Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, and Consumption in the Antebellum American Novel

Midcentury American novelists variously reworked the traditional conversion narrative to reflect a marked cultural shift in attitude towards human "nature," newly conceived as innocent and inclined to salvation. This liberalized aesthetic of conversion takes shape through the trope of the "organic angel," a developmental female figure whose journey from childhood innocence to saintly womanhood merges the processes of sexual maturation and Protestant conversion. Because she purifies self-interested desire by redirecting it towards spiritual ends, the organic angel provides a symbolic reconciliation of the young nation's budding imperial capitalism with its millennial expectations. While traditional emphasis on a maternal ethos at work in sentimental fiction has obscured the thematic and generic traction of this nonmaternal female saint, my project traces her structural impact across a surprisingly diverse range of authors and works—Sylvester Judd's Margaret, Maria Cummins' The Lamplighter, Hawthorne's The Marble Faun, Melville's Pierre, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig. At once a remarkably flexible and legibly constraining trope, the organic angel determines the relationship between narrative form and nationalist commitment; her relative efficacy as an agent of conversion measures authorial confidence in a pre-Civil war era vision of a unified, prosperous, and evangelical nation.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D. in English

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

English

Year dc:date.available

2015

Author dc:creator

• Schrock, Laura Jean

Contributors dc:contributor

• Kathryn McKee
• John R. Neff
• Cristin Ellis

• American
• Antebellum
• Novel
• Protestantism
• Religion
• Sentimental
• American Literature

Repository record dc:identifier

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1398

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:egrove.olemiss.edu:etd-2397