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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature by Winter Jade Werner Cheri L. Larsen Hoeckley (bio) Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature Winter Jade Werner The Ohio State University Press, 2020. xi + 210 pp. $79.95 cloth, $24.95 paperback. Missionary Cosmopolitanism surprises in the most satisfying ways. While drawing broadly and deeply from religious, imperial, and literary archives, Winter Jade Werner resists relentless condemnation of nineteenth-century missionaries for their occasionally enthusiastic complicity in colonialism's exploitation and oppression. Yet she also avoids an apologia for the missionary project's participation in empire. As Werner recounts her early research questions, she found herself drawn in by missionary claims to cosmopolitanism, asking what would happen if she "commenced a study of imperial history and literature not with a presumption of missionary backwardness but rather with a careful consideration of those values that missionaries [End Page 224] themselves claimed to be central to their work? What might history tell us about how religion and imperialism together influenced cosmopolitanism in the nineteenth century and beyond?" (3). Forging a meticulously researched path in scholarship prompted by these questions, her argument explores the interweaving of Enlightenment humanist ideals with Christian doctrine and practice as these ideologies cross to undergird missionary activity across the empire. Along the way, Werner offers fresh analyses of some of the most frequently read Victorian novels and recovers forgotten works that bear re-reading in our current moment. Readers expecting umbrage for missionary complicity in colonial exploitation will quickly note Werner's minimal usage of terms like "racism" or even "xenophobia," though her attentive readings persistently highlight power structures that missionaries supported, often to the detriment of indigenous populations. Her summary of Robert Southey's Tales of Paraguay, for instance, might be encapsulated as the narrative of the Jesuit-induced death of a Guarani family. Reading Southey through missionary society publications, Werner offers nuanced support for her conclusion that by "adopting the language of natural theology, proto-ethnography, and cosmopolitanism…missionaries distinguished their Christianity as 'rational,' painting a flattering portrait of their own faith as uniquely 'enlightened' when compared to superstitious 'heathen'" belief systems (81). When Werner combines her reading of Southey's defense of empire with her argument for his secularization of Christian education in Sir Thomas More, we see white supremacy's early roots that are better remembered in literary texts, such as Kipling's "White Man's Burden." Throughout, Werner stays fruitfully in conversation with previous scholars on both empire and cosmopolitanism, from Patrick Brantlinger to Amanda Anderson, James Buzard, and Tanya Agathocleous. Taking her scholarly strategies into consideration, it is not surprising that Missionary Cosmopolitanism opens with the words of missionary John Williams and his claim that the missionary is "the only true cosmopolite" (1). Werner grounds her argument by considering Williams's statement in the context both of missionary society documents and of Kant's writings on cosmopolitanism. From that foundation, she turns to literary texts, seeking "to complicate the often under-examined binaries that govern understandings of religion, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism in literary scholarship" (37). Her analysis of Bleak House builds convincing parallels between Mrs. Jellyby's renowned telescopic philanthropy and Harold Skimpole's "dangerous moral indifference" (61) as two sides of the cosmopolitan coin that emerges from the mint of Kantian philosophy. Werner concludes that the [End Page 225] similarities of these two apparently disparate characters reveal "the novel's keenly historic sense of cosmopolitanism: its savvy recovery of early nineteenth-century conservative fears of missionaries' (supposedly) depoliticized, re-Christianized cosmopolitanism in order to critique the 'cosmopolitan' fervor surrounding the Great Exhibition" (43). The mid-century missionary movement, that's to say, plays its part in a broader Dickensian turn toward the domestic, bolstering conservative anxieties about more secular forms of cosmopolitanism. Attuned as she is by her attention to missionary tracts and letters alongside Kantian discourse, when Werner turns to Jane Eyre, she shifts the focus of the novel's racial discourse from its debasing representation of creole Bertha Mason. Instead, Werner examines mid-century missionaries' racial controversies that ground St. John's impassioned demand that Jane marry him. Werner's analysis of what is arguably the Victorian period...