Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner Matthew VanWinkle Winter Jade Werner. Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Ohio State UP, 2020. 210p. A substantial strand of recent scholarship on nineteenth-century literature and culture contests the secularization hypothesis, the claim that religiously oriented worldviews are becoming less pervasive and influential as more rationalistic perspectives increasingly drive cultural priorities and decisions. This hypothesis depends on, and often merely assumes, a simplistic binary opposition between these two organizing visions of reality. Werner’s study counters this hypothesis by focusing on texts from the first half of the nineteenth century that find an emergent religious impulse not only compatible with but also contributing to a more inclusive view of intercultural encounters. An 1837 introduction to John Williams’s A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Seas confidently proclaims that “the Christian is the only true cosmopolite” (1). Few in Britain would have aspired so explicitly to such an appellation at the close of the eighteenth century. To call oneself a citizen of the world in the immediate wake of the French Revolution was to risk being suspected of an incendiary disregard for nation and family. Werner’s first chapter traces how the rhetoric and practice of the early nineteenth century missionary movement contributed to the rehabilitation of cosmopolitanism as a concept. In describing their aims as cosmopolitan, missionary societies returned [End Page 140] to an earlier Enlightenment conception of universally shared values “born of Christian belief rather than from an explicit political agenda” (49). By focusing on saving individual souls and largely abstaining from the local politics of the places they visited, missionary efforts plausibly advanced the possibility that one could be cosmopolitan and at the same time reassuringly British. While emphatic critique of missionary priorities persisted—Werner’s first chapter concludes with a discussion of Bleak House as an example—for the most part these priorities and their fundamental view of the world became more acceptable over the first half of the nineteenth century. Because missionary societies frequently described their efforts in terms of revived and rehabilitated Enlightenment ideals, their work frequently proved especially appealing to those seeking “reasonableness” in religion. Werner’s second chapter examines how one such admirer, Robert Southey (Britain’s poet laureate from 1813 until 1843), both popularized and crucially misrepresented this aspect of the missionary perspective. Although their travels frequently coincided with British colonial expansion, missionaries were often opposed to the more overtly coercive features of the imperial project: “the political and cultural benefits of Christianity would only be realized by changing individual hearts […] Social good followed individual spiritual salvation” (91). Southey’s literary representations of missionary work, in contrast, “tries to appropriate missionary cosmopolitanism to suit his own nationalist ends” (93). Werner shrewdly emphasizes this contrast through a reading of A Tale of Paraguay (1825), a long poem that construes the logic of posthumous salvation as an exculpation of imperial brutality: “colonial disease and native deaths work ultimately work for the greater good” (99). What might be seen as common ground in a rhetorical tendency toward pragmatism overlooks deeper theological and ideological divides in practice. The first two chapters of Missionary Cosmopolitanism, then, highlight the ways in which early nineteenth-century missionary work entered a mainstream that it sometimes subtly strove to redirect. The final two chapters illuminate the fissures that opened up in the movement in the 1840s and 1850s. The third chapter reads St. John Rivers’s proposal to Jane Eyre in connection with the increasingly vexed debate over missionaries and interracial marriage. Because the missionary movement was predicated on the idea of universal [End Page 141] human kinship, interracial marriages were accepted and even to some degree encouraged well into the 1820s. Yet precisely because these marriages proceeded from this assumption of equality, they also disrupted other assumptions about cultural superiority that tacitly informed missionary work. St. John’s insistence that he marry someone like Jane, someone as much like himself as possible, betrays an anxiety about a disruptive desire for the other by pre-empting it as emphatically as possible. Werner’s final chapter explores a turning point in the way that missionaries...