Sentimentality and Grace: Marilynne Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Prodigal Son Narratives

For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV

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LEIDEN | BOSTON

This Life, This World: New Essays on Marilynne Robinson’s

Housekeeping, Gilead and Home

Edited by

Jason W. Stevens


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Contents

Acknowledgments viiAuthor Biographies viiiMarilynne Robinson: A Chronology xi

Jason Stevens

Introduction 1Jason Stevens

Housekeeping, Wordsworth, and the Sublimity of Unsurrendered Wilderness 24

Jonathan Arac and Susan Balée

At Home with Transience: Reconfiguring Female Characters of the American West in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping 38

Corina Crisu

Religion, Literature, and the Environment in the Work of Marilynne Robinson 59

George B. Handley

Becoming a Creature of Artful Existence: Theological Perception and Ecological Design in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead 91

Chad Wriglesworth

Sentimentality and Grace: Marilynne Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Prodigal Son Narratives 131

Rachel B. Griffis

In the Face of Mystery: Soteriological Symbolism in Gilead and Home 148Mark S.M. Scott

Marilynne Robinson’s Merging of Medicine and Literature: Therapeutic Journaling as Balm in Gilead 171

Janella Moy


vi

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contents

The Privilege of Loneliness, the Kindness of Home: “Felt Experience” in the Writing of Marilynne Robinson 190

Carolyn Allen

“Jack Boughton has a Wife and a Child”: Generative Blackness in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Home 212

Yumi Pak

Robinson and Updike: Houses, Domesticity, and the Numinous Quotidian 237

James Schiff

An Interview with Marilynne Robinson 254Jason Stevens

Selected Bibliography 271Index 282

For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, �� | doi �0.��63/978900430��3�_007

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Sentimentality and Grace: Marilynne Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Prodigal Son Narratives

Rachel B. Griffis

Abstract

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), each set in the 1950s, engage with the heritage of Calvinism in American life. My essay places these companion novels in dialogue with two representative anti-Calvinist novels of the Victorian era: Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale (1822) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing (1859). The ways that these three writers portray the story of the prodigal son—Robinson’s Jack Boughton, Stowe’s Aaron Burr and James Marvyn, and Sedgwick’s David Wilson—demonstrate fundamental differences in what they believe about human nature, justice, and God’s grace. Robinson’s Calvinism is tough-minded, but Victorian sentimentalism attenuates the deep, abiding comforts of God’s sovereignty.

Initially inspired by Sir Walter Scott, American writers have written historical novels that allow them to comment on the present by way of examining the past. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), each set in the 1950s, continue the tradition started by James Fenimore Cooper and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and further developed by writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sedgwick and Stowe in particular concern them-selves with matters significant to Robinson, especially the heritage of Calvinism in American life. In A New-England Tale (1822), Sedgwick grapples with America’s Calvinist heritage and concludes that milder forms of Christianity like Quakerism or Methodism are more compatible with American values than her forbears’ faith. Calvinist doctrines like predestination and total depravity prove substantial stumbling blocks to her characters, and they must abandon these harsh traditions in order to be both American and religious. Stowe, too, confronts predestination in The Minister’s Wooing (1859), a novel that depicts the pain and anxiety caused by the impossibility of knowing whether a deceased loved one was part of the elect or damned for eternity.1

1 Though Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale and Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing are the two nine-teenth century texts that this essay studies in depth, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1869) is another example of a text by a woman that takes Calvinism to task. Like The Minister’s Wooing, Phelps demonstrates that living with uncertainty regarding a deceased


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In Robinson’s novels, the questions that preoccupy Calvinism’s heirs have not changed. Jack Boughton asks John Ames if “some people are intentionally and irretrievably consigned to perdition,” and at the end of Home, Glory and old Boughton plummet into a harrowing state of mourning when Jack leaves (Gilead 150). Their reaction stems from their inconsolable feeling of uncer-tainty; they do not know if they will see him again, they have doubts about his physical and mental well-being, and at least according to Boughton, he dem-onstrates no discernible signs that he has been summoned by God’s irresistible grace. Glory and Boughton’s grief is just as poignant as that of the characters in Stowe’s novel who mourn for James Marvyn, a young man who was thought dead prior to demonstrating the signs of conversion.

