Hannah More’s Art of Reduction

Hannah More is widely viewed as a major figure in the rise of evangelicalism, but how she played her role is still in doubt. She can be read as a conservative interested in maintaining social hierarchy or even as a radical who levels social strata by insisting that only spiritual classifications are important. An underlying network of theological uncertainties in More’s writing creates this divide in the criticism of her work. More insists on the plainness of the Bible, but, since readers nonetheless err, she suggests its plainness must first be matched in the reader in order for the text to be understood. She contradictorily indicates that the Bible or morally sound fictional works may improve the reader and that readers must already be purified before a text can have saving effects. On the one hand, this theological ambiguity can be liberating. On the other hand, the Pauline universalizing rhetoric on which More relies, rather than having the salutary impact recently described by philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou, creates a constant interrogation of self and others in order to reduce individual particularity. More’s fiction continually figures forth the need for an “annihilation of the self ” that is to be admired for its saving power and yet also pitied for the suffering it creates—suffering which is the vehicle of both that annihilation and attendant salvation.