Healing the Nation

L. Ashley Squires

Description

Exploring the surprising presence of Christian Science in American literature at the turn of the 20th century, L. Ashley Squires reveals the rich and complex connections between religion and literature in American culture. Mary Baker Eddy's Church of Christ, Scientist was one of the fastest growing and most controversial religious movements in the United States, and it is no accident that its influence touched the lives and work of many American writers, including Frances Hodgson Burnett, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Mark Twain. Squires focuses on personal stories of sickness and healing—whether supportive or deeply critical of Christian Science's recommendations —penned in a moment when the struggle between religion and science framed debates about how the United States was to become a modern nation. As outsized personalities and outlandish rhetoric took to the stage, Squires examines how the poorly understood Christian Science movement contributed to popular narratives about how to heal the nation and advance the cause of human progress.

Acknowledgements
Introduction: Restitution and Modernity
1. The Falling Apple: The Rise of Christian Science
2. Build Therefore Your Own World: The Restitution Narratives of Frances Hodgson Burnett
3. Error Uncovered: Mark Twain and the Limits of Demystification
4. All the News Worth Reading: Literary Journalism and the Christian Science Monitor
5. The Tragedy of Desire: Social Justice, Gender Politics, and Theodore Dreiser's "The Genius"
Conclusion

Sujets

• Religion
• Christianisme
• Philosophie et théologie
• Religión
• Christian Science
• Christianity
• Science chrétienne

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 07 août 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253030313
• Langue: English

Extrait

HEALING THE NATION
RELIGION IN NORTH AMERICA
Catherine L. Albanese and Stephen J. Stein, editors
HEALING
the
NATION
LITERATURE, PROGRESS,
and
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

