Children's Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure': Positive Thinking and Pseudo-Science at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 126) 1108830943, 9781108830942

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CHILDREN ’S L IT ERA TURE AND THE RI SE O F “MIND CURE”

Positive thinking is good for you. You can become healthy, wealthy, and influential by using the power of your mind to attract what you desire. These kooky but commonplace ideas stem from a nineteenthcentury new religious movement known as “mind cure” or New Thought. Related to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, New Thought was once a popular religious movement with hundreds of thousands of followers, and has since migrated into secular contexts such as contemporary psychotherapy, corporate culture, and entertainment. New Thought also pervades nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century children’s literature, including classics such as The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, and A Little Princess. In this first book-length treatment of New Thought in Anglophone fiction, Anne Stiles explains how children’s literature encouraged readers to accept New Thought ideas – especially psychological concepts such as the inner child – thereby ensuring the movement’s survival into the present day. anne stiles is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of Medical Humanities at Saint Louis University. She is the author of Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2011) and the editor of Neurology and Literature, 1866–1920 (2007). She also coedited two volumes in Elsevier’s Progress in Brain Research series (2013). Her work has been supported by long-term grants from the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (2016–2017); the Huntington Library (2009–2010); and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006–2007).

cambridge studies in nineteenth-century l i t e r a t u r e a n d cu l t u r e FOUNDING EDITORS Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley GENERAL EDITORS Kate Flint, University of Southern California Clare Pettitt, King’s College London Editorial board Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London Ali Behdad, University of California, Los Angeles Alison Chapman, University of Victoria Hilary Fraser, Birkbeck, University of London Josephine McDonagh, University of Chicago Elizabeth Miller, University of California, Davis Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine Cannon Schmitt, University of Toronto Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia Mark Turner, King’s College London Nineteenth-century literature and culture have proved a rich field for interdisciplinary studies. Since 1994, books in this series have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the visual arts, politics, gender and sexuality, race, social organisation, economic life, technical innovations, scientific thought - in short, culture in its broadest sense. Many of our books are now classics in a field which since the series’ inception has seen powerful engagements with Marxism, feminism, visual studies, post-colonialism, critical race studies, new historicism, new formalism, transnationalism, queer studies, human rights and liberalism, disability studies, and global studies. Theoretical challenges and historiographical shifts continue to unsettle scholarship on the nineteenth century in productive ways. New work on the body and the senses, the environment and climate, race and the decolonisation of literary studies, biopolitics and materiality, the animal and the human, the local and the global, politics and form, queerness and gender identities, and intersectional theory is reanimating the field. This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers of nineteenth-century literary studies, connecting the field with the urgent critical questions that are being asked today. We seek to publish work from a diverse range of authors, and stand for anti-racism, anti-colonialism and against discrimination in all forms. A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND THE RISE OF “MIND CURE” Positive Thinking and Pseudo-Science at the Fin de Siècle

ANNE STILES Saint Louis University, Missouri

University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, ny 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906 Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108830942 doi: 10.1017/9781108914604 © Anne Stiles 2021 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2021 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data names: Stiles, Anne, 1975– author. title: Children’s literature and the rise of ‘mind cure’ : positive thinking and pseudo-science at the fin de siècle / Anne Stiles. description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. identifiers: lccn 2020033570 (print) | lccn 2020033571 (ebook) | isbn 9781108830942 (hardback) | isbn 9781108914604 (epub) subjects: lcsh: Children’s literature, American – History and criticism. | American fiction – 19th century – History and criticism. | New Thought in literature. classification: lcc ps374.c454 s75 2021 (print) | lcc ps374.c454 (ebook) | ddc 813/.4099282–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033570 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020033571 isbn 978-1-108-83094-2 Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Kevin and our flock

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

page viii ix

Introduction

1

1 The Inner Child in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Sara Crewe

24

2 Fauntleroy’s Ghost: New Thought in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw

54

3 Rewriting the Rest Cure in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden

83

4 Sunshine and Shadow: New Thought in Anne of Green Gables

115

5 New Women, New Thoughts: Millenial Motherhood in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland Trilogy

155

Epilogue: The Cinematic Afterlife of New Thought Fiction

187 199 218 235

Notes Bibliography Index

vii

Illustrations

1 Reginald Birch’s 1886 illustration of Little Lord Fauntleroy 2 Mary Pickford in the 1921 silent film version of Little Lord Fauntleroy 3 The cover of The Forerunner 4 A young Shirley Temple in 1933 5 Shirley Temple as Sara Crewe in The Little Princess (1939)

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page 34 39 182 190 196

Acknowledgments

The seeds of this project were planted years ago when I was an undergraduate at Harvard University. In spring and fall, I enjoyed lengthy rambles in Cambridge’s Mount Auburn Cemetery, a popular destination for runners, bird-watchers, and history buffs alike. The cemetery contains many graves of famous people, including literary lights such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior, and Julia Ward Howe. But one particularly beautiful memorial caught my attention. Next to Halcyon Lake, surrounded by luxuriant foliage, stands a fifteen-foot-tall circular colonnade in classical revival style, built of Vermont white granite and decorated with a wild rose motif. This monument honors Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), who attracted countless followers in the nineteenth century with her belief that the body and all material things are illusions and that reality consists of mind and spirit. Ergo, pain, suffering, and death are false beliefs that can be healed through prayer and right thinking, methods that psychologist William James would later term “mind cure.” Eddy’s monument reflects these principles: it was built without a roof so that nothing could stand between her and Heaven. The monument was also outfitted with a telephone so that Eddy might call her followers from the beyond if she chose and testify to her triumph over death (so far, she hasn’t). At the time, I had no idea who Eddy was or why someone would dedicate such a sublime structure to her. But I was to encounter Eddy and her ideas again when I returned to Harvard for a postdoctoral fellowship in 2006–2007, where I audited a class on mind–body medicine taught by historian of science Anne Harrington. One unit of the course covered mind cure and featured guest speakers who were members of Eddy’s Mother Church in Boston. They described leaving their own and their children’s injuries in God’s hands and forgoing medical intervention, as Eddy’s religion notoriously demands. One woman described how she refused to go to the emergency room after a car accident smashed her ix

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windshield, leaving shards of glass embedded in her face. She described how prayer and faith alone had healed her, as her body gradually expelled each piece of glass. Another man described how he refused to take his child to the doctor after she broke her leg, even though Christian Science makes an exception to its medical prohibition for bone setting. I was unsure what to make of these stories or of people who were faithful to a seemingly dangerous creed. Revisiting the beautiful monument at Mount Auburn, I wondered why Eddy, a frail and eccentric human being, had seemed like a prophet to hundreds of thousands of people – someone for whom they willingly risked their lives and health time and again. Some years later, as an assistant professor of English at Washington State University, I taught a class called “Victorians and the Occult” that covered literature inspired by new religious movements such as Spiritualism, Theosophy, Mormonism, and Christian Science. I taught Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) and L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) alongside Eddy’s religious tome, Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures (first edition 1875). Slowly, Chapters 3 and 4 of this book started taking shape in my mind. This was the official beginning of a journey that would eventually lead to the publication of this volume. Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure” was an engrossing project that allowed considerable “scope for the imagination,” to quote Montgomery’s heroine Anne Shirley. But its subject matter aroused uncomfortable feelings for some. I encountered opposition from people who thought that Christian Science and its more secular offshoot, New Thought, were not proper topics for “serious” literary criticism. Others did not appreciate learning that their favorite children’s books – works like The Secret Garden, A Little Princess (1905), or Montgomery’s Anne series – were inspired by Christian Science or its offshoots in any way, shape, or form. Still less could they tolerate the idea that Anglo-American novelist Henry James, consummate stylist and cosmopolite, would have engaged with Eddy or New Thought. I am, therefore, doubly grateful to the funding agencies who generously supported this project in its early and middle stages. These included, interestingly enough, the Christian Science Church, which sponsored my research trip to the Mary Baker Eddy Library in August 2015. The superb librarians there directed me to their collection of Christian Science children’s fiction, a treasure trove of material that scholars have heretofore neglected. They also gave me access to Mary Baker Eddy’s correspondence and, most importantly, helped explain aspects of their beliefs and history

Acknowledgments

xi

that were difficult for me to understand as an outsider to their faith (as far as I could tell, all employees of the Mother Church, librarians included, are followers of the religion). When I gave a lecture about my research at the end of my visit, I met with a surprisingly warm reception from the Christian Scientists I addressed. They were forthcoming about books that inspired them as children (The Secret Garden was a universal favorite) and about the Church’s official stance on imaginative literature, which Eddy discouraged followers from reading. Unlike other audiences I had encountered, the Christian Scientists could readily see aspects of Eddy’s teachings in the mainstream children’s books I discuss here, even if they disagreed with my categorization of their faith as a branch of New Thought. I am also immensely grateful to the Institute for Research in the Humanities (IRH) at the University of Wisconsin, which awarded me a yearlong Robert M. Kingdon Fellowship in religious studies in 2016–2017. This fellowship provided me time and resources to write much of the manuscript, including a first draft of the introduction and the long chapter on Canadian author L. M. Montgomery, composed during a snowy Wisconsin winter. Special thanks go to Susan Stanford Friedman, then the Director of the IRH, for urging me to embrace what was controversial about my topic instead of shying away from it. The most consistent support for my work, however, came from my employer, Saint Louis University, which generously funded visits to archives throughout the United States, including the New York Public Library, the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Harvard’s Houghton Library, and the American Religions Collection at the University of California, Santa Barbara. My department chairs through the years – Sara van den Berg, Jonathan Sawday, and Toby Benis – provided unflagging support for this project, as have my other colleagues in the English Department. Special thanks to those who read early drafts of chapters and grant proposals, particularly Jonathan Sawday, Ellen Crowell, Phyllis Weliver, and Hal Bush, and to those who asked helpful questions at talks I gave about this material. Last but not least, I am grateful for the fall 2018 sabbatical that enabled me to complete a full-length draft of the manuscript. The earliest versions of this material debuted at academic conferences including Visawus (the Victorian Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States), whose members heard drafts of each chapter over the past few years. Special thanks to Diana Maltz, Kristen Mahoney, Neil Hultgren, and Lindsay Wilhelm for their sustained interest in my

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work and for asking questions that strengthened my research. Diana also read an early draft of my chapter on James and provided vital feedback. Kristine Swenson read a later draft of the James material and participated in my seminar, “Alternative Approaches to Health and Wellness,” at the Midwest Victorian Studies Association Annual Conference in 2018. My sincere thanks to each of the seminar participants, whose brilliant papers enhanced my knowledge of New Thought and its cultural milieu. I am also grateful to the members of NAVSA, the North American Victorian Studies Association, who heard drafts of my chapters on Burnett, James, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for their suggestions and encouragement. Some portions of this book previously appeared in print. A draft of Chapter 3, titled “Christian Science versus the Rest Cure in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden,” appeared in a summer 2015 special issue of Modern Fiction Studies devoted to literature and neuroscience. Many thanks to special issue editor Stephen Burn for soliciting this piece and to Modern Fiction Studies and Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to repurpose this material. A partial draft of Chapter 1, titled “New Thought and the Inner Child in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy,” appeared in a December 2018 special issue of NineteenthCentury Literature devoted to new religious movements. I coedited this special issue along with Charles LaPorte, Sebastian Lecourt, and Deanna Kreisel, each of whom provided valuable feedback on my essay. Many thanks to them and to journal editor Jonathan Grossman for their guidance, and to the University of California Press for allowing me to reuse this material. The artwork that appears inside this volume is in the public domain, from Reginald Birch’s illustrations of Little Lord Fauntleroy in Chapter 1 to the photographs of Shirley Temple in the epilogue. But this is not true of the cover art, John Singer Sargent’s oil painting “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” (1885–1886). I am grateful to the Tate Britain for allowing me to use Singer Sargent’s gorgeous artwork for this volume. Individual debts I have incurred are too numerous to name, though I will try. First and foremost, thanks to the members of the Victorian Writing Accountability Group (VWAG) for holding me to my writing goals and providing much-needed encouragement along the way. Jill Galvan, Nora Gilbert, and Diana Bellonby: each of you has strengthened this book in countless ways. Nora deserves special thanks for suggesting Shirley Temple films as a fruitful topic for my epilogue, and for advice on Chapters 1 and 2. Another generous supporter was L. Ashley Squires, who shared parts of her excellent book Healing the Nation: Literature, Progress,

Acknowledgments

xiii

and Christian Science (2017) with me before it was published and pointed me to important resources at the Mary Baker Eddy Library. My former graduate advisor, Joseph Bristow, continued to be a valuable ally and mentor during this second project. So did my former colleague Debbie J. Lee of Washington State University, who read early draft proposals of the manuscript. Finally, I am grateful to the many individuals at Cambridge University Press who shaped this book into its present form, including commissioning editor Bethany Thomas, editorial assistants Natasha Burdon and Rachel Blaifeder, series editors Kate Flint and Clare Pettitt, and the anonymous reviewers whose advice improved the book immeasurably. The person who deserves the greatest thanks, however, is the one who lived with this project, day in and day out, and read every draft along the way: my husband, Kevin Kelsey. I dedicate this book to him, and to my avian office mates, Kramer, Majesty, and Clementine, for providing the loving environment in which this book and I could flourish.

Introduction

In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved children’s classic The Secret Garden (1911), the climax of the story has little to do with the titular garden or the ostensible protagonist, Mary Lennox, a sickly orphan who travels from her native India to her uncle’s Yorkshire estate. Instead, the novel concludes with a dramatic faith healing. Mary’s invalid cousin, Colin Craven, learns that he is not a hunchback, will not die young, and that contrary to his own and his doctor’s belief, he can “run and walk like any other boy” (142). Colin’s cure is accomplished not by mainstream medicine, but by a simple change of attitude, as the narrator explains: “He had made himself believe that he was going to get well, which was really more than half the battle” (143). As a symbol of his dramatic transformation, Colin, who once believed he had a life-threatening allergy to roses, plants his very own “rose in a pot” (134). Burnett’s novel raises some puzzling questions. Why do Mary and the garden itself, who dominate the first two thirds of the book, recede from view in the novel’s dramatic conclusion? How could a once bedridden boy, whom experts believed to be dying, suddenly recover health and mobility merely by believing he is well? And why is the “rose in a pot” a triumphant expression of his recovery? These and many other aspects of the novel can be explained by Burnett’s interest in Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, a faith-healing movement founded in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1879 that discouraged followers from relying on medical doctors and promoted healing through prayer and right thinking. Burnett, who was born in Manchester, England, but moved to America in her teens, underwent Christian Science treatments for her depression and insomnia while staying in Boston and Lynn during the early 1880s (Griswold 237). She also read Eddy’s Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first edition 1875), which followers refer to as the “textbook” of their faith. While Burnett never formally converted to the religion, she maintained a lifelong interest in Christian Science and admiration for its strong female founder, whose favorite flower was the rose.1 1

2

Introduction

Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure” examines The Secret Garden alongside other British and North American novels that engage with Eddy’s Christian Science and a related movement known as New Thought, which touted positive thinking, meditation, and prayer as a means to health and prosperity. New Thought or “mind cure,” as it is sometimes called, consists in the belief that thoughts have the power to change the world. Dwelling on positive thoughts or uplifting words can supposedly bring about desired changes in one’s life, while negative thinking allegedly causes sickness, poverty, and other catastrophic outcomes. According to this belief system, people can influence one another via mental telepathy, and by sending positive or negative vibrations (vibes) into the universe. These ideas were developed in mid-nineteenth-century New England by mesmerist Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866) and his students, Warren Felt Evans, Julius and Annetta Dresser, and Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910). During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Dressers, Evans, and Eddy – followed by their students, such as Emma Curtis Hopkins, Ralph Waldo Trine, and Henry Wood – attracted hundreds of thousands of followers with the promise that they, too, could change their lives through positive thinking. These leaders brought together strands of liberal Christianity, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and Transcendentalism to create an eclectic faith with broad appeal. By 1906, for instance, Christian Science alone boasted 86,000 followers, 72.4 percent of whom were female, while the broader New Thought movement reached larger and more diverse audiences (Satter 5; Albanese 299).2 Historians suggest that New Thought flourished around 1900 because it harnessed the placebo effect to assuage ailments that nineteenth-century medicine could not treat (Harrington 65). Women were disproportionately attracted to the movement due to their dissatisfaction with mainstream medicine and their relative economic powerlessness. New Thought gave such women the illusion of control over their problems and allowed them to wield a variety of soft power within and outside of the domestic sphere.3 New Thought’s broad appeal explains the movement’s influence on classic children’s books of the era, many of which were among the top bestsellers of their day (Griswold vii). These books have, in turn, spawned theatrical and film adaptations that have taken on lives of their own.4 Take for instance, Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and A Little Princess (1905); Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903); L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) and its many sequels; Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna (1913); and Arnold Munk’s The Little Engine That

Introduction

3

Could (1930). These works remain well known and influential today, though few recognize the faith-based messages they contain. If one expands this list to include books written about children but not for them, one might include Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), which mocks New Thought in Little Lord Fauntleroy, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), whose all-female utopia revolves around maternity, childrearing, and avoidance of “horrible ideas” (Herland 240).5 Most of the books listed above are survivals of a once popular genre known as the New Thought novel, whose heyday (from approximately 1880–1930) coincides with the most rapid growth of this emergent movement.6 While some books in this vein were didactic, using “Christian Science,” “New Thought,” or related terms to describe the religious beliefs and practices they depict, by far the most successful and enduring have been those whose religious content is implicit rather than explicit.7 By espousing tenets of this faith within an apparently secular tale, novelists could reach a wider swath of readers, including those belonging to other religious sects (some of whom may have disapproved of New Thought in its more obvious forms). Such readers might later embrace New Thought principles or practices while still considering themselves devout Baptists, Presbyterians, Catholics, or secular humanists. Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure” argues that these New Thought children’s books, read by generations of young and impressionable readers, have conditioned English-speakers worldwide to accept New Thought concepts in purportedly secular areas of life, especially psychology, self-help, and alternative medicine. Historians have ably described how New Thought permeates these realms as well as corporate culture, twelve-step groups, fitness fads, prosperity gospel, and entertainment.8 Most visibly, television personalities like Oprah Winfrey and her protégée, Divine Science pastor and Yoruba priestess Iyanla Vanzant, bring New Thought into countless homes every day via their programming. For instance, Oprah’s Book Club promoted Australian television producer Rhonda Byrne’s self-help tome The Secret (2006), which sold over twenty-eight million copies by recycling New Thought platitudes for a new generation.9 Meanwhile, an offshoot of New Thought called prosperity gospel – whose followers believe God wants them to be rich – flourishes thanks to televangelists such as Creflo Dollar, T.D. Jakes, and Joel Osteen, whose ministry reaches a monthly audience of twenty million and brings in ninety million dollars a year (Dias). According to a 2006 article in Time Magazine, nearly one in five American Christians supports the prosperity movement (Van Biema and

4

Introduction

Chu 2). Followers of prosperity gospel are believed to be partly responsible for the election in 2016 of United States President Donald Trump, who is a disciple of mid-twentieth-century positive thinking guru Norman Vincent Peale and a friend of Osteen (Dias). Even medical doctors have jumped on the New Thought bandwagon, despite the historical rift between medical practitioners and Christian Scientists. Physician authors like Andrew Weil, Deepak Chopra, and Bernie Siegel have endorsed New Thought practices such as positive thinking, daily affirmations, and creative visualization. Some of these doctors – such as Siegel in his book Love, Medicine, and Miracles (1986) – court controversy by suggesting that such methods can cure cancer and heart disease. Siegel, for instance, avers that “happy people generally don’t get sick” and encourages cancer patients to “picture . . . your white blood cells eliminating the disease” (76, 114). Using creative visualization techniques such as these, patients allegedly shrank the size of tumors and metastases and even completely recovered in some cases. Despite their modern medical terminology, stories of miraculous cures told by Siegel and his ilk recall Colin Craven’s faith healing in The Secret Garden. Despite being widely influential in so many areas of modern life, New Thought is poorly understood and seldom studied outside of university theology and history departments. In these academic contexts, however, it has received substantial attention. Early histories of New Thought, such as Charles Braden’s Spirits in Rebellion: the Rise and Development of New Thought (1963), Donald Meyer’s The Positive Thinkers (1965), and Gail Thain Parker’s Mind Cure in New England (1973), emphasize twentiethcentury New Thought writing about wealth and success. By contrast, Beryl Satter’s Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920 (1999) traces nineteenth-century New Thought that privileged women’s health and spirituality over material concerns. Since then, Catherine Albanese’s A Republic of Mind and Spirit: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (2007) situates New Thought within a range of new religious movements and occult trends, while Anne Harrington views New Thought in medical context in The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (2007). Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America (2009) outlines the perils of New Thought when taken to extremes. Finally, Kate Bowler’s Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (2013) describes how early twentieth-century New Thought, Pentecostalism, and muscular Christianity combined to form modern prosperity gospel.

Introduction

5

Research on Christian Science also falls under the broad umbrella of New Thought scholarship. Like me, most historians view Eddy’s faith as an iconoclastic yet highly visible branch of the New Thought movement, though Christian Scientists themselves would deny this affiliation. Among the more even-handed histories of the faith is Steven Gottschalk’s Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism (2006), the first book-length treatment of Eddy’s life and work to make use of the Mary Baker Eddy Library Collection in Boston. Equally fair-minded and comprehensive is Gillian Gill’s biography, Mary Baker Eddy (1999). Rennie Schoepflin’s Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America (2002) examines Eddy’s beliefs through the lens of controversial legal cases wherein parents or Christian Science practitioners are accused of manslaughter or child neglect. Perhaps the most critical history of the faith is Caroline Fraser’s God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church (1999), which resembles muckraking journalism about Eddy written by Georgine Milmine, Mark Twain, and others in the first decade of the twentieth century. As a former Christian Scientist who left the fold, Fraser infuses her history with a degree of autobiography, aligning her book with memoirs by ex-Christian Scientists such as Lucia Greenhouse’s fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (2011) and Barbara Wilson’s Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood (1998). While historians gesture toward New Thought fiction, this topic is tangential rather than central to their arguments. Literary critics, meanwhile, have unjustly neglected New Thought, while writing voluminously on contemporaneous new religious movements such as Mormonism, Spiritualism, and Theosophy on both sides of the Atlantic.10 Related trends such as mesmerism and psychical research have also received considerable attention.11 Only recently have a few literary scholars begun to explore interactions between New Thought and American fiction. Key interventions include L. Ashley Squires’s Healing the Nation: Literature, Progress, and Christian Science (2017), which traces the influence of Eddy’s faith on Theodore Dreiser, Twain, and Burnett. Chapter six of Trysh Travis’s The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey (2009) examines New Thought in Oprah’s Book Club; while chapter five of Claudia Stokes’s The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion (2014) discusses Eddy’s own poetry and short fiction. Finally, chapter eleven of

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Introduction

Jerry Griswold’s Audacious Kids: The Classic American Children’s Story (1992) examines Christian Science overtones of Burnett’s The Secret Garden. Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure” extends Satter’s conversation about New Thought in middle-class domestic settings and builds on Squires’s and Griswold’s work on Burnett and Christian Science. Like these authors, I emphasize earlier, woman-centered varieties of New Thought that privileged health and spirituality over material gain. I also follow Harrington’s lead in exploring connections between New Thought, popular psychology, and alternative healing. The resulting book stands at the crossroads of children’s literature studies and medical humanities, fields that seldom intersect.12 This juxtaposition of perspectives enables us to see how children serve as multivalent metaphors in adult-centered discourses about health and desire. For instance, Colin Craven’s miraculous recovery in The Secret Garden might signal the triumph of mind over matter, the victory of positive thinking over male hysteria, or even the wish-fulfillment fantasy of Burnett’s deceased son, Lionel, coming back to life.13 As this example suggests, New Thought literature circa 1900 was as symbolically rich as it was abundant. For every blockbuster like Little Lord Fauntleroy, there were a dozen more ephemeral literary productions in a similar vein, many of which now languish in archives. Some of these works were written by New Thought leaders with literary aspirations, such as Alice Bunker Stockham and Lida Hood Talbot’s Koradine Letters (1893) and Helen Van Anderson’s The Story of Teddy (1893), both aimed at youth audiences. These texts supplemented the many didactic New Thought novels written for and about adult women, as described in chapter four of Satter’s Each Mind a Kingdom. There is also a fascinating and understudied collection of early twentieth century Christian Science children’s fiction housed at the Mary Baker Library in Boston. Some of these works sold well in their day, such as Clara Louise Burnham’s The Right Princess (1902) and Jewel (1903) and Lilian Bell’s Carolina Lee (1906).14 A few remain popular among Christian Scientists, including Jewel and Katherine M. Yates’s On the Way There (1904), a charming moral allegory reminiscent of Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). Though never officially endorsed by Eddy or her Committee on Publication, such children’s fictions occasionally received favorable notices in Church publications like the Christian Science Sentinel (“Slight Inventions”). There was even a short-lived magazine, The Children’s Star (1907–1912), devoted to Christian Science poetry, games, artwork, and fiction for juvenile audiences, including short stories by Burnham and

New Thought: An Overview

7

Yates. While such little-known works are not the primary focus of this book, this larger corpus of forgotten New Thought fiction demonstrates the surprising range and cultural influence of this genre around the turn of the twentieth century. With this historical background in mind, Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure” aims to restore the New Thought context of novels like Anne of Green Gables, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden, which most readers now view as secular, vaguely spiritual, or Protestant in nature.15 And understandably so: because New Thought lives on in so many mainstream, secular contexts, it can be difficult to recognize as religion when glimpsed in fictional narratives. The next section of this introduction provides a brief overview of the faith movement, its history, and its literary manifestations in order to recapture the cultural milieu in which these novels were written. This information will also help explain how and why New Thought and New Thought fiction infiltrated twentieth-first-century popular culture, psychology, and self-help literature.

New Thought: An Overview At its core, New Thought is a form of magical thinking, which is “the belief, specially characteristic of early childhood and of many mental illnesses, that thoughts, wishes, or special but causally irrelevant actions can cause or influence external events” (OED). One need not look far to find examples of such behavior. A young child, for instance, might imagine that because he has covered his eyes, you can’t see him, or that he might slip down the bathtub drain like a bubble or a sliver of soap. A sufferer from obsessive-compulsive disorder might avoid sidewalks out of a fear that stepping on cracks will break her mother’s back. Such people grant thoughts and seemingly unimportant actions an agency they might not logically seem to possess. But magical thinking is not confined to children and the mentally ill, nor to an allegedly more primitive or gullible historical past.16 Healthy adults continue to engage in this type of thinking in the context of certain religious practices, superstitious behaviors, and altered mental states. New Thought is a specific, optimistic type of magical thinking that pervades North American culture and has made inroads worldwide.17 In the words of Byrne’s The Secret, “your thoughts become things” that “attract . . . like thoughts to you.” Therefore, “If you want to change anything in your life,” you must simply “[change] your thoughts” (25). Byrne here articulates so-called law of attraction, the New Thought idea

8

Introduction

that positive thinking brings positive results. This philosophy suggests that you have only to visualize a desired outcome to achieve it: “Ask, believe, and receive,” as proponents are wont to say, or “Name it and claim it” (Ehrenreich 60). Millions of individuals have applied these practices in their own lives, hoping to attain improved health, financial prosperity, better relationships, or to meet specific goals such as weight loss. When they succeed, these New Thought enthusiasts chalk up their success to their mental efforts; when they fail, they often blame themselves for insufficiently sincere positive thinking. By such means, New Thought retains its hold on individuals who could seek more practical solutions to their problems (such as going to a doctor, joining a dating website, going on a diet, etc.). The seductive aspects of this philosophy include its hopeful affect, relative ease of application, and elevation of individuals to Godlike status through their alleged power to transform their surroundings. While this type of positive thinking is ubiquitous in certain areas of modern life, most people do not realize that it has a name and a history dating back to nineteenth-century New England, nor that it began as a religious movement. New Thought also has ties to mesmerism, a pseudoscientific practice that began in Paris in 1778 and took root in America in 1836 following Caribbean slaveholder Charles Poyen’s successful US lecture tour (Ogden 25, 29).18 Early mesmerists claimed to produce miraculous cures by manipulating a magnetic fluid inside patients. By passing their hands repeatedly over the patient or touching them with metal rods, mesmerists produced trembling and convulsions that “disrupted . . . unhealthy flows of animal magnetism,” with allegedly therapeutic effects (Harrington 44). Eddy’s mentor and personal healer, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, practiced a modified version of mesmerism that inspired the first New Thought leaders. Instead of manipulating magnetic fluids through the laying on of hands, Quimby created a mesmeric-style clairvoyant rapport with patients in order to alter their beliefs. Specifically, he attempted to cure patients’ false belief in sickness: “Illness, he said, was caused by people’s false beliefs, their failure to recognize that the body was a reflection of the mind and that the mind was whole and perfect . . . change the mind, correct the beliefs, and the body healed of its own accord” (113). Eddy channeled elements of Quimby’s philosophy when she argued that the body does not exist except in the mind and that all is Spirit, not Matter; sickness is thus an expression of a false belief that Matter is real.19 Some, like Julius Dresser, claimed that Eddy plagiarized Quimby’s views in her magnum opus, Science and Health, an accusation that would haunt Eddy

New Thought: An Overview

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and her church for decades (Gill 138–146). But by aligning Science and Health with the Bible, Eddy took Quimby’s principles in a more Christological direction than his other devotees, such as the Dressers or Warren Felt Evans, fellow patients who became New Thought pioneers in their own right (Squires, Healing the Nation 66). Meanwhile, Eddy attempted to distance Christian Science from its mesmeric roots by denouncing the practices of her rivals (especially competing New Thought sects) as “malicious animal magnetism,” contrasting their heterodox methods with her own Bible-based practices. Unlike Eddy, other New Thought leaders had “no codified religious doctrine”; instead, they liberally mixed heterodox religious traditions like Spiritualism, Theosophy, and elements of Buddhism and Vedanta with their own distinctive philosophies (66). From these eclectic roots in mid-nineteenth-century pseudoscience and heterodox faith practices, New Thought would grow into a ubiquitous part of American life. Various official branches of New Thought survive today, the best known being Christian Science with tens of thousands of members worldwide – down from a peak of 269,000 in 1936 (Squires, Healing the Nation 3; Satter 5).20 In addition to being more Bible-based than other branches of New Thought, Christian Science is more hierarchical and restrictive. Unlike members of other New Thought sects, Christian Scientists notoriously eschew mainstream medicine in favor of treatment by prayer. Although Eddy’s Mother Church ostensibly leaves medical decisions up to the individual, Christian Science branch churches can strip members of leadership positions for undergoing surgery, taking painkillers, and so forth (Fraser 131). The gradual decline of this religion – suggested by dwindling subscriptions to church periodicals and the closing of branch churches – may have something to do with the increasing efficacy of mainstream medical care over the last century and a half (Fraser 399–400). Christian Science also faces competition from alternative health practices currently in vogue, including imports from the East. As of 2015, according to Steve Silberman, “Americans now consult their homeopaths, naturopaths, herbalists, acupuncturists, chiropractors, and Reiki workers more often than they see their primary care physicians” (70). This fact suggests that widespread distrust of mainstream medicine persists well into the twenty-first century. But skeptics are no longer flocking to Christian Science for answers. Other prominent New Thought ministries active today include Divine Science Federation International, Religious Science, and Unity Church based in Kansas City, whose periodical Daily Word (1924–present) had

10

Introduction

1.2 million subscribers as of 2002 (Albanese 434). Because these branches of New Thought tend to be more flexible in their application – with some, like Unity Church, calling themselves movements as opposed to religious sects – they may stand a better chance of long-term survival than Christian Science (430). New Thought also thrives outside of the United States, as suggested by the success of Tokyo-based New Thought organization Seicho-No-Ie, founded in 1930, which had 1.5 million members worldwide in 2014 (“Summary of Seicho-No-Ie”). Since the mid-twentieth century, Seicho-No-Ie (loosely translated as “House of Growth”) has been the largest organized New Thought sect in the world, with substantial followings in Japan, Brazil, the United States, and elsewhere (Braden 499). Although Seicho-No-Ie differs from other New Thought groups by incorporating aspects of traditional Japanese Buddhism, its teachings otherwise resemble those of Religious Science and Unity Church in the United States (496). For members of these sects, New Thought consists of a set of beliefs and practices as well as a distinct religious outlook in which God is love, good is universal, and spirit (mind) triumphs over matter (one’s body and surroundings).21 According to this view, sickness, death, and other evils are illusions generated by our flawed understanding of a perfect universe. These illusions can be corrected through continual prayer and right thinking. New Thought thus fostered “healthy-minded attitudes” and feelings of “courage, hope, and trust,” as Harvard psychologist William James wrote in his influential book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902 [91]). New Thought’s rosy perspective appealed to downcast Americans in the wake of their country’s devastating Civil War, especially to those afflicted by that quintessential disease of modern life, neurasthenia or “Americanitis,” as James called it (Beck). Symptoms of this condition, whose emergence coincided with the rise of New Thought, included depression, anxiety, headaches, insomnia, indigestion, and a host of other stress-related ailments. Physicians such as Silas Weir Mitchell and George Miller Beard attributed such symptoms to the increasing speed and complexity of urban life in Gilded-Age America.22 While New Thought’s hopeful tone comforted nervous Americans, the religious movement also provided them with welcome relief from the fire and brimstone Calvinism of their Puritan forebears, epitomized by Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741). For instance, Eddy’s spiritual autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection (1891), describes her disillusionment with the Congregationalist faith of her youth, particularly its emphasis on predestination and its “belief in a final

New Thought: An Overview

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judgment-day, in the dangers of endless punishment, and in a Jehovah merciless towards unbelievers” (13). When Eddy developed the tenets of Christian Science later in life, she would largely erase these elements from her new religion, even if her writing retained a tinge of Calvinist rigor.23 In their relentless optimism, nineteenth-century New Thought followers reacted against what they saw as morbid approaches towards spirituality and health that were doing real harm to faithful Christians. Many testimonials by New Thought converts describe how the writers were made ill by the stern Calvinism of their era and the belief that sickness is a visitation from God that must be stoically endured.24 New Thought fiction includes similar anecdotes. In Henry Wood’s novel Edward Burton (1891), for example, the eponymous protagonist suffers from a protracted bout of neurasthenia after attending a religious seminary where Edwards’s sermons are held in high regard. After medical remedies fail, the hero discovers New Thought and quickly recovers. Wood’s tale mirrored the author’s own life, as he experienced a nervous collapse prior to his New Thought conversion. For similar reasons, many members of traditional Protestant sects explored New Thought as a complement to (rather than a replacement of) their beliefs. For example, Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, a lifelong Presbyterian and devout minister’s wife, wrote popular novels with New Thought content. She and her readers apparently saw no friction between the disparate religious views she espoused. Like Eddy, Montgomery turned to New Thought as a relief from the Calvinist beliefs in predestination and hellfire and as a treatment for her own ailments. In her private journals from 1891, for instance, Montgomery wrote that orthodox preachers “could never make me believe that God ordains any of his creatures to eternal torture ‘for his own good-will and pleasure’” (qtd. in Rubio, Wings 63). The author also experimented with various New Thought practices to reduce her neurasthenic symptoms, which included insomnia, headaches, and alternating moods of elation and depression. This example shows that heterodox believers like Montgomery could still be respected members, even leaders, of traditional Protestant congregations, without necessarily incurring the disapproval of their peers.25 Another high-profile (but considerably more problematic) example is Trump, who is both a Presbyterian and a devotee of Norman Vincent Peale’s gospel of success, which is derived from New Thought (Burke; Dias). That one can hold New Thought beliefs alongside other religious views has vastly increased the movement’s reach and popular appeal.

12

Introduction

While New Thought softened the sterner elements of early nineteenthcentury Calvinism to create a kinder, gentler faith, it also required followers to embrace denial as a way of life – sometimes quite literally, as in guided meditations where believers affirmed positive thoughts (for example, “God is Love,” “Life is good”) and denied negative ones (Hopkins, Class Lessons 8–9). In the 1880s and 90s, for example, popular New Thought leader Emma Curtis Hopkins instructed her students to repeat “There is no SIN! SICKNESS! DEATH!” and “There is no reality in evil” until they could internalize these ideas (27). Rather than seeing the world as it is, such believers saw it as they wished it to be, for better or worse. Ehrenreich points out that positive thinking can be “delusional” if carried to extremes, and that a certain amount of “anxious vigilance” is necessary to survival (195, 199). Perhaps more ominously, she suggests how New Thought can be harnessed for purposes of social control. New Thought’s emphasis on optimism and personal responsibility, whether directed at disgruntled workers, the unemployed, or cancer patients, encourages individuals to focus on self-improvement rather than social change. While no one would recommend relentless negativity as an approach to life’s problems, Ehrenreich’s criticisms of New Thought seem well-founded. One must also question whether New Thought in its various forms leads to personal happiness, as its proponents allege. Conventional wisdom suggests that positive thinking is good for you, like eating your vegetables. In a medical context, positive thinking has a placebo effect that may account for some of the apparently miraculous cures ascribed to New Thought and Christian Science (Harrington 103–138). Even skeptics would probably agree that optimism is at least better than unrelieved pessimism or a defeatist attitude. But New Thought in its various forms can do considerable harm. Consider the tragic fates of children whose Christian Scientist parents refuse to seek medical assistance for treatable ailments such as earaches, diabetes, appendicitis, and so forth. Since the nineteenth century, accidental deaths of Christian Scientists’ children have spawned contentious legal cases and garnered negative publicity in America and abroad, as historians like Schoepflin have described. Such cases form the emotional core of Emily Fridlund’s bestselling novel History of Wolves (2017), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize, and of Fraser’s God’s Perfect Child – both written by current or former Christian Scientists.26 Still other writers, like memoirists Greenhouse and Wilson, recount the agonizing deaths of adult Christian Scientists who refused medical

New Thought: An Overview

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treatment for serious ailments until it was too late. These stories remind us that while adult Christian Scientists make the conscious choice to opt out of medical treatment – unlike children, who have no say in the matter – their decisions may still cause unnecessary suffering for themselves and their loved ones. Adult Christian Scientists may also be swayed by familial or peer pressure, like Greenhouse’s late mother, whose husband made his living as a Christian Science practitioner. To protect his professional reputation, he concealed symptoms of his wife’s advanced colon cancer from family and friends and discouraged her from seeking medical attention, thus hastening her death. Oddly enough, a similar case inspired the 1991 Metallica song “The God That Failed” from the commercially successful Black Album. Lead singer James Hetfield’s mother was a Christian Scientist who died after refusing treatment for cancer. Even in cases where no lives are at stake, relentless positivity can set people up for disappointment. It can also foster what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism,” that is, “a relation . . . [that] exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” (1). She cites, for instance, the American Dream as one “fantasy of the good life” that may be less available to modern Americans than it was to their parents or grandparents, especially those who grew up during the relatively stable economic period following the Second World War (1).27 Even though such optimistic fantasies can “make life bearable” in the present, striving for unrealistic goals eventually leads to frustration, dissociation, and cognitive dissonance (14). While Berlant views cruel optimism as a distinctly modern phenomenon, there are striking similarities between the current cultural moment (which has been called the “new Gilded Age”) and New Thought’s heyday around the turn of the twentieth century. In the United States, the period from 1870 to 1900 witnessed economic booms and busts that fostered a sense of precarity among ordinary citizens. While robber barons like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller possessed the lion’s share of wealth and influence, working-class laborers (especially women, people of color, and immigrants) struggled to earn subsistencelevel wages. Then as now, New Thought tended to obscure the inequalities of American life, while giving people an illusory sense of control over their fluctuating personal circumstances. It is no coincidence that people in economically vulnerable demographics, such as women and African Americans, have numbered among New Thought’s most visible and enthusiastic proponents, from the nineteenth century until the present day.28

14

Introduction

If New Thought sometimes trespassed against common sense – or foreclosed avenues for social awareness and political activism – it was nonetheless useful to early followers, who included an eclectic mix of proto-feminists, nervous invalids, and would-be millionaires striving for business success. In his satirical novel Babbitt (1922), Sinclair Lewis paints a humorous picture of a New Thought meeting circa 1920, led by the suggestively named “Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge.” His description reveals much about the composition of the movement: Here were gathered sixty-five women and ten men. Most of the men slouched in their chairs and wiggled, while their wives sat rigidly at attention, but two of them – red-necked, meaty men – were as respectably devout as their wives. They were newly rich contractors who, having bought houses, motors, hand-painted pictures, and gentlemanliness, were now buying a refined ready-made philosophy. (356)

As this passage suggests, New Thought was initially most attractive to middle-class white women, particularly during the 1880s and 1890s, when the movement’s main emphases were spirituality and healing. Many of the women drawn to New Thought suffered from neurasthenia. Faced with a daunting array of medical treatment options – from institutionalization to gynecological surgery to rest cures consisting of bed rest and force feeding – such women understandably viewed mind cure as a benign alternative. Still other women, like Babbitt’s neglected wife, Myra, used New Thought to cope with domestic troubles such as demanding husbands, misbehaving children, and downward economic mobility – though they might not say so outright. As Myra diplomatically explains to her spouse, New Thought appeals to her because “women need inspiration now” (Lewis 356). But New Thought was more than a coping strategy. It also provided women with economic and leadership opportunities at a time when they were denied the vote and barred from entry into most professions. Women like the fictional Opal Emerson Mudge could earn a comfortable living as New Thought lecturers or healers, though few became anywhere near as rich or influential as Hopkins or Eddy. Moreover, as Satter emphasizes, New Thought allowed women to exercise a variety of soft power that circumvented conservative nineteenth-century gender norms, but still granted women unprecedented cultural and religious authority.29 Most, though not all, of the New Thought novels discussed in this book, including those written after 1900, can be traced back to this earlier feminist strain of the religion. This may help to explain why some of the

New Thought: An Overview

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titles I discuss, such as The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, or Anne of Green Gables, remain perennial favorites with women readers. In contrast to the feminine atmosphere of early New Thought, the next generation of New Thought leaders attracted male converts by focusing on financial success and mental mastery of one’s environment through positive thinking. This prosperity-oriented New Thought took root around 1900 and reached full flower during the Great Depression. The two “newly rich contractors” in Lewis’s fictional New Thought meeting probably represent this later strand of the movement, which remains visible today in prosperity gospel and in works such as Napoleon Hill’s enduring bestseller Think and Grow Rich (1937).30 In the mid-twentieth century, pastor Norman Vincent Peale continued this tradition of New Thought success literature with his book The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which sold millions of copies and spent 186 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list (Burke). Since then, corporations have turned to positive thinking to motivate stressed employees and maximize productivity, especially following the waves of corporate downsizing that began in the 1980s (Ehrenreich 108). New Thought-inspired gurus such as Tony Robbins, Zig Ziglar, and Tom Peters earn hefty speaker’s fees at corporate-sponsored events by exhorting employees to harness the law of attraction to achieve their full potential. As Ehrenreich explains, such events frequently resemble political rallies or religious revivals rather than staid corporate affairs; employees often break down in tears or get caught up in the rush of “motivational adrenaline” that these charismatic speakers provide (106). On the flip side of the coin, prosperity gospel sermons may employ the same motivational platitudes offered by Robbins, Ziglar, and others. These alliances trouble the still prevalent assumption that religion and capitalism inhabit separate realms or follow separate historical trajectories, as scholars such as Graham Ward, Russel McCutcheon, and Michael Kaufmann have suggested (Branch 95–96). In most histories of New Thought, financial success literature and prosperity gospel overshadow the feminist, health-conscious strain of New Thought popular in the late-nineteenth century. But both strands help us understand the current intellectual climate. When one examines New Thought novels, it becomes especially clear that the earlier, woman-centered strand of New Thought never died out – it simply went underground, surviving in fiction, self-help books, and certain types of psychotherapy. Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure” examines these survivals among other legacies of New Thought novels. One reason for New

16

Introduction

Thought’s persistence, I argue, is its tendency to blur the line between sacred and secular. In a recent issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature devoted to new religious movements (NRMs), Charles LaPorte and Sebastian Lecourt observe that NRMs such as New Thought, Spiritualism, and Theosophy pose unique challenges to the secularization thesis: that is, the once widespread (and still surprisingly resilient) belief among religious scholars, philosophers, and historians that modernization goes hand in hand with increasing secularism. While NRMs might seem to provide evidence against the secularization thesis, they actually raise tantalizing questions about what counts as religion and why: Are NRMs proof that we have never been secular? Are they evidence that modernity experiences moments of counter-secularization? Or might their existence somehow corroborate the secularization story? For in fact there exists a healthy sociological tradition of interpreting secularization as a process of religious compartmentalization that also enables proliferation. (LaPorte and Lecourt 149)

NRMs also suggest the triumph of the free market in the realm of religion as in other aspects of modern life: “Religion, unmoored from the domain of official power, migrates into the realm of consumer choice” (LaPorte and Lecourt 150). This is perhaps especially true of New Thought, which is historically allied with capitalist enterprise in ways other NRMs are not. Fiction has helped New Thought survive by intentionally blurring boundaries between religion and entertainment. Novels like The Secret Garden package faith-based messages in appealing tales directed at lay readers and young people. As a result, their religious content is simultaneously absorbed and overlooked (or at least, overlooked as religion). In contrast to early twentieth-century readers who immediately recognized The Secret Garden as “a Christian Science book,” modern readers are unlikely to view concepts like positive thinking, thought-transference, or the law of attraction as religious, perhaps because they have seen such ideas presented in secular contexts (V. Burnett 377). Predictably, such New Thought fictions have nurtured generations of “spiritual, but not religious” readers who often have difficulty pinpointing the sources of their views about God, spirituality, and the afterlife.31 This book also explores the interplay between New Thought literature and popular psychology. The works discussed here helped disseminate psychological concepts and practices we now take for granted, such as silent meditation, creative visualization, daily affirmations and denials, and the inner child.32 In twenty-first-century psychology and self-help

Chapters

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literature, the inner child stands for a person’s true or spiritual self, which can serve as a reservoir of strength and untapped creativity. The inner child can also be wounded by past traumas and require healing to reach its full potential. This figure descends from the feminist strand of New Thought promoted by Hopkins, Eddy, and others in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Both then and now, the inner child has helped women negotiate conflicting demands on their time and intervene in ongoing debates about women’s agency and status. Predictably, the antifeminist pushback to the idea of the inner child has been fierce, whether it comes from acerbic reviewers’ pens, literary authors like Henry James, or sketch comedy shows such as Saturday Night Live (1975-present), which mocked this and other self-help concepts via Al Franken’s recurring character Stuart Smalley in the 1990s. These examples suggest the degree to which New Thought and New Thought-derived ideas are subjected to ridicule or outright dismissal by scholars, journalists, and other cultural gatekeepers. Dismissing New Thought is potentially dangerous, however, because it leaves unexamined the many legacies of this religious movement in the twenty-first century.

Chapters Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure” draws on a wide range of sources to explore the role of New Thought in society. But the volume’s primary focus is on fiction as opposed to religious tracts, public lectures, or popular self-help books. Admittedly, some of this fiction was written by early New Thought leaders or Christian Scientists for didactic purposes. Such writers occasionally used literary works to convert nonbelievers or to demonstrate how one might apply the abstract principles of these faiths in daily life. The latter task was crucial given the sheer impenetrability of one of New Thought’s central texts, Eddy’s Science and Health, whose “unmeaning tangle of twists and snarls” confused even her most devoted followers, and provided ample comic fodder for Twain (Yates 222). To the extent that New Thought fiction taught believers how to “demonstrate” their faith through action, this study belongs to the domain of lived religion, a subfield of religious studies that emphasizes the everyday practices of laymen rather than church doctrine or textual exegesis, and that tries to “reclaim and establish the importance of texts and activities that all too readily are ignored or trivialized,” in the words of historian David Hall (ix).

18

Introduction

Didactic religious fictions like Wood’s Edward Burton, Stockham and Hood’s Koradine Letters, or Burnham’s Jewel were arguably less concerned with “art for art’s sake” than with “nonliterary ways of reading” that privileged emotional engagement, immediacy, and practical application of religious principles, as historian Erin Smith suggests (3). By contrast, the classic literary works foregrounded in this volume – such as The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, Herland, and The Turn of the Screw – are considerably more sophisticated and widely acclaimed. These works won popular success and critical accolades in their own day and continue to be widely read and taught in the twenty-first century. While these novels’ New Thought content may have buoyed their initial success, their enduring fame has more to do with their literary quality than with any overt religious message. Indeed, the authors examined here range from New Thought devotees like Burnett to interested dabblers like Gilman and Montgomery to skeptics like James, demonstrating that New Thought’s reach extended well beyond those affiliated with the faith. Accordingly, few of the mainstream literary works discussed here promoted New Thought dogmatically or uncritically.33 Burnett’s novels entertainingly dramatize situations central to New Thought, such as the practice of faith healing or the achievement of prosperity through positive thinking (think of Colin Craven’s miraculous cure or Little Lord Fauntleroy’s rags to riches transformation). But while she was deeply interested in Christian Science, Burnett denied formal affiliation with the religion. She aimed to inspire and uplift readers rather than to convert them. Meanwhile, Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and its sequels use New Thought to soften the fire-and-brimstone Calvinism that dominates the Presbyterian community of Avonlea, thereby demonstrating the potential compatibility of New Thought and competing Protestant faiths. Gilman’s Herland takes Eddy’s views on the obsolescence of marriage and childbirth in surprisingly literal directions, suggesting intriguing overlaps between first-wave feminism and New Thought. Finally, James’s The Turn of the Screw takes a critical view of New Thought in response to Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and its unrealistic ideal of childhood innocence. These literary authors grappled with New Thought in the form as well as the substance of their works. Consummate literary stylist James famously creates a “trap” for readers of The Turn of the Screw by employing an unreliable narrator whose ambiguous prose raises more questions than it answers (Felman 101). His novella confounds readers seeking easy solutions to questions about spirituality, as discussed in chapter two. Only by

Chapters

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reading his work alongside Little Lord Fauntleroy – a seemingly unlikely counterpoint – can we discern James’s disapproval of New Thought attitudes towards children and child rearing. Gilman, by contrast, professes to be ignorant or unconcerned by matters of style in works such as Herland. But by employing a literary narrative as opposed to her usual genre – the political treatise – Gilman can present her ideas about childcare, eugenics, and women’s work in an unfamiliar fictional setting that helps insulate them from controversy. Choosing utopian science fiction as a mode, meanwhile, allows Gilman to sidestep the real-world problems that might arise if these controversial political ideas were applied in practice. As a result of these choices, Herland notoriously lacks suspense or individual character development. Yet these seeming “flaws” evoke the peaceful heaven on earth touted by New Thought leaders, where selflessness and maternal love reign supreme. These examples suggest the importance of literary style, even when authors deny its significance. As Gilman’s Herland shows, simply choosing to write fiction instead of polemic is a decision with far-reaching consequences. This volume showcases multiple stylistic possibilities by covering novels from various genres (children’s fiction, popular romances, Bildungsromane, gothic horror, and utopian science fiction) that combine New Thought with a focus on childhood and adolescence. While some of these works are justly forgotten, others remain central to our collective cultural consciousness. Most obviously, The Turn of the Screw is one of the most widely taught and studied works in the English language. Though less canonical, The Secret Garden is no less well known. Large numbers of women feel an intense and lifelong attachment to Burnett’s most famous novel, as her biographer, Gretchen Gerzina, explains (xiv). Christian Scientists are even more likely than most to feel drawn to The Secret Garden, as I learned during a visit to the Mary Baker Eddy Library in 2015.34 Anne of Green Gables – which has sold over fifty million copies since its first publication in 1908 – likewise serves as an important touchstone for many female readers (Gammel, Looking for Anne 13; Ross 422). Anne even enjoys an unlikely popularity in Japan, where it has spawned cartoons, a now-defunct theme park (“Canadian World” in Hokkaido), and a vogue for Prince Edward Island tourism (Trillin 216–217). New Thought played a role in this unique cross-cultural phenomenon. The translation of Anne into Japanese in 1952 coincided with the rise of Seicho-No-Ie, which attracted around two million members in the decades following the Second World War (Akamatsu, “Japanese Readings” 208; “Seicho-No-Ie” 214). This Tokyobased New Thought movement primed Japanese readers to see Anne of

20

Introduction

Green Gables as representing “a positive way of thinking” that “make[s] life more beautiful” (Akamatsu, “Japanese Readings” 208). The above example shows that the popularity of New Thought novels is not limited to English speakers or to Western nations. But I suspect that these works have been most influential in Anglophone regions where they are routinely read during childhood. Accordingly, the book’s chapters focus on American authors like Gilman as well as British, transatlantic, and Canadian authors who helped import this religious movement to their native lands. What these diverse authors have in common, aside from an interest in New Thought, is ongoing concern with mental illness. Three of the four authors discussed here – Burnett, Gilman, and Montgomery – experienced symptoms suggestive of bipolar disorder, while James’s family was riddled with mental illness, from his sister Alice’s nervous invalidism to his father Henry Senior’s religious hallucinations. These authors’ interest in and experience of chronic mental illness may help to explain why their New Thought fictions intersect with twentieth-century popular psychology in suggestive ways. For instance, Chapter one examines Burnett’s New Thought blockbuster Little Lord Fauntleroy alongside contemporaneous New Thought writing to uncover the origins of the modern inner child. Emma Curtis Hopkins, the leading New Thought teacher of the 1880s and 1890s, described an idealized “Man Child” within each adult woman who could lead her to spiritual serenity and worldly success. Burnett fictionalized this figure in Little Lord Fauntleroy, whose eponymous child hero helps his mother achieve undreamed-of wealth and status. He also serves as her proxy outside of the domestic sphere, allowing her to reach personal goals without appearing selfish or inappropriately ambitious. The novel’s enormous popularity may have had something to do with this symbiotic relationship between mother and son. Then as now, the inner child helped women reconcile social pressures to be selfless and giving with career pursuits and self-indulgent behavior. The persistence of the inner child suggests that contemporary feminism still has work to do in enabling women to embrace opportunities without guilt. Chapter two turns to Henry James’s supernatural classic The Turn of the Screw to show the backlash of the literary intelligentsia against New Thought and the inner child. James’s famous ghost story and his earlier work The Bostonians (1886) number among several prominent literary works of the era that make fun of Christian Science and New Thought, including Lewis’s Babbitt; Edith Wharton’s short story “A Journey” (1899); Twain’s unfinished

Chapters

21

work “The Secret History of Eddypus, World Empire” (1901–1902); and Twain’s essays about Eddy collected in the volume Christian Science (1907). This chapter reads The Turn of the Screw as a critical response to Little Lord Fauntleroy that mocks the book’s saccharine portrayal of innocent children and its New Thought overtones. While siblings Miles and Flora initially resemble Fauntleroy in their youth, beauty, and apparent innocence, their subsequent actions could not be more different. Whereas Burnett’s protagonist heals his grieving mother and depressed grandfather and brings them spiritual peace, Miles and Flora lead their governess to the brink of madness by consorting with evil spirits. James, who wrote so perceptively about the inner life of a child a year earlier in What Maisie Knew (1897), deliberately portrayed Miles and Flora as opaque, unsympathetic, and allied with dark forces. In so doing, he skewered New Thought’s relentless idealization of children as conduits to God. He also paved the way for more recent depictions of evil children in horror fiction and in films such as The Bad Seed (1956), The Omen (1976), or We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011). Chapter three returns to Burnett, examining her classic work The Secret Garden as a feminist, Christian Scientist response to the rest cure. This cure, which was invented by Philadelphia neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell in the 1870s, involved bed rest, isolation, and force feeding. Burnett herself underwent at least three modified rest cures during her lifetime, but lasting relief of her symptoms eluded her. In The Secret Garden, child protagonist Mary Lennox stands in for charismatic leader Mary Baker Eddy, who died shortly after the serial version of The Secret Garden began its run in The American Magazine in November 1910. Mary Lennox heals her bedridden cousin Colin Craven by convincing him to abandon a regimen of enforced bed rest and social isolation. Colin’s father, Archibald Craven, is likewise healed of his depression when he sees the changes Mary has wrought in his son. By showing a young girl curing hysterical males, Burnett inverted the gender politics of the rest cure and contradicted its key principles. Chapter four turns to Montgomery, the sole Canadian author in this volume. New Thought provided Montgomery with an escape from the rigid Presbyterianism of her rural Prince Edward Island community and helped to assuage her mental health complaints, ranging from chronic insomnia to alternating moods of elation and despair. Ultimately, New Thought was not enough to save Montgomery, who committed suicide in 1942 – a long-held secret finally revealed by her heirs in 2008. But New Thought permeates her fiction, particularly Anne of Green Gables, which features an inspired girl child in the New Thought mold. Anne Shirley’s revitalizing influence on her adoptive parents, her remarkable healing of

22

Introduction

a dying baby, and her transformative imagination all signal her conformity to this role. So do her homosocial relationships with female “kindred spirits” like her “bosom friend,” Diana Barry. As Satter relates, unusually close relationships between women were a common feature of New Thought novels, which appealed to lesbian and bisexual readers and women seeking escape from oppressive marriages (134). The conclusion of this chapter turns to Montgomery’s later novel, the adult-themed comedy The Blue Castle (1926), to show that New Thought was more than a passing fancy for the author. Rather, it was a coping strategy that she returned to throughout her life and explored in various genres, from children’s literature to romances for adult readers. Chapter five examines the work of feminist writer and lecturer Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the only unequivocally American writer in this volume and the sole political activist. While not a children’s author per se, Gilman foregrounded motherhood and childcare in her polemical works and her fiction. She also included unexpected borrowings from New Thought in her novels and life writing. For instance, Gilman’s utopian novel Herland, which appeared serially in her self-published magazine, The Forerunner (1909–1916), resonates with Eddy’s Science and Health. Gilman’s all-female utopia, in which parthenogenesis has replaced sexual reproduction, resembles Eddy’s imagined future in which “there will be no more marrying nor giving in marriage” and women and men will increasingly resemble one another in body and mind (Science and Health 64).35 The Herlanders’ worship of a loving “Mother Spirit,” their reverence for maternity, and their practice of communal child-rearing likewise mirror Eddy’s androgynous “Father-Mother God, all-harmonious” and her emphasis on maternal feeling. Herland thus fulfills Eddy’s millennial predictions as well as Gilman’s feminist ideals. In selecting material for these chapters, I have had to make difficult choices. For instance, I could just as easily have devoted chapter four to Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm as Anne of Green Gables, two very similar novels written only five years apart. Both feature optimistic young orphans (or half-orphans, in Rebecca’s case) whose charming personalities win over their adoptive guardians and earn them a respected place in their communities. Though these “Growing-Girl” narratives chronicle the maturation of their heroines, they leave their protagonists arrested on the threshold of adulthood; Rebecca does not marry her benefactor Adam Ladd, despite many narrative hints to this effect, while Anne’s marriage to Gilbert Blythe is deferred until book five of the series (Hatch 32; Griswold 86).36

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In their heyday, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Anne of Green Gables were similarly beloved and culturally influential. Both numbered among the top bestsellers of their decade and inspired popular screen adaptations in the teens, twenties, and thirties (Griswold vii-viii). Ultimately, I decided to focus on the Anne books due to their more enduring influence in the twenty-first century, as attested by a spate of recent film and television adaptations. I was also intrigued by Anne’s Canadian origins and by the book’s popularity in Japan, both of which show the spread of New Thought beyond US borders. Also unjustly neglected here is Pollyanna, a New Thought novel that enjoyed remarkable success upon its first publication, selling over a million copies and going through forty-seven printings by 1920 (215). The book also inspired thirteen sequels, a popular board game by Parker Brothers, and several film versions, the most memorable being Disney’s 1960 adaptation starring Hayley Mills. But Pollyanna has not stood the test of time as well as similar predecessors like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm or the Anne books, perhaps because its heroine comes across as preachy and saccharine to modern readers. Though no longer widely read, the book survives in the popular lexicon (a “Pollyanna” refers, predictably, to an excessively cheerful or optimistic person). While I touch on Rebecca and Pollyanna in Chapter four and in the epilogue, I leave it to future scholars of New Thought fiction to give these works the extended attention they deserve. These omissions notwithstanding, I have tried to evoke the richness and variety of New Thought novels as well as their coherence around womanand child-centered themes. While many of these works are directed at young people, they address perennial feminist concerns such as the pursuit of meaningful careers, work–life balance, childcare, and the creation of a distinctively feminine spirituality. They also confront mental health problems like depression and anxiety with refreshing honesty, if also with a degree of wishful thinking. In part because they are often classed as popular or young adult literature, such works function as Trojan Horses disguising controversial messages as harmless entertainment. These are just some of the reasons why these works remain widely read, beloved, and immensely influential in ways that scholars are just beginning to understand.

chapter 1

The Inner Child in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Sara Crewe

One of the most recognizable pop-culture tropes of the late twentieth century was the inner child, an idea that has been a cornerstone of self-help culture, twelve-step groups, and influential forms of psychotherapy from the 1970s to the present day.1 In these contexts, the inner child represents a person’s original or true self. This inner self is sometimes called the “Imago Dei,” the “I Am,” or the “Divine Child,” indicating a spiritual dimension (Bradshaw 264, 177; Whitfield 9). It is likewise a repository of wisdom, creativity, and authenticity that can lead its adult counterpart to happiness and prosperity. But this divine being can also be terribly damaged. Books on the subject often speak of a “wounded inner child” that must be reparented to heal past trauma, thus freeing up the energies of the authentic self. In therapeutic contexts, the existence of the inner child and its psychological significance are seldom questioned; in popular culture, however, the inner child has been frequently ridiculed. For instance, Wendy Kaminer’s critique of the recovery movement, I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional (1992), states that “Inside every addict is a holy child yearning to be free” – an assertion that blurs the line between mockery and accurate representation of inner child theory (19). Meanwhile, former US senator and sketch comedian Al Franken’s book I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone it, People Like Me! (1992) – written in the voice of his Saturday Night Live character Stuart Smalley, a “caring nurturer and a member of several twelve-step programs” – describes Stuart appeasing his inner child by writing about dysfunctional forest animals (n.p.).2 As these examples show, the inner child can be easily dismissed as a symptom of New Age goofiness or navel-gazing narcissism.3 Perhaps this is why there have been few, if any, scholarly attempts to provide the inner child with an intellectual genealogy. Kaminer’s description of “inner child theory” as an “eclectic blend of Jung, New Age mysticism, holy child mythology, pop psychology, and psychoanalytic theories about narcissism” 24

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provides some helpful clues, but oversimplifies the many cultural trends that coalesce in this figure (17). Self-help writers provide even less context, preferring to represent the inner child as timeless. Physician Charles Whitfield, whose Healing the Child Within (1986) sold over one million copies, offers a characteristically imprecise history: The concept of the Child Within has been a part of our world culture for at least two thousand years. Carl Jung called it the “Divine Child” and Emmet Fox called it the “Wonder Child.” Psychotherapists Alice Miller and Donald Winnicott refer to it as the “true self.” Many in the field of alcoholism and other chemical dependence call it the “inner child.” (1)

While Whitfield provides some leads – pointing, for instance, toward Jungian psychoanalysis, mid-twentieth-century psychological studies of child abuse, and twelve-step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous – he leaves certain details tantalizingly vague, such as where the inner child originated two thousand years ago. Is he referring to the Christ Child? Or perhaps to a classical source? These and other facts remain unclear. Therapist and motivational speaker John Bradshaw, whose book Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing the Inner Child (1990) spent fifty-two weeks near the top of The New York Times Best Sellers list and who appeared on television shows, such as Oprah, Geraldo, and Good Morning America, says even less about the history of this figure. Bradshaw’s book on the inner child was so popular, in fact, that he was sometimes wrongly assumed to have invented the concept (Grimes). More recently, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, in Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child (2006), contextualizes the inner child within a range of Asian religious teachings, though he does not substantially challenge the basic tenets of the concept outlined in earlier writings. In this chapter, I provide a more detailed genealogy of the inner child. While I discuss various literary, philosophical, and religious antecedents for this figure, my primary focus is New Thought. In the first section of this chapter, I show how Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, her onetime student Emma Curtis Hopkins (1849–1925), and other New Thought writers adapted British Romantic attitudes toward childhood in ways that shaped the modern inner child. The next section turns to Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886), a blockbuster romance by British-born American author Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849–1924). This novel exemplifies how the inner child mediates between idealized young people and adult desires. Burnett, a onetime student of Christian Science, influenced the inner child

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as it appeared in New Thought writing of the period, thus paving the way for twentieth- and twenty-first-century incarnations of this figure. Finally, I examine Burnett’s later works Sara Crewe (1888) and its expanded version, A Little Princess (1905) to discern whether a young female character can embody the inner child as effectively as a boy. Throughout, I consider the uses of the inner child for nineteenthcentury New Thought enthusiasts and modern proponents of the recovery movement alike. Historically, the inner child has greater significance for women, who made up the bulk of early New Thought followers and remain the primary demographic targeted by self-help literature.4 Yet the inner child is hardly feminist in a traditional sense. In The Culture of Recovery (1996), for instance, Elayne Rapping describes the movement as apolitical at best, reactionary at worst (7). Within recovery culture, battered wives, rape and incest survivors, and victims of race and class prejudice are urged to heal their inner children rather than seek legal or political redress (41–42). Inner child therapy thus seemingly forecloses avenues for activism and consciousness-raising. The figure of the wounded inner child might also appear to reify patriarchal assumptions about similarities between women and children. Why, then, have so many women embraced the inner child, from the late nineteenth century to the present? The writings of Eddy, Hopkins, and Burnett help make sense of this phenomenon. Their works suggest that female New Thought followers needed to visualize themselves as children – often, though not always, as male children – to justify self-care and career pursuits. The inner child might be construed as the feminine counterpart to a dynamic described by Catherine Robson, in which male authors such as Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, and John Ruskin penned literature idealizing middle-class girl children (3).5 For such men, middle-class girls symbolized a return to the peaceful domestic realm of the nursery, where young boys of this class were raised alongside their sisters until they were sent to public schools. Girls and girlhood thus represented “the true essence of childhood” as well as a retreat from the competitive environments of public schools, universities, and careers (Robson 3). For women, the usually masculine inner child represented a different kind of escape, one that enabled conditional entry into male-dominated realms. The inner child was useful to such women precisely because it did not obviously challenge the political or economic status quo. By cloaking personal ambition in saccharine imagery of domesticity and childhood, women of the late nineteenth and late twentieth centuries could more easily inhabit positions of authority normally held by men. Eddy’s

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leadership of her Christian Science Mother Church serves as an important case in point, as I explain in the next section. Women could also justify self-indulgent behavior by blaming it on their inner child. In a 1902 diary entry, for instance, Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery attributes her taste for sweets and novel reading to her “inner girl” – in a comparatively rare, but not isolated example of a same-sex child being put to the same use (46). These examples hint at the many functions of the inner child adeptly modeled in Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and embraced in recent popular culture. They also point to a problem that contemporary feminism has yet to solve: the guilt that many women feel when putting their own needs and ambitions first.

