AMBIVALENT DEVOTION: RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN WOMEN‘S FICTION A Dissertation by SARAH L. PETERS Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December 2009 Major Subject: English AMBIVALENT DEVOTION: RELIGIOUS IMAGINATION IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN WOMEN‘S FICTION A Dissertation by SARAH L. PETERS Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Approved by: Chair of Committee, David McWhirter Committee Members, Anne Morey Pamela Matthews Joan Wolf Head of Department, M. Jimmie Killingsworth December 2009 Major Subject: English iii ABSTRACT Ambivalent Devotion: Religious Imagination in Contemporary Southern Women‘s Fiction. (December 2009) Sarah L. Peters, B.A., Henderson State University; M.L.A., Henderson State University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. David McWhirter Analyzing novels by Sheri Reynolds, Lee Smith, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Walker, Gloria Naylor, and Sue Monk Kidd, I argue that these authors challenge religious structures by dramatizing the struggle between love and resentment that brings many women to the point of crisis but also inspires imaginative and generative processes of appropriation and revision, emphasizing not destination but process. Employing first- person narration in coming-of-age stories, Smith, Reynolds, and Kingsolver highlight the various narratives that govern the experiences of children born into religious cultures, including narratives of sexual development, gender identity, and religious conversion, to portray the difficulty of articulating female experience within the limited lexicon of Christian fundamentalism. As they mature into adulthood, the girl characters in these novels break from tradition to develop new consciousness by altering and adapting religious language, understood as open and malleable rather than authoritative and fixed. Smith, Kidd, and Naylor incorporate the Virgin Mary and divine maternal figures from non-Christian traditions to restore the mother-daughter relationship that is eclipsed iv by the Father and Son in Christian tradition. Identifying the female body as a site of spiritual knowledge, these authors present a metaphorical return to the womb that empowers their characters to embrace divine maternal love that transgresses the masculine symbolic order, displacing (but not necessarily destroying) the authority of God the Father and His human representatives. Reynolds and Walker portray physical pain, central to the Christian image of crucifixion, as destroying the ability of women to speak, denying them subjectivity. Through transgressive sexual relationships infused with religious significance, these authors disrupt the Christian moral paradigm by presenting bodily pleasure as an alternative to the Christian valorization of sacrifice. The replacement of pain with pleasure inspires imaginative work that makes private spirituality shareable through artistic creation. The novels I study present themes that also concern Christian and non-Christian feminist theologians: the development of feminine images of the divine, emphasis on immanence over transcendence, the apprehension of the divine in nature, and the necessity of challenging the reification of religious images and dualisms that undermine female subjectivity. I show the reciprocal relationship between fiction and theology, as theologians treat women‘s literature as sacred texts and fiction writers give life to abstract religious concepts through narrative. v DEDICATION To Rebekah and Annabelle, who are always remaking my world. vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the members of my advisory committee, Dr. Anne Morey, Dr. Pamela Matthews, and Dr. Joan Wolf, for their comments and questions, guiding me and encouraging me in my continued commitment to the work I have begun here. Thank you, especially, to my committee chair, Dr. David McWhirter, who not only offered scholarly guidance, but also pushed me to make and achieve my goals during this process, and encouraged me to forgive myself when I fell short. Thank you to PEO International for a PEO Scholar Award in support of my dissertation. Thank you to Chapter BG of Arkadelphia, Arkansas, which nominated me for this generous award and welcomed me to their chapter to discuss my work in progress. Thank you to the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M University for a Graduate Stipendiary Fellowship in support of a project that became Chapter II of this dissertation. Thank you to Dr. Angela Boswell of Henderson State University who became my mentor while I was working on my Master‘s degree. Thank you for encouraging me to apply to doctoral programs, and specifically to Texas A&M University. Your advice that a good adviser and bull-headed determination are just as important to success in graduate school as sheer intelligence has proven true! Thank you to my friends and fellow graduate students, Courtney Beggs, Rochelle Bradley, Gina Terry, and Amy Montz, who celebrated my successes with me, vii commiserated when I felt defeated, and encouraged me to keep going. To Nick and Dana Lawrence, of Blocker 211D, for hours of talk about books and babies, for sharing the space where we celebrated our work, cursed our work, and avoided our work for the past five years. Thank you to my writing group, Emily Hoeflinger, Emily Janda Monteiro, Sonya Sawyer Fritz, and Sara Day—I wish we had come together sooner! Sharing my work with you helped to jumpstart me after a long and frustrating stall, and reading your work reminded me of why I love this profession. Thank you, especially, to Sara, who spent hours at Starbucks, McDonalds, and Blue Baker listening to me ramble on about half- baked ideas that weren‘t yet solid enough to get on paper. Thank you to my parents, Karen and David Evans, who have encouraged me constantly. You always knew I could do this, even when I didn‘t know it myself. I love you. Thank you to my husband, Shannon Peters, who let me drag him to another state so I could go to school. You have experienced the ups and downs of this process as much as I have, and I know you are as relieved as I am to have it completed. Thank you for having faith in me, for encouraging me, for putting up with me, and of course, for helping me raise our little girls. I love you. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................. iii DEDICATION .......................................................................................................... v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ...................................................................................... vi TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................... viii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: EVANGELICAL RELIGION AND LITERARY STUDIES ............................................................................................. 1 II BORN INTO THE WORD: GIRL NARRATORS AND RELGIOUS DISCOURSE ........................................................................................ 32 III RETURN TO THE WOMB: RESTORING THE MOTHER-DAUGHTER BOND ......................................................... 69 IV MOVING INTO THE WORLD: FROM PAIN TO CREATION ....... 115 V CONCLUSION: HEALING THE WOUND: WOMEN‘S FICTION AND FEMINIST THEOLOGY ........................................................... 160 WORKS CITED ....................................................................................................... 168 VITA ......................................................................................................................... 182 1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: EVANGELICAL RELIGION AND LITERARY STUDIES This dissertation analyzes the religious imagination of American women as it appears in novels by Lee Smith, Sheri Reynolds, Barbara Kingsolver, Gloria Naylor, Sue Monk Kidd, and Alice Walker. While imagination, like religion, is understood to be intensely private and invisible, the objects of imagination are shaped by social and material conditions. The artistic creations that are the artifacts of imagination, shared with others, make the invisible visible and the private social, much as the rituals, relics, architecture, and practices of religion make invisible belief visible and establish communities of people who share their understanding(s) of the divine. By religious imagination, I mean, as Paula M. Cooey has defined it, ―imagination whose creativity is governed by and expressed through religious imagery; a person who exercises religious imagination may or may not be conventionally pious in relation to religious institutions‖ (5). Religion in twenty-first century America includes many different forms of traditional monotheistic religions, spiritualities that are not connected to any particular doctrine, and religious organizations such as Unitarian Universalist churches, which make no claims to belief in a supreme being or the human soul, features many people understand to be the core of religious belief. This diversity in the understanding of what ____________ This dissertation follows the style of Publications of the Modern Language Association. 2 constitutes religion or spirituality makes a definition of religion difficult to pin down in any useful way. While I will elaborate later on my approach to religion, one way in which I am