CHAPTER ONE
A Thorn in the Flesh
Pain, Illness, and Religion in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America
On the night of October 18, 1842, twenty-one-year-old Mary Rankin was lying in bed, surrounded by a small group of physicians and friends. After binding a tourniquet around her leg, Rankin’s surgeon, Dr. J. Christy, commanded her to “brace every nerve” as he was prepared to amputate. Having refused any kind of analgesics to dull the pain, including the opiates and wine that her doctors had offered, Rankin felt the initial incision with acute clarity. “My first impulse after the introduction of the knife,” she later recalled, “was, ‘I cannot endure it; I will tell them to desist.’” But Rankin did not speak; in fact, she was told afterward that she moaned only once in the twelve minutes it took the surgeon to sever her limb from the rest of her body. Fully conscious for every cut, Rankin retained her composure even as she heard the sawing of the bone.1
Reflecting on the ordeal, Rankin refrained from describing the pain she experienced during the surgery—“To be known,” she remarked, “it must be felt!” Instead, she explained how it was that she found herself able to tolerate the experience. When tempted to cry out in agony or beg the surgeon to stop, Rankin instead “felt a sweet sinking into the will of Providence. Never did I realize more powerfully the fulfillment of that blessed promise, ‘My grace shall be sufficient for thee.’ His arms of love were underneath me, and by them I was upheld in this trying moment.” Refusing to accept any credit for the manner in which she bore the operation, Rankin averred that she had remained utterly passive in the process, relying entirely on God’s grace to sustain her. “‘Not unto me, not unto me,’” she insisted, “but unto God be all the praise for enabling me to endure it.”2
Like many Protestants of her generation, Rankin believed that patient resignation represented the proper Christian response to physical pain. In her aptly titled autobiography, The Daughter of Affliction: A Memoir of the Protracted Sufferings and Religious Experience of Miss Mary Rankin, first published in 1858, Rankin recounted her unflagging efforts to conform to the ideal of passive forbearance as she suffered a wide assortment of bodily ailments and endured an eclectic array of remedial yet frequently painful therapies. This chapter explores how mid-nineteenth-century Protestants like Rankin drew upon various theological, scientific, and cultural discourses in their efforts to understand the significance of suffering in the Christian life. Rankin’s meditations on the theological meaning of pain, for example, reflect her indebtedness to a particular version of the Reformed tradition, and especially to a theodicy that interpreted corporeal affliction as a blessing permitted, even ordained, by divine providence. Since bodily suffering was good for the soul, Rankin surmised, then pain and illness ought to be accepted with thanksgiving and endured with equanimity. Rankin’s encounter with the medical therapeutics of the mid-nineteenth century reinforced her perception of pain as a salutary force. Within the province of medical practice, pain was often construed as a positive indicator of therapeutic progress. To suffer discomfort at the hands of a physician or as the result of his prescriptions was to be confident that one was actively moving toward the goal of physical health. Finally, Rankin’s experience as a woman who came of age during the heyday of the “domestic ideology” undoubtedly encouraged her to interpret pain as spiritually fruitful and to embrace a devotional ethic that demanded silence and submission in the face of affliction. An exploration of the relationship between gender norms and Protestant responses to pain in this period also helps to explain why women like Rankin served as the primary exemplars of passive resignation and to elucidate the distinctive ways that the ideal of sanctified suffering worked in the spiritual practice of both women and men.
Bodily Illness, Heroic Therapy, and Afflictive Providence
Rankin was no stranger to suffering when she submitted to the surgeon’s knife in the autumn of her twenty-first year. Born in Huntington County, Pennsylvania, to “humble but respectable parents,” Rankin’s early childhood was marked by sickness and loss. Her father died when she was very young, leaving her mother to support a family of seven children. When she was eight years old, Rankin was sent away from home to board with another family, in whose household she remained for six years. Around the age of fourteen, Rankin stepped on a white thorn that penetrated the joint of her small toe. Despite “all the efforts of surgery and medical skill” applied to her case, the thorn festered in Rankin’s flesh, eventually causing her foot and limb to contract painfully. The injury also irritated her nervous system, which was “of the most sensitive character,” resulting in debilitating spasms. Gradually at first, but then more rapidly, Rankin’s health declined until she had to be sent home to be cared for by her mother. Soon she became “permanently confined” to her bed with multiple ailments.3
From the onset of her illness, Rankin sought help from a number of physicians, some of whom called her case “hopeless” and admitted that they could do nothing for her. Other, more enterprising doctors hoped that by healing such a “singular” case, they might make reputations for themselves and achieve the eminence that was so difficult to obtain in the crowded, competitive, and often unprofitable medical marketplace of the antebellum era. One such practitioner, a Dr. Greene, pronounced Rankin’s disease “nothing more nor less than inflammation of the spine,” and prescribed a series of treatments premised on a set of widely held assumptions about bodily illness and health. “For more than a year,” Rankin recalled, “I had to endure the excruciating process of blistering, cupping, scarifying, cauterizing, and setons, of which he introduced no less than ten along the region of the spine.”4
As medical historian Charles Rosenberg has explained, early-nineteenth-century physicians and lay persons shared certain common understandings of the body and its functions that helped to promote and sustain a system of aggressive or “heroic” therapeutics characterized by the prescription of painful remedies such as those Dr. Greene ordered. First, the body was viewed holistically, as a system in which “every part … was related inevitably and inextricably with every other.” The thorn embedded in the flesh of Rankin’s little toe could thus agitate her nervous system, irritate her spine, and inflame her liver. Such a local injury was presumed to promote systemic derangement, so that Rankin’s whole body was thought to be diseased. Second, the body was believed to be a closed system with only a finite amount of energy. As Rosenberg put it, “The body was seen as a system of intake and outgo—a system which had, necessarily, to remain in balance if the individual were to remain healthy… . Equilibrium was synonymous with health, disequilibrium with illness.”5
Prior to the nineteenth century, most medical theorists had argued that “disease could result from either an excess or a deficiency of some bodily elements.” In this view, “the physician’s most potent weapon was his ability to ‘regulate the secretions’—to extract blood, to promote the perspiration, or the urination, or defecation which attested to his having helped the body to regain its customary equilibrium.” Accordingly, remedies were designed either to stimulate a debilitated system or, more commonly, to deplete a body suffering from some sort of overabundance. This second approach was actively promoted by the influential Philadelphian physician Benjamin Rush around the beginning of the nineteenth century. Rejecting the theories of his predecessors, Rush maintained that the imbalances that led to illness were always the result of excess nervous energy. Based on this understanding of disease, Rush believed that equilibrium was restored exclusively through the application of “depletive” therapies such as bleeding, purging, sweating, and salivating. Rush was also of the mind that, as historian Martin Pernick has put it, “the efficacy of a remedy was proportional to its impact on the body… Rush therefore prescribed the depletive remedies until they produced ‘heroic’ results: repeated massive bloodlettings, to or beyond a state of collapse; calomel till the gums hemorrhaged.”6
Mary Rankin, c. 1858. Frontispiece to The Daughter of Affliction: A Memoir of the Protracted Sufferings and Religious Experience of Miss Mary Rankin (1871). Reproduced by permission of the United Brethren Historical Center, Huntington University, Huntington, Indiana.
