Fragile Belief: Secularity and the Antebellum American Novel
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Date
2017-02-13
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Johns Hopkins University
Abstract
Fragile Belief re-evaluates the relationship between secularity, ethnocultural pluralism, and the novel in the US through an excavation of the experience and representation of religious difference during the first half of the nineteenth century. Secularization narratives have predominated historical accounts of the novel, but in the “spiritual hothouse” of the antebellum US neither secularization nor the history of the novel have proceeded along such straight historical lines. My study joins the ongoing interdisciplinary conversation about secularism by distinguishing what I call “American secularity” as a condition engendered by the surfeit of belief in the US rather than by the naturalization of unbelief. Whereas the secularization of Europe was, according to Charles Taylor, driven by the reformation of the Catholic Church and the rise of humanism, “American secularity,” I contend, emerged within the pressurized environment of global religious contact in the US, a result of sectarian proliferation, indigenous spiritual resistance, European immigration, and the importation of Islam and West African religious traditions via the slave trade. The novel, I argue, arose in the wake of disestablishment in the US as a singular genre for mediating global religious difference as well as for interrogating secularism’s imperative to define “religion.” The authors I treat in each of the chapters track the genre’s development alongside the expansion of public Protestantism in the US. Chapter 1 examines the dynamics of religious contact and exchange between Protestantism and Native American religion in Lydia Maria Child’s first novel Hobomok (1824). In chapter 2, I show how the novels of the New England aristocrat and devout Unitarian Catharine Sedgwick tested the outer limits of liberal Protestant tolerance through the sustained and unassimilable presence in her fiction of celibate religious outsiders. Chapter 3 places Herman Melville’s novels Mardi and Moby-Dick in the context of the Mormon crisis of the 1840s. Finally, chapter 4 concludes outside the borders of the nation by recovering the political theology of black emigration movements in Martin Delany’s Blake; or, the Huts of America, abolishing plural religious expression and rejecting the foundational assumptions governing public Protestantisn in the US.
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secularism, secularity, american literature, religion and literature