Children’s Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure’: Positive Thinking and Pseudo-Science at the Fin de Siècle by Anne Stiles (review)

The title of Anne Stiles’s new book—Children’s Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure’—proposes a straightforward connection between two phenomena: a literary genre that flourished in the second half of the nineteenth century and a spiritual movement that gained popularity in the United States at the same time. Her introduction establishes the best-known link: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s documented interest in ‘mind cure’ and the ethos of positive thinking while she was writing The Secret Garden (1911), in which her character Colin Craven alleviates his debilitating disability merely by thinking himself well. Within only a few pages of Stiles’s thoughtful and engaging book, however, ‘children’s literature’ and ‘mind cure’ start to lose their rigid categorical edges and take on a wonderfully wide-ranging and integrative scope. ‘Mind cure’ is another term for New Thought, far less a logically coherent doctrine than a conveniently capacious coalescence of positive thinking, self-help, alternative medicine, faith healing, spiritualism, Romanticism, Transcendentalism, feminism, and utopianism. Stiles traces the intricate webs of these belief systems in familiar turn-of-the-century children’s literature and follows these threads into fictions by Henry James and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The resulting argument goes beyond simple connection. Rather, Stiles pulls both children’s literature and ‘mind cure’ from the fringes of literary culture and religious history and deftly demonstrates their centrality to tenacious (if under-studied) theories of self-actualization.

Stiles explains the rise of New Thought in the United States as a rejection of Calvinist predestination, on the one hand, and medical orthodoxy, on the other. Its proponents, including Phineas Parkhurst Quimby and Mary Baker Eddy, believed that thoughts and wishes have tangible power in the physical world and are, in some cases, more real than material bodies. Three of the authors whom Stiles discusses—Burnett, Gilman, and L. M. Montgomery—suffered from depression, insomnia, and bipolar disorder and experienced the damage done by the medically-sanctioned “remedies” offered to women: combinations of indiscriminately prescribed drugs and the “rest cure” (while others endured the traumas of institutionalization and invasive gynecological procedures). Though none became exacting devotees of New Thought, positive thinking provided an alluring curative alternative and, as Stiles convincingly shows, motivated the characterizations of their child protagonists, who like Cedric Errol of Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and Anne Shirley of Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) benefit from their insistent optimism regardless of material realities. Stiles argues that it is a mistake to assimilate these happy youngsters into the more familiar paradigm of the Romantic child, a predominantly male figure proposed by male poets and pedagogues. The child of New Thought, at least in its earliest formulations, expressed distinctly female concerns about embodiment, family bonds, and political power.

New Thought’s focus on spirituality and healing, rather than institutional hierarchy, allowed women to assume leadership positions largely unattainable elsewhere. But moving into professional spheres while still bearing the burdens of Victorian motherhood was not without personal cost. Burnett, Gilman, and Eddy shared an ambivalence about motherhood that influenced both their religious outlook and literary production. Stiles reads Cedric Errol as an externalized manifestation of “the inner child” who—in the guise of androgynous youthful exuberance—can carry out his mother’s “socially unacceptable desires” for influence outside the home (35). Gilman’s Herland trilogy (1911–16) adopts New Thought’s laissez-faire parenting as a necessary arrangement for her feminist utopia “devoid of sin, sickness, and sex” (159). This critical reorientation—from the autonomous child to the relationship between child and mother—is Stiles’s most significant disruption of the scholarly adherence to the Romantic child. The child inspired by New Thought is not the product of nostalgia for lost perfection, but a beacon of hope for a communal future achieved through creative visualization...