Yet Robinson stays within the Calvinist fold, both in her fiction and other-wise, which is not true of her predecessors.2 The ways that these three writers portray the story of the prodigal son—Robinson’s Jack Boughton, Stowe’s Aaron Burr and James Marvyn, and Sedgwick’s David Wilson—demonstrate fundamental differences in what they believe about human nature, justice, and God’s grace. Influenced by eighteenth century ideologies regarding the moral sense of human beings, Sedgwick and Stowe use the prodigal son narra-tive to show that Calvinism is incompatible with Enlightenment-inflected theories of moral sentiments and humane reason. They show that the human uncertainty of divine election, a human being’s inability to participate in his own salvation, and the irrelevance of one’s feelings to moral conduct—all sta-ples of traditional Calvinism as well as early Puritanism in America—lead to moral irresponsibility, depression, and mental or spiritual paralysis. Through the sentimental tradition that they helped to forge in Victorian America, Sedgwick and Stowe debunk Calvinism and demonstrate its harm to the human psyche as well as its detrimental effects on nation-building. Robinson, in contrast, re-envisions the prodigal son narrative without Sedgwick’s and Stowe’s sentimentality. In her portrayal of the parable, the sentimental novel’s narrative logic and philosophical perspective are the unworthy rival of a full, humanistic Calvinism that is animated by the mystery of divine grace.

loved one’s status in the afterlife is unbearable and unreasonable. By the end of the novel, Phelps’s female characters have effectively softened the views of a Calvinist minister, who declares, regarding an unfeeling sermon on the afterlife, “I shall never preach this again” (220).

2 Sedgwick joined the Unitarian church in 1821. Stowe’s change in religious affiliation is more complicated because her husband was often employed by colleges from the Calvinist tradi-tion, either Presbyterian or Congregational (Kimball 112). She started attending an Episcopal church in 1864.


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In Gilead and Home, Robinson rescues grace from nineteenth century dilu-tions by writers like Sedgwick and Stowe and presents this theological concept neither as inhumane nor unreasonable. In fact, Robinson’s novels do not con-sider the qualities of humaneness or reasonableness as appropriate ones with which to measure the divine. Rather, for Robinson’s characters, grace is both stern and loving, and ultimately, an incomprehensible gift.

There is perhaps no debate more provocative in the scholastic community committed to the study of American women writers than Jane Tompkins’s indictment, articulated in Sensational Designs (1985), of Ann Douglas’s The Feminization of American Culture (1977).3 While many scholars continue to take issue with Douglas’s book, her claim that nineteenth century women and clergy are responsible for the development of “an anti-intellectual sentimen-talism” that replaced the Calvinism of the American Puritans is difficult to dis-pute (13). Admittedly, scholars like Tompkins have shown that “anti-intellectual” is a misleading descriptor for nineteenth century women writers when their work is considered for its social dimensions. Tompkins goes so far as to argue that sentimental writers “offer[ed] a critique of American society far more dev-astating than any delivered by better-known critics such as Hawthorne and Melville” (124). While Tompkins’s reading of nineteenth century women is valuable because it shows how this body of writing pertains to nineteenth cen-tury reform ideologies, her argument takes for granted monumental changes in American Christianity. What American religion lost when it traded its Calvinist heritage for nineteenth century sentimentality, in the words of Douglas, was “a toughness, a sternness, an intellectual rigor” (18). Nothing Tompkins or her successors have written accounts for the losses in the nine-teenth century that Douglas powerfully documents. Instead, they tend to sur-pass this declension as unworthy of scholarly study and instead emphasize the social and political dimensions of nineteenth century American women writ-ers as if these dimensions were independent of the writers’ struggles to define (in some cases, re-define) their relationship to Reformed Protestantism.

3 Critics have since begun to view Douglas and Tompkins in less polarized terms. Mary G. De Jong, in her recent study of sentimentality in the American nineteenth century, is a fine example of a non-polarized perspective on Douglas and Tompkins (5). David S. Reynolds’s Faith in Fiction is also an important work that follows Douglas, as he refutes her claim “that a strong, masculine Calvinism gave way to a shrinkingly feminine liberalism” and argues that instead, many writers who opposed Calvinism were critical of it because it “created a timid languor and listlessness” (109). In his analysis of Sedgwick, he suggests that her female char-acters “become increasingly heroic and self-sufficient” (52).


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Sedgwick and Stowe are both examples of the loss of “toughness,” “stern-ness,” and “intellectual rigor” that Douglas states were qualities of early American Christianity. Both writers were influenced by sentimentality as they processed and expressed religious belief in their fiction stylistically and philosophically. Sentimentality is most often understood as a preference for emotion over the mind, as Leo Braudy asserts, “the sentimental novel strives to imitate feeling rather than intellect” (5). Though helpful, this definition does not take into account the eighteenth century roots of sentimentality and the philosophical assumptions underlying most works in this genre. Herbert Ross Brown’s description of the “sentimental formula” is more complete:

[It is] a simple equation resting upon a belief in the spontaneous good-ness and benevolence of man’s original instincts. It could point to what passed for philosophical justification in the admired writings of Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, and Adam Smith. It was informed through-out with a moral purpose to which all its other elements were subordi-nated. (176)

Sentimental fiction’s emphasis on the “benevolence of man’s original instincts” is particularly important to an understanding of Sedgwick’s and Stowe’s critiques of Calvinism, for they show that Calvinism must be rejected for a religion that has more faith in human goodness and therefore takes human feelings seriously in determining right and wrong. To use Stowe’s famous phrase from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, many women writers in the nine-teenth century advocated alternatives to Calvinism because this religious tradition does not “feel right” (624).4 Historically, Calvinism has often required its adherents to suspend their reason and feelings, to accept inequalities, and to yield to an incomprehensible authority. Sedgwick and Stowe, therefore, both employ sentimentality in their iterations of the prodi-gal son story to react against the Calvinism of their ancestors, focusing spe-cifically on the issue of human agency and the difficulty of living with uncertainty.

4 Near the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe speaks to her readers about what they can do to aid the cause of abolition: “There is one thing that every individual can do,—they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race” (624).



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Agency and Certainty: Sedgwick’s and Stowe’s Prodigal Sons

Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale contrasts a Calvinist family with characters who practice milder forms of Christianity in order to demonstrate the disas-trous effects of the Calvinist perspective on human nature, agency, and virtue. As this novel was written in the wake of Sedgwick’s own conversion to Unitarianism, she wrote it out of her “desire to help others escape from the chains which she had broken” (Dewey 151). The image of breaking chains is congruent with the thought of William Ellery Channing, the father of Unitarianism, who states that his religion “began as a protest against the rejec-tion of reason,” to which he adds, “against mental slavery” (435). Sedgwick, in turn, explores the enslaving effects of Calvinism in the religious upbringings of the Wilson children and the heroine of A New-England Tale, Jane Elton. Under the influence of her mother’s “pure and gentle spirit” and the practical virtues of Mary Hull, her domestic servant who is Methodist, Jane is the recipient of an education that forms both her sentiments and actions (12).5 For Jane, godliness is attainable through good works, a nurturing environment, and wholesome habits. Mrs. Wilson, on the contrary, insists on the innate sinfulness of human nature and the impossibility of justifying oneself before God on account of good works. She rules her family “according to ‘the letter,’ but the ‘spirit that giveth life’ [is] not there” (24). Jane, who is the product of her mother and Mary Hull, contributes to society while Mrs. Wilson raises irresponsible citizens who are detrimental to the republic.

