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GAIL K. SMITH From the Seminary to the Parlor: The Popularization of Hermeneutics in The Gates Ajar ?t? the renewal of interest in nineteenth-century American popular culture has come a fairly polarized discourse between its critics and its defenders. The battle lines have been familiar since at least the 1950s. One side tends to defend popular cultural manifestations as creative, subversive, even revolutionary responses to cultural givens; the other criticizes them as evidence of the co-optation of the masses by cynical culture-making machines and ideologies. Perhaps nowhere is this split more evident tiian in studies ofa body ofwork that has seemed to many late-twentieth-century readers a perfect window into the "real" sentimental culture of nineteenth-century America: the fictions ofpopular evangelical women writers like Susan Warner, Maria Cummins, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Despite the increased sophistication ofcultural studies and American studies in the last few decades, readings of these works have largely retained the old lines of demarcation, with critics taking sides on the basis of their sympathy or discomfort with "sentimental domesticity" or the "feminization " of American culture. We have tended, therefore, to portray evangelical women writers either as subversive heroines in an age bent on repressing them, or as agents of the degradation offormerly rigorous literary and theological standards. These dichotomies, crystallized in the response of Jane Tompkins to Ann Douglas' characterizations in TKe Feminization of American Culture, still structure much late-twentiethcentury interpretation ofnineteenth-century popular religion and literArizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 1998 Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board ofRegents issN 0004-1610 ?ooGail K. Smith ature, especially that produced and consumed by women. While the vigor of these debates has drawn attention to these recovered works, the dichotomies which undergird these critical conversations have also obscured the complexity and subtlety of the relationship of women's writing to popular religion and culture in the nineteenth century. In an effort to examine what has been obscured, I can think ofno better case study than a bestselling nineteenth-century evangelical novel often cited as the epitome of the sentimental evangelical sensibility, which has, since its publication, inspired the most polarized ofresponses. Critics have either defended it as a revolt against patriarchal Calvinism and the male clergy (Stansell; Morey 127-31, 134; Schnog; Hedrick 278-79; Long), a feminist Utopian precursor to the work ofEdward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (Kessler), a defense of middle-class women's feelings (Welter 113; Schnog; Long), an early milestone in the progression toward a social gospel (Curtis 95101 ), or a Lacanian turn from abstraction to the maternal language of the body (Schnog)—or derided it as the last gasp of the "small, feminine , New England sensibility" (Smith xxxiii), an example of a woman writer's "ludicrously literal" debasement of the grand themes of orthodox Christian theology (Rev. of TKe Gates Ajar; Kelly 34-35; Bennett 46-47), or a manifestation of the pernicious bourgeois materialism of Victorian culture (Smith xxi, xxv; Bennett 46-47; St. Armand, "Paradise " 61, 68-70, Dickinson 128, 139, 147; Douglas, "Heaven" 514-15, Feminization 270). That novel is Elizabeth Stuart Phelps' bestseller of 1868, TKe Gates Ajar, whose place in popular culture is often stressed with a litany of its sales figures and its spinoffs. It sold 180,000 known copies in England and America (Smith vi ?. ?), four thousand in the first few weeks (Phelps, Chapters 109); it was translated into thirteen languages and inspired popular songs, a cigar brand, a florists' funeral wreath pattern, a collar, a tippet, and a patent medicine with a free miniature pamphlet copy of the book attached (though why one would willingly ingest medicine named for a book about the afterlife is a mystery) (CKapters 111-12). Cast as the journal of twenty-four-year-old Mary Cabot of Massachusetts, the novel begins by recounting Mary's grief and atheistic doubts after hearing that her beloved brother Royal has been killed on a Civil War battlefield. Mary, now alone in the world, is consoled by her visiting aunt, Winifred Forceythe, a minister's widow from Kan- TKe Popuhnzation ofHermeneutics??? sas, who engages her in long conversations about what heaven will be...

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