New Thought and the Inner Child To be sure, New Thought is not the only relevant source for the inner child. This figure has a surprisingly long history, extending from classical antiquity to the present. One of the earliest examples comes from Plato’s Phaedo (360 BCE), which mentions a “child within us” who “fear[s] death as if it were a hobgoblin” (vol. I, section 77e).6 The Christ Child, meanwhile, has become “the primary inner symbol of the self in our times,” according to Jeremiah Abrams, paraphrasing Jung (Abrams 6; see also Jung 158). But the most important period in the formation of the inner child arguably began in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when French philosophers and British Romantic poets alike turned to children as representatives of the divine. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, and William Blake, for instance, saw children as closer to God and nature than their adult counterparts, a view best expressed in Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807, 1815): Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: (“Ode,” lines 63–67) Heaven lies about us in our infancy!

Victorians and Gilded-Age Americans continued this idealizing trend with the literary cult of the child. As Marah Gubar explains, this “cult” refers to celebrated literary works by authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, and J. M. Barrie in which children serve as “the epitome of

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attractiveness . . . transfixing – and often, humanizing – everyone they meet” (“The Cult of the Child Revisited” 399). Children’s literature in its various forms also influenced psychoanalysis, as Kenneth Kidd and others have discussed. Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung turned to myths and fairy tales when writing his 1941 essay “The Psychology of the Child-Archetype,” which introduces the “divine child” and “child hero” as structuring concepts of the psyche (Kidd 10). Jung also deserves credit for performing the earliest clinical inner child work. As Donald A. Price relates, Jung happily used himself as a guinea pig: “[Jung] discovered that he himself had an inner child, and spent some period of time on his own in play therapy . . . building a complete village as a way to access the 11-year-old part of himself who played with blocks” (69). This activity allegedly released Jung’s “extraordinary creative energies” (Price 69). While idealized children abounded in nineteenth-century literature and Jungian psychoanalysis, other psychological experts took a darker view of children’s nature. In nineteenth-century England and Continental Europe, Carolyn Steedman argues, the child gradually came to symbolize interior selfhood or personal history, including experiences of victimization. This trend took shape in evolutionary discourse and the Victorian child study movement but culminated in the work of Sigmund Freud. The Viennese psychoanalyst saw children as repositories of trauma whose real or fantasized seduction experiences shaped adult neuroses (Steedman 84–88). These diverse literary and psychological developments, combined with changing social attitudes about middle-class childhood as a protected time of play and education, all contributed to the notion of the inner child as we currently understand it, but cannot account for the entire history of this figure.7 New Thought authors such as Eddy, Hopkins, and Burnett took the idealized child popular in nineteenth-century literature and emphasized the relationality of this figure – that is, the child’s potential impact on adults in need of spiritual uplift. In their works, idealized children ultimately benefit mothers by providing emotional support and helping them express their wishes in culturally acceptable ways. This dynamic is key to understanding the role of the inner child (or “Man Child,” as Hopkins called it) as expressed by Gilded-Age New Thought writers. While popular New Thought writer Emma Curtis Hopkins first described the so-called Man Child and its utility for adult women, Eddy’s religious writings paved the way for this development by exalting women, children, and maternity in ways that appealed to her largely

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feminine audiences. Take, for instance, Eddy’s “Father-Mother-God” – which probably derived, in turn, from the Shaker concept of an androgynous deity – and her idea of the Virgin Mary as a prophet in her own right (Stokes 182, 186).8 As Claudia Stokes explains, Eddy’s public persona likewise reflected her lofty conceptions of maternity and childhood. Eddy’s followers often referred to her as “Mother,” and the religion’s Boston headquarters was dubbed “the Mother Church” in honor of its leader (182). There was even a “Mother’s Room” within the structure lovingly furnished by a group of Christian Scientist children. Though Eddy’s personal experience of motherhood was limited (she gave up her seven-year-old son, George, for adoption due to her ill health in 1851, and rarely saw him thereafter), she styled herself as a maternal figure to conform to sentimental models of womanhood popularized by mid-nineteenth-century writers, such as Stowe, Alcott, and Susan Warner (183). Eddy even referred to herself as “Mother” in some published writings, such as her poem “A Verse: Mother’s New Year’s Gift to the Little Children” (1896). In keeping with her maternal persona, Eddy wrote frequently of her love for children. In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (first edition 1875), Eddy described children as “the spiritual thoughts and representatives of Life, Truth, and Love” (582) and lauded their “freedom from wrong and their receptiveness of right” (236).9 In passages like these, Eddy’s attitude reflects the literary cult of the child as well as New Testament passages on children such as Mark 10:14, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God,” which was engraved on a stained-glass window of her Mother’s Room.10 But despite Eddy’s idealization of motherhood and children, her writings suggest ambivalence about parenting. On the rare occasions when she offered advice on the subject, she recommended less maternal involvement in children’s lives. Eddy warned in Science and Health, for instance: “If parents create in their babes a desire for incessant amusement, to be always fed, rocked, tossed, or talked to, those parents should not, in after years, complain of their children’s fretfulness or frivolity” (62). Eddy also gestured toward a utopian future without marriage and childbirth. Paraphrasing Mark 12:25, she wrote: “The time cometh of which Jesus spake, when he declared that in the resurrection there should be no more marrying nor giving in marriage, but man would be as the angels. Then shall Soul rejoice in its own, in which passion has no part” (64).11 Detractors like Mark Twain and Georgine Milmine noticed the disconnect between such passages and Eddy’s maternal posturing. Twain, for instance, wrote a series of scathing essays about Eddy between 1899 and

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1907. One such piece pointed to the lavish furnishings of the Mother’s Room as proof that Eddy was more interested in filthy lucre than motherly stewardship of her flock (Stokes 214). More devastatingly, Milmine, whose scandalous exposé of Eddy’s life ran in McClure’s Magazine from 1907 to 1908, accused Eddy of abandoning her son George, to whom she allegedly showed a “curious aversion . . . from the beginning” (Cather and Milmine 26).12 Eddy’s later biographer Gillian Gill contests this assertion, arguing that Eddy’s domineering second husband prevented her from reuniting with her son (111). Whatever the case, Eddy’s detractors forced her to rethink her self-presentation. After 1903, the Christian Science Church bylaws were amended to “drop the word mother and to substitute Leader” when referring to Eddy (Eddy, Manual of the Mother Church 65, emphasis in original). Eddy’s ambivalence about marriage and family life, however strongly decried, were hardly unique within her congregation. Historian Beryl Satter emphasizes that New Thought and Christian Science appealed to socalled New Women, a late-nineteenth-century term for women who embraced careers, higher education, and nontraditional family structures (134).13 Many female New Thought writers fell into this category and followed Eddy’s example with their unconventional approaches to parenting. Eddy’s onetime student Hopkins, for instance, who left Boston to found her own Chicago-based New Thought sect in 1885, left her husband and son behind in this move and never saw either of them again (Satter 82).14 Like Eddy, Hopkins wrote more about children’s symbolic value than about their day-to-day presence in women’s lives. Hopkins’s disciple Helen Van Anderson, meanwhile, advocated a hands-off parenting style in which children learned self-governance. In Van Anderson’s New Thought novel Victoria True: Or, the Journal of a Live Woman (1895), the eponymous heroine’s fractious children reform when she allows them to make their own decisions and spend extended periods unsupervised. While contemplating a long visit to a relative, Victoria reasons: “If I could never leave [the children], how could they prove so well their self-reliance, and how could I prove my trust in them? Besides, are they not ever with me in my love and loving thoughts?” (92). This disciplinary style – in which idealized children require less care because they are assumed to be good – is the logical extension of a philosophy in which children represent innocence incarnate. Hopkins’s writing on the “Man Child” takes Eddy’s idealization of children one step further. As the most popular New Thought teacher of the 1880s and 1890s, Hopkins promoted the idea of the divine Man Child within each adult, also called the “God-Self,” the “I Am,” or the “inner

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light.”15 She described this God-Self as a masculine, dominant entity within a passive, feminine individual (Satter 87). This inner Man Child helped women claim authority in a culture that disapproved of feminine self-assertion, as Satter relates: “By imagining their ‘personality’ or ‘mortal mind’ as a clear window through which a ‘Man Child’ or God-Self radiated, Hopkins’s students could behave in a forceful manner while still claiming to have stilled their unruly mortal ‘self’” (90). Hopkins uses the Man Child to emphasize female authority in her undated pamphlet The Radiant I AM, where she urges followers to practice daily affirmations that fortify the divine within themselves.16 She refers to this divine inner presence as “the Man Child, my I AM – who shall rule all nations with a rod of iron,” paraphrasing Revelations 12:1–5, and continues:17 I AM the unending, irresistible, beautiful Health of the whole universe. I, its Center, shed my Health abroad. This is my stopless ministry. I think this – I speak this – I write this – I live this. I AM the power of strength to the universe. Because I AM unalterable, I AM Omnipotence. (The Radiant I AM 7)

Hopkins’s affirmation is incantatory, fixating on the speaker’s nearGodlike powers. In affirmations such as this, the “Man Child” or “I AM” enables women to claim authority for themselves without disrupting the patriarchal status quo. A woman might attribute her desires to her inner Man Child or God-Self rather than her finite mortal self, thereby legitimizing her needs and justifying her decision to live as she saw fit. Hopkins’s influence lives on in the writing of her many disciples. These include the Depression-era New Thought leader Dr. Emmet Fox (1886– 1951), who was ordained by Hopkins’s student Nona Brooks (Satter 102). Fox, who immigrated from Ireland to the United States in 1931, preached to a crowd of five thousand at the Church of the Healing Christ in New York City (Satter 102; Gaze 8). He reached hundreds of thousands more by developing Hopkins’s teachings in works such as Power through Constructive Thinking (1932) and The Sermon on the Mount (1934), which was distributed in early meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. Fox’s widely circulated writings helped popularize the inner child (or the “Wonder Child,” as he called it) as an “infallible counsellor” for troubled adults (8). In chapter one of Power through Constructive Thinking, Fox describes this “Wonder Child” as an “Indwelling Power, the Inner Light, or Spiritual Idea, [that] is spoken of in the Bible as a child” (3). Like Hopkins, Fox described the Wonder Child as male: “the child, now arrived at man’s estate, turns the tables, and repays its debt by taking over the care of its mother” (4). In envisioning the Wonder Child and adult as mother

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and son, Fox emphasized the nurturing and inspirational qualities of the child, as opposed to its authoritarian power. By harnessing the wisdom of the inner Wonder Child, Fox explained, people can improve their health, make money, and become more creative. If these statements sound familiar, it is probably because they so strikingly prefigure the works by Bradshaw and Whitfield mentioned earlier. These more recent authors likely encountered Fox through twelve-step groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, which Bradshaw attended daily for three years (Grimes). While Bradshaw and Whitfield borrow liberally from Fox’s ideas (themselves an outgrowth of Hopkins’s New Thought philosophy), they predictably foreground more respectable antecedents such as Jung and mid-twentieth-century psychologists like Donald Winnicott, Alice Miller, and transactional analyst Eric Berne. In Whitfield’s brief chapter on the history of the inner child, for instance, New Thought is not once mentioned, even in the short paragraph on “spirituality” (see The Child Within 5–8). Are these authors intellectually dishonest, or are they ignorant of the nineteenth-century religious origins of their ideas? Either way, their failure adequately to historicize the inner child is symptomatic of the recovery movement at large, whose practical emphasis leaves little room for precise intellectual genealogies. In the context of recovery, what was originally a religious idea has become a quasi-medical one, as psychotherapists and selfhelp gurus blended Hopkins’s Man Child with Freudian and Jungian ideas to produce the wounded inner child. Despite these changes, I would argue that the inner child serves much the same function now as it did in the nineteenth century, and for a similar demographic (overwhelmingly white, middle class, and female). The child within helps women justify self-care and selfindulgence in a culture that might otherwise frown upon these pursuits. The next section shows how Burnett helped pave the way for the present-day inner child in Little Lord Fauntleroy. This novel externalizes the Man Child of New Thought in the form of an idealized male child character who maintains a close, intersubjective bond with an adult woman, and serves as her representative outside of the domestic sphere. Their bond brings the adult closer to the divine and helps her negotiate a patriarchal social environment. Little Lord Fauntleroy thus models a dynamic still apparent in more recent writing about the inner child.

Fauntleroy as Inner Child Frances Hodgson Burnett was ideally situated to popularize New Thought to vast audiences. She became the wealthiest woman author of her day on either

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side of the Atlantic due to her bestselling romances for women and children and her dramatic adaptations thereof (Gerzina xvii). Though she is now best remembered for The Secret Garden (1911), Burnett’s breakthrough success was Little Lord Fauntleroy, which was serialized in St. Nicholas Magazine in 1885–1886 and republished in book form by Scribner’s, becoming one of the top three bestsellers in the United States in 1886 (Clark 18). Like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) a generation earlier, Fauntleroy became a cultural phenomenon that inspired plays, toys, and tchotchkes of all sorts.18 These included Burnett’s wildly successful dramatic adaptation of her novel, which debuted in England and America in 1888, and Fauntleroy-related merchandise such as playing cards, chocolates, and perfumes (Clark 19). The novel and the illustrations by Reginald Birch also inspired the infamous Fauntleroy suit, a velvet costume with a lace collar loathed by young boys everywhere. As biographer Gretchen Gerzina explains, “after the book hit the stage, there would be no one from the smallest midwestern American town to the streets of Paris who had not heard of [Fauntleroy], and who did not know what he looked like” (110) (Figure 1). An Anglican by birth, Burnett eventually became an enthusiastic student of Christian Science (Bixler, Frances Hodgson Burnett 78). Her first encounter with this faith occurred in the years leading up to Fauntleroy’s publication, when she experienced a prolonged bout of depression and insomnia. From 1882 to 1884, Burnett “lived in Boston and summered in Lynn, Massachusetts,” both centers of Christian Science in the religion’s early days (Griswold 237). While there, Burnett undertook a course of study with Eddy’s student Anna B. Newman and bought and read Science and Health (V. Burnett 146). The treatment helped Burnett cope with her symptoms and later assuaged her grief upon the untimely death of her eldest son, Lionel. Christian Science and New Thought would eventually influence Burnett’s novels, including not just Little Lord Fauntleroy but also A Little Princess (1905), The Dawn of a To-morrow (1906), The Secret Garden, and The Lost Prince (1915).19 Despite her admiration of Eddy, Burnett never formally converted to Christian Science, citing her inability to “demonstrate” the faith through spontaneous healing (Gerzina 241). But her son Vivian – who served as the model for protagonist Cedric Errol in Little Lord Fauntleroy – would later join the religion and serve as First Reader at the Christian Science Society of Great Neck, Long Island.20 Gerzina suggests that Burnett herself might be more accurately described as an advocate of New Thought than a Christian Scientist, due to her loose interpretation of Eddy’s works and her wide reading of religious materials beyond the Bible and Science and

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Figure 1 One of Reginald Birch’s 1886 illustration of Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Health (259–260). In 1913, for example, Burnett explained to a reporter: “I am not a Christian Scientist, I am not an advocate of New Thought, I am not a disciple of the Yogi teaching, I am not a Buddhist, I am not a Mohammedan, I am not a follower of Confucius. Yet I am all of these things” (“Mrs. Burnett and the Occult” 259). Above all, Burnett added, she was “always an optimist” (259). Burnett’s response displays an eclecticism typical of New Thought, whose leaders read widely on Eastern religions and wisdom traditions. By contrast, such catholicity of reading was strongly discouraged within Eddy’s church, which forbade fiction as well as religious materials not sanctioned by the Christian Science Committee on Publications (founded in 1898).

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At the time Burnett was writing Little Lord Fauntleroy, however, the distinction between New Thought and Christian Science was blurry at best, with Eddy’s former students indiscriminately using the term “Christian Science” to designate their own related (but not identical) teachings. This murky state of affairs lasted until the early 1890s, when Eddy trademarked the term Christian Science and attempted to sue those who used it without her permission (Satter 96). Even after this date, the differences between the two faiths may not have mattered to someone like Burnett, who “did not have a stake in the . . . intellectual property disputes associated with this division,” as L. Ashley Squires explains (Healing the Nation 67). Burnett was thus one of many individuals who “quite freely mixed their readings of Science and Health with the readings of other teachers” (67). While Eddy was a decided influence on Little Lord Fauntleroy, it is unclear whether Hopkins inspired Burnett or the other way around. In chapter seven of Scientific Christian Mental Practice (1888) – published the same year as the first dramatic adaptations of Fauntleroy – Hopkins mentions Fauntleroy and his grandfather when discussing the power of positive thinking: Take the old Lord Fauntleroy as an example. Little Lord Fauntleroy thought he was generous and good. He really believed it. He praised his old grandfather. Everybody else condemned him. Consequently the grandfather would say, “Ask little Lord Fauntleroy. He knows me. He will tell you what I will do.” Now, even if the old Lord Fauntleroy had appeared to all other people to be savage and ugly, his soul was generous and good. The little child saw the soul. (135)

This detailed example raises the possibility that Hopkins adapted elements of Burnett’s hero in creating her Man Child – or even that Burnett should be considered a co-creator of this figure. In Little Lord Fauntleroy, protagonist Cedric Errol takes on the Man Child role for his grieving mother by exerting a healing spiritual influence and providing her with an alibi for socially unacceptable desires. Burnett’s novel relates the story of seven-year-old Cedric, a middle-class American boy who learns that, through the death of relatives, he stands to inherit a British title. He and his mother, whom he calls “Dearest,” leave New York to live with the boy’s grandfather, “the wicked Earl of Dorincourt,” on the family’s English estate (Burnett, Fauntleroy 134). There, Cedric charms his relatives and the local peasantry with his beauty, kindness, and indifference to caste distinctions. He also reforms his

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irascible grandfather by giving him “something to live for” (185). Just as important, Cedric facilitates a symbolic reconciliation between England and America by healing the rift between his mother and grandfather, who had disinherited Cedric’s father after his marriage to an American (Griswold 123). Literary scholars have offered various explanations for Little Lord Fauntleroy’s initial popularity and for the novel’s rapidly declining fortunes after 1900. Beverly Lyon Clark contends that Fauntleroy successfully fused together competing modes of masculinity circulating in the 1880s, including the “Christian gentleman, the self-made man, [and] the masculine primitive” (22). Gubar suggests that Cedric’s liminal traits, including his “ability to oscillate back and forth between categories such as child and adult, male and female, rich and poor,” enable him to unify radically different social worlds (“The Cult of the Child” 400). Alan Richardson argues that Fauntleroy enshrines the brief period of childhood when boys still retain a strong connection to their mothers, before they enter the masculine realms of public schools, sports, and commerce (13). Anna Wilson concludes that Dearest is the novel’s sentimental heroine, and that Fauntleroy himself is “a stalking horse, an attempt to take the domestic out into the world” (236). Each of these arguments helps explain Fauntleroy’s androgyny and his appeal for women – as well as the changing gender norms that eventually rendered his style of masculinity obsolete. By the early twentieth century, Katherine Carlson explains, Fauntleroy and his notorious velvet suit “came to represent effeminate passivity and a threat to the male order” in contrast to the more rugged, mischievous style of boyhood then favored (51). My own reading of the novel is potentially compatible with these interpretations, though I place greater emphasis on faith-based elements of Burnett’s work. I argue that Fauntleroy represents the inner child of New Thought at the very moment when this figure emerged into popular consciousness, thus helping to ensure its continued popularity. While the novel’s religious message is not overt, Cedric’s role as New Thought exemplar would have been apparent to someone familiar with the movement. Cedric displays the personal qualities most admired by New Thought followers, including a cheerful, loving affect; abundant health; fearlessness; connections with royalty (literal or figurative); and androgyny. While some of these traits are associated with the nineteenth-century cult of the child more generally (and thus with protagonists as diverse as Carroll’s Alice, Dickens’s Oliver Twist, or Barrie’s Peter Pan), Burnett’s

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deployment of these qualities suggests her familiarity with Science and Health and other New Thought writings. Cedric’s loving affect and trusting nature, for instance, reflect Eddy’s view of children as representatives of “Life, Truth, and Love.” Burnett’s emphasis on Fauntleroy’s robust health, meanwhile, represents a marked departure from the many frail and dying child protagonists earlier in the century, like Stowe’s Little Eva, Dickens’s Tiny Tim, or Alcott’s Beth March.21 In contrast to such characters, Cedric is “always well” (Burnett, Fauntleroy 5). His rosy good looks are not the harbinger of a delicate constitution or consumptive decline, as they might be in other childcentered narratives of the period, but instead signify radiant health. In Christian Science and other branches of the New Thought movement, good health aligns with fearlessness, a quality Cedric possesses in abundance. Burnett’s narrator suggests that Cedric has never experienced negative emotions like fear or resentment. True to this characterization, Cedric immediately embraces his grandfather’s “huge, lion-like” mastiff and warms to the intimidating old man himself (74). He likewise displays no alarm when learning to ride horseback, causing the Earl to remark: “Not much afraid, is he?” The riding master replies, “I shouldn’t say as he knowed what it meant. I’ve taught young gen’lemen to ride afore, an’ I never see one stick on more determinder” (124). Such incidents serve not merely to prove Cedric’s manliness and physical prowess, as Clark suggests, but also to evoke a now forgotten New Thought context (24). It is worth noting that Cedric does not exhibit courage – that is, the overcoming of fear through willpower – but is simply never afraid to begin with. This is an important distinction, since New Thought writers emphasized the absence of fear as a key to health and fear itself as a contagion. Eddy wrote, for instance, that “the cause of all so-called disease is mental, a mortal fear” (Science and Health 377). She encouraged Christian Science practitioners to “begin your treatment by allaying the fear of patients . . . if you succeed in wholly removing the fear, your patient is healed” (411–12). Influential New Thought writer Warren Felt Evans likewise emphasized that “fear . . . is the spiritual essence of disease” (58). Though he is “always well,” Cedric is ever alert to signs of sickness and grief in his mother, demonstrating the unusual closeness and reciprocity of their bond. His vigilance signals a parent–child role reversal that begins with his father’s death in chapter one: [Cedric] had always seen that his papa watched over and took great care of [his mother], and so he, learned, too, to be careful of her. So when he knew

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The Inner Child in Frances Hodgson Burnett his papa would come back no more, and saw how very sad his mamma was, there gradually came into his kind little heart the thought that he must do what he could to make her happy. He was not much more than a baby, but that thought was in his mind whenever he climbed upon her knee and kissed her and put his curly head on her neck . . . he did what he could, and was more of a comfort to her than he could have understood. (Burnett, Fauntleroy 6)

A few years later, Cedric looks forward to the day when he can support his mother financially, as he explains to his grandfather: “My father left her to me to take care of, and when I am a man I am going to work and earn money for her” (85). Cedric’s unusual closeness to his mother, and his readiness to assume his father’s role, lead Gubar to suggest that their bond resembles that of “a romantic couple” rather than “a parent/child dyad” (Artful Dodgers 177). But one can also read the bond between Dearest and Cedric as the spiritual union of adult woman and Man Child. Cedric’s protectiveness and his promise to support his mother financially one day anticipate Fox’s statement about the Wonder Child who “repays its debt by taking over the care of its mother.” Like the Wonder Child, Fauntleroy secures his mother’s health, wealth, and happiness, well before he “arrive[s] at man’s estate” (Fox 4). Cedric’s generosity towards his mother also points to his innate nobility of character, which becomes literalized in his unexpected inheritance of an Earldom. His title, Lord Fauntleroy, underscores this point: in Old French, Fauntleroy means child (enfant) of the king (le roi).22 Fauntleroy’s nobility signals a key preoccupation of early New Thought writers, who stressed a “royal birthright” or “divine inheritance” to console believers beset by downward economic mobility, marital problems, or unruly children (Satter 119, 134). In Van Anderson’s New Thought novel The Right Knock (1889), for instance, believers are told that they will be reborn in Christian Science and “find . . . the palace doors open to receive us, and the insignia of royalty written upon our faces” (qtd. in Satter 119). In Little Lord Fauntleroy, Cedric is described as a “fairy prince,” suggesting the masculine questing hero of romance (71). But his passivity and objectification render him more Cinderella than Prince Charming, as Wilson observes (242, 256 n). However off-putting Fauntleroy’s androgyny was to some critics, it doubtless contributed to his initial popularity. Claudia Nelson argues, for instance, that effeminate boy characters appealed to nineteenth-century women who wished to reform society by inculcating stereotypically feminine virtues in both sexes (Boys Will be Girls 4). Clark, meanwhile, suggests that Cedric’s appearance and behavior hearken back to

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Figure 2 Mary Pickford in the 1921 silent film version of Little Lord Fauntleroy

an early nineteenth-century style of masculinity that emphasized gentility and virtue, in contrast to the more rugged forms of American manliness that emerged later in the century (23–24). As if to underscore his girlish traits, Cedric was usually played by long-haired actresses (most famously by Mary Pickford) in stage and screen adaptations of the novel (Griswold 295 n) (Figure 2). Cedric’s dandyish clothing, meanwhile, may be an homage to Oscar Wilde, whom Burnett met during his 1882 North American lecture tour, and to the aesthetic movement that Wilde embodied (Thwaite 71; Seelye 207). Like most people at the time, Burnett would not necessarily have connected Wilde’s lavish costume to his sexual preferences, which became widely known only after his 1895 conviction for gross indecency.23 Fauntleroy’s androgyny would also have appealed to New Thought followers, though for different reasons. Following the model of Eddy’s “Father-Mother God,” believers were encouraged to cultivate an ideal mixture of male and female qualities. Eddy argued that The masculine mind reaches a higher tone through certain elements of the feminine, while the feminine mind gains courage and strength through

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The Inner Child in Frances Hodgson Burnett masculine qualities. These different elements conjoin naturally with each other, and their true harmony is in spiritual oneness. Both sexes should be loving, pure, tender, and strong. (Science and Health 57)

As an admiring reader of Science and Health, Burnett is careful to emphasize her hero’s “manliness” and athletic prowess.24 Yet she also lauds his more stereotypically feminine virtues such as empathy, which he demonstrates by carefully nurturing his mother. For Burnett as for Fauntleroy’s original readers, Cedric is not so much masculine or feminine as “outside of gender”; that is, he transcends gender categories by combining the best qualities of men and women (Carlson 49). But Fauntleroy’s most important New Thought quality is his ability to act on his mother’s behalf, thus fulfilling a key function of the Man Child. In Burnett’s 1888 dramatic adaptation of Fauntleroy, for instance, Dearest frankly acknowledges that “Cedric will speak for me” when she introduces herself to the boy’s grandfather (Act 2, scene 1, p. 27). The novel, meanwhile, presents multiple instances where Fauntleroy does just this. For instance, when Mrs. Errol wishes to improve the living conditions of the Earl’s tenants, she decides to use her son’s influence. “The Earl would give him anything,” muses Mrs. Errol; “Why should not that indulgence be used for the good of others?” (Burnett, Fauntleroy 142). Accordingly, Mrs. Errol tells Cedric about the disgraceful state of the cottages in Earl’s Court, trusting him to report it to his grandfather. Predictably, the Earl soon employs “a small army of workmen” to demolish the rickety dwellings (143). Though Mrs. Errol’s intentions here are unselfish, the episode suggests how she might exploit her son in other scenarios. For instance, her son’s intervention eventually enables her to live at Dorincourt Castle, as she has long desired. Like Hopkins’s Man Child, Cedric helps his mother negotiate a society that discouraged feminine self-assertion, allowing her to appear appropriately selfless. Intriguingly, the novel’s form replicates the dynamic between adult woman and Man Child by representing Dearest’s perspective in passages about Fauntleroy. While Burnett’s narration is omniscient, Mrs. Errol appears to be the novel’s principal focalizer, especially in the opening section about Cedric’s New York beginnings:25 It seemed as if there never had been a more fortunate baby. In the first place, he was always well, and so he never gave any one trouble; in the second place, he had so sweet a temper and ways so charming that he was a pleasure to every one; and in the third place, he was so beautiful to look at that he was quite a picture. (5)

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The description underscores Cedric’s effect upon his beholders – his beauty, his easygoing manner, his ability to give “pleasure” – especially to Dearest, who was undoubtedly the most frequent beholder of such early scenes. In this passage, as in Mrs. Errol’s relationship with the Earl, her son’s beauty and gentleness “speak for [her],” diffusing her presence throughout the narrative without explicitly foregrounding it. While Cedric is, of course, a fictional character, he and his mother are loosely based on real people: Burnett and her younger son, Vivian, who also called his mother “dearest” (Burnett, “How Fauntleroy Occurred” 201). In her essay “How Fauntleroy Occurred: And a Very Real Little Boy Became an Ideal One” (1894), Burnett lovingly portrays seven-year-old Vivian as he appeared around the time she wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy. Though she is ostensibly describing a “very real little boy,” Vivian seems nearly as idealized as his fictional counterpart, down to his curly love-locks, rosy cheeks, and his “peaceful resolve never to be in the way, and never to make anyone uncomfortable” (163). Like Little Lord Fauntleroy itself, Burnett’s autobiographical piece evokes a New Thought parenting style reminiscent of Hopkins and Van Anderson, whose idealized children require little oversight. For instance, Burnett rapturously describes how Vivian and his brother Lionel were well-behaved enough to undertake unsupervised railway travel: “It was quite safe to send them. If they had not been able to take care of themselves, half the world would have taken care of them. Conductors conversed with them, passengers were interested in them, and they arrived at the end of their travels laden with tribute” (205). Conveniently, Vivian and Lionel’s exceptional charm frees their mother from the responsibility of finding a chaperone. Vivian also resembles Cedric in his willingness to care for his mother. During her bouts of insomnia and depression, Vivian frequently attempted to soothe his mother to sleep. Burnett describes one of “many disturbed and weary nights . . . the door of my room opened quietly and a little figure entered – such an adorable figure, in a white nightgown, and with bright hair, tumbled by sleep.” This turns out to be Vivian, who says, “I’ve come to take care of you dearest,” with an “indescribable protecting and comforting air” (209). Burnett eventually comes to think of Vivian as her “protector and medical attendant,” much as Mrs. Errol turns to Cedric to allay her grief (211). In “How Fauntleroy Occurred,” Burnett gives the impression that Vivian’s healing qualities come to him effortlessly; his “soothing” presence “seemed to emanate from his childish softness” without apparent strain (209). But Vivian’s own perspective, related in his 1927 biography of his

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mother, suggests that such episodes took a psychological toll. Of their stay in Lynn, Vivian writes, There was, however, one grief to this summer. Dearest was not well. This was plain, even to the boys, who had never known her other than a gay, laughing companion. She spent much time in the hammock and she did not seem to be able to take part in their plays, or to care very much about them. (127)

Burnett’s account of Vivian’s boyhood glosses over this challenging period and minimizes the difficulties of a child prematurely placed in a caretaking role. Indeed, Vivian’s biography of his mother suggests that her idealization of children served, in part, to compensate for perceived maternal failings. Little Lord Fauntleroy, for instance, was allegedly written to “make things even” with the boys, who were upset that their mother spent so much time writing (V. Burnett 142). Thus began a pattern in which Burnett composed works for or about children to atone for neglecting her offspring. Gerzina characterizes Burnett as “an adoring but largely absent mother” who spent months, even years away from her boys as she traveled between England and America to oversee dramatic productions of her novels (xv). The boys, who remained with their father in Washington, DC, or were sent to boarding school, were saddened by her frequent absences and erratic correspondence. Tragically, her elder son, Lionel, fell ill with tuberculosis during one such absence and died in 1890. Overcome with guilt, Burnett wrote at least two works inspired by Lionel in the following years, including her ghost story The White People (1917). I do not wish to condemn Burnett, who obviously loved her sons. Like modern working mothers, she was stretched thin, serving as her family’s primary breadwinner while struggling with her fragile health and strained marriage. But “How Fauntleroy Occurred” suggests that New Thought idealization of children had less to do with children themselves than with adult concerns, including parental guilt and the desire to minimize maternal responsibility. The inner child or Man Child not only helped women assert their desires in a patriarchal society, but also deflected concerns about their very real children and the care they required. Modern self-help writers might feel uncomfortable tracing the lineage of the inner child back to an effeminate hero like Fauntleroy or to a nineteenth-century new religious movement such as New Thought. But that is exactly what we must do to understand the gendered and spiritual dimensions of this cultural figure. These aspects are misrepresented in current self-help literature on the inner child, which is usually

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written by men and uses predominantly male examples. But as my discussion of Eddy, Hopkins, and Burnett has shown, women have used the inner child to negotiate social pressures for well over a hundred years. Moreover, it is no coincidence that the inner child experienced a resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s, when women began entering the workforce in greater numbers. As these women juggled their new professional responsibilities with traditional household duties, the need to carve out time for relaxation and self-care became more urgent. So did the need to justify this self-care by imagining oneself as a child. The persistence of the inner child concept thus suggests that the women’s movement has important psychological work left to do. It is not enough to grant women access to careers once denied them; social attitudes must also change so that women feel free to enjoy these opportunities and take time for themselves without regret.

Sara Crewe and the Female Inner Child Returning to the nineteenth century for a moment, I wish to address a question left unresolved thus far. That is: was the inner child of New Thought inevitably male? In a word, no, as later fictions such as Burnett’s short story Sara Crewe: Or, What Happened at Miss Minchin’s (1888) and its expanded version, A Little Princess: Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe Now Told for the First Time (1905), amply demonstrate. But heroine Sara Crewe – noble-minded and unflaggingly positive though she may be – differs in important ways from the paradigmatic example of this figure in Little Lord Fauntleroy. She is a cross between the inner child and the striving adult woman depicted in much New Thought writing of this period, including more didactic New Thought fictions like Van Anderson’s Victoria True and The Right Knock. Sara is both artist and muse, agent and object at once, whereas Fauntleroy lands on the passive side of this equation. The short story version of Sara Crewe was written in 1885, the same year that Burnett composed Little Lord Fauntleroy, and published serially in St. Nicholas from December 1887–February 1888 (McGillis 3). It was republished in book form near the end of 1888 with illustrations by Reginald Birch, the same artist who immortalized Fauntleroy’s velveteen suit and love locks (Gerzina 117). Like Little Lord Fauntleroy, Sara Crewe is a variation on the Cinderella story as well as a rags-to-riches narrative: or, more precisely, a riches-to-rags-to-riches narrative (Bixler, Frances Hodgson Burnett 87).

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Crucially, the story locates nobility within and links it to “ethical behavior” and “spiritual power” as opposed to wealth or physical appearance (Gerzina 118–119). This emphasis on inner nobility chimes with the New Thought belief in a royal birthright awaiting loyal followers (Satter 134). It also suggests Burnett’s desire to contradict her reputation as a nouveau-riche social climber. As Gerzina explains, Burnett stressed in Sara Crewe as elsewhere that “her claim to gentility was internal, manifested in the imaginative process” rather than through material possessions (119). The story introduces eight-year-old Sara Crewe, the only child of a wealthy Indian widower who indulges her every whim. Believing the Indian climate to be unhealthy for children, Captain Ralph Crewe sends his daughter to Miss Minchin’s Select Seminary for Young Ladies in London, where she becomes a pampered star pupil. Her charmed existence does not last, however. When her father dies of “jungle fever” after losing his wealth in a failed investment scheme, Sara is orphaned and poverty stricken (Sara Crewe 9). Miss Minchin agrees to let her former pupil remain at the Select Seminary as a servant and tutor for younger girls. But she houses Sara in a freezing garret, starves her, and mocks her in front of her former classmates. Sara survives these trying circumstances by imagining life the way she wishes it to be, rather than as it is. She is rewarded for her positive outlook at the novella’s conclusion, when family friend Thomas Carrisford takes her in and informs her that she is heir to an unexpected fortune, the result of her father’s investment taking an upward turn. These events take place over several years; by the story’s conclusion, Sara is twelve, approaching the threshold of adolescence. Importantly, Burnett’s heroine retains key aspects of the inner child modeled by her male predecessor. Like Fauntleroy, she maintains symbiotic relationships with opposite-sex parents or parental figures (both her father and her eventual rescuer, Mr. Carrisford) and affects a quasireligious conversion in one of these men, giving chronically ill Mr. Carrisford a new lease on life (Koppes 192). Sara is also a fearless, born healer whose soothing words console both loved ones and casual acquaintances like the school dunce, Ermengarde. But while Fauntleroy remains an eternal child – his narrative ends with his triumphant eighth birthday celebration – Sara is forced to grow up, in terms of emotional maturity as well as chronological age. The suffering Sara undergoes during her transformation reflects Eddy’s belief in “life as a struggle” that “take[s] place in a world in which there are evils and enemies that need to be overcome” (Squires, Healing the Nation 67).

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While Little Lord Fauntleroy and its ageless hero remain solidly within the realm of the romance or fairy tale, Sara Crewe is a partial Bildungsroman that traces the heroine’s growth as a New Thought follower through several crucial years. As such, the tale has affinities with earlier female Bildungsromane such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), whose spirited heroine Sara resembles at times.26 Importantly, Sara’s moral education involves trials far greater than anything Cedric Errol ever faced (a false claimant to his title, his grandfather’s attempted bribery, and brief separations from Dearest being the sum total of his worldly sorrows). By contrast, Sara’s New Thought ideals are tested by circumstances that would overwhelm most adults. After her father’s untimely death, she experiences cold, hunger, and humiliation at the hands of her supposed protectress, Miss Minchin. She triumphs over these challenges thanks to her storytelling ability, which allows her to refashion the world according to her New Thought principles and selectively ignore what doesn’t fit. This talent also allows Sara to “preserve a particular image of herself” as a princess who exercises benevolence toward those around her (Squires, Healing the Nation 71). As in Little Lord Fauntleroy, the New Thought content in Sara Crewe is implicit, rather than overtly stated. Other religious elements are likewise muted. As John Seelye notes, God, Christianity, and the church are conspicuously absent from the narrative; Sara is not the “avatar of Christian piety” that one might find in other nineteenth-century children’s fiction (220). Nor does she have to be in order to follow the teachings of New Thought. While Christian Science “remained committed to biblical Christianity,” as Squires explains, “New Thought had no codified religious doctrine” (Healing the Nation 66). One could blend New Thought with Christianity or with aspects of “Buddhism, Vedanta, Theosophy, and even spiritualism,” as Burnett did on occasion (66). Thus, the narrative’s lack of overtly Christian elements need not preclude its investment in New Thought.27 Most obviously, Sara’s conviction that she is a princess relates to the divine inheritance expected by New Thought followers. After she is orphaned and banished to her freezing garret, Sara consoles herself by imagining that “I am a princess in rags and tatters . . . but I am a princess, inside” (Sara Crewe 41). The princess fantasy allows her to hold her head high and keep her anger in check, even when insulted by Miss Minchin or by fellow servants, as the narrator explains: “it really kept her from being made rude and malicious by the rudeness and malice of those about her” (40). Sara’s favorite daydream also helps compensate for her sudden

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downward economic mobility, much as it did for American New Thought believers during the economically turbulent 1880s and 90s (Satter 114). Like a good New Thought believer, Sara also practices non-resistance to evil. Eddy, Hopkins, and other New Thought leaders believed that evil is unreal, though they acknowledged that human belief in evil is quite real and can have harmful effects (Squires, Healing the Nation 65).28 Therefore, conflict with others was best handled by ignoring misbehavior and focusing on the positive. Sara follows this philosophy, at least to a point, by not responding to insults. As she explains, When people are insulting you, there is nothing so good for them as not to say a word – just to look at them and think. Miss Minchin turns pale with rage when I do it. Miss Amelia looks frightened, so do the girls. They know you are stronger than they are, because you are strong enough to hold in your rage and they are not. (Sara Crewe 21)

By refusing to react to evil words, Sara does not allow them to have power over her. But she does hold on to feelings of anger, suggesting that she has some growing to do in her practice of the faith. For instance, Sara indulges in the secret fantasy that, as a princess, she could order Miss Minchin’s execution any time she chooses. Perhaps this is why Miss Minchin finds her former pupil to be “a source of great secret annoyance,” despite Sara’s superficial deference (Sara Crewe 39). To be fair, non-resistance to evil was considered an especially difficult concept for juvenile believers, making Sara’s failure in this regard more forgivable (Partlow 55). Sara also practices Hopkins’s technique of creative visualization, which involves mentally picturing a desired result in hopes of bringing it about. For instance, a person who wishes to lose weight might imagine herself as already slim, while a cancer patient might envision her own cure. Because New Thought practitioners believed in the power of thoughts to change the world, such visualizations were thought to bring a person closer to a desired goal (Harley 76).29 This technique is particularly important for Sara because, unlike Fauntleroy, she is not an especially pretty or popular child – at least not at first – nor does she inherit an actual title.30 To overcome these disadvantages, she must mentally shape her own reality through her imagination. As the narrator explains, “[Sara] had a strong imagination; there was almost more imagination than there was Sara . . . [s]he imagined and pretended things until she almost believed them” (Sara Crewe 20). Sara’s imaginative faculty evokes the ingenuity with which New Thought writers refashioned reality to suit their needs, sometimes in ways that flew in the face of lived experience (Satter 94). It also reflects Burnett’s

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view of childhood fantasies as “things of actual pragmatic value” that help young people cope with unpleasant truths – an opinion she espoused in her fiction as well as her 1893 autobiography, The One I Knew the Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child (Squires, Healing the Nation 70). Unlikely as it may seem, Sara’s creative visualizations often bring about their desired results. On one particularly cold and hungry day, Sara finds herself “supposing” she might find an abandoned sixpence on the sidewalk and use it to buy hot rolls. Shortly thereafter, “not quite a sixpence, but the next thing to it – a four-penny piece” gleams on the pavement ahead of her, which she uses to buy hot currant buns at a nearby baker’s (Sara Crewe 47). When she gives all but one of these buns away to a starving beggar girl, Sara “supposes” that each bite of her remaining roll “was as much as a whole dinner. I should be over-eating myself if I went on like this” (59). That night, when she arrives back at her garret, she finds a feast spread for her before a blazing hearth, the gift of a mysterious benefactor. After this miraculous occurrence, Sara feels “as if I might wish for anything – diamonds and bags of gold – and they would appear!” (75). She is not far off the mark, as she inherits a great deal of money at the story’s conclusion, the result of her father’s investment finally bearing fruit. The above episode illustrates the New Thought principle of infinite supply, which suggests that believers’ wants will be furnished by God’s limitless bounty. New Thought writers stressed that followers should be generous with their belongings and spend money freely rather than worrying about poverty or privation. For instance, in Hopkins’s Class Lessons (1888), published the same year as Sara Crewe, readers are admonished: “If you are in seeming poverty, deny poverty, and affirm your rightful and true supply” (106). In this spirit, Sara gives away five of the six currant rolls she purchases to a starving beggar girl, reasoning, “she is hungrier than I am” (Sara Crewe 55). Since God will supply her every need, Sara need not worry excessively about her own hunger or conserve the food she has. Her generosity is justified by the abundance of good things in the universe; later that day, this abundance materializes in the form of a feast in her garret, supplied by an unknown friend (who eventually turns out to be “the Lascar,” an Indian servant of Mr. Carrisford).31 Finally, Sara resembles a New Thought follower in her use of withdrawal and silence as restoratives. Hopkins and her disciples instructed believers to “go into the silence” – that is, to meditate – to achieve mental calm that would fortify them for their daily tasks. While in the silence, followers would typically affirm pleasant thoughts and repeat positive words such as love, life, truth, or health, and deny negative ones, such as

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poverty, death, or sickness. The goal of such meditation was to enforce habits of positive thinking as a means of self-protection. At the beginning of Van Anderson’s novel Victoria True, for instance, the heroine feels vulnerable and exposed due to her alcoholic husband, cross aunt Delia, and ill-behaved children; she is “not . . . sheltered or protected by anyone” (4). Accordingly, her meditations equate love with armor or clothing for “the naked soul,” as in the following passage: So doth the naked soul find Wondrous raiment for its hard-earned cleanliness. The rich wrought seamless robe Of Love shall clasp and fasten Near the heart. (59)

As she grows in her faith, Victoria joyously exclaims that “I have made Love my shield and breastplate” (16). Passages like these imply that “the cleansed, clothed, and armored New Thought woman can float above the pain of her life” by meditating on uplifting thoughts, as Satter observes (123). Sara’s creative reveries in her garret serve a similar function to “going into the silence,” even if her thoughts focus on material things rather than spiritual ideals. Like Victoria True, Sara uses her alone time to reimagine the world along more positive lines. Her meditations leave her feeling clothed, comforted, and protected, as this example suggests: One of [Sara’s] chief entertainments was to sit in her garret, or walk about it, and “suppose” things. On a cold night, when she had not had enough to eat, she would draw the red footstool up before the empty grate, and say in the most intense voice, “Suppose there was a grate, wide steel grate here, and a great glowing fire – a glowing fire – with beds of red-hot coal and lots of little dancing, flickering flames. Suppose there was a soft, deep rug, and this was a comfortable chair, all cushions and crimson velvet, and suppose I had a crimson velvet frock on, and a deep lace collar, like a child in a picture.” (Sara Crewe 37–38)

As her reverie continues, Sara imagines an elaborate feast laid out on the table before her and a “soft, warm bed” where she and her doll Emily might “sleep as long as we liked” (38–39). These imaginings have a restorative effect on Sara, the narrator explains: “Sometimes, after she had supposed things like these for half an hour . . . she would feel almost warm, and would creep into bed with Emily and fall asleep with a smile on her face” (39). Sara’s meditations distract her from a reality in which she is not safe or well cared-for, but consummately vulnerable to financial reversals and the whims of unsympathetic adults. They also compensate for her lack of

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companionship. As Seelye notes, Sara is a loner who, unlike Fauntleroy, does not make friends easily (224). But she hardly needs friends, so sustaining are her imaginings. As we have seen, Sara Crewe resembles a faithful New Thought believer in her use of affirmations and denials, creative visualization, non-resistance to evil, and meditative withdrawal from her surroundings. While Fauntleroy effortlessly embodies innocence and purity, Sara must win moral authority by using these methods to overcome adversity. She is simultaneously a moral exemplar and a flawed character who puts New Thought to work in an imperfect world. Burnett’s heroine thus emerges as a midpoint between the inner child and the adult female believer, both touchstones of the New Thought novel as it evolved in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Sara Crewe suggests, in other words, that a girl cannot embody a symbolic inner child as neatly or satisfyingly as a boy, though she might serve as a useful role model for mature New Thought followers. At best, Burnett’s Sara Crewe of 1888 is a compromised version of the inner child whose powers are limited. For example, she cannot possibly provide nineteenth-century female readers with vicarious entry into the forbidden realms of business and politics, nor can she represent a woman’s viewpoint outside of the domestic sphere as Cedric does for Dearest. Instead, she represents female readers themselves and how they might overcome adversity with dignity. Sara is also a thinly veiled stand-in for the author (Thwaite 105; Seelye 239). Like her heroine, Burnett lost her father at a young age and experienced financial reverses as a result; she was also an expert storyteller who enjoyed refashioning the world as she wished it to be (Thwaite 19; Bixler, Frances Hodgson Burnett 89). As her sister Edith once observed, Burnett relished giving characters joyous, fairy-tale endings that seemed impossible in real life, much as Sara imagines (and then experiences) an unlikely happy ending of her own (Thwaite 19). For Burnett, the story of Sara Crewe was an unusually personal one that she reworked twice over the course of two decades. In 1902, the dramatic version of Sara Crewe, titled A Little Unfairy Princess, opened in London’s Avenue Theatre. The play began its New York dramatic run the following year with the simpler title A Little Princess (McGillis 5). There, it “met with a success quite comparable to her Fauntleroy,” as Vivian Burnett explains (304). Impressed by the play’s popularity, Scribner’s encouraged Burnett to expand Sara Crewe into a full-length novel, which was published in 1905 as A Little Princess: Being the Whole Story of Sara Crewe Now Told for the First Time (McGillis 7). In this novel-length version of her earlier tale,

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Burnett adds characters and details missing from the original, including child characters such as Sara’s spiteful rival Lavinia; Becky the scullery maid; and Lottie, a querulous four-year-old. Burnett also specifies the source of Sara’s wealth as diamond mines. This detail ties into Sara’s earlier imaginings about diamonds and bags of gold suddenly materializing in her attic and reinforces the story’s imperial connections (Seelye 221).32 More important changes involve the nature of the heroine herself and the severity of the trials she undergoes. In the original short story, Sara Crewe is an imperfect heroine whose trials render her more patient and endearing. But she is not especially loveable to begin with. The omniscient narrator emphasizes that Sara is “not a pretty child” and has been “indulged a great deal more than was good for her” (Sara Crewe 10, 7). She is unskilled at making friends; in fact, she “had never been intimate with the other pupils” even before her poverty increases the social distance between them (17). Most importantly, Sara’s simmering resentment and the “impolite . . . candor of her remarks” to Miss Minchin show an emotional immaturity that she must overcome through adherence to New Thought principles (33). By contrast, Sara Crewe of A Little Princess is prettier, more courteous, and more popular with her peers, who lionize her for her storytelling abilities. At seven years old, she is also slightly younger than her predecessor, and the same age as Fauntleroy at the height of his innocent charm. Though not a conventional beauty, the updated Sara Crewe has “an intense, attractive little face” and an “odd charm” lacking in the original (A Little Princess 9). Moreover, being indulged by her “young, handsome, rich, petting father” has not spoiled her (9). In fact, she is known “for her good manners, for her amiability to her fellow pupils, for her generosity” (34). These traits manifest in her nurturing treatment of the school’s social misfits such as Lottie and Ermengarde. Sara also nourishes Becky, the half-starved scullery maid, with gifts of cake and meat pies. The narrator explains that Sara enjoys helping her friends because “Nature [had] made her for a giver” (67). In other words, generosity is not something that Sara of A Little Princess has to learn; she intuits it from the beginning. Most importantly, Sara circa 1905 is more moderate in her anger toward Miss Minchin than Sara of 1888. While the original Sara Crewe had “promptly begun to hate Miss Minchin” from “the instant she had entered the house,” the new Sara withholds judgment because “it was disrespectful to hate grown-up people” (Sara Crewe 7, A Little Princess 75). Even after Miss Minchin shows her true colors by forcing Sara into servitude, then

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starving and abusing her, the heroine allows that “there might . . . be good in Miss Minchin” (A Little Princess 108). Sara’s milder temperament in the expanded version reflects the New Thought idea that thinking loving thoughts about one’s enemy might improve that person’s character, or at least allow them to appear in a different light. Victoria True, for instance, resolves to think kindly of her cruel and domineering Aunt Delia. She meditates on the word “Love” whenever her aunt’s criticisms tempt her to “break into angry speech” (Van Anderson 18). While Aunt Delia eventually responds with affection and gratitude, Miss Minchin remains hard-hearted as ever to her former star pupil, perhaps because she resents the girl’s cleverness and inner strength. In addition to idealizing its heroine, A Little Princess devotes less time to Sara’s trials and tribulations, thereby detracting from Eddy’s focus on “the world as a struggle between good and its absence” (Squires, Healing the Nation 75). While Sara Crewe proceeds in a matter of pages to Captain Crewe’s death, the expanded version spends six and a half chapters describing Sara’s prosperity and her gifts for storytelling and making friends. Only in chapter seven does the heroine learn of her tragic reversal of fortune. Due to this narrative dilation, Sara “arrives in the attic already prepared to furnish it with the workings of her fertile imagination” as Seelye observes (237). Moreover, the novel devotes only three chapters (eight through ten) describing Sara’s sufferings before her rescuers, Mr. Carrisford and his servant Ram Dass, conveniently appear in chapter eleven, though it takes several more chapters for them to recognize her identity (238). Sara’s abbreviated period of duress is brightened by the companionship of Becky and Sara’s tame rat Melchisedec, whose name refers to an Old Testament priest-king of Jerusalem (see Genesis 14:18–20). By improving Sara’s appearance and manners and downplaying her sufferings in A Little Princess, Burnett weakened the personal transformation at the heart of the original tale and arguably produced a “sequel” of lesser quality (Seelye 221).33 But she also brought A Little Princess closer to the pure romance of Little Lord Fauntleroy. While A Little Princess mirrors the Bildungsroman format of Sara Crewe to some degree, the obstacles Sara faces in the revision merely confirm her nobility of character rather than forging it. In fact, the most significant “tests” in A Little Princess are not those faced by the heroine, whose exemplary behavior and eventual reward seem like foregone conclusions. Instead, as Phyllis Bixler Koppes explains, “recognition of Sara’s true nature becomes a test for other characters in the story,” whose fates hinge on whether they see her for the princess she truly is (194).

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In other words, the new and improved Sara is a moral exemplar from start to finish, rather than a work in progress, thus resembling Little Lord Fauntleroy two decades earlier. This change suggests that the gender of Hopkins’s “Man Child” had become more flexible by the turn of the twentieth century, perhaps due to the influence of the original Sara Crewe or to changing gender norms for boys and girls circa 1900. As critics like Clark and Carlson have observed, early twentieth-century writers and their audiences preferred a more mischievous, rough-and-tumble style of boyhood than that depicted in Little Lord Fauntleroy. The boy as moral exemplar was gradually replaced by the rebellious adolescent as the “natural” style of American boyhood, so that Fauntleroy seemed both effeminate and old-fashioned in retrospect (Carlson 40; see also Clark 23–24). Under these circumstances, girls may have been more promising vessels of “Life, Truth, and Love” for writers in the new century. In any case, Sara Crewe in its many versions opened the floodgates for more literary depictions of idealized New Thought girls in years to come. These included Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) by Burnett’s friend Kate Douglas Wiggin. This novel features a cheerful half-orphan protagonist who goes to live with her crotchety aunts in Maine and inevitably improves their outlook on life. Fans of Wiggin’s book included Mark Twain, Jack London, and of course, Burnett herself, who wrote that “the normal spirit and good cheer of [Rebecca] are adorable” (qtd. in Thwaite 209). Other successful works in this vein include Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), Eleanor Porter’s Pollyanna (1913), and Harold Gray’s comic strip Little Orphan Annie (1924–2010), all of which inspired multiple stage and film adaptations. Taking their cue from Sara Crewe and Little Lord Fauntleroy, the female child protagonists of these works heal and enlighten adults with a mixture of childish innocence and preternatural wisdom, sometimes combined with New Thought platitudes. They also maintain close, symbiotic relationships with opposite-sex guardians whom they help to spiritualize (e.g., Matthew Cuthbert in Anne of Green Gables or Daddy Warbucks in Little Orphan Annie).34 These works owe much to Burnett’s idealized child heroes and heroines, as Montgomery, for one, frankly acknowledged. Upon rereading Little Lord Fauntleroy in 1902, Montgomery recalled, “Years ago, when I was about ten, this story was published as a serial in the Montreal Witness. Never shall I forget the charm of it or those magical Saturdays when each successive installment came” (Complete Journals 2: 42). These examples suggest that by the early twentieth century, fictions about both male and female inner child characters were popular

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throughout the English-speaking world. The international success of works by Burnett, Porter, Montgomery, and others made the inner child recognizable on both sides of the Atlantic and North of the US-Canadian border. But as we shall see in the following chapter, not everyone approved of this development. Henry James’s blistering satire of the inner child in The Turn of the Screw (1898) reveals the fault lines in this cherished figure and suggests the devious uses to which ideal children might be put.

chapter 2

Fauntleroy’s Ghost New Thought in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw

At first blush, few would associate Henry James with New Thought, Frances Hodgson Burnett, or Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886). Due to his reputation as a literary realist and proto-modernist, James would seem to have little in common with a female author of popular romances aimed at women and children. But in fact, James and Burnett were well acquainted and their works were often compared by contemporaries. Moreover, both authors were steeped in a milieu of American new religious movements, including New Thought, which informed their literary output (albeit quite differently). While we more readily associate James’s psychologist brother, William James, with Spiritualism, psychical research, and new religious movements, these topics frequently surface in James’s fiction as well, even if he did not embrace these trends without reservation. Because James’s and Burnett’s literary reputations diverge so drastically in the twenty-first century, their similarities have often gone unremarked. So, too, have the ways in which their works speak to one another. To cite only one example, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic The Secret Garden (1911) has been described as an adaptation of The Turn of the Screw (1898), one of the most critically debated and frequently taught of all nineteenth-century narratives (as well as James’s most famous foray into the Gothic romance). As Adeline Tintner observes, both works involve two neglected children (a boy and a girl) who live at the English country estate of an absent male relative who refuses to be burdened with their care (371). Paul Sharrad notes, moreover, that each tale features Anglo-Indian orphans (Mary in The Secret Garden, Miles and Flora in the Turn of the Screw) who return from the colonial peripheries to the center of Empire (2). Finally, both fictions concern magic of some sort. In The Secret Garden, “magic” represents the positive thinking of New Thought combined with the healing influence of nature on two young invalids. In The Turn of the Screw, meanwhile, a darker form of magic pervades the relationship between Miles and Flora and their ghostly companions. Suggestively, 54

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James’s tale was published in a volume called The Two Magics in 1898 (Tintner 372). While the two works diverge in many other respects, it should not surprise us that James influenced Burnett’s fiction or vice versa. The two authors met in the late 1880s in London. They became neighbors in the 1890s, around the time when Turn was written (Burnett’s lavish abode, Maytham Hall in Kent, was only six miles from his more modest Lamb House in Rye, Sussex [372]).1 Their surviving correspondence, consisting of twelve letters written by James to Burnett, suggests that the two authors maintained a polite social relationship in which Burnett invested more effort than James.2 In these missives, James politely declined invitations to visit Burnett’s nearby residence and thanked her for gifts of flowers and fruit from her gardens, all while showering her with exaggerated praise (“Noblest of Neighbors! Most Heavenly of Women!” he effused on one occasion [James to Burnett, October 28, 1898]). When they did meet, James was unfailingly kind, calling Burnett by her pet name “Fluffy” and consoling her after the death of her son Lionel in 1890 (James, Selected Letters 163; Gerzina 150). While James was outwardly friendly with Burnett, he expressed private misgivings about his neighbor and her literary output – calling her a “fatally deluded little woman” in his correspondence and savaging her plays such as Esmeralda (1883) and The Showman’s Daughter (1892) (Letters 3:370; Clark 32). James’s negative opinion of Burnett chimes with his generally dismissive view of American women writers who wrote in genres perceived as feminine (the romance, the melodrama, the domestic novel). It also speaks to his ambivalence about women’s pursuit of careers and fame (Habegger 6-9). Possibly, James disapproved of Burnett’s ambition or resented her greater material prosperity and success at writing for the stage. Despite James’s ambivalence about his neighbor, it would be a mistake to view their relationship as one-sided, as some scholars have implied (see, for instance, Gerzina 208). Burnett and her work loomed large in James’s mind around the time he wrote The Turn of the Screw. From 1888 through the early 1890s, Little Lord Fauntleroy and its stage adaptations were ubiquitous on both sides of the Atlantic, as was the merchandise inspired by these productions. Fauntleroy and its spin-offs made its author very rich, a fact that Burnett’s neighbors could hardly ignore. In an 1899 letter to his brother William, James alludes to the woman he called the “princess of Maytham” (Tintner 373) and her stately abode: When I look round me at the splendor of so many of the “literary” fry my confreres (M. Crawfords, P. Bourgets, Humphry Wards, Hodgson

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Fauntleroy’s Ghost Burnetts, W.D. Howellses, etc.) and I feel that I may strike the world as still, at fifty-six, with my long labour and my genius, reckless, presumptuous and unwarranted in curling up (for more assured peaceful production), in a poor little $10,000 shelter – then I do feel the bitterness of humiliation, and the iron enters into my soul, and (I blush to confess it), I weep! (Letters 4:115)

Compounding James’s embarrassment was the failure of his own play Guy Domville in 1895 and his renunciation of playwriting after five years of effort in this vein (Edel, The Treacherous Years 20). At the time James composed his most famous ghost story (between September and December 1897), his career and finances were at a low ebb, while Burnett appeared to be riding a wave of success and fame (203).3 While scholars such as Beverly Lyon Clark, Felicity Hughes, Ann Thwaite, and Gretchen Gerzina have traced James’s impact on Burnett’s work, few have turned the critical lens in the other direction to consider how Burnett influenced James. In this chapter, I argue that The Turn of the Screw, which served as one inspiration for Burnett’s The Secret Garden, is itself a satirical reworking of her earlier New Thought novel Little Lord Fauntleroy. James’s eerie child protagonists, Miles and Flora, present fun-house-mirror distortions of Burnett’s innocent hero. In these two youngsters, whom James describes in his Notebooks as “bad, full of evil, to a sinister degree,” Fauntleroy’s indiscriminate affection becomes lust and his androgyny shades into homosexuality (109). Fauntleroy’s ability to communicate divine love to surrounding adults, meanwhile, morphs into demonic channeling. Burnett’s idealized New Thought child thus blurs into its opposite, the evil child, a figure that casts a long shadow in twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury fiction and cinema – think, for instance, of films such as The Bad Seed (1956), The Exorcist (1973), We Need to Talk about Kevin (2011), and many movie adaptations of Stephen King’s works (Hanson 368). By reconfiguring elements of Little Lord Fauntleroy in The Turn of the Screw, James followed a precedent set in early works like Watch and Ward (1871, 1878), Daisy Miller (1879), and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Alfred Habegger argues that these novels were influenced by women’s fiction of the 1850s and 60s written by authors such as Louisa May Alcott, Anne Moncure Crane, and Rebecca Harding Davis (23). James had written highly critical reviews of these authors’ works in the early part of his literary career. His own fictions were meant as correctives to their novels, having similar plots and themes but fixing what he saw as their “flaws” (25). James made a similar maneuver in The Turn of the Screw but went one step

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further, producing a corrosive satire of Burnett’s novel. We can view The Turn of the Screw as a diagnostic that tells us what James disliked about Little Lord Fauntleroy and the New Thought values it expresses. The similarities between these two works surface even in a cursory reading. For instance, when James’s unnamed governess narrator arrives at Bly to meet her orphaned charges, her rapture recalls Fauntleroy’s fond guardians. She describes eight-year-old Flora as “the most beautiful child I had ever seen” while ten-year-old Miles radiates a “great glow of freshness, the same positive fragrance of purity, in which I had from the first moment seen his little sister” (James, The Turn of the Screw 30, 37).4 Miles, with his disarming beauty, princely mien, and “indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love,” bears a striking resemblance to Burnett’s innocent hero, though his tragic narrative arc is as different as possible from Fauntleroy’s rags-to-riches transformation (37). In place of Fauntleroy’s adoring mother Dearest, The Turn of the Screw provides the anxious, over-fond governess, who must serve as the “sole representative of parental authority” for her orphaned charges (Schrero 270). She takes this responsibility seriously and perhaps too literally by coopting the maternal role as imagined by New Thought followers. Recall that early New Thought writers such as Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and her onetime protégée Emma Curtis Hopkins imagined idealized children guiding their mothers to spiritual and material well-being. Hopkins, the leading New Thought teacher of the 1880s and 90s, described a “Man Child” or “God Self” within each adult woman that served as her spiritual center (Satter 87). This Man Child also lent a woman gravitas and moral authority. A female New Thought follower could justify her decisions and desires by attributing them to this inner Man Child, all without disrupting the patriarchal status quo. As I argued in the previous chapter, Little Lord Fauntleroy externalizes and fictionalizes this relationship between adult woman and Man Child in the bond between Cedric Errol, also known as Lord Fauntleroy, and his mother, Dearest, whose angelic son serves as her spiritual support and proxy outside of the domestic sphere. Dearest lives vicariously through her son as he spreads her feminine, middle-class values through the maledominated ranks of the British aristocracy. Cedric also helps his mother accomplish her goals without having to assert herself in inappropriate or unfeminine ways. For instance, he engineers a reconciliation between Dearest and his grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt, after years of estrangement. This reconciliation enables Dearest to live in Dorincourt Castle with

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her son, as she has long desired. In this and other instances, Little Lord Fauntleroy speaks for his mother and represents her interests. Fauntleroy also benefits his mother materially through his unexpected inheritance of an Earldom, allowing them both to achieve the “royal birthright” expected by loyal New Thought followers (Satter 119). Had she been living in the 1880s or 90s, James’s governess might well have identified with Dearest and wished for a Fauntleroy of her own. Indeed, The Turn of the Screw reads as if the governess is familiar with Burnett’s bestseller and tries unsuccessfully to recreate the mother–son bond at its core, perhaps encouraged by the superficial resemblance between Miles and Burnett’s hero. But unlike Dearest’s love for Cedric, the narrator’s “infatuation and pity” for her charges remain unrequited (James, The Turn of the Screw 37). For despite the children’s beauty and the governess’s affection, the symbiosis of woman and spiritually symbolic male child central to Fauntleroy fails to occur in James’s tale. Instead of leading his caretaker to enlightenment or serving as her alibi for selfish desires, Miles bonds with Quint, the ghost of a disgraced family servant. Meanwhile, Flora secretly communes with the spirit of her deceased former governess, Miss Jessel. The governess believes that these ghosts wish to “get hold of” her charges and lure them to their doom, and that the children cooperate “for the love of evil that, in those dreadful days, the pair put into them” (57, 76). Disappointed in her early hopes of spiritual connection with Miles and Flora, she decides that the children are corrupt, their “more than earthly” beauty and goodness “a policy and a fraud” (76). Setting aside, for the moment, the reality of the ghosts and the sanity of the governess – two issues long debated by critics – the governess’s blackand-white thinking reveals the shadow side of New Thought and of Fauntleroy.5 Burnett’s bestselling novel is often seen as the apotheosis of the beautiful or saintly child trend in Victorian fiction (Kawabata 34; Shine 15). As James Kincaid observes, the angelic or beautiful child trope rests on an implied contrast with its opposite: the child as experienced, corrupt, and erotic (5). In accordance with this logic, the governess’s imagination runs to extremes. She sees Miles and Flora as simultaneously “blameless and foredoomed” and preternaturally sensual and knowing, but never as ordinary children capable of a wide range of behavior (James, The Turn of the Screw 64). Her inability to “fix” their moral status or tolerate shades of gray triggers a panic that ultimately leads to Flora’s mental breakdown and Miles’s death.6 As this brief overview suggests, The Turn of the Screw deploys motifs found in Little Lord Fauntleroy, but with crucial differences in affect and

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intention. For instance, Miles and Flora initially evoke New Thought ideals that Fauntleroy embodies – such as a loving affect, connections with royalty, and innocent androgyny – only to undermine these traits through corrupt behavior. The children also reject the symbiotic Man Child relationship with their caretaker modeled in Burnett’s fiction and in the writings of Eddy and Hopkins. Instead of enlightening the governess or serving as her proxy outside the domestic sphere, as Cedric does for Dearest, Miles and Flora deceive her and lead her to the brink of madness. The governess’s overreactions and their fatal consequences, in turn, show how New Thought idealization of children can imperil their well-being. The Turn of the Screw thus undercuts writing by Burnett, Hopkins, and Eddy on young people as “representatives of Life, Truth, and Love” who require minimal oversight (Eddy, Science and Health 582). This reading of The Turn of the Screw as a send-up of Little Lord Fauntleroy, a popular romance by a highly successful female author, forces us to reconsider common preconceptions about James. We must, for instance, confront James’s gender bias, including his hostility toward women’s suffrage and women’s entry into the professions (Habegger 6). James maintained these conservative opinions on women’s roles “up until his late middle age,” as Habegger asserts (6). Critics have often overlooked or downplayed James’s antifeminism because of his sympathetic renderings of female characters such as Isabel Archer or Maisie Farange, as well as his close friendships with women.7 This reading also places The Turn of the Screw in unfamiliar contexts connected to the occult trends and new religious movements of the era.8 Significantly, James was at least as well acquainted with American new religious movements as Burnett. He grew up in an eccentric household steeped in Swedenborgianism, Spiritualism, and Emersonian Transcendentalism, where the latest religious fads were discussed by noted intellectuals of the day (Edel, Henry James: A Life 35–36). His eldest brother, William James, dabbled in New Thought and Christian Science and wrote favorably of these movements in “The Gospel of Relaxation” (1899) and The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Another brother, Civil War veteran Robertson James, converted to Christian Science for a time in hopes of conquering his alcoholism and depression (Robert Richardson 493; Maher 187). Given his background, Henry James could hardly have ignored how New Thought ideology pervaded his own family and the popular culture of his day. These influences suggest why we should consider James’s The Turn of the Screw (and perhaps other works like his 1886 novel The Bostonians) in

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the contexts of New Thought, Christian Science, and mind cure more broadly. In the next section of this chapter, I further explore the connections between James, Burnett, and New Thought to show why Little Lord Fauntleroy roused his ire. The final section, meanwhile, presents a more nuanced reading of The Turn of the Screw as a critique of New Thought and Fauntleroy that wantonly distorts the style and substance of Burnett’s original. Whereas Little Lord Fauntleroy contains straightforward prose and unalloyed praise of its child hero, delivered by an omniscient narrator, The Turn of the Screw is a notoriously ambiguous tale told from the point of view of an unreliable narrator whose initial, positive impressions of Miles and Flora must be taken with a grain of salt. Also suspect, therefore, is the governess’s description of how both children decline in her estimation from angelic beings to victims of demonic possession. Through such literary sleight-of-hand, James undermines Burnett’s New Thought logic and suggests that both the innocent child and the evil child are flimsy, unrealistic constructions. So is any attempt to view the child as a religious symbol rather than a rounded individual. He further suggests how adult investment in the idea of childhood purity can harm precisely those “innocent” beings it is meant to protect. James’s sympathy toward children in this tale, however, does not extend to their female caretakers, for whom the figure of the innocent child served multiple purposes. As suggested in the previous chapter, the belief that children are divinely good and capable of conscientious self-government helped relieve New Thought mothers like Burnett of onerous parental burdens. By stripping away the fiction of the innocent child and exposing it as a labor-saving ruse, James sealed off one escape route favored by New Thought believers seeking time for career pursuits or self-care. He also signaled his distaste for laissez-faire New Thought parenting techniques and his preference for a strong mother figure who provides her offspring with consistent guidance and boundaries.

