| The Serpent and the Dove explores the role of religion---in particular women's evangelical spirituality---in shaping a critical response to the emerging social sciences in a secularizing British society. In analyzing the intersection of women's social work and their spiritual self-writing, my argument revises the dominant narrative in Victorian scholarship, which understands the rise of secular, professional social science as the chief source authorizing women's social work. In the rhetoric of conversion---in the narrative of the self's progress from spiritual crisis to salvation---women found a model of selfhood that allowed them not only to engage in work outside the home, but to reclaim "the social" for moral and religious ends. I see women social reform writers---prison visitors, urban missionaries, proto-sociologists, industrial novelists---not as handmaidens to professional social science, but as exponents of a distinctive model of cultural inquiry. This model, which I call spiritual autoethnography, became exemplary for women fieldworkers during and beyond the nineteenth century.;The lack of a critical language to describe religion's role in the formation of nineteenth-century social sciences requires me to look outside the period for comparable discursive models. I look in particular to the recent impulse in feminist cultural theory, sociology, and ethnography that has revisited the potential of forms of selfhood for ethical critique of the social sciences. These radically divergent perspectives---nineteenth-century evangelicalism and postmodern social science---merge at the level of a shared desire to re-situate the sociological observing self as participant not just in culture, but in the process of cultural formation. The women in my analysis---Elizabeth Fry, Charlotte Tonna, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ellen Ranyard, and Harriet Martineau---anticipate the postmodern ethical critique by turning the spiritual self into the chief condition of cultural knowledge. Spiritual autoethnography is my term for a self-reflective practice of social inquiry that challenges the traditional narrative of disciplinary specialization and professionalization, and which reveals the extent to which religion plays an integral role in the formation of seemingly secular disciplines. |