Although Rush’s system was strenuously challenged in the 1830s by both “regular,” or “orthodox” physicians—those who relied primarily on observational techniques and invasive or chemical therapies to diagnose and treat disease—and by various health reform movements, Mary Rankin’s experience at the hands of Dr. Greene, among other evidence, reveals that many physicians continued to employ heroic methods well into the latter half of the nineteenth century. Excruciating treatments like those Rankin underwent remained popular among physicians and acceptable to patients in this period in part because, as Rosenberg and others have argued, they appeared to work. Since doctors relied almost solely on their senses in diagnosing disease and charting a patient’s prognosis, they were attracted to therapies that produced “visible and predictable physiological effects.” When Dr. Greene broke the surface of Rankin’s skin with his scarificator or lancet and applied his “doctor’s sucking glass”—a glass cup that had been heated over a hot torch—to her lacerated flesh in order to siphon her blood more effectively, he was taking action that generated obvious and consistent results that he could see. He also would have assumed that the external effects of his treatments—the bruise and burn marks left from the incisions and the cups, as well as the amounts of blood drawn—provided ample evidence of corresponding internal changes that would bring Rankin’s system back into balance.7
In addition to assuring physicians that their prescriptions were effective, the drastic effects produced by heroic therapies also served to demonstrate to patients and their families that the doctor was actively striving to combat the patient’s disease. Since patients and physicians shared an understanding of how the body worked, Rankin would have viewed Dr. Greene’s attempts to regulate her secretions as an appropriate means for restoring her body’s equilibrium and therefore her health. Pain, in this context, offered proof that the physician was doing his job and confirmation that the body was responding as it should. Because “insensibility” was so frequently thought to herald impending death, many individuals—doctors and patients alike—assumed that pain was a vital sign of life. According to this logic, the experience of acute physical discomfort signaled that a person was on the road to recovery. Similarly, painful remedies were thought to aid in the process of healing by stimulating the patient’s system. Patients assented to heroic therapeutics because the pain these procedures produced inspired confidence that the flesh was being affected for the better.8
Unfortunately for Rankin, Dr. Greene’s treatments did not generate the desired results. After fifteen months, all the blood-letting and burning “appeared of no avail.” Despite the obvious sensory and painful effects of these therapies, Rankin’s overall condition did not seem to improve. Lacking any lasting evidence of recuperation, Greene gave up the case, leaving Rankin with multiple scars but without any real relief. About two years later, in June of 1842, Rankin resorted to another round of heroic therapy, this time turning to “mercurial medicines.” The widespread popularity of toxic drugs such as antimony, arsenic, and especially calomel (mercurous chloride), a powerful purgative that, if taken in substantial or frequent doses, caused violent diarrhea followed by involuntary salivation, has been well documented by medical historians, one of whom has dubbed this period “the poisoning century.” Like blistering and bleeding, drugs were thought “to modify the body’s ongoing efforts to maintain or restore a health-defining equilibrium.” And, like other kinds of heroic remedies, the administration of emetics, cathartics, and diuretics produced obvious physiological results that confirmed their efficacy for practitioners and patients alike. After quaffing a large draught of one such medicine, for example, Rankin’s throat and tongue became so swollen that she could scarcely swallow. Since the mercury did seem to help her paralysis, however, her physician “thought it was of some benefit” and continued to administer the medication along with “opiates” to quiet her nerves. But rather than calming her, these drugs only caused Ranking greater irritation. Looking back on this experience, Rankin thanked God for the “peculiar providence” that enabled her body to reject these narcotic medicines. “I trust I fully appreciate the motives of my physician,” she remarked, “but had these opiates produced their desired effect, they would more than likely have been administered to such an extent as to render my mind imbecile and unfit for future mental effort.”9
Trust her physician’s intentions though she might, Rankin’s comments suggest that she harbored some doubts about his prescriptions. Throughout her memoir, in fact, Rankin recalls her reluctance to undergo the treatments her various doctors ordered. When she initially heard the course of therapy Dr. Greene recommended, Rankin resisted, consenting only “after a great deal of persuasion.” After she began to suffer spasms, another “strange physician,” a Dr. Burnet, proposed to cauterize her injured toe. Again, Rankin “objected” until her family physician convinced her that allowing acid to eat away at her diseased flesh might bring her some relief. Finally, when this and all other remedies seemed to have failed, Rankin’s physicians concluded that amputation of her leg was the only remaining option. When they informed her of their opinion, she flatly refused to consider the operation. “No! no! rather let me die. You shall never amputate my limb!” she cried. No amount of argument from physicians, friends, or family could sway her. Even when the surgeon insisted that amputation was her “only hope” and threatened to leave without helping her in any other way, Rankin refused to be budged. “I can not submit,” she replied.10
But eventually Rankin did acquiesce to the amputation, just as she had agreed to try all of the other torturous therapies her physicians prescribed. For in Rankin’s view, something more than physical suffering was at stake in her struggle to reconcile herself to her physicians’ recommendations. Submission to the doctors’ orders was not just a means for pursuing bodily health, it was also a matter of spiritual scruples. As a member of the United Brethren in Christ, a Reformed church influenced by pietistic revivalism and Methodism, which she had joined soon after her injury, Rankin learned to interpret her sufferings as afflictions sent by God for her own advantage as well as for the good of others. “Often when reflecting on the providence of God in afflicting his people,” Rankin wrote, “I have thought of how very necessary these afflictions are, which at times we are so unwilling to bear; for they serve to remind us that here is not our home.” Placing her own injury in this perspective, Rankin described the thorn in her flesh as “the external means of separating my heart fully from the world, and uniting it to Christ.” Without it, she insisted, “I might have become vain and forgetful of God.”11
When an apparently well-meaning friend challenged Rankin’s theological views, suggesting that her suffering was the result of “an accidental injury,” Rankin responded with incredulity. “Can it be that you are not a believer in the afflicting providence of God?” she queried her friend. “There is no doctrine I think more clearly taught in the Bible than this.” Rankin went on to explain why this conviction was so compelling for her. “Could I believe that all which I have been made to suffer was merely in consequence of having violated a physical or organic law, (and not as directed by an unerring Providence for some wise purpose),” she wrote, “I would then also believe God had dealt unjustly with me.” Believing that God ordained her afflictions enabled Rankin to trust that her suffering was meaningful. Without that hope, she explained to her friend, she would lose her faith in God’s goodness. And losing the faith that provided her with an explanatory framework for her experiences was a theological crisis that she was simply unwilling to endure.12
