Religious Transnationalism in the American Renaissance: Susan Warner's Wide, Wide World

Abstract

Ellen Montgomery overlooks Edinburgh from the window of her uncle's mansion. Illustration by Frederick Dielman, from Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1892), 528. Religious Transnationalism in the American Renaissance : Susan Warner's Wide, Wide World JOHN CARLOS ROWE In the middle of Susan Warner's Wide, Wide World (1850), Kitty Dolan appears at Rev. Humphreys's house to beg him to visit her dying son, John Dolan. Kitty is a poor Irish American Catholic living in the neighborhood of the Humphreys's comfortable home in rural New York, and her appeal to Humphreys , a Presbyterian minister, signals to the reader one of many moments of religious didacticism in Warner's romance. Although raised a Catholic, John Dolan has regularly attended Rev. Humphreys's church '"to hear,'" he says, '"yer honor spake the good words.'"1 John's deathbed conversion occurs at the same time that Alice Humphreys introduces her brother John Humphreys to the novel's heroine, "their little sister" Ellen Montgomery, initiating the spiritual romance that will culminate in Ellen and John becoming engaged in the ancestral home of her mother's relatives in Edinburgh, the original source of the Presbyterianism Warner advocates so vigorously in The Wide, Wide World. John Dolan's conversion focuses our attention on nineteenth -century religion's powerful transnational reach and the forces it employed in a global effort to rebuild a Christian commonwealth . Christianity's transnational and transcultural ambitions were profoundly involved in nationalism, even if the ultimate goal was the transcendence of anything as secular as fSQ \V.49\ 1ST-3RD QUARTERS | 2003 45 JOHW CARLOS ROWE the nation-state. Today we often condemn the collapse of the constitutional separation of church and state, especially in the face of new enthusiasms for Christian fundamentalism and evangelicism, but this contemporary problem has its roots in nineteenth-century Christian Protestantism, its vigorous advocacy of U.S. nationalism, an expansionist zeal uniting spiritual conversion with political imperialism, and an apparently contradictory anti-colonialism. Benedict Anderson argues that nation-states superseded the medieval religious empires of Islam and Catholicism only by virtue of legitimating themselves through strong appeals to religion.2Although the central roles played by religion in Spanish, Portuguese, British, and other European imperialisms are well known, Protestantism's part in U.S. expansion is still eccentric to most scholarly discussions . In "Manifest Domesticity," Amy Kaplan argues that nineteenth -century U.S. expansion relied on an ideology of domestic stability imbued with Christian evangelical ardor. Kaplan links the "empire of the mother" with "the American empire" by showing how both aimed "to encompass the world outside their borders" and contradictorily "to exclude persons conceived of as racially foreign within those expanding national boundaries." Kaplan's approach links the domestic sphere's regulation of women with the imperial mission to "civilize" foreigners, especially "pagans" and "heathens," and it does so in more than merely rhetorical terms. In her discussion of Sarah Josepha Hale's advocacy of Thanksgiving as a national holiday and of women's potential roles in African colonization , Kaplan shows how imperial and domestic ideologies worked together to practical effect. Kaplan concludes that " [understanding the imperial reach of domesticity and its relation to the foreign should help remap . . . the broader international and national contexts in which unfold narratives of female development. " 3 Warner's Wide, Wide Worldis one of Kaplan's examples of sentimental romances whose conventional focus on "the interiority of the female subject" is transformed when viewed from the perspective of nineteenth-century imperialist nationalism: 46 WARNER AND REUGIOUS TRANSNATIONALE Even at the heart of The Wide, Wide World, a novel usually understood as thoroughly closeted in interior space, where the heroine disciplines herself through reading and prayer, her favorite book is the popular biography of George Washington, the father of the nation. Her own journey to live with her Scottish relatives can be seen as a feminized re-enactment of the American revolution against the British empire.4 For Kaplan, the religious discipline in Warner's romance is indistinguishable from the vaguely defined Protestant ethos of nineteenth-century northeastern culture. We certainly need what Kaplan terms a "remapping" of how national and imperial interests complemented...