Gender, Race, and Secular Agency in American Protestant Fiction, 1820-1870

GENDER, RACE, AND SECULAR AGENCY IN AMERICAN PROTESTANT FICTION, 1820-1870 Ashley Reed A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2013 Approved by: Jane Thrailkill Philip Gura Laurie Maffly-Kipp Timothy Marr Eliza Richards © 2014 Ashley Reed ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT Ashley Reed: Gender, Race, And Secular Agency In American Protestant Fiction, 1820-1870 (Under the direction of Jane Thrailkill) This dissertation argues that disenfranchised authors of the antebellum and early postbellum periods used fiction as an imaginative space in which to explore new forms of collaborative agency grounded in particular Protestant beliefs. In chapters on Catharine Maria Sedgwick, William Wells Brown, Susan Warner and Augusta Jane Evans, and Elizabeth Stoddard, it asserts that authors excluded not just from voting citizenship but also from the clergy and from sectarian journals explored in fiction questions of atonement, free will, and predestination that helped them to imagine into being new forms of spiritual and temporal agency. This narrative of religiously based cultural innovation has been overlooked by historicist critics working within a secularized and individualist model of self-determination. Building on recent work in the field of secularism studies that replaces inaccurate sociological models of secularization with a more nuanced description of post-Enlightenment secular society, this project illuminates how modern secular conditions offered new opportunities for the circulation and expression of religious thought and enabled nineteenth-century authors to envision collaborative action across race and gender lines. By attending to the religious concerns woven into fictional plots, this dissertation reveals how states and behaviors that look (to a secularized criticism) like passivity—expressions of belief, unconscious cognition, collective immersion, or willful submission—often represent potent forms of theological engagement that helped writers at the political margins catalyze significant cultural change in a volatile period in American history. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful first and foremost to my director Jane Thrailkill for the intellectual seriousness and deep critical engagement she brought to this project; throughout the writing and revision process she has modeled the best kind of mentorship and support. I am grateful also to the other members of my dissertation committee, Philip Gura, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, Timothy Marr, and Eliza Richards, for their scholarly generosity and collegiality. I owe thanks to the Graduate School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a 2010 Thomas F. Ferdinand Summer Research Fellowship and to the Department of English and Comparative Literature at UNC Chapel Hill for a Richardson Dissertation Fellowship in Spring 2012. This project could not have been completed without the perpetual assistance of UNC library staff, particularly the great Tommy Nixon. I am grateful also to the Massachusetts Historical Society for permission to include passages from the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers in this dissertation. Attendees of the 2010 Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society Symposium provided valuable assistance with my first chapter; I am particularly indebted to Melissa Homestead for her advice about navigating the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers on microfilm. Nicole Livengood generously shared her transcriptions of Elizabeth Stoddard’s Daily Alta California columns after we met at the 2012 Society for the Study of American Women Writers Conference. The project has also benefited from the insight provided by members of Donald Pease’s seminar group at the Futures of American Studies Institute in Summer 2012. iv I have been the beneficiary of immeasurable moral and intellectual support from three formally organized writing groups. To Harry Thomas, Angie Calcaterra, Kelly Bezio, Ben Bolling, and Jenn Williamson I owe an immense debt of gratitude; I couldn’t have asked for a kinder and more inspiring group of colleagues with whom to begin and pursue our projects. Kate Attkisson, Graham Culbertson, Lauren Garrett, Jen McDaneld, Ben Sammons, Heath Sledge, and Katie Shrieves offered incisive critique and continuing encouragement in the latter stages of the project. Throughout the research and writing process Meredith Malburne-Wade has been an especially strong source of motivation and friendship; I am particularly thankful for the long- distance writing dates and the panda challenge. And Megan Goodwin has been my walking, talking (and infinitely patient) religious studies bibliography. Finally, I am grateful to my parents Ralph and Sherry Reed, to my sisters, brothers-in- law, and much beloved nieces, and to a host of friends too numerous to list here but all indispensable to the successful completion of this project. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: READING RELIGIOUS AGENCY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA ........................................................................................ 1 Believing in Belief: The Sedgwick Family and the Story of Mum Bett ............................. 1 A Social History of Belief ................................................................................................... 7 The Secularization Thesis and the Study of American Literature .................................... 20 Secularism and Non-liberal Agency ................................................................................. 30 Chapter Summaries ........................................................................................................... 38 CHAPTER 1: “MY RESOLVE IS THE FEMININE OF MY FATHER’S OATH”: SACRIFICIAL VIOLENCE AND RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE IN HOPE LESLIE AND THE LINWOODS .......................................................... 47 Religion and/as Early National Public Discourse ............................................................. 50 Deconstructing Atonement in Hope Leslie ....................................................................... 56 Religious Language in The Linwoods ............................................................................... 69 Conclusion: Religious Language and the Problem of Appropriation ............................... 80 CHAPTER 2: “THE BULWARK OF CHRISTIANITY AND OF LIBERTY”: CLOTEL AND (WHITE) WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS AGENCY ............................. 85 The Minister and the Lady, or the Public and Private Uses of Doctrine .......................... 92 Preaching on the Plantation: Mr. Snyder and Georgiana Peck ....................................... 101 Clotel in Context: Women’s Religious Agency in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl .............................. 116 Conclusion: The White Christian Woman as Narrative Construct ................................. 129 CHAPTER 3: “UNSHEATHE THE SWORD OF A STRONG, UNBENDING WILL”: PROTESTANT DOCTRINE AND FEMALE AGENCY IN THE 1850S SENTIMENTAL NOVEL ............................................................... 132 vi The Douglas-Tompkins “Debate” and the Problem of Evangelicalism ......................... 136 Susan Warner, Augusta Jane Evans, and the Calvinist-Arminian Divide ...................... 148 “Not my will, but thine be done”: Calvinist Agency in The Wide, Wide World ............ 156 “What was my will given to me for?”: Beulah and the Arminian Sentimental .............. 162 The Sentimental Novel and the Politics of Female Will ................................................. 170 Conclusion: Reevaluating Religious Agency in the Sentimental Novel ........................ 175 CHAPTER 4: “I HAVE NO DISBELIEF”: SPIRITUALISM AND SECULAR AGENCY IN THE MORGESONS .......................................................................... 179 Secularization and Secularism in The Morgesons .......................................................... 184 Agency Unhinged: Spiritualist Practice and the Circulation of Agency in The Morgesons .............................................................................................. 194 The Cultural Work of Spiritualist Fiction ....................................................................... 208 Conclusion: Misdiagnosing The Morgesons ................................................................... 214 CODA: RELIGIOUS AGENCY AND THE SECULARIZED ACADEMY ............................ 222 WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................... 234 vii Introduction: Reading Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America Believing in Belief: The Sedgwick Family and the Story of Mum Bett This study, focused on Protestant belief and personal agency in nineteenth-century U.S. culture, takes up a set of questions exemplified in the case of the African-American slave woman Elizabeth Freeman and in the way the story of her experiences circulated in the nineteenth- century U.S. in the writings of the white Sedgwick family. In 1781 Theodore Sedgwick, a Massachusetts lawyer and well known Federalist politician who would serve during his career as a delegate to the Continental Congress, a Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, and Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, successfully argued for Freeman’s emancipation before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. Freeman, after her emancipation, joined

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