Instead, Rankin embraced the doctrine of God’s providence with passionate and persistent fervor, disciplining herself to accept afflictions with equanimity. “Although his providence has often appeared mysterious to me, and his ways past finding out,” she stated, “I have endeavored to submit to the severe stroke of his unseen hand with Christian resignation and patience.” At times, she admitted, acquiescing to God’s designs proved difficult. Once, when a physician “proposed to introduce a seton,” Rankin confessed that she “felt almost unwilling to submit” and could scarcely suppress her tears. “For a moment it seemed as if I were called not only to suffer in every possible way from disease, but also from the means resorted to for my relief,” she remarked. Troubled by these circumstances, Rankin began to question: “Why have I to suffer more than appears to fall to the common lot of mankind? Is it because I am a more rebellious child than others, that it requires such means to keep me humble?” But to continue along this line of inquiry threatened to undermine her faith, so Rankin quickly pulled herself back by focusing her thoughts, not on her doubts, but on the promises of scripture. As she meditated on Jesus’ words—“What thou knowest not now thou shalt know hereafter”—Rankin was “filled with an unusual comfort” and “felt calmly to sink into His will.”13
To lose her own will in God’s was Rankin’s greatest solace in suffering and the highest goal of her spiritual life. Rather than rebelling against doctors who proposed painful remedies or railing against circumstances that seemed unfair, Rankin strove to adopt an obedient pose. After twenty years of practicing patient resignation, Rankin wrote in her journal, “I feel to say, come life, come death, come what may, I can bow in humble submission, and gently kiss the rod that smites me, knowing full well that it is directed by a Father’s hand, and trusting in Him who said that ‘all things work together for good to them that love the Lord.’” Afflictions, Rankin affirmed, were not only to be accepted but to be cherished, for they brought blessing both to the sufferer and to others. Throughout her testimony, in fact, Rankin linked “excruciating pain” with “exquisite” religious enjoyments. “During my severest pain and suffering I frequently realized the greatest joys and richest blessings,” she declared. Once, when enduring an attack of “inflammatory disease,” Rankin experienced “hights [sic] and depths in the love of God, to which I had hitherto been a stranger.” Recounting the rapture, she wrote: “I lay for several hours in an unconscious state, at least so far as all around me was concerned. But to my spiritual vision was disclosed heaven with its weight of glory. I have no suitable language with which to describe the glories of that place which mortal eye hath not seen nor ear heard, and which have never entered into the heart of man to conceive.” Such ecstatic, visionary spiritual experiences, Rankin believed, were the fruits of affliction—gifts of God available through patient endurance of intense physical pain.14
Many of Rankin’s physicians, ministers, and friends affirmed her interpretations of her experiences and held her up as a kind of spiritual virtuoso. Mrs. M. V. Snyder, a friend of Rankin’s and the wife of a missionary to Kansas, commended Rankin for enduring all her afflictions with “submission and patience.” Snyder was especially impressed with Rankin’s attitude toward physical suffering. “She … has so long experienced the spiritual benefit resulting from sanctified pain,” Snyder noted, “that she seems rather to enjoy it, and turn it into occasions of thanksgiving and praise, than otherwise.” The six physicians and fourteen ministers representing four different denominations who signed the “testimonial” endorsing Rankin’s book also praised her fortitude in the face of affliction and suggested a close causal connection between her “almost unparalleled sufferings” and “the remarkable communications of divine grace” she had experienced over the course of her invalidism.15
Rankin’s admirers also corroborated her efforts to make herself “useful”—a desire that she expressed frequently in her journal entries and correspondence, and one that echoed a broader evangelical discourse that stressed the responsibility of each Christian to exercise all of her available energies, faculties, and resources to exert a sanctifying influence on other individuals, on the culture, and even on the world. In a letter to a friend dated April 1859, Rankin articulated her belief in the priesthood of all believers and the corollary conviction that “in the economy of grace all have a purpose to fill; and there is no situation in life in which we can be placed in which we can not glorify God if we strive to do so.” Bedridden though she might be, Rankin believed that she could serve God acceptably by demonstrating her faith in Christ to others through her attitude toward suffering. Capitalizing on the abiding tradition of Christian hagiography and auto-hagiography, a textual form that became increasingly abundant with the expansion of evangelical publishing in the nineteenth century, Rankin agreed to publish her memoirs in order to reach the widest possible audience with her message. “I had a great desire to be useful in some way,” she explained, “and this appeared to be the only way in which I could likely accomplish that laudable end.” Supporting Rankin in her endeavor, the twenty testimonial-signers called her book both “interesting”—a term that nineteenth-century evangelicals used to indicate a text’s ability to rouse pious emotions and inspire holy actions—and “useful,” recommending it “to all Christians, as a monument of God’s faithfulness and as a solace in the hour of affliction.”16
Sanctified Suffering in Historical Perspective
The link between bodily suffering and spiritual blessing that Rankin embodied and her admirers endorsed has deep roots in the Christian scriptures and tradition. Although the Bible itself is ambivalent about the meaning and nature of pain (contrary to popular perception, for example, the book of Job treats suffering as an enemy sent by the devil rather than as a gift of God), Christians throughout the centuries have often exalted physical affliction as a means for imitating Jesus—the suffering servant, who through his pain brought healing and reconciliation between God and humanity. The martyrs of the early church have frequently been commended for enduring horrible tortures at the hands of their imperial persecutors and thereby emulating the passion of Christ. In the hands of medieval hagiographers, such identification with Jesus’ sufferings signified a person’s sanctity and often secured her candidacy for sainthood. Many medieval mystics believed that meditating on Christ’s wounds, or experiencing these torments in one’s own flesh—whether through feats of asceticism and self-flagellation or through receiving the stigmata—offered means for entering into closer communion with God.17
Although sixteenth-century reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin contested models of sanctity that stressed corporeal mortification as a strategy for achieving mystical contemplation, insisting instead that union with God was a gift of grace offered through Christ’s death on the cross rather than a prize to be won as the result of human endeavor, their emphasis on God’s sovereignty and the corollary doctrine of divine providence assured that physical illness and bodily injury retained a crucial role within Protestant spirituality. According to the theological framework articulated in the works of Calvin and his followers, especially, all manner of suffering, including somatic pain, represented God-given occasions for weaning the affections from the snares of earthly existence, for purifying the sinful impulses of the flesh, and for learning the lessons of self-denial and submission to the divine will that led to personal holiness. Additionally, because Protestant reformers rejected the monastic ideal of withdrawal from the world and relocated the spiritual life from the cloister to the household, they broadened the types of experiences that could contribute to an individual’s sanctification. The ordinary trials of everyday life, including the disappointments and sufferings associated with sickness and disease, offered opportunities for imitating Christ through the practice of patient acquiescence to the fiats of divine providence.18