Contexts: James, Burnett, and New Thought As suggested above, Burnett and James had much in common, despite appearances to the contrary. Both lived transatlantic, cosmopolitan lifestyles and enjoyed roughly equal critical acclaim through the 1870s and 80s (Thwaite 86; Clark 33). While Burnett was born in England in 1849 and moved to America in her teens, becoming an American citizen in 1905, American-born James made the opposite journey, becoming a British citizen in 1915. In the early years of their literary fame, the authors were

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even compared on occasion. In 1883, for instance, The Saturday Review observed that Burnett’s Through One Administration “rival[s] Mr. Henry James in his happiest mood” (qtd. in Gerzina 102). Burnett’s novel A Fair Barbarian (1881), meanwhile, was favorably compared to James’s Daisy Miller (1879) in initial reviews (Gerzina 101). As Mark Noonan observes, A Fair Barbarian contains an implied critique of James’s “unflattering portrayal of the American girl abroad” in Daisy Miller (204). This suggests that Burnett carefully attended to James’s literary output and responded to it in her own fiction, much as James reworked Little Lord Fauntleroy in The Turn of the Screw. Today, critics tend to classify James as a high realist writing for adult audiences and Burnett as a romancist writing for children. Both labels are somewhat misleading. While Burnett’s posthumous fame rests largely on The Secret Garden, most of her fifty-two novels and thirteen plays were written for adult or crossover audiences (Gerzina xiii). Her early novels, including That Lass O’Lowries (1877), Haworth’s (1879), and Through One Administration (1883), were written in a realistic style that suggests James’s influence (Bixler, Frances Hodgson Burnett 19, 36). It was only after the phenomenal success of Fauntleroy that Burnett gravitated toward the romance as her predominant literary mode (49). James, meanwhile, sometimes strayed outside the bounds of the high realism he championed in his literary criticism. For instance, James greatly admired romancists like his literary predecessor Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and his contemporary Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), with whom he corresponded frequently between 1885 and 1894.9 While James and Stevenson disagreed about the relative merits of romance versus realism, James offered unstinting praise for Stevenson’s work, assuring him of “my enjoyment of everything you write” (James to Stevenson, December 5, 1884). In his prefaces to the New York Edition of his works (1907–1909), meanwhile, James discussed many of his own novels and novellas in the context of romance. These include The American (1877), The Princess Casamassima (1886), “The Aspern Papers” (1888), and, of course, The Turn of the Screw, which he called both a “sinister romance” and “a fairy tale pure and simple” (“Henry James’s Preface” 227). James’s shorter works, too, often addressed outré topics that can hardly be considered realistic. In stories like “The Ghostly Rental” (1876), “The Real Right Thing” (1899), and “The Jolly Corner” (1908), he explored gothic and occult subject matter such as “hallucinations, pursuit of ghostly presences, mental telepathy, clairvoyancy, and hauntedness,” as Martha Banta explains (8). These stories capitalized on a surge of popular interest

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in psychical research and spiritualism in England and America around the turn of the twentieth century.10 James also wrote abundantly about – although not for – children. Muriel Shine observes that he spent “the better part of a decade” (from 1891 to 1899) writing perceptively about young people in novels such as What Maisie Knew (1897) and The Awkward Age (1899), and in short stories like “The Pupil” (1891) (vii).11 James also wrote a sensitive autobiographical account of his own childhood in A Small Boy and Others (1913), while Burnett described her own early years in The One I Knew the Best of All: A Memory of the Mind of a Child (1893).12 While both Burnett and James carefully rendered a child’s-eye view of the world, their aims in doing so were markedly different. Generally speaking, Burnett adopted a sentimental view of childhood in which the child is the object of adult veneration and childhood itself is rendered with nostalgia (though her child protagonists are less prone to early death than those of previous sentimental authors like Dickens or Stowe).13 Her cheerful omniscient narrators seemingly dote upon the child protagonists of works like Fauntleroy, A Little Princess (1905), and The Secret Garden and portray their happy fates as inevitable. By contrast, James resisted the literary cult of the child that Burnett, among others, famously promoted. In his own works, James viewed childhood as a “time of unhappiness” in which children must “perform” the innocence and naivete demanded by adult caretakers (Shine 22; Shuttleworth 325). His frequent use of unreliable adult narrators and of third-person limited narration combined with a child focalizer (as in What Maisie Knew) emphasizes his characters’ tragically incomplete knowledge and resulting vulnerability.14 Maisie Farange’s confused perception of her divorced parents’ petty rivalries and love affairs serves as a heartrending case in point (see Shuttleworth 325-334). Little boys fare even worse in James’s works. Take, for instance, Miles, Morgan Moreen of “The Pupil,” or Dolcino of “The Author of Beltraffio” (1884), who all die due to the cruelty, neglect, or sheer ineptitude of adults (Shine 76). While Burnett’s child characters often act as saviors of their guardians, James’s many “sacrificial children” fall prey to adult manipulation, hypocrisy, and ignorance (29). James’s disdain for sentimental portrayals of childhood suggests one reason that he targeted Burnett’s writing in his own fiction. So does his preference for realism over romance, especially when the romancist in question was female. In essays such as “The Art of Fiction” (1884), James famously argued that the novelist must “compete with life” by offering

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a nuanced, painterly rendition of his subject (54). In “The Future of the Novel” (1899), meanwhile, James expressed his distaste for popular literature that attracted “irreflective and uncritical” readers – that is to say, “the ladies and the children” – not to mention the newly literate Britons educated in the “common schools” (state-funded public schools mandated by the Elementary Education Acts of 1870-1893 [34, 31]). He worried that catering to such unsophisticated readers could bring about “the demoralization, the vulgarization of literature in general,” implying that literature as high art was the exclusive preserve of educated men (34). As Felicity Hughes suggests, James’s theories of the novel helped to reshape the twentieth-century academic landscape and the literary marketplace, where children’s literature was increasingly marketed as a separate category from adult fiction and deemed unworthy of serious critical attention (547). By contrast, the nineteenth-century literary marketplace promoted books considered appropriate for all ages. This earlier emphasis on “family reading” favored crossover authors like Burnett, but handicapped James, whose works were sometimes accused of being unfit for young ladies (Hughes 543; Edel, Henry James: A Life 71). As a female author of bestselling romances that appealed to women and children, Burnett was one implied target of James’s literary criticism, as Beverly Lyon Clark suggests (32–33). James’s published remarks about Burnett’s work and his correspondence attest to his low opinion of her writing (of which she remained mercifully ignorant). For instance, James’s anonymous review in The Pall Mall Gazette of Burnett’s first play, Esmeralda (1883), denounced the piece as an “infantine” and “primitive . . . attempt at dramatic writing” (“A Poor Play” 195). In a 1907 letter, meanwhile, he described Burnett as the “Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth . . . of our age,” referring to a prolific, highly popular (but then unfashionable) author of the previous generation whose novels appealed primarily to women (Letters 4:440). This comment was, Clark notes, “not a compliment” (32). On a personal level, James accused Burnett of pursuing her literary career at the expense of her family. In an 1892 letter to Mrs. Hugh Bell, James opined, “I wish [Burnett] would gather up her few remaining feathers while yet there is time and flutter them westward, where she has, after all, a husband and child” (Letters 3:370). This unkind observation about Burnett as absentee mother foreshadows James’s critique of New Thought parenting methods in The Turn of the Screw. The two authors also differed dramatically on matters of religion. As explained in the previous chapter, Burnett studied Christian Science between 1882 and 1884 and admired Eddy’s work. Many of her famous

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children’s fictions, from Fauntleroy and A Little Princess to The Secret Garden and The Lost Prince (1915), contain Christian Science and New Thought overtones. By contrast, James has been described as an agnostic who kept aloof from organized religion and remained skeptical of occult trends (Edel, Henry James: A Life 11, 36; Banta 4). Yet he, too, seems to have been at least nominally interested in heterodox religious movements. In 1907, for instance, he wrote to Burnett’s friend Elizabeth Garver Jordan, the editor of Harper’s Bazaar, proposing to extend his book The American Scene (1907) in a series of essays on the American West and the eclectic religious cultures he had encountered there. These included Buddhism, yoga, “Mrs. Eddy” and her beliefs, and Theosophy (Life in Letters 446). Jordan responded encouragingly, suggesting that the Bazaar would take three such essays if they were “specifically addressed to Women” (447n3). Unfortunately, these essays were never written, forcing us to deduce James’s attitude toward new religious movements from his writing on other subjects. James’s unorthodox upbringing suggests a potential source for his interest in occult phenomena and new religious movements. As alluded to earlier, James grew up in a household permeated by alternative religious cultures that flourished during America’s Second Great Awakening (Edel, Henry James: A Life 35). His father, Henry James, Senior, experienced occasional “visions” and counted Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson as a close friend. James, Sr. was also the leading American advocate of Emanuel Swedenborg, a Swedish mystic who believed that human beings could converse with angels and demons and that sexual relations would continue in heaven (Kucich 121). Notably, Swedenborg and the Transcendentalists were important influences on Eddy’s theology and on contemporaneous new religious movements such as Spiritualism. Like Burnett, the elder James was also an “irrepressible” optimist whose rosy outlook often flew in the face of facts (James, Notes of a Son and Brother 224). Because of his optimism and belief in the divine power within each individual, the elder James’s religious views bore a striking resemblance to Christian Science, as a reporter for The Christian Science Journal noted in 1900 (“Editor’s Table” 125–127). Like his father, James’s older brother, Harvard psychologist and philosopher William James, was fascinated by occult phenomena, serving as President of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) from 1894–1896 (Beidler, “Introduction” 17). The SPR was founded in London in 1882 by a group of Cambridge University professors and other noted intellectuals.15 This ambitious group proposed to examine séances, spirit

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mediums, and similarly outré topics “without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit” (qtd. in Haynes 6). The Society published allegedly scientific case studies of hauntings, telepathy, clairvoyance, and other occult phenomena reported by reliable witnesses in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (1884–present) and books such as Phantasms of the Living (1886). While SPR members described themselves as impartial observers, many hoped to find evidence that the human soul survived bodily death (Beidler, Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James 33). In an era of waning belief in orthodox Christianity, the SPR’s forays into the occult came to “substitute for religious faith” for some members, as Jill Galvan explains (The Sympathetic Medium 4). William James was also intrigued by new religious movements such as New Thought, which he discussed in two works published in the years immediately following The Turn of the Screw: an 1899 article in Scribner’s titled “The Gospel of Relaxation,” and a section of The Varieties of Religious Experience called “The Religion of Healthy Mindedness.” In “The Gospel of Relaxation,” James urges fellow Americans to adopt a calm and cheerful outlook as part of their “mental hygiene” (261). He cites “mind curers of various religious sects” such as Annie Payson Call, “Mr. Dresser,” and Ralph Waldo Trine in support of this idea (271).16 Like these New Thought writers, James suggests that true serenity comes through forgetfulness of “self,” that is, letting go of “egoistic preoccupation” with success and social respectability (270). James’s “Gospel of Relaxation” was specifically addressed to New England women, whose ingrained habits of “prudence and duty and selfregard, emotions of ambition and anxiety” had become injurious to their mental health (270). While speaking at women’s colleges on this subject, James observed that “What our girl-students and women-teachers most need nowadays is not the exacerbation, but rather the toning down of their moral tensions” (272). William James’s observations presage those of modern historians like Barbara Ehrenreich and Beryl Satter, who emphasize New Thought’s utility for Gilded-Age women. Ehrenreich argues, for instance, that New Thought appealed to women sickened by the fire-andbrimstone Calvinism of their era, with its attendant guilt and workaholism (79). William James goes into more detail about Christian Science and New Thought in “The Religion of Healthy Mindedness,” which was originally delivered as a series of lectures at the University of Edinburgh in 1901–1902 and later included in his book The Varieties of Religious Experience. Here, James cites Christian Science founder Eddy as well as New Thought

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writers Henry Wood, Call, and Trine. He also mentions New Thought leader Horatio Dresser, who by this time had undertaken graduate work with James at Harvard (Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone 342). Ever the pragmatist, James seems less interested in the doctrinaire differences between Christian Science and other New Thought sects than in the practical benefits that mind cure offers believers. He provides plentiful evidence of these benefits, including no less than forty-seven firsthand testimonials by converts to these faiths, many of whom were healed of longstanding physical and mental complaints through positive thinking and prayer (Robert Richardson 397). While James maintains a veneer of objectivity in discussing these emergent religious movements, his overall assessment is positive. He describes New Thought as “a deliberately optimistic scheme of life” that touts “the conquering efficacy of courage, hope, and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and all nervously precautionary states of mind” (The Varieties of Religious Experience 91–92). He lauds the practical value of a religious movement that relieves much real suffering, even if the means of cure are poorly understood. Partly due to his flattering depictions of New Thought in his writings, James became something of a hero to believers (Meyer 315). New Thought writers from Call to Norman Vincent Peale incorporated elements of James’s psychological theories into their own writings, and cited him as an authority (Parker 82). William James’s positive writings on mind cure perhaps reflect his personal experiences with New Thought and Christian Science, which helped assuage his neurasthenia. Like Burnett, James suffered intermittently from crippling bouts of depression and insomnia. In 1887, he underwent a mind cure with New Thought practitioner Annetta Dresser and was surprised to find that his insomnia improved under her treatment (Robert Richardson 275). In 1909, meanwhile, James undertook a monthlong Christian Science treatment for a heart ailment with a well-known practitioner, Lewis Strang, who was Eddy’s former secretary (Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone 342; Robert Richardson 515). More significantly, William James engaged in a legal defense of Christian Science that jeopardized his professional reputation. In 1898, he testified before the Massachusetts Legislature against a bill proposing that only physicians and surgeons could legally treat the sick. This bill would have outlawed Christian Science healing and similar practices. James also argued against the bill in the Boston Evening Transcript (1830– 1941) when it was first proposed in 1894, much to the chagrin of his medical colleagues (Fraser 265–266; Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone 339–341).

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This controversy took place around the same time that Henry James was writing The Turn of the Screw. Henry James was a curious yet skeptical observer of the occult phenomena and new religious movements that fascinated his brother. He was, for instance, a tentative supporter of the Society for Psychical Research. While he disliked the flat, scientific tone of case studies published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, which tended to “wash ghosts clean of all mystery and horror,” he seems to have been interested in their content (Edel, The Treacherous Years 89). He was acquainted with SPR founders Frederic W. H. Myers, Edmund Gurney, and Henry Sidgwick, and purchased a copy of Phantasms of the Living when it appeared in 1886 (Beidler, “Introduction” 17). He also attended at least one SPR meeting in London in 1890, where he “read aloud, on behalf of his absent brother William, a scientific report” about an alleged medium named Mrs. Piper who channeled the spirit of a deceased man (17). After William’s death in 1910, meanwhile, “Henry remained in Cambridge [Massachusetts] for several months to see if his brother would succeed in contacting his family from beyond the grave, as he had promised to try,” but was deeply skeptical when his brother’s voice was allegedly heard at a séance (Kucich 122; Edel, Henry James: A Life 670). James’s willingness to go along with such experiments, however ambivalently, suggests some degree of acceptance of psychical research, which boasted the imprimatur of science and the endorsement of illustrious men. By contrast, James was more critical of new religious movements like Spiritualism and New Thought that attracted large numbers of women. In The Bostonians, for instance, James skewers the burgeoning women’s movement in 1870s New England as well as the eclectic religious trends that overlapped with it. As John J. Kucich explains, heroine Verena Tarrant’s trance speaking and mediumship place her firmly in the mainstream of American Spiritualism. Nineteenth-century Spiritualists believed in the equality of each individual soul, regardless of race or gender. The movement thus offered female followers “a means of getting around the proscriptions facing women who entered public life,” Kucich observes (118). Like Spiritualism, New Thought in its early years boasted an overwhelmingly female membership who championed women’s causes, as historians Satter and Catherine Albanese have explained.17 The movement also provided women with significant leadership opportunities, as the examples of Eddy and Hopkins suggest. While The Bostonians contains no explicit mention of Christian Science or New Thought, some readers sensed that James took aim at these emergent movements. For instance,

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two contemporary reviews of The Bostonians mention mind cure among the novel’s relevant contexts. Horace Scudder of The Atlantic Monthly (1857–present) sets the scene of James’s novel amidst “a medley of women’s rights, spiritualism, inspirationism, and the mind cure” (qtd. in Hayes 168), while an anonymous reviewer for the Boston Evening Traveller (1845– 1967) states that No candid observer can look upon this Boston life, with its multitudinous phases of inquiry and pursuit – with its advocates of suffrage and antisuffrage; its discussions of mind-cure, metaphysical cure, mesmerism, spiritualism, theosophy . . . heaven knows what – without finding all Mr. James’s material around us. (qtd. in Hayes 158)

The novel also contains a possible reference to Eddy in chapter eleven, where Verena is said to have “grown up among lady-editors of newspapers advocating new religions” (60). Eddy, who established The Christian Science Journal in 1883 and served as editor during its early years, is the most likely subject of this reference (Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone 97).18 Some have even suggested Eddy as one possible model for Verena. Caroline Fraser, for instance, argues that Verena resembles the religious founder in her personal charisma and her sway over audiences (85).19 It seems likely, then, that James mocks Christian Science and New Thought among other targets in The Bostonians, setting a precedent for his critique of New Thought in The Turn of the Screw. The next section of this chapter builds upon these historical and biographical connections to trace the uncanny resemblance between Miles and his predecessor, Cedric Errol. A ghostly reiteration of Fauntleroy, Miles suggests what is at stake in New Thought followers’ veneration of child spirituality: no less than a child’s agency, individuality, and well-being. This section also contrasts the hapless governess of James’s tale with Little Lord Fauntleroy’s Dearest, both of whom attempt to use adorable male children for self-interested purposes. Specifically, both seek a symbiotic relationship with a child in which affections, desires, and goals are reciprocally mirrored. This relationship rests upon an understanding of the male child’s symbolic value within New Thought as a woman’s personal conduit to God. While Dearest attains this symbiosis with her own son, the governess signally fails to achieve a similar merging of identity and interests with Miles. Her failure and Miles’s untimely death warn against using a child in the service of a religious ideology, even if (perhaps especially if) it may be personally expedient to do so.

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New Thought in The Turn of the Screw Despite his innocent appeal, Cedric Errol is not necessarily the most interesting or even the central character in Little Lord Fauntleroy. Anna Wilson suggests that Dearest is the novel’s true “sentimental heroine” and that “Fauntleroy is his mother’s creation . . . Fauntleroy functions as her proxy, for he represents her at every turn” (240). Like a proper Gilded-Age lady, Fauntleroy embodies the values of the domestic sphere, winning converts through persuasion and a loving heart rather than through “manly” action (though Burnett repeatedly uses this adjective to describe her hero, as if anticipating the charges of effeminacy he would later encounter). Wilson’s reading helps explain why Fauntleroy has been both “the darling of mothers” and “the abomination of a generation” of young boys forced to wear the dreaded Fauntleroy suit and style their hair in curly love-locks (232). Fauntleroy was, of course, the creation of a loving mother whose literary tribute to her seven-year-old son, Vivian Burnett, inadvertently led to his lifetime of infamy as “the original Little Lord Fauntleroy” (White n.p.). Viewing Little Lord Fauntleroy as a book for and about mothers, which celebrates close relationships between mothers and sons, is a good starting point for a comparison of the novel with The Turn of the Screw. If Little Lord Fauntleroy celebrates the oceanic merging of identity between mother and idealized son, then The Turn of the Screw depicts a catastrophically failed attempt to establish such a bond. But who or what is at fault for this failure? Is it Miles and Flora, who cannot measure up to the high bar set by Fauntleroy, or their governess, who holds them to such unrealistic expectations in the first place? Or are Burnett’s New Thought beliefs to blame for suggesting the idea of the Man Child as spiritual support and proxy for its mother – an ideal perhaps impossible to achieve outside of fiction? At stake in this dispute are the reality of the ghosts, the reliability and sanity of the governess narrator, and the willingness of readers to believe that children are capable of erotic depravity. As James’s Preface to The Turn of the Screw makes clear, the author intentionally leaves such issues unresolved in order to exercise the reader’s creativity and maximize the novella’s suspense: “Only make the reader’s general vision of evil intense enough . . . and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars” (232). Despite James’s purposeful ambiguity, however, it is still possible to identify a strong critique of New Thought in The Turn of the Screw,

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whether we look principally at the governess (a shadowy figure in her own right, as H.G. Wells noted) or at the children (James to Wells, December 9, 1898). For her part, the governess selfishly tries to impose upon Miles the role of New Thought Man Child who might serve as her conduit to God. This desire surfaces in her spiritualized language about the boy, her repeated attempts to win his affection and trust, and her desire to “save or shield” him from competing emotional bonds (James, The Turn of the Screw 59). Moreover, the governess at times deploys a nonconfrontational, hands-off New Thought parenting style endorsed by Burnett and described in detail later in this chapter. In so doing, she departs from her era’s conventional wisdom about governesses, who were supposed to exercise unwavering vigilance about the moral welfare of their charges (Schrero 269-270; Newman 60). While an uninvolved parenting style makes sense if one views children as innately good – as New Thought followers generally did – this approach prevents the governess from intervening in her charges’ problems until it is too late. For their part, the children undermine New Thought values embodied by Fauntleroy in ways both obvious and subtle. Though Miles and Flora mirror Cedric’s rosy-cheeked, golden-haired appearance and loving demeanor – and even mimic his verbal tics, such as calling the governess “my dear” (in place of Cedric’s “Dearest”) – these similarities mask essential differences in motive and character, as I shall explain.20 These differences surface in the novella’s earliest descriptions of the children’s beauty and good nature, which resonate with similar passages in Fauntleroy, but introduce troubling notes of dissonance. Take, for instance, the loving affect displayed by Cedric and Miles and admired by New Thought writers such as Eddy, for whom children represented “Life, Truth, and Love” and “freedom from wrong and receptiveness of right” (Science and Health 582, 236). In Little Lord Fauntleroy, Burnett’s narrator describes Cedric’s affectionate nature and provides a rational explanation for it, perhaps to add a touch of realism to his idealized portrait: He had lived so much with his father and mother, who were always loving and considerate and tender and well-bred. He had never heard an unkind or uncourteous word spoken at home; he had always been loved and caressed and treated tenderly, and so his childish soul was full of kindness and innocent warm feeling. (6)

One might expect a child so lovingly raised to be kind, if not “simply radiantly happy” as Cedric is (204).

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While Burnett provides a believable reason for Cedric’s sweetness, one cannot say the same for the governess’s descriptions of Miles, who is said to possess “something divine that I have never found to the same degree in any child – his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love” (James, The Turn of the Screw 37). She adds, “there was in this beautiful little boy something extraordinarily sensitive, yet extraordinarily happy . . . [h]e had never for a second suffered” (43). These descriptions of Miles’s untroubled looks belie his difficult past, in which he has suffered the “loss upon loss” of “two sets of guardians” (Flatley 110). Despite these crushing blows, Jonathan Flatley observes, Miles and Flora’s grief is “eerily absent from their initial cheery presentation” (112). This inconsistency of affect and presentation is an early sign that all is not as it seems at Bly. The governess’s description of neglected orphans who have “never for a second suffered” also forces readers to question her judgment. As Sally Shuttleworth and Kevin Ohi have separately argued, the governess repeatedly demonstrates her investment in the ideal of childhood innocence, even when evidence points to the contrary (Shuttleworth 213–220; Ohi 123–153). We can hardly take her statements at face value, given that James considered childhood a “time of unhappiness” and was conscious of the performative aspect of children’s behavior (Shine 22; Shuttleworth 325). The governess’s remarks about Miles’s sublime happiness represent one of many instances in The Turn of the Screw in which James de-naturalizes positive traits lauded by Burnett and other New Thought enthusiasts – in this case, innocence and a loving affect – revealing them to be constructed or imaginary. Another trait thus called into question is royalty, whether real or symbolic. In Little Lord Fauntleroy, Cedric’s inheritance of an earldom literalizes his innate nobility of character. His title also signals a key preoccupation of early New Thought writers, who stressed a “royal birthright” or “divine inheritance” to console believers beset by economic or marital problems (Satter 119, 134). In Burnett’s Sara Crewe (1888) and its expanded version, A Little Princess, for instance, the heroine imagines herself as a princess to soften her sudden descent into poverty. James alludes to royalty more than once in his descriptions of Miles and Flora, though neither stands to inherit a title. In The Turn of the Screw, such allusions highlight the uncomfortable status difference between the middleclass governess and her upper-middle-class charges. This imbalance of rank and power naturally undermines her authority and self-confidence. Early in the novella, for instance, the governess compares her charges to “a pair of little grandees, of princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be right,

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would have to be fenced around and ordered and arranged” (38). Her choice of terms is unusual; a “grandee” originally referred to high-ranking Spanish or Portuguese nobleman, though the word now designates persons of noble rank more generally (OED). This foreign word perhaps evokes the orphans’ colonial past, as Sharrad suggests, or their strangeness and unknowability in the eyes of their guardian (4). The governess’s remark, with its curious elliptical structure, also suggests the considerable trouble her charges impose upon her due to their high status (“everything . . . would have to be fenced around and ordered and arranged”). The novella’s second reference to royalty occurs after the governess finds Miles strolling at midnight on the grounds of the estate, where he has communed with Quint. When the governess questions him about his nocturnal outing, “[h]e was gentleness itself, and while I wagged my head at him he stood there more than ever a little fairy prince” (James, The Turn of the Screw 74). This sentence echoes Burnett’s identical description of Cedric as a “fairy prince” in Little Lord Fauntleroy, but occurs under far more compromising circumstances (71). In this context, the governess’s allusion to royalty highlights the dissonance between Miles’s regal appearance and his untoward behavior, which – whatever its particulars – seems quite different from Cedric’s innocent affection.21 It also sharpens the contrast in rank between Miles and Quint, the lower-class servant with whom he consorts. Flora’s aristocratic veneer proves even more fragile, crumbling when she is forced to address her secret meetings with Miss Jessel. As soon as the governess raises the subject, she finds that Flora’s “incomparable childish beauty had suddenly failed, had quite vanished” (James, The Turn of the Screw 103). Along with the loss of her looks, Flora loses social status in the eyes of the governess: “she had turned common and almost ugly” and resembled a “vulgarly pert little girl in the street” (103). Flora’s striking transformation reverses the rags-to-riches trajectory of Little Lord Fauntleroy and underscores its unlikeliness, suggesting how much more easily a child might fall from relative economic stability to a life of poverty, hard labor, or even prostitution – the last being a timely subject thanks to W.T. Stead’s exposé of child sex work in The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon (1885). In other words, Flora’s ravaged looks evoke the economic risks that were a day-to-day reality for most children during the volatile Gilded Age. Flora’s breakdown and apparent loss of status problematize ideas derived from Burnett’s New Thought faith, specifically, followers’ belief in a noble birthright and in wealth as a reward for right thinking. But a larger

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question concerns Flora’s presence in the narrative in the first place. On the one hand, she is extraneous to the spiritual bond between woman and Man Child described by Burnett and Hopkins. On the other hand, Flora’s role makes sense in terms of plot development and the evolution of New Thought over time. Most obviously, her presence heightens the tale’s suspense, as the frame narrator, Douglass, suggests: “If the child gives the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children – ?” (23). Flora’s apparent collusion with her brother also makes the governess’s entrapment and isolation more complete. From a New Thought perspective, moreover, Flora evokes the female inner child characters that had begun to appear in Burnett’s work and elsewhere, providing an important variant on the Man Child of New Thought. One case in point is the heroine of Burnett’s Sara Crewe, who engages in New Thought practices like nonresistance to evil, creative visualization, affirmation of positive thoughts, and denial of negative ones. As discussed in the previous chapter, these practices enable Sara to mentally transform her impoverished surroundings into opulence; as, for instance, when she imagines a single hot currant bun turning into an entire dinner. Sara also forms strong bonds with opposite-sex adults in the manner of Hopkins’s Man Child, first with her father and later with her rescuer, Mr. Carrisford, whom she lifts out of a serious depression. Sara Crewe is, of course, a forerunner of the inspired heroines in Anne of Green Gables, Eleanor Porter’s Pollyanna (1913), and Kate Douglass Wiggin’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), New Thought novels in which optimistic young girls “redeem adult curmudgeons” with positive thinking (Mintz 195). Unlike these inspiring young girls, however, Flora’s presence is anything but redemptive. Instead, she angrily rejects a deeper bond with her caretaker and further destabilizes the governess’s hold on her sanity. Even so, Flora seems peripheral to the emotional drama of James’s tale; as Peter Coveney suggests, the real struggle “is essentially between the woman and the boy” (211). Flora’s presence and her relative marginality may have to do with shifting gender norms in fiction for and about children around 1900. Catherine Robson describes how extended focus on innocent girls in the Victorian era gave way to a preoccupation with boys in the Edwardian period, due in part to exposés of female child prostitution like Stead’s: “Excessive focus on the innocence of the little girl could not help but destroy her and left the way clear for the boy to embody a new image of a new childhood for a new age” (192). In other words, the two child characters in The Turn of the Screw may be symptoms of a cultural sea change then in progress. While Flora hearkens back to

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mid-Victorian female child heroines such as Carroll’s Alice or Dickens’s Little Nell, Miles looks forward to boy heroes in twentieth-century works by J.M. Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, and others (193). This explanation seems too pat, however, in light of other historical developments of the 1890s. In this decade, boyhood innocence also came under fire due to changing understandings of male sexuality. Sexologists in England and on the Continent studied “deviant” sexual behaviors like homosexuality, while a series of scandals (such as the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889 and the Wilde trials in April and May 1895) brought love between men increasingly under scrutiny (Gunter and Jobe 9). Due to these developments, especially the Wilde trials, effeminacy became firmly associated with homosexuality in the popular mind (Bristow 2). Meanwhile, homosexuality itself was more broadly defined as “a kind of relationship and a type of individual rather than a particular act” (Matheson 711). These changes meant that Fauntleroy’s androgyny – which Burnett connected with Eddy’s Father-Mother God and her desire that followers combine the best of both sexes – no longer seemed so innocent. Looking back on Fauntleroy in the early twentieth century, the next generation of reviewers called Burnett’s hero a sissy, an “insufferable mollycoddle,” and an “odious little prig in a lace collar,” among other insults that targeted his effeminacy (qtd. in Clark 26 and Anna Wilson 235). Many of these same writers who remembered the “Fauntleroy plague” had been among its first victims: boys forced to wear his “fussy costume” by their fond mothers (Clark 26). Some rebelled rather than don the velveteen suit. Memorably, Oscar Wilde’s son Vyvyan Holland and his brother Cyril appeared naked at a party rather than wear the dreaded Fauntleroy costume, as Holland relates in Son of Oscar Wilde (1954). As discussed in the previous chapter, Burnett based Fauntleroy’s outfit on Wilde’s lavish apparel during his 1882 American lecture tour (Thwaite 71). She and Wilde met during the Washington, DC leg of his tour and spent an afternoon in rapt conversation (Gerzina 96). Burnett could never have predicted that, over a decade later, Wilde would be convicted of acts of gross indecency with other men, nor that his trial and conviction would tarnish her most famous fictional creation. James, too, was shaken by the Wilde trials, which left their mark on The Turn of the Screw. James – whose closest emotional bonds were with younger men – was predictably fascinated and horrified by the information made public in court.22 His correspondence about the trial frequently veered into the Gothic mode, much like The Turn of the Screw itself, as

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Neill Matheson observes (712-713). In an 1895 letter to Edmund Gosse, for instance, James wrote of the “sickening horribility” of the famous playwright’s ordeal, which evoked his sympathy and revulsion: It is the squalid gratuitousness of it all – of the mere exposure – that blurs the spectacle. But the fall from nearly 20 years of a really unique kind of “brilliant” conspicuity (wit, “art,” conversation – “one of our 2 or 3 dramatists, etc.”) to that sordid prison cell and this gulf of obscenity over which the ghoulish public hangs and gloats – it is beyond any utterance of irony or any pang of compassion! He was never in the smallest of degree interesting to me – but this hideous human history has made him so. (Selected Letters 179)

As biographer Leon Edel explains, James regarded Wilde’s conviction and his sentence – two years of hard labor – as “a very squalid tragedy, but still a tragedy” (The Treacherous Years 122). Wilde’s fate was also a disturbing reminder for James to keep his own sexual inclinations well concealed. The Wilde trials colored James’s depiction of Miles in The Turn of the Screw and influenced the reception of his gothic tale. Like Cedric, Miles’s physical beauty, empathy, and intuition make him strikingly androgynous – so much so, that his governess feels compelled to say that he is not “a muff” (that is, a sissy or unmanly boy [43]). But whereas Fauntleroy’s girlishness is part of his innocent appeal, Miles’s effeminacy takes on more dangerous overtones due to his suspiciously close relationship to Quint and to greater public awareness of homosexuality in the last five years of the nineteenth century. Simply put, Miles was open to reader scrutiny in a way that Fauntleroy had not been in 1886, even if Miles’s precise transgressions (sexual or otherwise) are never explained. There are tantalizing hints, however. As she prepares for her final encounter with Miles, for instance, the governess lets slip that “what I had to deal with was revoltingly, against nature,” perhaps alluding to one common English translation of Joris-Karl Huysman’s 1884 succès de scandale, À rebours (111).23 This French novel about a dissolute nobleman became a touchstone for British decadent writers and aesthetes such as Wilde, who alluded to this “poisonous” book in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). Formal elements of The Turn of the Screw – especially the governess’s roundabout way of hinting at taboos and transgressions – provide further clues about Miles’s sexual inclinations. As Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick explains, homosexuality was defined at the fin de siècle in negative or elliptical terms, as in Lord Alfred Douglas’s phrase “the love that dare not speak its name” (202–203). The Turn of the Screw, whose narrator circles obsessively around Miles’s misdeeds but refuses to

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name them, may be implicated in this larger trend. James’s choice of the Gothic mode may also be a response to “the climate of anxiety surrounding nonnormative sexuality in England in the 1890s, embodied for James (and many others) by the sensational trials of Oscar Wilde,” as Matheson observes (711). In any case, late-Victorian critics read between the lines, drawing liberally on the pseudoscientific discourse surrounding homosexuality at the fin de siècle. Take, for instance, the outspoken response of psychical researcher Frederic W.H. Myers to James’s tale in 1898: The little girl feels lesbian love for the partially materialized ghost of a harlot-governess; and the little boy (who is expelled from school for obscenity) feels pederastic passion for the partially materialized ghost of a corrupt manservant. (220)

While other readers were less direct about the children’s sexuality, some condemned the tale’s immorality in more general terms. The reviewer for the Sketch, for example, wrote that the “intolerable” subject matter of James’s novella “should only be treated by a book on morbid pathology,” perhaps alluding to late-nineteenth-century sexological studies of pedophilia, homosexuality, and other so-called perversions by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and James’s acquaintance John Addington Symonds (qtd. in “Book Reviews Reviewed” 562). By suggesting Miles’s homosexuality, James brought Fauntleroy up to date by drawing out implications not imagined by earlier readers, and certainly not intended by Burnett herself. He also undermined a key component of the cult of the child by linking androgyny to same-sex attraction at a time when homosexual encounters were still illegal in Britain and America. By undercutting traits valued by New Thought followers, such as androgyny, nobility, and a loving affect, the uncanny children of The Turn of the Screw challenge the belief system animating Fauntleroy. Miles and Flora also bring to mind James’s earlier arguments against idealized child characters. In an 1886 book review, for instance, James asserted that children’s “essentially immoral love of pleasure” is incompatible with religion and disinterested altruism: We firmly believe that children in pinafores, however rich their natural promise, do not indulge in extemporaneous prayer, in the cognition of Scripture texts, and in the visitation of the poor and needy, except in very conscious imitation of their elders . . . children grow positively good only as they grow wise, and they grow wise only as they grow old and leave childhood behind them. (qtd. in Shine 24)

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This passage suggests that there is something unnatural, even tragic, about a child moral exemplar such as Fauntleroy. To make children prematurely moral, James argued, “is to make them wise before their time, which is a very painful consummation” (24). To offer children no moral guidance, however, can be equally harmful. If children are amoral pleasure-seekers who become good only “in very conscious imitation of their elders,” then they need someone older and wiser whose behavior they can emulate. The governess cannot provide the firm, steadying influence Miles and Flora need, for several reasons. The first is that she is not the children’s mother, nor even the “delegate of the mother,” as a governess traditionally was (Schrero 265). As we have seen, James disapproved of Burnett’s absentee motherhood and presumably felt that no other guardian would suffice in her place (when away from her, Burnett’s sons typically stayed with their father or at boarding school). The governess’s difficulties in fulfilling her role stem from who she is – the hired help, not a family member, not a social equal – as well as how she carries out her responsibilities. Seen from this angle, she is less to blame than the children’s absentee uncle, who neglects his responsibilities as the children’s closest relative and legal guardian. Nonetheless, the governess’s questionable choices further undermine her already compromised authority. Some of her mistakes can be traced to her youth, lack of experience, and excessive emotional investment in her charges, as we have seen. Other errors stem from the governess’s emulation of a New Thought parenting style portrayed in Little Lord Fauntleroy and elsewhere, one that alternates between under- and over-involvement in children’s lives and studiously avoids parent–child confrontations. While Victorian upper- and middle-class parenting was generally more hands off than we are used to – with boarding schools and hired help being the norm rather than the exception – governesses were expected to exercise unwavering vigilance exceeding that of a mother or other relative. One conduct manual recommended, for instance, that “[t]he eye of the governess must be fixed on her pupils from morning till night, every day of her existence: her duty is not confined to the school room . . . it extends to every occupation – almost to every word and gesture” (Sir George Stephen, qtd. in Newman 269–270). The goal of such watchfulness was, in part, to protect the children from corruption by lower servants, who were believed to be a bad influence (Schrero 265). To be sure, the governess does display such watchfulness in parts of The Turn of the Screw, especially when she fears the influence of the ghosts (who are former servants) on her impressionable charges. In such moments, she

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keeps the children ever in her sight; of Miles, she says, “I had all but pinned the boy to my shawl . . . I was like a gaoler with an eye to possible surprises and escapes” (83). At other times, however – particularly at the beginning and end of the tale – the governess grants the children unusual freedom because she trusts, or desperately wants to trust, in their thoroughgoing innocence and good nature. During her first months at Bly, for instance, she puts off “the end of [Miles’s] holidays and the resumption of his studies,” and enjoys “space and air and freedom” alongside her pupils (37–38). Near the conclusion, the governess again suspends her watch on Miles’s behavior, exclaiming: “[Miles] had his freedom now – he might have it to the end!” (104). True to her word, she catches “no glimpse” of Miles on their first morning alone together at Bly (110). The governess also avoids confrontation with her charges at all costs. Until their final conversation, the governess refrains from speaking openly with Miles about his expulsion from school or his relationship with Quint, just as she postponed mentioning Miss Jessel to Flora. Instead of bringing matters into the open, the governess tries to win the children’s friendship and trust so that they might “confess” and be “saved” of their own volition (110). The governess’s relatively light hand with discipline, her attempts to befriend her pupils, and her avoidance of conflict diverge from the authoritarian parenting methods common in the Victorian era. Cassell’s Household Guide (c. 1880), for instance, emphasized that “obedience is the first lesson to be taught” if parents hope to raise “well-managed babes” (2:38).24 To this end, parents were advised to avoid caresses and other displays of affection and use “great firmness in checking” unwanted behaviors. Cassell’s also stressed the dangers of spoiling a child by too frequently indulging his or her will. Parents who are “instead of their rulers, slaves to their children . . . create a double misery – neither themselves nor their children are happy” (2:38). In contrast to this strict discipline, the governess’s behavior toward her charges more closely conforms to a New Thought parenting style described by authors such as Eddy, Frances Partlow, Helen Van Anderson, and Burnett. These writers emphasized children’s moral goodness and believed that, given proper encouragement and examples, children might be trusted to exercise their own will, make their own decisions, and spend time away from their parents. This parenting philosophy derived from the New Thought belief that evil does not exist or exists only in the human mind. Therefore, to acknowledge evil is to give it power over you and spread its influence (Satter 62–64). Along these lines, New Thought parents acknowledged Eddy’s principle of “moral contagion,” whereby speaking of

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negative things had the potential to make them real. Eddy wrote, for instance, that parents and guardians should “keep out of the minds of your children either sinful or diseased thoughts” and focus instead on “the truths of health and holiness” (Science and Health 236–237). Instead of confronting children about misbehavior, then, a mother should give gentle advice and trust that her children’s loving natures will help them attain spiritual maturity. On the surface, this New Thought approach seems like a kinder, gentler alternative to the icebox parenting recommended by guidebooks like Cassell’s. Yet it had its own problems, being steeped in denial and simultaneously over- and under-involved in children’s lives. As Partlow explained in Training of Children in the New Thought (1903), mothers should maintain a “tender carelessness” toward their offspring that combines love and detachment (12).25 On the one hand, a mother should encourage children to be independent by teaching them to complete errands by themselves and to spend hours, days, even months apart from her when necessary. The goal was to allow children to learn selfgovernment in the mother’s absence (and, perhaps, to allow the mother time for rest and self-actualization). On the other hand, the New Thought mother should become her children’s “closest and best friend” and “not . . . permit any influence, even the friendship of a girl or boy chum to become more precious than the mother’s friendship” (28). By becoming her children’s confidant and preempting competition for this role, the mother is more likely to find out what her kids are planning, feeling, and thinking. She can also vigilantly protect them from evil influences such as false friends and corrupting servants. In sum, the New Thought mother was physically absent but ever-present in spirit; bent on ignoring evil, yet keen to pry into her children’s secrets. How might a New Thought parenting style look in practice? The lives and works of New Thought followers provide plentiful examples. In Helen Van Anderson’s New Thought novel Victoria True: Or, the Journal of a Live Woman (1895), for instance, the eponymous heroine reforms her alcoholic husband and teaches her fractious children self-restraint, not by confronting them about their misbehavior, but simply by meditating on positive statements about life, love, and truth. Victoria’s children reform once she allows them greater freedom to “use their own will and power of self-control,” so that they “voluntarily make decisions between right and wrong,” as she explains in her journal (48). In defiance of manuals that urged parental vigilance and repeated reprimands, Victoria promises her daughter that “I will not tell you what to do, not say anything about it if

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you make a mistake. I know you can do what you choose to do, and I believe you will choose the good” (29–30, emphasis in original). Victoria even feels comfortable leaving her newly obedient children home with their alcoholic father and invalid Aunt Delia when she makes an extended visit to Colorado. Similarly, Burnett wrote adoringly about her younger son, Vivian, in her autobiographical essay “How Fauntleroy Occurred, and a Very Real Little Boy Became an Ideal One” (1894). There, she describes how she allowed her sons to take long train rides unsupervised because of her faith in their goodness and amiability. She also trusted that they would flourish in her absence as she crisscrossed the Atlantic to supervise dramatic versions of her literary works. Burnett’s fiction, too, advocated these New Thought approaches to childcare. For instance, Cedric Errol has a loving mother, but she is often absent (Cedric lives at Dorincourt Castle with his “wicked” grandfather, while Dearest lodges in a nearby house). Her presence is hardly necessary, however, since Cedric displays goodwill and generosity even without supervision. In The Secret Garden, meanwhile, sickly heroine Mary Lennox thrives precisely because she does not have a governess (Sharrad 5). Mrs. Sowerby, a motherly neighbor woman, recommends “fresh air and freedom and running about” as the best tonics for the neglected orphan (Burnett, The Secret Garden 70). She also suggests that Mary have no nurse or governess until she is older and stronger. The New Thought emphases on childhood innocence, lax discipline, and denial of evil clashed with James’s own views. Raised by unconventional parents who traveled extensively and offered him “unlimited freedom of choice” on matters of religion and culture, James craved the routine and structure his own upbringing had lacked (Shine 93–94). He felt that American parents were remiss in providing the tradition and discipline children need. In an 1876 travel sketch, for instance, the author favorably contrasted the French jeune fille to her less strictly raised American counterpart. Observing French girls hemmed about by “a solid phalanx” of adults, “I used to pity the young ladies at first, for this perpetual application of the leading string; but a little reflection showed me that the French have ordered this as well as they have ordered everything else” (qtd. in Shine 96– 97). For, “if a jeune fille is for three or four years tied with a very short rope,” this structured adolescence prepares her to become a successful mère de famille, a position endowed with considerable authority (96-97). This passage, as Muriel Shine suggests, underscores the value James placed on a strong, dedicated mother figure and on responsible parenting more

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generally (98). James’s ideal parent was not passive, detached, or deep in denial. Instead, she actively shaped her child’s future. The same cannot be said for James’s governess, who adopts many of the laissez-faire New Thought parenting techniques and attitudes described earlier. Like “tenderly careless” New Thought mothers, she is at once hands-off and controlling, obsessed with ferreting out the children’s secrets while granting them considerable freedom (to roam the grounds and choose the contents of their lessons, for example). While these approaches may have worked for some New Thought followers, they signally fail in James’s tale, leading to Flora’s mental breakdown and Miles’s untimely death. This disastrous outcome suggests James’s disapproval of the New Thought parenting style on display in Fauntleroy and elsewhere. Importantly, Miles’s death results, in part, from the governess’s refusal to seek outside help from his uncle or another authority figure. Her refusal recalls Christian Scientist parents who eschew medical treatment for their offspring, sometimes resulting in accusations of wrongful death or child neglect. By the 1880s and 90s, such cases had already resulted in wellpublicized trials in the United States and abroad (Schoepflin 184–185). Around the same time, James’s older brother William was involved in his controversial legal defense of Christian Scientists, mind curers, and other unlicensed medical healers.26 This coincidence makes it more likely that James himself was aware of such scandalous cases. The governess’s persistent refusal to contact her employer – against the advice of Mrs. Grose and the wishes of the children themselves – constitutes neglect, even if it is not precisely medical help that Miles needs. By emphasizing the governess’s willful ignorance and inaction, James condemns a New Thought parenting style characterized by denial and nonresistance to evil. The governess’s most significant failure, however, is her inability to see the children as rounded human beings rather than as representatives of “Life, Truth, and Love.” She is stymied by their refusal to engage in the emotional symbiosis she expects of them, based on narratives like Little Lord Fauntleroy and the New Thought idea of the Man Child. In contrast to Cedric Errol – who is very much his mother’s creation – Miles and Flora are individuals who pursue their own friendships and desires. As such, they behave unpredictably. The governess admits as much to Mrs. Grose: “They haven’t been good – they’ve only been absent. They have been easy to live with because they’re simply leading a life of their own. They’re not mine – they’re not ours” (James, The Turn of the Screw 76). In this rare moment of insight, the governess identifies what she is most afraid of: the children existing as independent and unknowable beings. Her desire to fully possess

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their affections, as well as her projection of New Thought values onto her charges, dooms their relationship. In The Turn of the Screw, James mercilessly picks apart the governess’s logic and that of New Thought followers who similarly idealized children and adopted a relaxed disciplinary style. His portrayal of two children who are ostensibly evil, or possessed by evil spirits, inverts and satirizes the New Thought idea that children are angelically good and connected to a higher power. By showing the ridiculousness of either moral extreme, James suggests that real children come in as many gray-shaded varieties (gay, straight, kind, unruly) as their adult counterparts. For all his sensitivity toward young people, however, James could not extend the same sympathy to New Thought mothers. These included busy working parents like Burnett for whom the innocent child was a convenient, perhaps necessary fiction – one that enabled them to practice self-care and pursue careers outside the home, to the chagrin of traditionalists like James. In conclusion, I would like to propose two future directions for research on James and his work, suggested by the content of this chapter. James’s rivalry with Burnett for dominance in the literary marketplace, combined with his unfriendly critiques of her fiction and her lifestyle, indicate the need to reexamine his negative attitudes toward women writers, extending foundational work on this topic by Habegger, Hughes, and others. James’s mockery of New Thought and Christian Science in The Turn of the Screw and The Bostonians, moreover, suggests that critics have underestimated his familiarity with the new religious movements that fascinated his father and brother, especially New Thought. Together or separately, these avenues of inquiry will broaden our understanding of a novelist whose works are usually (incorrectly) assumed to be agnostic or secular in nature and whose attitudes toward women were more conservative than is generally thought.

chapter 3

Rewriting the Rest Cure in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden

Previous chapters have discussed how Burnett’s earlier works Little Lord Fauntleroy (1886) and Sara Crewe (1888) introduced an idealized inner child figure into popular consciousness in a manner that drew on and disseminated New Thought. These bestselling fictions not only catapulted Burnett to international fame and fortune, but also contributed to the inner child as twentieth-century pop culture phenomenon. While these works may have influenced psychology and self-help culture, they do not explicitly address illness or disability except in passing. For instance, the Earl of Dorincourt’s gout, Captain Ralph Crewe’s jungle fever, and Mr. Carrisford’s invalidism receive relatively little narrative attention. Little Lord Fauntleroy and Sara Crewe are also comparatively subtle in their invocation of Christian Science and New Thought, though astute readers like Emma Curtis Hopkins and Henry James recognized these influences. By contrast, Burnett’s later novels The Dawn of a To-morrow (1906) and The Secret Garden (1911) deal explicitly with medical problems and with mind cure in its various forms. Instead of angelic child protagonists, these works feature chronically ill or disabled main characters whose cures hinge on New Thought and Christian Science rather than orthodox medical treatments. Significantly, the religious content of The Secret Garden and The Dawn of a To-morrow was widely recognized by contemporary readers, even though Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy and her faith are nowhere mentioned in these novels. As Vivian Burnett wrote in his 1927 biography of his mother, To many people it will probably be a surprise to be told that she was not an avowed Christian Scientist. The Dawn of a To-morrow is generally credited with being a Christian Science book, and so is The Secret Garden. Throughout all her later books will be found traces of the faith in the Allness of Good, which is one of the fundamentals of Christian Science. (377) 83

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Initial reviews of these two novels and of the 1909 dramatic adaptation of The Dawn of a To-morrow amply bear out Vivian’s assertion. The reviewer for American Monthly Magazine in 1911, for instance, called The Secret Garden “a New Thought story” while The Bookman mentioned the novel’s “therapeutic power of suggestion,” echoing psychologist William James’s remarks about the methods behind the mind cure (“Reviews and Mentions” 273, 269).1 Burnett’s stage version of The Dawn of a Tomorrow, meanwhile, was described by theatre critics as “New Thought mixed with fantasy” and as “the cults of the Faith Cure, Mind Cure, Rest Cure or the theology that has Mrs. Eddy as its oracle and guide” (qtd. in Gerzina 259). This highly successful play led some to assume that Burnett was a Christian Scientist, prompting her to declare in the April 10, 1909 edition of The Chicago Post, “thank goodness, I am not a scientist of any kind” (“Mrs. Burnett Not a Christian Scientist” 249). It’s no wonder Burnett needed to set the record straight, since even Eddy herself was unclear on the subject. Eddy’s scrapbooks – which she maintained with the aid of her secretary, Calvin Frye – contain a clipped advertisement for the stage adaptation of The Dawn of a To-morrow (Squires, Healing the Nation 61). This suggests that Eddy and her circle had identified Burnett as a potential ally in the quest to spread Christian Science, even if the author remained technically unaffiliated with the religion (though her son Vivian and his wife and children would later become devout Christian Scientists). In December 1906, for instance, the head of Eddy’s Committee on Publication, Alfred Farlow, recommended Burnett as one of several authors who might be willing to write favorably about Christian Science and its founder in the wake of the scandalous biography of Eddy published in McClure’s Magazine in 1907–1908 (Alfred Farlow to Mary Baker Eddy, December 22, 1906).2 This biography depicted Eddy as a “hysterical, overwrought child” who still had to be rocked to sleep in a cradle as an adult, and as a hypocritical leader whose “selfishness” and “rage for mastery” overshadowed her religious messages (Stouck xviii–xix).3 Farlow’s suggestion must have reached Burnett, who refused, but affirmed her interest in Eddy in a letter to Vivian: [S]uch an article could only come convincingly from a person who had long known Mrs. Eddy as a friend and had personally watched the development and effect of her work. Though I have been for years deeply interested in her thought and believe its principle, even while I cannot demonstrate it as others do, I have known very few Christian Scientists – only two – more than slightly . . . while I could not call myself a Christian Scientist, I believe

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in its principle because it is the exposition of the pure Christ-spirit applied to the needs of today. (qtd. in Gerzina 241)

Burnett’s letter suggests her cautious support of Christian Science and its founder, with whom she had a surprising amount in common. As L. Ashley Squires observes, both Eddy and Burnett were wealthy professional women who made a living from writing; both experienced chronic illness; both had divorced and remarried; and both suffered the devastating loss of a child (Healing the Nation 58). Both likewise “share a history of being read within the confines of Victorian sentimental rhetoric” despite ambitious careers and unconventional personal lives that continued well into the twentieth century (59).4 Whether or not she was aware of these similarities, Burnett’s message in her novels hewed increasingly close to Christian Science and New Thought (which she called “beautiful thought”) as she aged (Gerzina 260). Her attraction to these faiths was part of a larger cultural trend. By 1906, there were 85,000 self-identified Christian Scientists in America, 72% of them women (Parker 8; Schoepflin 34). Many more Americans were affiliated with New Thought, which likewise emphasized positive thinking as a route to health and prosperity. Christian Science and New Thought were also making their mark in England, where Burnett often resided.5 As historian Charles Braden recounts, both Eddy and New Thought leader Emma Curtis Hopkins sent disciples to London to spread their respective faiths during the late 1880s and thereafter; some of these representatives also made their way to Dublin and other parts of the United Kingdom (410–411).6 By 1914, moreover, the International New Thought Alliance decided to hold its first conference in London on June 21–26, perhaps to herald the movement’s growing transatlantic presence (188). As Burnett’s interest in Christian Science grew, her critique of mainstream medicine increased in intensity. Of all New Thought sects, Christian Science was and remains by far the strictest in its “complete repudiation of medical care,” as historian and former Christian Scientist Caroline Fraser explains (89). Eddy’s rejection of orthodox medicine followed logically from Christians Scientists’ belief in the unreality of matter, including the physical body. Her prohibition of medical remedies was also a means of differentiating Christian Science from the many competing New Thought sects that emerged in its wake, serving as an effective form of branding for Eddy’s Mother Church (89). Following legal disputes or other public relations disasters, Eddy sometimes introduced exceptions to this prohibition: allowing followers to visit obstetricians and

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dentists and have broken bones set, for instance.7 But Christian Scientists often penalized church members who availed themselves of other medical treatments, such as painkillers or surgery.8 By contrast, early New Thought followers might opt for conventional medical treatment if they chose, though they were encouraged to try prayer, positive thinking, meditation, and Christian Science healing instead or in addition. Unlike Eddy’s strictest followers, Burnett consulted with medical doctors, though she often found their care unsatisfactory. “Doctors don’t know half as much as you do yourself if you are intelligent and selfcontrolled,” she wrote in 1922 (qtd. in V. Burnett 401). Burnett had many reasons for turning toward faith healing and away from mainstream medicine around 1900. Not one, but two divorces from physicians surely contributed to this shift; Burnett divorced her first husband, ophthalmologist Swan Burnett, in 1898, and her second husband, surgeon and aspiring actor Stephen Townesend, in 1902. Burnett’s loss of her eldest son Lionel to tuberculosis in 1890, despite the best efforts of American medical specialists and several European spa cures, increased her distrust of medicine and “deepen[ed] her need for spiritual relief,” as Squires explains (Healing the Nation 59). The most pressing factor, however, was her intermittent depression and insomnia, which had plagued her for years but inevitably worsened following these traumatic events. Like Mary Lennox, the sickly heroine of The Secret Garden, Burnett admitted to being “always ill – in one way or another” (qtd. in V. Burnett 382). While Burnett sought both conventional and alternative remedies for her ailments, lasting relief eluded her. Following the failure of her second marriage in 1902, for example, Burnett sought “mental and physical rest” at Riverview Sanitarium in Fishkill Landing, New York, at the recommendation of her physician, Dr. William Whitwell (“Authoress in a Sanitarium” 1, Gerzina 232). This hospitalization coincided with her most serious bout of nervous prostration, the term she and her family members used to describe her illness (V. Burnett 302). In 1908, Burnett tried a cure at Dr. Lampé’s sanitarium in Frankfurt consisting of “regular baths, electric baths, rest, and . . . friction with brandy” (probably a form of massage), combined with a weight-loss diet (Gerzina 256). Again in 1919, Burnett underwent a modified rest cure under Dr. Fowler, who discouraged her from getting out of bed, reading anything exciting, or writing more than one letter per day (Frances Hodgson Burnett to Elizabeth Jordan, 10 December 1919). These cures were variants of S. Weir Mitchell’s infamous rest cure for nervous women, which was the standard treatment for female invalids

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around 1900. The rest cure involved weeks or months of bed rest, social isolation, massage, and rich food for underweight patients (overweight patients might receive a restricted diet like that prescribed to Burnett at Lampé’s sanitarium). Invented in the 1870s by Mitchell, a Philadelphia neurologist, the cure was used to treat ailments such as hysteria and neurasthenia, a nineteenth-century term for “nerve weakness” that encompassed depression, anxiety, migraines, indigestion, fatigue, and other symptoms. Nineteenth-century physicians believed that neurasthenia had a somatic basis, specifically, a deficiency or “lack of nerve force” in the body (Beard 5). This deficiency could be hereditary or caused by overwork that depleted the available energy in the nervous system. Accordingly, the rest cure addressed the physical rather than psychological causes of nervous disorders. The goal was to help patients regain nerve force and repair wasted tissues through rest and enhanced nutrition. Mitchell initially designed the rest cure during the Civil War as a means of treating soldiers with severe nerve damage from bullet wounds (Cervetti 83–84). At Turner’s Lane Military Hospital in Philadelphia, Mitchell cared for injured veterans rendered helpless or even “hysterical” by prolonged nerve pain (79). Little could be done for these desperate patients short of amputation of limbs and injection of narcotics for pain. A regimen of rest and nutrition, supplemented by massage and electrical stimulation of muscles in lieu of exercise, helped such patients rebuild injured nerve tissue. Inevitably, the stress of caring for these pain-ravaged men took its toll. Mitchell’s wartime experiences brought on his own first bout of “neurasthenia with grave insomnia” which would torment him at intervals throughout his life (Mitchell, “The Treatment by Rest, Seclusion, etc.” 2035). Approximately eight years later, Mitchell repurposed the treatment for a different, but equally challenging set of patients: “that class well known to every physician, – nervous women, who as a rule are thin, and lack blood” (Mitchell, Fat and Blood 9). He laid out the basics of his cure in the popular volume Fat and Blood, and How to Make Them (1877), which had been translated into four languages by the time of Mitchell’s death in 1914 (Poirier 15). While it was unusual at this time for American treatments to be adopted in Britain or on the Continent, the rest cure jumped the Atlantic in 1881, when Scottish gynecologist William Smoult Playfair first used it in his fashionable London practice. The rest cure continued to flourish in America and abroad in the early decades of the twentieth century.9

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Compared to other available treatments for nervous women at that time – such as long-term institutionalization, ovariotomies, and hysterectomy – the rest cure was relatively benign. This probably accounted for its popularity as much as any measurable improvements in patients’ health (Cervetti 31). But the rest cure was still a harrowing experience for some, as suggested by author Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892). In this tale – which was loosely based on Gilman’s own experience – the heroine undergoes a modified rest cure and is driven crazy by boredom, loneliness, and inactivity.10 By the story’s conclusion, the depressed protagonist develops full-blown psychosis thanks to this stultifying regime of rest and overfeeding. By depriving female patients of exercise and useful occupation, the rest cure enforced gender stereotypes about female passivity and confinement to the domestic sphere. It is easy to imagine why women suffering from depression and other mental health conditions were attracted to Christian Science and New Thought at a time when conventional remedies were so limited. As nineteenth-century religious movements like Christian Science and New Thought have faded from memory, we have lost an important context for Burnett’s work that helps make sense of her fiction. Unlike Burnett’s contemporaries, most modern readers – even Christian Scientists – fail to recognize The Secret Garden as a Christian Science novel.11 We have also forgotten the primitive medical practices that made such New Thought so appealing, especially to women. This chapter unearths these forgotten histories by examining The Secret Garden as a feminist, Christian Science revision of Mitchell’s rest cure and The Dawn of a To-morrow as a critique of mainstream remedies for neurasthenia. While scholars such as Squires, John Seelye, Jerry Griswold, and Lois Keith have addressed Burnett’s attraction to Christian Science and her treatment of illness and disability in The Secret Garden, none have devoted serious attention to the rest cure.12 Given Burnett’s medical history, this seems like a significant oversight. Burnett was aware of Mitchell’s theories about mental illness and its treatment from her own experiences with his cure. Her familiarity with medical writing on neurasthenia is likewise clear from her fiction, especially the opening section of The Dawn of a Tomorrow, which describes the protagonist’s depressive symptoms in terms reminiscent of Mitchell’s medical treatises. While Burnett’s novels evoke the medical logic behind the rest cure, they proceed to undermine it at every turn. Both The Dawn of a To-morrow and The Secret Garden promote wholesome activity, rather than rest, as a means to health and happiness. In these works, it is female children,

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rather than male doctors, who possess the key to recovery, and men, rather than women, who are prone to hysterics. In The Dawn of a To-morrow, for instance, a twelve-year-old girl named Glad cures a suicidal businessman by teaching him the pleasures of charitable giving. In The Secret Garden, meanwhile, ten-year-old orphan Mary Lennox heals her invalid cousin, Colin Craven, by engaging him in outdoor activity and discouraging him from thinking about his physical ailments, which turn out to be largely imaginary. Colin’s real problems turn out to be mental disorders conventionally associated with women – hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia – which ultimately yield to the healing powers of gardening and positive thinking (Martin 144). In the novel’s final scenes, Mary helps yet another hysterical man, her hunch-backed uncle, Sir Archibald Craven, overcome his depression when he sees the changes she has wrought in his neglected son. Burnett’s fiction thus reverses the gender politics of the rest cure and refutes its basic principles. Her novels also focus on male nervous illness at a time when attention to this subject was relatively unusual (Mitchell’s wartime experiences notwithstanding). I suspect that the power of The Secret Garden – long beloved by female readers – stems in no small part from its resistance to medical orthodoxy and its rejection of gender stereotypes. But while Burnett challenged Mitchell’s method of treating nervous illness and his gender bias, she did not entirely refute the physiological theories upon which his cure was based. She shared his idea that nervous invalids of both sexes suffered from a lack of available energy in the nervous system, so that patients resembled depleted electric batteries. But she suggested an entirely different treatment method that granted women greater agency. Burnett was not alone in her views, judging by the popularity of Christian Science and New Thought around 1900. The Secret Garden packaged female-centered faith healing in a delightful tale for children, thus ensuring that Burnett’s message reached generations of impressionable young readers.

