“Bought with a Price”: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Commodification of Heaven in Postbellum America

Our country is now in the situation of a private family whose means are absorbed by an expensive sickness, involving the life of its head: just now it is all we can do to keep the family together; all our means are swallowed up by our own domestic wants; we have nothing to give for the encouragement of other families, we must exist ourselves; we must get through this crisis and hold our own, and, that we may do it, all the family expenses must be kept within ourselves as far as possible.

—Harriet Beecher Stowe, “What Can Be Got in America” (1864)

To what extent do popular representations of the afterlife shed light on social transformations and deep-seated cultural anxieties? Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar, the best-selling novel of the 1860s, offers a particularly revealing example of the ways in which visions of the life to come can register the impact of—indeed, be generated by—traumatic national events and rapid social change. During the three decades after its postwar publication in 1868, Phelps’s novel sold over eighty thousand copies in the United States and over one hundred thousand worldwide. It launched the literary career of its young author, who received hundreds of letters of thanks from grateful readers. The book provoked harsh criticism from the religious establishment, however, because it presented heaven as a material place where the inhabitants live “under the conditions of organized society” in homes “not unlike the homes of this world” and own consumer articles “nicer than they have in the shops in Boston.”¹ This account of the afterlife has also excited the censure of modern scholars, not because of its heterodoxy, but because it reads to them as self-indulgent escapism at a time of national crisis. Ann Douglas, for example, castigates Phelps for her “literal-minded” assurances about the spiritual realm and remarks: “The bribe [Phelps] offers her readers is the enormous, intimate domestic detail of her heaven. Reading the book is somewhat like window-shopping outside the fanciest stores on Fifth Avenue.” Barton Levi St. Armand is less dismissive but still clearly critical of Phelps’s “Biedermeier paradise,” noting with approval that Mark Twain “chose to direct some of his most telling satire” against it in his burlesque work Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.² Implicit in this treatment is the sense that Twain’s robust, masculine satire provides a corrective to what St. Armand perceives as Phelps’s regressive, feminized sentimentality.

In the novel’s defense, such scholars as Gail K. Smith, Lisa Long, and Mary Louise Kete have viewed its highly unconventional heaven not as a denial of death and loss but as an attempt both to respond to the brutal reality of death in war and to address the pain of the bereaved.³ But even while arguing that the materiality of Phelps’s afterlife is integral to the novel’s therapeutic work, these critics either pass over its consumerist elements or sound a note of unease in relation to them. Smith, for example, seeks to defend Phelps against charges of literalism and anti-intellectualism by arguing that her heaven is the product of a nuanced engagement with biblical hermeneutics. Yet her focus on the complexities of Phelps’s theological rhetoric and figurative language elides the issue of materialism per se. Long explores Phelps’s “rehabilitation” of earthly bodies in the afterlife but not the question of heavenly commodities, remarking only that Phelps’s emphasis on the young protagonist’s “desire for possession [is not] meant to invoke an exaggerated capitalism.” Kete does highlight the role of commodities, arguing that the ownership of such items as pianos and sofas in the afterlife enables Phelps to make the case for “a new definition of salvation predicated on the continuation of the personal subjectivity of the possessive individual.” Kete primarily focuses, however, on how this continued personal subjectivity after death allows Phelps to envisage “an ongoing economy of affection and sentiment” between the living and the dead.⁴ She...