The Altar at Home

Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion

Claudia Stokes

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780812246377, 9780812246377
• eBook ISBN: 9780812290141
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Displays of devout religious faith are very much in evidence in nineteenth-century sentimental novels such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Little Women, but the precise theological nature of this piety has been little examined. In the first dedicated study of the religious contents of sentimental literature, Claudia Stokes counters the long-standing characterization of sentimental piety as blandly nondescript and demonstrates that these works were in fact groundbreaking, assertive, and highly specific in their theological recommendations and endorsements. The Altar at Home explores the many religious contexts and contents of sentimental literature of the American nineteenth century, from the growth of Methodism in the Second Great Awakening and popular millennialism to the developing theologies of Mormonism and Christian Science.Through analysis of numerous contemporary religious debates, Stokes demonstrates how sentimental writers, rather than offering simple depictions of domesticity, instead manipulated these scenes to advocate for divergent new beliefs and bolster their own religious authority. On the one hand, the comforting rhetoric of domesticity provided a subtle cover for sentimental writers to advance controversial new beliefs, practices, and causes such as Methodism, revivalism, feminist theology, and even the legitimacy of female clergy. On the other hand, sentimentality enabled women writers to bolster and affirm their own suitability for positions of public religious leadership, thereby violating the same domestic enclosure lauded by the texts. The Altar at Home offers a fascinating new historical perspective on the dynamic role sentimental literature played in the development of innumerable new religious movements and practices, many of which remain popular today.

CHAPTER 1

Revivals of Sentiment

Sentimentalism and the Second Great Awakening

OUR UNDERSTANDING of the sectarian contours of sentimental literature derives primarily from Ann Douglas’s foundational study, The Feminization of American Culture (1977), in which she analyzed sentimentalism within the context of Calvinism, a focus that left sentimentalism by contrast seeming lax and doctrinally vague. According to Douglas, Calvinism was both destroyed and succeeded by sentimentalism, which institutionalized a loose, “anti-intellectual” lay religion that replaced theology and scholarly rigor with feeling and domesticity, a transition exemplified by her claim that the minister was replaced by the housewife as the national arbiter of morality.¹ Douglas’s conception of the religious character of sentimental literature found a bracing response from Jane Tompkins, who in Sensational Designs (1985) sought to rehabilitate sentimental piety by arguing that sentimentalism boldly aspired to “remak[e] the social and political order.”² Though Tompkins’s critique permanently dimmed the academic luster of Douglas’s study, Douglas’s analysis of sentimentalism within the context of Calvinism has proved highly durable. While recent scholars such as Sharon Kim, Marianne Noble, and Abram Van Engen have disagreed with Douglas’s assessment of the precise relationship between sentimentalism and Calvinism, they have nonetheless preserved this pairing by tracing the enduring vestiges of Calvinist theology in sentimental literature.³

This chapter seeks to integrate an additional variable into our understanding of the sectarian character of sentimental piety: the Second Great Awakening (1790–1840). A sprawling, grassroots movement that toppled numerous established conventions and hierarchies in American Protestantism, the Second Great Awakening has long evaded the notice of scholars of the era’s most popular literature, but, I argue, the Awakening contributed far more to the growth of sentimentalism than did Calvinism. In essence, Ann Douglas was correct to link the relative fortunes of sentimentalism and Calvinism, but she mischaracterized this relationship as causal rather than as correlative, for the respective rise and fall of both movements were enabled by the Second Great Awakening. This period of religious ferment provided the backdrop for the larger cultural transition she describes, with new sects springing up practically overnight and with a multitude of new religious leaders—among them Alexander Campbell, William Miller, John Humphrey Noyes, and Barton Stone—attracting sizable followings with new interpretations of scripture and new ideas about salvation. Despite Douglas’s narrative of a declining clergy, the American pastorate grew exponentially during the Second Great Awakening, rising from 1,800 ministers in the late eighteenth century to about 40,000 by 1845.⁴ While the orthodoxy of New England may have been on the wane, religion thrived outside the North Atlantic and in rural territories of upstate New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Tennessee, fueled by the Methodist circuit riders and itinerant preachers roaming the land, organizing revivalist camp meetings, and inciting their listeners to emotionally anguished conversions in often boisterous public meetings. And despite the sounded death knells of organized religion, church membership rose in this era; even taking into account the nation’s growing population during this period, the Methodists alone doubled in size to number half a million members in the 1820s and became the nation’s biggest Protestant denomination by 1850.⁵ Calvinism thus had bigger problems to contend with than simply the rise of sentimentalism, and by the time sentimental literature reached its apogee in the 1850s, Calvinism was already a shadow of its former self, reduced by the upstart religious movements of the Second Great Awakening to a vestigial, regional relic of an earlier time.

