple and attractive enough to encourage—and even inspire—millions of readers.

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