Mental Illness and Its Cures During her final illness, Burnett explained to her son Vivian that she hoped to cheer her readers: “With the best that was in me I have tried to write more happiness into the world” (qtd. in Adams 314). But paradoxically, Burnett’s own “life was not a happy one,” as Vivian explained shortly after her death in 1924 (qtd. in Gerzina xvi). Burnett’s insomnia and depression flared up periodically throughout her life, especially when she was worn down by the pressures of nonstop writing. While

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it would be anachronistic to apply modern labels to Burnett’s condition, her personal correspondence reveals a pattern of depression alternating with elation that suggests bipolar disorder. In one letter dated around 1877, Burnett begs her editor, Richard Watson Gilder, to tell her whether her book-in-progress is “good or bad” so she can decide whether to keep or destroy it. In a subsequent letter to Gilder dated February 5, 1878, she describes her previous despondency and gloats over her now rapid progress: “After working and going through agonies untold and raving and tearing and hating myself and every word I ever wrote I have suddenly walked out onto a cool place and begun to soar and I have soared and soared until I don’t think I shall ever return to earth again.”13 The difference between the two letters lies not just in their tone, but also Burnett’s handwriting, which is considerably messier in the 1878 letter.14 Whatever Burnett’s condition was, it appears to have been hereditary. Her son Vivian periodically became “ill . . . from overwork,” and his mother worried that he might suffer a nervous breakdown (Gerzina 229). Burnett’s correspondence demonstrates both her self-deprecating wit and her awareness of neurological explanations for mental illness then current. By June of 1880, Burnett was struggling with her novel In Connection with the DeWilloughby Claim (which finally appeared in 1899) and enduring a prolonged bout of neurasthenia (Gerzina 93). Yet she was still able to write humorously to Gilder: About three months ago I seemed to arrive at my breakdown. My backbone disappeared and my brain and when I found they were really gone I missed them. Their defection seemed so curious that I began to try to account for it and finally rambled weakly around to the conclusion that it might be because I had written ten books in six years and done two or three other little things . . . I have about three hundred pages of a book done and generally don’t seem to care about it. There’s a good deal of it in one place and another if I could find my brains and my wrists didn’t seem to dangle so. I generally lie on my back and despise myself. Yesterday and the day before I was immensely better. Today I’m not. I’m going to Nook Farm to spend the summer. Brains may turn up there. If any one finds them he might as well hand them over . . . Mine would not be of any use to any one. They’re atrophied except on the story side where they bulge out unnecessarily in a lopsided way.

Though jocular in tone, the above passage suggests the severity of the depressions Burnett experienced and their extended duration. Indeed, this

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particular bout of illness would last for several years, until around the time Burnett began writing Little Lord Fauntleroy (Gerzina 102). Burnett’s letter also shows her awareness of contemporary medical beliefs that the brain and nervous system – rather than the soul, the heart, or the uterus – were primarily to blame for nervous illness in men and women alike. For instance, she alludes to Mitchell’s idea that “brain work” of the sort undertaken by white-collar professionals (including not just novelists but also lawyers, businessmen, and doctors) was a frequent cause of such disorders. Mitchell first outlined this theory in his influential treatise Wear and Tear: Or, Hints for the Overworked (1871) and reiterated it in subsequent works. Burnett also invokes the older but still current theory of bilateral brain asymmetry as a cause for mental illness when she describes her brains as “atrophied except on the story side where they bulge out unnecessarily in a lopsided way.” According to this theory, uneven development of the right and left brain hemispheres could result in a variety of mental disorders, even multiple personalities (as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde [1886]).15 For a novelist frequently described as sentimental and old-fashioned, such up-to-date understanding of brain function may come as a surprise. While Burnett’s ophthalmologist husband and her own physicians surely contributed to this knowledge, she was not satisfied by the conventional remedies they offered. As described in Chapter One, Burnett turned in 1883 to Eddy’s Christian Science, then a new faith centered in Boston and Lynn, Massachusetts. Though she attended Christian Science services and even “enrolled herself in a class for higher study” of the faith, Burnett found herself unable to complete the course, as Vivian explains: For some reason, despite her sympathy with Christian Science, and her real need of healing, she was not able to accept it wholly, and, though from time to time she turned to it for help, she never absolutely enrolled herself as a Scientist. (V. Burnett 377)

There were several likely reasons for Burnett’s ambivalence. First, she doubted Eddy’s claim that contagious disease was “engendered solely by human theories” rather than noxious germs (Eddy, Science and Health 220). In an undated letter to her friend Elizabeth Garver Jordan, for example, Burnett discouraged Jordan from visiting her residence at Plandome, New York, on account of a recent flu outbreak: “Germs are devils and I don’t believe in them but I will not allow my friends to run risks.” Second, Burnett’s interest in Buddhism, Spiritualism, Theosophy, and other belief systems denounced by Eddy may have distanced her from

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Christian Science, whose followers acknowledged only the Bible and Science and Health as sources of truth. Finally, Burnett struggled to grasp the Christian Science belief that matter, evil, and suffering are unreal and can be overcome through right thinking. This proved especially difficult during the last decade of her life, when she experienced intense pain caused by undiagnosed colon cancer. At such times, positive thinking became a burden rather than a solace, as Burnett confessed in an April 24, 1920 letter to Jordan: “My guilty secret is that I am generally having more of a devil of a time than it would be worth while [sic] owning to people and the greater part of me goes into keeping a gaily stiff upper lip and pretending that there is really very little the matter with me.” Burnett’s inability to “demonstrate” Christian Science (i.e., to manifest spontaneous faith healing) or to embrace Eddy’s belief system wholeheartedly left her open to other remedies during subsequent bouts of depression and physical illness. But the modified rest cures she later experienced were only temporarily helpful. At the beginning of her stay in Riverview Sanitarium in 1902, for instance, Burnett was suffering from neurasthenic symptoms and had difficulty walking and climbing stairs. Dr. Whitwell diagnosed her with “neuritis,” defined vaguely as “an affection of the nervous system” (“Authoress in a Sanitarium” 1).16 After six weeks, “she was able to go for walks, had resumed writing, and was planning to move to an apartment,” according to biographer Gretchen Gerzina (232). This apparently successful recovery was followed, however, by Burnett’s most emphatically anti-medical fictions in a New Thought vein, including The Dawn of a To-morrow and The Secret Garden. What about Burnett’s rest cures inspired such resistance? The limited information available about each cure provides some clues. For instance, Burnett’s 1908 treatment at Dr. Lampé’s sanitarium in Frankfurt was complicated by language barriers; she did not understand German, and his English was poor. As a result, the experience “turned out to be more of a comedy than a cure” (Gerzina 256). Burnett’s correspondence during her later rest cure with Dr. Fowler in 1919 provides more detailed information, though this treatment took place well after she wrote The Secret Garden. In a December 10 letter to Jordan, for instance, Burnett describes her ongoing treatment with Dr. Fowler in a largely positive light, while acknowledging his domineering bedside manner and her nagging doubts about his expertise: I am still lying in my bed and feeling a strange reluctance to getting up and wondering if the feeling denotes a fault of character which ought to be

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battled against with Puritan vigor. I have seriously discussed the matter with my doctor and he commands – above all things – not to struggle against this languor because it is what he has been struggling to bring about – he assures me that when my nervous system lies down so to speak, it then begins to build up normally. Patients who have obeyed him are every now and then allowed to present themselves to cheer me by their . . . joyous robustness after being rescued from the depths. As for me I can now eat without disturbance, I sleep all night until after seven or eight in the morning, and all the horror in my head gave way – so I will not complain and will be good. (emphasis in original)

While this letter implies Burnett’s occasional reluctance to comply with Dr. Fowler’s “commands” (for instance, her fleeting desire to get out of bed), it also testifies to her understanding of the medical rationale behind the cure: that normal building up of the nervous system through rest and feeding will automatically lead to better mental and physical health, perhaps even “joyous robustness” if one is obedient enough. Though not especially negative, Burnett’s letters about her rest cures do suggest the authoritarian nature of the treatment as it was originally conceived by Mitchell and implemented by physicians in America and abroad. Mitchell’s regimen of rest and feeding was intended to instill “order and control” that might serve as “moral medication” for coddled or selfish invalids (Mitchell, Fat and Blood 41). Typically, Mitchell’s patients were not allowed to read, write, sew, feed themselves, or have contact with friends or family. The patient had to lie in bed for six weeks to two months; during this period, she needed the doctor’s permission to sit up or turn over without assistance. She would likely be fed a heavy diet including enormous amounts of meat and milk, plus iron supplements and doses of cod liver oil, strychnine, or arsenic (Stiles, “The Rest Cure” 4).17 Patients who refused to eat might be force-fed through the nose or rectum, or (rarely) whipped to ensure obedience (Poirier 23). Given Mitchell’s personal experiences with neurasthenia, one might expect him to identify with similarly afflicted patients. With few exceptions, he was sympathetic towards nervous men, to whom he offered more flexible forms of the rest cure along with so-called West Cures involving rough riding and male bonding in idyllic frontier environments.18 Poet Walt Whitman, painter Thomas Eakins, novelist Owen Wister, and future US President Theodore Roosevelt all benefitted from this active outdoor treatment (Stiles, “Go West Young Man”).

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By contrast, Mitchell’s clinical writings on women stress the punitive nature of the cure when applied to uncooperative female patients: To lie abed half the day, and sew a little and read a little, and be interesting and excite sympathy, is all very well, but when [patients] are bidden to stay in bed a month, and neither to read, write, nor sew, and to have one nurse, – who is not a relative – then rest becomes for some women a rather bitter medicine, and they are glad enough to accept the order to rise and go about. (Fat and Blood 43)

Despite the rigidity of the cure, many women claimed to benefit from it, and appreciated Mitchell’s autocratic bedside manner. For instance, authors Rebecca Harding Davis and Amelia Gere Mason befriended Mitchell during their rest cures and corresponded with him thereafter. Mason credited Mitchell with “restoring ‘value’ to her life” when he treated her neurasthenia in 1882 (Schuster 705). But others found the cure positively stifling, particularly active women who enjoyed reading, writing, and physical exercise. Gilman, for instance, traveled to Philadelphia in the spring of 1887 to see the doctor then regarded as “the greatest nerve specialist in the country” (Gilman, Living 95). Mitchell diagnosed her with hysteria and began his usual treatments. He reportedly instructed Gilman to “[l]ive as domestic a life as possible . . . and never touch pen, brush, or pencil as long as you live” (96). After faithfully following his “prescription” for months, Gilman wrote, she “came perilously near to losing my mind. The mental agony grew so unbearable that I would sit blankly moving my head from side to side” (96). Virginia Woolf, too, reportedly detested the rest cures she underwent during episodes of severe depression, feeling that “eating and resting made her worse” (Woolf 155). In her novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Woolf depicts a traumatized war veteran, Septimus Warren Smith, who kills himself to avoid a rest cure at the hands of a fashionable Harley Street physician. Due in part to the writings of Gilman and Woolf, Mitchell’s treatment is often cited as an example of nineteenth-century medical misogyny. But it is important to note the divergent reactions of his patients, some of whom appreciated the regimented care. It is hard to tell where Burnett falls on this spectrum, since her letters about Dr. Fowler and his treatment are neither especially detailed nor emphatically positive or negative. Dr. Fowler also seems to have been more permissive than most advocates of the rest cure, even allowing Burnett to leave her bed for an afternoon to shop at Bloomingdale’s (Frances Hodgson Burnett to Elizabeth Garver Jordan, n.d.). Nonetheless, the failure of these cures to bring about lasting

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improvement must have been disappointing. Burnett may have also taken to heart Eddy’s implied denunciation of the rest cure in Science and Health: The unscientific practitioner says: “You are ill. Your brain is overtaxed, and you must rest. Your body is weak, and it must be strengthened. You have nervous prostration, and must be treated for it.” [Christian] Science objects to all this, contending for the rights of intelligence and asserting that Mind controls body and brain. (79)

Other New Thought leaders made similar denunciations of Mitchell and his cure. Echoing Science and Health, New Thought author Annie Call criticized the rest cure as a self-indulgent practice that encouraged unhealthy preoccupation with the body (Parker 85). In her fictions, Burnett imagined characters who reassert control over their bodies and brains by accessing a higher power, thus managing to “demonstrate” Eddy’s faith in a way that the author herself could not. In The Dawn of a To-morrow, for instance, suicidal protagonist Sir Oliver Holt rejects the useless advice of physicians and finds happiness in helping others. In The Secret Garden, meanwhile, a modified form of Mitchell’s treatment is shown to be ineffective, if not downright harmful, for a spoiled young hypochondriac, who responds to the healing power of “Magic” instead. In the rest of this chapter, I read these two novels within the related faith traditions of Christian Science and New Thought and as critical responses to Mitchell’s cure. I also invoke the neglected body of New Thought literature described in chapter four of historian Beryl Satter’s Each Mind a Kingdom (1999): that is, didactic novels written by New Thought leaders with literary aspirations, such as Helen Van Anderson, Ursula Gestefeld, and Alice Bunker Stockham. Though not exactly mainstream, these novels were widely distributed enough to reach New Thought enthusiasts such as Burnett. The didactic New Thought fictions described by Satter addressed predominantly female audiences and heralded the arrival of a “woman’s era” dominated by love, spirituality, and maternal self-sacrifice (12). They featured female protagonists using New Thought to come to terms with physical ailments, unhappy marriages, economic vulnerability, and oppressive household responsibilities. These New Thought novels often concluded with the dramatic recovery or reform of a previously unrepentant male character, though other, more minor characters (usually babies or animals) might be healed along the way. In Van Anderson’s influential New Thought novel Victoria True; Or, the Journal of a Live Woman (1895), for instance, the heroine’s alcoholic husband promises to give up drinking; in Gestefeld’s The Woman Who Dares (1892), meanwhile, protagonist

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Murva Kroom’s estranged spouse returns and begs her to lead him to new spiritual heights. In each case, the reform of the man redounds to the credit of the female protagonist, who spends most of the novel setting a positive moral example for him to follow, while hoping and praying for his recovery. Within this genre, depictions of female same-sex desire were not uncommon and androgyny was a valued character attribute. For instance, disabled male characters were considered “the epitome of human development” because they allegedly combined the strength and dominance of a man with the moral purity of a woman (Satter 139). Even if a character’s disability might be a mark of virtue, however, it also represented a hurdle to be overcome through prayer and right thinking. In Stockham and Lida Hood Talbot’s utopian New Thought novel Koradine Letters (1893), for instance, the eponymous teenage heroine finds her future husband and soulmate in beautiful blind boy Tommy Merton, whose vision is eventually restored through prayer. Meanwhile, Koradine’s romantic friendships with girls suggest that Tommy is not the only, nor even the principal, object of her affections. While Burnett borrowed from this generic model, she also introduced male protagonists and child healers to a genre traditionally focused on mature women. Burnett’s authorial choices reflect larger shifts in New Thought around 1900. While nineteenth-century New Thought focused primarily on women, spirituality, and health, early twentieth-century New Thought literature began to address male audiences, advocating positive thinking as the key to financial success. To use historian Catherine Albanese’s terminology, this later strand of “instrumentalist” or “noetic” New Thought harnessed faith-based practices such as meditation, affirmations and denials, and creative visualization to achieve economic and intellectual mastery (396). Accordingly, the protagonist of The Dawn of a To-morrow is a neurasthenic businessman rather than a sick woman. In The Secret Garden, meanwhile, invalid Colin Craven abandons his sickbed to embrace scientific discovery and muscular Christianity. But despite their central male characters, both novels retain an old-fashioned focus on neurasthenia and female healers. This emphasis suggests that, like many women who had embraced New Thought and Christian Science in the 1880s and 90s, Burnett remained invested in millennial hopes for a coming woman’s era. Burnett’s eclectic faith can help us understand some puzzling aspects of The Secret Garden, such as her ambivalent treatment of gender. The shift from a female to a male protagonist in the final third of the novel is not merely evidence of Burnett’s conservative sexual ideologies, as critics such

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as Elizabeth Keyser, Claudia Marquis, Shirley Foster, and Judy Simons have alleged (Keyser 10–11; Marquis 165; Foster and Simons 324–325). Nor is Colin’s dramatic recovery necessarily a wish-fulfillment fantasy of Burnett’s dead son, Lionel, “ris[ing] from his sickbed to cure himself with the aid of belief and nature,” as Gerzina suggests (263).19 By emphasizing Colin over Mary in the novel’s final section, Burnett invokes a convention of didactic New Thought novels, which tended to conclude with the reform of a refractory male. The novel’s ambivalent treatment of disability, too, owes something to New Thought novels in which androgynous, handicapped males represent the epitome of human perfection – even if their ultimate recovery is also part of the novel’s faith-based agenda. The next section will examine The Dawn of a To-morrow and The Secret Garden as New Thought novels, though both contain features of other genres as well (such as the romance, the fairy tale, and the Gothic novel). In these texts, Burnett’s deployment of New Thought dovetails with her critique of the rest cure. Like many New Thought followers, Burnett saw mind cure and rest cure as competing methods of assuaging neurasthenic symptoms. In her own life, she repeatedly availed herself of both cures with limited success. Burnett’s fictional characters accomplish what she could not by finding effective spiritual cures for their ills and using their hardwon wisdom to help others.

New Thought Novels for the New Century While The Dawn of a To-morrow is not widely read today, it was one of Burnett’s three most popular works during her lifetime (along with Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess [Gerzina x]). After successful stage runs in 1909 in both New York and London, the book was made into a silent film by Paramount in 1915, starring Mary Pickford at the height of her fame (Gerzina 242; Thwaite 237). The testimonials Burnett received from readers and audience members suggest the novel’s uplifting, even therapeutic qualities, as she wrote to publisher Charles Scribner: “There is an intensity in the feeling about it. A person who is passing through trouble came to me and said ‘You saved my life the other day . . . ’ and a tired school teacher said ‘it made me pluck up heart again – it actually did’” (qtd. in Thwaite 213–214). A reviewer of the film version corroborates that the tale “brought to so many weary souls a new inspiration to bear the trials of today in the expectancy of tomorrow’s dawn” (qtd. in Thwaite 237). The book’s religious didacticism may be precisely what endeared it to readers circa 1906, a time of rapid growth for Christian Science and New

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Thought. Yet this same quality may have prevented it from becoming a classic along the lines of The Secret Garden. The Dawn of a To-morrow promotes the idea of the “absolute goodness of God and his transcendent and immanent presence in the world” familiar to Eddy’s followers, as Squires explains (Healing the Nation 77). The novel also rejects the idea of hell and the notion that God is to blame for human suffering, both of which are consistent with New Thought but alien to orthodox Protestantism (77). Eddy, for instance, defined Hell as a state of mind rather than a place: “The sinner makes his own hell by doing evil . . . the evil beliefs which originate in mortals are hell” (Science and Health 266). Burnett likewise dismissed the idea of hell as an actual place, joking with a reporter for the Kansas City Post in 1910 that “Belief in the devil and hell” is “archaic – Neolithic” and “rococo” (West 251). Despite these deviations from mainstream Protestantism, however, the book remains “the most explicitly Christian of Burnett’s works,” due to the Biblebased faith of main character Jinny Montaubyn (Squires, Healing the Nation 79). Above all, the novel emphasizes the pragmatic value of New Thought to help a wide variety of individuals, echoing William James’s praise of mind cure in The Varieties of Religious Experience (Squires, Healing the Nation 72). Though the novel’s characters question whether their new faith is more valid than the traditional Protestantism espoused by a neighborhood curate, they embrace it because it is “cheerfler” and “[t]here’s no 'ell fire in it,” in the words of protagonist Glad (Burnett, Dawn 91). She adds, “P’raps it was lies, but it was cheerfle lies that 'elps yer” (89). For these characters, the salutary effects of their creed are more important than their “absolute certainty about its basis in truth” (Squires, Healing the Nation 78). While later chapters of The Dawn of a To-morrow emphasize faith healing, the opening chapters focus squarely on nervous or hysterical men, a theme that continues with Colin and his father in The Secret Garden. The novel’s protagonist, Sir Oliver Holt, is a wealthy English businessman who becomes seriously depressed and contemplates suicide. After purchasing a revolver, he gets lost in the London fog and meets Glad, a twelve-year-old London street urchin whose positive outlook proves infectious. Glad introduces him to a friendly band of prostitutes, beggars, and thieves living in a slum called Apple Blossom Court. In this unlikely environment, Holt learns that God is omnipresent and death does not exist. He finds peace by sharing his money with his new acquaintances, thus following Eddy’s advice to “dissipat[e] fatigue in doing good” (Science and Health 79).

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The Dawn of a To-morrow was influenced by Burnett’s own struggles with depression following her two failed marriages (Gerzina 241–242). Her novel likewise draws on the influential work of American neurologists Mitchell and George Miller Beard, if only to criticize their views of depression and its treatment. In 1869, Beard introduced the diagnosis of neurasthenia, arguing that symptoms as various as depression, fatigue, anxiety, headaches, and insomnia could be caused by a deficiency or “lack of nerve force” (5). Beard went on to boast that neurasthenia was not merely an illness, but a sign of American cultural superiority. He connected overwork with success in commerce and intellectual achievement. Soon after, Mitchell joined forces with Beard to popularize neurasthenia as a typically American disease that disproportionately afflicted upper-class men. In Wear and Tear, Mitchell focused on the exhausted male “brain worker” of the middle and upper classes rather than the nervous women he has since become famous for treating. These anxious men felt worn down by “late hours of work, irregular meals bolted in haste away from home, the want of holidays and of pursuits outside of business” (64). For such men, the single-minded pursuit of success was key to their prosperity, yet damaging to their health. Middle-aged men were at particularly high risk, Mitchell thought. In Wear and Tear, he described what we might call a mid-life crisis: Is it any wonder if asylums for the insane gape for such men? There comes to them at last a season of business embarrassment; or, when they get to be fifty or thereabouts, the brain begins to feel the strain, and just as they are thinking, “Now we will stop and enjoy ourselves,” the brain, which, slavelike, never murmurs until it breaks out into open insurrection, suddenly refuses to work, and the mischief is done. (65)

Except for his Englishness, the protagonist of Burnett’s The Dawn of a Tomorrow could have stepped out of the pages of Mitchell’s book. Sir Oliver Holt is a famous businessman whose name “represented the greatest wealth and power in the world of finance and schemes of business” (Burnett, Dawn 150). Nonetheless, Holt succumbs at midlife to a crushing depression that no medical intervention can relieve. “There was no wealth on earth that could give me a moment’s ease – sleep – hope – life,” Holt explains (152). He knows that “physicians would have given a name to his mental and physical condition. He had heard these names often – applied to men the strain of whose lives had been like the strain of his own, and had left them as it had left him – jaded, joyless, breaking things” (8, 7).

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While Burnett never uses the word “neurasthenia” to describe Holt’s illness, she relies on the language of wear and tear, stress, strain, and breakdown that permeates Beard’s and Mitchell’s writings on this condition. But Holt has gotten no relief from rest cures, West cures, drugs, or other standard remedies, as he explains: Anything else must be better than this – the thing for which there was a scientific name but no healing. He had taken all the drugs, he had obeyed all the medical orders, and here he was after that last hell of a night – dressing himself in a back bedroom of a cheap lodging-house to go out and buy a pistol. (18)

While doctors like Beard and Mitchell could provide a name (neurasthenia) and scientific explanation for Holt’s condition, they offer no effective remedy for this unfortunate sufferer. Where the medical community fails Holt, New Thought succeeds in alleviating his depression. In the unlikely environment of Apple Blossom Court, Holt first encounters New Thought from the mouth of Jinny Montaubyn, a reformed alcoholic and dance hall prostitute who acquired her faith from a pious lady visitor at a hospital. Despite her humble origins, Miss Montaubyn is the book’s spiritual center who articulates what Burnett “came to call ‘the beautiful thought’” (Squires, Healing the Nation 77). She explains to Holt, for instance, that there is no death and that God is always accessible to believers. “Arst therefore that ye may receive” is a creed she takes quite literally, expecting God to fulfill her every wish (Burnett, Dawn 113). She urges Holt to shift his negative perception of events: “Keep in the light . . . never think of nothin’ else, an’ then you’ll begin an’ see things” (101). For his part, Holt is impressed by this woman’s tenacious faith, especially her trust in the immanent presence and availability of God. “Am I sitting here listening to an old female reprobate’s disquisition on religion?” he ponders. “Why am I listening? I am doing it because here is a creature who believes – knowing no doctrine, knowing no church. She believes – she thinks she knows her Deity is by her side. She is not afraid” (113, emphasis in original). Struck by Miss Montaubyn’s conviction, Holt decides not to commit suicide and gives money to his new friends in AppleBlossom Court. If Holt’s conversion experience sounds unlikely to us, it must have been more convincing (or at least more familiar) to early twentieth-century readers steeped in New Thought. Miss Montaubyn speaks in familiar New Thought platitudes that are scarcely disguised by her cockney dialect.

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Her belief in the power of right thinking and the non-existence of death come straight from Eddy’s Science and Health, while her literal interpretation of Mark 11:24, “whatsoever things ye desire, when ye pray, believe that you receive, and ye shall receive,” echoes Hopkins’s reading of this verse (Satter 92). Even Miss Montaubyn’s economic self-sufficiency stems from her positive thinking, which keeps her supplied with food while her neighbors starve. Since embracing her new faith, she explains, “me legs is better – me luck’s better – people’s better” (Burnett, Dawn 116). Her newfound plenty echoes stories in New Thought tracts about faithful women finding purses full of money and other tangible evidence of God’s bounty (Satter 176). While an older female mentor like Jinny Montaubyn was by then a familiar standby of New Thought novels, The Dawn of a To-morrow introduces some fresh elements into the formulaic genre. By setting her story in a London slum and making her protagonist a titled British man, Burnett distanced New Thought from its American, female, middle-class roots, perhaps to show the religion’s universality. Her choice of a male protagonist, meanwhile, not only hearkens back to Mitchell’s neurasthenic businessmen of the 1870s, but also looks forward to expanded audiences for New Thought literature. Titans of industry like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford numbered among the many prominent men who embraced this faith in the first decades of the twentieth century (Harrington 118). While Sir Oliver Holt’s wealth invites comparison with Carnegie, success in commerce is not enough for him. Two female characters, Glad and Miss Montaubyn, must show him the way to achieve health and happiness. In these respects, Holt’s story deviates from twentieth-century New Thought literature on financial success and more closely resembles earlier New Thought narratives in which the sick and despondent turn to female healers. In this strain of New Thought, converts embraced traditionally feminine virtues such as love and maternal self-sacrifice. Holt’s experiences follow the latter model. For instance, Holt learns the pleasures of selfless giving when he sees what good his wealth could do in AppleBlossom Court. Holt even acquires a surrogate family at the novel’s conclusion by taking in a prostitute named Polly and her baby, perhaps hearkening to Miss Montaubyn’s suggestion to “lov[e] everythin’ as if it was yer own child at breast” (Burnett, Dawn 103). He ends the novel happier and more in tune with his feminine side, recognizing that financial success alone cannot ensure personal satisfaction. While The Dawn of a To-morrow remains dedicated to the woman- and health-centered variety of New Thought popular in the late nineteenth

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century, Burnett curiously includes two female healers in the novel when one might conceivably suffice. This doubling appears again in The Secret Garden, when the child heroine Mary Lennox and the loving mother figure, Susan Sowerby, together nurse the novel’s invalid males back to health. In each novel, Burnett pairs an older woman with a gifted female child healer. While the adult female healer is a standard trope of New Thought literature, the precocious girl child seems comparatively new, if not entirely unprecedented (the eponymous heroine of Sara Crewe being one early prototype). The child healers of Burnett’s later fictions call to mind the inner child that first emerged in New Thought and in Burnett’s own early works such as Little Lord Fauntleroy. As discussed in chapters one and two, Eddy’s idealization of children in Science and Health was further developed by Emma Curtis Hopkins, the leading New Thought teacher of the 1880s and 90s. Hopkins encouraged her mostly female followers to nurture the divine within themselves, which she termed the “God-Self” or “Man Child.” Drawing upon this inner Man-Child would give women Godlike powers, Hopkins wrote. The New Thought discourse of the inner child drew in turn upon earlier sources, including Wordsworthian conceptions of the divine child and mid-Victorian male fantasies about female children. If nineteenth-century women could so easily imagine an opposite-sex, child version of themselves, perhaps this is because of a parallel tradition in which Victorian men saw themselves in young girls. Recall, for instance, Catherine Robson’s argument that mid-Victorian male writers including John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, and Lewis Carroll used relationships with girls to reconnect with their lost childhood selves. Middle- and upper-class Victorian men spent their earliest years in the feminized realm of the nursery, in company with their sisters, before heading off to male-dominated public schools. They looked back upon their early childhoods as an Edenic lost realm and idealized the girls they associated with this time. Such idealized girl children in literature include the eponymous heroine of Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Little Nell in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841), and many others (Robson 3–15). Glad’s relationship with Holt bears some resemblance to this paradigm. Her naïveté and boisterous good spirits counteract Holt’s jaded pessimism, perhaps reminding him of his bygone youth. But in Robson’s model, middle- and upper-class men idolize young girls of their own social station. Glad, a “little rat of the gutter,” cannot embody the innocence and purity typical of this pattern (Burnett, Dawn 68). Holt is shocked, for instance

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when Glad mentions her friend Polly, a battered teenage prostitute, and vows to “get on better than Polly when I’m old enough to go on the street” (48). Given the vast social gulf between them, why did Burnett position Glad as a foil for Holt? The answer lies in his identity as neurasthenic, for neurasthenia was emphatically a disease of the middle and upper classes, specifically, brain workers who succumbed to the pressures of intellectual labor. In Wear and Tear, Mitchell wrote, I am talking chiefly of the crowded portions of our country, of our great towns, and especially of their upper classes . . . the physical worker is being better and better paid and less and less hardly tasked, while just the reverse obtains in increasing ratios for those who live by the lower form of brainwork. (10)

Mitchell’s definition of the neurasthenic virtually excluded lower-class patients, particularly manual laborers. As Marijke Gijswijt Hofstra explains, doctors tended to attribute the nervous complaints of the poor to other causes, such as hard work, childbearing, or hysteria (8). By virtue of her humble origins, then, Glad would be considered practically immune to neurasthenia. She can help Holt precisely because she is so removed from his world of brain-work. Glad also displays wisdom beyond her years that aligns her with the inner child of New Thought, even if she is hardly the paradigm of virtue embodied in Little Lord Fauntleroy. In contrast to The Dawn of a To-morrow, The Secret Garden was not wildly popular when it first appeared as a serial in The American Magazine in 1910 and in book form in 1911, though sales and reviews were respectable (Gerzina x; Lundin 278). Yet, after falling into obscurity at the time of her death in 1924, the novel became arguably “the most significant children’s book of the twentieth century,” thanks to word of mouth from readers and pioneering biographies of Burnett by Marghanita Laski, Ann Thwaite, and Phyllis Bixler (Lundin 277, 282–285). Moreover, the novel was so highly regarded in Britain that “both England and America claim the book as their own” (277). The Secret Garden has since been made into numerous theater and film versions, beginning with a Famous Players production in 1919 (now lost) and continuing with well-received film adaptations in 1949 and 1993 (287).20 While The Secret Garden is far less didactic than The Dawn of a Tomorrow, these novels have much in common. Both combine Burnett’s favored genre, the romance – characterized by happy endings, magical thinking, and unlikely coincidences – with Gothic overtones such as the

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gloomy London fog in which Holt loses his way or the bleak Yorkshire setting of Misselthwaite Manor.21 Both works involve sentimental portrayals of outcasts who come together to form makeshift family units that transcend social class and place of origin (Bixler, Frances Hodgson Burnett 79, 95). Most importantly, each novel implicitly critiques mainstream medicine, especially the questionable treatments prescribed for neurasthenia. These works likewise owe a debt to Eddy’s Science and Health, though neither could be described, strictly speaking, as “a Christian Science book” (V. Burnett 377). The Dawn of a To-morrow comes closest, since its mentor figure, Jinny Montaubyn, espouses a Bible-based faith resembling Eddy’s beliefs. By contrast, the characters in The Secret Garden are more heterodox. They combine Eddy’s philosophy with pagan nature worship and borrowings from Eastern religions and Spiritualism: take, for instance, Mary’s mentions of Indian Rajahs, snake charmers, and fakirs, or the climactic moment where Colin’s late mother, Lilias Craven, speaks from beyond the grave. A brief scene in which Mary, Colin, and Dickon sing the Doxology constitutes the novel’s only concrete reference to Christianity (Squires, Healing the Nation 84–85; Seelye 268). As historians like Anne Harrington remind us, such eclecticism is typical of New Thought (116). Like its predecessor, The Secret Garden reflects the shift in New Thought from a women- and health-centered movement to male-dominated religion of economic prosperity, falling (chronologically and thematically) somewhere around the midpoint of this transition. The Secret Garden likewise continues the New Thought emphasis on the inner child present in Burnett’s earlier works by introducing a cast of child characters. But not all of them possess uncanny wisdom. The novel’s protagonist, ten-year-old Mary Lennox, is a spoiled orphan who hails from India. The hot Indian climate has ruined her appetite and her appearance, as the narrator explains: “[h]er hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another” (Burnett, Secret Garden 3). When her parents die of cholera, Mary is sent to the Yorkshire countryside to live with her hunch-backed uncle, Archibald Craven, at Misselthwaite Manor, “a house with a hundred rooms, nearly all shut up and with their doors locked” (12). In this unlikely Gothic setting, Mary slowly regains her health through gardening, socialization, and outdoor exercise. Once she recovers, Mary helps cure her uncle and invalid cousin, Colin, with the aid of a third child, a peasant boy named Dickon with a talent for nurturing wild animals.

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Like Glad in The Dawn of a To-morrow, Mary has a salutary influence on neurasthenic males, helping them discover their inner wisdom and healing power. But by the novel’s conclusion, Colin himself seems to have taken over the role of the inner child initially vested in Mary, having transformed from a bedridden hypochondriac into an ambitious young athlete, lecturer, and “Scientific Discoverer” (172). The last third of The Secret Garden focuses on Colin’s growing strength and his emotional reunion with his father, while Mary seemingly fades into the background. The novel’s shift from a female healer to an inspirational male paragon mirrors the larger changes occurring in New Thought, which increasingly catered to men in search of wealth and success. Because Colin is in some sense Mary’s alter ego – both are unloved, sickly children with bad tempers, and biological relatives to boot – this narrative shift is not as jarring as it could be (Seelye 258; Foster and Simons 333). Moreover, Colin’s healing is connected to Mary’s own, as Phyllis Bixler points out: “Mary’s gradual discovery of Colin symbolically suggest[s] her own search for the unhappy self hidden inside of her” (Frances Hodgson Burnett 97). Colin’s transformation reflects his successful reintegration into the feminine domestic realm, here represented by the titular garden, which was lovingly tended first by his mother and later by his female cousin (Martin 141). As in didactic New Thought novels, his recovery counts as a victory for the female character(s) who helped bring it about. Thus, Mary is not “marginalized” or “half-forgotten” in the novel’s concluding chapters, as some critics have alleged, because she is a crucial stakeholder in Colin’s transformation (Foster and Simons 324; Keith 139). Mary’s centrality is further underscored by her resemblance to Mary Baker Eddy, who died in December 1910, shortly after the serial version of The Secret Garden began its run in The American Magazine. The religious founder suffered years of sickness before undergoing a spontaneous healing in 1866. After slipping on a patch of ice in Lynn, Massachusetts, and seriously injuring her back, Eddy was able to cure herself simply by reading the Gospels, as she describes in her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection (1891): “My immediate recovery from the effects of an injury caused by an accident, an injury neither medicine nor surgery could reach, was the falling apple that led me to the discovery how to be well myself, and how to make others so” (24). This discovery, combined with the teachings of her mentor, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, became the basis for the creed outlined in Science and Health. Like her namesake, Mary Lennox is a born healer who first learns how to cure herself, then helps others. She is also introverted, stubborn, obsessive,

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and has difficulty relating to people – traits shared by Eddy, as even her most sympathetic biographers acknowledge. Gillian Gill describes, for instance, how Eddy terrorized her household staff with her rigid rules and “rages . . . so terrible” that employees were often reduced to tears (401). In her worst moments, Eddy “could be bad tempered, irrational, capricious, inconsiderate, domineering, sanctimonious, unkind” (405). Throughout her life, Eddy’s relationships were strained by her extreme perfectionism, introversion, and perseveration on unusual topics (including what she called Malicious Animal Magnetism, a type of hostile mesmerism feared by Christian Scientists and derided by those outside the faith). Though Burnett was well-disposed towards Eddy, rumors of the religious leader’s eccentricities, hypocrisy, and foul temper would have reached her through the scandalous biography published in McClure’s and the explosion of press surrounding it. These sources perhaps contributed to Burnett’s portrait of Mary Lennox as a “sickly, fretful, ugly” child who becomes, through alternating indulgence and neglect, “as tyrannical and selfish a little pig as ever lived” (Burnett, Secret Garden 3). Unwanted by her parents, an Anglo-Indian bureaucrat and his fashionable wife, Mary vents her spite on the hired help.22 She rages against her Ayah, or nanny, calling her “‘Pig! Daughter of Pigs!’ . . . because to call a native a pig is the worst insult of all” (6, 4). This cross, solitary child proves too much for a series of governesses, each of whom leaves after a short time. Thus, until age nine, Mary has scarcely ever interacted with anyone not paid to look after her. Like Colin, Mary is “spiritually and emotionally crippled” by an upbringing devoid of maternal love (Marquis 167). In a sense, Mary is already an orphan even before her parents die and leave her to a series of reluctant caregivers, each of whom finds her challenging. During her brief stay at the Anglo-Indian Crawford household, Mrs. Crawford laments that “Mary has the most unattractive ways I ever saw in a child” (Burnett, Secret Garden 8). Meanwhile, the Crawford children taunt Mary for making pretend flower beds out of dirt and bits of vegetation. They nickname her “Mistress Mary, quite contrary” when she refuses to let them join in her creative outdoor play (7). Intriguingly, “Mistress Mary” and “Mary Mary Quite Contrary” were working titles of the first draft of The Secret Garden (Rector 189). Though less appealing than The Secret Garden, these titles underscore the similarities between Burnett’s heroine and the religious leader she resembles, including personality traits suggestive of autism spectrum disorder.23

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In other words, the unflattering depiction of Mary Lennox as a sickly, spoiled, and angry little girl may link her to Eddy as much as their shared gift for healing. These various traits eventually come together in a key scene where Mary’s rage against Colin has a salutary effect (more on this later). But as in Eddy’s own life story, Mary’s cure must precede her healing of others. The narrator explains how Mary’s health improves through exercise and exposure to the bracing Yorkshire climate, which makes her “stronger and fatter” – weight gain being here, as in the rest cure, an index of female well-being (Burnett, Secret Garden 28).24 She also makes friends for the first time, beginning with the maid, Martha Sowerby, the robin, and the estate’s elderly gardener, Ben Weatherstaff. Mary’s new companions shatter her previous isolation and help her develop the empathy she once lacked. Mary’s healing takes place in the titular secret garden, which critics have variously interpreted as a symbol of fertility, sexuality, paganism, and the healing power of nature, and as an allusion to the Biblical Garden of Eden.25 This luxuriant green world serves as a perfect backdrop for the children’s flowering into healthy adolescence. By the novel’s conclusion, once-sickly Mary is described as a “blush rose” who may yet become a beauty, while Colin has learned to walk and embraced his rightful role as heir to the estate (160). The secret garden symbolizes maternal love for these neglected children, who learn to nurture and be nurtured in the bower once beloved by Colin’s mother. But the garden also embodies a central metaphor of New Thought, a fact that has heretofore been overlooked. Ralph Waldo Trine’s In Tune with the Infinite (1897), considered to be the first New Thought bestseller, contains the parable of a “Soul Garden” tended first by a wise man, then by a foolish one (20). This garden consists of “a beautiful lotus pond” that is “supplied with water from a reservoir in the foothills” (18–19). The garden’s wise owner leaves open the gate connecting the lotus pond to the mountain reservoir. While the water can flow freely from this source, the garden is a continual source of pleasure to all who visit. This wise man then rents his estate to a more “practical” man who shuts the gate connecting the reservoir to the pond and puts up a “No Trespassing” sign (21). Predictably, the pond withers. This story is of course a metaphor. The lifegiving water of the reservoir represents God’s infinite supply of goodness, to which we must remain connected in order to thrive. Like the soul garden in Trine’s parable, the secret garden brings health and life to its visitors, but only when it is properly tended. Ten years prior to Mary’s arrival at Misselthwaite Manor, Archibald Craven’s wife Lilias died following an accident in the garden. Devastated by this loss, Craven

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locked the door to the walled garden and buried the key. Craven thus resembles the practical renter who closes the gate to the reservoir and puts up a “No Trespassing” sign. Initially, Mary, too, jealously guards the secret garden from outside intrusion. But as winter turns to spring, she gradually allows select visitors to enter this cherished space, beginning with Dickon and continuing with Colin and Mrs. Sowerby. Mary thus comes to resemble the wise owner who makes his garden available to others. Under her care, the garden transforms from a dead place into a verdant paradise, with “roses . . . rising out of the grass, tangled round the sun-dial, [and] wreathing the tree-trunks” (Burnett, Secret Garden 137). Several elements of Mary’s garden hold significance according to early twentieth-century New Thought. In the movement’s early days, followers elevated “Mind” or “Spirit” over matter and downplayed the importance of the physical body and its surroundings (Satter 9). By the late 1890s, however, some New Thought writers had begun to stress the importance of the body and the aliveness and intelligence of all matter. For instance, Hopkins’s student Helen Wilmans, who founded a New Thought sect called Mental Science, stressed that every “atom in the universe had power to think . . . Animals think; plants think; even crystals think” (qtd. in Satter 168). This animism surfaces in The Secret Garden, particularly in the novel’s descriptions of intelligent animals and willful plants. The robin who makes friends with Mary resembles a “real person – only nicer than any other person in the world” (Burnett, Secret Garden 40). The robin is soon joined by a fox, a crow, a lamb, and other creatures tamed by Dickon. Meanwhile daffodils are compared to “tiny, pale green points . . . to be seen in cleared places, looking twice as cheerful as they had looked before when the grass and weeds had been smothering them” (48). The personification of nonhuman life in The Secret Garden chimes with early twentieth-century New Thought, which emphasized divine forces animating nature. Even the garden’s roses have special significance. Eddy’s Science and Health contains a striking passage about diseases and allergies, including what she calls “rose cold”: In old times who ever heard of dyspepsia, cerebro-spinal meningitis, hayfever, and rose-cold? What an abuse of natural beauty to say that a rose, the smile of God, can produce suffering. The joy of its presence, its beauty and fragrance, should uplift the thought, and dissuade any sense of fear or fever. (175)

In The Secret Garden, Colin avoids roses due to his fear of “rose cold” (83). As servant Martha Sowerby explains, one of Colin’s worst hysterical fits

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began in Misselthwaite’s rose gardens, where he began to sneeze and “cried himself into a fever an’ was ill all night” (83). Colin’s eventual recovery involves spending time in Mary’s rose garden, where he suffers no allergic symptoms and even plants his very own “rose in a pot” (134). Fittingly, roses serve as an index of Colin’s transformation from hypochondriacal shut-in to healthy lover of the outdoors. Roses were one of Eddy’s favorite flowers as well as a source of delight for Burnett, who famously grew her own rose garden at Maytham, her rented English estate in Kent. In championing a life of outdoor activity and fellowship in lieu of bed rest and isolation, Burnett develops her most effective critique of the rest cure. Colin serves as an object lesson. When Mary first encounters Colin, he is a bedridden invalid every bit as querulous as Mitchell’s hysterical female patients. He rarely leaves his room, refuses to see visitors, and throws fits when he does not get his way. At the root of Colin’s hysteria is his profound terror of illness and dying. He is especially afraid of becoming a hunchback, like his father. “If I live I may be a hunchback, but I shan’t live,” Colin explains. “My father hates to think I may be like him” (74). Colin’s extraordinary suggestibility recalls Eddy’s teaching that illness stems from “fear of the disease and from the image brought before the mind” rather than from physical causes (Science and Health 196). Burnett’s negative depiction of mainstream medicine in this novel is consistent with Eddy’s denunciation of orthodox remedies. Colin’s physician, Dr. Craven, encourages him to rest and eat more and to avoid “too much excitement” (Burnett, Secret Garden 88).26 He also exacerbates his patient’s illness by making him morbidly preoccupied with his symptoms. The doctor warns Colin that “he must not talk too much; he must not forget that he was ill; he must not forget that he was very easily tired.” Overhearing these remarks, Mary reflects that “there seemed to be a number of uncomfortable things that [Colin] was not to forget” (88). Dr. Craven’s advice resembles Dr. Fowler’s warnings to Burnett to avoid exciting reading material, writing letters, or getting out of bed during her own rest cure.27 While encouraging a patient to rest and eat sounds harmless enough – or at least minimally invasive – Dr. Craven’s intentions are suspect, as Colin explains: “My doctor is my father’s cousin. He is quite poor and if I die he will have all Misselthwaite when my father is dead. I should think he wouldn’t want me to live” (77). Colin’s other caretakers apparently share this morbid sentiment. When Colin has typhoid fever, for instance, Mrs. Medlock predicts that “He’ll die this time sure enough, an’ best thing for him an’ for everybody” (83). She does not seem concerned that

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Colin is “starin’ at her as sensible as she was herself,” and thus liable to take her remarks very much to heart (83). That this is a toxic environment for any child is obvious to others at Misselthwaite and its environs. Motherly Mrs. Sowerby remarks, for instance, “there’s no reason why any child should live that gets no fresh air an’ doesn’t do nothin’ but lie on his back an’ read picture-books and take medicine” (83). Mrs. Sowerby’s daughter Martha suspects that Dr. Craven is doing Colin harm by “keepin’ him lyin’ down and not lettin’ him walk.” Her opinion is confirmed by a “grand doctor” who comes from London to consult on Colin’s case. This doctor declares that “there’d been too much medicine and too much lettin[g] him have his own way” (82). He orders the removal of Colin’s back brace, the “iron thing” that served as an uncomfortable visual reminder of his disability (75).28 The “grand doctor” further admonishes that “the lad might live if he would make up his mind to it. Put him in the humor” (86). Intriguingly, Burnett here uses a distinguished physician as a mouthpiece for her diatribe against medicine, or at least against specific medical practices deemed unwholesome or unnecessary.29 Indeed, the London doctor’s remarks echo the warnings of New Thought writers like Eddy and Call, who argued that rest cures encouraged excessive preoccupation with bodily disease. Into this desperate situation comes hot-tempered Mary, newly healed from her own sickliness by socialization and outdoor exercise. Disregarding Mrs. Medlock’s warnings to stay in her room, Mary follows the mysterious sobbing sounds she hears at night to their source: Colin. Though she at first befriends her cousin, she soon tires of his tyrannical behavior and morbid preoccupation with death. During one of his hysterical fits, she shocks him by expressing rage as visceral and ungoverned as his own: “You stop!” she almost shouted. “You stop! I hate you! Everybody hates you! I wish everybody would run out of the house and let you scream yourself to death! You will scream yourself to death in a minute, and I wish you would!” (103). Colin is stunned to see his own anger mirrored by a child “as spoiled as himself,” as the nurse exclaims (100). Mary’s outburst proves therapeutic for several reasons. Her tantrum gives Colin a much-needed moment of self-recognition as he sees how his impotent rage must look to others. Mary also provides Colin with a salutary taste of his own medicine. Her “healing” of her cousin operates according to the homeopathic principle of simila or “let like cure like.” Following this principle, homeopaths dosed patients with medicines that created similar effects to the illness itself, but in small amounts that the body could manage (qtd. in Swenson 98). Importantly, there is a family

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relationship between New Thought and homeopathy, which Eddy herself practiced extensively before her discovery of Christian Science.30 Like New Thought, homeopathy was a “gentler and less invasive approach to curing illness” traditionally favored by women, social progressives, Spiritualists, and even some liberal followers of Christian Science (Swenson 98; Gill 347–348). By “dosing” Colin with therapeutic rage, Mary operates (however unconsciously) according to this homeopathic logic. More importantly, she manages to convince her cousin that his physical ailments and impending death are figments of his morbid imagination, thus invoking the principles of Christian Science. When Colin protests that he feels a lump on his back and will die young, Mary shouts “’Half that ails you is hysterics and temper – just hysterics – hysterics – hysterics!’ and she stamped each time she said it” (Burnett, Secret Garden 103). Her imperious bedside manner recalls that of Mitchell when faced with disobedient female patients, but has far more salubrious effects. Mary follows her protest with a careful examination of Colin’s back, declaring “There’s not a lump as big as a pin! If you ever say there is again, I shall laugh!” (104). Mary’s “crossly spoken” refutation of Colin’s spinal curvature is the beginning of true healing (104). While Colin’s disease is caused by believing he is ill, his cure consists of behaving like a healthy, normal boy of his age. Mary encourages Colin to visit the rose garden, where he overcomes his previous fear of the outdoors and discovers that his legs and back are perfectly well. Gradually he begins walking, exercising, and gardening with the help of Mary and Dickon. As Eddy might have predicted, Colin’s rapid improvement follows upon the change in his beliefs about illness. Burnett’s narrator relates, “[h]e had made himself believe that he was going to get well, which was really more than half the battle” (143). Colin’s father likewise partakes in the novel’s general atmosphere of healing and reconciliation. By the conclusion, Archibald Craven learns to accept the death of his wife by revisiting the place she once loved. In the forgotten rose garden tended by his son and niece, Craven realizes for the first time that Colin is neither crippled nor doomed to an early death. Colin’s seemingly miraculous cure and his father’s joyous reaction provide an emotionally satisfying conclusion for the novel. But they also raise some troubling questions about disability, as critics such as Alexandra Valint, Lois Keith, and Martha Stoddard-Holmes observe. For instance, what message might this novel send to a reader who has a physical (as opposed to a psychosomatic or imaginary) disability? What would have happened in the story if, for instance, Colin did turn out to have a spinal

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curvature or paralysis of the legs? Would the other characters still have accepted him as future lord of the manor? Stoddard-Holmes thinks not, arguing that “the novel reinforces the idea that permanent disability is a terrible condition” through characters’ use of insulting terms such as “cripple” and “half-wit” (214). The Secret Garden further suggests that disability might be overcome “with the right amounts of faith, will, and fresh air,” so that recalcitrant disability might seem like “malingering” (214). Though Stoddard-Holmes approaches the text through the lens of disability studies, she echoes concerns voiced by critics of New Thought, including followers whose medical conditions failed to respond to prayer and right thinking.31 Historically, such followers have been blamed for insufficient faith, which surely only compounded their suffering. Moreover, New Thought problematically assumes that imperfect health signals spiritual immaturity, and that an improvement in one area will be followed by positive changes in the other, as in Burnett’s assessment of Mary: So long as Mistress Mary’s mind was full of disagreeable thoughts about her dislikes and sour opinions of people and her determination not to be pleased by or interested in anything, she was a yellow-faced, sickly, bored and wretched child . . . When her mind gradually filled itself with robins, and moorland cottages crowded with children, with queer crabbed old gardeners and common little Yorkshire housemaids, with springtime and with secret gardens coming alive day by day, and also with a moor boy and his “creatures,” there was no room left for the disagreeable thoughts which affected her liver and her digestion and made her yellow and tired. (Burnett, Secret Garden 163)

Mary’s improvement in health and looks are intimately tied up with the nature of her thoughts.32 Within the New Thought novel genre, a heroine who grows spiritually but remains physically frail or unattractive would seem to be a contradiction in terms. Though the same logic should presumably apply to Colin, New Thought novels treat disabled men and boys differently than their female counterparts. As Satter observes, these works simultaneously exalt disabled men as paragons of virtue and demand that they be cured as the fulfillment of prayer or prophecy. In works such as Gestefeld’s The Woman Who Dares and The Leprosy of Miriam (1894) or Stockham and Talbot’s Koradine Letters, crippled men and boys combine “a man’s strength and dominance with a woman’s gentleness and beauty” (139). These characters embody the androgynous ideal set forth in Science and Health by uniting feminine chastity, maternal self-sacrifice, and male strength of will.

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Though Colin is anything but a model child at the beginning of The Secret Garden, his strength of will and androgyny suggest his potential to embody Eddy’s ideal. For instance, his imperious habit of giving orders “like a Rajah” signals his dominance, while his striking resemblance to his mother and his hysterical behavior are stereotypically feminine (Burnett, The Secret Garden 104). Once he demonstrates Eddy’s teaching through spontaneous healing, he can become the paragon he was obviously meant to be. By the novel’s concluding chapters, Colin has developed into a “Lecturer and Scientific Discoverer” with an interest in sports and weightlifting (172). He also becomes a spiritual leader of sorts, guiding Mary, Dickon, and the gardener, Ben Weatherstaff, in a recitation of the Doxology. But there is a key difference between Colin and earlier disabled New Thought paragons such as Stockham and Talbot’s beautiful blind boy Tommy Merton. While these earlier heroes were desireless, passive, and chaste – eschewing romance and capitalist endeavor – Colin is a “healthy young human thing” who craves companionship and competition (172). Like the male New Thought leaders of the early twentieth century, he does not scorn desire, but harnesses it for success in the masculine realms of business, athleticism, and scientific discovery – just as Ford, Carnegie, and other captains of industry famously did. Colin’s triumph is a sign of shifting values within New Thought and conflicting perceptions of male disability in the early twentieth century. Early drafts of The Secret Garden suggest that these were fraught issues about which Burnett herself felt uncertain. In one manuscript version, for instance, Dickon was lame and used crutches, which might indicate his exalted status within the New Thought novel (Rector 193). While the final draft restores Dickon’s ability to walk, he retains the idealized aura that New Thought followers associated with disabled men. These details suggest that initially, Burnett had not decided which of the novel’s three child figures would serve as her focal point. In fact, it is not clear that she ever completely made up her mind. An early review in the New York Bookman, for instance, lamented the difficulty of identifying the hero of the story, a point reiterated by recent critics (Lundin 280; Bixler, “Gardens, Houses, and Nurturant Power” 292). While Mary dominates the early chapters and Colin takes over the conclusion, Dickon is arguably the most arresting character of the novel’s central chapters. Thus, the role of inspired child healer filled by Glad in The Dawn of a To-morrow is shared between three characters in The Secret Garden. This potentially confusing split is Burnett’s way of negotiating the male- and female-centered strands of

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New Thought that competed for prominence in the early twentieth century. If Burnett wavered in her allegiance to various strands of New Thought, she consistently rejected mainstream treatments for neurasthenia in her fiction (if not in her life). The Dawn of a To-morrow and The Secret Garden express the author’s dissatisfaction with the rest cures, medications, and other palliatives that she herself had tried. Echoing authors like Gilman and Woolf, Burnett condemned the rest cure for its stultifying boredom, rigid gender stereotypes, and tendency to foster a morbid preoccupation with illness. In its place, Burnett offered readers a more nurturing, femaleoriented “cure” loosely based on Eddy’s faith. This cure trades on the wishfulfillment fantasy that a positive attitude and fresh air might heal crooked spines, estranged families, and broken hearts. While this fantasy did not play out in Burnett’s own life, her books abound with young girls curing hysterical males through right thinking, socialization, and wholesome activity. The enduring popularity of The Secret Garden suggests that this plot fulfills an emotional need for some readers, especially women. I suspect this is because – long after the heyday of Mitchell’s rest cure – women remain underserved by mainstream medicine, and disproportionately attracted to alternative treatments, including New-Thought-derived therapies. This treasured children’s tale points out ongoing deficits in medical care by imagining a utopian green world where medicine is no longer necessary.

chapter 4

Sunshine and Shadow New Thought in Anne of Green Gables

In 2008, fans of L.M. Montgomery, the Canadian author of the cheerful young adult classics Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Emily of New Moon (1923) and their many sequels, were shocked to learn that the author had apparently taken her own life through a drug overdose in 1942. Montgomery, then age 67, was exhausted by chronic depression as well as the stress of caring for her mentally ill spouse, retired Presbyterian minister Ewen Macdonald. She was also ashamed of her ne’er-do-well older son, Chester, who abandoned his first wife and their children and had difficulty holding down a job. Her increasing reliance on drugs such as barbiturates and bromides, some of them potentially toxic, intensified her spiraling depression.1 Montgomery was found dead in her bed on April 24, 1942 (Rubio, Wings 575). On her bedside table, next to some bottles, she left a brief, heartbreaking note: I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best. (qtd. in Rubio, Wings 576)2

Montgomery’s granddaughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, decided to reveal this long-kept secret to combat “the stigma surrounding mental illness” and the idea that “depression happens to other people, not us – and most certainly not to our heroes and icons” (qtd. in Flood). Butler also addressed the contrast between Montgomery’s work and her life. “The fictional Anne went on to happiness and a life full of love and fulfilment. My grandmother’s reality was not so positive,” Butler stated. Montgomery, who had spent her life writing novels that brought happiness to others, ultimately could not stave off the crushing depression that plagued her throughout her life. 115

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While Montgomery’s apparent suicide was until recently a well-kept secret, her history of deep depressions – periods in which she often could not work, sleep, or eat and had a “morbid horror of seeing anyone” – had already been revealed by the posthumous publication of her journals, beginning in 1985 (Montgomery, Complete Journals 2: 203). Sometimes these depressive episodes alternated with periods of elation, in a pattern suggestive of bipolar disorder (Rubio and Waterston xi). Unfortunately for Montgomery, mood disorders were poorly understood during her lifetime. The author, her family members, and her physicians referred to her depressive spells as nervous prostration or neurasthenia, an umbrella term that encompassed many stress-related ills and carried a certain cultural cachet as a disease of civilization and refinement (Fiamingo 175). While neurasthenia did not have the pejorative connotations of hysteria, melancholia, or manicdepressive insanity – three plausible alternative diagnoses available during Montgomery’s lifetime – this catch-all term for symptoms as various as depression, anxiety, anorexia, neuralgia, and migraines was not especially helpful from a diagnostic or treatment standpoint. Montgomery’s primary treatment involved barbiturates, which were first prescribed for her in 1904 and which she took in increasing doses as she aged (Rubio, Wings 509). Montgomery experienced particularly volatile mood swings during the years surrounding the publication of Anne of Green Gables and preceding her marriage to Macdonald in 1911. From 1902–1911, the author lived with her grandmother in her childhood home on Prince Edward Island and supported herself financially with an increasingly successful career as a freelance writer.3 While she rejoiced in her ability to make a living by her pen, Montgomery struggled with the isolation of rural living – especially during bad weather, when roads became impassible and mail failed to arrive. After her engagement to Macdonald 1906, her ambivalence about her approaching marriage played a role in her depressions, as did the long Canadian winters. In October 1908, for instance, Montgomery complained of “an absurd and reasonless dread which I cannot control or banish” (Complete Journals 2: 200). Later that year, Montgomery experienced “the worst week I have ever lived through without exception” in which she was plagued by migraine headaches, suicidal thoughts, and “intolerable nervous unrest” (2: 204–205). When Montgomery finally mustered the courage to see a physician, Philadelphia-educated Dr. Stephen R. Jenkins of Charlottetown, P.E.I., his advice (“nervous system is run down and requires a course of raw eggs and cod liver oil”)

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was not especially helpful (Montgomery, Green Gables Letters 85). Her symptoms continued to worsen, so that in January 1910 she experienced “a month of nervous prostration – an utter breakdown of body, soul, and spirit” (Complete Journals 2: 281). She was again unable to eat, sleep, work, or talk coherently, and could only “walk the floor like one possessed of devils” (2: 282). Janice Fiamingo explains that “In after years, this period in her life became the standard against which all future suffering was measured, a unique event to which Montgomery looked back with horror and shuddering” (174). During the same period, Montgomery composed the cheerful young adult classic that would establish her literary fame: Anne of Green Gables, and the first of seven sequels, Anne of Avonlea (1909). Anne of Green Gables, which has sold over fifty million copies to date, transformed its author almost overnight from a little-known freelancer into one of the period’s most celebrated novelists (Gammel, Looking for Anne 13). Both novels radiate optimism and generate surprisingly little narrative tension; as John Seelye observes, the heroine’s problems are typically short-lived and easily overcome (335). Nonetheless, Anne of Green Gables and its sequels are perennial favorites in English-speaking countries, in parts of Europe and the Middle East, and especially in Japan, where Montgomery’s works have long enjoyed cult status (Akamatsu, “Japanese Readings” 204).4 Like Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy in its heyday, Anne has spawned an international cottage industry, inspiring numerous film and television adaptations; Anne cartoons, dolls, and figurines; a theme park, “Canadian World” in Hokkaido, Japan; and a multimillion-dollar tourist economy centered around Prince Edward Island (Gammel, Looking for Anne 13). In the many places where Anne has been read and admired, readers have embraced its positive, healthy outlook and its nostalgic depiction of an idealized rural past. Some have even touted the book’s healing influence. In a December 1908 letter to pen pal Ephraim Weber, for instance, Montgomery describes “a letter I received last month from a poor little cripple in Ohio who wrote to thank me for writing Anne because she said it had taught her how to endure her long lonely days of imprisonment by just ‘imagining things’” (Green Gables Letters 77). Early twentieth-century reviewers likewise lauded the “healthy,” “cheerful,” and “wholesome” aspects of the story and its emphasis on positive thinking.5 A reporter for The Globe of Toronto, for instance, wrote that “in these days of unhealthy literature it is . . . a real pleasure to come across a story so pure and sweet as ‘Anne of Green Gables,’” comparing Montgomery’s novel favorably to the

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“problem stories with which the bookshelves are crowded today” (“Sunshine and Shadow” 336). More than a century later, readers continue to value the novel and its sequels for their upbeat, reassuring qualities, as Catherine Sheldrick Ross found in interviews with members of online reading forums. Among Ross’s female interviewees, about a quarter “spontaneously mentioned the Montgomery books” as works that were important to them during childhood, suggesting the ongoing demand for such reassuring “comfort reading” (422, 424). One reader argued, for instance, that books like Anne “[help] you cope because of increasing your faith that things are really going to end up right” (qtd. in Ross 424). Readers worldwide, in fact, have used Anne as a form of bibliotherapy in times of upheaval. In Poland during the Second World War, “Anne brought joy and cheerfulness and comfort to afflicted and traumatized readers,” as Gammel relates, and sold briskly on the black market (“Reading to Heal” 83; Butler 266). Postwar Japanese readers had a similar reaction to Montgomery’s novel, which was first translated in 1952 and became part of the national school curriculum in 1953.6 In a society full of war orphans and displaced individuals, Anne provided a temporary “safe place” and a sense of connection to departed family members (Gammel, “Reading to Heal” 84). In modern Japan, readers continue to admire Montgomery’s heroine for her red hair, studiousness, and love of nature, as well as her “positive attitude toward life that has been regarded as a role model for Japanese children” (Akamatsu, “Japanese Readings” 207). Anne’s reputation as upbeat, therapeutic comfort reading sits uneasily alongside our knowledge of the author’s crippling depression. How can one account for the striking contrast between Montgomery’s life and work? A recent television adaptation of the novel, Moira Walley-Beckett’s Netflix series Anne with an E (2017–present), tries to surmount this obstacle by adding disturbing elements absent from the original. In this version, Anne suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder and experiences flashbacks to abuse that occurred prior to her adoption by the Cuthberts. By presenting Anne as a tragic “antihero” as opposed to the relentlessly cheerful being of Montgomery’s original tale, this version drastically changes the tone and themes of the novel to fit more recent understandings of childhood trauma and Montgomery’s own personal struggles (Paskin).7 Short of rewriting Montgomery’s fiction, how might we bridge the divide between Montgomery’s tragic life and cheerful novel? Montgomery’s recent biographer Mary Henley Rubio suggests that Anne’s optimistic tone stemmed from the author’s budding romance with Macdonald in 1905,

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the year in which she composed the novel. This romance allegedly prompted a manic upswing in her mood that accounts for the heroine’s effervescence (Wings 119). While there may be some truth to this account, it does not square with the author’s statement that she wrote the novel under “conditions of worry and gloom and care,” nor does it align with Montgomery’s remarks about Macdonald in her journals (Complete Journals 2: 199). There, Montgomery wrote that she agreed to marry Macdonald because she esteemed him and desired companionship and children: “I liked him – I respected him – I saw all his good qualities of heart and character; to put it plainly, I was very fond of him. But I knew that was all” (2: 157). Although Montgomery heavily edited this section of her journals in the years after her courtship – leaving open the possibility that she retrospectively downplayed her feelings for Macdonald – this certainly does not sound like the sort of mad infatuation that would inspire literary creativity.8 In this chapter, I suggest that Anne’s cheerful affect can be traced to Montgomery’s interest in New Thought. Elements of this faith surface in Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and some of Montgomery’s later works. While literary critics have discussed the author’s involvement with Spiritualism, Theosophy, Transcendentalism, and psychical research, they have so far overlooked New Thought in her works.9 For Montgomery, New Thought served both as a palliative to her depressive episodes and as a welcome corrective to the fire-and-brimstone Calvinism of her Scotch Presbyterian background. Moreover, the healing practices of this new religious movement gave her a (perhaps illusory) feeling of control over the frightening, unpredictable mood swings she experienced during these years. While Montgomery was not a follower of any New Thought sect, she read widely on New Thought-related subject matter and maintained her interest in the emergent faith throughout her life, as demonstrated by her private journals and her fiction. Montgomery’s heterodox leanings apparently did not compromise her status as a model Presbyterian and respected minister’s wife – although she was careful to keep her most controversial religious thinking, including her nagging doubts about the existence of God, out of the public eye during her lifetime. In fact, some of the books on occult and psychical subject matter that she read around the time she composed Anne were borrowed from her fiancé, a Presbyterian minister. This suggests that both she and he adhered to the more liberal strand of the faith that emerged after the “disruptions” that occurred in the Scottish Presbyterian church during the mid-nineteenth century (Rubio, “Scottish-Presbyterian Agency” 98).

