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chapter three Historical Interlude Vita Religiosa and Romantic Evangelism “Diligently train your ideals upward and still upward.” —What Is Man? “Keep innocency and take heed to the thing that is right, for this will bring a man peace in the last.” —Work H uck Finn and Jo March are the two most enduring adolescent figures in the canon of American literature. But how did it happen that authors such as Clemens and Alcott seized on the concept of adolescence as the nexus of moral choice and reform? Before moving on to analyses of the reformist adolescents that populate the rest of the Twain and Alcott canon, I would like to explore the history of ideas as a major factor in the evolution of both authors’ reform-minded adolescent protagonists. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and LittleWomen vary significantly in their use of generic conventions and in their settings, plot, and structure. But both novels are informed by the intellectual climate—specifically the nineteenth-century American obsession with religion—in which the two authors were writing. What initially led both post–Civil War writers to use youthful characters as a symbol for the possibility of social hope was undoubtedly a result of the Romantic belief in the purity of youth. Little Eva’s inspirational piety in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is perhaps the most famous example of the Romantic child inspiring social change in nineteenth-century American literature. Although Eva is not an adolescent like Huck and Jo, but a child character who is “between five and six years of age” (161), Alcott’s construction of Jo as being at fifteen “as innocent and frank as any child” fits squarely into the same tradition of the innocent child functioning as a symbol of moral purity (46).1 Far more interesting to me than the effect of the inspirational child, however, is the relationship between moral growth, spirituality, and reform that occurs in LittleWomen and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Ultimately, Alcott and Clemens’s greatest 54 legacy to American literature may be their use of the adolescent as a metaphor for social growth, which I discussed in the previous chapter. But that metaphor grew out of the Protestant theology that most affected Clemens’s and Alcott’s attitudes toward religion. Romantic Evangelism If people can be said to share a similar theological ancestry, Alcott and Clemens shared one that led them to have comparable views about reform, charity, and the individual’s responsibility to improve the world. The influence of various theologians on both of them has historically been well-documented, but origins of influence for the theologians that most affected the authors can be traced back to the same religious figure: Jonathan Edwards. Something of a family tree of religious leaders demonstrates this phenomenon (see Fig. 1). The men who influenced Clemens’s and Alcott’s spirituality each had an important mentor who was, in turn, someone who embraced some aspect of Edwards’s theology but who also broke away from some of Edwards’s beliefs to create a schism in Congregationalism. Samuel Clemens attended Joseph Twichell’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford. While Clemens never formally joined the church, he did rent a pew for his family and regularly went to church there. More important, he had an intimate friendship with Twichell that influenced Clemens’s spirituality throughout his adult life (LeMaster and Wilson 757). Twichell himself had studiedunderHoraceBushnell ,oneofthemostinfluentialtheologiansofnineteenthcentury American Protestantism, and Bushnell had studied under Nathaniel William Taylor, a follower of Jonathan Edwards’s grandson, Timothy Dwight, who had served as a president of Yale from 1785 to 1817. Louisa May Alcott, on the other hand, widely acknowledged the spiritual influences of Ralph Waldo Emerson andTheodore Parker, whose transcendentalism was directly affected by William Ellery Channing, who in turn had been influenced by—and rejected many of the tenets of—one of Jonathan Edwards’s most ardent disciples, Samuel Hopkins. The part of Hopkins’s Congregationalism that influenced Channing the most was his abolitionism. The part Channing rejected was the Calvinism that the Unitarians rejected but the Congregationalists continued to embrace. What follows, then, is an account of the historical relationships among these religious leaders and a subsequent analysis of Clemens’s and Alcott’s religious lives in ways that help explain their motivation to create youthful reformers. The theologians who most influenced Alcott and Clemens were immersed in the dominant religious milieu of their day, romantic evangelism. If evangelism Vita Religiosa and Romantic Evangelism l 55 describes...

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