The Wilson children, consequently, are selfish, dishonest, and manipulative. The daughters, Elvira and Martha, read books that they are told not to read and go to dances from which they are forbidden. They plagiarize their papers, abscond with rakish men, and marry tavern keepers and foreigners. David, the novel’s type of the prodigal son, similarly leads a reckless life. He steals money from his mother and allows Jane to take the blame for it. He is a gambler, a spendthrift, and worst of all, a seducer who impregnates a young woman and abandons her. While Jane’s religious upbringing has taught her that she will be formed by her influences, experiences, and choices, the Wilson children have

5 As Carla R. Ritter notes, Jane Elton “is clearly a Unitarian at heart” (100). The heroine of A New-England Tale thus expresses religious sentiments congruent with the author’s, but Sedgwick also portrays Methodism in a sympathetic light and as a positive alternative to Calvinism along with Unitarianism and Quakerism. It is likely that Sedgwick portrayed Methodism sympathetically because this form of Christianity counters some of the tenets of Calvinism to which Sedgwick was opposed, such as the doctrine of limited atonement and the doctrine of irresistible grace (Noll 278–279).


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been taught about the depravity of human nature and the evilness of the human heart. Therefore, Jane takes responsibility for her choices and believes in the ability to improve herself through good habits and influences while the Wilsons relinquish responsibility for their lives because they assume no agency in effecting their own virtue or salvation.

At the end of the novel, David demonstrates the disastrous results of Calvinist beliefs regarding human nature and human agency in letter to his mother: “If you taught me truly, I have only acted out the nature totally depraved (your own words,) that [God] gave to me, and I am not to blame for it” (155). In this passage, Sedgwick illustrates Channing’s critique of Calvinism, specifically his conclusion that total depravity and divine election “give excuses to the bad” (89). He also lambasts the idea of “God’s irresistible agency,” a doctrine that he believes “subvert[s] our responsibility,” “make[s] men machines,” and “cast[s] on God the blame of all evil deeds” (94). For Sedgwick, Calvinism not only deals poorly with the prodigal son, but also helps to produce him along with the moral and political problems that his remorseless behavior poses to the young republic. She therefore eschews Calvinism in her fiction in favor of other forms of Christianity such as Methodism, Quakerism, and Unitarianism. These traditions, which grant more agency to human beings in matters of virtue and salvation, better align with American notions of freedom and individual responsibility.6 As Emily VanDette notes, “Calvinist doctrine has no place in the raising of republican nations and families, because it precludes the concept of free will, a central tenet of democracy. Effective parenting/governance involves teaching children/citizens to become self-determining, a rationalist-inspired value fundamentally at odds with Sedgwick’s depiction of Calvinist predeter-mination” (55). Consequently, Sedgwick represents the rejection of Calvinism as an indispensable part of the country’s future progress.

While Sedgwick criticizes Calvinism for subtracting a human’s agency to choose virtue or salvation, Stowe builds upon Sedgwick’s objections to Cal-vinism by adding that Calvinism requires Christians to live with the uncertainty

6 Although American Christians at the beginning of the nineteenth century believed, like their predecessors, that humans were sinful and needed salvation, “they were much more likely than before to hold that the human will was an active, necessary, and determinative partici-pant in the reception of divine grace” (Noll 231). When representing the Methodist tradition specifically, Sedgwick portrays the doctrine of perfection as another way to grant human beings more agency than Calvinism had formerly. While Mrs. Wilson says that Mary Hull is “indulging” in the “soul-destroying” doctrine of perfection, the narrator of A New-England Tale describes Mary’s life as “a commentary on the precepts of the Gospel” (25). As Noll reports, Methodists “held that it was possible by God’s grace for Christian believers to become perfectly sanctified,” which was a great affront to traditional Calvinists (335).