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This newer type of Presbyterianism featured a loving God and was more tolerant of outside religious influences. By contrast, the older strain of the religion emphasized hellfire and predestination – that is, the doctrine that God knows and determines in advance who shall be saved and who will be eternally damned (Rubio, “Scottish-Presbyterian Agency” 99; White 84). Both strands of Presbyterianism shaped the Prince Edward Island community of Cavendish, where Montgomery spent her youth and early adulthood. Local ministers would occasionally cater to the elders of their congregation by preaching “a good rip-roaring sermon on hell” – to quote a colorful character in Montgomery’s 1919 novel Rainbow Valley (117). On the other side of Prince Edward Island, Macdonald was reared in a Highland Scottish community where predestination was still widely taught (White 84). Throughout his adult life, Macdonald was tormented by spells of religious melancholia in which he imagined that he was predestined to eternal damnation. His ailment testifies to the damaging effects of this older doctrine on some members of the faith. Montgomery became a helpless witness to this psychological damage whenever her husband had one of his “attacks,” which seldom responded to medical intervention. For her part, Montgomery persistently satirized hellfire and brimstone sermons in her fiction – starting with the gloomy lecture Anne hears on her first visit to the Avonlea church – while using New Thought to shore up the idea of a kind, loving God familiar to more liberal Presbyterians. Like many others of her generation, she apparently saw many New Thought ideas and practices (such various forms of “mind cure,” positive thinking, and a belief in thought-transference) as reasonably compatible with a more traditional Protestant faith. She also saw how New Thought could transform orthodox Protestant sects, helping to mold a kinder, gentler form of Christianity that could adapt to changing times. Because scholars have overlooked Montgomery’s interest in New Thought, they have failed to notice that Anne of Green Gables – like The Secret Garden (1911), Pollyanna (1913), or Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), to which it is frequently compared – might reasonably be considered a New Thought novel.10 While Anne has variously been called a female Bildungsroman, a humorous critique of the Gothic romance (Epperly 17–38), and an exploration of women’s romantic friendships (Gubar, “Where is the Boy?”) – to cite only a few interpretations – Mongtomery’s novel also exhibits many of the generic conventions described in earlier chapters of this book. These include a child heroine who transforms her oppressive surroundings using imagination and charm,

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while forging strong homosocial bonds with like-minded women and girls. Anne of Green Gables, with its optimistic heroine and her many “kindred spirits,” especially “bosom friend” Diana Barry, certainly fits this mold. Anne Shirley’s revitalizing influence on curmudgeonly adults; her remarkable healing of Diana’s baby sister; and her transformative imagination all mark her as an inspired girl-child in the New Thought mold. But unlike the New Thought fiction discussed earlier in this book, Anne of Green Gables deploys New Thought beliefs and practices to achieve specific goals, not as ends in themselves. Significantly, Anne does not aim to convert her community to New Thought – she is content to be accepted into Avonlea society on any terms. Instead, her relentless positivity is a force that shakes up the stuffy conservatism of Avonlea, moving the townsfolk toward a more liberal brand of Presbyterian faith and away from the old beliefs in fire and brimstone personified by the town busybody, Rachel Lynde.11 By the novel’s conclusion, Anne herself changes from a spunky New Thought heroine into a proper young lady, having learned to tame her temper and quiet her effervescent chattiness in obedience to social expectations. The eventual harmony between Anne and Avonlea suggests that New Thought, like Anne herself, can be readily assimilated into a Presbyterian community, with great benefit to the more established faith. Where did Montgomery, a staunch Presbyterian from a rural corner of the Canadian Maritimes, encounter New Thought in its various forms? Historian Charles Braden explains that New Thought “gradually made itself at home on both sides of the [US-Canadian] border” but developed “no new distinctive features and no permanent separate organization” in the North. As in the United States, New Thought in Canada “was often enough accepted by individuals who never left their churches,” including lifelong Presbyterians such as Montgomery (409). Canada, like the United States and Great Britain, also had its share of highly publicized court cases involving Eddy’s Christian Science, which was (and remains) the most highly visible branch of New Thought, despite its relatively small size. Take, for instance, the Lewis case of 1901, in which a Toronto jury convicted Christian Scientist parents of medically neglecting their son, who died of diphtheria (Schoepflin 184–186; Opp 120). Christian Science and New Thought thus received both positive and negative publicity in Montgomery’s native land. Montgomery’s upbringing in Prince Edward Island made her more susceptible to New England religious influences than the average Canadian. The Maritime provinces had always had close ties to the New

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England seaboard, and Boston – a cultural center of Christian Science and New Thought circa 1900 – was a “natural destination” for traveling Maritimers (Rubio, Wings 59, 370). Montgomery herself spent two weeks in Boston in 1910 at the invitation of her publisher, L.C. Page, where she toured the homes of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and the Alcotts (DuVernet 15). These facts help to explain not just the Transcendental elements evident throughout Montgomery’s works, such as their quasireligious attitude towards nature, but also their New Thought overtones. The New England connection surfaces in Anne and its sequels, where characters such as Ruby Gillis, Thomas Lynde, Stephen and Paul Irving, Lavendar Lewis, and Leonora Bowman (a.k.a. Charlotta the Fourth) regularly travel to or from Boston, bringing “Yankee” ideas to remote Prince Edward Island. These fictional travels mirror the real-life exodus of Montgomery’s childhood friends from Prince Edward Island to locations offering greater economic opportunity, such as Boston, Lynn, Massachusetts (the birthplace of Christian Science), and the Canadian West, from which they would periodically return to visit family (Gammel, Looking for Anne 38). The circulation of Boston periodicals in Prince Edward Island is also faithfully documented in the Anne books. For instance, Anne gleans inspiration for her Avonlea Improvement Society and other optimistic schemes “out of some rubbishy Yankee magazine,” as Rachel Lynde caustically remarks (Anne of Avonlea 13). Despite Mrs. Lynde’s suspicion of Americans and her conviction that the States are “an awful place,” she herself subscribes to a Boston newspaper (Anne of the Island 54). Mrs. Lynde’s comments suggest the regular flow of print materials – and positive thinking – from Boston to the Maritimes, as well as the provincial backlash to these Stateside imports. Anne of Green Gables and its sequels show how the heroine overcomes such local resistance by spreading “beautiful thought,” which was also Burnett’s preferred term for New Thought (Anne of Avonlea 134, 218, 321; Gerzina 260). That Montgomery intended a spiritual dimension to this term is clear from the novels, where Anne’s favorite pupil, recent Boston import Paul Irving, remarks that “teacher here said once that every really beautiful thought was religious, no matter what it was about” (Anne of Avonlea 321). It is no coincidence that L.C. Page, the firm that published Montgomery’s early novels, was based in Boston, where her books’ New Thought overtones would have been recognized and appreciated. In fact, Page’s catalogue in the early twentieth century suggests that the firm sought out fiction with New Thought and Christian Science content, as did some other publishers of the era. New York-based D. Appleton and

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Co., for instance, wrote directly to the Christian Science Committee on Publication in 1906 asking about authors “qualified to furnish . . . a novel on the subject of Christian Science,” while Boston firm Houghton Mifflin sought Eddy’s approval for their release of Clara Louise Burnham’s 1903 novel The Right Princess (Strang to Yates, 17 February 1906). L.C. Page, meanwhile, published Lilian Bell’s Christian Science novel Carolina Lee (1906), about a Yankee heiress who converts a Southern community to Eddy’s beliefs, just two years before Anne appeared in print. In other words, Anne was not the first or only L.C. Page publication to touch on New Thought subject matter, although it is certainly the most successful of these works. Building on the runaway success of Montgomery’s novel, L.C. Page would later release Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna (1913), a New Thought novel known for its heroine’s extreme and sometimes ridiculous optimism (she resolves to be “glad” even when faced with catastrophes such as the paralysis of both legs). But although Pollyanna inspired twelve sequels, called “Glad Books,” a popular board game, and several film versions, Montgomery’s works remained L.C. Page’s most valuable properties until 1957, when the company was sold to Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux (Rubio, Wings 223). These facts suggest one reason behind the bestseller status of Anne and similar works, which rode the wave of popularity enjoyed by Christian Science and New Thought well into the twentieth century. In the rest of this chapter, I describe Montgomery’s encounters with New Thought and related heterodox traditions as well as her experiments with mind cure, before explaining how New Thought manifests in Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and later works such as the adult-themed romance The Blue Castle (1926). That New Thought appears in compositions from both the early and late periods of Montgomery’s career, and in very different genres, suggests that her investment in this emergent religious movement was more than a passing fancy. Instead, it was a coping strategy that helped the author and her readers surmount otherwise intolerable circumstances. New Thought also helped Montgomery make aspects of her Presbyterian faith more palatable to herself and her audiences.

Montgomery and New Thought Like many Canadians of her generation, Montgomery was brought up in an old-fashioned Presbyterian household where the Sabbath was regularly observed and novel reading was discouraged as frivolous and possibly

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corrupting. Montgomery was a half-orphan whose mother died young and whose father left her behind when he moved to the Western Canadian frontier. She was raised by her maternal grandparents, fire-and-brimstone Calvinists whose religious observance consisted of “going blindly through certain meaningless ceremonies,” as the author would later observe in her journals (qtd. in Steffler 54). Even as a child, Montgomery found this environment uncongenial: like the young Mary Baker Eddy she experienced “spasms of fear about Hell.” And no wonder: the sermons she heard in church depicted Hell in strikingly visual terms as a “subterranean lake of fire, brimstone, and burning sulphur, presided over by a plotting, energetic Devil” (Rubio, Wings 35).12 Montgomery rebelled against these harsh strictures early on. Despite her grandparents’ disapproval of novels, Montgomery read whatever literature came to hand, from religious books like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) to decidedly more outré fare like Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni (1842), a mystical romance with Rosicrucian content.13 She also grew increasingly ambivalent about her own faith. By the time she reached adulthood, she had developed a “contradictory and long-standing loyalty and aversion to institutionalized Christianity and Presbyterianism,” according to Margaret Steffler (59). While Presbyterianism connected the author to home, family, and traditions, it also failed to satisfy some of her deeper spiritual cravings (72). One result of this divided loyalty was an intense period of religious seeking during the years leading up to the composition of Anne of Green Gables. In 1901, while working as a journalist for the Halifax Daily Echo, Montgomery tried “making the rounds of all the churches,” from Anglican to Universalist (Complete Journals 2:33). When she moved back to Prince Edward Island in 1902, she often attended the local Baptist church in addition to her usual Presbyterian congregation (Rubio, “ScotchPresbyterian Agency” 97). By this time, she had already “ceased to believe” in traditional Calvinist ideas such as predestination and “the fine old hell of literal fire and brimstone” (Complete Journals 1: 382). Instead, Montgomery conceived of the afterlife as a sort of “continuation of the life here” where human beings struggle towards “perfection,” an idea that resembles New Thought, Spiritualist, and Theosophical conceptions of life after death (qtd. in Heilbron 428).14 Meanwhile, Montgomery came to view Jesus as “the greatest of great teachers” instead of God incarnate, a view consonant with much New Thought writing on the subject (Green Gables Letters 35). Eddy, for instance, referred to Jesus as “The highest human corporeal concept of the divine idea” rather than as a deity in his own right

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(Science and Health 589, emphasis added). But despite Montgomery’s gradual relinquishment of some childhood beliefs, she retained both her social identity as a Presbyterian and her intense curiosity about other religions. In a journal entry from 1897, for instance, she wrote: “I want to find out – to know – and hence I am always poking and probing into creeds and religions, dead and alive, wanting to know for knowledge sake what vital spark of immortal truth might be buried among all the verbiage of theologies and systems” (Complete Journals 1: 380). To sate this curiosity, Montgomery read widely on heterodox religious practices and experimented with séances and faith healing. On Jan 26, 1906, for instance – around the same time she was finishing the manuscript of Anne of Green Gables – Montgomery, Macdonald, and several others “had a ‘séance’ and made a table rap . . . we made [the table] do various stunts, such as standing up on one leg, walking around the room, etc.” While this séance and one that followed a few nights later were undertaken in the spirit of “fun” (and, notably, were attended by at least two local clergymen), Montgomery wrote that the experience was “a little uncanny, give it what scientific ‘explanation’ you please” (Complete Journals 2: 147). As Alexandra Heilbron notes, this was not the first or only time that Montgomery had “made a table rap”; her first such experiment occurred when she visited her father in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, in 1890 (426). She would return to this practice during and after the First World War, when a renewed vogue for Spiritualism and Ouija boards was fueled by a desire to contact fallen soldiers and other lost loved ones. While Montgomery received many fascinating insights from the “spirits,” she took a common-sense approach to this topic, attributing such messages to the influence of her unconscious mind (Heilbron 427).15 Montgomery’s wide reading on mystical subjects reinforces the impression that she was a curious skeptic who contemplated occult phenomena from a scientifically informed viewpoint. Around the time she wrote Anne, Montgomery consulted religious and self-help books that combined psychology and evolutionary theory with the contemplation of otherworldly phenomena. These works included Bliss Carman’s The Making of Personality (1908), Louis Lucien Baclé’s Future Life in the Light of Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science (1905, English trans. 1906), and Thomas Jay Hudson’s The Laws of Psychic Phenomena: A Working Hypothesis for the Systemic Study of Hypnotism, Spiritualism, Mental Therapeutics, Etc. (1893). Hudson’s 400-page tome would prove particularly important to Montgomery. This book linked psychology to mystical experience and influenced New Thought authors such as Ernest Holmes, the founder of

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Religious Science and leading New Thought spokesman of the 1940s (Holmes 127; Parker 16). Montgomery devoured The Laws of Psychic Phenomena in two days of rapt reading in February 2–3, 1906, around the time she was finishing the handwritten manuscript version of Anne, but before she typed and revised the text to send to potential publishers (Complete Journals 2: 148).16 So impressed was she that she re-read Hudson’s book again in March 1908, while she was correcting the page proofs of Anne, and tried some of its experiments in “mental healing” to treat her insomnia (Montgomery, Green Gables Letters 61–64). Montgomery’s readings suggest not only that she was personally interested in New Thought and related faith movements, but that these were hotly debated topics at the time. The author states in her journals, for instance, that Hudson’s book – which sold over 100,000 copies and was reprinted dozens of times before the First World War – was still “much talked-of” more than ten years after its initial publication (Moore 156; Complete Journals 3:71 n and 2:148). In the years preceding the composition of Anne, Montgomery also relished heterodox literary works such as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays (1841); Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s New Thought-inflected poetry; George du Maurier’s Trilby (1894), with its sinister depictions of hypnotism and mesmeric trance; Marie Corelli’s Spiritualist romances Ardath (1889), The Soul of Lilith (1892), and The Sorrows of Satan (1895); Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868), a Spiritualist novel with unorthodox views of the afterlife; and bestselling New Thought novels such as Little Lord Fauntleroy.17 The latter was a particular favorite, which Montgomery first read when it was serialized in the Montreal Witness and reread in 1902 (Complete Journals 2: 42). Montgomery’s enduring affection for Burnett’s novel suggest that Little Lord Fauntleroy – or Burnett’s later New Thought protagonist, Sara Crewe – served as prototypes for Anne Shirley, just as Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, or Kate Douglas Wiggin’s Rebecca Rowena Randall almost certainly did.18 Montgomery’s lifelong love of Romantic poetry, especially Wordsworth, also contributed to her portrayal of children as innocent and close to God, a view propounded in Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (1807) and in much New Thought fiction. Tellingly, Montgomery cited Wordsworth’s “Ode” both in her journals and in chapter thirty-six of Anne, whose title, “The Glory and the Dream,” resembles line five of the poem (Gammel, Looking for Anne 49). Montgomery revealed some of these religious and literary explorations in her private journals, but she reserved her most pointed theological

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questions for a favorite pen pal, Ephraim Weber, a Mennonite teacher, writer, and homesteader in Alberta, Canada, whose grandfather was a Christian Scientist (Eggeston 11; Rubio, Wings 111). The two were put in contact by a mutual correspondent, Philadelphia writer Miriam Zieber, but did not actually meet in person until 1928, nearly thirty years after their correspondence began in 1902 (Tiessen et al. xii-xiii). From the beginning, their letters centered around religious themes. On October 24, 1902, Weber wrote: “Religious problems interest me particularly, because I’m in a transition from the old thought and creed to some new and undefined life” (qtd. in Eggleston 18). Understandably, Montgomery was more willing to share her religious explorations with a self-described spiritual seeker such as Weber than with her fellow Presbyterians in Cavendish, where gossip was a powerful force of social control in religion and other matters. The relative anonymity of their relationship – and the lack of overlap in their social circles – may have also allowed for more honest explorations of theological subjects than Montgomery would have permitted herself to engage in elsewhere. In any case, Montgomery felt that with Weber she could “‘let myself go’ – writing freely from my soul, with no fear of being misunderstood or condemned” (Complete Journals 2: 113). In her letters to Weber, Montgomery was at her most forthcoming regarding Christian Science, New Thought, and the other heterodox religious trends she encountered in her wide reading. In March 1908, for instance, she enthusiastically recommended Hudson’s The Laws of Psychic Phenomena, which she was rereading at the time. Hudson’s book, which historian R. Laurence Moore describes as “a hodgepodge of ideas from [psychologist Pierre] Janet, [psychical researcher F.W.H.] Myers, and his own imagination,” explains Spiritualism, Christian Science, and other allegedly supernatural matters by means of psychological laws (156). The volume draws on the work of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in England, especially their recent publication Phantasms of the Living (1886), which allegedly provided scientific proof of the existence of telepathy.19 Hudson also touted the psychological discoveries of Nancy school physicians Ambroise-August Liébeault and Hippolyte Bernheim, who argued that the power of suggestion was the mechanism behind hypnotism, mesmerism, and faith healing. Throughout this eclectic book, Hudson maintains a division between the conscious and unconscious minds – which he called the “objective” and “subjective” minds – arguing that the unconscious retained instincts, emotions, and long-forgotten memories, and served as the seat of the immortal soul. He thus preserved some residue of theological ideas while promoting various strands of pre-Freudian depth

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psychology, forging a compromise between faith and science that resonated with his substantial readership. While Hudson had much to say about various occult phenomena popular at the time, his ideas about faith healing are most relevant here. In chapters eleven through fourteen, Hudson provides an overview of six types of mental healing – including Christian Science, New Thought, mesmeric healing, and suggestive hypnosis – and concludes that all are effective under the right psychological conditions. The healer must ensure that the patient enters a passive state in which his unconscious mind can be impressed by oral or telepathic suggestion. If the patient believes in the treatment, it is likely to work; even if he does not, his condition may still improve if his unconscious has been sufficiently engaged. Mental healers have had more success with some medical conditions than others, Hudson admits; insomnia, for instance, is readily treatable via suggestion, whereas certain internal complaints might be more difficult to influence. However, much depends on the individual temperament of the patient (168). Montgomery was highly receptive to Hudson’s thinking. As an insomniac and frequent sufferer from migraine headaches, she took special note of chapter fourteen, where Hudson describes how to alleviate minor ailments via autosuggestion or self-hypnosis. She explained to Weber in March 1908 that “I have been trying some little experiments in ‘mental healing’ on myself, by impressing ideas on my ‘subjective mind’ before going to sleep, and there is certainly something in it. The book explains it all by purely natural laws and discards all ‘supernatural’ explanations” (Green Gables Letters 64). Her experiment proved that autosuggestion “is a cure for insomnia . . . If I keep saying a thing over to myself persistently before I go to sleep one night, the next night I can put myself at once to sleep again by beginning to say it” (64). She later found relief from migraines using a similar technique, as she describes in a 1909 letter (86). These methods could not have been entirely successful, as Montgomery continued to suffer from migraines and insomnia throughout her adult life. Nonetheless, she was so impressed by Hudson’s autosuggestion techniques that she used them to ensure a “safe and almost painless” childbirth for her oldest son, Chester, in 1912. In the months before her son was born, she explained, “every night, as I was dropping off to sleep, and frequently through the day I repeated over and over the command to my subconscious mind ‘Make my child strong and healthy in mind and body and make his birth safe and painless’” (Complete Journals 3: 71). Montgomery claimed that Chester’s birth occasioned “no severe pain. I have suffered more many a night with toothache” (3: 70–71). She turned to Hudson’s book again in

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the 1930s when her friend Myrtle Webb had health problems ranging from gall bladder trouble to suspected pancreatic cancer. In June 1932, Montgomery confided in her journal: “When Myrtle was ill I persistently ‘healed her mentally’ according to the suggestions in that old book The Law of Psychic Phenomena. Every night before I went to sleep I commanded my subconscious mind to cure her” (Selected Journals 4: 204–205). While these anecdotes attest to Montgomery’s interest in Hudson’s book over a period spanning several decades, they also hint at other possible sources for the author’s ideas about mental healing. For instance, safe and painless childbirth was not mentioned in Hudson’s chapters on mental therapeutics, but was a frequently touted benefit of Christian Science. Eddy’s Science and Health states in a paragraph on “obstetrics” that “the Christian Science infant is born of the Spirit, born of God, and can cause the mother no more suffering” (463). Many testimonials in The Christian Science Journal likewise attested to the power of the new faith to calm women’s nerves and reduce pain during childbirth (Fraser 97). The author of one such piece confessed that she had “suffered very severely at childbirth” before discovering Christian Science, but that “my last [birth] caused so little suffering that it seemed like a miracle” (qtd. in Fraser 97). Further evidence that Montgomery encountered Christian Science outside of Hudson’s work can be found in her early fiction, such as the short story collection Chronicles of Avonlea (1912). In this book, the casual mention of Christian Science by characters native to P.E.I suggests that the religion had gained a foothold in the Canadian Maritimes. In the short story “The Hurrying of Ludovic,” for instance, two longtime lovers “drifted into an eddy of friendly wrangling . . . over Christian Science” (Chronicles of Avonlea 4; the pun is surely intended). This conversation, it is later revealed, lasts an entire evening and incites a minor disagreement between the lovers, one of whom later steps out with a Boston rival who exudes “all the glamour of ‘the States’” (Chronicles of Avonlea 7). This sequence of events suggests that, for Islanders, Christian Science carried a whiff of the exotic, but was also familiar enough to form the substance of a lovers’ quarrel. Both Chronicles of Avonlea and Montgomery’s novel The Story Girl (1911) were favorably reviewed by The Christian Science Monitor, suggesting that Eddy’s followers admired the author’s work and found it potentially sympathetic (or at least not entirely averse) to their views. The reviewer of The Story Girl, for instance, admired the book’s “dewy freshness and wholesomeness that breathe through its pages” and praised the characters for their “innocent hearts” (“Books Sent us for Review” 5).20

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These references notwithstanding, Montgomery was largely in agreement with Hudson’s views on Christian Science and the limits of mental healing more generally. While Hudson respected all schools of mental healing due to the seemingly miraculous cures they brought about, he found fault with Christian Science for the “intense, monumental, and aggressive absurdity” of Eddy’s belief in the unreality of matter, bodies, and disease (157). Christian Science healers, he argued, are handicapped by “a theory which shocks the common-sense of the average man,” even though its practitioners are “doing a great and noble work” (163). Hudson further suggested that the Christian Science Church should allow its members to seek assistance from the medical profession. Montgomery would express similar views about Christian Science in her letters to Weber. On March 28, 1909, for instance, Montgomery wrote of Christian Science, “It is laughable to see the extremes to which the human mind will go.” Yet, she argued, “I believe there is a good deal in mental healing, where no organic disease is present,” echoing Hudson’s claim that faith healing was less effective with certain internal complaints (Green Gables Letters 86). What is striking about Hudson’s method of suggestive therapeutics is that it does not depend on religion for effectiveness. One need not believe in Eddy’s theories, or even believe in God, to receive material benefit. Hudson was, in fact, describing what later researchers would call the placebo effect: that is, a beneficial outcome derived from a patient’s belief in a treatment, instead of the treatment itself. But instead of dismissing or minimizing this effect, as modern-day researchers often do, he celebrated it and discussed how one might maximize its potential. Hudson was remarkably prescient about the strengths and limitations of the placebo effect, which subsequent researchers have documented more fully. Scientists have now established, for instance, that placebos “can stimulate real physiological responses, from changes in heart rate and blood pressure to chemical activity in the brain, in cases involving pain, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and even some symptoms of Parkinson’s” (Feinberg 36). Whether the placebo effect might help other medical conditions is less clear. Hudson seemingly intuited this when he remarked that suggestive therapeutics had a “comparatively limited” range of usefulness (164). While Hudson’s claims were conservative compared to those of many New Thought followers and Christian Scientists, Montgomery was willing to follow him only so far. While she respected his ideas on autosuggestion as a healing practice, she was not entirely convinced about telepathy and clairvoyance – though both phenomena would later appear in her fiction, particularly the Emily series (1923–1927). In March 1908, Montgomery

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suggested that she and Weber attempt one of Hudson’s telepathic experiments, in which they would try to appear in one another’s dreams. “When you receive this [letter] try to make me dream of you some night and if I do I’ll carefully observe the date and let you know the result,” she wrote (Green Gables Letters 64). Because Weber declined to experiment, Montgomery did not receive the assurance she sought. Montgomery’s later fictions and journal entries suggest her continued ambivalence about thoughttransference and clairvoyance, which she viewed as the prerogative of a few gifted individuals rather than an ability universally available to all. Her protagonist Emily Starr, for instance, experiences several psychic visions, one of which saves the life of her future husband, Teddy. Montgomery herself experienced many prophetic dreams about the First World War, her business affairs, and her friends and family members (Heilbron 427–428). She was unsure what to make of these experiences, as Alexandra Heilbron suggests, and generally maintained an interested but skeptical attitude toward what we would call extra-sensory perception (429). New Thought followers, by contrast, were convinced that every individual’s thoughts had the potential to travel long distances and influence others. Overall, Montgomery’s embrace of New Thought was tentative and confined to those aspects of the faith that were supported by the science of her day. She was most interested in New Thought and occult ideas when they intersected with contemporary psychology. In her March 28, 1909 letter to Weber, for instance, Montgomery lauded the Emmanuel Movement in Boston, a method of group therapy that combined religious healing with up-to-date psychological approaches such as autosuggestion. The movement was founded in 1906 by Reverend Elwood Worcester, an Episcopalian minister who held a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Leipzig and had studied with Wilhelm Wundt and Gustav Fechner (Gifford 1). While originally used to treat tubercular patients, the Emmanuel method proved most useful for neurasthenics, the same class of individuals who flocked to Christian Science and New Thought for solace. The Emmanuel Movement was an important precursor of Alcoholics Anonymous, founded in 1935, and other popular recovery and self-help groups still active today (Gifford 122; Dubiel xi). Montgomery confessed that she felt “considerable interest in” this emergent trend, which she described as “Christian Science purged of its absurdities” (Green Gables Letters 86). In the same letter, Montgomery recommended Bliss Carman’s The Making of Personality (1908), a self-help tome published by L.C. Page

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about three months prior to Anne of Green Gables. Carman was a Canadian Maritime poet celebrated for his prolific verses in a Transcendental or Romantic vein. Montgomery considered him one of the leading poets of his era (“Bliss Carman” 152). After he fell in love with Mary Perry King – a silent co-author of Personality – he became interested in Unitarian religion and Delsartean movement as a means of uniting mind, body, and spirit.21 After the First World War, he would explore Theosophy and other esoteric spiritual movements (Bentley 1–2). While The Making of Personality is not, strictly speaking, a New Thought production, the book shows many affinities with New Thought and Christian Science, especially the idea that the body is a reflection of the spirit and that a balanced life involves “arduous progress toward perfection” (Carman 68). Like many early New Thought followers, Carman professed the eugenic goal of developing “a more perfect race” through physical and mental culture (13). At the very least, New Thought and the views expressed in The Making of Personality both fall under the broad umbrella of “harmonial religion,” Sydney Ahlstrom’s term for “those forms of piety and belief in which spiritual composure, physical health, and even economic wellbeing” were said to “flow from a person’s rapport with the cosmos” (qtd. in Albanese 295). Montgomery found Carman’s book “delightful and helpful,” embodying “a fine and excellent philosophy of life” (Green Gables Letters 86). Intriguingly, the volume was lent to her by Macdonald, suggesting that heterodox ideas such as these passed muster with liberal Presbyterian clergy (Montgomery, Complete Journals 2: 214). Later in life, Montgomery would return to Hudson’s volume, which remained among her favorites, and peruse other famous works that combined psychology with inquiries into occult phenomena. These included Morton Prince’s Dissociation of a Personality (1906), a novel-length case study of multiple personalities, and psychical researcher F.W.H. Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (1903), a bestselling tome on telepathy, hypnosis, and the unconscious, both of which she read in 1921. Prince’s book numbered among “the most fascinating, extraordinary, and illuminating books I have ever read,” as the author confided in her journal, where she also admitted to being “intensely interested in these psychical subjects” (Selected Journals 3:9). In 1922, Montgomery read French psychologist Emile Coué’s book Self-Mastery through Conscious Autosuggestion, which encouraged its legions of readers to repeat, twenty times a day, the still well-known mantra “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better” (Harrington 118). This book, which remained popular through the Depression era, provided scientific validation for New

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Thought practices of positive thinking and daily affirmations as a path to renewed health, wealth, and better living more generally. At first, Montgomery reacted with skepticism to Coué’s ideas: “I can hardly believe in all his miracles. If one could make oneself well and good by repeating over and over before going to sleep the mystic formula . . . why couldn’t one make oneself perfect or immortal?” (Selected Journals 3: 72). Still, she implicitly acknowledged the similarities between Coué’s techniques and Hudson’s autosuggestion. A year later, she was again studying Coué’s book, this time with the intention of treating her husband’s melancholia: “I believe Auto Suggestion [sic] would help Ewan if he would try it” (3: 109). Unfortunately, MacDonald was unwilling to serve as a guinea pig. While Montgomery encountered these three works long after writing Anne of Green Gables, they show that her interests in psychology and New Thought, and the intersections between these subjects, persisted in her life and fiction over a period of several decades. The next section of this chapter examines Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea as novels whose New Thought content overlaps with their liberal Presbyterian worldview, thus heightening the contrast between these newer religious perspectives and the fire-and-brimstone Calvinism of the previous generation. Throughout this segment, we must keep in mind that Montgomery approached New Thought through the lenses of psychology and popular culture, rather than as a believer. This no doubt explains why Anne of Green Gables eschews some of the more outlandish features of many New Thought novels of the period – such as mental telepathy, faith cures, and wishes granted as if by magic – while retaining some structural features and thematic emphases central to the New Thought novel genre. The author’s ambivalence about New Thought also helps to explain why the protagonist’s unbridled optimism wanes as she matures into adulthood, taking on a more muted tone in Anne’s many sequels. But if Montgomery’s interest in New Thought decreased over time, it never entirely disappeared, as suggested in later works such as The Blue Castle (1926), which combines a healthy dose of New Thought with gentle satire of insular Protestant traditions.

Positive Thinking in the Anne of Green Gables series and The Blue Castle In her journals, Montgomery expressed a philosophy of writing that sounds distinctly like New Thought: “Thank God, I can keep the shadows of my life out of my work. I would not wish to darken any other life – I want instead to

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be a messenger of optimism and sunshine” (Complete Journals 2: 199). While Anne of Green Gables does at least hint at the “shadows” of the author’s life – the emotional heroine, for instance, often claims to be “in the depths of despair” (28, 33, 137, etc.) – Montgomery’s statement about the optimistic purpose of her fiction resembles similar remarks by Burnett, another New Thought novelist who aimed to cheer readers beset by worldly cares. Anne of Green Gables lives up to Montgomery’s promise by presenting an upbeat, imaginative heroine whose charm wins over skeptical townspeople. In keeping with the novel’s New Thought emphasis, the protagonist’s early history of abandonment and neglect are kept firmly in the background, as are the author’s personal troubles (which surface obliquely in the form of Anne’s mood swings and flashes of temper).22 Anne of Green Gables opens, however, not with the eponymous heroine but with a chapter on the town busybody, Mrs. Rachel Lynde, who serves as the novel’s representative of old-school Calvinist theology and the rigid social mores that go along with it. Mrs. Lynde is leader of the Avonlea Presbyterian church who “helped run the Sunday school, and was the strongest prop of the Church Aid Society and Foreign Missions Auxiliary” (7). In a less formal capacity, Mrs. Lynde exercises her moral authority by judging her neighbors’ every move. “Not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum,” the omniscient narrator relates (7). In the novel’s opening chapters, the dour churchwoman serves as the heroine’s foil and sometime antagonist. Before Marilla Cuthbert brings home her new ward, for instance, Mrs. Lynde greets the idea of adoption with considerable skepticism: “Don’t say I didn’t warn you if [s]he burns Green Gables down or puts strychnine in the well – I heard of a case over in New Brunswick where an orphan asylum child did that and the whole family died in fearful agonies” (13). In such episodes, Mrs. Lynde represents Avonlea’s closed-mindedness, including its suspicion of outsiders and new ideas. She embodies the resistance Anne must overcome in introducing New Thought into this rural Maritime community. Into this staid Scotch-Presbyterian milieu bursts Anne Shirley, an exuberant eleven-year-old orphan adopted by elderly siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who had sent for a boy to help Matthew with farm chores. When the orphanage in Nova Scotia sends a girl by mistake, the brother and sister reluctantly decide to keep her out of a sense of religious duty and pity for her neglected background. Perhaps they are also won over – or at least stunned into submission – by the torrent of verbal optimism Anne unleashes beginning in chapter two. When shy Matthew

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picks up his new ward at the Bright River train station, she astounds him with a running monologue of upbeat sayings: “It just makes me feel glad to be alive – it’s such an interesting world.” (19) “Isn’t it splendid there are so many things to like in this world?” (p. 23)

The unrelenting positivity continues when Anne arrives at her new home and meets her adoptive mother, Marilla Cuthbert, a Presbyterian spinster “of narrow experience and rigid conscience,” who is greatly surprised by Anne’s loquacity (10). “Don’t you feel as if you just loved the world on a morning like this?” Anne asks Marilla on an apparently ordinary spring day (32). Even when Anne worries that she will be sent back to the orphanage and exchanged for the desired boy, she chirps, “[y]ou can nearly always enjoy things if you make up her mind firmly that you will” (36). Understandably, Matthew and Marilla are astonished to find such wellsprings of optimism in a neglected child whose life has been filled with hardship, and who has received little formal religious instruction beyond learning the Presbyterian Shorter Catechism at the orphan asylum (Anne of Green Gables 46 n). Indeed, she has never even been taught how to pray, as we learn in chapter seven. Instead, Anne has been raised by a series of foster parents who required her to perform housework and childcare that left little time for schooling. Anne’s zeal for positive thinking – like her literary allusions and prodigious vocabulary – are thus difficult to account for, as a reviewer from The New York Times complained: “[Anne] is altogether too queer . . . she talked to the farmer and his sister as though she had borrowed Bernard Shaw’s vocabulary” (“A Heroine from an Asylum” 335). Both Anne’s precocity and her optimism can be explained, at least in part, by the reigning literary trends of the day. As scholars like Claudia Nelson, Claudia Mills, John Seelye, and Jerry Griswold have explained, “exuberant, effervescent orphans” were common in North American literature around 1900 (Mills 228). These orphaned characters, who tended to be smarter, kinder, and more loving than the adults around them, exhibit almost “unbearable cheerfulness,” to quote one disgruntled critic (Carpenter 98). We have already encountered some of these sunny orphans, half-orphans, and adoptees in earlier chapters of this book. But Cedric Errol and Sara Crewe are only the tip of an iceberg that also includes the protagonists of Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs (1912) and Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles (1904), not to mention many more ephemeral narratives that contain this “recognizable . . . literary type” (Mills 228).

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Anne’s affectionate nature, combined with her irresistible optimism, aligns her with these protagonists, even if her flaws (such as her impulsivity, quick temper, and melodramatic bent) provide touches of realism and comic relief. The idealized heroes and heroines of such adoption narratives inherited the mantle of the “Romantic Child” popularized by British Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Blake. The Romantic child was closer to God than adults, being able to sense the divine in nature and respond spontaneously, and prayerfully, to this presence. This Romantic literary legacy contributed to a positive shift in attitudes towards children over the course of the nineteenth century, both in popular culture more generally and within the Presbyterian church specifically. By the early twentieth century, Claudia Nelson explains, “even the fiercest Presbyterian churches abandoned the doctrine of infant depravity, replacing it with the notion that ‘all dying infants would be saved’ because children are made in God’s image” (Little Strangers 72). Adult Presbyterians, Nelson notes, received “no such free pass” into heaven. While these idealized protagonists channeled the Wordsworthian child, they also served a rhetorical function in a genre aimed at social reform. Turn-of-the-century adoption literature discouraged the practice of adopting a child for his or her labor value, as Matthew and Marilla had originally attempted to do. Instead, adoptive parents were urged to value children for affective qualities, such as the seemingly boundless love they can give (Nelson, Little Strangers 68). Adoption narratives thus took part in a broader social trend around 1900, in which a child’s value shifted from “object of utility” to “object of sentiment” in both middle- and workingclass American homes (Zelizer 7). This genre also drew attention to abuses of the foster care system and to other problems faced by poor and displaced children, who were exceedingly numerous in the last third of the nineteenth century due to immigration, a rise in divorce and desertion, and increased economic precarity (Nelson, Little Strangers 3). The idealized child at the center of most adoption narratives provided an emotional pull that motivated readers to address these social ills, perhaps by adopting a needy child themselves. While most adoption narratives could not be characterized as New Thought fiction, there was undoubtedly overlap between the two genres. Popular adoption narratives such as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, A Little Princess (1905), and Pollyanna, for instance, all contain significant New Thought overtones. Anne of Green Gables likewise displays many typical features of earlier New Thought novels. These include the conversion of

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spiritually alienated adults, a surprising (if not exactly miraculous) healing, strong homosocial bonds between women and girls, and the ability to transform one’s surroundings using imaginative thinking. The most obvious of these plot elements is Anne’s successful conversion of emotionally stunted adult characters. Anne wins over many grown-ups with her loquacity and good cheer – starting with her shy adoptive father, Matthew, who warms to his talkative new ward from their first meeting. Anne also charms Diana Barry’s cranky aunt, Miss Josephine Barry, a wealthy spinster who blooms in Anne’s presence much as Fauntleroy’s “wicked Earl” of Dorincourt melts at the sight of his grandson (Burnett, Fauntleroy 145). To her credit, selfish Miss Barry fully recognizes Anne as an agent of moral reform: “If I’d had a child like Anne in the house all the time I’d be better and happier woman,” she observes (Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 190). But the novel’s most dramatic conversion is that of Anne’s adoptive mother, Marilla, a strict, unimaginative Calvinist much like Montgomery’s maternal grandmother. Through Anne, Marilla comes to feel the affection that was missing in her life: “I love you as dear as if you were my own flesh and blood and you’ve been my joy and comfort ever since you came to Green Gables,” she finally confesses to Anne near the novel’s conclusion (235). As Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood suggests, Marilla’s transformation from a lonely old maid into a loved and loving mother figure is arguably the novel’s emotional core, as well as the subplot that appeals most to adult readers (225–226). The book also contains a remarkable healing that loosely resembles the mind cures featured in didactic New Thought fiction. In chapter eighteen, “Anne to the Rescue,” the heroine saves Diana Barry’s baby sister, Minnie May, from a potentially fatal attack of the croup by dosing her repeatedly with ipecac. When the local doctor finally arrives, he finds that his services are no longer needed. He says, “That little red-headed girl they have over at the Cuthberts is as smart as they make ’em. I tell you she saved that baby’s life, for it would have been too late by the time I got here” (Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 119). This incident serves as an implicit critique of the medical establishment, since an untrained orphan saves the day without the doctor’s assistance. Though Minnie May’s treatment involves materia medica, it nonetheless recalls the faith healings that occur in didactic New Thought and Christian Science novels of the era, in which the cure of a sick infant or family pet demonstrates the heroine’s growing spiritual maturity and earns her a degree of social acceptance. In Clara Louise Burnham’s Jewel (1903), for instance, the eight-year-old heroine’s Christian Science healing of her

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grandfather’s prized mare wins the crusty old man’s love and respect. In Bell’s Carolina Lee, meanwhile, the protagonist’s cure of a blind baby earns her the reputation for spiritual wisdom throughout her previously skeptical Southern community. Despite Anne’s judicious use of ipecac, her “rescue” of Minnie May serves a similar narrative function by helping her integrate into her community. Anne wins the renewed trust of Diana’s mother, who had forbidden the two girls to play together after Anne accidentally gets Diana drunk on currant wine in chapter sixteen. This incident also softens the hearts of the Avonlea townspeople toward the newcomer, who demonstrates unexpected skill and resourcefulness. Like her healing of Minnie May, Anne’s close relationships with other girls – especially her “bosom friendship” with Diana Barry – fit a pattern visible in earlier New Thought novels, in which romantic friendships between women eclipse heterosexual relationships. Historian Lillian Faderman defines romantic friendships as socially sanctioned passionate relationships between women that flourished from the Renaissance up until the First World War. Female romantic friends might write each other love letters, kiss, embrace, sleep in the same bed, and make promises of eternal love and faithfulness. Since women were believed to have little sexual passion, such expressions of affection rarely incited suspicion or controversy, at least not before the advent of modern sexology around the turn of the twentieth century (Faderman 15–20). Anne and Diana’s romantic friendship has been the subject of much critical commentary. In “‘Where is the Boy?’: The Pleasures of Postponement in the Anne of Green Gables Series,” Marah Gubar traces Anne and Diana’s relationship from their childhood vows of lifelong loyalty in chapter twelve, to their adolescent desire to “be nice old maids and live together for ever,” to Anne’s emotional breakdown at the time of Diana’s marriage to Fred Wright, which takes place in the third book of the series, Anne of the Island, published in 1915 (Anne of Green Gables 192). Gubar also notes a trend towards postponed marriages and lengthy engagements in the Anne series, including the dilatory courtship between Anne and Gilbert Blythe, who finally marry in the fifth book in the series, Anne’s House of Dreams (1917). In the Anne series, Gubar concludes, Montgomery carved out space for female romantic friendships and utopian communities of women who seem markedly happier than the married couples in these novels, Anne and Gilbert included. Montgomery’s tendency to downplay heterosexual relationships in favor of female friendships may have resulted

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from her own unhappy marriage or dissatisfaction with traditional gender roles (“Where is the Boy?” 60). Other critics take this line of questioning a step further by pondering whether Anne or Montgomery herself might be “queer,” as Diana innocently suggests in chapter twelve (“You’re a queer girl, Anne. I heard before that you were queer. But I think I’m going to like you real well.” [Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 75]). Irene Gammel points to the author’s childhood friendships with schoolfellows like Amanda and Penzie Macneill, which included vows of loyalty reminiscent of Anne and Diana’s initial meeting, not to mention love poetry, sleepovers, and effusive letters.23 In one missive to Penzie, for instance, fifteen-year-old Montgomery wrote, “Oh don’t I wish that instead of writing to you I could go to you and get my arms around you and kiss you,” calling her “my own sweet wildwood rose” (qtd. in Gammel, Looking for Anne 95). As an adult, Montgomery maintained close friendships with women such as Nora Lefurgey and Fredericka (“Frede”) Campbell, her first cousin. Montgomery’s relationship with Campbell, which was cut short in 1919 by her untimely death from influenza, was “likely the most meaningful connection of [the author’s] life,” Gammel relates (Looking for Anne 99). If Montgomery did experience same-sex desire – as seems likely – this may help explain why she found New Thought appealing. As historian Beryl Satter relates, lesbian and bisexual women were drawn to New Thought because of the movement’s emphasis on female community and its suggestion that marriage and childbirth would eventually be things of the past (111–149). In chapter three of Science and Health, titled “Marriage,” Eddy wrote that “the time cometh of which Jesus spake, when he declared that in the resurrection there should be no more marrying nor giving in marriage, but man would be as the angels” (64). While Eddy left the details of this future life uncertain, she seemed to promise that heterosexual procreation was a temporary evil, a byproduct of man’s fallen state. In the remainder of her chapter on marriage, Eddy says surprisingly little about human sexuality, aside from forbidding infidelity and lauding sexual purity (56–58). Eddy’s reticence to address sexual behavior in general, and homosexuality in particular, left open a space for Christian Scientists and members of other New Thought sects – who also held Science and Health in high regard – to pursue same-sex relationships if they so desired, though few did so openly in the early twentieth century.24 These facts perhaps explain why New Thought novels often included romantic friendships between women and girls, even though such bonds were already beginning to attract

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negative press from medical doctors and concerned citizens around 1900 (Gammel, Looking for Anne 98). Anne’s indulgence of same-sex feelings for Diana marks her as a typical New Thought heroine, and likely contributed to the book’s initial popularity. As Gammel observes, female romantic friendships were widely tolerated for much of the nineteenth century, and were thus imbued with considerable nostalgia for Montgomery and her original audience (90). Anne’s transformative imagination is likewise employed in the service of New Thought. While many of her flights of fancy are inspired by popular literature of the day – from Romantic poetry to ghost stories and sensation novels – others are deliberate attempts to transform workaday realities into beautiful visions, using methods reminiscent of Hudson’s conscious autosuggestion. The first example of this in the novel is Anne’s attempt to imagine away the “horrid old wincey dress” given to her by the orphanage, which she wears when she first meets Matthew. As she explains, When I got on the train I felt as if everybody must be looking at me and pitying me. But I just went to work and imagined that I had on the most beautiful pale blue silk dress . . . and a big hat all flowers and nodding plumes, and a gold watch, and kid gloves and boots. I felt cheered up right away. (Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 18)

Later in the novel, Anne uses her prodigious imagination to entertain herself when she is sidelined with a broken ankle after falling off the ridgepole of a roof. In this case, imagination also enables her to “look on the bright side of things,” as she reflects that “I might have broken my neck” (151). These seemingly minor incidents demonstrate how Anne uses her imaginative faculties to conjure up a better reality or adjust her perspective on events, a practice that helps her endure hardships even if it does not materially change her circumstances. Anne’s use of imagination may remind readers of an earlier New Thought heroine, Sara Crewe, whose cherished fantasy that she is a princess comes true in all but name when she discovers that she will inherit a great fortune. In Anne’s case, no such miraculous transformations take place: though her material circumstances do improve over the course of the novel, she rises no higher than the well-to-do middle class. Meanwhile, Anne’s own fantasies that she is a royal personage – as in chapter twenty, where she imagines herself “an enchanted princess shut up in a lonely tower” – result only in her accidentally burning a pie (134). The different attitudes towards magical thinking and wish fulfilment in the two novels suggest Burnett’s greater enthusiasm for New Thought and her

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experience as a onetime student of Christian Science, as opposed to Montgomery’s more casual interest in these faiths. In fact, despite its New Thought-inspired plot elements, Anne of Green Gables is not a typical New Thought novel. The book does not aim to convert readers to this emergent faith, even if it does present aspects of New Thought in an appealing light. Instead, Montgomery’s most famous work deploys New Thought strategically as a means of softening the fire-andbrimstone Calvinism of Anne’s adopted hometown and supporting a more liberal, inclusive brand of Presbyterianism in which “God . . . is Love” and “the universe is full of love,” as Montgomery writes in Emily of New Moon (17–18). This dynamic, in which New Thought rubs off the sharp edges of Avonlea Presbyterianism, becomes evident in Anne’s initial skirmishes with the local Presbyterian congregation and its most vocal representative, Mrs. Lynde, and in the heroine’s eventual reconciliation with these same entities. Accordingly, the first few chapters of Anne of Green Gables record the heroine’s clashes with the town’s religious institutions and their reverberating effects. When Mrs. Lynde calls the sensitive orphan “terrible skinny and homely” with “hair as red as carrots” during their first meeting, Anne’s outburst of temper and equally dramatic apology provide a taste of the conflict to come (57). Her first visit to the Avonlea church is likewise fraught with tension and misunderstanding. Anne, who is already rumored to be eccentric, shows up to Sunday school in an unfashionable dress and a hat bedecked with wildflowers. She then stares out of the window during the minister’s “awfully long” sermon on Revelations 3:2–3.25 This Bible verse is a “warning of imminent death” more appropriate for the older, fireand-brimstone style of Presbyterianism (Anne of Green Gables 72 n). Anne finds far more inspiration in the view of “The Lake of Shining Waters” (Barry’s Pond) seen through the church window, which causes her to spontaneously give thanks to God. She also criticizes the Sunday-school Superintendent’s prayer, which sounds as if “[h]e was talking to God and he didn’t seem to be very much interested in it, either. I think he thought God was too far off to make it worth while” (71). Notably, the idea of a God who is “far off” and unconcerned with human affairs belongs to the older Calvinist theology of predestination. The newer school of Presbyterianism, like New Thought, emphasized a God who is loving, nearby, and always reachable through personal prayer or meditation (Rubio, Scotch-Presbyterian Agency 99). In scenes like these, Anne reveals her status as Romantic child who finds the divine in nature more easily than in the gloomy religious forms of the

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Avonlea church. She also turns out to be an astute critic of local religious practices. While Marilla is shocked by Anne’s narration of her experiences at church, she nonetheless acknowledges the truth of her observations: “Some of the things Anne had said, especially about the minister’s sermons and Mr. Bell’s prayers, were what she herself had really thought deep down in her heart for years, but had never given expression to” (Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 72). By giving voice to “the repressed thoughts of the community,” as Christiana R. Salah explains, Anne reveals the religious hypocrisy of Avonlea society and paves the way for much-needed change (203). Most of the changes Anne works in Avonlea, however, are accomplished through the force of her personality rather than through social critique. In early chapters of Anne of Green Gables, the heroine successfully embodies values associated with New Thought, such as a loving nature, optimism, faith in the power of ideas, and a tendency to see God as loving and perpetually available to his flock. Above all, Anne possesses spontaneity, which New Thought writer Mary E.T. Chapin alternately described as “a condition of freedom from whatever obstructs and impedes” and “the essential condition of being able to find the light” (60). Spontaneous acts, such as Anne’s adornment of her hat with roadside wildflowers or her vows of eternal friendship with Diana, are “uncompelled, unwilled joyous acts in present time” that flash into one’s mind “with the swiftness and clearness of light” (60). Anne’s unconventional behavior thus introduces the townsfolk to a new way of thinking about God and his creation, as well as a new way of being that disrupts entrenched routines. Among the first signs of Anne’s successful conversion of Avonlea is the church’s selection of a new minister, Mr. Allan, whose gentler style of Presbyterianism mirrors Anne’s view of God as loving and people as basically good. The community’s open-hearted embrace of the new minister and his wife shows that this attitude shift is not grudging but natural and unforced (Salah 203). The new minister’s wife, Mrs. Allan, is a kindred spirit who reassures Anne that organized religion can be a “cheerful thing,” not “melancholy” as Anne had assumed from her prior experiences at church (Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 139). With the aid of this spiritual mentor and her inspiring teacher, Miss Stacy, Anne slowly brings the community around to her way of thinking. We see this through small changes in the behavior of the townsfolk rather than through any sweeping statements. For instance, Mrs. Lynde gradually becomes a friend and mentor to Anne rather than an antagonist. As a mentor, she is especially valuable because she

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demonstrates the power of female leadership within a conservative Christian community (Rothwell 138). Mrs. Lynde even starts spouting New Thought platitudes (or something very like them), saying, “If you can’t be cheerful, be as cheerful as you can” (Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 206). Rigid Marilla, meanwhile, finds herself breaking out into uncharacteristic fits of laughter and tears in response to strong emotion, demonstrating a new capacity for spontaneous feeling. Statements and actions like these point to a gradual reconciliation between New Thought and Presbyterianism in the broader Avonlea community. As the community assimilates Anne’s brand of New Thought into their more traditional faith, so does Anne assimilate to her community. But while the community profits by this transaction, becoming more tolerant and adaptable, Anne herself grows markedly less interesting. This unfortunate transformation was noted not only by initial reviewers of the novel – one of whom remarked that the book’s conclusion was too “poor and commonplace” to match the “freshness and originality” of the first twothirds of the novel – but also by the characters themselves (qtd. in Montgomery, My Dear Mr. M. 39). Miss Josephine Barry admits of sixteen-year-old Anne, for instance, “I don’t know that she is as amusing as she was when she was a child,” while Marilla finds herself “wishing you could have stayed a little girl, even with all your queer ways,” as she tells Anne before she heads to Queen’s Academy (Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 227, 220). The domestication of Anne is perhaps inevitable within the didactic genre of girls’ fiction. As T.D. MacLulich explains, heroines of books like Little Women and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm may be “given to impulsive behavior and occasional acts of rebellion” as children, but they must “yield to social pressures” as they mature – typically by embracing domesticity and abandoning professional aspirations (390). Anne’s moral and social progress over the course of the novel follows this predictable path. She learns to tame the romantic flights of fancy evident in the story club and Haunted Wood episodes, instead turning her imaginative faculties toward self-improvement. By chapter twenty-one, Anne has also become “much quieter,” perhaps in response to frequent criticisms of her loquacity (Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables 204). The novel’s concluding chapters feature two more dramatic transformations, as Anne reconciles with her former rival, Gilbert Blythe, and selflessly turns down the Avery scholarship to help Marilla keep Green Gables. These events mark the heroine’s moral growth even as they signal the erasure of the chatty, irresistible child she once was. Anne has become, for better or worse, a respectable and fully

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integrated member of the Avonlea community, as Mrs. Lynde finally acknowledges: “You’re a credit to your friends, Anne, that’s what, and we’re all proud of you” (211). As Anne abandons her eccentric ways to become a proper young lady, she remains connected to ideas and values associated with New Thought, especially optimism and imaginative power. But she cannot effortlessly embody these values as she did during childhood; put differently, she has lost the spontaneity that made her right thinking seem natural and unforced. Instead, Anne can only give lip service to the impulses that animated her younger self. Before final exams at Queen’s Academy, for instance, Anne invokes both New Thought and Romantic nature-worship when she encourages her nervous classmates: “Next to trying and winning, the best thing is trying and failing. Girls, don’t talk about exams! Look at that arch of pale green sky over those houses and picture to yourself what it must look like over the purply-dark beechwoods back of Avonlea” (228). Her classmates wisely ignore this condescending advice and talk about fashion. In such passages, Anne sounds less like inspirational child protagonists such as Little Lord Fauntleroy and more like the adult heroines of didactic New Thought novels like Victoria True: Or, the Journal of a Live Woman (1895), for whom New Thought is a daily practice requiring intensive study, rather than the spontaneous outflowing of their natures. This tonal difference tacitly suggests that New Thought may be easier to apply in children’s stories than in the workaday world of adult women. These problems persist in the sequels to Anne of Green Gables, which were written by Montgomery at the insistence of her publisher, L.C. Page. Montgomery herself was reluctant to revisit her popular heroine, feeling that “Anne is a grown-up and can’t be made as interesting as when a child” (Complete Journals 3: 130). This is certainly true in Anne of Avonlea (1909), where the inspired New Thought girl-child we met in Anne of Green Gables has become a reflexively optimistic country schoolmarm. In contrast to the pleasingly disruptive, original orphan of the previous novel, sixteen-yearold Anne is a conformist who “wants to fit in with everything and everybody” (Epperly 40). She can also be annoyingly preachy about the New Thought values she once so effortlessly channeled. In chapter six, for instance, Anne chides pessimist Eliza Andrews that she should “look on the bright side” because “[i]t’s really a beautiful world”; in chapter thirteen, meanwhile, she demands that her friends “have nothing but beautiful thoughts” during her birthday celebration, and then scolds them for being insufficiently imaginative (Anne of Avonlea 57, 134). Anne has also, disappointingly, let go of the ambition that drove her in Anne of Green

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Gables. Instead of fantasizing about her own success, she daydreams about influencing a male student who will later achieve fame as “a college president or a Canadian premier” (Anne of Avonlea 2). In other words, Anne unthinkingly follows the gender norms she so delightfully flouted in the earlier novel. Though the sequel was, by Montgomery’s own admission, “not nearly so good as Green Gables,” it made the Canadian bestseller lists in both 1909 and 1910, taking eighth and ninth place, respectively (Complete Journals 2: 196; Gerson 31 n). As Elizabeth Epperly notes, Anne of Avonlea is a “busy” book with a large cast of supporting characters, including child characters that compensate for the shortcomings of grown-up Anne (41–42). Six-year-old orphans Davy and Dora supply the spontaneity and mischief our heroine now lacks, while a third youngster, her star pupil Paul Irving, calls to mind Anne’s former imaginative fervor and literary ambition, now indefinitely postponed. This dreamy little boy from Boston with his romantic fancies (“buttercups are made out of old sunshine . . . sweet peas will be butterflies when they go to heaven”) grows up to be a famous poet, as we learn in a later sequel (Anne of Avonlea 218). Montgomery also livens up the narrative by throwing in some romances. In the second half of the novel, Anne plays matchmaker for two long-divided lovers, Lavendar Lewis and Stephen Irving, a widower who has just returned from a lengthy sojourn in Boston. The novel ends with the marriage of these two relatively minor characters, perhaps to substitute for Anne and Gilbert’s deferred nuptials (Gubar, “Where is the Boy?” 51–52). Thanks to these new characters and their lively antics, much of the story’s action happens near Anne but does not directly involve her. Anne becomes, in effect, an interested bystander of her “own” story. For all its faults, Anne of Avonlea is certainly not lacking in New Thought. In fact, it was written during a period when Montgomery’s interest in the emergent faith was at its height, judging from her journal entries, letters, and readings around this time. One senses this interest in the many characters who hail from Boston or have family there, the “Yankee” periodicals mentioned occasionally, and Anne’s seemingly inexhaustible supply of optimistic sayings.26 Anne also engages in charity work, like many heroines of didactic New Thought novels. Take, for instance, Anne’s leadership of the Avonlea Improvement Society alongside her friend and future husband, Gilbert Blythe. This society – which is inspired by American periodicals – takes on community beautification projects like painting unsightly barns, planting trees, and banning patent medicine advertisements that would spoil the view. As in Anne of Green Gables and

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other New Thought novels, homosocial or homoerotic bonds between women likewise flourish in this sequel. For instance, Anne’s budding interest in Gilbert takes a back seat to her jealousy over Diana’s engagement to Fred Wright. Meanwhile, fourteen-year-old Leonora Bowman (aka “Charlotta the Fourth”), who describes herself as “intended from the start to be [an] old maid,” develops a crush on Anne, striving to emulate her stately manner and appearance (Anne of Avonlea 342). While Anne’s exploits in Anne of Avonlea are thus in character for a New Thought heroine, they lack the resonance of her earlier adventures. As we have seen, didactic New Thought novels provided readers with useful role models of how to apply New Thought principles in daily life. Anne’s status as role model is certainly clearer in this novel than in its predecessor. Whereas Anne as a child struggles to grasp local religious practices, fine points of cookery, and social niceties, teenaged Anne often figures as a symbol of ideal womanhood. This becomes clear in a passage about Gilbert’s feelings for the heroine: “She held over him the unconscious influence that every girl, whose ideals are high and pure, wields over her friends; an influence which would endure as long as she was faithful to those ideals and which she would certainly lose if she was ever false to them” (Anne of Avonlea 221). The ideal woman of Montgomery’s narrative possesses the conventional moral framework provided by her Presbyterian faith, combined with New Thought optimism and a romantic imagination that help smooth over the harsh realities of adult life. Both Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea are products of an early stage in Montgomery’s career that was also a period of heightened interest in New Thought. By 1926, when she wrote The Blue Castle, the author’s religious outlook had changed significantly. By now a minister’s wife in Ontario who had given birth to three children, Montgomery was still reeling from the impact of the First World War. This brutal conflict, along with the stillbirth of her second son, Hugh, in 1914 and the death of her best friend Frede Campbell in 1919, shook the foundations of her beliefs.27 For Montgomery, as for many others who lived through the War, “the old view of the world, ruled by an omnipotent God who took an active and benevolent interest in human affairs, was . . . nearly impossible to maintain” (Rubio, Wings 205). While outwardly conforming to her husband’s Presbyterian faith, Montgomery privately continued to explore heterodox traditions such as Transcendentalism, Theosophy, and Rosicrucianism, as Sylvia Duvernet explains (49–57). Montgomery also maintained her interest in New Thought, even if her later fiction is less optimistic than Anne of Green Gables. Many of her works

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from the teens, twenties, and thirties take on somber themes in keeping with Montgomery’s personal struggles during these decades. Take, for instance, the three-volume Emily series, which relates the story of another, less idealized orphan whose journey to adulthood is more fraught than Anne’s, and more clearly autobiographical. This change in tone is also evident in later installments of the Anne series, where the heroine experiences a number of losses, from the stillbirth of her own first child in Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), to misunderstandings with husband Gilbert in Anne of Ingleside (1939), to the wartime death of her adult son Walter in Rilla of Ingleside (1921). In these later novels, Anne is somewhat less given to optimistic sayings, and much of the interest and action has shifted to her children, whose spontaneous charm and mischief recall their mother’s youthful exploits. The subplots of these novels, meanwhile, explore taboo topics such as suicide, child abandonment, and spousal abuse, as in Anne’s friendship with battered wife Leslie Moore in volume five or her daughter Rilla’s adoption of a war orphan in volume eight. By this later stage in her career, Montgomery was no longer a reliable “messenger of optimism and sunshine,” though a ray of sunlight breaks through occasionally. Accordingly, New Thought in Montgomery’s The Blue Castle takes different forms, specifically, a critique of the medical establishment reminiscent of Eddy’s Science and Health. The Blue Castle also reflects broader changes in the New Thought movement, such as a shift in emphasis from spirituality and sexual purity in the late nineteenth century to a celebration of materiality, wealth, and sexual pleasures in the early twentieth. This sea change is described in chapter five of Satter’s Each Mind a Kingdom, which explains how “a new generation of New Thought leaders emerged who openly lauded wealth and desire” in the early decades of the twentieth century (152). For instance, Emma Curtis Hopkins’s student Helen Wilmans emphasized that “desire, matter, and the animal will formed the heart of healthy female selfhood” and that women should attain their desires through a “violent struggle for freedom” if necessary (Satter 152, 162). Wilmans further argued that repressed or thwarted female desire could result in insanity, while liberated desire led to union with the divine intelligence (168–170). In The Blue Castle, protagonist Valancy Stirling’s embrace of wealth, sensual pleasures, and heterosexual passion seemingly aligns her with this later strand of New Thought, as does the rebellious behavior by which she attains these ends. In many ways, The Blue Castle represents a significant departure from Montgomery’s earlier plots and themes. This comic romance was

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Montgomery’s first book aimed at adult audiences and the only one of Montgomery’s twenty novels set outside of Prince Edward Island (Tracey 9). The novel was dedicated to her longtime pen pal, Ephraim Weber, with whom she discussed heterodox religious ideas throughout her life. It also owes a debt to Bliss Carman, whose Transcendental nature writings served as an inspiration for the books of “John Foster” featured in the novel (Pike 195). The Blue Castle’s hapless heroine, Valancy Stirling, could hardly be more different from Anne. Twenty-nine years old, plain, and unmarried, Valancy lives with her controlling mother and aunt in fictional Deerfield, Ontario, which is loosely based on the resort town of Bala, Muskoka, where Montgomery vacationed in 1922 and 1928 (Duvernet 49). Valancy patiently endures her relatives’ strict rules and cruel taunts until she is unexpectedly diagnosed with a fatal heart condition, whereupon she decides to enjoy what is left of her life. First, Valancy determines to “please myself” and “tell the truth” instead of saying what others want to hear (Montgomery, Blue Castle 81). She then abruptly moves out of her parental home to nurse her friend Cissy Gay, a fallen woman who is dying of tuberculosis. These decisions cost Valancy her family’s approval and her social respectability, but shore up her mental health, which had been slowly unraveling due to repressed desire. Valancy’s most significant decision, however, is to follow her heart by proposing marriage to mysterious ne’er-do-well Barney Snaith. He accepts on the understanding that she has less than a year to live. The two of them live in wedded bliss on Barney’s private island in Lake Muskoka, Ontario, a tourist area where neurasthenics like Montgomery and her husband often traveled to recuperate in a natural setting (Pike 192). In these beautiful natural surroundings, the new couple engages in vigorous outdoor activities such as hiking, canoeing, snowshoeing, and ice-skating, which further strengthen Valancy’s physical and mental health. After a year elapses and Valancy feels better than ever, she returns to her physician, Dr. Trent, who reveals that there was a mix-up with her diagnosis; in fact, she is “fit as a fiddle and would probably live to be a hundred” (Montgomery, Blue Castle 232). Her earlier symptoms were nothing more than harmless “pseudoangina,” a syndrome involving chest pain, heart palpitations, and dizziness that was commonly associated with neurasthenia at the time (Blue Castle 231; Pike 192). Fearing that Barney will think that she tricked him into marriage, Valancy returns home to explain, only to encounter Barney’s estranged father, Dr. Redfern, the maker of lucrative patent medicines. Valancy discovers that Barney is heir to a multi-million-dollar fortune, and that he

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is her favorite author, John Foster, whose Transcendental nature books sustained her through dark times. In the unlikely conclusion, Barney reaffirms his love for Valancy, reconciles with his father, and takes his bride on a lavish European honeymoon. Despite this apparently happy ending, the reader is left wondering whether a relationship that flourished on a private island will survive in the real world, given the social and economic inequality between the two lovers (Tracey 26). As Laura Robinson suggests, The Blue Castle is in some ways the “mirror opposite” of the Anne books (83). Unlike Anne Shirley, Valancy has no educational ambitions or career prospects. She is consumed by dreams of romantic rescue, which come true as improbably as Sara Crewe’s fantasies of lavish wealth. Whereas Anne puts off marriage to enjoy career success and female companionship, Valancy shuns same-sex friendship (with the exception of her dying friend, Cissy Gay) and leaps into a heterosexual romance at the first opportunity. The differences between Anne and Valancy might be traced in part to the antifeminist backlash of the 1920s and 30s, during which Canadian women faced pressure to marry younger, higher education of women was discouraged, and female friendships faced increasing medical scrutiny (Robinson 82). The Blue Castle reflects these social changes and implicitly critiques them by showing their disastrous consequences for unmarried women like Valancy. But despite its many differences from the Anne books – including its bleaker outlook on women’s lives – The Blue Castle affirms Montgomery’s continued interest in New Thought and shows the evolution of this interest over time. The wish-fulfillment embedded in the story’s plot, in which the town “reprobate” turns out to be Prince Charming, is one manifestation of this optimistic faith tradition (Robinson 90). The Blue Castle’s critical take on organized religion likewise suggests a break from Calvinist traditions and a tacit endorsement of heterodox beliefs. While Anne evolves from an inspired New Thought girl child to a proper Presbyterian matron, Valancy moves in the opposite direction, as this socially respectable Anglican spinster throws off propriety in search of pleasure. This search leads her to Barney as well as to an embrace of Romantic nature worship as a cure for neurasthenia. By these means, Valancy gains the very quality that Anne loses as she grows up – spontaneity – a trait that New Thought writers associated with children and nature and defined as responsiveness to the divine forces within (Chapin 60). One might say that Valancy’s story is Anne writ backwards. While Anne matures as her series progresses and learns to cooperate and conform, Valancy grows both younger and harder to

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control, transforming from a “sallow, faded, little old maid” into an “elfin girl” who is “oddly, improperly young-looking” for her age (Montgomery, Blue Castle 233; 131; 185). She also becomes uncomfortably outspoken, embarrassing her relatives with truthful but tactless reflections. After a repressed childhood in which she “was never really young,” as she explains to Barney, Valancy finally experiences the youthful energy, enthusiasm, and freedom she missed out on as a child (153). The novel’s plot thus improbably combines the best of both worlds: the pleasures of adulthood (sex, wealth) lauded by the latest generation of New thought writers, alongside the glamour of “immortal youth” that proved impossible even for Anne Shirley to sustain (192). But The Blue Castle’s most obvious New Thought element is its nonetoo-subtle critique of the medical establishment, both the standard allopathic approach represented by Doctor Trent and Doctor Redfern’s popular but unproven patent remedies. Neither has anything substantial to offer beyond the placebo effect, Montgomery suggests. The catalyst for the novel’s action, in fact, is a serious medical mix-up: Valancy receives a letter from Dr. Trent that was intended for another patient, an elderly spinster with “a very dangerous and fatal heart disease – angina pectoris – evidently complicated with an aneurism” who has at most a year to live but “might also die at any moment” (Montgomery, Blue Castle 69). In this letter, Dr. Trent freely admits that “nothing could be done” for this unfortunate patient (69). His only contribution is an accurate diagnosis, which proves worthless because he mistakenly sends it to the wrong person. When Dr. Trent sees Valancy a year later, he can offer no medical remedy for her pseudo-angina, either. This non-fatal but uncomfortable condition sometimes responds to a “shock of joy,” he admits, which cannot readily be supplied by medical means (231). Valancy turns out to be her own best physician, seeking out the emotional and physical support she needs without the help of the medical establishment. New Thought writers like Eddy might have predicted this outcome. As Eddy writes in Science and Health, “When the Science of being [i.e., Christian Science] is universally understood, every man will be his own physician, and Truth will be the universal panacea” (144). While Montgomery criticizes doctors, she also censures patients who put their faith in unproven remedies and mediocre practitioners. Valancy’s family members, for instance, place habit and social respectability above other factors in their choice of a physician, Dr. Ambrose Marsh: “None of the Stirlings ever consulted a doctor without holding a family council and getting Uncle James’ approval. Then, they went to Dr. Ambrose Marsh of

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Port Lawrence, who had married Second Cousin Adelaide Stirling” (Montgomery, Blue Castle 39). Aside from marrying a Stirling, Dr. Marsh’s best quality is that he tells the family what they want to hear, something his rival, Dr. Trent, had signally failed to do: “None of the Stirling clan had ever gone to [Dr. Trent] since he had told Cousin Gladys, ten years before, that her neuritis was all imaginary and that she enjoyed it” (40). By seeing Dr. Trent, Valancy is already committing a rebellious act that she knows would displease her family. For the Stirling clan, Dr. Marsh is potentially useful because he wields the power to medicalize, and thus condemn, unorthodox behavior. His function has as much to do with social control as with healing. For instance, when Valancy talks back to her astonished relatives, they ask Dr. Marsh to declare her insane and “lock Valancy up.” To his credit, Dr. Marsh tells Uncle James Stirling “that Valancy had not, as yet, really done or said anything that could be construed as proof of lunacy – and without proof you cannot lock people up in this degenerate age” (110). But the looming threat of institutionalization is not an empty one. It hints at the oppressive rest cures that were still popular in the 1920s in North America and Europe and that were sometimes used to discipline unruly or unconventional women. While Montgomery luckily managed to avoid a rest cure, she had plenty of experience with other ineffective treatments for mental illness. These included addictive barbiturates, which were frequently supplemented with “non-prescription drugs including bromides, veronal, blue pills, and chloral, a mixture of sedative, hypnotic, and liver/ digestive treatments” (Pike 200). This dangerous mix of medications almost certainly did Montgomery and her husband more harm than good. Given Montgomery’s own negative experiences with non-prescription “blue pills” and patent remedies, it makes sense that she criticizes such treatments in The Blue Castle. For instance, Valancy refuses Dr. Redfern’s “Purple Pills,” even though they are “the standard medicine of the Stirling clan” (Montgomery, Blue Castle 58). She likewise bristles at the suggestion that she be rubbed with Redfern’s Liniment, another remedy favored by her relatives: “Valancy hated the smell of Redfern’s Liniment – she hated the smug, beaming, portly, bewhiskered, bespectacled picture of Dr. Redfern on the bottle” (65). Valancy also receives no benefit from “Redfern’s Hair Vigor,” which she has “faithfully rubbed . . . into the roots” of her hair every night (43). Valancy’s negative attitude towards patent medicines amplifies the critique of such remedies already suggested in Anne of Avonlea, where “perfectly awful . . . advertisements of pills and

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plasters” threaten to spoil views of the landscape (154). As in The Blue Castle, it is “Purple Pills” that loom largest in Anne’s imagination (Anne of Avonlea 156). Montgomery softens her critique of patent remedies somewhat towards the end of the novel, when bewhiskered Dr. Redfern himself turns out to be Valancy’s father-in-law. Even though he suffers from conditions that his medicines supposedly cure – baldness and rheumatism, for instance – Valancy still finds herself liking this “pleasant, fatherly” old man (Montgomery, Blue Castle 236). Dr. Redfern’s son Barney, meanwhile, treats his father’s business with amused contempt. When Dr. Redfern began his multi-million-dollar empire, Barney says, “[h]e wasn’t even a doctor – isn’t yet. He was a veterinary and a failure at it” (262). Despite this serious drawback, Barney has no qualms about the morality of his father’s business. “[H]is money isn’t tainted money,” he tells Valancy. “He made it honestly. His medicines are quite harmless. Even his Purple Pills do people whole heaps of good when they believe in them” (268). These statements foreshadow modern research on the placebo effect and echo Eddy’s claim that “drugs lose their healing force” when “unsupported by the faith reposed in [them]” (Science and Health 160). In addition to this sustained critique of medicine, The Blue Castle contains various other hints that Montgomery was responsive to New Thought and Christian Science around the time she composed the novel. Some of these hints come in the form of quotes from “John Foster’s” nature books. Valancy is particularly inspired by one passage: “Fear is the original sin . . . Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something. It is a cold, slimy serpent coiling about you. It is horrible to live with fear; and it is of all things degrading” (Montgomery, Blue Castle 59, emphasis in original). This passage recalls New Thought attitudes towards fear as a force that could block inspiration and cause illness. Eddy wrote, for instance, that Christian Scientists “must rise above both fear and sin” and that “[d]isease is . . . fear made manifest on the body” (Science and Health 373, 493). Eddy also quotes the Apostle John: “There is no fear in Love, but perfect Love casteth out fear” (410). Intriguingly, Montgomery references this same Bible verse (1 John 4:18) in The Blue Castle to describe Valancy’s love for Barney: “Love had cast out her last fear” (152). Valancy’s subsequent progress bears out the suggestions of Eddy and of later New Thought writers like Wilmans, who emphasized that fearless living opened the door to health, wealth, and inspiration (Satter 175–177). Montgomery’s heroine must first overcome her fear of death (in the form of Dr. Trent’s grave misdiagnosis), followed by her fear

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of family disapproval, before she can experience happiness, financial prosperity, and true love. Finally, Valancy’s rosebush – a healthy but bloomless plant that she hacks “viciously” in chapter seven, only to find it “[c]overed with blossoms” in chapter twenty-seven – is a symbol with multiple resonances, including religious overtones (Montgomery, Blue Castle 66, 183). Most obviously, Valancy’s late-blooming rose bush is an emblem of fertility whose luxuriant blossoming coincides with her marriage to Barney (Tracey 15). The plant may also be, as Duvernet suggests, a Rosicrucian symbol. The Blue Castle was influenced by the Rosicrucian ideas present in one of Montgomery’s favorite novels, Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni, which she reread in 1924. For Rosicrucians, “The mystery of all nature and all knowledge lay . . . in the heart of a blooming rose. It was symbolic of a soul blooming in the Garden of Eden” (Duvernet 53–54). Roses were also Eddy’s favorite flower; in Science and Health, for instance, she calls the rose “the smile of God” (175). Blooming roses are thus an appropriate symbol for Valancy’s physical and spiritual transformation. Just as roses serve as an index of Colin’s miraculous healing in Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Valancy’s flourishing rosebush signals her recovery from neurasthenia and the newfound love in her life. This chapter shows how Montgomery’s fictions are permeated with New Thought in ways that reflect her changing engagement with this new religious movement over several decades. For reasons of space, I have left out several major works that further attest to her interest in New Thought: most notably, the epistolary novel Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), the fourth installment of the Anne series chronologically but the second-to-last to be written. Although Montgomery composed the book during a period of tremendous financial and personal hardship, Anne of Windy Poplars rehashes upbeat plots and themes from Anne of Avonlea, featuring more of Anne’s optimistic sayings, matchmaking exploits, and her transformative effects on pupils and acquaintances alike. Perhaps this return to cheerful, familiar territory during a tumultuous time was therapeutic for Montgomery. It is equally likely, however, that Montgomery was catering to the increased demand for New Thought created by the Great Depression, which witnessed a glut of bestselling New Thought success literature by Napoleon Hill, Emmet Fox, and others, as well as an increased appetite for child-centered, escapist fare like Anne of Green Gables. In fact, George Nicholls, Jr.’s successful film version of Anne of Green Gables, starring Dawn O’Day as Anne Shirley, was a surprise hit in 1934.