The Second Great Awakening permanently changed the American religious landscape, both by breaking the tenacious hold of Calvinism on the North Atlantic and by ushering in a religious climate characterized by populism and mounting democratic inclusiveness, which relaxed ecclesiastical hierarchy and enabled figures on the religious periphery to move closer to the center. This milieu provided the new social opportunities and religious doctrines that enabled the development of nineteenth-century literary sentimentalism; without it, sentimentalism would never have evolved beyond its eighteenth-century expression in the seduction novel, for this religious epoch provided the particular religious tenets, tropes, and narrative forms that are distinctive of this later iteration. All of the major figures of sentimentalism grew up in this vital period of American religious transformation, and their personal religious histories register its influence: for instance, Catharine Sedgwick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan Warner all rejected the Calvinism in which they were raised and embraced instead many of the new teachings and practices developed in this period. The Second Great Awakening was not merely an adjoining historical context that framed sentimental literature. Instead, the Second Great Awakening provides an important etiology for sentimental literature, for many of the period’s distinctive qualities became, through their textual assimilation, signature features of this literature: the female-centeredness, emotionalism, and anti-clericalism characteristic of the Second Great Awakening became distinguishing generic traits of sentimental literature. Sentimentalism’s hallmark attributes bear witness to the influence of this cultural progenitor.

The context of the Second Great Awakening reveals that sentimental piety was significantly more topical and tendentious than it may at first appear, and its constituent features comprised not weak responses to Calvinism but strong endorsements of the contemporary movements that precipitated Calvinism’s decline. The contents of sentimental literature therefore evidence the active participation of sentimental writers and texts in contemporary religious debate, although this participation is often inconspicuous because of its extraction from the immediate sectarian moorings in the public spheres of the pulpit and the broadside, and its relocation to the private spheres of the home and the affections. However, sentimental ratification of the Second Great Awakening was not absolute, and there were in fact many new doctrines and practices that sentimental literary texts did not absorb or promote. For instance, the reinvention of marriage by such groups as the Mormons, the Oneida Perfectionists, and the Shakers did not find support in sentimental writings. Nor did the revival meeting, the era’s trademark event, receive a benison in sentimental texts, which tended to favor the private and the domestic over the public and declamatory. However, as will become clear, the new beliefs that did permeate and circulate within sentimental texts tended to share a particular trait: the promotion of religious liberty. This quality may be surprising, as religion often seems to provide discursive justification for submission in sentimental literature, as Marianne Noble has shown, but these texts repeatedly absorbed and sponsored beliefs that promote religious autonomy, liberated from clerical supervision or the mediation of established religious custom.⁶ These beliefs are supported by countless narratives and poems that question the necessity of religious hierarchy in arbitrating religious experience, and they instead vest common people with religious authority on the basis of sincerity and sentiment rather than education and stature.

However, lest the sentimental endorsement of these teachings seem wholly egalitarian, it bears remarking that in sentimental texts these doctrines enable not the wide democratic dispersal of religious authority, as was the case amid the Second Great Awakening, but the reassignment of that leadership along gendered, classed, raced, and regional lines—specifically, to white, middle-class North Atlantic Protestant women. Though the populist climate of the Second Great Awakening enabled and informed the work of sentimental writers, they were chiefly preoccupied with the advancement of their own social demographic. As applied in sentimental texts, the new populist teachings of the Second Great Awakening work above all else to enable and justify the empowerment of this constituency alone, and their fitness for this standing is often evidenced by their effective participation in the ugly sectarian conflicts that characterized the Second Great Awakening and from which sentimentalism putatively withdrew through domestic enclosure.

Though the Second Great Awakening and its doctrines may seem emancipatory because of their promotion of religious liberty, that liberty was constituted along sectarian lines, for it was used to justify the public condemnation of religious groups deemed repressive and at odds with religious autonomy. Indeed, Calvinism itself was often the subject of sentimental denunciation because its doctrines and clericalism were presumed to stand in violation of the religious liberty at the heart of sentimental piety. However, the principal target in the era’s promotion of religious liberty was without question Catholicism, and, by promulgating teachings that announced their commitment to religious autonomy, sentimental literary texts actively contributed to anti-Catholic discourse and suspicion. Participation in sectarian divisiveness was not an accidental consequence of the sentimental foundation in the Second Great Awakening. Rather, it was strategic and opportunistic, for it was at the expense of these maligned denominations that sentimental women writers and texts were able to execute and justify the authority they pursued. In simultaneously championing emancipatory new doctrines and dissuading readers from these authoritarian sects, sentimental writers appointed themselves the protectors of the reader’s own religious authority, a task that by extension allowed them to claim that authority for themselves.

