Diana Walsh Pasulka - A Communion of Little Saints: Nineteenth-Century American Child Hagiographies - Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 23:2 (original) (raw)
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The Journal of The History of Childhood and Youth, 2009
A SOMBER PEDAGOGY-A HISTORY OF THE CHILD DE ATH BED SCENE IN E ARLY AMERICAN CHILDREN'S RELIGIOUS LITER ATURE , 1674 -1840 ursory review of popular culture of the nineteenth-century United States reveals the presence of what is, to contemporary eyes, a macabre and curious literary convention. To historians familiar with childhood or nineteenth-century studies, the trope of child death, so ubiquitous in nineteenth-century literature, is as puzzling as it is familiar. The subject of child death was pervasive as evidenced by the fact that two of the most famous fictional characters of the era are pious but doomed children, Harriet Beecher Stowe's' Little Evangeline St. Clare and Charles Dickens' Little Nell. What social, demographic or religious developments led to the sensationalist portrayal of child death particular to this era? The pervasiveness of the phenomenon demands a critical treatment, and scholars have begun the process of examining the subject from multiple perspectives. 1 This essay contributes to these analyses by examining the theological precedents for the literary genre of sentimental literature that had as its subject the dying child.
Perfect Child, Perfect Faith: Raising Children in Nineteenth-Century Religious Communities
“Perfect Child, Perfect Faith” studies how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the abolitionist and integrationist community of Berea, Kentucky, the Oneida Perfectionists, and the United Society of Believers (better known as Shakers) raised their children in the nineteenth century. Each of these communities incorporated a specific interpretation of Christianity and rejected “traditional” culture and society in favor of their “perfected” alternative. For each of these groups, children acted as a space to write their own identity. Children embodied hope, patriotism, faith, obedience, and goodness. Exploring childhood and children's experience in history can be difficult as retrieving the voices of children can be a daunting task. They produced less sources and materials than their adult contemporaries. And even fewer of these sources have been preserved. This means that much of their experiences, as they happened, are lost to historians. However, many of these children grew up to write memoirs, diaries, and brief histories of their people, which have provided access to children’s experiences. In addition to relying on memoirs, the dissertation uses handbooks and guides on childrearing and practices produced by each of the communities. Finally, it considers non-textual sources, especially photography of families and children, as well as illustrations in literature and periodicals. To understand how the communities raised their child and why these children did not vi continue their original communal goals, the dissertation is organized into four categories: the symbolic meaning of the child, the definition and role of the family, educational practices, and the connections between work and play. Each section considers both the community’s view of the child and the child’s actual experience. Often a child’s reality differed dramatically from the ideals and expectations of his/ her community. The dissertation argues that Mormons, Bereans, Oneida Perfectionists, and Shakers failed to raise their children in radically different ways and instead raised them similar to nineteenth-century bourgeois America: as innocents with the possibility of perfecting the future.
Body and Religion, 2022
By at least the 1830s, evangelical Protestants in the United States considered relic collection and distribution to be an essential part of an individual's 'good death' experience. Protestant relics took form as bodily and contact relics. Bodily relics included locks of hair, pictures of bodies that once lived, post-mortem images, and, in rare cases, blood and bones. Contact relics included Bibles, clothes, burial shrouds, letters, and other objects associated with the dead. Evangelical publishers employed the memoir genre to teach children and adults how to distribute these relics on their deathbeds to family and friends. Some evangelical children even modeled handwritten memoirs of their friends after these published accounts. By the mid-nineteenth century, most Anglo-American Protestants regarded relic collection and distribution around the deathbed as a defining feature of evangelicalism. This held true for evangelical women, children, and men. In fact, evangelical men took these deathbed practices with them to war. Civil War soldiers who died away from home insisted on writing deathbed letters to families as part of their good death experiences. These letters usually carried soldiers' most treasured possessions back home as Protestant relics, including locks of hair, Bibles, and rings.
