Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Women (review)

Sentimental Confessions makes serious demands of its readers, a consequence that owes much to the rigorous scholarship and skillful interpretive readings of author Jocelyn Moody. In Sentimental Confessions, Moody calls her readers to recognize and treat properly texts that celebrate "the convergence of Christianity, conversion, mysticism, transformation, and sexuality" (152). This call is as much a challenge to the conventional academic critic and reader as it is a recognition of the power of the texts Moody explores.

Maria Stewart, the subject of Chapter One, is in some ways a surprising choice. Although Stewart's published collections, Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1835) and Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1879), are not generally viewed as spiritual autobiography, they constitute in Moody's view, a "sentimental confession" significant to that genre. Moody points out that "[spiritual] autobiographers generally assume their lives to be in some way exemplary or representative and worthy of readership" (27). Yet Stewart's Productions is more readily identifiable as jeremiad than exemplary religious autobiography. Moody argues that Stewart conceived the expanded 1879 collection as an autobiographical enterprise, explaining that the text hybridizes various genres including jeremiad, meditation, and sentimental fiction. Stewart thereby develops a "theology of survival" closely related to the "theology of suffering" that becomes a focus of Chapter Two.

Where Stewart hybridizes various genres, her contemporaries Jarena Lee and Zilpha Elaw discussed in Chapter Two "revise the traditional early American Spiritual Autobiography" (52). Lee and Elaw both embrace what Moody identifies as a "theology of suffering" (a term borrowed from theorist M. Shawn Copeland) that "remembers and retells the lives and sufferings of those who "came through" (Copeland, qtd in Moody 52). Each writer uses her physical suffering to develop what Moody calls "incarnational theology" (52), and enactment of belief in Word made Flesh. Both women also employ the tropes of sentimental fiction (particularly that of besieged moral virtue) within narratives that explicitly identify and define the experience of evangelical black holy women.

In contrast to the first three writers, Nancy Prince, the subject of Chapter Three, rejects sentimentalism in favor of an African American female narrator who is both self-reliant and capable on her own behalf. Prince's "largely secular" narrative still reveals "the republican missionary's sense of religious, civic, nationalistic and maternal duty toward others" (77). Prince's text contains a rich irony: although devoted to her missionary cause and critical of the controlling white presence, Prince occupies an inherently colonialist stance relative to the Jamaicans to whom she ministers. In the narrative she reaches an "embittered attitude toward American Christianity" (91), even as she affirms the goodness of God. In Moody's words, Prince's "solution to her religious and social dilemma was to declare independence from American Christianity by leaving the US every chance she got" (102).

Chapter Four tells readers that Mattie Jackson, in The Story of Mattie J. Jackson, espouses "a theology of survival, or resistance and defiance" (103). This "[o]stensibly secular narrative can and should also be read as a spiritual autobiography" that subsumes slave narrative; it thus must address a dual audience of blacks (the conventional audience for the African American Conversion Narrative) and whites (the conventional audience for the slave narrative). Jackson's text closes with a chapter titled "Christianity" that calls for "the collective national practice of Christianity" (105).

Chapter Five deals with Julia Foote. In A Brand Plucked from the Fire, Foote exemplifies the "thundering daughter" whose "theology of defiance" is matrilocal (128). Though she portrays her mother's reconstructed memory as a sentimental trope and spends much of her text repudiating aspects of her mother's behavior, Foote carries forth her mother's strategy of verbal defiance.

The book's movement from Stewart to Foote seems forced at times, in part because apparently secular texts are recast in spiritually motivated readings that persist in using secular referents. [End...