Contexts of the Awakening

Though the Second Great Awakening may seem an unlikely ally of sentimentalism, this period of a half century, from roughly 1790 to 1840, produced the cultural climate necessary for the development of this literary movement. Where the first Great Awakening of the 1740s was firmly rooted in New England orthodoxy, the Second Great Awakening was diffuse, denominationally heterogeneous, and geographically expansive, encompassing both East Coast cities and rural frontier regions alike. The Second Great Awakening was a period of immense theological innovation and creativity, giving rise to a dramatic spike in religious fervor and the formation of innumerable new denominations and sects, such as the Campbellites, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Millerite Adventists, and the Oneida Perfectionists. According to William McLoughlin, the Second Great Awakening can be understood as the religious extension of the new political sovereignty afforded by the American Revolution, for the period was characterized both by the active pursuit of personal religious independence and an overt antipathy for governing clerical authority.⁷ The changing denominational landscape of the period offers ample evidence of this shift, as with the declining fortunes of Calvinist orthodoxy. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the orthodox belief in predestination became irreconcilable with the era’s preoccupation with liberty and self-determination, and the inexplicable salvation of the elect disconcertingly evoked an aristocratic caste whose superior status was the product of the felicitous accidents of birth rather than merit. The rolls of orthodox Calvinist denominations consequently plummeted, the membership of the Congregationalists alone falling from 20 percent of American church members in 1776 to 4 percent in 1850.⁸ Public attitudes toward Catholicism in this era also register the influence of post-revolutionary anxieties about the incompatibility of older religious movements with new American independence and the suspicion that such sects might reinstate authoritarian rule. Amid escalating immigration of European Catholics as well as growing numbers of conversions to Catholicism, Protestant critics across denominations denounced Catholicism as inherently incompatible with American democracy, for it demanded unquestioning submission to unelected clergy as well as to the European regime of the pope himself. Critics publicly decried Catholic immigrants to the United States as the pawns of a conspiratorial plot between European monarchies and the papacy to overturn American democracy, and much of the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening derived from a pan-Protestant campaign to arrest the spread of Catholic influence by inciting widespread Protestant conversion, as with the anti-Catholic mission of such vital evangelical organizations as the American Home Missionary Society and American Tract Society.⁹

While the public image of Calvinism and Catholicism suffered grievously amid this preoccupation with religious independence, Methodism by contrast grew exponentially in this climate, for Methodism was distinguished by an anti-aristocratic belief in religious self-determination and a populist reconstitution of religious authority. Methodism, for instance, rejected the orthodox belief that one’s salvation had already been predetermined, and it championed instead the heretical doctrine of Arminianism, which insisted that conversion and redemption were available to anyone willing to experience such phenomena. The Methodist emphasis on self-determination also resulted in the loosening of conventional hierarchical strictures that elevated clergy over the laity, and it consequently permitted common people to preach and assume ministerial duties without attending seminary or undergoing ordination. To become an itinerant Methodist preacher or circuit rider, one merely had to possess dedication to evangelical ministry and ardent religious faith. Methodism thus enabled anyone—women, children, slaves—to assume moral and religious authority that had heretofore been available only to an educated male (and presumably white) elite.¹⁰ In revival meetings, for instance, it was by no means unusual for diffident white men to find themselves publicly exhorted to repent by people on the social periphery, whether women or African Americans.¹¹ Populism also underlay the Methodist practice of conducting public worship in open spaces accessible to anyone, regardless of religious affiliation, class, or race, an innovation that gave rise to the camp or tent meeting, the signature religious event of that era. The openness of these meetings enabled the intermingling of people across the social spectrum in the common endeavor of religious worship, and the breakdown of social stratification was likewise accompanied by the erosion of traditional church decorum, which was replaced by lively, energetic worship services in which the attendees played an active role: where conventional services usually rendered the worshipper passive and silent, with the occasional opportunity for scripted participation in the recitation of psalms and prayer, the Methodist tent meeting was famous for the raucous participation of worshippers, who openly wept, publicly testified about sins and trials, and replied to preachers. In all these ways, traditional practices and hierarchies gave way to a genuinely populist religious culture, characterized by congregation-centered worship in which clergy were now mere facilitators to the central focus of the event, which was the participants’ own experie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Revivals of Sentiment: Sentimentalism and the Second Great Awakening
• Chapter 2. My Kingdom: Sentimentalism and the Refinement of Hymnody
• Chapter 3. The Christian Plot: Stowe, Millennialism, and Narrative Form
• Chapter 4. Derelict Daughters and Polygamous Wives: Mormonism and the Uses of Sentiment
• Chapter 5. The Mother Church: Mary Baker Eddy and the Practice of Sentimentalism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments