A Study On Quakerism In The Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

Quakerism,also known as the Religious Society of Friends,is a branch of Protestant Christianity.It originated from a radical religious movement led by George Fox in Northern England in 1652.After it was spread to the North America in 1656,especially after William Penn established the Pennsylvania Colony in 1681,Quakerism quickly became one of the most influential Protestant denominations there.Since then,Quaker beliefs and practices such as the Inner Light and pacifism have been exerting a profound and subtle impact on the values and moralities of the United States.After the heyday of Quakerism in the eighteenth century,the nineteenth century witnessed its maturity and a subsequent decline caused by its division into three sects and Quietism movement.Besides,because of its alternative religious beliefs and practices,as well as its small size,Quakerism had yet to receive full recognition and acceptance of the American mainstream culture then.Even so,Quakerism had an important influence on the nineteenth-century American literature,particularly the American fiction.Despite the limited number of novelists with explicit Quaker backgrounds,quite a few novelists were influenced by Quakerism in their lives and literary works.For example,Hawthorne,Mrs.Stowe,Cooper,and Melville all had a close relationship with Quakerism,whose The Gentle Boy,Uncle Tom’s Cabin,The Leatherstocking Tales and Moby Dick abound with Quaker beliefs and practices.In addition,such lesser-known novelists as Silas Weir Mitchell and John Townsend Trowbridge were keenly aware of Quakerism and presented Quaker characters as their protagonists respectively in Hugh Wynne: Free Quaker and Cudjo’s Cave.The Quaker fiction of this period is a distinctive component of American literature.Out of English literature,three monographs,two journal articles and four doctoral dissertations are partly related to Quakerism and American literature,in which some chapters or parts deal with the nineteenth-century American fiction.Fully related are one journal article and two doctoral dissertations.On the whole,the English literature fails to conduct a panoramic review of the 19th-century American Quaker fictions,and thus hardly explores the general characteristics of the fictions throughout the century.Besides,the literature fails to closely read the fiction texts to reveal the Quaker beliefs,practices,and images embedded in them.Most of the few Chinese literature falls into the fields of religious history,politics and theology.There is only one master thesis that discusses the influence of Quakerism on American literature,a few fragmented discussions of which are about some eighteenth-century American fictions.Therefore,in China,Quakerism in the nineteenth-century American fiction is yet to be studied.In light of literary sociology,the thesis intends to study Quakerism in the 19th-century American fiction by means of literature analysis and text analysis.Specifically,it studies the following questions.Firstly,what are the general characteristics of the nineteenth-century American Quaker fictions? Secondly,what Quaker beliefs and practices are reflected in them?Thirdly,what are the Quaker images in them?In addition to the introduction and conclusion,the body is divided into four chapters.The first chapter reviews the studies on Quakerism itself and its relationship with American literature,especially the nineteenth-century American fiction.The second chapter first introduces the origin and development of Quakerism,and then makes a century-long and panoramic review of the19th-century American Quaker novelists and their masterpieces.The third chapter analyzes the Quaker beliefs and practices embodied in four typical Quaker novels.The fourth chapter is an analysis of Quaker images in the novels.The findings are as follows.Firstly,at the macro level,the Quaker theme in the19th-century American fiction goes through three distinct phases: from the reexamination of its colonial experience,through the retrospect of its “Golden Age”,to its response to America’s industrialization.At the micro level,as for location,most of the Quaker novelists are from Pennsylvania and the neighboring New England states where most Quaker lived;as for social identity,many of them are committed to such social activities as the abolitionist movement and the feminist movement;as for gender,the proportion of female writers is relatively higher than that of the nineteenth-century American literature;as for religious identity,only one of them is a Quaker,reflecting the historical status of Quakerism as a religious small-sized sect with big cultural influence,and the unenthusiastic attitude of Quakerism towards literature and art.Secondly,a close reading of the texts shows that the novelists highlight the core beliefs and practices of Quakerism,namely,mysticism,abolitionism,pacifism and simplicity.What deserve special attention are the two paradoxes in the novels.One is about mysticism that is depicted both as a positive force through which “every man is naturally impelled to goodness”,and as a negative force that leads to tragedies such as martyrdom.The other is about the juxtaposition of traditional non-violent Quakers and the “fighting Quaker”,which overturns the stereotype of Quaker pacifists.Thirdly,the Quaker images portrayed in the novels exhibit three distinct traits,i.e.,eccentricity,loneliness and idealism.