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While Montgomery appreciated this film and its bankable star – who later changed her stage name to Anne Shirley in honor of her most famous role – this uptick in Anne’s popularity could not compensate for damage in other areas of the author’s life. Professionally, Montgomery’s reputation suffered because her brand of romantic nature-worship was no longer fashionable. Critics preferred the more experimental Modernist style of writers like Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot. Personally, Montgomery was reeling from her worsening bipolar disorder, her increasing dependence on addictive drugs, and the embarrassing behavior of her husband and eldest son, Chester – not to mention the beginning of the Second World War in 1939. Montgomery’s apparent suicide in 1942 suggests that optimism could sustain her only so far, and that New Thought is more tenable in the lives of literary heroines than of real-life men and women.

chapter 5

New Women, New Thoughts Millennial Motherhood in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland Trilogy

Feminist writer and activist Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935), today best known for her Gothic tale “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), seems like a strange fit for this volume in several respects. She stands alone as the only unambiguously American writer included here, though she traveled to England five times and befriended British intellectuals such as Alfred Russell Wallace, George Bernard Shaw, William Morris, and H.G. Wells (Gilman, Living 258).1 Moreover, Gilman was a religious iconoclast who wrote and lectured about political issues such as women’s suffrage, rational dress reform, and socialism for educated adult audiences. It is hard to imagine her rubbing shoulders with Frances Hodgson Burnett or Lucy Maud Montgomery, two largely apolitical writers who penned classic New Thought children’s fiction – though in fact, Gilman and Burnett did cross paths in 1899, when Burnett stole Gilman’s assigned seat at a luncheon held by the Society of American Women in London (Gilman, Living 262).2 Of course, Gilman is not known as an author of children’s fiction, though she did try unsuccessfully to have her book of children’s verses, entitled Mer-songs and Others, published during her lifetime (Rudd 77).3 Instead, Gilman belongs in Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure” because her utopian science fiction foregrounds motherhood, childrearing, and early childhood education as central concerns of a well-run society. In Herland (1915), for instance, an isolated all-female society regards motherhood “as a lode-star . . . as the highest social service, as the sacrament of a lifetime” (222).4 Accordingly, these women spend their whole lives preparing for and fulfilling their sacred maternal duties. As I shall explain, Herland society is heavily influenced by New Thought values, especially those outlined in Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health: with Key to the Scriptures (first published 1875) – despite Gilman’s lack of allegiance to any organized religious sect. Gilman also belongs here because her utopian fantasies address the same nexus of concerns as the New Thought fictions described in previous 155

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chapters: specifically, the management of mental illness and the conflicts between work, marriage, and motherhood familiar to ambitious women then and now. These were preoccupations of New Thought writers and feminists alike, groups whose ranks substantially overlapped in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For both groups, the idealization of children and motherhood in their writings compensated for pursuing self-interested activities outside the home, be they hobbies, religious or political involvement, or paid employment. In fact, Gilman did have much in common with Montgomery and Burnett, who likewise struggled to balance precarious mental health with motherhood and prolific writing careers. All three authors were lifelong sufferers from nervous illness who experienced alternating periods of depression and extreme productivity, symptoms suggestive of bipolar disorder (Deegan 8). For Gilman, this condition was hereditary. As Michael Robertson observes, her great-grandfather, celebrated Calvinist preacher Lyman Beecher, was “almost certainly manic-depressive, and at least seven of his twelve children suffered from serious depression or other ailments; two sons committed suicide” (174). Gilman’s female forebears, meanwhile, tried rest cures, water cures, and other largely experimental remedies for the family malady, mostly without success. For instance, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s daughter Georgiana – who was Gilman’s cousin – experienced Silas Weir Mitchell’s infamous rest cure for nervous women a decade before Gilman entrusted herself to his care (Davis 11). As nervous invalids, Gilman, Burnett, and Montgomery experienced crises ranging from institutionalization to suicidal impulses. Like Burnett, Gilman was a veteran of Mitchell’s rest cure; like Montgomery, she committed suicide, though for very different reasons.5 While Montgomery’s suicide appears to have been a spontaneous act of despair, Gilman’s was a carefully planned euthanasia when inoperable breast cancer left her unable to work. As she wrote in her posthumously published book The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography (1935), “it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one . . . I have preferred chloroform to cancer” (333–334). That said, Gilman was no stranger to suicidal thoughts in her earlier years, especially during the breakdown of her marriage to first husband, Walter Stetson, when she spoke continually of “pistols and chloroform” (Stetson, qtd. in Davis 103). Such thoughts plagued her throughout her life during recurring episodes of melancholia. The three women also shared a deep ambivalence about motherhood in their own lives, while exalting children and mothers in their works.

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Gilman’s personal experience of maternity was particularly fraught. In her autobiography, she stressed that “Always I have loved children and children have loved me” (153). Upon her marriage to Stetson she had originally “planned to have six children, three of each kind. The coming of my baby was unmeasured joy and hope, with high purposes of wisest, tenderest care” (154). Yet this self-presentation, written years after the fact, does not capture the whole truth. As the author’s most recent biographer, Cynthia J. Davis, explains, Gilman worried that marriage and motherhood would hinder her work, fears that were exacerbated by a difficult pregnancy (80). In Davis’s words, “children more often represented a threat to [Gilman’s] ambitions than their fulfillment” (69). Moreover, severe postpartum depression thwarted Gilman’s efforts to bond with her infant daughter, Katherine, as she explains in her autobiography: “I would hold her close – that lovely child! – and instead of love and happiness, feel only pain” (92). The author’s depression ultimately drove her to seek an unsuccessful rest cure with Mitchell in 1887 and a more successful “West Cure” of sorts in Pasadena, California.6 Gilman’s health and spirits improved when she left Stetson in 1888 and returned to Pasadena with her daughter. There, she began a promising career as a writer and lecturer, penning her now famous short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” in 1890 and producing a well-received volume of poems, In This Our World, in 1893. She also became known for her powerful lectures on women’s rights, dress reform, and other progressive causes. As Gilman’s reputation grew, her professional responsibilities increasingly conflicted with her fragile health and the task of caring for Katherine, who was watched by friends and neighbors when her mother was busy or unwell. Late in life, Katherine still harbored resentment over this perceived abandonment, as she wrote in her unpublished memoir: “In me you do not see my mother’s training – you must always remember that even in my earliest years others were watching over me and caring for me while she lay in a hammock recovering from ‘nervous prostration’” (qtd. in Davis 151). Gilman herself, meanwhile, at times felt “utterly used up by the worry and exertion” of parenting a young child, as she wrote in 1894 (Diaries 2:570). She also feared that the responsibility of raising Katherine was interfering with her work on behalf of socialism and women’s rights (Davis 159). When Gilman eventually relinquished custody of her nine-year-old daughter to Stetson and his new wife, Grace Channing Stetson, in 1894, she believed she was making the right decision for all concerned. Gilman’s finances were at a low ebb and she was about to take a new job in San

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Francisco in “a place unsuitable for a child” (Gilman, Living 162). She also wanted Katherine to know Stetson as she had not known her own father, who abandoned her family when she was very young. As Gilman explained in her autobiography, “Since [Stetson] longed for his child and had a right to some of her society; and since the child had a right to know and love her father . . . this seemed the right thing to do” (275, 163). These reasonable motives notwithstanding, Gilman was savaged by the press and shunned by acquaintances for “giving up [her] child” at a time when divorce was considered shameful and paternal custody almost unheard of (Gilman, Living 163; Robertson 174). Gilman was condemned as an “unnatural mother” and even slapped in the face by a neighbor who took issue with her custody decision (Gilman Living 275; Diaries 2: 792).7 Though Gilman regained custody of her daughter in 1900 and visited her in the interim, their six-year separation and the negative publicity surrounding it were so painful that for years she could not see a mother and child together without crying (Gilman, Living 164). These years left Gilman with an outsized burden of regret. Until the end of her life, Gilman tried to atone for her parental “failures” by supporting her adult daughter financially, as she explained in a 1919 letter to Katherine: “There has been so much, so very much, that I . . . failed in giving you, dear child. It is a joy to my heart to be of some use now” (qtd. in Davis 349). Katherine, meanwhile, never forgave her mother for her unavailability, as suggested by interviews she gave in the 1970s, when she was in her nineties. “My mother abandoned me when I was nine years old,” Katherine repeatedly told Ann Lane during their conversation in 1978. “She put me on a train by myself to travel East” (qtd. in Lane 311).8 Katherine told biographer Mary Hill, meanwhile, that despite her mother’s philosophy of selfless service to mankind, she was “too absorbed in expressing herself, making a career for herself, or in her causes” to be a dependable parent or “co-mother” to Walter’s second wife, Grace Channing Stetson (qtd. in Hill 234). This sad history, replete with misunderstandings and disappointments on both sides, suggests that Gilman wrote lovingly of children, early childhood education, and universal mother instinct partly to atone for her own prolonged absences and perceived inadequacies as a parent, much as Burnett wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy to make up for time apart from her sons. Gilman’s dedication of her autobiography to “my dear daughter” is but one obvious example of this compensatory dynamic.9 In Gilman’s utopian science fiction and her political and autobiographical writings, she exalted motherhood and children in the abstract to assuage lingering guilt about her own parental choices (Davis 164; Hill 230). At the same time, she

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“asserted women’s right to independence from too much mothering responsibility” by promoting day cares, kindergartens, and so-called baby gardens staffed by highly trained experts in child development and early childhood education (Hill 230). These communal childcare options would allow mothers to work outside the home, provide time for relaxation, and assist women who were, by nature or training, less inherently maternal than others (a reality that Gilman graciously acknowledged and accommodated, perhaps bearing her own experience of motherhood in mind). Gilman’s attempts to address these maternal dilemmas in her fiction are both inspiring and revealing. In the Herland trilogy, for instance, she created imaginary worlds where motherhood, careers, and service to humanity were compatible, so that difficult choices like hers would no longer be necessary. While Burnett and Montgomery channeled their maternal longings and anxieties into New-Thought children’s fiction, Gilman took hers in political yet fantastical directions, writing feminist utopias that realized many of Eddy’s fondest wishes. This chapter explores why Gilman’s Herland trilogy – consisting of the novels Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland, and With Her in Ourland (1916), all of which were serialized in Gilman’s progressive monthly magazine The Forerunner (1909–1916) – contains plot elements derived from Christian Science and New Thought, culminating in Herland ’s female-dominated society devoid of sin, sickness, and sex. These New Thought borrowings are surprising given that Gilman was outspokenly critical of organized religions, including (but certainly not limited to) Christian Science. This chapter further examines how Gilman’s utopian science fiction blurs the lines between the personal and political, secular and divine, thus challenging the secularization thesis that stresses the waning of religion as a necessary component of progress. For Gilman, religion and social progress went hand in hand. The residents of Gilman’s fictional utopias are neither atheists nor agnostics, but adherents of a woman-centered, socially conscious religion akin to the author’s personal faith. Gilman followed a personal creed consisting of belief in a benevolent God and a life of service to humanity. This faith, which she invented at the tender age of sixteen and refined in her utopian fictions and her polemical book His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers (1923), emphasized the progressive, teleological evolution of humankind to ever higher states of being. This progressive evolution would be led by women, Gilman predicted, whose nurturing “birth directed maternal creeds” contrasted with death-oriented patriarchal religions (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) that focused on the

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afterlife as opposed to the progress of the race in the present day (Gilbert and Gubar 203). In His Religion and Hers – Gilman’s last book published during her lifetime – she condemned these existing religions for their “posthumous egotism” and for their “original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race” (46, 217). She also took Christianity to task for “the hideous idea of hell, the worst thought ever produced by the mind of man. It cannot be attributed to women any more than to Jesus that his wise, tender, and practical teaching of right living was twisted and tortured into a theory of right dying” (His Religion and Hers 52). As her mention of “right living” suggests, Gilman’s maternal theology incorporated elements of Christian Science and New Thought, both woman-centered faiths that projected millennial futures for humankind. Like Gilman’s personal creed, these optimistic religious movements evolved in opposition to the fire-and-brimstone Calvinism of previous generations, with its emphasis on original sin and eternal damnation. Early New Thought followers and Christian Scientists likewise elevated mothers, children, and maternal relationships above all other bonds. Recall that Eddy was often referred to as “Mother” by her followers, who lovingly furnished a “Mother’s Room” in the Boston Mother Church in her honor.10 She and her followers worshipped a “Father-Mother God, all harmonious” that combined the best attributes of both sexes. In the next section of this chapter, I show how Gilman’s personal faith incorporated the teachings of prominent New Thought leaders such as Eddy, Ralph Waldo Trine, and Emma Curtis Hopkins, despite her occasional criticism of Christian Science. The final section, meanwhile, traces the development of these New Thought ideas in her utopian science fiction, which contains the clearest and most entertaining expression of her vision for humanity. These contexts show how this fiercely independent thinker relied on New Thought for her optimistic projections of social reform and also, perhaps, for personal reasons. New Thought’s “healthy-minded” outlook may have assuaged Gilman’s frequent depressions after orthodox methods such as the rest cure had failed.11 Moreover, as historian Beryl Satter attests, New Thought disproportionately appealed to New Women like Gilman who sought to escape traditional marriage and compulsory heterosexuality and forge meaningful careers outside the home (134). Gilman, who was attracted to both men and women and allergic to domesticity, identified with these goals and wove them into polemical fictions about all-female communities. Whether or not Gilman acknowledged it, New Thought was a motivating force behind her progressive politics and a crucial

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component of the maternal theology outlined in Herland and expanded eight years later in His Religion and Hers.

New Thought in Gilman’s Life and Life Writing Though Gilman descended from a long line of famous preachers and religiously motivated social reformers – including Calvinist theologian Lyman Beecher, Congregationalist minister and abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher, and novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe – she is better known for her political activism than her religious views. Accordingly, scholars of her work tend to downplay religion in favor of social and political themes such as feminism, race, eugenics, and socialism. Those who do attend to religious themes usually focus on Gilman’s critique of patriarchal faiths in works such as Herland and His Religion and Hers (see, for instance, Gilbert and Gubar). New Thought and Christian Science are typically ignored or mentioned only in passing. But in fact, as Gail Harley and Gail Thain Parker have suggested, Gilman adopted “many New Thought tenets,” even if she “stopped short of formal affiliation” with the faith (Harley 94; see also Parker 87–96). Gilman’s New Thought leanings dovetailed with her political views and with the maternal theology she expounded in the Herland trilogy, as I shall explain. This holds true despite Gilman’s criticism of Christian Scientists and their faith healing methods in her autobiography. There, she recalled an 1897 visit to her stepmother, Frankie Beecher Johnson Perkins, then a new convert to Eddy’s faith. Gilman lamented how this “kind little” woman was taken advantage of by other Christian Scientists, who stayed at her boarding house free of charge in exchange for giving “absent treatment” to her dying husband, “which was of no advantage to his health or her business” (242).12 On this visit, Gilman stayed next door to a Christian Science healer whose sessions with patients she overheard through a thin partition. “Rather brisk and brief with poor persons, he was; much more prolonged with the richer,” she wryly observed (243). She also recounted his banal and sometimes fraudulent interactions with patients, such as a partially deaf woman who was told (in a very loud voice) that she could hear perfectly, or a sick man who was advised to keep his life insurance policy despite Eddy’s proclamation that “There is no death!” (243). Importantly, this passage condemns specific Christian Scientists (the freeloaders and hypocrites among Eddy’s flock) rather than the tenets of Christian Science itself. If one examines these tenets closely, one finds

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many similarities between Eddy’s beliefs and Gilman’s maternal theology, including the parallels with the Herland trilogy described in the next section. Gilman’s personal creed also borrowed freely from other New Thought sources, including Ralph Waldo Trine’s bestseller In Tune with the Infinite (1897), which was described in the 1960s as “the single most successful New Thought book,” having sold well over two million copies by that time (Albanese 394).13 Trine’s book was an important influence on Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) and on automobile magnate Henry Ford, who famously ordered bulk copies to distribute to other industrial capitalists (Harrington 118).14 Gilman’s personal investment in New Thought is unsurprising given the overlap between this faith movement and the many progressive causes she supported. Christian Science and New Thought intersected with the so-called woman movement, a strain of nineteenth-century feminism led by Gilman alongside suffragists and reformers such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Frances Willard, and Jane Addams. These early feminists defied the misogyny of orthodox Christianity and much contemporary science by arguing that women were not merely equal, but superior to men. They believed that both sexes should cultivate supposedly feminine virtues such as chastity, selflessness, and maternal love, and abandon male vices such as lust, violence, and aggressive competition. Allowing women greater political influence and entry into the professions, they believed, would allow these feminine virtues to permeate society.15 While these views owed much to nineteenth-century stereotypes about Christian women as morally superior “angels of the house,” the womanists also drew on contemporary evolutionary theory to imagine alternative trajectories for humanity. They embraced the work of American sociologist Lester Frank Ward, who argued that human society had originated as a nurturing matriarchate and only later devolved into aggressive patriarchy.16 In works such as “Our Better Halves” (1888) and Pure Sociology: On the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society (1903), Ward upended Victorian sexism by identifying the woman rather than the man as the “race type” – that is, the primary instigator of evolutionary and social improvement in human civilization. According to this logic, man was at best an “assistant” to womankind or at worst, “an afterthought useful principally for his sperm” (Gilman, Moving the Mountain 74; Robertson 196). If a benevolent matriarchy had dominated humanity’s past, it followed that society might return to a woman-led (or at least more gender equitable) social structure. Gilman – who described Ward as “the greatest man

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I have ever known” (Living 187) – expressed these hopes in her poem “Matriatism,” in which she contrasted male- versus female-dominated civilizations: Man fights for wealth and rule and pride, For the “name” that is his alone; Comes woman, wakening to her power, Comes woman, opening to the hour That sees life as one growing flower, All children as her own.

(lines 712)

Gilman was not alone in her hopes for a coming woman’s era. As Satter explains, nineteenth-century feminists believed that middle-class white women could lead society to a glorious future characterized by peace and plenty (43). Using moral influence and female-guided sexual selection, women had the potential to “create a new humanity and so usher in the millennium” (47). The keynote of this new age would be maternal instinct, directed toward the entire human race. Gilman, for instance, believed that women would eventually rise into “world-motherhood” that would allow them to “consider the rest of the world . . . with the same divine instinct, the inborn desire to serve and benefit” as a mother protecting her child (His Religion and Hers 291). The woman movement was an important influence on Eddy and other early New Thought leaders, who likewise envisioned millennial futures dominated by stereotypically feminine virtues. Recall that Eddy’s Science and Health describes an androgynous Father-Mother God who embodies the best traits of both sexes, including feminine chastity, maternal love, and male strength of will. Eddy suggested that human beings should similarly reflect “union of the masculine and feminine qualities,” much like the androgynous women of Herland (57). Eddy further argued that “[c]hastity is the cement of civilization and progress” and predicted a future devoid of sin, sickness, and sexual intercourse, taking the woman movement’s emphasis on sexual purity to its logical extreme (57). As described in earlier chapters, Eddy paraphrased Matthew 22:30, with its prediction that “there should be no more marrying and giving in marriage” after the resurrection (64). She added: “Proportionally as human generation ceases, the unbroken links of eternal, harmonious being will be spiritually discerned; and man, not of the earth earthly but coexistent with God, will appear” (69). Though Eddy’s writing is notoriously difficult to parse, she seems to suggest that marriage and sexual reproduction constitute a temporary stage of human

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evolution. She further implies that children are spiritual beings rather than earthly products of human generation, writing of young people as “the spiritual thoughts and representatives of Life, Truth, and Love” (582). Eddy’s followers refined her philosophies and drew out their implications. Her onetime student Emma Curtis Hopkins, the leading New Thought teacher of the 1880s and 90s, alternately spoke of a loving “Mother Spirit” and a God with both feminine and masculine attributes (Harley 63). Echoing the maternal themes prominent in Science and Health, Hopkins wrote, “We are an infant on the bosom of the Infinite Mother God” (Class Lessons 132). Hopkins also reiterated Eddy’s prediction of a future without marriage or childbirth, but made it more explicit: “there shall no longer be marrying, or giving in marriage, or giving of birth, for all shall awake to know they are as the angels of God in heaven” (qtd. in Satter 92, emphasis added). Because of such rhetoric, Christian Science and New Thought were widely perceived as women’s movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Membership rosters support this perception: in 1906, Christian Science membership was 72.4 percent female, while church membership across denominations averaged 56.9 percent female (Albanese 299).17 While New Thought began its evolution into a maleoriented gospel of capitalist success during the same decade, the faith movement was simultaneously popular among contemporary socialist reformers, suggesting its considerable ideological flexibility. Indeed, New Thought was a significant influence not just on the woman movement, but also on early twentieth-century socialism, Bellamyite Nationalism, and Christian Socialism. The latter two movements were inspired by Edward Bellamy’s 1888 bestseller Looking Backward: 2000–1887, a socialist utopian novel that influenced Gilman’s political philosophy and her fiction. This work begins when nineteenth-century narrator Julian West falls into a mesmeric sleep and awakens over 100 years later, in Boston of the year 2000. He finds America profoundly changed; in this socialist future, the nation is the sole employer. Each citizen serves for equal pay in the country’s “industrial army” from ages twenty-one to forty-five. Citizens are motivated by patriotism and desire for honor; capitalist greed, competition, and selfish individualism are things of the past. Because women are financially independent members of the industrial army, they are free to choose marital partners for love alone. This freedom has eugenic benefits for the nation, as Julian’s host, Dr. Leete, explains: “it means that for the first time in human

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history the principle of sexual selection, with its tendency to preserve and transmit the better types of the race, and let the inferior types drop out, has unhindered operation” (Bellamy Loc. 2762). Thanks to woman-led sexual selection, criminal tendencies, disease, and disability have been all but eliminated in a few generations. Bellamy’s popular novel – which sold over a million copies in its first decade and inspired the founding of 162 nationalist clubs – served as a “primer in socialism” for many of its fans, even if the book is vague about how a socialist utopia might be achieved and maintained (Davis 121–122). Gilman was an admirer of Bellamy’s novel and ardent supporter of Nationalism long after the movement fell out of vogue around 1894 (125). She also corresponded with Bellamy and considered him a mentor figure of sorts.18 Though some high-profile New Thought socialists were men – Bellamy and Trine among them – the vast majority were women who also embraced the tenets of the woman movement (Albanese 324). Socialist reformers of both sexes gravitated toward New Thought because it suggested the possibility of rapid human progress, accelerated by thought transference as well as practical action. In the words of Benjamin Orange Flower, editor of the progressive journal The Arena (1889–1909), “Thought is contagious, and people are thinking . . . unspoken thought is a potent factor in influencing other minds.” It followed that when many people “are thinking earnestly along any certain line, the thought waves or mental emanations must necessarily become powerful factors in influencing public sentiment” (qtd. in Satter 190). Trine, meanwhile, saw the potential for New Thought to increase personal power and social influence. He described human beings as “channel[s] through which the infinite powers and forces can manifest” so long as we open ourselves to “divine inflow.” This openness can change ordinary individuals “from mere men into Godmen,” Trine tantalizingly suggested (18). Gilded-Age socialists, Bellamyite Nationalists, and woman movement reformers shared a set of assumptions about who could bring about social change and what forms it might take. Like womanists, socialists of this period followed Ward’s idea that white women’s altruism, self-sacrifice, and moral influence could improve society and “the race,” whereas manly competition and capitalist greed led to moral degradation (Satter 187). By “the race,” reformers usually meant white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, though they also gestured toward the human race, thereby implying that other racial and ethnic groups were somehow less than human (185).19 Importantly, reformers’ goals included not just social but also biological change. To this end, some reformers advocated positive

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eugenics – that is, the purposeful breeding of desired traits – as well as negative eugenics, meaning the social segregation, sterilization, or killing of evolutionary undesirables. After some initial hesitation, Gilman would eventually embrace both types of eugenics, as demonstrated in Herland. Herlanders exercise positive eugenics by allowing evolutionarily fit “Over Mothers” to bear more than one child; they practice negative eugenics by denying motherhood to women manifesting “atavistic exceptions” like sexual instinct (Gilman, Herland 225; Robertson 213). Though eugenics may seem objectionable from our post-Holocaust perspective, both positive and negative eugenics are still practiced today: take, for instance, Iceland’s claim to have eliminated Down syndrome through prenatal screening and early termination of pregnancies.20 These modern eugenic practices hearken back to views held by Gilman and many of her contemporaries (Davis 302). The first decade of the twentieth century witnessed a vogue for eugenics that crossed political divides, following the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics and the dissemination of Sir Francis Galton’s studies on heredity. Well-known proponents of eugenics included reform-minded individual such as H.G. Wells, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, and leading scientists at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Chicago (301–302). More to the point, feminists such as Gilman, birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger, and Victoria Woodhull advocated for “sexual and economic freedom, reproductive necessity, and eugenic discipline simultaneously,” as Dana Seitler explains (67). In other words, Gilman’s eugenic thinking was not an unfortunate anomaly in her otherwise reform-minded agenda, as some feminist critics have suggested. Instead, it was a crucial component of her work and that of many womanist and socialist reformers of her day (64). New Thought socialists thus combined eugenics, white female supremacy, and positive thinking as central components of their world view. New Thought socialists known to Gilman personally or by reputation included not just Trine, Bellamy, and Flower but also her close friend Helen Campbell, whom she described as her “adopted mother” (Davis 166).21 Campbell was a sociologist, home economist, and prolific author of children’s books such as the Ainslee Stories (1868) that Gilman had read as a child (166). She worked with Gilman on Flower’s journal The Arena and the short-lived “Populist-socialist-woman-movement journal” titled the Impress (1894) (Satter 198). Campbell also served on the board of the New Thought Federation in 1904 alongside faith leaders such as Trine, Nona Brooks, Horatio Dresser, Charles Fillmore, Alice Bunker Stockham,

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Ursula Gestefeld, and Helen Van Anderson (198). Gilman and Campbell remained close well into the twentieth century, when Campbell occasionally visited the author and her second husband in New York City (Davis 230). Of these contacts, Campbell was probably the most instrumental in exposing Gilman to New Thought. Gilman and Campbell spent several months together in 1896 at Unity Settlement, a cooperative living and mutual aid society located in a polluted Chicago slum called “Little Hell” (187). This settlement was run by Unity Church, a Kansas City-based branch of New Thought founded by two of Hopkins’s former students, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore. Though Gilman did not relish the gritty urban wasteland of Chicago’s North Side, the Unity Settlement nonetheless inspired aspects of the utopian society depicted in Herland (Deegan 23). As Mary Jo Deegan suggests, the Unity settlement and Jane Addams’s Hull House – where Gilman spent three months 1895 – both provided the author with “lived experience of successful female communities outside traditional family structures and homes” (42). Unity Settlement and Hull House also provided services to the community such as kindergartens and day care for working mothers, foreshadowing the baby gardens of the Herland Trilogy. Importantly, both settlements were located in Chicago, arguably the cultural epicenter of New Thought in the 1890s and the home base of New Thought leaders such as Hopkins, Gestefeld, and Stockham. Given the multiple avenues through which Gilman was exposed to New Thought – including a residence of several months at a New Thought settlement – it is not surprising that her personal faith contained overtones of Eddy and Trine. Broadly speaking, Gilman’s creed combined New Thought, Transcendentalism, and her great uncle Henry Ward Beecher’s liberal Protestantism, which replaced Calvinist doctrines of Hellfire and original sin with emphasis on a loving God (Robertson 176). Her faith emphasized service to humanity in the present day as opposed to preoccupation with the world to come. Gilman was always uninterested in the idea of an afterlife, believing that “[d]eath is the essential condition of life, not an evil” (Living 40). Like Herland character Ellador, Gilman believed the immortality of the soul to be “a singularly foolish idea . . . and if true, most disagreeable” (Herland 245). In this regard, Gilman differs from most New Thought believers, who imagined the human soul continuing its existence on another plane after death. In many respects, however, Gilman’s thinking and writing conform to the tenets of New Thought and adopt metaphors and imagery popular with

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New Thought authors. Gilman’s autobiography retrospectively describes how she “set about the imperative task of building my own religion, based on knowledge” while still in her teens (38). A series of Socratic questions leads her to conclude that “God is Good” and that God consists of a “Force” or “Power” as opposed to the anthropomorphized male deity of mainstream Protestantism. She further describes how people of all faiths, “Christian, Hebrew, Moslem, Buddhist,” may derive “strength peace and power from inner contact with this Central Force . . . this Force does not care what you call it, but flows in, as if we had tapped the reservoir of the universe” (42). Gilman’s belief in a benevolent deity who will reliably fulfill her needs recalls the Christian Science belief in the Allness of the Good. But her religious eclecticism and choice of metaphors resembles Trine’s In Tune with the Infinite, with its language of “reservoirs and influx” and its concept of God as infinite supply (Parker 90). As discussed in Chapter Three, Trine’s book begins with the metaphor of a “Soul Garden” supplied with water from a mountain reservoir – representing, of course, the “Infinite Spirit” of God sustaining human beings with its “divine inflow” (Trine 22). This water imagery was typical of his works, as historian Catherine Albanese explains: “Trine’s favored theme is . . . a stream, a fountain, a divine reservoir overflowing toward earth dwellers who gladly expose themselves to is flow” (395). Gilman adopted similar imagery and metaphors in her polemical work, life writing, and her fiction, suggesting a more than passing familiarity with the popular New Thought author and his works. She was likely also aware of Unity Church writer H. Emilie Cady, whose Lessons in Truth (1896– 1897) employs similar images of reservoirs, fountains, and flow. Gilman’s residence at the Unity Church settlement in Chicago coincided with the serial publication of Cady’s volume, which is considered the “basic textbook” of the Unity movement as well as the bestselling Unity volume to date (as of 2002, the book had sold 1.6 million copies [Albanese 432]). Like much New Thought writing, Gilman’s personal religion was eminently pragmatic. In her autobiography, Gilman stated that “the business of mankind was to carry out the evolution of the human race, according to the laws of nature, adding the conscious direction, the telic force, proper to our kind” (42). The individual’s role was to render services that might speed the evolutionary process, thus sublimating personal to communal goals. “The first duty of a human being,” she explained, “is to assume the right functional relation to society – more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.” God was best served, she believed, not by praying,

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attending church, or adhering to specific rituals, but through altruistic work benefitting humanity. In performing such work, Gilman observed, people can “replenish our individual powers by application to the reservoir,” repeating the Trinean metaphors of God as flow and all-supply that pepper her writing (42). Though not identical to New Thought or Christian Science by any means, Gilman’s personal religion contained elements of both. First, Gilman’s emphasis on selflessness and service echoed preoccupations of early New Thought leaders and womanist reformers, who stressed the overcoming of “self” as the greatest obstacle to would-be believers. Eddy wrote, for instance, that “mortals need only turn from sin and lose sight of mortal selfhood to find Christ” (Science and Health 316). Hopkins, meanwhile, negated individual selfhood in favor of the collective by emphasizing that “ALL IS ONE. THERE IS ONLY ONE. WE ARE ONE” – much as Ellador in Herland can only “think in we’s” (Class Lessons 174; Herland 255). Second, Gilman’s pragmatism – that is, her emphasis on religion as a way of life, rather than a set of rituals or beliefs – resembled New Thought’s eclectic, non-sectarian nature and its focus on demonstrable results (e.g., spiritual or physical healing). Like psychologist William James, who shared her fondness for Trinean metaphors such as reservoirs and fountains, Gilman may have been attracted to New Thought’s optimism and practicality rather than its logical coherence, which was never a strong suit of the movement (Albanese 416–417). Third, Gilman’s focus on race progress, led by white middle-class women, mirrored the eugenic strain evident in both nineteenth-century reform movements and New Thought. Finally, and most importantly, Gilman’s personal religion emphasized the power of thoughts to change the world, articulating what was, perhaps, the central tenet of New Thought. In His Religion and Hers, for instance, she stressed that “under the light and power of an idea, a concept, a theory, we can and do resist our impulses, change our conditions, alter our conduct beyond recognition. A concept is stronger than a fact. This is the leverage by which the will of man can move mountains” (4, emphasis added). Following this logic, Gilman argued that masculine religious ideas were responsible for social ills, which could be cured by her birth-based maternal theology. While His Religion and Hers presents the clearest articulation of Gilman’s womancentered faith, the New Thought themes in her writing – including the power of ideas, reverence for maternity and childhood, and the desirability of chastity and androgyny – come together most entertainingly in the Herland trilogy, which spins Eddy’s millennial predictions into daring science fiction utopias.

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New Thought in Gilman’s Herland Trilogy While Herland is usually read as a stand-alone work, it is actually the second in a trilogy of thematically connected novels, each of which presents Gilman’s vision for the future of humanity. These three works – Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland – also fulfill many of Eddy’s hopes for humankind, from the elimination of medicine and “horrible ideas” to the end of sexual reproduction as we know it (Gilman, Herland 240). Whether this overlap was intentional or not, it attests to common values held by New Thought leaders, Christian Scientists, and woman movement reformers alike in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also suggests Gilman’s personal investment in New Thought and its influence on her evolving maternal theology. While these three novels (especially Herland) are now considered highlights of Gilman’s literary output, they were written when her career was at a low ebb. Gilman’s popularity and social influence peaked after the publication of Women and Economics in 1898 and waned in the first decades of the twentieth century, as her views came to seem increasingly oldfashioned (Doskow 11–12). She explains in her autobiography that “as time passed, there was less and less market for what I had to say, more and more of my stuff was declined. Think and write I must, the manuscripts accumulated far faster than I could sell them” (304). These unwanted manuscripts found a home in The Forerunner, a self-published journal where Gilman had “utter control over both medium and message” but limited circulation (Davis 292). Though The Forerunner won some devoted converts, including one who called “Mrs. Gilman” the “High Priestess of my religion,” the magazine was never able to pay its own way (qtd. in Davis 292). Annual revenues totaled only $1,500 – about half of what it cost to publish the journal – with the rest supplied by Gilman’s own funds, advertising, and lecturing fees (291). The magazine folded after nine years due to financial problems and Gilman’s difficulty keeping up with her own hectic production schedule. As the sole writer and editor for the publication, Gilman was responsible for supplying four issues per year of 36,000 words apiece, an astonishing pace even for a writer as prolific as she (Gilman, Living 304). Gilman speculated that The Forerunner failed because it “held blazing before its readers a heaven on earth which they did not in the least want,” Herland being perhaps the clearest vision of this ideal (Living 310). Though Gilman wanted to publish Herland and several other fictions that appeared serially in the journal as stand-alone volumes, these hopes were not realized

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until long after her death, when second-wave feminists rediscovered her work in the 1960s and 70s. Herland was finally reissued in book form by Pantheon Press in 1979, billed as a “lost feminist utopian novel by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.” The novel’s appeal is not confined to feminist scholars, however. Herland also experienced an unlikely afterlife as an inspiration for the comic book character Wonder Woman, a female superhero who battles inequality, created in 1941 by psychologist William Moulton Marston and reimagined in a blockbuster 2017 film starring Israeli actress Gal Gadot. As Jill Lepore recounts, Herland was one of Marston’s chief inspirations for this character and the all-female Amazonian society from which she emerges (87).22 Though Herland is the best-known volume of the trilogy, it is thematically and stylistically part of a larger whole. All three works are apparently didactic rather than self-consciously literary or aesthetically innovative, as they were intended to “popularize and dramatize” Gilman’s ideals of social reform, Minna Doskow suggests (13). In her autobiography, Gilman herself maintained that “I have never made any pretense of being literary” and that “as far as I had any method in mind, it was to express the idea with clearness and vivacity, so that it might be apprehended with ease and pleasure” (284–285). She elsewhere explained that “I can’t stop to bother with characters . . . I’m so interested in my own theories that I can’t consider theirs” and that she gravitated toward “not the individual but the race” (qtd. in Davis 295). Given the artistry of earlier works such as “The Yellow Wallpaper,” however, one might question Gilman’s claims to aesthetic indifference or ineptitude. Davis suggests that the author’s utilitarian literary style may have been a deliberate challenge to the emergent proto-modernist aesthetic she elsewhere scorned (298). Carol Farley Kessler, meanwhile, links Gilman’s matter-of-fact prose to her class consciousness: “[Gilman’s] purpose in fiction was not so much aesthetic or belletristic – the accepted (and elitist) goals of post-Victorian imaginative writing – but rather rhetorical, the goal we have come to expect of nonfiction writing” (42). There are other reasons to doubt Gilman’s professed indifference to literary style in the Herland trilogy. By eschewing her usual medium – the political treatise – and placing her controversial feminist ideas in fictional settings, Gilman likely hoped to insulate these concepts from the intense scrutiny they would have otherwise received (though Herland and its companion works were nonetheless controversial in their own day and remain so in the twenty-first century). Moreover, by choosing utopian science fiction as her preferred mode, Gilman sidestepped questions about

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how her avant-garde ideas on childcare, eugenics, and women’s rights might be applied in real life. This format also encouraged readers to rethink basic assumptions of the culture in which they lived. As Darko Suvin has observed, science fiction deals in unfamiliar settings that add an element of “cognitive estrangement” to the reader’s experience, allowing them to reflect more deeply on their own society and its mores.23 Even the oft-cited “flaws” of Gilman’s Herland trilogy may well have been deliberate. For instance, these novels tend to lack character development or character differentiation and to perseverate on pet ideas such as kitchenless homes, day care centers, and early childhood education at the expense of gripping narrative trajectories. But it may be precisely these works’ uneventfulness that made them therapeutic for Gilman, as Doskow explains: “The utopian realms she envisions . . . are calm peaceful, rational, and ordered imaginative worlds peopled by equally calm, peaceful, rational, orderly, pleasant individuals, and present a sharp contrast to Gilman’s own emotional struggles, her frequent depressions, and the vicissitudes of her own life” (9). The calming affect of these fictions also evokes the peaceful heaven on earth sought by New Thought followers. Critics of the Herland trilogy have noted these works’ optimistic, even therapeutic nature, though they rarely make the connection to New Thought. Jill Rudd and Val Gough, for instance, emphasize Gilman’s “persistent optimism,” her “unwavering belief that things could be changed for the better and surprisingly quickly, by dint of individual effort” (x). Kessler, meanwhile, contends that Gilman’s utopian narratives harness techniques used in cognitive behavioral therapy, such as “actively confronting and setting aside negative thought patterns in order to alter one’s overall attitude” – or, in other words, using “our conscious minds” to “actively reprogram unconscious, automatic behavioral responses” (81). Kessler further argues that Gilman’s utopias operate via suggestion, encouraging a state of “learned optimism” in the reader that may “bring about the very event or action believed in” (81). But New Thought writers understood the power of suggestion long before cognitive behavioral therapy existed, as William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) amply attests. In this volume, James identifies the method behind the mind cure as “largely suggestive,” observing that “‘suggestion’ is only another name for the power of ideas, so far as they prove efficacious over belief and conduct” (107, emphasis in original). Gilman lauded the power of suggestion in the first installment of the Herland trilogy, Moving the Mountain, where New Thought paves the way for social change. This novel revisits themes of housework and childcare

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that Gilman explored in her unfinished 1907 fiction “A Woman’s Utopia” and in short stories such as “Aunt Mary’s Pie Plant” (1908) and “A Garden of Babies” (1909). She also examined these topics in nonfiction works like Women and Economics, Concerning Children (1900), The Home (1903), and Human Work (1904) (Kessler 51, 63). Moving the Mountain and its sequels allowed Gilman to dramatize and further develop ideas from earlier writings. Gilman described Moving the Mountain as “a baby utopia” – that is, a “short distance Utopia” involving only a thirty-year jump into the future (Moving the Mountain 37). The novel’s compact time frame recalls Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which involves a lapse of 113 years. But Moving the Mountain is also a “baby utopia” in another sense, as the narrative overflows with babies, baby gardens, and blissful mothers unencumbered by the strains of round-the-clock childcare. The fortunate inhabitants of Gilman’s America circa 1940 enjoy a society free of “poverty – no labor problem – no color problem – no sex problem – almost no disease – very little accident – practically no fires” thanks to a nonviolent social and religious revolution begun by women (54). In this egalitarian, socialist society, men and women work side by side at jobs of their choosing – for no more than two hours a day – and farm out housework and childcare to an army of paid specialists, leaving them free to relax and pursue their own interests.24 Liberated from domestic chores, women can enter fields once dominated by men and become leaders in their professions. Moving the Mountain thus combine’s Bellamy’s dream of a socialist utopia with Gilman’s concerns about the equality of the sexes and women’s confinement to the home, themes she more famously explored in “The Yellow Wallpaper” and her political writings.25 The book begins in Tibet in 1940, where American narrator John Robertson awakens from a thirty-year bout of amnesia occasioned by a mountain-climbing accident. He is brought to his senses by his longlost sister Nellie, now a physician and head of a coeducational college. She informs John about the changes to his native land since his fateful fall in 1910. She describes how American “women woke up” and embraced a creed similar to Gilman’s own, combining reverence for service and maternity with a eugenic interest in human evolution to ever higher states of being (65). Intriguingly, John himself situates this broad social transformation in relation to Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science. Before his accident, he explains, “I learned that Mrs. Eddy had been dead some time, and that another religion had burst forth and was sweeping the

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country, madly taken up by the women” (39). (Eddy did, in fact, die in 1910 – so Gilman’s novel is factually accurate in this respect.) By 1940, John finds that women and their new religion have changed America beyond recognition. Perhaps the most radical development is the professionalization of domestic labor. Citizens have beautifully appointed apartments without kitchens; tasty, healthful food is whisked to them via pneumatic tubes from communal kitchens staffed by professional chefs. Childcare, too, is entrusted to trained professionals. While children reside at home with their mothers, they spend most of their days at baby gardens staffed by experts in early childhood education, who allow children to learn through play rather than through Gradgrindian memorization (developments foreshadowed in Gilman’s earlier short story “A Garden of Babies” and influenced by the popular educational theories of Friedrich Fröbel and Maria Montessori). These highly trained childcare experts are among the best and brightest minds of their society, “real geniuses, some of them” (113). Literature and art produced for children, meanwhile, have risen to splendid new heights, reflecting society’s renewed emphasis on its youngest and most plastic citizens. These proposed social innovations struck many of Gilman’s contemporaries as heretical. Some accused her of “wish[ing] to unsex women” and “abolish home life” or of “trying to separate babies from their mothers” (qtd. in Davis 246). By contrast, modern readers accustomed to dual-income households, day care, and fast food may find Gilman’s ideas more familiar than threatening (Doskow 15; Kessler 46). Though instigated by women, the social changes in Gilman’s fictional America ultimately benefit both sexes. People in this new America are happier, better looking, healthier, and live longer; moreover, men seem content to play second fiddle to women. For instance, Nellie’s husband, Owen, echoes Ward by declaring that “The female is the race type; the male is her assistant. It’s established beyond peradventure” (Gilman, Moving the Mountain 74). When John asks him how men stand being treated as inferiors, Owen responds, “Women stood it for ten thousand years” (109). But for all their advancement, the women of Gilman’s future America have not completely left Eddy behind. Their new creed is influenced by Eddy’s reverence for motherhood and childhood innocence, and her belief that individuals should combine the best of both sexes. Gilman’s utopia is also indebted to Eddy’s philosophy of right thinking, as John learns from ethics professor and reformed reprobate Dr. Frank Borderson, who explains the differences between America of 1910 and 1940. Prior to the social revolution, Borderson relates, “our minds were full of what Mrs. Eddy christened error. I wish I could make you feel what a sunrise

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it was to the world when we left off believing lies and learned the facts” (137). Another expert, Mr. Pike, uses New Thought rather than Christian Science terminology to explain this earlier, benighted state of mind: “The channel of progress was obstructed with a deposit of prehistoric ideas. We choked up our children’s minds with this mental refuse as we choked up our rivers and harbors with material refuse” (86). The imagery of channels and blockage calls to mind Trine’s language of reservoirs and flow as well as the environmental pollution Gilman condemned during her residence in Chicago’s “Little Hell” neighborhood, where “the loathly river flowed sluggishly near by, thick and ill-smelling” (Living 184). While Pike likens bad ideas to environmental pollution, he stresses that positive thinking has created the garden-like utopia John sees before him. He likewise emphasizes the New Thought belief that thoughts are things with real-world consequences: “That was the greatest, the most sudden, the most vital of our changes, sir – the change in the world’s thought! Ideas are real things, sir!” (Gilman, Moving the Mountain 86). John’s brother-in-law, Owen, is more specific about how the spread of New Thought and mind cure paved the way for peaceful social revolution. He even provides a brief history of the New Thought movement and its major achievements: You remember the talk there was about “Mental Healing” – “Power in Repose” . . . Anyway, people had begun to waken to the fact that they could do things with their brains. At first they used them only to cure diseases, to maintain an artificial “peace of mind” and tricks like that. Then it suddenly burst upon us . . . that we could use this wonderful mental power every day, to live with! That all these scientific facts and laws had an application to life – human life. (100)

In this passage, Owen clearly identifies various stages of New Thought, beginning with what Albanese has called the “affective” stage – that is, early, woman-centered New Thought that focused on spirituality and health. He then proceeds to the more male-oriented “noetic” stage that began around 1900, when people began using New Thought practices to achieve money, power, or commercial success (325–326). In Moving the Mountain, Gilman considers what might happen if one applied these same techniques of learned optimism and mental suggestion to broader social goals, even the improvement of humanity. This makes her perhaps the most far-seeing and idealistic writer examined in this volume. Gilman’s Moving the Mountain is also intensely focused on children and childcare. For it is impressionable children who stand to gain or lose the most through exposure to positive or negative ideas. Nellie explains the

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transformative results of the new mental training on children in her society: “the child mind, opening to this lovely world, is no longer filled with horrible or ridiculous old ideas . . . [t]hey have never been frightened, John. They have never been told any of those awful things we used to tell them” (Gilman, Moving the Mountain 113). Instead of being alarmed by violent Grimm’s fairy tales or Calvinist religious doctrine, with its emphasis on sin and eternal damnation, children are “surrounded with beauty” and continually fed with “our newest, not our oldest, ideas” (115, 114). Nellie’s explanation calls to mind Burnett’s views on “the beautiful thought” – as she called New Thought doctrine – as well as Eddy’s idea of fear as a contagion that engenders sickness and suffering. Indeed, Moving the Mountain is every bit as didactic in this respect as The Secret Garden, where Burnett’s narrator opines that “thoughts – just mere thoughts – are as powerful as electric batteries, as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison” (163). For an early twentieth-century woman overwhelmed with domestic duties and barred from meaningful work outside the home, the womancentered society of Moving the Mountain must have seemed like a utopia indeed. But Gilman’s future America is also a “chillingly ruthless eugenic state” that advocates sterilization of supposed defectives (Robertson 214). Allegedly heritable traits seen as negative (e.g., disability, mental illness, alcoholism, criminality) are selectively bred out of the population, lessening the need for hospitals, sanitariums, and prisons. This society is even open to euthanasia if no more humane solution presents, as Borderson explains: “At first . . . [w]e killed many hopeless degenerates, insane, idiots, and real perverts, after trying our best powers of cure” (Gilman, Moving the Mountain 136). This ruthlessness extends to the non-human environment. Despite the citizens’ dedication to reforestation and beautification of the landscape, they have eradicated entire species judged to be harmful, such as the unfortunate gipsy moth, brown tail moth, and elm beetle (103). Gilman’s eugenically minded utopia also severely restricts immigration. Would-be Americans must pass a strict “physical examination – the most searching and thorough – microscopic” (57). They must also undergo an extended process of socialization and retraining to blend in with the American population. This imposition of training to ensure cultural homogeneity is at best “patronizing,” as Kessler observes, and at worst, xenophobic – revealing Gilman’s increasingly ethnocentric views as the twentieth century progressed (60). The objectionable views about racial minorities, disabled people, and immigrants expressed in Moving the Mountain, along with the “creepily

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efficient eugenic regime” depicted therein, have led many critics to ignore the novel, as Michael Robertson observes (214–215). Moving the Mountain also does a relatively poor job of demonstrating what a woman-led society might look like. As Doskow notes, the professional women characters in the novel are rarely shown at work or otherwise exercising their authority. Moreover, the various experts who serve as Gilman’s mouthpieces in the book are almost all men (19). By contrast, Herland is “dramatically more successful” than its predecessor: “the characters are more fully realized, and Gilman’s satirical humor is given full play” (20). By moving the site of her utopia from 1940s America to an undiscovered fictional society of women, Gilman helps readers suspend disbelief and prevents male characters from dominating the narrative. She also sidesteps the question of how, precisely, the United States might overcome its many problems to become a utopia (Robertson 217). While superior to its predecessor as a work of literature and somewhat less offensive in its racial politics, Herland continues the New Thought emphasis in Moving the Mountain.26 Yet, since its rediscovery in the 1970s, Herland has never been read as a New Thought novel – though it has been described variously as a utopian romance, a work of science fiction, and even as a fantasy of lesbian motherhood (Knight xv; Gough 196). The book introduces readers to a previously unknown, geographically isolated land whose inhabitants are all female, “white,” and “of Aryan stock” (Gilman, Herland 193). For 2,000 years, the Herlanders have reproduced asexually, bearing only daughters. Because these women are descended from a single parthenogenic “Queen-Priestess-Mother,” they constitute a large extended family as well as an independent nation (196). By embracing a new mode of reproduction that does away with intercourse and sexual differentiation, Herlanders fulfill Eddy’s millennial predictions. They also learn to exert their mental powers in miraculous ways. For instance, Herlanders conceive their children merely by willing them into being, as one inhabitant explains: “Before a child comes to one of us there is a period of utter exaltation – the whole being is uplifted and filled with a concentrated desire for that child” (207). The narrator elaborates: “When a woman chose to be a mother, she allowed the child-longing to grow within her till it worked its natural miracle. When she did not so choose she put the whole thing out of her mind” (207–208). Despite the quasi-erotic language with which it is described, this reproductive method echoes the New Thought emphasis on positive thinking and creative visualization as a means to accomplish one’s desires.27 It also suggests

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Eddy’s notion that children are creations of mind or spirit as opposed to fleshly products of sexual reproduction. Much like Eddy and her followers, Herlanders elevate mothers, children, and early childhood education above all else. For instance, their religion is “a sort of Maternal Pantheism” that celebrates the fruitfulness of the earth and its inhabitants: “Here was Mother Earth, bearing fruit. All that they ate was fruit of motherhood, from seed or egg or their product. By motherhood they were born and by motherhood they lived – life was, to them, just the long cycle of motherhood.” This faith evolved from their original worship of a “Mother Goddess” or “great Mother Spirit” who represents “the accumulated mother-love of the race” (198, 241). Like Gilman’s personal deity, this Mother Goddess is described as a “Loving Power” or “a great tender limitless uplifting force” rather than an anthropomorphized being (242–243). Herlanders honor this deity not through organized worship services or prescribed rituals, but by living out the principle of universal love in their daily lives, the narrator explains: “Their cleanliness, their health, their exquisite order, the rich peaceful beauty of the whole land, the happiness of the children, and above all the constant progress they made – all this was their religion” (244). As a result of this practical faith, Herlanders inhabit a utopia with pristine forests, ample food supply, and little discord. Such modern-day ills as crime, poverty, and disease are virtually unknown, and medicine has become “practically a lost art” (208). Because Herland is a utopia, the novel’s conflict must come from outside its boundaries. Disruption arrives in the form of three male explorers from America – Terry O. Nicholson, Jeff Margrave, and the narrator, Vandyck Jennings (Van for short) – who think they’ve hit the motherlode. Expecting pretty, available young women, they are surprised to meet androgynous, grandmotherly types who are “strikingly deficient in what we call ‘femininity,’” as Van explains (197). These “calm, grave, wise” women wear short hairstyles and sensible reform clothing consisting of tunics and knee breeches, outfitted with plentiful pockets (165). After they have “tamed and trained” the explorers and taught them their language and culture, the older women allow each man to marry a young Herlander in hopes of diversifying the country’s evolutionary stock and forging ties with other nations (209). The men are astonished to learn that they represent “the New Hope” for Herlanders, that is, the reestablishment of a bisexual state joining “Brotherhood as well as Sisterhood,” Motherhood and Fatherhood (247).28 In an ironic reversal of Christian theology, the

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Herlanders eagerly await their country’s first non-virgin birth in 2,000 years (Kessler 76). These carefully orchestrated eugenic marriages have mixed results. The explorers find their wives distressingly uninterested in sex, homemaking, or fancy clothes. The Herland wives, meanwhile, reject their husbands’ desire for dominance and frequent demands for non-procreative sex, which the women hold to be “against nature” (Gilman, Herland 138). The three men handle this conflict differently. Jeff, a Southern gentleman who reveres women, has a child with his wife, Celis, and decides to stay in Herland permanently.29 Aggressive he-man Terry gets expelled from Herland for attempted marital rape. Meanwhile, more open-minded Van discovers for the first time that sex is not “a physiological necessity” to a well-bred man (254). Leaving behind “the custom of marital indulgence” (262) common in America of his day, Van gradually learns to regard his wife, Ellador, with “the restful reverence which looks up to the Mother sex” (256). Clearly, the inhabitants of Herland have already achieved many of the millennial goals predicted by Eddy and other New Thought leaders. Following the model of Eddy’s Father-Mother God, they are androgynous, their asexual evolution having “eliminated not only certain masculine characteristics . . . but so much of what we had always thought essentially feminine,” Van explains (196). Herlanders worship a loving Mother Spirit similar to the deity envisioned by Eddy, Hopkins, and other New Thought leaders, and share these faiths’ reverence for maternity and childhood. More importantly, they have managed to eliminate marriage and sexuality (and, for that matter, men) altogether by means of parthenogenesis. While Herlanders apparently still give birth to their children, the process is scarcely mentioned in the novel and must not be too onerous, if medicine is a thing of the past. Most importantly, the Herlanders, like the enlightened Americans of Moving the Mountain, seem unwilling or unable to harbor negative thoughts. In this respect, they are (knowingly or not) faithful to the teachings of both Christian Science and New Thought, in which positive thinking reliably brings about agreeable results, while negative thinking has dire consequences. For instance, when Van describes to Ellador the theory of infant damnation held by certain Christian sects, she runs with “sudden shuddering” to the “nearest Temple” to receive comfort and counsel from the Temple Mother on call (240). Afterwards, Ellador explains to Van: “You see we are not accustomed to horrible ideas . . . We haven’t any. And when we get a thing like that into our minds it’s like – oh, like red pepper in your eyes. So I just ran to [the Temple Mother] blinded and almost

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screaming, and she took it out so quickly – so easily!” The Temple Mother neutralizes Ellador’s negative thoughts through denial, a common New Thought technique. She tells Ellador, “You do not have to think that there ever was such a God – for there wasn’t. Or such a happening – for there wasn’t. Nor even that this hideous false idea was believed by anybody.” Like Eddy’s followers, who are taught to deny sin, sickness, and death, Ellador actively chooses not to believe in infant damnation as a concept or a reality. Reflecting on this exchange, Van connects positive thinking to social progress: “No wonder this whole nation of women was peaceful and sweet in expression – they had no horrible ideas” (240). As in Moving the Mountain, control over one’s thoughts, combined with selective breeding and intelligent social engineering, contribute to an ideal civilization. Unlike the other works in the trilogy, however, Herland features an allfemale society. The absence of men in the novel is a point of contention among critics. Some, like Gough, argue that Herland is a lesbian separatist fantasy prefiguring later works in this vein such as Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1976) or Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1969) (197). Accordingly, Gough stresses the “provisional” nature of the heterosexual couplings at the novel’s conclusion and of the Herlanders’ attempts to reestablish a bisexual state (206). There is biographical support for this argument in the passionate relationships Gilman shared with female friends such as Martha Lane, Adeline Knapp, and Grace Channing, who would eventually marry Gilman’s ex-husband Walter Stetson, forming one third of a complicated love triangle. Gilman, who told Channing in 1890 that she felt like “a man inside,” surely identified with the androgynous Herlanders on many levels (qtd. in Selected Letters 82).30 As discussed in the previous chapter, many early New Thought followers were women who might today identify as lesbian or bisexual, which helps explain Gilman’s attraction to the faith and its relevance to the all-female society depicted in Herland (Satter 99, 102–103). By contrast, Kessler argues that Gilman did not see a world without men as a utopian solution in its own right. Instead, the absence of men in Herland is a rhetorical maneuver that highlights the “possibilities and potentials” of women in all of their “full, adult humanity” (69). If one views Herland as part of Gilman’s larger oeuvre rather than a stand-alone work, then the latter opinion seems more convincing. In the Herland trilogy and elsewhere, Gilman envisions heaven on earth as a eugenic, progressive society in which both men and women express their talents to their fullest, and the two sexes harmoniously coexist. After her second marriage to her cousin Houghton Gilman in 1900, moreover – which

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proved much more successful than her first – Gilman was anxious to depict positive models of heterosexual relationships that did not interfere with women’s freedoms. Van and Ellador’s relationship, begun in Herland and continued in With Her in Ourland, perhaps represents the type of companionate marriage Gilman envisioned. While Herland may not be a lesbian separatist utopia, its female-dominated society that includes men on its own terms is radical in and of itself. It also resembles Eddy’s millenial future governed by feminine values (love, chastity, peacefulness) and populated by androgynous beings. Taken together, Moving the Mountain and Herland demonstrate how New Thought influenced Gilman’s personal beliefs and served as an inspiration for aspects of her fictional utopias. These novels also suggest the degree to which progressive culture, including the woman movement and socialism, were mutually imbricated with New Thought in the first decades of the twentieth century. Both works present peaceful, prosperous societies – virtual heavens on earth – that might be possible if people embraced right thinking and right living as Gilman understood them. By contrast, With Her in Ourland is a bleaker work that views America through the eyes of a utopian visitor, showing what happens when New Thought principles are applied inconsistently, ineffectively, or not at all. In this 1916 sequel to Herland, Van and Ellador travel to the outside world at the height of the First World War. At first, Ellador is excited to learn about society beyond her native land, being “convinced that it is better for the world to have both men and women than to have only one sex, like us.” She views herself as a kind of “high ambassador sent on an important and dangerous mission” (Gilman, Ourland 271–272). Over the course of more than two years abroad, however, Ellador becomes disillusioned by the unnecessary suffering and inequality she witnesses. In Europe, she recoils at the horrors of trench warfare; in China, she sickens at the brutal practice of foot-binding that cripples young girls in the name of fashion. In Van’s native America, Ellador condemns the inequality of women, capitalist robber barons, citizens’ political apathy, environmental pollution, and deforestation. She also decries the country’s lax immigration policies in racist and antisemitic diatribes that reflect Gilman’s increasingly xenophobic views. At the end of the novel, Ellador and Van return to Herland and produce the nation’s first male child in 2,000 years. This conclusion reflects Gilman’s ideal future for humanity, in which men and women work side by side in a socialist society guided by maternal love. This vision is crystallized on the cover of The Forerunner magazine, designed by Gilman’s daughter

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Figure 3 The Cover of The Forerunner, designed by Gilman’s daughter, Katherine Beecher Stetson Chamberlin

Katherine, which depicts a gender-neutral infant astride a giant globe, with an adult man and woman sitting on either side, providing support (Davis 289) (Figure 3).31 Ellador’s adventures in Ourland deploy New Thought logic to show the negative influence of “horrible ideas” on the American people and on the heroine herself, who has been sheltered from such negativity in Herland. Despite her wisdom, strength, and vibrant health, Ellador is visibly distressed (and visibly ages) as a result of the suffering she witnesses. After the couple arrives in America, Van observes that “In Europe I had seen that beautiful face pale with horror; in Asia, sicken with loathing; now, after going around the world; after reaching this youngest land, this land of hope and pride, of wealth and power, I saw that face I loved so well, set in sad lines

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of disappointment – fairly age before my eyes” (Gilman, Ourland 312–313). Ellador’s intense pain – by now inscribed on her body – recalls the crushing depressions Gilman experienced periodically throughout her life. Van continues: “I could see the light die out of her face and a depressing look creep over it; a look of agonized disappointment . . . [i]t was as if a mother had learned that her baby was an idiot” (313). This strange concluding simile, in which the idiot child represents the young nation of America, reminds us of the primacy of eugenic motherhood in Herland and how far America of 1916 was from realizing this ideal. In His Religion and Hers, for instance, Gilman recommends that American women unite under the slogan “No More Morons!” in order to “raise the standard” of infant intelligence (86). Van’s disturbing simile also underscores the depth of Ellador’s despair as “horrible” Ourland ideas take root in her mind. Intriguingly, Ellador and Van try to assuage her emotional suffering using popular treatments recommended by physicians such as Mitchell and Sigmund Freud, despite Gilman’s stated resistance to the works of both medical luminaries in her autobiography and in “The Yellow Wallpaper.” These treatments include a variant of the “talking cure” first employed by Viennese physicians Freud and Josef Breuer in the 1890s and popularized in the United States through Freud’s lectures at Clark University in 1909. As Gilman states in her autobiography, she was no fan of Freud’s methods. She questioned why “apparently intelligent persons” would allow psychoanalytic “mind-meddlers” to access “their thoughts and feelings, and extract confessions of the last intimacy” (314). Yet it appears as if Van’s treatment of Ellador’s distress owes something to this source. When Ellador witnesses the horrors of trench warfare and retreats into mute despair, Van teaches her to “manage pain” by sharing it: “What I want you to do now is to relieve the pressure of feeling that is hurting so, by putting it into words – letting it out. Say it all. Say the very worst . . . I can stand it. And you’ll feel better” (Gilman, Ourland 282–283). The couple also escapes into nature when Ellador shows signs of “wear and tear,” visiting the Great Lakes, the Grand Canyon, and other natural wonders (316). Notably, narrator Van uses the same mechanical metaphors (“wear and tear”) that Mitchell used to describe the etiology and symptoms of neurasthenia. By taking Ellador into the great outdoors, moreover, he adopts a variant of the nature or camp cures Mitchell prescribed for acute sufferers.32 The use of these therapeutic techniques in With Her in Ourland reinforces Davis’s argument that Gilman did not reject the works of Mitchell or Freud wholesale, but took what she found useful and discarded elements she found personally and ideologically offensive (Davis 95–100).

