Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America by Ashley Reed

Abstract

Reviewed by: Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America by Ashley Reed Ashley C. Barnes REED, ASHLEY. Heaven's Interpreters: Women Writers and Religious Agency in Nineteenth-Century America. Cornell, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. 262 pp. $19.95 paperback; open access e-book. Over the past two decades, literary criticism has situated itself as a post-secular discipline by negotiating between disenchantment and re-enchantment. Some critics have urged us to question the value of secular skepticism and to rediscover the pleasures of enchantment: to cease digging down and standing back (Rita Felski), to read reparatively (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), to embrace vibrant matter (Jane Bennett). Meanwhile, disenchantment has pursued a complementary path, deconstructing secularism as modernity's most pernicious form of mystification. Think of Bruno Latour's claim that moderns worship facts as their own preferred fetishes, or Talal Asad's argument that secularist claims of liberal pluralism simply offer a cover for Western imperialism. Ashley Reed works both sides of the case. Her book is in part a skeptical exposure of secularism as a program that domesticated women and religion to free the public sphere for male-dominated market capitalism. Her book could also be seen as pursuing the enchantment of the material world, arguing as it does for women's power to invest matter, including their own bodies, with spiritual meaning. But Reed walks a productive line between debunking the allure of disenchantment and promoting the value of re-enchantment. She seeks out the "excluded middle" occupied by persons for whom "the impossibility of total self-determination is in many ways simply a fact, an everyday occurrence" (23). The women writers who occupy this middle ground marshal the resources of theology and of the novel to imagine alternate ways of exercising their will. Reed's balance of generosity and skepticism makes a potent case for the value of this novelistic theologizing. Her book's fundamental goal is to define agency as a viable, non-secular contrast to autonomy. In the process of correcting our secular prejudices about agency, Reed's book also aims to revise literary critical reading methods. Women's religious agency offers Reed a fulcrum for the critique of the secular self, because secularism built its autonomous ideal against a caricature of believing women: at the mercy of their emotions and bodies, irrational and incapable of free choice. Secularism wants us to believe in the autonomous self as "enlightened and free from supernatural coercion" (22). Agency, by contrast, can circulate and empower multiple persons in a community. Agency does not require, as autonomy often does, escape from tradition. Agency can "[adapt] to the power structures within which one lives" (19). The women who write the narratives that Reed examines, and the characters portrayed in those narratives, are neither passive believers nor lone wolves. They are busy making meaning for themselves and others. [End Page 321] There is, for example, the agency exercised in the speech acts that we see in Catherine Maria Sedgwick's The Linwoods. Such speech changes minds and political affiliations, and it is grounded in faith, specifically a recasting of Christ as a salvific preacher rather than a sacrificial atonement. Likewise, in writing Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs accesses agency through, not despite, religious faith. If we read Linda Brent's story as a spiritual autobiography akin to Nat Turner's and Jarena Lee's, Reed argues, then we see Brent claiming authority to speak by virtue of her battle against sin, calling on God as her judge and on readers as silent witnesses to her testimony. Brent claims interpretive authority when she counters Dr. Flint's reading of the Bible with her own. Both the authors and the women in these texts are themselves "heaven's interpreters," in the phrase of Reed's title. Representation and interpretation are the ways they exercise agency. Perhaps because that exercise lies so close to critics' own professional activity, and because we have long defined our professional activity as secular, we are liable to interpret in favor of the secular ideal of autonomy. But, Reed argues, it is time that we reform that liability. In...