2021
This project would not have been possible without the help of many people. 1 owe a special debt to Roger Simpson, my church family at Holy Trinity, Vancouver, John McClennan, and Ruth Gill, as well as untold others for their moral, spiritual, and financial support. Special mention is due to John Enns of Prairie Bible College, who introduced me to the school archives, and, more importantly, to the diaries of Dorothy Ruth Miller. Research librarian Flora Forbes also proved invaluable, arranging access to the archives, coordinating interviews, and organizing my accommodation while in Three Hills. Brian Wiggins of the Christian and Missionary Alliance archives, as well as library staff at the Alliance University College in Calgary were also of great help. I am also grateful to my supervisors and teachers. I owe a particular debt to my initial advisor, Esther Reed, who steered me to ask the right questions of my own heritage, and from whom I learned much about the art of teaching. I am especially grateful to Alan Torrance and John Clark, who together guided this work to completion. John cheerfully oversaw my introduction into the world of historical research, and read and commented upon numerous drafts of this work in the process. Alan's confidence in me and his unfailing enthusiasm for this project even when unforeseen events delayed its submission have been invaluable sources of strength. Thanks are also due to George Marsden, who, during his short sojourn in St. Andrews, helped fill in many of the gaps in my knowledge of American evangelical history. List of Figures vi Chapter One Introduction: Female Ministry and Evangelical Spirituality 1 Chapter Two 'An association, of one mind and aim': Fraternity and Unity at Midland
Eternal Innocence: The Victorian Cult of the Dead Child
2020
This dissertation argues that Victorian subjects' increased idealization of childhood as a distinct phase of life marked by freedom, helplessness, innocence, and unproductiveness relied upon the figure of the dead child. Working through literary texts, in conjunction with cultural and social histories of childhood and of death, I argue that excessive mourning for dead children in the Victorian era functioned not only as an expression of sorrow for the loss of a particular child but also as a celebration and confirmation of the figure of "the child" as a distinct category of humanity, and bearer of human value. Child death worked alongside eugenicist politics to establish and preserve an image of the ideal child as white, "innocent," and in need of protection. My chapters examine the figure of the ideal Victorian dead child in both fiction and memoir, while also drawing attention to the many dead children whose childhoods and deaths are erased because they do not fit this ideal. This focus on the dead child helped to cement the image of the child as defined by innocence and unproductiveness that began in the Victorian era, and this image of the child excluded most Victorian children. These nineteenth-century depictions of child death still shape who is recognizable as a dead child for contemporary audiences.
Delivery and Deliverance: Religious Experiences of Childbirth in Eighteenth-Century America
Church History, 2022
This paper argues that childbirth served as a prism for religious experience in early America, not just among the women who experienced it but also among the members of their households and communities. Examining childbirth as the source of religious experience can shed light on the social and physiological dimensions of early American spirituality by illuminating a religious culture of childbearing that shaped the piety of anyone who came into contact with it. We might expect that childbirth molded women's spirituality. But this article proposes that not just women but also others in their midst experienced religion differently because of their proximity to childbirth. Pregnancy, labor, and infant loss forced women and men to confront mortality and became means through which they carved out spiritual life, created ritual, and forged religious community. Using the body as a category of analysis, this paper reveals a space where the physical and spiritual persons intersect, and it argues that spiritual responses to childbirth as a physiological event were part of the longer arc of religious experience than we have previously appreciated. In doing so, it offers new ways to center women and gender in the narrative of early American religious history.
Living and dying: A window on (Christian) children's spirituality
Children, Spirituality, Loss and Recovery, 2009
Faith and beliefs about living and dying are fundamental constituents of spiritual development. However, children are seldom asked to talk about their experiences of life and death. This article has a twofold purpose. It first describes children's expressions on living and dying, as heard during a newly developed programme, which encourages children's participation as active subjects of their spiritual journey. This programme, the Grande Halte, began in 2004 within the changing context of Christian religious education in a secular Quebec. Secondly, it proposed a theological reflection informed by the social sciences and the social context of the milieu, and based on children's expressions. It suggests that stories and symbols are needed in order to develop a coherent horizon of meaning in one's life. The relational dimension of the process is also highlighted.