As part of their continuing efforts to reform Christian theology and spiritual practice, Protestants began to develop their own hagiographical canon. Texts like John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563), which memorialized the English Protestants executed during the reign of Catholic Mary Tudor as well as the martyrs of the early church, emphasized the ability of all individuals—not just cloistered or clerical saints—to imitate Christ through the faithful endurance of trial and affliction. For the Protestant who sought instruction on how to cope with ongoing earthly tribulations of various types, John Bunyan composed his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666), and later his classic allegory of the Christian life, The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World to That Which is to Come (1678). Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, authors such as Richard Baxter, Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and John Wesley, to name just a few, added to the growing body of hagiographies, memoirs, and autobiographies intended to provide believers with appropriate models for sanctity, and particularly for perseverance in the face of divinely sanctioned hardships and distress.19
Encounters with native Americans fueled the production of missionary memoirs such as Jonathan Edwards’ Life of David Brainerd (1749), a specialized genre of Protestant hagiography that became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century as the passion for foreign missions spread among American and British evangelicals. The “labors, suffering, and death” of Adoniram Judson and of his wife, Ann Hasseltine Judson, who were among the first American foreign missionaries, were memorialized in numerous biographies, beginning with the Memoir of Mrs. Ann H. Judson (1829), a book that went through ten editions in nine years and was “universally known,” according to Lydia Maria Child, within four years of its initial publication. The popularity of this work demonstrates the growing tendency among nineteenth-century evangelicals to lionize pious women, in addition to male ministers like Bunyan and Brainerd. While Protestants had always included women among the “saints” that they honored in funeral sermons, memoirs, and martyr stories, accounts of the holy lives, arduous ordeals, and triumphant deaths of female “worthies” like Ann Judson became increasingly common in the early decades of the nineteenth century.20
Drawing upon the longer tradition of Protestant hagiography and the more recent focus on female sanctity, Mary Rankin’s text was both a classic expression of Protestant piety that shared some aims and attributes of abiding works such as The Life of David Brainerd and a distinctive product of nineteenth-century sensibilities. Like most Protestant hagiographies, The Daughter of Affliction emphasized the importance of suffering as a means provided by God for personal sanctification. The particular kinds of trial that Rankin encountered and the manner in which she bore her tribulations, however, distinguish her story from both standard tales of Protestant martyrdom and popular biographies of evangelical missionaries. Although David Brainerd was commended for “his humility, his self-denial, his perseverance,” especially in the face of disappointments in his work, bouts of physical sickness, and periods of mental depression, for example, he did not suffer from the kind of protracted invalidism that marked Mary Rankin’s life. When Brainerd did fall ill, he struggled against his sickness, lamenting the fact that physical prostration kept him from his evangelistic tasks and deprived his Indian converts of his pastoral ministrations. While he thoroughly accepted the doctrine of divine providence and acknowledged that contentment was a proper response to bodily affliction, Brainerd’s zeal for missionary endeavor complicated this ideal. Sickness, in other words, was not the hallmark of Brainerd’s sanctity.21
Similarly, although Ann Judson suffered from various illnesses and ultimately succumbed to death as the result of “the weakness of her constitution, occasioned by the severe privations and long protracted sufferings which she endured” during her missionary career in Burma, she was revered by her contemporaries not only for the “meekness, patience, magnanimity and Christian fortitude” with which she bore her physical ailments, but also for the “genius and heroism and piety” she displayed as she negotiated with Burmese authorities for her husband’s release from prison, for her courageous work among and on behalf of Burmese women, and for her bravery and self-sacrifice in leaving the comforts of home to labor in a foreign land. While Judson’s endurance of bodily affliction was a estimable practice worthy of emulation, forbearance of physical illness and discomfort represented only one of the many occasions for the development of holiness and the display of Christian character that she encountered.22
For Mary Rankin, on the other hand, pain was the primary reality and the principal means of her sanctification. In this way, the model of sanctified suffering that Rankin promoted in her book and strove to embody in her life was not altogether unlike the somatic piety of certain medieval saints. In particular, Rankin’s tendency to link the endurance of severe physical pain with the enjoyment of ecstatic visionary states is evocative of the experiences described in hagiographies of late-medieval mystics such as the vita of Beatrice of Nazareth (1200–1268), James of Vitry’s life of Mary of Oignes (1176–1213), or Raymond of Capua’s biography of Catherine of Siena (1347–138), Legenda Major. Sanctity, in these works, is explicitly connected with the experience of intense bodily suffering, which was understood to be a sign of an individual’s identification with Christ.23
By the fourteenth century, a specific type of physical suffering—corporeal illness—marked the lives of an increasing number of mystics. In one of the major auto-hagiographies of this period, for example, the Dominican nun Margaret Ebner (1291–1351) suggested that sickness served as the stimulus for deeper mystical experience and interpreted invalidism as a sign of God’s favor. The connection between somatic infirmity and sanctity was especially compelling in cases of female mysticism, for the long-standing tendency to associate “woman” with body, flesh, and physicality fueled a corollary assumption about women’s distinctive ability to imitate Christ through corporal suffering. While experiences of sickness and pain often featured in the lives of late-medieval men, “there is no question,” historian Caroline Walker Bynum has argued, that physical suffering was “more prominent” in hagiographical depictions of women’s religiosity. As late-medieval theology grew increasingly concerned with the centrality of Christ’s humanity, and particularly with his physical nature and his material body, women gained the opportunity to serve as spiritual virtuosi who bore the burden of imitating Christ through a literal identification with his bodily sufferings. Within this context, Bynum has written, “patient suffering of disease or injury was a major way of gaining sanctity for females but not for males.” Through their endurance of illness and other forms of somatic pain, late-medieval women attained sanctification and achieved more intense experiences of mystical union with God. By suffering in the flesh, as Christ himself had suffered, female invalids also incarnated the divine presence for their contemporaries. The “sensibly marked” bodies of female saints, as historian Amy Hollywood has put it, served as signs of “Christ’s presence on earth”; a woman’s wounded flesh made the “divine presence” visible.24
While vast temporal, theological, and cultural chasms separate Mary Rankin’s experiences from those of her late-medieval forerunners, highlighting the gendered assumptions that influenced ideals of sanctity and shaped cultural norms regarding the place of pain in the spiritual life during the late Middle Ages helps shed light on an analogous process of cultural prescription, also driven by gendered notions of selfhood, at work in the mid-nineteenth century. During the early decades of the 1800s, a potent complex of ideas about the fundamental nature of “manhood” and “womanhood,” and a related collection of regulations regarding the social and spiritual roles of women and men began to hold sway among increasing numbers of Anglo-American Protestants (and others). By parsing human nature into constituent categories, posing fundamental dualisms between these separate parts of the self—head/heart, intellect/affections, reason/emotions, mind/body—for example, and associating men and women with opposite sides of these dyads, many Protestants in this period, like their medieval predecessors, contributed to the development of a deeply gendered somatic piety that linked female sanctity with passive forbearance of physical suffering.