L. ASHLEY SQUIRES
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by L. Ashley Squires
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02954-6 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-03037-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-03031-3 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Restitution and Modernity
1. The Falling Apple: The Rise of Christian Science
2. Build Therefore Your Own World: The Restitution Narratives of Frances Hodgson Burnett
3. Error Uncovered: Mark Twain and the Limits of Demystification
4. All the News Worth Reading: Literary Journalism and the Christian Science Monitor
5. The Tragedy of Desire: Social Justice, Gender Politics, and Theodore Dreiser s The Genius
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NEARLY A DECADE AGO , I embarked on an effort to comprehend every possible intersection between American literary and religious history. During that process, someone patiently pointed out to me that there was enough original material in the Christian Science chapter to fill an entire monograph, thus making possible the book you see before you. To Phillip Barrish and Brian Bremen, I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude for their patient collegial advice throughout the process of writing this book. Tom Tweed, likewise, opened the door to the field of religious studies for me and provided an indispensable model for how to write a book. I also thank Gretchen Murphy and Coleman Hutchison for their insightful feedback and Evan Carton and Christopher Ellison for reading early chapters. Michael Winship is to be thanked for helping my findings on Willa Cather and the authorship of Mary Baker Eddy s biography-which did not fit within the scope of this book-a proper home.
Also in my thoughts are my colleagues from the University of Texas at Austin, including the members of my writing group: Coye Heard, Sydney Bufkin, Rachel Wiese, Bradley King, and Ty Alyea-to name but a few-who have already read almost this entire book, though in pieces over the course of time.
Much of the primary research for this project was conducted at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston, Massachusetts. This would not have been possible without the two fellowships they offered. I thank Sherry Darling for her guidance through that process and for making it possible for me to share my research with the community. Judy Huenneke, whose expertise in this area is unparalleled, was a tremendous resource to me during my residence, as were Research Room staff members Kurt Morris and Amanda Gustin.
The final stages of the writing and revision process were conducted during my first two years at the New Economic School in Moscow, Russia. I wish to thank my colleagues there as well as my research assistants Daniel Resnick and Kerry Matulis, who edited individual chapters and helped me track down primary sources. I am also blessed with a number of colleagues around the world who have contributed to this project in various ways, even just by chatting about it at MLA. I particularly want to recognize Anne Stiles for motivating me to press forward with this book with her interest in its topic as well as for her assistance with the Burnett chapter. Myles Chilton, who has been such a vital collaborator on other projects, also swapped book chapters with me and provided moral support. And finally, Melanie Haupt helped me get this manuscript into fighting shape, finding the mistakes and inconsistencies that I could not.
My family has borne witness to this entire process with the utmost forbearance. My husband, Edmond Squires, has given up many a vacation so that I could spend time writing, has tolerated many a foul mood, and has supported me unconditionally throughout this journey. My parents and siblings have also offered their views on the monograph from outside academia and have helped me continue to believe that it is interesting to real people.
Chunks of this monograph have appeared in other places, and I would like to thank the editors and reviewers at American Literary Realism, Studies in the Novel , and Book History , particularly Andrew Jewell for his work on the Cather issue in SITN. And finally, at Indiana University Press, Dee Mortenson provided patient guidance throughout the review process, and I am grateful to her and the peer reviewers for having very high standards and holding me to them.
HEALING THE NATION
Introduction
Restitution and Modernity
Since 2010, American actor Val Kilmer has toured the United States performing one-man shows in the character of Mark Twain. Bedecked in a white suit and disheveled wig, he portrays the familiar Sam Clemens of the turn of the century-curmudgeonly, lethally clever, skeptical of everything, and wrestling with his legacy as an author. Less familiar to audiences is the Clemens who was also deep in the throes of a vitriolic obsession with Mary Baker Eddy, the venerable leader of a growing religious movement called Christian Science. Kilmer s Twain is the man who had lost his daughter, a Christian Scientist, and his wife, a dabbler in various sectarian medical theories. He is also a writer whose preoccupation with Eddy exploded into print in a series of articles, a book-length screed published in 1907 as Christian Science , and lengthy correspondences with Eddy s friends and enemies, including one woman who claimed to have conceived her son, named Prince of Peace, through parthenogenesis. This is a Clemens who, at an earlier time, had written an article called Mental Telegraphy, espousing the theory that minds could influence one another at a distance-a central principle in Christian Science-and was ignoring his memoirs while writing a never-to-be-finished story called The Secret History of Eddypus, the World-Empire, conceived as a sequel of sorts to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur s Court .
Though entertaining in their own right, Kilmer s performances are part of an independent film project that has been gestating since 2002, an historical epic depicting the contrasting lives of two towering figures of fin de si cle American culture. 1 Whether the film ever actually graces theaters, it is difficult to deny that Kilmer, a Christian Scientist himself, has found in Twain and Eddy, both of whom died in 1910, a compelling set of foils. Here is Mark Twain: the avatar of late-nineteenth-century skepticism and hostility toward enchantment, irrationalism, and romanticism. And here is Eddy: self-proclaimed prophetess and instrument of the divine, leader of a religious movement that claimed to have found the secret of health not in germ theory or surgery, but in metaphysics. These are contrasts worthy of both romance and comedy.
But Mark Twain was hardly alone among literary figures of public note in his preoccupation with Christian Science. While Twain was penning polemics, respected novelist and New York Times correspondent Harold Frederic was dying slowly of complications following a stroke as doctors battled with the Christian Science practitioner who had been summoned by his mistress. Frederic eventually dismissed the doctors, and after he died, both women were tried for manslaughter but never convicted.
In 1907, the fully revised version of Twain s book on Eddy greeted the public, and Willa Cather, fresh off the success of Alexander s Bridge , joined the staff of McClure s . Her first assignment: editing a serial biography of Mary Baker Eddy by a young journalist named Georgine Milmine and previously edited by Ida Tarbell and Burton Hendrick.
During this same decade, Theodore Dreiser was visiting a Christian Science practitioner with his estranged wife, Sara, amid the ruins of their crumbled marriage and the intense personal crisis precipitated by the commercial failure of Sister Carrie . He wrote about this experience for eighty pages of the semiautobiographical novel The Genius, published in 1918. Frances Hodgson Burnett likewise became fascinated with Eddy s teachings, an interest made manifest in A Little Princess, The Secret Garden , and The Dawn of a To-morrow , novels that explore the ability of the mind to shape experience in the material world.
In 1918, Upton Sinclair came after Christian Science in the self-published work The Profits of Religion ; in Europe, various members of Gertrude Stein s circle, including, to her consternation, her sister-in-law Sarah, were dabbling in Christian Science along with Vedanta. Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane were both raised by mothers who were Christian Scientists, and Christian Science was one of the many religio-medical theories adopted by J. D. Salinger. The list goes on.
The questions that animate this book are as follows: How did Christian Science-a movement that now numbers its members in the tens of thousands rather than the millions-become such a cultural phenomenon that it left virtually no corner of the early-twentieth-century American literary canon untouched? And why is almost no one in the field of literature talking about it? Of all of the interventions of major canonical writers into the debates surrounding Christian Science, Mark Twain s c