Printing Infidelity: Watson Heston and the Making of the Impressionable Freethinking Subject, 1873–1900

Abstract

Nineteenth-century print media provided a set of metaphors with which American unbelievers began to articulate an understanding of religious infidelity as something permanent. Ink, paper, pencil, and mechanical printing technologies served as symbols for articulating disbelief as something imprinted indelibly on the mind of the reading or viewing subject. Thus, over the course of the nineteenth century, American nonbelievers began discussing infidelity less in terms of something rationally subscribed to and more in terms of something non-rationally imprinted at a young age. At the same time, the late nineteenth century witnessed an increasing emphasis on a militaristic understanding of missionary activity incumbent upon American infidels—a tendency partially enabled by understandings of the cartoon image as a tool suited to the defeat of believers and the creation of young unbelievers.