American Madonna
Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture
1st Edition
Published on 27. November 1997
192 pages
978-0-19-535460-7 (ISBN)
Description
This book explores a notable if unlikely undercurrent of interest in Mary as mythical Madonna that has persisted in American life and letters from fairly early in the nineteenth century into the later twentieth. This imaginative involvement with the Divine Woman -- verging at times on devotional homage -- is especially intriguing as manifested in the Protestant writers who are the focus of this study: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harold Frederic, Henry Adams, and T.S. Eliot. John Gatta argues that flirtation with the Marian cultus offered Protestant writers symbolic compensation for what might be culturally diagnosed as a deficiency of psychic femininity, or anima, in America. He argues that the literary configurations of the mythical Madonna express a subsurface cultural resistance to the prevailing rationalism and pragmatism of the American mind in an age of entrepreneurial conquest.
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
11/1997
Oxford University Press Inc
€110.10
Shipment within 15-20 days
John Gatta
American Madonna
Book
11/1997
Oxford University Press Inc
€35.95
Article exhausted; check different version
Person
John Gatta is Professor of English and English Department Head at the University of Connecticut. His publications, most concerned with religion and literature, include numerous journal articles and an award-winning book on the New England poet Edward Taylor.
Content
- Intro
- CONTENTS
- INTRODUCTION
- ONE: THE SACRED WOMAN: THE PROBLEM OF HAWTHORNE'S MADONNAS
- Of Holy Mothers and Dark Ladies
- Hester's Divine Maternity
- Queen Zenobia of Blithedale
- The New England Maiden and the Fallen Goddess of The Marble Faun
- Hawthorne's Search for Sacred Love: From Puritan Fathers to Divine Mothers
- TWO: THE VIRGINAL SOUL OF MARGARET FULLER'S Woman in the Nineteenth Century
- Queen Margaret's Mythmaking
- Her own creator": Images of Self-fashioning in Minerva, Leila, and Mary through 1844
- The Mary Victoria of Woman in the Nineteenth Century
- THREE: CALVINISM FEMINIZED: DIVINE MATRIARCHY IN HARRIET BEECHER STOWE
- Godly Maternity and Motherly Jesus
- Birthpangs of the New Order in Uncle Tom's Cabin
- The Ministry of Mary in The Minister's Wooing
- Other Appearances of the Madonna-Intercessor in Agnes of Sorrento, Poganuc People, and The Pearl of Orr's Island
- Sacrament of Mother-Love, Compassion of the Mater Dolorosa
- FOUR: THE SEXUAL MADONNA IN HAROLD FREDERIC'S Damnation of Theron Ware
- The Post-Romantic Madonna of the Future
- Celia Madden: Catholic Madonna or Sex Goddess?
- From Maya and Mary to the New Woman
- The Unsettling Character of Soulsby and the Undoing of Ware
- Beyond Illusion: The Grace of Critical Realism
- FIVE: HENRY ADAMS: THE VIRGIN AS DYNAMO
- The Woman Unknown in America
- The Adamic Quest for New Eve
- The place has no heart": Preserves of Womanly Grace in Democracy and Esther
- Mary of Chartres as Personal Presence and Romantic Ideal
- Adams's Education: The Unknowable and Generative Woman
- SIX: ELIOT'S ARCHETYPAL LADY OF SEA AND GARDEN: THE RECOVERY OF MYTH
- Myth, Modernism, and Lady Mary
- The Sibyl and Belladonna of The Waste Land
- Toward Our Lady of la Vita Nuova
- Eliot's Soul Sisters: The Sacred and Profane Ladies of "Ash-Wednesday
- Best Dead Madonna this side Atlantic": "The Dry Salvages" and the Quartets
- EPILOGUE
- APPENDIX: "Raphael's Deposition from the Cross," by Margaret Fuller
- "Mary at the Cross" and "The Sorrows of Mary," by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Excerpt from "The Golden Legend" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- NOTES
- INDEX
- A
- B
- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
- H
- I
- J
- K
- L
- M
- N
- O
- P
- R
- S
- T
- U
- V
- W
- Z
