Missionary Positions: Evangelicalism and Empire in American Fiction

5. Revival: Missionary Reform in Alice Hobart’s Yang and Yin and Missionary Rebuke in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom

5 Revival Missionary Reform in Alice Hobart’s Yang and Yin and Missionary Rebuke in Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom The American missionary novel, qua novel, did revive. It did so more than a generation after Twain’s anti-imperialist essays appeared, when in the 1930s Christian missions all over the world were being scrutinized by humanists and evensocialistswhoquestionedtheideologyofthemissionary enterprise. The two most notable missionary novels from this period are Alice Tisdale Hobart’s 1936 Yang and Yin, a fictional account of an American Protestant medical missionary in China who serves during the first quarter of the twentieth century, and Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom, a 1933 novel drawn from the author’s experience with Baptist missionaries in the British colony of Jamaica during this same period. Both engage the issue of Western imperialism and move dramatically away from such nationalistic expressions of missionary Christianity as had enthralled Cooper .InthisrespecttheyrevealacriticalorientationakintotheoneMelville presented a century earlier, but with the striking difference that both are more attuned to the psychology of those directing or implicated in the colonizing missionary movement itself. Hobart, however, finds a place for an enlightened Christian mission built upon cross-cultural understanding and respect. I Alice Hobart’s Yang and Yin may perhaps be taken as the 1930s missionary novel about China that Pearl S. Buck never wrote. As the daughter of a fundamentalist missionary, Buck certainly had the background to write an important novel about the missionary experience in China, but she never 108 • Part II. Mid-Nineteenth to Twentieth Century: Missionaries Abroad did. Instead she wrote two biographical memoirs, Fighting Angel: Portrait of a Soul, 1937, treating her father’s life (Absalom Sydenstricker), and The Exile,1936, on hermother’slife(CarolineStultingSydenstricker).1 Hobart, for her part, was no missionary’s daughter. She was the well-to-do wife of a manager of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey and was inspired by a 1910 trip to China to write a series of novels about that country. The most well-known of these, Oil for the Lamps of China, was turned into a 1935 film starring Pat O’Brien. A powerful period piece, her 1936 novel Yang and Yin is particularly valuable for dramatizing the clash between the traditional, Calvinistic practices of the Presbyterian Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (obliquely referred to) and the rising new breed of “social gospel” missionaries, of which Dr. Peter Fraser, Hobart’s protagonist, is an exemplar, since he considers himself a medical missionary first and an evangelizing missionary second.2 Thecontroversyoverthedirectionofmissionaryservicescametoahead in1922,whenPresbyterianministerHarryEmersonFosdickreturnedfrom a trip to China to declare that orthodox members of his church were sowing dissension in foreign missions by overemphasizing theological tenets. He joined many others who supported “modernist” readings of the Bible to promote educational and social programs in foreign missions.3 Urging greater tolerance, he delivered a much-reprinted sermon, rhetorically entitled “Shall the Fundamentalists Win?”4 The gathering forces that opposed fundamentalist oversight of Chinese missions came to be embodied in the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry of 1930, chaired by Harvard professor William Hocking.5 Pearl Buck, by this time a Pulitzer Prize winner for The Good Earth (1931), delivered an influential speech to a large Presbyterian convocation at the Hotel Astor in New York City endorsing this report but arguing that it ought to have gone even further. Her speech, printed as an essay, “Is There a Case for Foreign Missions?” was both a public rejection of her father’s fundamentalism and a clarion call for humanistic Christian missions.6 Challengingly, it asked whether there was forever to be an unchangeable body of doctrine governing foreign missions.7 So celebrated and so controversial was Buck’s message that it engendered a deepening chasm in what had already become a breach within traditional Protestant denominations. Implicitly, Hobart’s Yang and Yin takes Buck’s side in this controversy. An important plot strand in Hobart’s novel, the one that treats the dissident , human-service missionary, Stella Perkins, may actually be modeled Revival: Alice Hobart’s Yang and Yin and Claude McKay’s Banana Bottom • 109 in part after features of Buck’s own struggle with her board. More broadly, Hobart expressed her anti-colonizing outlook in her foreword, which describes the impact of the West upon the East, as “tragic and beautiful and terrible . . .—the blind drive of machinery into a civilization already overstocked with man power, the forcing of impersonal...