In Memory of Cassie: Child Death and Religious Vision in American Women's Novels
| Autor: | Ann-Janine Morey |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 1996 |
| Předmět: |
Cultural Studies
History Lectern business.industry Pulpit 05 social sciences Religious studies Subject (philosophy) 050109 social psychology Private sphere Child mortality 050106 general psychology & cognitive sciences Aesthetics Publishing Natural (music) 0501 psychology and cognitive sciences Consolation business Social psychology |
| Zdroj: | Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation. 6:87-104 |
| ISSN: | 1533-8568 1052-1151 |
| DOI: | 10.2307/1123974 |
| Popis: | This article investigates the contribution of several twentiethcentury women writers to the legacy of women's writing about child death and scriptural consolation. The suffering and death of children constitutes the most intractable of religious problems, and recent studies of parental grieving support women's literary treatment of child death. Thus, just as child death creates a unique religious space, it may also demand its own literary category and aesthetic. By considering the unique dimensions of parental grieving, and by looking at how Perri Klass, Toni Morrison, and Harriette Arnow handle this subject, it is possible to gain fresh literary perspective on the fiction of nineteenthcentury American women, many of whom also addressed the problem of child death and scriptural consolation. Women writers create children who are more than literary or symbolic commodities, and, in so doing, these writers challenge us to reevaluate scriptural and social perspectives on child death. The subject of children is traditionally relegated to the private sphere of women's concerns and traditionally disdained as a great literary subject. Moreover, nineteenth-century women writers struggled against cultural prohibitions for women designed to protect female modesty against unseemly public display. Nevertheless, although the woman at the lectern or the pulpit was condemned as a violation of the natural and biblical order, many nineteenth-century women found that publishing provided access to a public audience otherwise forbidden to the well-bred American female. Nineteenthcentury women's writing has been variously labeled as "sentimental" or "domestic" or, more recently, "homiletic."' This latter term, "homiletic fiction," does not refer to the entire range of nineteenth-century women's writing, but it does capture the sense of religious intensity that often saturates nineteenth-century women's writing. In effect, nineteenth-century women seized the novel as their pulpit and, writing on the things they felt passionately about, produced a unique literature, often sermonic in its fervor and even ecstatic in its religious vision. In |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
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