The Valiant Woman: The Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century American Culture by Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez (review)

The Valiant Woman has been waiting to be written for a long time. Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez’s study investigates a figure—Mary, the mother of Jesus—who was pervasive in both secular and religious literature and art in the nineteenth century and yet whose cultural significance in the United States has not been fully explored or appreciated by contemporary scholars. Alvarez demonstrates that, despite Mary’s strong association with Catholics, before the twentieth century she was widely revered beyond the Catholic community and ultimately served as a “shared cultural figure whose content was one source (among many) for the maintenance and transformation of American gender ideology” (6). More specifically, Alvarez argues that Mary became a cultural symbol through which Christians across denominations sought to work out the “dislocations associated with the emergence of the market economy and its individualistic ethic” (8), but that for a variety of reasons, including the emergence of Christian Fundamentalism with its strong opposition to traditional Marian devotion, Mary lost her ecumenical following in the decades after 1890.

To say that U.S. Protestants revered Mary is not to suggest that they always did so in the way their Catholic neighbors did. Indeed, the cult of the Immaculate Conception, nurtured by Pope Pius IX’s 1854 declaration that Mary was conceived without original sin, served as a perennial flash point that delineated clear theological differences. Yet as Alvarez shows, a more than passing familiarity with Mary and deep appreciation for Marian imagery was common in white Protestant homes, as well as among middle-class museum-goers and the readership of secular magazines. What Americans drawn from diverse religious backgrounds shared, she argues, is their use of Mary as a means for projecting a “female domestic ideal” and a “sentimental maternal ideal” that would help both to define and inculcate nineteenth-century gender ideology (42, 53).

Alvarez spotlights a number of once-prominent writers and critics who made Mary a focus of their work. Among the more significant is the prolific English writer and art historian, Anna Jameson, whose Legends of the Madonna, which drew much interest in the mid-century United States, helped launch a “reinterpretation of Mary as a liberatory figure” and affirmed her as a “site for reconceptualizing gender” (88, 113). Whereas the tendency was for Catholics and Protestants alike to extol Marian docility and obedience and urge such virtues on American women, the Anglican Jameson highlighted Mary’s power as the God-bearer who ushered the divine into the realm of human history. Likening Mary to a goddess and depicting her, Alvarez says, as a “symbol of the feminine component of the divine,” Jameson made the case that Mary could be “spiritually relevant to non-Catholics,” notably amid early stages of the movement for women’s emancipation (100–101).

Alvarez incorporates a wide array of written and visual sources that range across religious lines and highlight diverse depictions of Mary—from a meek angel to an authoritative queen. In doing so, she has established fruitful and important connections in the scholarship on Marian devotion and on U.S. popular culture.