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It also suggests that these orthodox treatments might be at least partially compatible with Gilman’s New Thought leanings, despite the rift between mainstream medicine and mind cure. Ellador’s most important defense mechanisms, however, are those Gilman herself employed in her life’s work: that is, emotional detachment from and intellectualization of troubling phenomena (evidenced by Ellador’s copious reading, notetaking, lecturing, and writing). After witnessing the mistreatment of women in Japan, for instance, Ellador states: “I’m trying not to feel about these particularly awful things, and not to judge, even, till I know more. These things are so; and my knowing them does not make them any worse than they were before” (Gilman, Ourland 305). Van once again adopts the role of Ellador’s chief therapist by lauding her emotional detachment and encouraging her to take on more active intellectual tasks. For instance, during their travels through America, when he notices that “[t]hat look of gray anguish had settled on her face again,” Van urges Ellador to think of herself as a physician diagnosing his native land and prescribing treatment: “If that Herland mind of yours can find out what ails us – and how we are to mend it; if your little country with its strange experiment can bring aid in solving the problems of the world – that is what I call a Historic Mission!” (314–315). At first, this intellectual challenge piques Ellador’s interest and takes her mind off her sorrows. She visualizes the United States as a promising but troubled child and diagnoses it with several grave “parasites” and “diseases” – among them uncontrolled immigration, sexual inequality, rampant financial corruption, and outdated patriarchal religious ideas (320). She offers a “cure” reminiscent of New Thought: namely, the instruction of children in new ideas. “Aren’t [people] born babies, with dear little, clean, free minds?” she asks Van. “Just as soon as people recognize the evil of filling up new minds with old foolishness, they can make over any race on earth” (363). She also suggests that radical changes in thinking are possible for adults: “There’s nothing on earth to hinder [adults], Van, dear, except what’s in their heads. And they can stop putting it in, in the babies, I mean, and can put it out of their own” (364–365). Ellador’s Trinean metaphors of input and outflow of thoughts suggest one possible New Thought source for Gilman’s ideas of social and eugenic reform. But even these intellectual efforts, combined with salutary doses of Mitchell and Freud, ultimately cannot stave off crushing despair. Ellador’s chronic neurasthenia takes a toll on her looks and her health, as Van relates: “[h]er face had changed, somewhat, in our two years of travel

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and study; there was a sadness in it, such as it never wore in Herland, such as I had never seen in anyone while there . . . . [t]here was a lonely look about her, as of some albatross in a poultry yard” (365). Once again, one can read Gilman’s own predicament into that of her heroine. Both women reformers suffer from depression and isolation due to their high ideals and dissatisfaction with the world as it is. Ellador reaches her emotional nadir in the final chapter, where she declares that “I would die childless rather than bear a child in this world of yours.” Van reflects that “In Herland to say ‘I would die childless’ is somewhat equivalent to our saying ‘I would suffer eternal damnation.’ It is the worst deprivation they can think of” (381–382). Critics of the novel have suggested that this remark amounts to “sacrilege” or race suicide (see, for instance, Davis 307). At the same time, Van’s mention of “eternal damnation” circles back to the first horrible idea to which Ellador was exposed in Herland, that of infant damnation, which was a taste of worse to come in Ourland. Fortunately for Ellador, the solution to her problems is simple. She returns to Herland with Van, where the two have a son who represents their “new Hope” for “a new kind of men” (Gilman, Ourland 387, 382). While we are not shown what happens in the long term, once this new breed of men becomes permanently established in Herland, the implication is that Van and Ellador lead peaceful and trouble-free lives. They also enlist the help of Herlanders in solving the problems of Ourland, but do not anticipate an easy fix: “Not in a thousand years, will we rest, till the world is happy!” Ellador exclaims (386). This superficially cheerful ending is highly pessimistic, Davis observes, since readers (unlike the main characters) have no utopian escape hatch. Indeed, Gilman offers little hope for American society of her day: “utopias are premised upon the possibility of improving the present world. But by this point in her career, Charlotte considered many of Ourland’s problems endemic and intractable. In short, by 1916, she no longer believed the mountain could be moved” (307).33 Indeed, With Her in Ourland would be Gilman’s last work of utopian fiction. Permanently stuck in Ourland, Gilman labored mightily to change it for the better, then exited voluntarily when terminal illness cut short her usefulness. Her visions of peaceful maternal utopias were not to be realized in her lifetime or that of any subsequent generation (at least, not yet). Even her practical suggestions for feminist reform proved decades ahead of their time, more in line with concerns of second-wave feminists who rediscovered her work in the 1960s and 70s than with her first-wave

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contemporaries (Davis 402–403). Yet Gilman’s hopeful temperament and New Thought ideas made her an “optimist reformer,” in the words of William Dean Howells, at a time when contemporaries like H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, and Jack London presented much darker futuristic visions – and when she herself could have easily remained mired in despair (Gilman, Living 182).34 While Gilman’s utopias may not have successfully predicted the future, they provide an excellent window on the past, especially the womancentered variety of New Thought embraced by progressive reformers around 1900. Significantly, Gilman’s New Thought-influenced visions of heaven on earth include elements that feel foreign or even repugnant to us, such as her insistence on chastity, eugenic fitness, and Anglo-Saxon female superiority. These and other aspects of early, woman-centered New Thought have either disappeared or gone underground in more recent incarnations of the faith movement, such as the male-oriented success literature of the early twentieth century, the prosperity gospel of pastors like Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar, or the feel-good New Thought entertainment of Oprah Winfrey and her protégée Iyanla Vanzant.35 By contrast, Gilman’s brand of New Thought was not pure wish fulfillment and not always easy to swallow. Instead, she asked people to think new thoughts – and reshape their ideas of femininity in so doing – a task that remains challenging for open-minded readers today.

Epilogue The Cinematic Afterlife of New Thought Fiction

So far, this book has focused on classic New Thought fiction for and about children written between approximately 1886 and 1930. But novels like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903), A Little Princess (1905), Anne of Green Gables (1908), The Secret Garden (1911), and Pollyanna (1913) might not be remembered today without the intervention of another medium – film – that kept them consistently in the public eye. While many New Thought novels were made into silent films – take, for instance, Mary Pickford’s renditions of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1917), Pollyanna (1920), and Little Lord Fauntleroy (1921) – interest in the genre peaked in the 1930s, when the Great Depression increased public appetite for New Thought. During this decade, staggering unemployment and economic hardship compelled many families to forego luxuries and even necessities of life. Homelessness and malnutrition were endemic. Though this crisis had its origins in the stock market crash of October 1929, there was a widespread sense among the American public that “the Depression was also an emotional crisis and that it needed to be addressed on emotional terms,” as historian John Kasson explains (20). One available answer to this emotional crisis was New Thought. The Depression swelled the rolls of New Thought churches that provided an antidote to the era’s prevailing gloom and austerity. In New York City, Divine Science pastor Emmet Fox attracted 5,000 members to the Church of the Healing Christ, which met at the Hippodrome, then the Metropolitan Opera House, and later Carnegie Hall, filling each venue to capacity (Satter 102; Gaze 76). Kansas City-based Unity Church’s publication Daily Word (established in 1924) reached even wider audiences with a circulation of 144,000 in 1928 and 182,000 a decade later (Albanese 434).1 Meanwhile, Christian Science membership reached an all-time high of around 269,000 in 1936 (Satter 5). While Christian Science stayed true to its woman- and health-centered roots, other New Thought denominations showed greater interest in 187

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money and success literature than formerly. Take, for instance, New Thought writer Napoleon Hill, author of the perennial bestseller Think and Grow Rich (1937). In this book, Hill promised to reveal the “moneymaking secret” of robber baron Andrew Carnegie, which he described as a “magic formula” that could result in a “stupendous fortune” (Hill 13). Depression-era New Thought followers also turned to idealized children for inspiration and renewal, following the lead of teacher Emma Curtis Hopkins in the 1880s. Fox, who was a disciple of Hopkins’s former student Nona Brooks, wrote about the “Wonder Child” within each adult in bestselling works such as Power through Constructive Thinking (1932) and The Sermon on the Mount (1934), both still in print today. As discussed in Chapter One, listening to one’s inner Wonder Child could supposedly increase creativity, personal magnetism, and financial success. Readers of such materials were primed to accept Romantic ideals of children as sheltered, innocent beings and to look back on their own childhoods with nostalgic longing. These various strains of New Thought converged in popular entertainment, which was overwhelmingly optimistic, escapist, and child-centric. Depression-era audiences were especially fond of rags-to-riches tales featuring plucky orphan girls. These included screen adaptations of New Thought novels like Anne of Green Gables, which was “one of the most pleasing financial and critical successes of the year” for RKO studios in 1934 (Jewell and Harbin 78). At the studio’s insistence, the film’s star, Dawn O’Day, changed her name to Anne Shirley to identify herself with this memorable character, leaving her vulnerable to typecasting in “Pollyanna roles” (Jewell and Harbin 78; Hatch 41). Though RKO’s Anne of Green Gables is not especially faithful to the original – ending with Anne’s romantic union with Gilbert Blythe instead of her renunciation of the Avery scholarship – it revived public interest in L.M. Montgomery’s famous heroine. The 1934 film also changed the course of the Anne series as a whole, creating a feedback loop between literature and cinema. Author L.M. Montgomery, who lost most of her money following the 1929 stock market crash, saw the picture’s success as a chance to recoup her losses (Rubio 391). She capitalized on this opportunity by writing an additional sequel, Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), which was eventually made into a second film starring Shirley (482).2 Anne of Windy Poplars is among the most reflexively optimistic installments of the Anne series, feeding the Depression-era appetite for “cheerful, upbeat, ‘Shirley Temple’ style material,” in the words of Montgomery’s enterprising New York agent, Ann Elmo (qtd. in Rubio 481).

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As Elmo suggests, child star Shirley Temple was intimately connected with the contemporaneous hunger for New Thought material. From 1935 to 1938, Temple was Hollywood’s most bankable star in the US and worldwide, “a record never equaled” before or since (Kasson 2). She appeared in twenty-two feature films between 1934 and 1940, usually starring as a plucky orphan whose buoyant optimism “mend[s] the rifts of estranged lovers, family members, old-fashioned and modern ways, warring peoples, and clashing cultures” (3). Her characters typically function as problem solvers or emotional healers who transform adults by connecting them with their inner children. During her four-year box office reign, Temple would play two classic New Thought heroines, Rebecca Rowena Randall and Sara Crewe, along with many new characters with similar story arcs. Like these New Thought protagonists, Temple’s optimism and charm translated into material wealth, for others if not necessarily for herself (Figure 4).3 Starting with the runaway success of Stand Up and Cheer (1934) and continuing with meatier star vehicles like Bright Eyes (1934), The Little Colonel (1935), and The Little Princess (1939), Temple’s string of hits helped lift 20th Century Fox out of near-bankruptcy to unprecedented financial success (Kasson 67). She also boosted the economy by encouraging cautious Americans to spend more money on movies than they had prior to the Depression (72). No wonder President Franklin Delano Roosevelt lauded Temple as a national treasure: “When the spirit of the people is lower than at any other time during this Depression, it is a splendid thing that for just 15 cents, an American can go to a movie and look at the smiling face of a baby and forget his troubles” (qtd. in Black 59). From a modern perspective, it seems highly unusual that a child star would be a bigger box-office draw than adult rivals such as Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, or Marlene Dietrich.4 The frenzy of excitement surrounding Temple may also seem perverse or pedophilic, as critics like James Kincaid maintain, with some grounds (371). For instance, in his 1937 review of Wee Willie Winkie, film critic Graham Greene accused its eightyear-old star of “dimpled depravity . . . Her admirers, middle-aged men and clergymen, respond to her dubious coquetry, to the sight of her wellshaped and desirable little body” (qtd. in Black 185). Recognizing that Temple’s continued popularity depended on her perceived innocence, 20th Century Fox successfully sued Greene and his publishers for libel, as Temple Black recounts in her 1988 autobiography (186).5 While Greene found Temple precociously erotic, Depression-era audiences more often viewed her as wholesome and innocent, even as having

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Figure 4 A young Shirley Temple in 1933 (from the film Glad Rags to Riches)

a “beneficial effect on society,” as film historian Kristen Hatch explains (5). Hatch places Temple at the end of a child-star era that began in the nineteenth century and continued through the silent film era (1–5). Not coincidentally, the child-star era overlapped with the period frequently described as the “Golden Age of children’s literature,” from approximately 1865–1914. During these years, bestseller lists were frequently topped by children’s books, and audiences of all ages evinced a fascination for “the figure of the Child and the subject of childhood” (Griswold viii, 24). Seen from this historical viewpoint, Temple’s most important predecessors included Elsie Leslie, who played Cedric Errol in Burnett’s

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blockbuster stage production of Little Lord Fauntleroy (1888), and famous “child impersonator” Mary Pickford, the leading silent film star of the teens and twenties (Hatch 1–2). These stars’ popularity rested on their perceived innocence and purity, Hatch explains. Their mere presence could elevate “the most scandalous material” to the status of family viewing: “When filtered through the body of the sexually innocent child, behavior that would otherwise challenge social mores was transformed into something ‘clean’ and ‘wholesome’” (109). By contrast, Marah Gubar argues that child stars produced an erotic frisson that existed in pleasurable tension with their presumed innocence. In children’s literature and theater of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, “it is not that purity per se gets eroticized; rather, the most titillating figures are those who vacillate between innocence and experience, blurring the line between child and adult and allowing those who interact with them to avoid being pinned down to one side of this binary as well” (Artful Dodgers 178). Thus, fans of child actors admired not just their innocence, but also their “prematurely developed proficiency and professionalism” that allowed them a degree of agency in their work (158). Temple’s appeal lay precisely in this ability to combine the apparent innocence of youth with prodigious talent and consummate professionalism. With a purported IQ of 155, Temple was famously adept at recalling her own lines and those of her adult co-stars (Kasson 122). She was also admired for her singing and tapdancing skills – showcased in her duets with African American Broadway veteran Bill “Bojangles” Robinson – and her uncanny understanding of camera angles and lighting that flattered her childish features. So impressive were Temple’s abilities that some people speculated that she was not a child at all, but a thirty-year-old dwarf (184). Ludicrous though they may seem, such speculations reflected the reality that “quite old actors sometimes managed to pass themselves off as children,” as Mary Pickford did in the teens and twenties (Gubar, Artful Dodgers 174). In the silent film Little Lord Fauntleroy, for instance, twenty-nine-year-old Pickford played both Cedric Errol and his mother, Dearest, a feat that strained viewers’ credulity and the special effects available at the time.6 In addition to blurring clear distinctions between adult and child, Temple walked a fine line between nature and artifice. From the nineteenth century on, child actors were vulnerable to charges of “precocity” – a term that suggested premature worldliness or rote memorization of partially understood lines (Gubar, Artful Dodgers 152, 163). Though Temple was not immune to such criticism, she strove to imbue her acting

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with elements of her own personality so that it did not seem forced or unnatural (Black 106).7 Temple’s personality was, moreover, ideally suited to the needs of her time. In the middle of the Depression, she radiated emotional resilience and an “inexhaustible fund of optimism”; moreover, she was “self-reliant, enthusiastic, and adorable” (Kasson 3, 137). These qualities allowed her to nurture the inner child within vulnerable adults around her, as she does in film after film. Temple’s breakthrough role came in Fox Studios’ cinematic variety show Stand Up and Cheer (1934), which banked on her cuddly appeal to staunch “the personal despair and disillusion of the Depression” (Black 59). The film’s standout number, “Baby Take a Bow,” features five-year-old Temple tapdancing and lisping the words to the titular song, backed by an adoring chorus of adult performers. Her too-short polka-dot dress emphasizes her chubby legs, and her hair is styled in her signature ringlets. After the dance number, her onscreen father, played by James Dunn, lifts her up for a loving embrace. Many viewers apparently wished they could do the same. A critic for the Louisville Courier-Journal wrote, for instance, that “Miss Temple is blonde, dimpled and all smiles . . . one wants to walk up to the screen and snatch her off it and hug her” (qtd. in Kasson 64). Slight though this role was, Fox executives took notice, signing Temple to a one-year contract with an option for an additional seven years (Hatch 20). In 1934 alone, Temple appeared in eight films, many of which placed her in flirtatious relationships with adult father figures. In Bright Eyes, for instance, Temple plays an orphan stuck in the middle of a custody battle between her rich Uncle Ned and her godfather, pilot Loop Merritt (played by Dunn). During the film, she is held and caressed by “at least fifteen men, each of whom is utterly smitten by her infectious mix of jollity, candor, and affection” (Kasson 85). In Little Miss Marker, meanwhile, orphaned Marthy (played by Temple) melts the heart of hardened gangsters like bookie Sorrowful Jones. Her undeniable cuteness notwithstanding, Temple’s appeal for adult men stemmed from specific historical and cultural circumstances. Kasson argues, for instance, that Temple helped Depression-era men recover from the humiliation of poverty and unemployment by calling forth a protective fatherly response (79, 82). She also enabled a form of escapism by helping adults “recall nostalgically their own childhoods and savor a vision of domestic bliss” (78). Hatch, meanwhile, notes that 20th Century Fox repeatedly marketed films like Bright Eyes or The Little Colonel (1935) as love stories between Temple and a middle-aged man (55). Yet this does not mean that men viewed her as a sexual prospect. Instead, Temple embodied

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a Romantic ideal in which the presence of an innocent child left men “better and happier” (55). Because of their supposed nearness to a pure, prelapsarian state, child performers like Temple were seen as “antidote[s] to the ill effects of modern life” (57). From a New Thought perspective, Temple’s appeal might be construed somewhat differently. Like Fauntleroy half a century earlier, she embodied Hopkins’s Man Child or Fox’s Wonder Child by bringing out the best in opposite-sex adults, helping them reach their full creative, emotional, and financial potential. As a so-called “Wonder Child of the Screen,” Temple led grown-ups to emotional healing by bringing forth their spirituality or inner light (qtd. in Kasson 220). Yet it was several years before she was cast in adaptations of classic New Thought texts, and even these had to be substantially altered to fit her distinctive cinematic persona. By the time Temple filmed Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1938) and The Little Princess (1939), 20th Century Fox was running out of original vehicles for her unique talents. Studio executives were also concerned about her staying power as she aged out of younger child roles. Placing Temple in literary classics was one way of imbuing her formulaic pictures with a degree of prestige (Kasson 170). Fox also hoped to capitalize on the young star’s similarities to Mary Pickford by “recycling” her through some of the silent film actress’s more successful productions (Black 198).8 This was a canny, if not terribly original, move. Both Temple and Pickford were the most popular actors in America in their heydays, and were frequently described as “America’s Sweethearts” (Hatch 25). Moreover, both actresses bridged the divide between Victorian sentiment and modern innovation with their spunky onscreen personas (31). Because Pickford had successfully embodied many New Thought heroes and heroines, studio executives must have felt that Temple could do the same. Yet 20th Century Fox interpreted the plots of these New Thought novels loosely, substantially updating these by now old-fashioned texts. While Pickford’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is at least recognizable as an adaptation of Wiggin’s original coming-of-age tale, 20th Century Fox’s remake transforms the sentimental heroine into an aspiring child performer. Little is left of the original novel besides a nominally rural setting and “the title and the names of characters,” as Temple Black observes (208). In Wiggin’s original tale, ten-year-old half-orphan Rebecca Rowena Randall is sent to live with her well-to-do maiden aunts, Miranda and Jane Sawyer, in the village of Riverboro, Maine. By contrast, 20th century Fox’s remake begins in New York City, where eight-year-old orphan

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Rebecca Winstead (played by Temple) auditions for the radio role of Little Miss America at the behest of her stepfather, Harry Kipper. She wins the role but believes she has lost it due to a misunderstanding. Her exasperated stepfather leaves her in the care of her aunt Miranda and cousin Gwen, who reside at Sunnybrook Farm. Meanwhile, studio executive Tony Kent tracks down his Little Miss America and gets her to secretly broadcast a radio program from his house next door (in defiance of aunt Miranda, who despises “show people”). The program, featuring a medley of previous Temple hits like “The Good Ship Lollipop” (1934), is a runaway success. Once they recognize Rebecca as a profitable commodity, Kent and Kipper become embroiled in a fierce custody battle, which was by then a standard element of Temple pictures. Ultimately, Kent and cousin Gwen (now a couple) prevail. This thin plot supports Temple’s virtuosic song and dance numbers, including more tapdancing duets with Robinson. Predictably, the film is suffused with New Thought overtones. The ebullient, smiling Temple once again serves as emotional healer and matchmaker who unites no fewer than three pairs of lovers, the most in any of her pictures (Kasson 173). The film’s original song, “Come and Get Your Happiness,” written by Samuel Pokrass and Jack Yellen, underscores the availability of joy and success for all, regardless of bank balance. Moreover, Temple’s Rebecca shows herself to be fearless and resourceful, qualities admired by New Thought writers. Despite its relentless positivity, however, the film presents disturbing messages about child labor that undermine the cherished image of the Romantic child. As discussed in Chapter Four, adoption narratives written between 1850 and 1930 highlighted the affective value of orphaned children – that is, their ability to be loving and lovable members of a nuclear family – as opposed to their labor value (Nelson, Little Strangers 2). This emergent view of adoption as an emotional rather than a financial transaction reflected broader social changes circa 1900: specifically, the elevation of children from “object[s] of utility” to “object[s] of sentiment” in middleclass American households (Zelizer 7). These cultural shifts chimed with Wordsworthian notions of children as bearers of divine wisdom who help adults “glimpse . . . their earlier, better selves” (Stoneley 63). These competing views of adoption vie for prominence in Wiggin’s original novel and in 20th Century Fox’s adaptation. In Wiggin’s novel, Rebecca’s aunts originally send for her to help with the housework, much as Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert want a boy to help with farm chores in Anne of Green Gables. As Rebecca matures, however, the aunts recognize that their love for their ward outstrips her practical usefulness. Though

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Rebecca occasionally puts her affective charm to commercial uses – by selling large quantities of soap, for instance, and attracting a wealthy benefactor, Adam Ladd – the narrative always foregrounds her emotional appeal and loving relationships with adult protectors.9 Ultimately, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, like Anne of Green Gables, encourages people to adopt orphans as family members rather than as cheap labor. In 20th Century Fox’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, by contrast, child performer Rebecca uses her emotional appeal to turn a profit. Thus, Kent and cousin Gwen stand to gain financially by adopting her, even if they also offer her a loving home. This dissonant conclusion unintentionally highlights stark realities about child labor during the Depression. While the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 outlawed or limited most forms of child labor, it made an exception for child actors like Temple, who were vulnerable to mistreatment and exploitation (Kasson 59). For instance, Temple’s father spent nearly all her wages before she reached maturity, leaving her little to show for her nineteen years of employment with Fox, MGM, and Vanguard Films (Black 482–484). Despite its dubious message, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm proved a critical and financial success. So did Temple’s next remake of a New Thought classic, The Little Princess, though it would be her last hit with 20th Century Fox. This version of Burnett’s 1905 classic moves the action forward to the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Sara’s father, Captain Crewe, departs for South Africa with his regiment, leaving his pampered only child at Miss Minchin’s school for young ladies. There, Sara shines as a star pupil and nurtures a budding romance between a teacher, Miss Rose, and the school’s riding master, in keeping with Temple’s reputation as matchmaker. As in the novel, things take a turn for the worse when Captain Crewe is reported dead and his fortune lost. But this time, Sara has no need to find a substitute father figure in Mr. Carrisford. Instead, she remains convinced that her father is alive and searches for him at a nearby army hospital. Incredibly, she manages to find him among the wounded on the very day Queen Victoria comes to visit. Though Captain Crewe suffers from amnesia, Sara restores his memory through her presence and comforting words. This plucky little girl seemingly wills her father back to life and health on the strength of her wishes alone. In this adaptation, some aspects of Burnett’s original novel are muted or altogether absent, while others are modified to fit Temple’s onscreen persona. The film’s emphasis on military conflict departs from the original text and gestures toward the impending Second World War, which America would enter in 1941. Meanwhile, Sara’s cherished fantasy that

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Figure 5 Shirley Temple as Sara Crewe in The Little Princess (1939)

she is a princess appears only in the form of a dream sequence (Figure 5). In terms of New Thought content, the film is perhaps even more extreme than the novel. While Burnett’s original ended with Sara gaining a fortune and substitute father figure in Mr. Carrisford, here the heroine’s positive thinking seemingly brings her father back from the dead. This wishfulfillment fantasy exceeds almost anything in Burnett’s novels in its optimism and improbability. Casting Temple in The Little Princess was a shrewd move that payed off handsomely for Fox. Critics recognized it as “Shirley Temple’s best picture

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to date” and it remains among her most enduringly popular movies (qtd. in Kasson 183). As a vehicle for Temple’s acting talents, The Little Princess provided greater emotional latitude than any of her previous pictures, allowing her to swing from joy to grief to rage, sometimes in the course of a single scene. Yet even so, demand for Temple’s pictures started to dwindle. As the eleven-year-old actress approached puberty, she could no longer effortlessly embody the innocence and optimism audiences associated with child actors. Moreover, public appetite for such cheerful fare waned during the Second World War, which witnessed a temporary downturn in the popularity of New Thought (Satter 251). These were among the factors leading to the early termination of Temple’s contract with 20th Century Fox in 1940, an event that signaled the end of the child star era (Hatch 3). The end of an era did not mean the end of New Thought films, however. The 1950s witnessed yet another upswing in New Thought, buoyed by postwar optimism and the stunning success of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which in 1954 sold more copies than any nonfiction book except the Bible (Satter 6). This cultural backdrop helps explain why Walt Disney would try to revive the novel Pollyanna in 1960, even though the book had fallen out of favor by the late 1940s (Griswold 217). The resulting film version, starring British child actress Hayley Mills, was a critical, if not necessarily a financial success. Though the film grossed less than half of the expected six million dollars at the box office, critics unanimously declared Pollyanna to be “Disney’s best live action film ever” (217). Mills won a juvenile Academy Award, presented by Temple herself, for her performance as the orphaned preteen who cheers up her gloomy small town by playing “the glad game.” Though the film downplays the novel’s preachier moments, it nonetheless preserves the original’s New Thought emphasis. By contrast, later adaptations of New Thought classics tone down the optimism of the originals in favor of more “realistic” depictions of the hardships faced by their orphaned protagonists. The most extreme example is Moira Walley-Beckett’s Netflix series Anne with an “E” (2017–present), whose heroine suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, complete with flashbacks to mistreatment endured at the orphanage. Walley-Beckett, best known as an Emmy-winning writer for the acclaimed series Breaking Bad (2008–2013), attempts to bring the gritty sensibility of prestige cable TV to Montgomery’s sentimental tale, with mixed results. While the series is well cast and visually stunning, some viewers have complained that it is neither wholesome family viewing nor especially

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faithful to Montgomery’s novel and its Edwardian cultural setting. A reviewer for The American Conservative, for instance, laments the series’ “gritty and gray portrayal of Anne’s story” and waxes nostalgic about Montgomery’s original Anne: “We love Anne of Green Gables. She keeps the child alive in us, reminds us what it means to be a dreamer . . . She brings humor and color to the grayest of spaces, transforming the everyday and the bleak” (Olmstead). Other critics have been more accepting of the show’s departures from its source material, which include openly gay characters, frank depictions of child abuse, and mature subject matter (such as Anne getting her period). These details of Walley-Beckett’s adaptation certainly fall outside the scope of a typical New Thought novel, as do Anne’s embarrassing failures at matchmaking in this version, such as her attempt to reunite Matthew with an old flame. Yet the show’s “gritty realism” is perhaps “closer to what life actually would have been like for a turn-of-the-century orphan,” as Isabella Biedenharn of Entertainment Weekly observes. Against this darker backdrop, Anne’s “relentless optimism . . . seems delusional” rather than inspired, Biedenharn suggests, recalling Lauren Berlant’s and Barbara Ehrenreich’s remarks about the limits of positive thinking.10 Recent adaptations like Anne with an “E” test how much of New Thought novels’ appeal still comes from their optimistic emphasis, versus other aspects of the storyline (problems, conflicts, controversies) that New Thought tends to obscure. In other words, do modern audiences continue to embrace classic tales like A Little Princess or Anne of Green Gables because of their reflexive optimism, or in spite of it? Controversial though it is, Walley-Beckett’s series is an important barometer of changing tastes, one that suggests a turn away from insistent positivity.

Notes

Introduction 1. For more detailed readings of The Secret Garden as a Christian Science novel, see chapter eleven of Griswold; chapter two of Squires, Healing the Nation; and Chapter Three of this volume. 2. Because New Thought is an amorphous movement consisting of many different religious sects, precise membership numbers are unavailable. 3. “Soft power,” a term coined by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye in 1990, refers to a persuasive, rather than coercive approach to international relations that relies on influence and moral authority instead of military action or economic sanctions. The term has since been more broadly applied by cultural historians to a range of other disciplines. 4. See the Epilogue of this volume for a discussion of such films. 5. This and all further quotations from Herland in this volume refer to the edition available in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels: Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland, ed. Minna Doskow, Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999. 6. I am indebted to Beryl Satter, who provides the first scholarly account of the New Thought novel as a genre in chapter four of Each Mind a Kingdom. 7. During the period under discussion, New Thought went by many different names, including mind cure, Divine Science, Religious Science, and so forth. Some of these terms corresponded to specific sects founded by influential leaders within the movement. The term “New Thought” entered the vernacular in the early twentieth century as a catch-all to describe these related belief systems (Meyer 36–37). 8. On New Thought’s impact on psychotherapy, see Harrington, chapter three, and Cushman, chapter five; on corporate culture, see Ehrenreich, chapter four; on diet fads, see Griffith, chapter three; on prosperity gospel and televangelism, see Bowler and chapter five of Ehrenreich; on entertainment, see Travis, chapter six. 9. These sales figures come from Byrne’s website, “The Secret Book That Changed the World.” www.thesecret.tv/ Accessed 27 June 2019. 199

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Notes to pages 5–8

10. For an overview of the substantial literary scholarship devoted to Spiritualism, see Christine Ferguson, “Recent Studies in Ninteenth-Century Spiritualism” (2012). On Mormonism in literature, see Lecourt, Scales, Morgan, and chapter four of Stokes. On Theosophy in literature and other arts, see Ferguson, “New Religions and Esotericism”; Leigh Wilson, Modernism and Magic; as well as the June 2011 special issue of the journal Literature and Aesthetics devoted to this topic, edited by Alderton and Petsche. 11. For an excellent literary history of mesmerism, see Ogden. On literature and psychical research, see, for instance, Groth and Lusty; Delgado; Galvan, “Tennyson’s Ghosts”; and Luckhurst. 12. Exceptions include work on children’s literature and disability by Martha Stoddard Holmes, Alexandra Valint, and others, as well as Sally Shuttleworth’s magisterial study The Mind of the Child (2010). 13. These interpretations are discussed at greater length in Chapter Three of this volume. 14. Burnham produced a total of twenty-six novels in her lifetime, which her publisher believed to have sold around a half million copies altogether (“Slight Inventions”). These figures suggest that her popularity extended well beyond the Christian Science community. 15. At talks I have given about this material, some audience members were unaware of or reluctant to acknowledge the heterodox religious content of the New Thought novels I discussed. The most receptive audience were the Christian Scientists I addressed at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in August 2015, who could more readily see elements of their faith in these works. 16. On modern perceptions of religion in past historical eras, see Ogden’s introduction. 17. As of his writing in 1963, historian Charles Braden argued that “[p]ersons holding essentially New Thought ideas are to be found all over the world, and in some countries substantial movements have developed” (409). While New Thought has made the greatest inroads in English-speaking nations such as Britain, Australia, and South Africa, it has also had a substantial cultural impact in other Western countries and in Japan, as Braden explains in chapters 14–16. See also Seal, Christian Science in Germany, for a case study of one type of New Thought in a specific European context. 18. For a fascinating account of Poyen and his lecture tour, see chapter two of Ogden. Intriguingly, Poyen used mesmerism not just to heal, but also to manage slaves and factory laborers, an application that aroused great interest from his American audiences. This example demonstrates how mesmerists exploited subjects’ gullibility for various ends: to cure, to educate, to manage labor, to entertain, and to mediate communication.

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19. Intriguingly, Eddy’s contemporary Ellen White (1827–1915) founded another new religious movement on the opposite principle: the idea that one could glorify God by perfecting the body. White’s followers, known as Seventh-Day Adventists, typically adopted plant-based diets; avoided stimulants, tobacco, and alcohol; and were instrumental in founding the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. Adventists also undertook medical missionary work at home and abroad. This example foregrounds how Body and Spirit were categories with shifting but crucial relevance for women, as Satter suggests in her introduction. 20. The Christian Science Church Manual has forbidden the release of membership numbers since 1908 (Schoepflin 53). The numbers listed for 1936 come from the US Census Bureau. 21. While Christian Scientists deny the reality of matter, New Thought followers “never denied the reality of the material world, but saw it as contingent upon the mind” (Bowler 14). On the slippery relationship between mind and matter in New Thought, see also the introduction to Satter. 22. For more nuanced definitions of neurasthenia and discussions of its role in nineteenth-century life, see Beck and Gijswijt-Hofstra. 23. Contradicting Eddy’s own account of her spiritual development, Albanese contends that Eddy’s Christian Science hewed close to the Calvinism of her youth, while incorporating more heterodox influences (294–95). Ehrenreich, meanwhile, suggests that Christian Science retained “some of Calvinism’s more toxic features” such as “a harsh judgmentalism” and “insistence on . . . self-examination,” even though it evolved out of a resistance to Calvinism (89). 24. Such testimonials are readily available in James’s The Varieties of Religious Experiences, lectures IV and V: “The Religion of Healthy-Mindedness.” See also chapter eighteen of Eddy’s Science and Health: With Key to the Scriptures, titled “Fruitage.” 25. This example is complicated by Montgomery’s simultaneous interest in Theosophy and by her gradual loss of faith, particularly after the First World War. Over the course of her life, Montgomery increasingly “saw [the church] as a social institution rather than a religious one,” even as she continued to fill her duties as a minister’s wife (Rubio, Wings 188). For a more detailed look at Montgomery’s religious attitudes, see Chapter Four of this volume. 26. Fraser is forthright about her Christian Science upbringing and later rejection of the faith. Fridlund attended Principia College in Illinois, where 100 percent of students and faculty are Christian Scientists (see www.principiacollege.edu /fastfacts). But Fridlund’s History of Wolves is quite critical of the religion. In interviews, Fridlund has been vague about her relationship to Eddy’s church.

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Notes to pages 13–24

27. The increasing economic precarity of modern life has been perhaps most keenly felt by white men, whose wages and employment prospects were better several decades ago than they are today. Women and minorities, by contrast, have made significant gains in terms of wages and employment during the same time frame, while by no means achieving parity with their white male counterparts. 28. On African American involvement in New Thought during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see, for instance, Bowler 25–30 and Griffith 141–159. 29. While Satter does not actually use the term soft power in her work on New Thought, it seems appropriate for the dynamic she describes. 30. On Hill’s book and its influence, see Meyer 168–170 and Albanese 440–442. 31. On the prevalence of “spiritual but not religious” Americans and the current vogue for “pastiche spirituality,” see the introduction to Schmidt. 32. Silent meditation was a component of early New Thought practice but was also promoted by Eastern faiths introduced to Britain and the United States during the nineteenth century. In other words, it cannot be traced to a single source. 33. Exceptions might include Burnett’s now-forgotten work The Dawn of a ToMorrow (1906) – which was a blockbuster success in its own day, despite or because of its didacticism – as well as Eleanor H. Porter’s cloyingly optimistic bestseller Pollyanna (1913). These works are discussed in Chapter Three and the Epilogue, respectively. 34. Nearly all of the Christian Scientists I spoke to at the Eddy Library mentioned The Secret Garden as one of their favorite books. Perhaps surprisingly, most did not realize it was a Christian Science novel until I pointed it out to them. 35. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes from Science and Health in this volume come from the edition published in 2000 by The Writings of Mary Baker Eddy. 36. As Griswold observes in chapter three of Audacious Kids, similar narrative patterns structure other girls’ fiction of the era, from Little Women (1868–1869) to Pollyanna.

1 The Inner Child in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy and Sara Crewe 1. Transactional analysis, object relations theory, and Internal Family Systems therapy all include inner child work. 2. Despite its levity, Franken’s book reflects insider knowledge of twelve-step programs, as the author was a member of Al-Anon in the early 1990s. 3. The term “New Age” refers to a loosely organized group of spiritual seekers who hoped to usher in a “new universal religion” based on “the development of

Notes to pages 26–31

4.

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15.

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a mystical consciousness or awareness.” The New Age movement began in Britain in the 1960s and peaked in North America in the 1980s (“Spiritualist, Psychic, and New Age Family” 160). Historian Beryl Satter emphasizes that “the majority of late-nineteenth-century New Thought authors, healers, teachers, patients, and congregants were white middle-class women” (8). A 2017 article by YouYou Zhou, meanwhile, suggests that about 83 percent of readers of self-help books online are female (n.p.). Robson emphasizes that while this dynamic could involve an element of pedophilia – as in Carroll’s Alice books – it was not primarily sexual in nature. Many thanks to David Ebrey for this reference. On changing social attitudes toward children and childhood during the long nineteenth century, see, for instance, Zelizer and Ariès. Eddy grew up near the Shaker village of Canterbury, New Hampshire, which may account for the similarities between Shakerism and Christian Science (Stokes 187). On other maternal or androgynous conceptions of the deity in the long nineteenth century, see Houston. Unless otherwise noted, citations of Eddy’s Science and Health refer to the edition published in 2000 by The Writings of Mary Baker Eddy. Bible verses quoted in this volume come from the King James Version (known as the Authorized Version in Britain), as this was the translation of the Bible most widely available to nineteenth-century readers (Larsen). The 77th edition of Science and Health (1890) contains a further, revealing passage: “Until it be learned that generation rests on no sexual basis, let marriage continue.” This passage might seem to leave open the possibility that sexual reproduction will continue after the resurrection. But the surrounding text suggests otherwise, gesturing toward the “white-robed purity” of man’s future state, in which “passion hath no part” (274). While this work has sometimes been attributed to Willa Cather as well as Georgine Milmine, recent scholarship suggests that Cather’s role was limited. See Squires, “The Standard Oil Treatment.” On the New Woman phenomenon and its literary manifestations, see, for instance, Ardis. For a slightly different account of Hopkins’s break with her husband, see Harley, who suggests that George Hopkins made the initial move to Chicago with his wife but later filed for divorce, charging “abandonment.” Their son, John Carver Hopkins, died in 1905, probably in an influenza epidemic (Harley 9–10). Hopkins adapted the idea of the God-Self from an earlier New Thought writer, Warren Felt Evans. Evans conceived of this figure somewhat differently, however, especially its gendered parameters. For details, see Satter 87.

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Notes to pages 31–45

16. This pamphlet was likely written sometime between 1885 and 1895, when Hopkins largely withdrew from public life. 17. “The Radiant I AM” 4. Revelations 12:1–5 describes a “woman clothed with the sun” who “brought forth a man child, who was to rule all nations with a rod of iron: and her child was caught up unto God, and to his throne.” This passage is significant within Christian Science because some have (controversially) interpreted the “woman clothed with the sun” to be Eddy herself (Gottschalk, Rolling Away the Stone 275–276). 18. On Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the merchandising phenomenon it inspired, see the introduction to Bernstein. 19. On Christian Science and New Thought in these works, see chapter eleven of Griswold; chapter two of Squires, Healing the Nation; and Chapter Three of this volume. Chapters eight–eleven of Seelye may also be useful in this regard, though he sometimes confuses elements of New Thought with Spiritualism and Theosophy. 20. Because Christian Science churches have no ministers, a First and Second Reader choose passages to read aloud from the Bible and Science and Health during services. The First Reader has a significant administrative role within his or her local branch church. Vivian also composed a piece in the Christian Science Hymnal titled “O When We See God’s Mercy” (1932). See McCarthy, “The Real Little Lord Fauntleroy.” 21. Burnett was consistent in this regard, as Thwaite explains: “Frances never wrote of the death of a child in one of her real children’s books – though there are plenty of off-stage deaths of parents” (136). 22. Many thanks to Ruth Evans for this etymology. 23. A homoerotic reading of Fauntleroy is indeed possible, as Anna Wilson observes, though it is beyond the scope of this essay. Such a reading might hinge on the moments when the Earl or his lawyer, Mr. Havisham, gaze lovingly at the boy, or on readers’ hostile responses to Cedric’s effeminacy (243). 24. On the significance of the word “manly” in Fauntleroy, see Carlson 42. 25. Burnett’s novel lacks a single focalizer; the viewpoint moves between Faunteroy himself and the many adults who observe him. Dearest’s perspective is arguably the most important and consistently rendered, however. 26. On the similarities between Jane Eyre and A Little Princess, see Seelye, chapter nine, and Ulrich C. Knoepflmacher’s “Introduction” to the 2002 Penguin edition of A Little Princess. 27. In contrast to Sara Crewe, A Little Princess does contain at least one Bible reference and a mention of Sara’s regular churchgoing (see, for instance, Sara’s remark on Revelations on p. 49 and the reference to church visits on p. 15). These alterations raise the question of whether Burnett felt pressure to

Notes to pages 46–58

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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“Christianize” the narrative in some fashion. Yet Burnett also includes a lengthy description of Heaven that is more indebted to Spiritualism than the Bible (Squires, Healing the Nation 72). On the problem of evil in Christian Science, see also Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science 128. This New Thought-derived technique is still highly popular today, as one discovers from books as diverse as surgeon Bernie Siegel’s Love, Medicine and Miracles (1986), which deals with creative visualization and oncology, and Rhonda Byrne’s self-help tome The Secret (2006). The examples given above were suggested by these sources. While Sara is described as “not a pretty child” in an early chapter, she becomes “pretty and interesting” once she is adopted by Mr. Carrisford and properly treated (Burnett, Sara Crewe 10, 102). On the significance of the Lascar – renamed Ram Dass in A Little Princess – and his affinities with Burnett’s omniscient narrator, see Knoepflmacher xviii–xxi. For a postcolonial reading of A Little Princess, see McGillis. For a contrasting opinion, see Knoeflmacher, who refers to A Little Princess as “unquestionably . . . the most exquisitely controlled of all of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s fictions,” thanks in part to its multi-stage composition process (ix). See also Griswold, chapter three, on narrative patterns shared by these classic North American girls’ fictions.

2 Fauntleroy’s Ghost: New Thought in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw 1. From the spring of 1898 until 1908, Burnett rented Maytham Hall (Gerzina 202, 255). Meanwhile, James signed a twenty-one-year lease on nearby Rye house in 1897 and purchased the home when it became available for sale in 1899 (Beidler, “Introduction” 15; Edel, The Treacherous Years 318). 2. These letters are held at Harvard’s Houghton library. Excerpts are available in Thwaite 184–187, along with descriptions of Burnett and James’s social encounters. 3. In fact, Burnett suffered reverses during the 1890s, including a serious depression following the death of her son Lionel and her declining critical reputation throughout this decade (on this subject, see Clark 19). To an outside observer like James, however, her conspicuous material prosperity might have overshadowed these setbacks. 4. These and other references to James’s The Turn of the Screw come from Peter Beidler’s Bedford/St. Martin’s edition of the text (2010). 5. On the endless critical debates about the governess’s sanity and the reality of the ghosts, see, for instance, Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of

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6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

Notes to pages 58–68 Interpretation,” and Peter Beidler, “A Critical History of The Turn of the Screw.” On the nuances of the word “fix” in The Turn of the Screw, see Newman. On James’s friendships with women, see, for instance, Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women, ed. Susan Gunter. Scholars who focus on occult material in The Turn of the Screw tend to explore Spiritualism and psychical research as opposed to other new religious movements of the era. See, for instance, Peter Beidler, Ghosts, Demons, and Henry James, and Martha Banta, Henry James and the Occult. See James’s book Hawthorne (1879) and his 1897 essay on the author in The House of Fiction (1973), edited by Leon Edel. See also James’s correspondence with Stevenson, anthologized in Janet Adam Smith’s Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism (1948). Other examples of what James called his “fantaisies, fairy-tales, romances, [or] ghost stories” include “Sir Edmund Orme” (1879), “The Friend of the Friends” (1896), “The Third Person” (1900), “Owen Wingrave” (1892) and his posthumously published novel A Sense of the Past (1917; Banta 51–52). Burnett owned and read a copy of What Maisie Knew, suggesting these authors’ continued reciprocal interest in each other’s works (Tintner 373). For a perceptive comparison of Burnett’s and James’s memoirs, see Shuttleworth 296–300 and 326–327. In later works like The Secret Garden (1911), Burnett presents somewhat less idealized child protagonists who face greater hardships during their formative years. But there remain elements of sentimentality and idealization that James would have disdained. For a nuanced discussion of narration and point of view in What Maisie Knew – both contested topics – see, for instance, Teahan. Distinguished members of the SPR in its early years included scientists Oliver Lodge, William F. Barrett, and William Crookes; literary authors Charles Dodgson, John Ruskin, and Alfred Lord Tennyson; Prime Minister William Gladstone; and journalist William T. Stead (Banta 15; Galvan, The Sympathetic Medium 4). “Mr. Dresser” probably refers to Horatio Dresser rather than his father, Julius Dresser, who passed away in 1893. Both were prominent New Thought leaders and historians of the movement. See especially chapter six of Satter and chapter five of Albanese. See also Richard Lansdown’s note on p. 384 of The Bostonians. Verena was also likely modeled on medium and trance speaker Cora Hatch, Kucich explains. James attended one of Hatch’s trance lectures in New York in the early 1860s and was impressed by the speaker, if not the substance of her talk (119).

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20. The governess explains, “His ‘my dear’ was constantly on his lips for me, and nothing could have expressed more the exact shade of the sentiment with which I desired to inspire my pupils than its fond familiarity” (James, The Turn of the Screw 83). Similarly, Burnett’s sons referred to their mother as “sweetest,” “sweet dearest,” or simply “dearest,” as the author explains in “How Fauntleroy Occurred” (1894; 201). 21. Though we never learn exactly what passed between Quint and Miles, the implication is that their contact was inappropriate and possibly sexual in nature. See, for instance, Matheson on erotic innuendo in The Turn of the Screw. 22. James’s sexual orientation has been long debated by critics, some of whom view him as a closeted gay man. For a nuanced discussion of this topic, see Gunter and Jobe’s “Introduction.” 23. The title of À Rebours is usually translated as Against Nature or Against the Grain. 24. For more Victorian parenting advice, see chapter 42 of Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management (first published in 1861), though it deals mostly with very young children. 25. Although it postdates The Turn of the Screw by a few years, Partlow’s book neatly summarizes New Thought parenting practices first described by writers such as Eddy, Burnett, and Van Anderson in the 1880s and early 1890s. 26. In the nineteenth century, New Thought followers and Christian Scientists alike were encouraged to avoid seeking medical care, though Christian Scientists were much stricter about this prohibition.

3 Rewriting the Rest Cure in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden 1. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James writes: “I will say a brief word about the mind-curer’s methods. They are of course largely suggestive . . . ‘Suggestion’ is only another name for the power of ideas, so far as they prove efficacious over belief and conduct” (107, emphasis in original). 2. The other two writers mentioned in Farlow’s letter were Clara Louise Burnham and Lilian Bell, who were both Christian Scientists and authors of popular novels with Christian Science themes. On Burnham’s career and her complicated relationship with Eddy, see “‘Slight Inventions’: The Fiction of Clara Louise Burnham,” The Mary Baker Eddy Library, www .marybakereddylibrary.org/research/slight-inventions-fiction-of-claralouise-burnham/. Accessed 30 December 2018. 3. The authorship of the McClure’s biography has been disputed, though recent archival research suggests that Georgine Milmine was the principal writer. See Squires, “The Standard Oil Treatment.”

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4. On Eddy as a sentimental writer, see also chapter five of Stokes. 5. Since Burnett crossed the Atlantic 33 times over the course of her life, it is difficult to say where she spent most of her time or felt most at home (Gerzina xiii). 6. An appendix to Science and Health, titled “Fruitage,” contains testimonials by Christian Scientists residing in England and Ireland, suggesting that these disciples made significant inroads (see Eddy 600–700). 7. For instance, Eddy allowed followers to visit obstetricians after the 1888 manslaughter trial of Abby Corner, a Christian Science practitioner, for the death of her daughter in childbirth. Though Corner was eventually acquitted, the trial was a public relations crisis for the faith (Fraser 100). In 1900, Eddy lifted the ban on dental care when a Boston newspaper reported that she had been to the dentist and had some teeth pulled (128). 8. Christian Scientists who seek mainstream medical care may be stripped of positions they hold in their branch churches, though they are never excommunicated from the Mother Church for this reason (Fraser 131). 9. On the popularity of the rest cure in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, see Roy Porter and Marijke Gijswijt Hofstra, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia: From Beard to the First World War, especially the essays by Sengoopta and Marland. On the decline of the rest cure by the mid-twentieth century, see Stiles, “The Rest Cure.” 10. Typically, Mitchell’s rest cures took place in a clinic staffed by professional nurses. By contrast, Gilman’s heroine remains at home with a relative for a nurse. 11. When I spoke about this project at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in August 2015, several Christian Scientists in the audience named The Secret Garden as one of their favorite books. None of them recognized it as a Christian Science novel, however, until I pointed out the book’s resonance with Eddy’s beliefs. 12. See chapter two of Squires, Healing the Nation; chapter four of Keith; and chapter eleven of Griswold. Chapters eight through eleven of Seelye may also be useful in this regard, though he sometimes confuses elements of New Thought with Spiritualism and Theosophy. 13. During the winter of 1877–8, Burnett was working on the novel Haworth’s (Gerzina 81). This is probably the manuscript whose progress is described here. 14. Medical literature suggests a correlation between handwriting changes and bipolar disorder (see Tigges et al.). Generally, patients in a depressed mental state write more neatly than those in a manic state. 15. On the history of bilateral brain hemisphere imbalance as an alleged cause for mental illness, and the application of this idea in Jekyll and Hyde, see chapter one of Stiles, Popular Fiction and Brain Science.

Notes to pages 92–109

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16. It was common for rest cures to be prescribed for a combination of physical and mental symptoms, as in Burnett’s case. Moreover, neurasthenia was thought to encompass numerous physical symptoms, such as migraines and indigestion (see Beard 7–8 for a complete list). 17. Despite their toxicity, strychnine and arsenic were then believed to function as nerve tonics if taken in small doses. 18. Exceptions to this rule include alleged malingerers Mitchell saw during the Civil War, to whom he could be cruel. He was also unsympathetic towards the few men he deemed “hysterical,” usually those who proved violent, unmanageable, or effeminate. See Micale for a discussion of such cases. 19. In a similar vein, Shirley Foster and Judy Simons invoke Lionel’s death from tuberculosis and suggest that “The portrait of Colin Craven, lying pathetically on a sickbed, suggests consumptive symptoms, while his ultimate recovery can be read as a projection of her wish-fulfillment, and even as an attempt to assuage her guilt at having spent so much time away from her children during their formative years” (325). 20. For a fruitful comparison of the 1949 and 1993 film versions with respect to disability studies, see Stoddard-Holmes. 21. The Secret Garden has also been categorized as a pastoral novel, a fairy tale, and a Bildungsroman. See, for instance, Koppes 198–205. 22. In Burnett’s time, the term “Anglo-Indian” referred to a Briton who lived in India rather than its current meaning of “a person of mixed British and Indian descent” (Martin 151). In this chapter, I invoke the older meaning of the term. 23. While autism would be an anachronistic diagnosis for either Eddy or her fictional counterpart, Mary Lennox, it would explain traits such as social withdrawal, emotional reactivity or curious lack of affect, and difficulty relating to others. Observations about Eddy’s autistic traits have appeared in casual online forums such as blog posts, though not in published scholarship. See, for instance, Mary Kathleen Huggins’s May 17, 2013 post on her blog “Understanding Mortal Mind: My Life Beside Christian Science”: https://mk huggins.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/mary-baker-eddy-and-aspergers-syndrome -a-revision-to-the-case-history-post/. Accessed 12 October 2018. 24. On the salutary influence of the English climate as opposed to the unhealthful atmosphere of India, see, for instance, Martin 138–141, Philips, and Sharrad. 25. On the garden’s symbolic meanings, see, for instance, Bixler, “Gardens, Houses, and Nurturant Power;” Wilkie; and Seelye 264–268. 26. In Agnieszka Holland’s 1993 film version of The Secret Garden, Colin’s treatments also include electrical stimulation of muscles, a key component of the rest cure not mentioned in the novel. On this film, see Stoddard-Holmes 224–226.

210

Notes to pages 109–116

27. Burnett likely received similar advice during her earlier rest cures that predated the writing of The Secret Garden. 28. On the significance of Colin’s back brace in the novel and in the 1949 film version, see Stoddard-Holmes 219–222. On Colin’s other prosthetic device, the wheelchair, see Valindt. 29. Burnett’s inclusion of a perceptive, sympathetic physician in The Secret Garden separates her from the strictest Christian Scientists, who eschewed mainstream medical care. Instead, Burnett hews closer to a New Thought perspective that allowed for both alternative and mainstream remedies, while generally preferring the former to the latter. 30. In the third edition of Science and Health, Eddy describes how she cured a woman of dropsy by gradually lowering the dose of homeopathic remedies and finally substituting unmedicated pellets. These early experiments with what we would now call the placebo effect were an important source of inspiration for Christian Science (Gill 109). 31. On critiques of positive thinking as a cure-all for physical illnesses ranging from cancer to AIDS, see Harrington 122–125. 32. Stoddard-Holmes notes that the only two medical conditions the novel does not try to ameliorate are cholera and Archibald Craven’s “crooked” shoulders (213). Perhaps these conditions seemed too stubbornly physical to be affected by positive thinking.

4 Sunshine and Shadow: New Thought in Anne of Green Gables 1. Montgomery’s recent biographer Mary Henley Rubio explains the thenunknown dangers of bromides, which were frequently prescribed for anxiety during the first half of the twentieth century. These drugs could cause kidney problems and psychotic or violent behavior when taken in large doses. Rubio suspects that bromide poisoning was a complicating factor in the illnesses of both Montgomery and her spouse (Wings 511–515). 2. Whether this message was intended as a suicide note as opposed to a journal entry is open to debate, as Rubio explains (Wings 575–580). But Montgomery’s son Stuart Macdonald and her physicians all interpreted it as a suicide note, knowing that the author had suffered from “a very high degree of neurasthenia” for at least two years preceding her death (qtd. in Rubio, Wings 575). They kept this conviction secret to preserve the reputation of the deceased and to protect her sons’ career prospects, which could have been damaged by a revelation of mental illness in the immediate family. 3. By the time she was thirty-four – the age when Anne of Green Gables made her an overnight sensation – Montgomery already had 286 stories and 256 poems in

Notes to pages 117–124

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

211

print and was making a comfortable living off of her literary productions (Rubio and Waterston xi). On the reception of Anne in various countries, see Ledwell and Mitchell’s anthology, Anne Around the World. See, for instance, the August 22, 1908 review from Outlook; the March 13, 1909 review from The Spectator of London; and The Globe review cited later in this paragraph. All three are anthologized in The Annotated Anne, pp. 481–494. Anne of Green Gables was one of many books promoted by American educational reformers in occupied postwar Japan. Despite the book’s Canadian origins, it was used as “a means of introducing Japanese girls to U.S. domestic culture and to understanding of gender norms within the democratic American family unit” (Gammel et al., “An Enchanting Girl” 181). On Walley-Beckett’s screen adaptation, see also this volume’s Epilogue. On Montgomery’s changes to this section of the journal, see Rubio, Wings 122. On Transcendentalism in Montgomery’s writing, see White 85–86; on Spiritualism, see Heilbron; on Theosophy, see Duvernet. For comparisons of these works, see, for instance, Mintz 195, Classen 42, Mills 228, and chapter three of Griswold. These scholars follow the lead of a reviewer for The Spectator who described Anne of Green Gables as “a sort of Canadian Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” (“Winning Our Sympathies” 337). Thanks to Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer for this perceptive remark on Rachel Lynde. Eddy described her childhood fears about Hell in her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection (1891): “The doctrine of unconditional election, or predestination, greatly troubled me; for I was unwilling to be saved, if my brothers and sisters were to be among those who were doomed to perpetual banishment from God. So perturbed was I by the thoughts aroused by this erroneous doctrine, that the family doctor was summoned, and pronounced me stricken with fever” (13). As Eddy’s biographer Gillian Gill observes, Eddy had a strong tendency to somatize psychological distress by developing fevers and other symptoms (12). For a fuller list of Montgomery’s childhood reading material, see Rubio, Wings 41–44. Spiritualists generally believed that “mortal life was only one stage of human existence, to be followed by various levels of ascendance through an afterlife with its own material landscape” (Bann 668). Theosophists embraced the idea of reincarnation and “envision[ed] a future in which individuals continued to grow and improve after the death of their current physical bodies” (Ferguson, “New Religions and Esotericism,” 416). While New Thought views on the

212

15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

Notes to pages 125–139 afterlife varied, they often involved reincarnation or transcendence to a higher spiritual plane. Throughout this chapter, I use the term “unconscious” to align with modern usage, even though Montgomery herself more often used the terms “subconscious” or “subjective” mind, in keeping with the psychological works she read during her lifetime. The precise dates of composition for the handwritten manuscript of Anne of Green Gables are hard to pin down, since Montgomery provides different timelines in her various published works (Doody 9). The most reliable account indicates that she finished the handwritten draft around January 1906. She then sent the typed, revised version of the manuscript to L.C. Page in February 1907, where it was ultimately accepted (“Chronology” 5). This list was compiled using Montgomery’s journals and correspondence. I have included only those works that she specifically mentions having read, as opposed to the many books she mentions in passing. On Anne’s resemblance to these literary heroines, see MacLulich, Seelye 333–340, Careless, and Classen. The SPR’s discovery that telepathy was “a fact in Nature” was seriously compromised in 1888, when researchers learned that two experimental subjects had deceived them by using code to simulate thought transference (qtd. in Oppenheim 141; see also Oppenheim 144–145). Hudson, however, seems to have been unaware of this controversy. For a similarly positive review of Chronicles of Avonlea in the Monitor, see “Books for Review” 2. Delsartean movement was also popular in New Thought circles, as evidenced by its prominent role in Alice Bunker Stockham and Lida Hood Talbot’s novel Koradine Letters (1893). The protagonist attends a school where New Thought principles are taught in combination with Delsartean poses. On this novel, see Satter, chapter four. For a biographical reading of Anne that highlights similarities between Montgomery and her heroine, including their intelligence, mood swings, and histories of neglect, see Rubio, Wings 119–122. The town of Cavendish in Prince Edward Island had been settled by relatively few families and thus many townspeople shared the same last names. In addition, Rubio states that “virtually everyone in Cavendish was related to everyone else through almost a century of intermarriage.” The inbreeding that occurred in these circumstances may have contributed to the prevalence of mental illness in the region (Wings 19). Because Eddy’s writings do not explicitly refer to homosexuality, the Mother Church currently takes no position on same-sex relationships, leaving

Notes to pages 141–157

213

members to make their own decisions on the matter. In the 1960s through the 1980s, however, some official Church publications denounced same-sex relationships. For a detailed history of homosexuality in the Christian Science church, see Stores. 25. Revelation 3:2–3 reads as follows: 2. Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God. 3. Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come up (King James Version). 26. Alternatively, these Boston-based characters may be nods to Montgomery’s sizeable American readership, as Gammel suggests (Looking for Anne 242). 27. Montgomery was also facing other personal stressors around this time that reverberate in her fictions. These included her “growing melancholia and anxiety, her efforts to cope with Ewan [sic] Macdonald’s struggles with depression, the initiation of the lawsuit with L.C. Page, and the beginning of a growing dependence on pharmaceuticals” (Thompson 113).

5 New Women, New Thoughts: Millennial Motherhood in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland Trilogy 1. Wells, Morris, and Shaw shared Gilman’s interest in socialism and made her an honorary member of the British Fabian Society when she first visited England in 1896 (Gilman, Living 203). 2. Gilman also read and enjoyed Burnett’s A Lady of Quality (1896), which she called “a delightful book,” as well as Through One Administration (1883) and A Fair Barbarian (1881) (Gilman, Diaries, 1:33, 1:153, 2:642). In her autobiography, meanwhile, Gilman alludes to Burnett’s memoir of her childhood, The One I Knew the Best of All (1893): “I did not compose, make stories like Frances Hodgson Burnett in her childhood, but was already scheming to improve the world” (Living 21). 3. On the content of this volume of children’s verse, see Rudd, “When the Songs are Over and Sung.” 4. This and all further quotations from Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland refer to the editions available in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Utopian Novels: Moving the Mountain, Herland, and With Her in Ourland, ed. Minna Doskow, Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1999. 5. Burnett’s and Gilman’s experiences with the rest cure are described in Chapter Three of this volume. 6. Mitchell’s West Cures for nervous men involved rough-riding and male bonding in rugged frontier environments (see Stiles, “Go West, Young

214

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16.