Female Invalidism and the Gendering of Somatic Piety in Nineteenth-Century America
Mary Rankin’s status as a spiritual virtuoso whose patient resignation to the afflictive providence of God resulted in religious raptures and marked her as a kind of Protestant saint worthy of esteem and emulation drew support from several prominent assumptions about women and their relationship to society that were extremely influential in the early nineteenth century. Driven in part by the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy in which men increasingly worked outside the home and women were charged with the education of children, the “doctrine of separate spheres” insisted that the public domain was the province of men, while the domestic sphere was woman’s place.
This division between the public world of affairs and the private realm of the home contained within it another important supposition: that a properly ordered household served as the model for the good society. The “cult of domesticity” upheld the home as the seat of religion, virtue, and morality. Within this private domestic arena, women were called upon to exercise their moral influence upon family members, servants, and guests. Through their influence within the home, promoters of this ideology asserted, women had the power to transform individual character and even public culture. This conception of women’s mission rested on a third assumption about woman’s nature. According to the “cult of true womanhood,” woman’s “natural” dependence and weakness were signs of her moral purity and spiritual superiority. Women, in this view, were inherently more attuned to the emotions, to the sentiments of the heart, and especially to religion. Because of their heightened sensitivity to affections and to spiritual realities, women were more capable of redeeming individuals and society through their virtuous examples.25
While these ideas were not entirely new in the early nineteenth century, they took on a particular force in this period as they were combined into a “domestic ideology” that established a prevailing set of norms and expectations for and about women’s nature and roles within society. The domestic ideology also stipulated a corresponding collection of assumptions and prescriptions about manhood and proper male behavior. Whereas women were thought to be inherently dependent, submissive, passive, and self-sacrificing, men were supposed to be essentially autonomous, assertive, active, and self-interested. Because of male participation in the public domain, white middle-class masculinity, in particular, was associated with ambition, competition, and production, qualities a man needed to possess and exercise in order to succeed in the ruthless arenas of republican politics and entrepreneurial capitalism. Although early-nineteenth-century Protestants recognized the importance of “manly passions” for economic advancement and political achievement, they simultaneously condemned these characteristics as signs of a corrupt and sinful nature. Unless male aggression and avarice were appropriately channeled through the discipline of self-mastery, they might wreak havoc with the social order. In order to contain the potentially destructive possibilities of masculine passions, the domestic ideology dictated that men’s selfish impulses were subject to the chastening influence of female virtue within the home, and, as historian Anthony Rotundo has put it, “symbolically quarantined by the separation of spheres.” By segregating the public realm from the private, aspiring middle-class Protestants found a way to assuage the ambivalences associated with male passions and to achieve productivity without sacrificing social stability or pious morality.26
Like all dominant cultural dogmas, the domestic ideology provoked several competing interpretations among its contemporaries. Opponents such as abolitionists and early women’s rights advocates Sarah and Angelina Grimke argued vehemently against the grounding assumptions that delineated male and female nature and isolated the public realm from the private sphere. In their view, the domestic ideology was a fiercely repressive social philosophy that created a false, unbiblical distinction between women and men, and undermined women’s political agency by circumscribing them within the home. Others insisted that the tenets of the domestic ideology—and particularly its claims about woman’s superior moral nature—provided a platform for asserting that the future of American society was dependent upon the influence of women. The greatest spokesperson for this interpretation of the domestic ideology was Catharine Beecher, the eldest of Lyman and Roxanna Beecher’s thirteen children and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s older sister.27
In 1837, Beecher and the Grimke sisters engaged in a public, printed debate over woman’s proper role in American society that continued for the better part of two years. In this dispute, Beecher challenged the Grimkes’ interpretation of the domestic ideology as a philosophy that devalued women and denied them moral agency and political power by restricting their domain of influence to the home. In Beecher’s view, the doctrine of separate spheres, the idea that the home is the ideal model for society, and the belief in the moral superiority of female nature offered women powerfully influential roles as agents of social and political change. She argued that it was precisely because women were restricted to the domestic arena that they could exercise a reforming influence on society. Against the corruption of the male-dominated political sphere, Beecher lifted up the home as a pure, moral realm—a place set apart that sheltered its inhabitants from the temptations of the world. Since women who remained in the private, domestic arena avoided the pollutions of the public domain—the vices of democratic politics and the materialism of capitalist economic culture—they were “uniquely qualified” to serve as mirrors to corrupt society and as stabilizing forces for the young nation. By cultivating their unique and superior moral sensibility within the domestic sphere, Beecher proclaimed, women would have a far-ranging influence beyond that arena.28
For Mary Rankin, the notion that the private realm could become a place of power offered a satisfying strategy for asserting agency and exercising influence, not despite, but precisely because of, her circumstances. Drawing upon the rhetoric of separate spheres but changing the language slightly to suit her situation, Rankin proposed a distinction between the arena of health, in which an individual was called to actively pursue God’s will in the world, and the state of sickness, in which she was constrained to submit to the afflictions of divine providence within the confines of the sickroom. “Let our whole business in life to be to serve him acceptably, each in our different sphere,” Rankin wrote to a friend in 1859. “If I bear patiently the afflictions he sees fit to lay on me, I may be said to suffer passively the will of my Father in heaven,” she wrote to her healthy friend, “whilst you, in your more favored sphere, must do actively his will: and thus, by letting our lights shine others may be attracted to Christ, and we be made the happy instruments of bringing them to him.”29
Rankin’s admirers took her argument one step further, claiming both that her separation from everyday affairs heightened her purity and that her endurance of affliction increased her sanctity. As a woman who patiently bore excruciating pain within the cloistered arena of the home, Rankin embodied both the principles of the domestic ideology and the Christian ideal of suffering servanthood. Her influence, her devotees insisted, was potent and essential. “In an active sphere of life you might be ready to conclude she was made in vain, that her physical inability to act and the seclusion from duties would entirely cut off her influence for good,” wrote Dr. Samuel M. Ross. “Not so, she has a circle of friends who feel that they can not properly estimate her worth; and that they cannot dispense with her counsels.”30
As the years passed and Rankin’s experiences became increasingly well known, people began to seek out her advice on spiritual matters. When Rankin had been bedridden for about twenty years, an “old gentleman” called to see her. “He had been for some time anxious to obtain that grace which (to adopt the language of Paul) would enable him to overcome ‘those roots of bitterness which are continually springing up in the heart (such as anger, etc.),’” Rankin recalled, “and for this reason he had called to converse with me on the subject, believing that I had experienced those things for myself.” By the 1850s, Rankin’s former physician Dr. Hoffman was regularly requesting Rankin’s prayers and asking for guidance about how to cope with his own difficulties. On account of her experiences with affliction and her secluded status, Rankin became a living saint from whom seekers garnered insight and understanding.31
