In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

American Literature 73.4 (2001) 869-870



[Access article in PDF]
Divine Destiny: Gender and Race in Nineteenth-Century Protestantism. By Carolyn A. Haynes. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi. 1998. xxi, 190 pp. $40.00.

After Carolyn Haynes reminds readers of the “pervasive and consequential influence” of Protestantism on nineteenth-century U.S. culture, she alerts us to distinctions among various denominations from one historical moment to the next (xvii). Her readings of spiritual autobiographies, conversion narratives, speeches, novels, advice books, poetry, and religious commentaries suggest the differences that doctrinal distinctions make to any account of the cultural and social effects of Protestant thought. If the rhetorics of Manifest Destiny and the ideology of domesticity colluded to produce an oppressive and ostensibly divinely ordained politics legitimated by dominant forms of Protestantism, then intradenominational disputes, Haynes argues, made room for feminist and antiracist positions that evaded or contested Protestant-generated exploitation. In so arguing, Haynes criticizes historians and literary critics gently but insistently. Contrasting George Whitefield’s experiments with Calvinist-based evangelicalism to the experiences and efforts of Olaudah Equiano, she challenges the now familiar dismissal of Equiano’s “‘hegemonically European and capitalist’” vision (26). Explaining the special importance of Methodism to Pequot William Apess’s cultural criticism, Haynes disputes Arnold Krupat’s claim that in accepting Christianity Apess disavows his ethnicity. In chapters concerned with white and African American women (among them, Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, Maria Stewart, Frances Willard, Amanda Berry Smith, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton), Haynes argues for the political efficacy of the “cultural performance of Christian feminism.” Haynes thus calls into question accounts of women’s history whose critical models presume a “feminist teleology with secular feminism as the treasured culmination” (93). To illuminate her subjects’ rejection of the rigid and hierarchical dualisms inherent in Calvinist thought, Haynes calls on the recent work of Jean Baker Miller and Judith Jordan for developmental accounts of (nonbinary) human relations. To underscore her subjects’ enactments of performative agency, and their use of the mechanisms of shame, she turns to Butler, Sedgwick, and Silvan Tompkins. These moves can be jarring (Jean Baker Miller with Judith Butler?), and they are distracting when they divert attention from the more surprising historical materials on subjects ranging from the Wesleyan holiness movement and biblical hermeneutics to Methodist training schools for women, the huge career of African American evangelist Amanda Berry Smith, and the quirky voice of writer Elizabeth Oakes Smith. To show, despite evidence against it, that her thinkers promoted anti-exclusionary agendas from within the Protestant faith that oppressed them, Haynes observes that the textual strategies of “bi-focality” and “miming” helped them undermine dominant norms. This may be helpful, but it is much less provocative than the specific spiritual disputes Haynes brings to our attention, or the critical force behind her own measured but pointed suggestion that scholars resist “automatically accepting [End Page 869] religious attributes or effects as necessarily expressive of a conservative interior sentiment” (xix).

Lynn Wardley , Stanford University



...

pdf

Share