Evangelical space: Art,experience,and the ethical landscape in America,1820--1860.
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation explores the cultural work that representations of space performed in antebellum America. Reading across a range of genres and media---from religious tracts to sentimental novels, slave narratives to landscape paintings---I argue that "evangelical space," a distinctly American form of spatial imagination, transformed the act of looking across physical space into a form of symbolic action. Moving thematically from religion to politics to art, my chapters examine evangelical space in three cultural moments. Chapter 1. The Landscape of Reform: Benevolent Print and The Oxbow. This chapter reads Thomas Coles iconic painting The Oxbow 1836) as a paradigmatic example of evangelical space by placing the painting within the context of the illustrated religious print circulating in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The illustrated print of the most prolific evangelical publishing society in these years, the American Tract Society ATS), mobilizes two distinct spatial imaginaries that combine in evangelical space: a "millennial landscape" in which Christian truth in the form of Bibles, tracts, and missionaries) is imagined spreading centrifugally throughout the world, hastening the dawn of Christs Kingdom in the millennium； and a "pilgrimage landscape" in which the readers imagined movement through space rehearses a personal journey of faith in the mold of John Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress. Chapter 2. The Landscape of Freedom: Abolitionist Print and the Ethical Horizon. In 1829 when Angelina Grimke described slavery in Charleston in her diary and prayed for her "deliverance" to the North, a "promised land, a pleasant land because it is a land of Freedom," she intimated how sacred geography could structure a personal conversion to abolitionism. The organization she would later join, the American Anti-Slavery Society AASS), set out to replicate that experience on a broad scale, launching a nationwide print campaign in 1835 intended to convert millions to the cause. This chapter examines the evolution of that campaign over several years and excavates its ambitious plan to "abolitionize" the land by establishing circulating libraries in towns and schools across the North. Chapter 3. The Landscape of Art: Evangelical Space in the American Renaissance. Challenging scholarly accounts that see the literary and visual art of the 1850s simply as products of the secularization of American culture, this chapter begins by reading an apparently naturalistic view, Jasper Francis Cropseys Catskill Mountain House 1855), as a form of evangelical space emblematic of the complex interaction between sacred and secular in the art of the American Renaissance. I then indicate the range of literary attitudes toward the model of media circulation and moral suasion intrinsic to evangelical space by examining two major authors of the period, whose responses ranged from emulation Harriet Beecher Stowe) to skepticism and hostility Herman Melville). Next turning to two major works of what Jane Tompkins called "the other American Renaissance," I show how Susan Warners The Wide, Wide World 1850) and Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin 1851) work in distinct ways to turn the spatial dynamics of evangelical space into compelling fictional geographies. The apocalyptic landscapes of Warners novel enable its protagonist to reconcile her experiences of suffering and loss with the providential design of a benevolent Creator. In Stowes novel, Eliza Harriss flight through the spiritually charged geography of antebellum America dramatizes the ability of religious language to constitute an ethical community that overcomes physical and social distance. In the process Stowe engages readers in a practice of "ethical perception" in Jeffrey Stouts terms) distinct from rationalistic modes of ethical reasoning. Finally I consider the rhetoric of formal transparency as expressed in claims of divine authorship made by Stowe, and resisted by Frederick Douglass. Rather than dismissing Stowes famous claim that God wrote Uncle Toms Cabin, I argue that such rhetoric reflects her long literary apprenticeship in evangelical publications like The New-York Evangelist and her shrewd understanding of a reading public steeped in evangelical print culture. While Douglass was familiar with this rhetoric, his careful containment of such claims in "The Heroic Slave" 1853) and My Bondage and My Freedom 1855) reflects his awareness of both the power and the perils of a rhetoric that attributed the eloquence of racialized speakers to the agency of God. In a brief epilogue, I turn to Rebecca Harding Davis Life in the Iron Mills 1861). Life in the Iron Mills adapts evangelical space to a new set of artistic and social concerns, and anticipates the prominent role of the spatial imagination in the socially engaged art of the Gilded Age---an imagination vividly captured in literary and visual form in the work of Jacob Riis and John Muir. Abstract shortened by UMI.)