If prevailing gender norms such as the cult of true womanhood and the doctrine of separate spheres promoted the perception that cloistered women like Rankin possessed extraordinary spiritual wisdom, medical discourse regarding women’s health also helped to foster the notion that female bodies were especially suited to endure sanctified suffering because of their inherent weakness and sensitivity. While medical theories maintaining the comparative frailty of women were rooted in longstanding assumptions about the innate differences between female and male nature and physical strength, certain influential nineteenth-century physicians associated women’s health primarily with the proper functioning of their reproductive systems and thus encouraged a growing tendency to see women as fundamentally prone to illness as the result of menstrual irregularity, or even of menstruation itself. A woman’s “whole organism,” wrote E. H. Dixon in his text Woman and Her Diseases (1847/55), is ruled by her uterus and will “respond to its slightest affectations.” Positing an “intimate” relation between the reproductive organs and the nervous system, physicians like Dixon could attribute virtually any bodily or emotional ailment to some sort of uterine or ovarian malfunction. “Woman’s reproductive organs are pre-eminent,” wrote one physician in 1854. “They exercise a controlling influence upon her entire system, and entail upon her many painful and dangerous diseases. They are the source of her peculiarities, the centre of her sympathies, and the seat of her diseases. Everything that is peculiar to her, springs from her sexual organization.” Hysteria, in particular, was linked both etiologically and diagnostically with women’s anatomy, so that physicians increasingly came to understand the ever-more-endemic disease in gendered terms, as “‘the natural state’ in a female, a ‘morbid state’ in the male.”32
While a woman’s intrinsic physical frailty increased her vulnerability to disease, her essential weakness also heightened her capacity for feeling pain. Because women’s nerves “are smaller” and “of a more delicate structure,” one doctor explained, “they are endowed with greater sensibility.” Another physician maintained that “a blow of equal force produces a more serious effect” on a woman than on a man “in consequence of her greater sensitiveness to external impressions.” According to this logic, sensitivity to physical pain, like bodily weakness, was a feminine trait. “The female sex,” wrote one physician in 1827, “is far more sensitive and susceptible than the male.” Men, as members of the stronger sex, were less likely to feel corporal discomfort. The more robust a man was, the more impervious to pain he was thought to be. In this formulation, physical strength and sensitivity to pain were inversely related.33
Because female delicacy and sensitivity were imaginatively linked with moral authority and spiritual preeminence in this period, medical theories that stressed women’s natural (and, indeed, inevitable) physical infirmity and sensibility encouraged the tendency to associate bodily suffering with female sanctity. Female invalids who, like Mary Rankin, passively endured painful corporal afflictions, were, in this view, particularly qualified to serve as exemplars of somatic piety. Male invalids, on the other hand, were rarely exalted as models of Protestant sainthood. Since sickness, submission, and sensitivity to suffering were culturally connected with femininity, patient forbearance of protracted illness (as opposed to stoic fortitude in the face of acute pain such as a battle injury or the “heroic” ministrations of a physician) was an emasculating behavior for men. The doctrine of separate spheres, which conferred upon men sole responsibility for providing for their families, also made invalidism impractical, especially for male members of the lower and middle classes who aspired to upward mobility. When men did fall ill, they could rarely afford long periods of convalescence. In accordance with the economic realities of men’s status as heads of households, and also with ideals of manhood in the early nineteenth century that associated white middle-class men with vitality, reason, and self-mastery, physicians often encouraged sick men to take action in order to overcome their illnesses. Through energetic physical activity that required them to exercise will-power and self-control, men weakened by disease would replenish their “natural” strength and be refitted for their social roles. In some cases, of course, men were too sick to engage in vigorous forms of therapy and required rest in order to recuperate. But because such passivity contradicted cultural prescriptions for male behavior, men who were forced to adopt a recumbent posture for anything but a brief interlude seldom, if ever, received accolades for bearing their afflictions with patience. While memoirs of men who endured illness and persevered under trial certainly existed, works of this genre devoted to recounting the long-sufferings of invalid women were much more prevalent and well-known.34
The predominance of the saintly female invalid in works of popular fiction also reflected and abetted the propensity to uphold women as paragons of Christian piety who passively resigned themselves to the divine will (not to mention exemplary patients who always acquiesced to their doctors’ prescriptions). Although male invalids are not absent from the cast of such nineteenth-century literary characters, women played the pious but sickly protagonist far more frequently than men. As numerous literary historians have observed, the creation of “a new aesthetic type—the delicate, sickly heroine” whose saintliness increased in proportion to her physical weakness—both expressed and endorsed the notion that ill-health was a marker of genteel femininity, moral superiority, and spiritual sanctity. Characters such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Priscilla, the fragile heroine of The Blithedale Romance (1852), and perhaps most famously, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Evangeline St. Clare—Little Eva—of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), helped give rise to the literary “cult of female invalidism” and furthered the increasingly widespread perception that middle- and upper-class white women were inherently frail and, by virtue of this vulnerability, angelically pious. In evangelical works of sentimental fiction like Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), invalid women such as the physically delicate yet spiritually robust Alice Humphreys personified the lessons of self-renunciation and serenity in the face of suffering that the novels were designed to teach. Alice’s death, like that of Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, highlighted the beauty of her character as she preached a sermon advocating patient resignation to divine providence and encouraged those around her sick-bed to set their sights on heaven. When “little Ellen Montgomery,” the main character of the novel, expressed dismay at her mentor’s impending death, Alice chided her spiritual apprentice by restating the devotional ethic that she herself lived by and that she hoped Ellen would espouse: “We must say ‘the Lord’s will be done;’—we must not forget he does all things well.”35
Similarly, in her best-selling novel, Stepping Heavenward (1869), popular evangelical author Elizabeth Prentiss linked medical theories about women’s health with devotional norms that esteemed passive endurance as the proper response to suffering. As a sixteen-year-old young woman, Katy, the female protagonist of Prentiss’s story, fell sick after hurrying off to school in the snow without overshoes and then staying up that night to write in her journal in a cold room. Katy’s frequent bouts with illness continued throughout her young adulthood, often occasioned, Prentiss suggests, by immoderate work or even by her very active social life. Soon after making his acquaintance, Katy’s future husband, Dr. Ernest Elliott, warned her that unless she learned to subdue her emotions, her “passionate nature” would put her health at serious risk. When Katy’s health began to falter, Ernest suggested that too much “feverish activity” had irritated her peculiar “nervous organization” and recommended that she refrain from undertaking any work that she could not “carry on calmly.” When Katy did become ill, Ernest insisted that she desist from her activities in order to rest and regain her strength. Katy objected that she feared becoming a “mere useless sufferer,” but Ernest replied that “God’s children please Him just as well when they sit patiently with folded hands, if that is His will, as when they are hard at work.” Although Katy felt “like an old piece of furniture no longer of any service,” she consented to Ernest’s prescription, and what she perceived to be God’s chastening will.36
Alice Humphreys, the fictional heroine of Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), proclaiming the message of patient resignation to her pupil Ellen Montgomery. Line drawing from the 1892 edition. Courtesy of Portland Public Library, Portland, Maine.
