Via Media : Transatlantic Anglicanism in The Female American

Abstract

With its heroine who is stranded on a deserted island and who converts other Native Americans living nearby, The Female American (1767) has primarily received critical attention a unique feminist rewriting of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), yet few scholars have given sustained attention to superiority of Anglican doctrine and proselytizing integral part of how novel rewrites Defoe's classic Puritan spiritual autobiography and ideology of religious imperialism.1 The Church of England, its very inception and name tied to nationhood, faced particular challenges when exported abroad in order to help consolidate Britain's colonial power. Transatlantic travel, colonization, and missionizing, with their attendant messy processes of transculturation, strained Anglicanism's boasted doctrinal purity and its Englishness.2 The Female American engages and attempts to resolve this ideological and cultural struggle by returning to Anglican self-justifications well-reasoned, stable middle way between Puritanism and Catholicism. This via media motif is radically extended in novel, however, to pertain to Anglican missionary's ability to mediate between various forms of religious media technologies well to embrace different kinds of mediating bodies, most notably by envisioning a spiritual mediator who is herself between cultures - Native American and Anglo-British - and between genders, Britons comprehended gender egalitarianism present in many Native American cultures.3 Secured rather than destabilized by this middling identity, biracial heroine Unca Eliza Winkfield draws on Anglican theories and structures of mediation in order to justify appropriation of various types of media in her efforts to missionize among other Native Americans.Published just four years after conclusion of Seven Years' War (1756-63), novel's imperialist vision shares with Church of England and its missionary organization, Society for Propagation of Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG), ambition to add religious conquest to Britain's recent military victories.4 As Richard Terrick observed during one of SPG's anniversary sermons, In course of late war, our successes, great in themselves and glorious to British arms, have extended our empire and opened a large field, which in every view, whether of religion or civil policy, demands our culture and improvement.5 Echoing a sentiment ubiquitous in post-war Anglican literature, Terrick acknowledges role of religion the firmest bond, most assured pledge of . . . fidelity for new populations now under British governance.6The author of The Female American seems particularly savvy in recognizing Britain's objectives during peacetime to transition in its role from military conqueror to spiritual director. During extended visit to England, Unca Eliza describes a monument she has designed to commemorate her mother, a Pocahontas-like figure who has died in colonial Virginia. She writes, as I found it was custom in England to erect monuments for persons who often were interred elsewhere, I desired my uncle to erect a superb mausoleum in his church-yard, sacred to memory of my dear mother.7 Such a culturally hybrid funerary monument would have substantially transformed composition of a typical Anglican church-yard: lofty structure is supported by Indians big life. The building is shaped like Egyptian pyramid, each side of which inscribes life of her mother in languages of, respectively, Indian, Latin, and English. At top, where one would expect a sculpture of Unca Eliza's mother, we find instead an urn, on which Indian leans, and looks on it in a mournful posture (51). As Mary Helen McMurran has discovered, Unca Eliza's monument to her mother bears a remarkable resemblance to Robert Adam's funeral monument for Seven Years' war hero, Robert Townsend, designed in 1760's for Westminster Abbey. …