Misery's Mathematics by Balaam Peter;

Author:Balaam, Peter;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2011-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

DOMESTICITY’S LIMITS: MOURNING “THE GREAT SEPARATION”

Despite Warner’s positive representation of the relating and ritualism Ellen and her mother enjoy in the domestic sphere, the emotional atmosphere of Mrs. Montgomery’s home is also mined with remarkable ambivalence. For all the evident nurture and mutual understanding of the novel’s early domestic scenes, Warner reveals that such gains are sought and (temporarily) won in opposition not only to the masculine world of commerce and compromise outside, but to the indoor and even interior threats of the child’s fears of desertion and the mother’s isolation and secrecy. Begun in the very months of a controversy around Horace Bushnell’s Christian Nurture, The Wide, Wide World engages the domestic as embodying all the good that Cheever identifies according to the “voice of nature,” but does so in order to reveal its inadequacy as a shelter from change and its incommensurability with the rougher goods she would have associated with “the voice of grace.”

At issue in discussions of domesticity among Protestants in New York and New England in 1847 as Warner began to write was Bushnell’s controversial theory of domestic enculturation as the optimal route to Christian regeneration. Against revivalist conceptions of the nature of conversion as an adult individual’s sudden and violent overpowering and reorientation of the will, Bushnell proposed that “the child is to grow up a Christian … not remembering the time when he went though a technical experience, but seeming rather to have loved what is good from his earliest years” (Christian 6). An influential but very controversial Congregationalist minister in Hartford, Bushnell had been Taylor’s student at Yale, but was generally criticized by New Schoolers for his anti-scholastic, Coleridge-inspired, romantic theology (Marsden 162). Bushnell lamented that piety in the U.S. was grounded not in love but in “conquest.” Lacking “beauty,” “holiness,” and “domesticity of character,” much of what passed for Christian nurture served only “to make the subject of religion odious” to children in those years when they might be most susceptible to it (8). He emphasized the child’s growth within the family and a conception of religious truth as organically interconnected with familial relation. As for salvation, the child’s religious status was covered by that of the parent “as a seed is formed in the capsule,” from which it would naturally be “gradually separated” at maturity (18). Bushnell’s were important and influential liberal reforms, but Warner’s novel reveals how unsympathetic she was to such innovations. The uncanny irruptions of futility and failure within Ellen’s earnest domesticity and the unbridgeable silences of “the great separation” between her and her mother act in this ostensible “domestic novel” like Freudian slips that, against Bushnell’s widely known model of Christian enculturation through domesticity, reveal the home as a site of futility, aggression, and loss.

Especially in the wasting illness that keeps her on the sofa and her (to Ellen, incomprehensible) capacity to welcome her afflictions as a sign of divine love, Mrs. Montgomery was in 1850 something of a stock character. The passive mother of woman’s

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