Like the many other “trials” she experienced as she struggled to subdue herself in order to fulfill her roles as wife and mother, Katy interpreted sickness as a blessing sent by God for her edification. After a particularly long bout of infirmity, she wrote, “All these weary days so full of languor, these nights so full of unrest, have had their appointed mission to my soul.” Although she longed for health, Katy submitted to sickness as a necessary affliction. Illness, in this view, afforded opportunities for suffering through which God transformed the willful and selfish sinner into a rejoicing and restful saint whose only purpose was to worship. Katy writes: “Not till I was shut up to prayer and to the study of God’s word by the loss of earthly joys, sickness destroying the flavor of them all, did I begin to penetrate the mystery that is learned under the cross… . To love Christ, and to know that I love Him—this is all!”37
Prentiss’s novel was a great success in part because it provided women with a devotional framework that helped to make sense of both physical suffering and social situation. By encouraging women to see both illness and the seclusion of the sickroom as opportunities for the pursuit of holiness, Prentiss offered her readers a strategy for interpreting even the most painful of circumstances as spiritually fruitful. An invalid herself for most of her life, Prentiss sought solace in the notion that God sent physical affliction as a means for her own spiritual improvement. Sickness, Prentiss believed, was a disciplinary experience that enabled her to accept with patience not only the “helplessness” that physical debility occasioned but also the particular domestic obligations that came with marriage and motherhood. “I do thank my dear Master that He has let me suffer so much,” she wrote in her journal in May of 1857; “it has been a rich experience, this long illness, and I do trust He will so sanctify it that I shall have cause to rejoice over it all the rest of my life. Now may I return patiently to all the duties that lie in my sphere.”38
As literary historian Jane Tompkins has so persuasively argued, female audiences in this period were hungry for the kind of message that works like Prentiss’s conveyed—a message that gave women who were politically, economically, and often physically dispossessed access to a more potent kind of authority: the power to transform their inner lives and, through this endeavor, the opportunity to influence others and even to reshape society and culture. Although the ethic of submission promoted in sentimental fiction did not directly challenge the conditions of oppression that structured women’s lives, Tompkins has maintained, this model of behavior did provide women who could not, in her view, openly rebel against their culture’s value system with a strategy for transcending some implications of their position. As Tompkins put it, “These novels teach the reader how to live without power while waging a protracted struggle in which the strategies of the weak will finally inherit the earth.” In other words, by changing the stakes involved, authors such as Prentiss, Warner, and Stowe redefined the struggle for power so that woman’s weakness became a sign of strength, her death the ultimate victory rather than the decisive defeat.39
The overwhelming popularity of works like Stepping Heavenward, The Wide, Wide World, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped to make the pious female invalid a stock figure in mid-nineteenth-century American culture. By the time Mary Rankin published the first edition of her autobiography in 1858, the frail and sickly woman who patiently endured physical distress and therefore served as an exemplar of Christian virtue and even as a mediator of spiritual power would have been familiar to many readers. Modeling her own life story according to an analogous interpretive framework, Rankin imbued her experiences with purpose and subtly claimed for herself the sort of spiritual authority that self-renunciation and patient submission to God bestowed.40
Rankin’s autobiography also provided her female readers with something that most works of sentimental fiction failed to offer. By and large, the invalid heroines of popular novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin did not endure the agonizing therapies that Rankin underwent. The sickroom of Victorian literature was usually a soothing space filled with flowers, not a torture chamber spattered with blood or marked by the scent of blistered flesh. Nor did the female protagonists of most nineteenth-century novels have to tolerate a lifetime of bodily affliction or social oppression. Usually, after a relatively brief period of unspecified bodily suffering in which they demonstrated perfect submission to divine providence, fictional characters died in what would have been the prime years of their youth. Mary Rankin was not so blessed. When The Daughter of Affliction first appeared in print, Rankin had been confined to her bed for more than twenty years. At the age of thirty-seven, she was certainly no longer a young maiden. In the final chapter of the second edition of her memoir, the fifty-year-old Rankin wrote, “As this volume closes September 1870, I am still an invalid, confined to my couch of pain.” Unlike the fictional heroines who populated the pages of so many mid-nineteenth-century novels, Rankin was a real person afflicted by very specific symptoms for an extremely long time, and these facts gave her memoir a different kind of force than readers would have gleaned from the romanticized accounts they encountered in sentimental fiction. Whereas Little Eva sickened of a broken heart and died because she was “too good for this world,” as one literary historian has put it, Mary Rankin had to find a way to continue to live out her invalid life this side of heaven. Rankin’s life story, while undoubtedly idealized, did seek to present a strategy for enduring affliction over the long haul. Although she often wished for the release that death would bring, Rankin had to learn to live with the fact that, as she put it, “an all-wise God, for reasons beyond the scan of mortals, ordered my destiny otherwise.” In Rankin’s case, submitting to a painful life, rather than accepting a victorious death, was the ultimate challenge.41
The enduring popularity of Mary Rankin’s autobiography alongside other works of this genre reveals that the question of how to interpret and endure physical suffering remained a matter of urgency for Protestants throughout the middle and latter decades of the nineteenth century. Just one year after the first edition of The Daughter of Affliction appeared, for example, the American Sunday School Union published Chloe Lankton; or, Light Beyond the Clouds. A Story of Real Life (1859). This text purported to be “neither myth nor fiction, but a true, unvarnished tale without comment or colouring.” Like Rankin’s work, this book sought to speak to those struggling to reconcile themselves to chronic illness and pain by presenting a living example of a woman who had learned to accept her sufferings with “sweet patience and resignation.” After twenty-five years of confinement to her bed, Lankton insisted that she continued to find meaning in her afflictions by placing them in a theological frame. Indeed, she commented, “I am so thankful that I can see the providence of God in all his dealings with me, and that I can see it all for my good; for, if I did not see it so, how could I have borne it at all?”42
