“Escaping from Gross Bondage”: The Divine Music of Augusta Jane Evans’s Beulah

Abstract

REBECCAH BECHTOLD Wichita State University “Escaping from Gross Bondage”: The Divine Music of Augusta Jane Evans’s Beulah A SELF-DECLAREDDEVOTEE“ATTHESHRINEOFAESTHETICS,”AUGUSTAJANE Evans openly complained of the “lamentable want of aesthetic culture” available to southerners (“Letter to Beauregard” 66; “Letter to Victor” 14). She nevertheless wrote of the hope that one day soon “the youth of our country” would come to appreciate southern art in an 1860 letter to fellow writer Orville James Victor (“Letter to Victor” 15). Still, Evans’s novels proved to be the closest she would come to fulfilling her vision of a culturally advanced southern society. Working as music instructors, opera singers, artists, and writers, the female protagonists in Evans’s writings each possess the intellectual and artistictalentsthatdefinethem as both the preservers and producers of southern culture. For Evans, however, any creative and intellectual self-realization ultimately depended on the “nobler” goal “of doing God’s work.” (“Letter to Rachel” 18). Crucial to understanding Evans’s novels, then, is her religiously defined artistic vision. As she wrote to Walter Harriss in 1856, “O! I want an artist, and glorious works of art that will fill my soul with God-born impulses!” (Fidler 136). Perhaps tired of waiting for such a “glorious” art to emerge, Evans decided to produce her own, publishing in Beulah her only novel that overtly studies the tension between religious faith and artistic expression. This essay situates Beulah within a framework attentive to the social andreligiousdiscourseinfluencingEvans’sdefinitionoftheidealwoman of faith. Examining the extent to which Evans internalized the South’s conservative gender politics, I first consider the varied models of intellectual and artistic labor the novel privileges, arguing that while Beulah’s labor as author offers a viable source of financial stability, it threatens her access to more conservative definitions of womanhood in a manner Evans finds troubling. For this reason I maintain that Evans rejects Beulah’s literary proclivities if only to reframe them through a medium more suited to her ideal vision of art, that of music. When read alongside an emerging nineteenth-century spiritual soundscape that 140 Rebeccah Bechtold defined music as capable “of doing God’s work,” Beulah ultimately subverts southern expectations of gender, identifying in a woman’s creative expression both religious authority and social power. In the end, it is music, and specifically the Romantic prelude form, that best allows Evans to interrogate the limitations of Beulah’s artistic autonomy while still maintaining her religious faith.1 “Fame Don’t Pay”: The Southern Literary Tradition The first anthology of southern literature published in the United States, Mary Forrest’s Women of the South Distinguished in Literature (1860) identified thirty white women writers who had successfully published in the pre-Civil War South, including “popular writers” like CarolineGilman,E.D.E.N.Southworth,CarolineLeeHentz,andAugusta Jane Evans, to name a few (vi). Anticipating the recovery work of scholars like Nina Baym and Mary Kelley who turned to the very same authors, along with their northern counterparts, to establish the reputationandculturalrelevancyofnineteenth-centurywomenwriters, Women of the South Distinguished in Literature. traces the longstanding tradition of female authorship in the South. Anne Goodwyn Jones observes, for instance, how “As writers, southern white women have had an active and highly visible history since colonial times. In numbers alone they outdistanced men before the Civil War” (41). Even though these women writers remain largely linked to a “fundamentally nonserious literary tradition,” their work nevertheless contributed in significant ways to the representation of the ideal of the southern lady (44). Although recognized in Forrest’s anthology as a woman writer who shows “bounteous promise” (332), Evans remains one of the lesserknown “literary domestics,” writing at a time when the “genre had run 1 R. MurraySchaferfirstdefinedtheterm“soundscape”inTheSoundscape:OurSonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. (8). Since then, sound historians such as Mark Smith, Leigh Eric Schmidt, Richard Cullen Rath, and Jonathan Rée have provided ample examples of sound’s centrality to our understanding of early American history and culture. See also Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies., edited by Kala Keeling and Josh Kun. Daniel Cavicchi offers a recent study of early American music practice while Candace Bailey provides a useful analysis...