Notes to pages 158–162 Man”). Gilman’s “cure” did not follow this format precisely; it involved a stay in Pasadena with a close female friend, Grace Channing, during the winter of 1885. Gilman would return to Pasadena with Channing in 1888. This neighbor was Augusta “Gussie” Sentner, a friend of Grace Channing Stetson who had served as Katherine’s “third mother” in Gilman’s absence (Davis 232). In fact, Katherine’s grandfather (Gilman’s father) had accompanied her on her railway journey, but the two scarcely knew each other and he “paid no attention to me,” she explained to Lane (311). Gilbert and Gubar similarly argue that “much of Gilman’s maternal theology is compensatory,” though they suggest that she was compensating for “anxiety at maternity,” especially “processes associated with conception, birth, and nursing” that she allegedly found profoundly disturbing (211). Hill points out, meanwhile, that Gilman “romanticized and sentimentalized her relationship with Katherine” in her writings, probably to assuage lingering guilt and sadness over their separations (230). On the controversy surrounding Eddy’s use of the title “Mother” and the eventual closure of the Mother’s Room, see chapter five of Stokes and Chapter One of this volume. On New Thought as “the religion of healthy-mindedness,” see William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, and Chapter Two of this volume. Absent treatment involved a mental healer sending positive thoughts and prayers to a sick person located elsewhere, sometimes thousands of miles away. Christian Scientists and New Thought followers believed in the power of thought transference to convey messages over long distances. Today, that honor might go to Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret (2006), which has sold over twenty-eight million copies worldwide according to Byrne’s website: www.thesecret.tv/about/rhonda-byrnes-biography/. Another contender is Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), which had sold over fifteen million copies by the late 1980s (Albanese 444). Ford was either unaware or unconcerned that Trine was a socialist. This example suggests how readily New Thought could be used in support of a variety of political and ideological positions. This paragraph and the following one condense arguments made in Satter, chapter one, and Davis, chapter eleven. Ward was, of course, not the first to articulate the idea of humanity’s matriarchal origins. Gilbert and Gubar explain that “sanctifyings of the maternal had appeared in the writings of European thinkers from the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who hymned the praises of ‘The Mothers’) to the Swiss jurist J. J. Bachofen (who hypothesized the originatory power of a Matriarchate)” (201).

Notes to pages 164–177

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17. Because New Thought was a many-faceted religious movement with numerous individual sects, precise membership tallies are unavailable. 18. Bellamy’s letters to Gilman are held at Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, which has helpfully digitized most of its Gilman-related holdings. These are available at http://schlesinger.radcliffe.harvard.edu/onlinecollections/gil man/. 19. Despite their eugenic emphasis, nineteenth-century reformers were not racist in a modern sense, Satter explains: “First, color was not yet seen as the exclusive marker of race. Racial categories included ‘Celt,’ ‘Gaul,’ ‘AngloSaxon,’ and ‘Teuton,’ all of whom today would be characterized as European in nationality and ‘white’ in race. Second, then, as now, there was no consistent agreement upon how the boundaries of race should be drawn . . . Finally, unlike modern white supremacists, white Protestants who believed that Anglo-Saxons had reached the pinnacle of human evolution did not necessarily despise ‘lesser’ races,” believing that these lower races could eventually ‘advance’” (305–306n). 20. On Iceland’s purported elimination of Down syndrome and the controversy surrounding it, see, for instance, Stephen Camarata’s blog post on the subject: www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-intuitive-parent/201801/icelandcures-down-syndrome-should-america-do-the-same. Accessed 10 July 2019. 21. For a fuller list of socialist reformers and woman movement leaders who were also New Thought enthusiasts, see Satter 182. 22. On other Amazonian narratives that emerged around the same time and may have influenced Herland as well as Wonder Woman, such as Inez Haynes Gillmore’s Angel Island (1914), see Lepore 86–87. 23. Suvin first introduced this term in Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (Yale University Press, 1979). 24. Though Gilman was a self-proclaimed socialist, critics such as Delores Hayden and Carol Kessler argue that she promoted a form of benevolent, grassroots capitalism that defied corporate hegemony (Kessler 57, 269n). 25. To some extent, Bellamy addressed feminist concerns in Looking Backward, whose women of the year 2000 work outside the home and perform little housework within it. But the book also expresses chauvinist views about women’s inferior strength and limited ability (Davis 123–124). In the Herland trilogy, Gilman would move beyond Bellamy’s ambivalent feminism to imagine a more egalitarian society. 26. As Michael Robertson suggests, “Herland became the most popular of Gilman’s utopian fictions in part because it does not foreground the eugenic regime that is directly addressed in Moving the Mountain or the nativism and anti-Semitism that permeate With Her in Ourland” (217). For detailed analyses of the trilogy’s racial bias and eugenic thinking, see,

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27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35.

Notes to pages 177–189 for instance, Robertson 214–221, Kessler 60 and 76–77, and Davis 302–307. On the eroticism of the above passages, see Gough 203 and Robertson 213. By “bisexual,” Gilman indicates reproduction involving both sexes, not the modern meaning of the term (that is, a person who feels sexual attraction to both males and females). According to Val Gough, Jeff may have been based on Gilman’s first husband, Walter Stetson, who likewise idolized his wife while confining her to traditional gender roles (210n). For the full transcript of Gilman’s December 3, 1890 letter – in which she declares her passionate love for Channing and laments that she is not able to marry her – see Selected Letters 87–88. Davis notes that “Ironically, given Katherine’s own upbringing, [The Forerunner cover] depicts an intact family” (289). On Mitchell’s outdoor or camp cures, see, for instance, his Nurse and Patient, and Camp Cure (1877); on the similar West Cure for neurasthenic men, see Stiles, “Go West Young Man.” For a more optimistic reading of the conclusion to With Her in Ourland, see Deegan 47–48. Laura Donaldson reminds us that the fin-de-siècle and the First World War tended to inspire dystopian, rather than utopian fiction. One thinks, for instance, of Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), London’s The Iron Heel (1908), Forster’s “The Machine Stops” (1909), or Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1924), to name only a few examples (373). On prosperity gospel, see Bowler; on New Thought in Oprah’s television empire, see Travis, chapter six.

Epilogue: The Cinematic Afterlife of New Thought Fiction 1. While not all subscribers to Daily Word were members of Unity Church, they were presumably interested in New Thought and its practical applications. The publication consisted of “a small monthly pamphlet with a daily affirmation, short related discourse, and scriptural verse” (Albanese 434). 2. Unfortunately, Anne of Windy Poplars (1940) was a flop, losing $176,000 for RKO studios. Jewell and Harbin blame the film’s “mawkish sentimentality and tedious construction” for its failure (149). 3. In her autobiography, Shirley Temple Black reveals how her $3,207,666 in gross earnings were mismanaged by her father, leaving her with a mere $44,000 when she reached adulthood (482, 486). 4. Since records have been kept in 1932, Temple is the only child star to top Quigley’s list of box-office stars (Hatch 1).

Notes to pages 189–198

217

5. 20th Century Fox was awarded $5,250 in punitive damages, while Temple herself received $7,000 (Black 185–186). 6. The most challenging scenes were those where Cedric and Dearest appear together. Since both characters were played by Pickford, this required complicated double exposures that took hours to film. 7. For instance, New York Times drama critic Frank Nugent unflatteringly called Temple “Little Miss Precocity” in response to her 1936 film Dimples (qtd. in Black 144). 8. On Temple as heir to Pickford’s cinematic legacy – with key differences – see chapter one of Hatch. 9. For a different reading of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, see Stoneley, who argues that Rebecca successfully monetizes her “revitalizing pastoral energy” and that the novel highlights the compatibility of Romanticism and commercialism (68). If one accepts this reading, then Temple’s film is surprisingly faithful to the spirit of Wiggin’s original. 10. Ehrenreich and Berlant’s arguments are described in the Introduction to this book.

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Index

Abrams, Jeremiah, 27 adoption, 29, 118, 134, 136, 147, 194 adoption narratives, 136, 194 afterlife, the, 16, 124, 126, 160, 167, 211 Ahlstrom, Sydney, 132 Ainslee Stories (Campbell), 166 Albanese, Catherine, 4, 67, 96, 168, 175, 201 Alcoholics Anonymous, 31, 32, 131 Alcott, Louisa May, 27 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll), 102 Allan, Mr. (Anne of Green Gables), 142 Altar at Home, The: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion (Stokes), 5 American Conservative, The, 198 American Dream, the, 13 American Magazine, The, 21, 103, 105 American Monthly Magazine, 84 American Scene, The (James), 64 American, The (James), 61 Andrews, Eliza (Anne of Avonlea), 144 androgyny, 76, 96, 112, 113 Angel Island (Haynes), 215 “Anglo-Indian,” 209 animal magnetism, 8, 9 Anne of Avonlea (Montgomery), 117, 144–146 Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery), x, 2 Calvinism and, 18 clashes with religion in, 141 composition of, 212 motivation for sequels to, 144 movie adaptations of, 188 New Thought and, 21, 120, 121, 134, 136, 141, 142, 146 optimism of, 134 popularity of, 19, 117, 211 publication of, 117, 124 Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and, 23 Sara Crewe and, 52 Anne of Ingleside (Montgomery), 147 Anne of the Island (Montgomery), 138

Anne of Windy Poplars (Montgomery), 153, 188 Anne with an “E”, 118, 197, 198 Anne’s House of Dreams (Montgomery), 138, 147 Ardath (Corelli), 126 Arena, The, 165 arsenic, 209 “Art of Fiction, The” (James), 62 “Aspern Papers, The,” 61 Atlantic Monthly, The, 68 Atwood, Margaret, 137 Audacious Kids: The Classic American Children’s Story (Griswold), 6 “Aunt Mary’s Pie Plant” (Gilman), 173 autism, 106, 209 autosuggestion, 128, 130, 131, 133, 140 Avonlea, 18 Awkward Age, The (James), 62 Babbitt (Lewis), 14 “Baby Take a Bow,” 192 Bachofen, J. J., 214 Baclé, Louis Lucien, 125 Banta, Martha, 61 Barrie, J. M., 27 Barry, Diana (Anne of Green Gables), 22, 121, 138 Barry, Josephine (Anne of Green Gables), 137, 143 Barry, Minnie May (Anne of Green Gables), 137 Battle Creek Sanitarium, the, 201 Beard, George Miller, 10, 99 Beecher, Henry Ward, 161 Beecher, Lyman, 156, 161 Bell, Hugh, 63 Bell, Lilian, 6, 138, 207 Bellamy, Edward, 164, 215 Berlant, Lauren, 13, 198 Bernheim, Hyppolite, 127 Bible, the, 33, 92, 141, 152, 197, 203, 204 bibliotherapy, 118 Biedenharn, Isabella, 198 Bildungsroman, 45, 51 biological change, 165

235

236

Index

bipolar disorder, 20, 90, 116, 156, 208 Birch, Reginald, 33, 43 Bixler, Phyllis, 103, 105 Black Album (Metallica), 13 Black, Shirley Temple, 216 Blake, William, 27 Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Bowler), 4 Blue Castle, The (Montgomery), 22, 146, 147–153 Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood (Wilson), 5 Blythe, Gilbert (the Anne series), 22, 138, 143, 145 Bookman, The, 84, 113 Borderson, Dr. Frank (Moving the Mountain), 174 Boston Evening Transcript, the, 66 Boston Evening Traveller, the, 68 Bostonians, The (James), 20, 67, 82 Bowler, Kate, 4 Bowman, Leonora (Anne of Avonlea), 146 Braden, Charles, 4, 121, 200 Bradshaw, John, 25, 32 Breaking Bad, 197 Breuer, Josef, 183 Bright Eyes, 189, 192 Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America (Ehrenreich), 4 British Fabian Society, the, 213 British Romanticism, 25 Brontë, Charlotte, 45 Brooks, Nona, 31, 188 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 124, 153 Burnett, Frances Hodgson, x, 1 awareness of contemporary medicine of, 90, 91 biographical details of, 32, 60 bipolar disorder and, 90 on childhood, 62 Christian Science and, 1, 18, 84, 85, 88, 91 context of work of, 88 depression and, 90 Eddy and, 106 fame of, 61 Gilman and, 156, 176, 213 on happiness, 89 Haworth’s and, 208 Hopkins and, 35 illness of, 86 on imagination, 46 the inner child and, 25, 32 H. James and, 54, 55, 77 mainstream medicine and, 110 on medical care, 86 mind cure and, 83 Montgomery and, 134

neurasthenia and, 90 parenting and, 70, 82 popularity of, 83 protagonists of novels of, 96 relationship with son of, 41, 42, 80 rest cure and, 21, 86, 88, 92, 97, 109, 210 on royal birthright, 72 as target of James’s criticism, 63 Wilde and, 39, 74 Burnett, Lionel, 41, 42, 55, 86, 209 Burnett, Swan, 86 Burnett, Vivian bipolar disorder and, 90 Christian Science and, 83, 84 Cedric Errol and, 41 Little Lord Fauntleroy and, 69, 80 on mother’s ill health, 89 relationship with mother of, 41 on the success of A Little Princess, 49 Burnham, Clara Louise, 6, 123, 137, 207 Butler, Kate Macdonald, 115 Byrne, Rhonda, 3, 7, 214 Cady, H. Emilie, 168 Call, Annie, 95 Calvinism in Anne of Green Gables, 18, 134, 141 Christian Science and, 201 Montgomery and, 124 New Thought and, 10–12, 65, 119, 160 predestination and, 141 Camarata, Stephen, 215 Campbell, Fredericka, 139, 146 Campbell, Helen, 166, 167 capitalism, 15 Carlson, Katherine, 36, 52 Carman, Bliss, 125, 131, 148 Carnegie, Andrew, 13, 101, 188 Carolina Lee (Bell), 6, 123, 138 Carrisford, Thomas (Sara Crewe), 44, 51, 73 Carroll, Lewis, 102 Cassell’s Household Guide, 78 Channing, Grace, 214 Chapin, Mary E. T., 142 Chicago Post, The, 84 child labor, 194 child prostitution, 72, 73 childbirth, 129 children in the Bible, 29 Burnett and, 42 changing attitudes towards, 203 Christian Science and, 12, 13 corruption of, 58 divinity and, 27

Index divinity of, 194 Eddy on, 29, 37, 70, 102, 178 Freud on, 28 gender norms and, 73 Gilman and, 176 the Great Depression and, 188 healing and, 6, 88, 89 Hopkins on, 57 idealization of, 21, 27, 28, 42, 53, 59, 82, 102, 156 innocence of, 30 H. James and, 19, 21, 60, 62, 76, 80 magical thinking and, 7 the Man Child and, 30, 59 parenting and, 29, 41, 70, 77, 78, 79 psychological views of, 28 in Romantic poetry, 126 self-care and, 26 self-governance and, 30, 79 spontaneity and, 149 symbolic value of, 68 women and, 26 children’s literature, 22, 28, 63, 190, 191, 200 children’s literature studies, 6 Children’s Star, The, 6 cholera, 210 Christ Child, the, 27 Christian Science on the Allness of the Good, 168 Burnett and, 33, 63, 84, 85, 88, 91, 92 Calvinism and, 201 Chronicles of Avonlea and, 129 as context, 88 the Emmanuel Movement and, 131 fear and, 37 female membership of, 164 founding of, 1 Gilman and, 159, 169 on good health and fearlessness, 37 growth of, 2 Herland and, 179 homeopathy and, 111 homosexuality and, 213 Hudson and, 130 the inner child and, 25 H. James and, 82 W. James and, 65, 66 H. James, Sr. and, 64 on matter, 85 mesmerism and, 9 Montgomery and, 129, 130, 152 Moving the Mountain and, 173 New Thought and, 35, 45, 85, 187 New Thought scholarship and, 5 New Women and, 30 obstetrics and, 129

237

other New Thought ministries and, 10 placebo effect and, 12 popularity of, 85, 97, 121 refusal of medical assistance and, 12 on royal birthright, 38 on the rest cure, 95 The Secret Garden and, 88, 208 services of, 204 as topic for literary criticism, x trademarking of, 35 the woman movement and, 162 women and, 88 as women’s movement, 164 Christian Science Church Manual, 201 Christian Science Journal, The, 68 Christian Science Monitor, The, 129 Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America (Schoepflin), 5 Christian Science Sentinel, 6 Christianity, 104, 160 Chronicles of Avonlea (Montgomery), 129, 212 Church of the Healing Christ, the, 31, 187 Civil War, the, 10, 87, 209 clairvoyance, 130, 131 Clark, Beverly Lyon, 36, 38, 52, 63 class consciousness, 171 Class Lessons (Hopkins), 47 Cleveland Street scandal, the, 74 cognitive behavioral therapy, 172 Corelli, Marie, 126 corporate downsizing, 15 Coué, Emile, 132 courage, 37 Coveney, Peter, 73 Crane, Anne Moncure, 56 Craven, Archibald (The Secret Garden), 21, 89, 104, 107, 111 Craven, Colin (The Secret Garden) androgyny of, 113 back brace of, 210 L. Burnett and, 193 gender and, 113 healing and, 89 healing of, 1, 4, 6, 111 as inner child, 105 Mary Lennox and, 106 New Thought and, 112 as New Thought paragon, 113 preoccupation with death of, 110 the rest cure and, 21 rose cold and, 108 roses and, 109 wheelchair of, 210 Craven, Dr. (The Secret Garden), 109, 110 Craven, Lilias (The Secret Garden), 107

238

Index

Crawford, Mrs. (The Secret Garden), 106 creative visualization, 46, 47 Crewe, Captain Ralph (Sara Crewe), 44 Crewe, Sara (A Little Princess), 50, 135 Crewe, Sara (Sara Crewe) Anne of Green Gables and, 126 creative visualization of, 47 Cedric Errol and, 45 Jane Eyre and, 45 Fauntleroy and, 43, 49 imagination and, 140 as imperfect heroine, 50 A Little Princess and, 50 royal birthright and, 45 silence and, 47 story of, 44 as thinly veiled Burnett, 49 Cruel Optimism (Berlant), 13 Culture of Recovery, The (Rapping), 26 Cure Within, The: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (Harrington), 4 Cuthbert, Marilla (Anne of Green Gables), 134, 135, 137, 142, 143 Cuthbert, Matthew (Anne of Green Gables), 52, 134, 137 D. Appleton and Co., 123 Daddy-Long-Legs (Webster), 135 daffodils, 108 daily affirmations, 133 Daily Word, 9, 187 Daisy Miller (James), 56, 61 Dass, Ram (Sara Crewe), 51 Davis, Cynthia J., 157 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 56, 94 Davy (Anne of Avonlea), 145 Dawn of a To-morrow, The (Burnett) Burnett’s depression and, 99 Christianity and, 98 Dickon (The Secret Garden) and, 113 faith healing and, 98 hysterical men in, 98 mainstream medicine and, 88, 95 male protagonist of, 96 mind cure and, 83 Mitchell and, 99 as New Thought novel, 97, 101 popularity of, 97 religious content of, 83 rest cure and, 88, 114 reviews of, 84 Science and Health and, 104 The Secret Garden and, 101, 103 Deegan, Mary Jo, 167 Delsartean movement, 212

denial, 12, 180 depression American neurology and, 99 Anne of Green Gables and, 118 Burnett and, 1, 33, 41, 86, 89, 90, 99, 205 Butler and, 115 T. Carrisford (Sara Crewe) and, 73 Christian Science and, 88 A. Craven (The Secret Garden) and, 21, 89 Eddy and, 92 Ellador (Herland) and, 185 Gilman and, 157, 160, 183 Holt (The Dawn of a To-morrow) and, 99 R. James and, 59 W. James and, 66 Macdonald and, 213 Montgomery and, 115, 116 Woolf and, 94 depth psychology, 128 Dickens, Charles, 102 Dickon (The Secret Garden), 108, 111, 113 disability, 88, 96, 97, 112, 113 disability studies, 112, 209 Disney, Walt, 197 Dissociation of a Personality (Prince), 132 divine inflow, 165, 168 divine love, 56 Divine Science Federation International, 9 Dollar, Creflo, 3 Dora (Anne of Avonlea), 145 Doskow, Minna, 171, 172 Douglas, Lord Alfred, 75 Down syndrome, 166, 215 Dresser, Annetta, 2, 66 Dresser, Horatio, 66 Dresser, Julius, 2, 8 dropsy, 210 Du Maurier, George, 126 Dunn, James, 192 Duvernet, Sylvia, 146, 153 Each Mind a Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875–1920 (Satter), 4, 6, 147 eclecticism, 104 Eddy, Mary Baker, ix, 208 against mesmerism, 9 autism and, 209 Burnett and, 1, 84, 104, 106 Calvinism of, 201 on children, 37, 57, 102 disillusionment with Congregationalist faith of, 10 Father-Mother God of, 39, 74, 163 on fear, 37, 152

Index Gilman and, 159, 162, 170, 176 H. James and, 68 on Hell, 98, 211 Herland and, 155 homosexuality and, 212 on illness, 109 on Jesus, 124 Little Lord Fauntleroy and, 35 mainstream medicine and, 150 on marriage, 163 Mary Lennox (The Secret Garden) and, 21, 105, 106, 107 McClure’s biography of, 84 Milmine and, 30 on mind and body, 8 Montgomery and, 124 on moral contagion, 78 as Mother, 29, 160 on motherhood, 178 Moving the Mountain and, 173, 174 on parenting, 29 as part of the New Thought movement, 5 psychological distress of, 211 Quimby and, 2 on the rest cure, 95 roses and, 153 as sentimental writer, 170 The Secret Garden and, 111 spontaneous healing of, 105 Twain and, 29 Edel, Leon, 75 Edward Burton (Wood), 11, 18 Edwards, Jonathan, 10 faith healing, 4 effeminacy, 74 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 4, 12, 15, 65, 198, 201 Ellador (Herland trilogy), 182, 185 Elmo, Ann, 188 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 64, 126 Emily of New Moon (Montgomery), 141 Emmanuel method, the, 131 Emmanuel Movement, the, 131 English climate, 209 entertainment, 16 Entertainment Weekly, 198 Epperly, Elizabeth, 145 Ermengarde (Sara Crewe), 44 Errol, Cedric (Little Lord Fauntleroy), 135 androgyny of, 38, 40, 74 Vivian Burnett and, 33, 41 Sara Crewe and, 45 fearlessness of, 37 Man Child and, 35 Miles (Turn of the Screw) and, 57, 81 as New Thought exemplar, 36

239

relationship with mother of, 38, 57, 69, 80 vigilance of, 37 escapism, 192 Esmeralda (Burnett), 55, 63 Essays (Emerson), 126 eugenics, 132, 166, 176, 179 Evans, Warren Felt, 2, 37 evil, 46, 78 extra-sensory perception, 131 Faderman, Lillian, 138 Fair Barbarian, A (Burnett), 61, 213 faith healing Anne of Green Gables and, 137 The Dawn of a To-morrow and, 98 Gilman and, 161 Hudson and, 128 mainstream medicine and, 86 Montgomery and, 125 New Thought and, 18 the power of suggestion and, 127 The Secret Garden and, 1, 4, 89 Farange, Maisie (What Maisie Knew), 62 Farlow, Alfred, 84 Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 123 Fat and Blood, and How to Make Them (Mitchell), 87 Father-Mother God, 29, 39, 74, 160, 163, 179 fathermothergod: My Journey Out of Christian Science (Greenhouse), 5 fear, 37, 152, 176 Fechner, Gustav, 131 Female Man, The (Russ), 180 feminism, 14, 18, 26, 156, 162 Fiamingo, Janice, 117 Flatley, Jonathan, 71 Flora (The Turn of the Screw) breakdown of, 72, 81 C. Errol (Little Lord Fauntleroy) and, 81 demeanor of, 70 the inner child and, 73 Miss Jessel and, 58 Little Lord Fauntleroy and, 69 parenting and, 78 as peripheral to drama of story, 73 relationship with governess of, 73 royal birthright and, 71, 72 Flower, Benjamin Orange, 165 Ford, Henry, 101, 162, 214 Forerunner, The, 22, 159, 170 Foster, Shirley, 97, 209 Fox, Emmet, 25, 31, 38, 187, 188 Franken, Al, 17, 24 Fraser, Caroline, 5, 12, 85 Freckles (Stratton-Porter), 135

240

Index

free market, the, 16 Freud, Sigmund, 28, 183 Fridlund, Emily, 12 Fröbel, Friedrich, 174 Frye, Calvin, 84 Future Life in the Light of Ancient Wisdom and Modern Science (Baclé), 125 “Future of the Novel, The” (James), 63 Gadot, Gal, 171 Galton, Sir Francis, 166 Galvan, Jill, 65 Gammel, Irene, 139, 213 “Garden of Babies, A” (Gilman), 173 Garden of Eden, the, 107 Gates Ajar, The (Stuart Phelps), 126 gender, 40, 52, 67, 88, 89, 96, 114 gender bias, 59, 89 gender norms, 14, 36, 52, 73, 145, 211 gender politics, 21, 89 gender roles, 139, 216 genetics, 166 Gerzina, Gretchen, 19, 33, 42, 92, 97 Gestefeld, Ursula, 95, 112 “Ghostly Rental, The” (James), 61 Gilded Age, the, 10 Gilder, Richard Watson, 90 Gill, Gillian, 5, 30, 211 Gillmore, Inez Haynes, 215 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 3 Bellamy and, 165 bipolar disorder and, 156 bisexuality of, 180 Burnett and, 156, 213 Campbell and, 167 career of, 170 Christian Science and, 169 critique of religion of, 161 Eddy and, 170 eugenics and, 166 James and, 169 on maternal instinct, 163 maternal theology of, 160, 162, 169, 170 on matriarchy, 162 motherhood of, 157, 158, 214 New Thought and, 22, 155, 160, 161, 162, 167, 169, 181 the rest cure and, 88, 156, 157 secularization and, 159 on style, 19 suicide of, 156 Trine and, 168 uniqueness of, 155 utopianism of, 180 writing of children of, 158

Gilman, Houghton, 180 Glad (The Dawn of a To-Morrow), 89, 98, 101, 102, 103, 105, 113 God, 142 God Self, the, 31, 57, 102 “God that Failed, The,” 13 God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church (Fraser), 5, 12 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 214 “Gospel of Relaxation, The” (W. James), 59, 65 gospel of success, 11 Gosse, Edmund, 75 Gottschalk, Steven, 5 Gough, Val, 172, 216 Gray, Harold, 52 Great Depression, the, 15, 187 Greene, Graham, 189 Greenhouse, Lucia, 5, 12 Griswold, Jerry, 6, 88 Grose, Mrs. (The Turn of the Screw), 81 Gubar, Marah, 27, 36, 38, 138, 191 Guérillères, Les (Wittig), 180 Guy Domville (James), 56 Habegger, Alfred, 56 Hall, David, 17 Hanh, Thich Nhat, 25 happiness, 12, 24, 88, 89, 101, 153 Harley, Gail, 161 harmonial religion, 132 Harrington, Anne, ix, 4 Hatch, Kristen, 190, 192 Haworth’s (Burnett), 61, 208 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 61 Hayden, Delores, 215 Healing the Child Within (Whitfield), 25 Healing the Nation: Literature, Progress, and Christian Science (Squires), 5 Heaven, ix, 64, 136, 205 Heilbron, Alexandra, 125, 131 Hell, 98, 124, 160, 211 heredity, 166 Herland (Gilman) eugenics and, 166, 179 the Herland trilogy and, 170 marriage and, 18 on motherhood, 155 New Thought and, 155, 177 popularity of, 170, 215 style and, 19 utopianism of, 3, 22 Wonder Woman and, 171 Herland trilogy, the, 171–172, 180 Hetfield, James, 13 Hill, Mary, 158, 214

Index Hill, Napoleon, 15, 188 His Religion and Hers: A Study of the Faith of Our Fathers and the Work of Our Mothers (Gilman), 159, 169, 183 History of Wolves (Fridlund), 12 Hofstra, Marijke Gijswijt, 103 Holland, Cyril, 74 Holland, Vyvyan, 74 Holmes, Ernest, 125 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr., ix Holt, Sir Oliver (The Dawn of a To-morrow), 95, 98–101, 102, 103 Homecoming: Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child (Bradshaw), 25 homeopathy, 111 homosexuality, 56, 74, 75–76, 139, 212, 213 Hopkins, Emma Curtis Burnett and, 35 on children, 57, 102 creative visualization of, 46 infinite supply and, 47 on the Man Child, 20, 28, 30, 57 on the Mother Spirit, 164 New Thought and, 188 New Women and, 30 positive thinking and, 2, 12 Wilmans and, 147 Houghton Mifflin, 123 “How Fauntleroy Occurred, and a Very Real Little Boy Became an Ideal One” (Burnett), 41, 80 Howe, Julia Ward, ix Howells, William Dean, 186 Hudson, Thomas Jay, 125, 127, 130–131, 140 Huggins, Mary Kathleen, 209 Hughes, Felicity, 63 Hull House, 167 Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death (Myers), 132 “Hurrying of Ludovic, The” (Montgomery), 129 Huysman, Joris-Karl, 75 I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional (Kaminer), 24 I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone it, People Like Me! (Franken), 24 illness Burnett and, 85, 86, 88 C. Craven (The Secret Garden) and, 109, 111 Eddy and, 85 false belief and, 8 fear and, 109, 152 Montgomery and, 210 positive thinking and, 210 principle of simila and, 110

241

the rest cure and, 114 imagination, 46, 140 immigration, 176 In Connection with the DeWilloughby Claim (Burnett), 90 In Tune with the Infinite (Trine), 107, 162, 168 India, 209 infinite supply, 47, 168 inner child theory, 24 inner child, the Burnett’s later work and, 102 contemporary significance of, 32 Sara Crewe and, 44, 49 current misrepresentation of, 42 defined, 24 female versions of, 43 feminism and, 26 Flora (The Turn of the Screw) and, 73 Fox on, 31 genealogy of, 25 Glad (The Dawn of a To-Morrow) and, 103 historicization of, 32 idealization of, 28, 42 lineage of, 42 Little Lord Fauntleroy and, 36 masculinity and, 26 origins of, 20 persistence of, 43 popularity of, 52, 83 psychoanalysis and, 28 resurgence of, 43 The Secret Garden and, 104 sources of, 102 Shirley Temple and, 189 as trope of pop culture, 24 as true self, 17 Whitfield on, 32 inner nobility, 44 insomnia autosuggestion and, 128 Burnett and, 1, 33, 41, 86, 89 Hudson and, 128 W. James and, 66 Mitchell and, 87 Montgomery and, 126, 128 International New Thought Alliance, the, 85 Irving, Paul (Anne of Avonlea), 145 Irving, Stephen (Anne of Avonlea), 145 Jakes, T. D., 3 James, Henry biographical details of, 60 Burnett and, 54, 55, 77 Burnett as target of criticism of, 63 on childhood, 62

242 James, Henry (cont.) Christian Science and, 82 gender bias of, 59 the inner child and, 53 Little Lord Fauntleroy and, 54 New Thought and, x, 3, 54, 59, 67, 80, 82 optimism of, 64 parenting and, 80, 81 realism of, 62 religious interests of, 64, 67 romanticism of, 61 the Second Great Awakening and, 64 sexual orientation of, 207 spiritual upbringing of, 59 Spiritualism and, 67 the Wilde trials and, 74, 75 writing about children, 62 James, Robertson, 59 James, William Christian Science and, 65, 66, 81 Gilman and, 169 on mind cure, ix, 84, 98, 207 New Thought and, 10, 65 on the power of suggestion, 172 spiritualism of, 54, 59, 64 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 45 Jenkins, Dr. Stephen R., 116 Jessel, Miss (The Turn of the Screw), 58, 72, 78 Jesus, 124 Jewel (Burnham), 6, 18, 137 “Jolly Corner, The” (James), 61 Jordan, Elizabeth Garver, 64, 91 Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, 67 Jung, Carl, 25, 28 Kaminer, Wendy, 24 Kansas City Post, the, 98 Kasson, John, 187, 192 Kaufmann, Michael, 15 Keith, Lois, 88 Kessler, Carol Farley, 171, 172, 176, 180, 215 Keyser, Elizabeth, 97 Kidd, Kenneth, 28 Kincaid, James, 58, 189 King, Mary Perry, 132 Koppes, Phyllis Bixler, 51 Koradine Letters (Stockham and Talbot), 6, 18, 96, 112, 212 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 76 Kroom, Murva (The Woman Who Dares), 96 L.C. Page, 122, 123, 131, 144 Ladd, Adam (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), 22 Lady of Quality, A (Burnett), 213 Lane, Ann, 158

Index Language of the Heart, The: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey (Travis), 5 LaPorte, Charles, 16 Laski, Marghanita, 103 law of attraction, the, 7, 15 Laws of Psychic Phenomena, The: A Working Hypothesis for the Systemic Study of Hypnotism, Spiritualism, Mental Therapeutics, Etc. (Hudson), 125, 127, 129 Lecourt, Sebastian, 16 Leete, Dr. (Looking Backward), 164 Lefurgey, Nora, 139 Lennox, Mary (The Secret Garden) autism and, 209 Burnett and, 86 Colin Craven and, 106 Craven’s healing and, 111 disagreeableness of, 106, 110 as Eddy, 21, 105, 107 Glad (The Dawn of a To-morrow) and, 105 healing and, 1, 89, 102 illness of, 104 the inner child and, 105 New Thought and, 112 parenting and, 80 Lepore, Jill, 171 Leprosy of Miriam, The (Gestefeld), 112 Leslie, Elsie, 190 Lessons in Truth (Cady), 168 Lewis, Lavendar (Anne of Avonlea), 145 Lewis, Sinclair, 14 Liébeault, Ambroise-August, 127 Little Colonel, The, 189 Little Engine that Could, The (Munk), 3 Little Hell, 167, 175 Little Lord Fauntleroy (Burnett) Anne of Green Gables and, 126 Burnett’s depression and, 91 Burnett’s later work and, 102 Burnett’s legacy and, 33 Burnett’s sons and, 158 Eddy and, 35 influence of, 52 the inner child and, 20, 25, 32, 57 H. James and, 54 A Little Princess and, 51 the Man Child and, 20 Montgomery and, 126 parenting and, 77 popularity of, 2, 36, 55, 83 The Turn of the Screw and, 19, 21, 56, 58, 61, 69, 81 the Wonder Child and, 38 Little Miss Marker, 192

Index Little Nell (The Old Curiosity Shop), 102 Little Orphan Annie, 52 Little Princess, A (Burnett), 2, 26, 43, 51, 71 Little Princess, The, 189, 196 Little Unfairy Princess, A (Burnett), 49 Little Women (Alcott), 143 lived religion, 17 Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The (Gilman), 156 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, ix Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (Bellamy), 164, 173, 215 love Anne of Green Gables and, 141 as armor, 48 The Blue Castle and, 153 of children, 136 fear and, 152 God as, 10, 12 in Herland, 178 New Thought and, 101 parenting and, 79 Victoria True and, 51 Love, Medicine, and Miracles (Siegel), 4 Lynde, Rachel (Anne of Green Gables), 121, 122, 134, 141, 142, 143 Macdonald, Ewen, 115, 116, 118, 120 MacLulich, T. D., 143 Macneill, Amanda, 139 Macneill, Penzie, 139 magic, 54, 95 magical thinking, 7, 103, 140 Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, The (Stead), 72 mainstream medicine, 9, 86, 104, 109, 114, 150, 152, 210 Making of Personality, The (Carman), 125, 131 Malicious Animal Magnetism, 106 Man Child, the Sara Crewe as, 73 Eddy and, 28 Flora (The Turn of the Screw) and, 73 gender and, 52 Hopkins on, 30, 31 idealization of, 42, 102 Little Lord Fauntleroy and, 35, 38 Miles (The Turn of the Screw) as, 70 relationship with mother of, 40 relationship with mothers of, 28 as spiritual center, 57 Shirley Temple as, 193 The Turn of the Screw and, 69, 81 Marquis, Claudia, 97 Marsh, Dr. Ambrose (The Blue Castle), 150, 151

243

Marston, William Moulton, 171 Marthy (Little Miss Marker), 192 Mary Baker Eddy (Gill), 5 Mason, Ameila Gere, 94 maternal instinct, 163 maternal love, 19, 106, 107, 162, 163, 181 maternal theology, 160, 162, 169, 170 Matheson, Neill, 75, 76 “Matriatism” (Gilman), 163 matter, 8, 108, 130, 201 Matthew 22:30, 163 McClure’s Magazine, 30, 84, 106 McCutcheon, Russel, 15 medical humanities, 6 Medlock, Mrs. (The Secret Garden), 109 mental healing, 128, 129, 130 mental illness, 20, 88, 90, 91, 115, 151, 156, 208, 210, 212 Mental Science, 108 Merritt, Loop (Bright Eyes), 192 Merton, Tommy, 96, 113 mesmerism, 5, 8, 9 Metallica, 13 Meyer, Donald, 4 mid-life crisis, 99 Miles (The Turn of the Screw) androgyny of, 75 C. Errol (Little Lord Fauntleroy) and, 57, 68, 81 death of, 81 demeanor of, 70, 71 Little Lord Fauntleroy and, 69 as Man Child, 70 parenting and, 78 Quint and, 58 royal birthright and, 71, 72 the Wilde trials and, 75 Miller, Alice, 25 Mills, Hayley, 23, 197 Milmine, Georgine, 29, 30, 207 Minchin, Miss (A Little Princess), 50 Minchin, Miss (Sara Crewe), 44, 45, 46 mind cure as alternative to harsher treatments, 14 in Anne of Green Gables, 137 in The Bostonians, 68 Burnett and, 83 coining of, ix defined, 2 in history of science, ix W. James and, 66, 98 Montgomery and, 123 the power of suggestion and, 172 social change and, 175 Mind Cure in New England (Parker), 4

244

Index

Mitchell, Silas Weir, 10, 21, 86, 87, 91, 93, 99, 114, 156, 183, 209 Modernism, 154 modernization, 16 Montaubyn, Jinny (The Dawn of a To-Morrow), 98, 100, 101, 104 Montessori, Maria, 174 Macdonald, Chester, 115, 151 Montgomery, L. M., x, 201 autosuggestion and, 132 biographical details of, 116 Burnett and, 134 Calvinism and, 123 Christian Science and, 129, 130, 152 depression of, 115, 116 Eddy and, 124 Emerson and, 126 the Emmanuel Movement and, 131 on fear, 152 Gilman and, 156 Hudson and, 126, 128, 130 on the inner child, 27 insomnia of, 128 on Jesus, 124 mainstream medicine and, 152 The Making of Personality and, 131 migraines of, 128 mood swings of, 116 New Thought and, 119, 121, 131, 133, 146, 149, 152 on New Thought and Presbyterianism, 21 personal stressors of, 213 Presbyterianism of, 119, 123 prophetic dreams of, 131 “queerness” of, 139 religious seeking of, 124, 125, 146 religious views of, 11 Romanticism and, 126 suicide of, 115 upbringing of, 121, 122 Weber and, 126 Moore, Leslie (Rainbow Valley), 147 Moore, R. Laurence, 127 moral contagion, 78 Mother Spirit, 178, 179 motherhood, 156, 178 Mount Auburn Cemetery, ix, x Moving the Mountain (Gilman), 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 94 muckraking, 5 Mudge, Mrs. Opal Emerson (Babbitt), 14 Myers, Frederic W. H., 76, 132

Nelson, Claudia, 38, 136 neurasthenia Beard’s introduction of, 99 in The Blue Castle, 148, 153 of Burnett, 90 in Burnett’s fiction, 114 class and, 103 in The Dawn of a To-morrow, 100 Edward Burton and, 11 Gliman and, 183, 184 W. James and, 66 mainstream medicine and, 104 Mitchell and, 87, 93 Montgomery and, 11, 116 New Thought and, 14 in The Secret Garden, 96 as sign of cultural superiority, 99 somatic basis of, 87 The Dawn of a To-morrow and, 88 new Gilded Age, the, 13 New Thought on the afterlife, 211 Anne of Avonlea and, 145, 146 Anne of Green Gables and, 136, 138, 142, 143, 144, 146 attractiveness of, 14, 15 in The Blue Castle, 147, 150 Burnett and, 33, 85, 102 Calvinism and, 10, 12, 18, 65, 119 capitalism and, 16 children and, 68 Christian Science and, 9, 35, 85 Christianity and, 45 circa 1900, 6 the Civil War and, 10 compatibility with other religious beliefs of, 11 as complement to Protestant belief, 11 as context, 88 creative visualization and, 46 criticisms of, 112 defined, 2 denial and, 180 different names of, 199 disability and, 113 eclecticism and, 34, 104 the Emmanuel Movement and, 131 evil and, 46, 78 extra-sensory perception and, 131 fear and, 37 female membership of, 67 feminism and, 14, 156 fiction and, 16 gender and, 113 Gilman and, 159, 160, 161, 162, 167, 169, 181 on good health and fearlessness, 37

Index the Great Depression and, 187, 188 growth of, 2, 121, 187 happiness and, 12 harms of, 12 Herland and, 155, 179 in the Herland trilogy, 172, 175, 177 histories of, 4 Holt (The Dawn of a To-morrow) and, 100 homeopathy and, 111 homosexuality and, 139 Hudson and, 126 idealization of children of, 42 ideology and, 214 imagination and, 46, 140 infinite supply and, 47 the inner child and, 17, 20, 25, 32, 104 H. James and, 54, 59, 67, 80, 82 W. James and, 65–66 Jesus and, 124 the law of attraction and, 7 M. Lennox (The Secret Garden) and, 112 Little Lord Fauntleroy and, 36 on loving thoughts about one’s enemy, 51 magical thinking and, 7 The Making of Personality and, 132 the Man Child and, 40, 57, 81 on Matter, 201 on meditation, 48 Mental Science and, 108 mesmerism and, 8 Montgomery and, 119, 121, 131, 133, 146, 149, 152 neglect of amongst literary critics, 5 the new Gilded Age and, 13 New Women and, 30 as obscuring inequality, 13 opportunities for women in, 14 opposition to Christianity of, 11 parenting and, 41, 70, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81 persistence of, 16 placebo effect and, 12 in popular culture, 188 popular psychology and, 16 popularity amongst medical doctors of, 4 popularity of, 7, 9, 83, 85, 98, 200 pragmatic value of, 98 Presbyterianism and, 143 prominent ministries of, 9 Protestantism and, 98, 120 reach of, 18 rest cure and, 95 on royal birthright, 38, 44, 45, 58 royal birthright and, 71 Sara Crewe and, 45 The Secret Garden and, 108 secular context of, 7

245

set of beliefs of, 10 on silence, 47 social change and, 172 social control and, 12 socialism and, 164, 165, 166 soft power and, 14 Soul Garden and, 107 spontaneity and, 149 stages of, 175 television personalities and, 3 Shirley Temple and, 189 on thoughts as things, 175 as topic for literary criticism, x The Turn of the Screw and, 59, 69, 70, 71, 76, 82 twentieth-century shifts in, 96 usefulness of, 14 Winfrey and, 216 the woman movement and, 162 women and, 88 as women’s movement, 164 New Thought fiction, 5, 17, 95, 121, 122, 136, 137 New Thought films, 197 New Thought literature, 16, 95, 96, 101, 102 New Thought novels, 3, 112, 120, 146 New Thought scholarship, 5 New Thought success literature, 15 New Women, 30 New York Times, The, 135 Newman, Anna B., 33 Nicholls, George Jr., 153 Nineteenth-Century Literature, 16 Noonan, Mark, 61 Nugent, Frank, 217 Nye, Joseph, 199 O’Day, Dawn, 153, 188 obedience, 78 “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” (Wordsworth), 27, 126 Ohi, Kevin, 71 Old Curiosity Shop, The (Dickens), 102 On the Way There (Yates), 6 One I Knew the Best of All, The: A Memory of the Mind of a Child (James), 62, 213 Oprah’s Book Club, 3, 5 Osteen, Joel, 3 Ouija boards, 125 “Our Better Halves” (Ward), 162 Pall Mall Gazette, The, 63 Parker, Gail Thain, 4, 161 parthenogenesis, 22, 179 Partlow, Frances, 79 Peale, Norman Vincent, 4, 11, 15, 197, 214 Perkins, Frankie Beecher Johnson, 161

246 Peters, Tom, 15 Phaedo (Plato), 27 Phantasms of the Living, 67, 127 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 126 Pickford, Mary, 97, 187, 191, 193 Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde), 75 Pilgrim’s Progress (Bunyan), 6, 124 placebo effect, the, 12, 130, 150, 152 Plato, 27 Playfair, William Smoult, 87 Polly (The Dawn of a To-morrow), 103 Pollyanna (Porter), 2, 23, 52, 123, 197 popular psychology, 16 Porter, Eleanor H., 123 Portrait of a Lady, The (James), 56 Positive Thinkers, The (Meyer), 4 positive thinking, 210 Anne of Green Gables and, 117, 135 autosuggestion and, 133 Boston and, 122 corporate use of, 15 Gilman and, 175 Hopkins on, 12, 35 New Thought and, 15 prosperity and, 18, 96 The Secret Garden and, 210 postpartum depression, 157 Power of Positive Thinking, The (Peale), 15, 197, 214 power of suggestion, the, 127, 172 Power Through Constructive Thinking (Fox), 31, 188 Poyen, Charles, 8 prayer, 9, 10, 112 precarity, 13 predestination, 141 Presbyterian Shorter Catechism, the, 135 Presbyterianism, 123, 134, 136, 141, 142, 143 Price, Donald, 28 Prince, Morton, 132 Princess Casamassima, The (James), 61 prosperity, 18, 24, 153 prosperity gospel, 3, 15, 216 Protestantism, 98, 120, 167, 168 psychical research, 5, 62, 67 psychoanalysis, 28 “Psychology of the Child-Archetype, The” (Jung), 28 “Pupil, The” (James), 62 Pure Sociology: On the Origin and Spontaneous Development of Society (Ward), 162 Puritanism, 10 Quimby, Phineas Parkhurst, 2, 8, 105 Quint (The Turn of the Screw), 58, 72, 75, 78

Index race, 67 Radiant I AM, The (Hopkins), 31 Rainbow Valley (Montgomery), 120 Randall, Rebecca Rowena (Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), 193 Rapping, Elayne, 26 “Real Right Thing, The” (James), 61 Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Wiggin), 2, 22, 23, 52, 143, 195 Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child (Hanh), 25 Redfern, Dr. (The Blue Castle), 148, 150, 152 religion, 15, 16, 149 “Religion of Healthy Mindedness, The” (W. James), 65 Religious Science, 9, 126 religious studies, 17 Republic of Mind and Spirit, A: A Cultural History of American Metaphysical Religion (Albanese), 4 rest cure, the authoritarian nature of, 93 Burnett and, 86, 88, 92, 97, 109, 210 Christian Science and, 21 gender politics of, 21, 88, 89, 114 Gilman and, 156, 157, 213 as harrowing experience, 88 invention of, 86 popularity of, 87 punitive nature of, 94 reasons for prescription of, 209 Stowe and, 156 weight-gain and, 107 Woolf and, 94 Retrospection and Introspection (Eddy), 10, 105, 211 Revelation 3:2–3, 213 Richardson, Alan, 36 Right Knock, The (Van Anderson), 38 right living, 160, 181 Right Princess, The (Burnham), 6, 123 right thinking, 112, 144, 174, 181 Rilla of Ingleside (Montgomery), 147 Robbins, Tony, 15 Robertson, John (Moving the Mountain), 173 Robertson, Michael, 156, 177, 215 Robinson, Bill “Bojangles”, 191 Robinson, Laura, 149 Robson, Catherine, 26, 73, 102 Rockefeller, John D., 13 Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism (Gottschalk), 5 Romantic Child, the, 136, 141 Romanticism, 144, 149, 154 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 189 rose cold, 108 roses, 108, 109, 153

Index Rosicrucianism, 124, 153 Ross, Catherine Sheldrick, 118 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 27 royal birthright, 58, 71 Rubio, Mary Henley, 118, 212 Rudd, Jill, 172 Ruskin, John, 102 Russ, Joanna, 180 Salah, Christiana R., 142 Sara Crewe: or, What Happened at Miss Minchin’s (Burnett), 26 as Bildungsroman, 45 influence of, 52, 83 the inner child and, 43, 49 A Little Princess and, 51 New Thought content of, 45, 73 royal birthright and, 71 Satter, Beryl on Body and Spirit, 201 on gender, 112 on homosexuality, 139 on matriarchy, 163 on mind and matter, 201 on New Thought, 4, 65, 67, 95, 160 on racism, 215 on relationships between women in New Thought novels, 22 on soft power, 14 Saturday Night Live, 17 Schoepflin, Rennie, 5, 12 Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures (Eddy), x androgyny and, 112 The Blue Castle and, 147 Burnett and, 1, 104 Burnett’s reading of, 33 children in, 29, 102 Christian Scientists and, 92 Father-Mother God and, 163 Herland and, 22, 155 homeopathy and, 210 homosexuality and, 139 mainstream medicine and, 150 New Thought and, 17 on obstetrics, 129 on parenting, 29 Quimby and, 8 on the rest cure, 95 rose cold and, 108 on roses, 153 spontaneous healing and, 105 Scientific Christian Mental Practice (Hopkins), 35 Scribner, Charles, 97

247

Scudder, Horace, 68 Second Boer War, the, 195 Second Great Awakening, the, 64 second-wave feminism, 185 Secret Garden, The (Burnett), 21 androgyny and, 113 Burnett’s legacy and, 33, 61 categorizations of, 209 Christian Science and, 88, 104, 208 climax of, 1 The Dawn of a To-morrow and, 98, 102, 103 disability and, 112 Eddy and, 105 faith healing and, 4 feminism of, 88 gender and, 96 Glad (The Dawn of a To-morrow) and, 113 hysterical men in, 98 the inner child and, 104 magic and, 54 mainstream medicine and, 95 male protagonist of, 96 mind cure and, 83 Moving the Mountain and, 176 New Thought and, 6, 97 parenting and, 80 popularity of, 19, 103 power of, 89 religious content of, 83 the rest cure and, 21, 88, 114 reviews of, 84 Soul Garden and, 107 Trine and, 162 The Turn of the Screw and, 54, 56 working titles of, 106 Secret, The (Byrne), 3, 7, 214 secularism, 16 secularization thesis, the, 16 Sedgwick, Eve Kosovsky, 75 Seelye, John, 45, 51, 117 Seicho-No-Ie, 10, 19 Seitler, Dana, 166 self-actualization, 79 self-care, 26, 32 self-government, 79 self-hypnosis, 128 self-indulgence, 32 Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion (Coué), 132 Sentner, Augusta, 214 serenity, 65 Sermon on the Mount, The (Fox), 31, 188 Seventh-Day Adventism, 201 sexology, 138 sexual differentiation, 177

248

Index

sexual reproduction, 178 sexuality, 74, 76, 139 Sharrad, Paul, 54 Shaw, Bernard, 135 Shine, Muriel, 62 Shirley, Anne (Anne of Avonlea), 146 Shirley, Anne (Anne of Green Gables), x, 126 clashes with religion of, 141 domestication of, 143 imagination and, 140 New Thought and, 21, 143, 144 optimism of, 134 “queerness” of, 139 relationship with other girls of, 138, 140 as Romantic Child, 141 Valancy Stirling (The Blue Castle) and, 149 Showman’s Daughter, The (Burnett), 55 Shuttleworth, Sally, 71 sickness, 8 Siegel, Bernie, 4 Silberman, Steve, 9 Simons, Judy, 97, 209 “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (Edwards), 10 Small Boy and Others, A (James), 62 Smalley, Stuart (Saturday Night Live), 17, 24 Smith, Septimus Warren (Mrs. Dalloway), 94 Snaith, Barney (The Blue Castle), 148 social change, 165, 172 socialism, 157, 164, 165, 213 Society for Psychical Research, the, 64, 67, 127 soft power, 14, 199 Son of Oscar Wilde (Holland), 74 Sorrowful Jones (Little Miss Marker), 192 Sorrows of Satan, The (Corelli), 126 Soul Garden, 107, 168 Soul of Lilith, The (Corelli), 126 soul, the, 167 Sowerby, Martha (The Secret Garden), 107, 108 Sowerby, Susan (The Secret Garden), 102, 110 Spirit, 8 Spirits in Rebellion: the Rise and Development of New Thought (Braden), 4 Spiritualism, 64, 125, 211 spontaneity, 149 spontaneous healing, 105, 113 Squires, L. Ashley, 5, 35, 85, 86, 88, 98 Stacy, Miss (Anne of Green Gables), 142 Stand Up and Cheer, 189, 192 Starr, Emily (the Emily series), 131 Stead, W. T., 72 Steedman, Carolyn, 28 Steffler, Margaret, 124 Stetson, Charles Walter, 156, 157, 216 Stetson, Grace Channing, 157, 158, 214

Stetson, Katherine Beecher, 157, 158 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 61, 91 Stirling, Uncle James (The Blue Castle), 151 Stirling, Valancy (The Blue Castle), 147–149, 153 Stockham, Alice Bunker, 6, 96 Stoddard-Holmes, Martha, 111, 112 Stokes, Claudia, 5, 29 Stoneley, Peter, 217 Story Girl, The (Montgomery), 129 Story of Teddy, The (Van Anderson), 6 Stowe, Georgiana, 156 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 27, 156, 161 Strang, Lewis, 66 Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 91 Stratton-Porter, Gene, 135 strychnine, 209 subconscious, the, 212 suggestive therapeutics, 130 Suvin, Darko, 172 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 64 Talbot, Lida Hood, 96, 212 talking cure, the, 183 Tarrant, Verena (The Bostonians), 67, 68 telepathy, 127, 130, 212 Temple, Shirley, 189, 193, 194, 195 That Lass O’Lowries (Burnett), 61 Theosophy, 132, 201, 211 Think and Grow Rich (Hill), 15, 188 This Our World, In (Gilman), 157 thought-transference, 131 Through One Administration (Burnett), 61, 213 Thwaite, Ann, 103 Time Magazine, 3 Tintner, Adeline, 54 Townesend, Stephen, 86 Training of Children in the New Thought (Partlow), 79 Transcendentalism, 167, 211 Travis, Trysh, 5 Trent, Dr. (The Blue Castle), 148, 150 Trilby (du Maurier), 126 Trine, Ralph Waldo, 2, 107, 162, 214 True, Victoria (Victoria True), 48, 51 Trump, Donald, 4, 11 Turn of the Screw, The (James) ambiguity of, 69 childhood innocence and, 18, 20 Christian Science and, 82 gender norms and, 73 homosexuality and, 75 influence on Burnett of, 56 the inner child and, 53 Little Lord Fauntleroy and, 21, 58, 61, 69

Index magic and, 54 mother-son relationships and, 58 narration of, 18 New Thought and, 3, 71, 76, 82 parenting and, 77 popularity of, 19 romanticism of, 61 royal birthright and, 71 The Secret Garden and, 54 the Wilde trials and, 74, 75 Twain, Mark, 17, 29 Two Magics, The (James), 55 typhoid fever, 109 Uncle Ned (Bright Eyes), 192 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 33 unconscious, the, 127, 212 Unity Church, 9, 167, 187 Valint, Alexandra, 111 Van Anderson, Helen, 6, 30, 38, 48, 79, 95 Vanzant, Iyanla, 3, 186 Varieties of Religious Experience, The (W. James), 10, 59, 65, 172, 207 “Verse, A: Mother’s New Year’s Gift to the Little Children” (Eddy), 29 Victoria True: Or, the Journal of a Live Woman (Van Anderson), 30, 48, 79, 95, 144 Virgin Mary, the, 29 Walley-Beckett, Moira, 118, 197 Warbucks, Daddy, 52 Ward, Graham, 15 Ward, Lester Frank, 162 Watch and Ward (James), 56 Wear and Tear: or, Hints for the Overworked (Mitchell), 91, 99 Weatherstaff, Ben (The Secret Garden), 107 Webb, Myrtle, 129 Weber, Ephraim, 117, 127, 128, 131, 148 Webster, Jean, 135 Wee Willie Winkie, 189 Weil, Andrew, 4 West Cure, the, 213

249

West, Julian (Looking Backward), 164 What Maisie Knew (James), 21, 62 “‘Where is the Boy?’: The Pleasures of Postponement in the Anne of Green Gables Series” (Gubar), 138 White People, The (Burnett), 42 White, Ellen, 201 Whitfield, Charles, 25, 32 Whitwell, Dr. William, 86, 92 Wiggin, Kate Douglas, 52 Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 126 Wilde trials, the, 74, 75 Wilde, Oscar, 39, 74, 75 Wilmans, Helen, 108, 147 Wilson, Anna, 36, 38, 69 Wilson, Barbara, 5, 12 Winfrey, Oprah, 3, 186 Winnicott, Donald, 25 With her in Ourland (Gilman), 170, 181, 183, 185 Wittig, Monique, 180 woman movement, the, 162, 163, 165 Woman Who Dares, The (Gestefeld), 95 “Woman’s Utopia, A” (Gilman), 173 Women and Economics (Gilman), 170 women’s rights, 157 Wonder Child, the, 31, 38, 188, 193 Wonder Woman, 171 Wood, Henry, 2, 18 Woolf, Virginia, 94 Worcester, Reverent Elwood, 131 Wordsworth, William, 27, 126 World War I, 125, 146, 216 World War II, 13, 195 Wright, Fred (Anne of Avonlea), 146 Wright, Fred (Anne of the Island), 138 Wundt, Wilhelm, 131 Yates, Katherine, 6 “Yellow Wallpaper, The” (Gilman), 88, 155, 157, 171, 173 Zanoni (Bulwer-Lytton), 124, 153 Zieber, Miriam, 127 Ziglar, Zig, 15

cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture GENERAL EDITORS: Kate Flint, University of Southern California Clare Pettitt, King’s College London Titles published 1. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill miriam bailin, Washington University 2. Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age edited by donald e. hall, California State University, Northridge 3. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art herbert sussman, Northeastern University, Boston 4. Byron and the Victorians andrew elfenbein, University of Minnesota 5. Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and the Circulation of Books edited by john o. jordan, University of California, Santa Cruz and robert l. patten, Rice University, Houston 6. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry lindsay smith, University of Sussex 7. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield 8. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle kelly hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder 9. Rereading Walter Pater william f. shuter, Eastern Michigan University 10. Remaking Queen Victoria edited by margaret homans, Yale University and adrienne munich, State University of New York, Stony Brook 11. Disease, Desire, and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels pamela k. gilbert, University of Florida 12. Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature alison byerly, Middlebury College, Vermont 13. Literary Culture and the Pacific vanessa smith, University of Sydney 14. Professional Domesticity in the Victorian Novel Women, Work and Home monica f. cohen 15. Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and the Boundaries of Representation suzanne keen, Washington and Lee University, Virginia

16. Actresses on the Victorian Stage: Feminine Performance and the Galatea Myth gail marshall, University of Leeds 17. Death and the Mother from Dickens to Freud: Victorian Fiction and the Anxiety of Origin carolyn dever, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee 18. Ancestry and Narrative in Nineteenth-Century British Literature: Blood Relations from Edgeworth to Hardy sophie gilmartin, Royal Holloway, University of London 19. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre deborah vlock 20. After Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance john glavin, Georgetown University, Washington D C 21. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question edited by nicola diane thompson, Kingston University, London 22. Rhythm and Will in Victorian Poetry matthew campbell, University of Sheffield 23. Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War paula m. krebs, Wheaton College, Massachusetts 24. Ruskin’s God michael wheeler, University of Southampton 25. Dickens and the Daughter of the House hilary m. schor, University of Southern California 26. Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science ronald r. thomas, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut 27. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology jan-melissa schramm, Trinity Hall, Cambridge 28. Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World elaine freedgood, University of Pennsylvania 29. Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture lucy hartley, University of Southampton 30. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study thad logan, Rice University, Houston 31. Aestheticism and Sexual Parody 1840–1940 dennis denisoff, Ryerson University, Toronto 32. Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920 pamela thurschwell, University College London 33. Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature nicola bown, Birkbeck, University of London 34. George Eliot and the British Empire nancy henry The State University of New York, Binghamton 35. Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture cynthia scheinberg, Mills College, California 36. Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body anna krugovoy silver, Mercer University, Georgia

37. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust ann gaylin, Yale University 38. Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 anna johnston, University of Tasmania 39. London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885–1914 matt cook, Keele University 40. Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland gordon bigelow, Rhodes College, Tennessee 41. Gender and the Victorian Periodical hilary fraser, Birkbeck, University of London judith johnston and stephanie green, University of Western Australia 42. The Victorian Supernatural edited by nicola bown, Birkbeck College, London carolyn burdett, London Metropolitan University and pamela thurschwell, University College London 43. The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination gautam chakravarty, University of Delhi 44. The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics and the People ian haywood, Roehampton University of Surrey 45. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature geoffrey cantor, University of Leeds gowan dawson, University of Leicester graeme gooday, University of Leeds richard noakes, University of Cambridge sally shuttleworth, University of Sheffield and jonathan r. topham, University of Leeds 46. Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot janis mclarren caldwell, Wake Forest University 47. The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf edited by christine alexander, University of New South Wales and juliet mcmaster, University of Alberta 48. From Dickens to Dracula: Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction gail turley houston, University of New Mexico 49. Voice and the Victorian Storyteller ivan kreilkamp, University of Indiana 50. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture jonathan smith, University of Michigan-Dearborn 51. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture patrick r. o’malley, Georgetown University 52. Epic and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Britain simon dentith, University of Gloucestershire 53. Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal helena michie, Rice University 54. The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture nadia valman, University of Southampton

55. Ireland, India and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Literature julia wright, Dalhousie University 56. Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination sally ledger, Birkbeck, University of London 57. Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability gowan dawson, University of Leicester 58. ‘Michael Field’: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle marion thain, University of Birmingham 59. Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in NineteenthCentury Writing david amigoni, Keele University 60. Realism, Photography and Nineteenth-Century Fiction daniel a. novak, Lousiana State University 61. Caribbean Culture and British Fiction in the Atlantic World, 1780–1870 tim watson, University of Miami 62. The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History michael sanders, University of Manchester 63. Literature and Dance in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Jane Austen to the New Woman cheryl wilson, Indiana University 64. Shakespeare and Victorian Women gail marshall, Oxford Brookes University 65. The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood valerie sanders, University of Hull 66. Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America cannon schmitt, University of Toronto 67. From Sketch to Novel: The Development of Victorian Fiction amanpal garcha, Ohio State University 68. The Crimean War and the British Imagination stefanie markovits, Yale University 69. Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction jill l. matus, University of Toronto 70. Sensation and Modernity in the 1860s nicholas daly, University College Dublin 71. Ghost-Seers, Detectives, and Spiritualists: Theories of Vision in Victorian Literature and Science srdjan smajic´ , Furman University 72. Satire in an Age of Realism aaron matz, Scripps College, California 73. Thinking About Other People in Nineteenth-Century British Writing adela pinch, University of Michigan 74. Tuberculosis and the Victorian Literary Imagination katherine byrne, University of Ulster, Coleraine

75. Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century: Visible City, Invisible World tanya agathocleous, Hunter College, City University of New York 76. Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England’s Disciples of Flora, 1780–1870 judith w. page, University of Florida elise l. smith, Millsaps College, Mississippi 77. Time and the Moment in Victorian Literature and Society sue zemka, University of Colorado 78. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century anne stiles, Washington State University 79. Picturing Reform in Victorian Britain janice carlisle, Yale University 80. Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative jan-melissa schramm, University of Cambridge 81. The Silver Fork Novel: Fashionable Fiction in the Age of Reform edward copeland, Pomona College, California 82. Oscar Wilde and Ancient Greece iain ross, Colchester Royal Grammar School 83. The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense daniel brown, University of Southampton 84. Moral Authority, Men of Science, and the Victorian Novel anne dewitt, Princeton Writing Program 85. China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined ross g. forman, University of Warwick 86. Dickens’s Style edited by daniel tyler, University of Oxford 87. The Formation of the Victorian Literary Profession richard salmon, University of Leeds 88. Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press fionnuala dillane, University College Dublin 89. The Victorian Novel and the Space of Art: Fictional Form on Display dehn gilmore, California Institute of Technology 90. George Eliot and Money: Economics, Ethics and Literature dermot coleman, Independent Scholar 91. Masculinity and the New Imperialism: Rewriting Manhood in British Popular Literature, 1870–1914 bradley deane, University of Minnesota 92. Evolution and Victorian Culture edited by bernard lightman, York University, Toronto and bennett zon, University of Durham 93. Victorian Literature, Energy, and the Ecological Imagination allen macduffie, University of Texas, Austin 94. Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain andrew mccann, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire

95. Women Writing Art History in the Nineteenth Century: Looking Like a Woman hilary fraser birkbeck, University of London 96. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture deborah lutz, Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus 97. The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York nicholas daly, University College Dublin 98. Dickens and the Business of Death claire wood, University of York 99. Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry annmarie drury, Queens College, City University of New York 100. The Bigamy Plot: Sensation and Convention in the Victorian Novel maia mcaleavey, Boston College, Massachusetts 101. English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850–1914 will abberley, University of Oxford 102. The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination aviva briefel, Bowdoin College, Maine 103. Evolution and Imagination in Victorian Children’s Literature jessica straley, University of Utah 104. Writing Arctic Disaster: Authorship and Exploration adriana craciun, University of California, Riverside 105. Science, Fiction, and the Fin-de-Siècle Periodical Press will tattersdill, University of Birmingham 106. Democratising Beauty in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Art and the Politics of Public Life lucy hartley, University of Michigan 107. Everyday Words and the Character of Prose in Nineteenth-Century Britain jonathan farina, Seton Hall University, New Jersey 108. Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Poetry of Religious Experience martin dubois, University of Newcastle upon Tyne 109. Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing heather tilley, Birkbeck College, University of London 110. An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction: Chartism, Radical Print Culture, and the Social Problem Novel gregory vargo, New York University 111. Automatism and Creative Acts in the Age of New Psychology linda m. austin, Oklahoma State University 112. Idleness and Aesthetic Consciousness, 1815–1900 richard adelman, University of Sussex 113. Poetry, Media, and the Material Body: Autopoetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain ashley miller, Albion College, Michigan 114. Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire jessica howell, Texas A&M University

115. The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination edited by alexandra lewis, University of Aberdeen 116. The Political Lives of Victorian Animals: Liberal Creatures in Literature and Culture anna feuerstein, University of Hawai’i-Manoa 117. The Divine in the Commonplace: Recent Natural Histories and the Novel in Britain amy king, St John’s University, New York 118. Plagiarizing the Victorian Novel: Imitation, Parody, Aftertext adam abraham, Virginia Commonwealth University 119. Literature, Print Culture, and Media Technologies, 1880–1900: Many Inventions richard menke, University of Georgia 120. Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf jacob jewusiak, Newcastle University 121. Autobiography, Sensation, and the Commodification of Identity in Victorian Narrative: Life upon the Exchange sean grass, Rochester Institute of Technology 122. Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature: Economics and Political Identity in the Networks of Empire phillip steer, Massey University, Auckland 123. Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination will abberley, University of Sussex 124. Victorian Women and Wayward Reading: Crises of Identification marisa palacios knox, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley 125. The Victorian Cult of Shakespeare: Bardology in the Nineteenth Century charles laporte, University of Washington