While accounts of long-suffering endurance of bodily affliction such as Lankton’s and Rankin’s provided Protestant women in this period with exemplars for emulation that helped explain and sanctify their own experiences of pain and protracted illness, these narratives offered a different kind of spiritual encouragement for men. Indeed, although female invalids like Rankin served as the principal paragons of passive resignation, their stories were intended for and read by both women and men. In the testimonial endorsing The Daughter of Affliction, a cadre of Rankin’s male devotees revealed the appeal that her autobiography held for them. Rankin’s life story, this group of men affirmed, offered “a monument of God’s faithfulness and solace in the hour of affliction.” One of the signers, Dr. Samuel M. Ross, described Rankin herself as “a victim of suffering, but a monument of amazing grace.” In other words, these men implied, Rankin served as a sort of shrine bearing witness in her body to God’s afflictive yet sustaining power. Whereas her patient forbearance of intense and ongoing somatic suffering presented women readers with a model for imitation, Rankin’s afflicted flesh itself appeared to these male admirers as a physical symbol of divine providence.43
Of course, Rankin’s tormented body may have served a similarly representative function for her female disciples, just as it is likely that not all men would have looked upon her corporal suffering as a means of incarnating God’s sovereign power. Nor did the penchant for venerating Rankin’s flesh as material evidence of divine prerogative necessarily preclude Rankin’s male votaries from also upholding her as a spiritual exemplar for all Christians. Dr. D. R. Good, Rankin’s physician for a number of years and the scribe to whom she dictated her experiences, proclaimed in the preface to her memoirs: “Mary still lives to teach us lessons of patience in long-suffering and submission to the will of ‘God.’” Rankin’s purpose, Good declared, was to provide an “example of Christian resignation” from whom others should “learn … a lesson of gratitude for the blessings of health, and many temporal privileges and enjoyments bestowed upon us, of which she is deprived.” Even in Good’s estimation, however, Rankin’s passive endurance of prolonged physical affliction served primarily as a foil for the reader’s own presumed experience of bodily wholeness, rather than as an ideal for imitation. By reflecting on Rankin’s deprivations and the laudable manner in which she bore them, Good suggested, readers would be inspired to give thanks that they had been spared such sufferings and to praise God for the boon of physical health, with all of its attendant advantages and benefits.44
The ideal of sanctified suffering that Rankin embodied seems to have served several purposes for Protestants in the mid- to late nineteenth century struggling to comprehend and cope with the problem of pain. For her fellow female invalids, and even for healthy women who were nevertheless obliged to conform to the norms of self-sacrificing domesticity, Rankin’s example of patient resignation offered a model of sanctity worth emulating. For Protestant men striving to measure up to the cultural prescriptions of mid-nineteenth-century manhood, Rankin’s passive forbearance provided an inverted reflection of their own call to active achievement outside the domestic realm. Finally, Rankin’s somatic piety furnished her contemporaries with assurance that physical pain was a spiritual blessing ordained by God for the sufferer’s sanctification and for the good of others. Rankin’s afflicted body itself thus took on spiritual significance as a material sign of God’s providential care for his children.
Texts like The Daughter of Affliction reveal the ways in which cultural norms, medical theories, and theological doctrines worked together to advance and sustain a potent and closely entangled set of assumptions about the nature of female and male bodies, the proper roles of women and men in society, and the correct Christian interpretation of and response to physical suffering. The ideal of patient endurance promoted in this and similar works of nineteenth-century Christian hagiography powerfully shaped the way many Protestants in this period understood and contended with corporal pain and illness. Like Mary Rankin, numerous Protestant women saw bodily sickness as an opportunity for spiritual sanctification and service to others, and strove to submit to what they believed was God’s sovereign will. During the four years that she was confined to her bed and “never free from pain,” Mary Lamb of Rochester, New York, thought her illness was sent “as a cross from God and tried to bear it with cheerfulness and patience.” When she was completely prostrated from “a combination of diseases” that brought “suffering beyond description,” Mrs. L. W. Bush of Brookline, Vermont, “felt that God had mercifully afflicted” her and prayed, as she put it, that “He would perfect His own work in me, whatever I might suffer, and teach me His will.” “O, the weary days and sleepless nights, none but God can ever know,” Bush proclaimed, “but He gave me that calm, sweet peace … and I could lie passive in the arms of my blessed Saviour, waiting his teaching and guiding.”45
In keeping with mid-nineteenth-century gender norms, fewer Protestant men indicated that passive resignation represented a significant feature of their own responses to bodily infirmity or physical pain. While many men testified to their belief in God’s afflictive providence, most suggested that long-suffering endurance of protracted invalidism simply was not an option for them, given their economic and social circumstances. When the Reverend A. P. Moore was taken sick, he noted that he was “so situated” that he could not stop work. Similarly, after spending several months convalescing from what his doctor described as “congestion of the brain and partial paralysis of the vocal organs,” Methodist minister John Haugh “felt obliged to resume work,” against his physician’s better judgment, because he had “a large family dependent upon” his labor. When men did discuss the ideal of sanctified suffering, they usually linked passive forbearance with female piety, suggesting that women were uniquely qualified to bear physical affliction, and in so doing, to serve as representatives and reminders of God’s sovereign power.46
Despite the enduring power of patient resignation as a normative model and as a spiritual practice, not all Protestants endorsed this particular way of construing the relationship between providence and pain. Rankin’s own story, in fact, offers evidence of dissent on multiple levels. At one point during her illness, as we have observed, Rankin felt threatened by a friend’s suggestion that her suffering was the consequence of an accident, rather than the result of divine decree. This alternative explanation of her experiences provoked from Rankin a strong affirmation of God’s sovereignty and of the purposeful nature of physical affliction over and against the interpretive schemes of what she identified as a particular, falsely conceived version of “science.” In a related manner, one of Rankin’s male sponsors, Dr. S. M. Ross, felt compelled to defend her practice of resigned endurance over and against those pragmatists who might view her “physical inability to act” as an impediment to more effective Christian influence.47
These two incidences of discord suggest that the meaning and practice of suffering were matters of significant dispute among Protestants in the late nineteenth century. Competing frameworks of interpretation were raising challenges to the doctrine of afflictive providence. Rival models of Christian service that stressed active evangelical engagement, such as those celebrated in missionary biographies like The Life of David Brainerd and the Memoir of Mrs. Ann H. Judson (1829), contested the association between passivity and sanctity that Rankin’s text so adamantly promoted. Within this context, the carefully constructed (and profoundly gendered) link between physical suffering and spiritual blessing was beginning to unravel.
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