Friends Imaginary and Beautiful

As James Emmett Ryan's Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650-1950 richly describes, Quakers have held the attention of the American public since the 1656 arrival of Mary Fisher and Ann Austin in the new world. Puritan authorities greeted their arrival in Boston with alarm, imprisoning Fisher and Austin. The authorities' reaction, Ryan argues, reveals their anxiety about Quaker contagion through print and manuscript: the books Fisher and Austin had brought with them were confiscated and burned, "their pens, ink, and paper were taken from them, and they [were] not suffered to have any candle-light in the night-season" (Sewel 184, qtd. in Ryan 44, 234n46). As Ryan shows, these fears were partly justified. Though Quaker women like Fisher and Austin were demonized by Puritan clergy like Cotton Mather and John Norton, "many generations later, [they would] eventually become idealized by many of the descendants of the Puritan faithful and not just by Quakers themselves" (Ryan 44).

Though the Religious Society of Friends never came to dominate the American religious landscape, its members have often fared better in historical accounts than have the Puritans who persecuted them in early New England. In fact, Friends have been viewed as models of ethical political action, especially in their peace testimony and in their opposition to slavery. Thomas P. Slaughter's The Beautiful Soul of John Woolman, Apostle of Abolition offers a biography of the most famous early American Quaker. Slaughter explores the influences that shaped Woolman's faith and testimony, and the process by which he became not only an early and prominent crusader against slavery among Friends in colonial America but also an inspiration to antislavery forces on both sides of Atlantic, and to other reformers into the twenty-first century. Slaughter's biography testifies to the power of early Quakers to inspire non-Quakers, both in their own time and in our own.

Ryan's Imaginary Friends examines texts by Friends, their admirers, and their opponents, demonstrating a long-standing American fascination with the Society of Friends. Tracing the Quaker presence in texts from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century, Ryan shows the range of texts—polemics, martyrologies, biographies, stories and novels, plays, and films—featuring Quakers. Drawing on Sacvan Bercovitch and Constance Rourke, he argues that "actual Quakers and imagined Quakers" played a "unique role . . . in the formation of American national identity" (224). As "the nation has utilized its long and vexed conversation about Christian religion as a technique for negotiating a host of competing pressures: domestic life, market capitalism, urban development, labor (including slavery), gender, and political activities," Ryan makes a convincing case that "the representation of Quakers has been an important aspect of these discourses" (5).

Running through Ryan's account is the relationship between insiders and outsiders. Ryan considers both Quakers' role as an outsider religious group in the larger American religious landscape, and the distinctions between those representing Quakers from within the Society of Friends and those writing from outside the community. Ryan draws on R. Laurence Moore's work on religious outsiders to emphasize the influence that such outsiders can wield (Ryan 6). Moreover, Ryan suggests that Quakers are unusual, even "unmatched within American history," as an example of "sustained 'outsider' group religious influence," and that no other group "has served a more important role in the ongoing conversation about American morals and social habits" (8, 10). Ryan decenters further the old views of "'American character' . . . formed out of the stuff of the Calvinist/Puritan religious heritage or the legacy of a violent frontier existence," and argues instead for the importance of "Quaker life and religion . . . as counterpoints or foils to more commonly held religious and political values" (6).

Ryan makes his case by laying out both the richness of Quaker life in America and the wide variety of texts in which Quakers appear...