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of one’s salvation. She represents this uncertainty and the inability to choose belief as humanly impossible in The Minister’s Wooing, which includes two prodigal sons: James Marvyn and a fictionalized version of Jonathan Edwards’s grandson, Aaron Burr, Jr. Both of these men, like the Wilson children, view con-version as something that cannot be accomplished by an act of the will. James’s backstory is proof of this mindset. Having been gifted with a nature decidedly different from that of his Christian siblings, James is a strong-willed, active child who spends his days getting into mischief and avoiding his lessons. The narra-tor tells us that he “yawned over books, and cut out moulds for running anchors when he should have been thinking of his columns of words in four syllables” (65). In the present time of the novel, when James is a young man, these behav-iors and attitudes continue to characterize him, as in this brief scene: “He held the little Bible in his hand as if it were some amulet charmed by the touch of a superior being; but when he strove to read it, his thoughts wandered, and he shut it, troubled and unsatisfied” (79). According to James and the characters who surround him, it is not in his nature to be converted for the kingdom of Christ. If he were destined to become a Christian, he would have more aptitude for conventional Christian behavior, like study and Bible reading. Aaron Burr, who was not only Edwards’s grandson but also an accused conspirator against the u.s. government, gives the same reason for his lack of faith. “Unfortunately, our intellectual beliefs are not subject to the control of our will,” he tells the novel’s heroine Mary Scudder when she encourages him to persevere in the faith of his fathers.7 He continues, “I have examined, and the examination has, I regret to say, not had the effect you would desire” (277).

Like Sedgwick, Stowe critiques Calvinist teachings for discouraging human participation in matters of virtue or salvation.8 In a religious tradition where

7 Aware of Burr’s accused conspiracy against the u.s. government, Stowe, in the same manner as Sedgwick, indicts Calvinism for raising irresponsible citizens for the republic.

8 In her depiction of the Wilson children’s many sins and Jane’s virtue, Sedgwick takes issue with the Calvinist notion that sanctification is obtained by God’s grace alone and not by good works or human effort. Additionally, Sedgwick demonstrates her objections to the Calvinist understanding of sanctification through her sympathetic portrayal of the Methodist Mary Hull, as the Westminster Confession of Faith opposes the Methodist doctrine of perfection by asserting that sanctification is “imperfect in this life; there abideth still some remnants of corruption in every part” (Williamson 149). In The Minister’s Wooing, Stowe specifically takes issue with the Calvinist concept of irresistible grace, which expresses that humans cannot turn to God, or gain salvation, by their own means. The Westminster Confession states about salvation: “This effectual call is God’s free and special grace alone, not from any thing at all foreseen in man; who is altogether passive therein, until, being quickened and renewed by the Holy Spirit, he is thereby enabled to answer this call, and to embrace the grace offered and conveyed in it” (Williamson 115).


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individuals cannot choose “the straight and narrow” but must be converted by God’s irresistible grace alone, men like David Wilson and Aaron Burr seduce innocent women and leave destruction in their wake because they cannot choose otherwise. Furthermore, an unbearable feeling of grief and uncertainty cloaks men like James Marvyn who actually want to be converted but cannot find sufficient evidence within their natures to prove their conversion, both to themselves and to others. When he leaves—unconverted—for an expedition at sea and is later thought dead, his mother is nearly driven insane by the pos-sibility that he died unconverted and perished into the everlasting flames of hell. A similar situation in Stowe’s life was the impetus for The Minister’s Wooing, which impacts this very scene.9

Although Stowe succumbs to evangelical conventions by returning James Marvyn to his family and the arms of Mary Scudder, putting him through a conversion experience that would satisfy the most rigid judge, the Calvinism of her main characters is not the brand of Christianity she wishes to endorse in this novel. The author gives Mary Scudder the piety and sisterly affection she hopes will influence her readers, but the character who exudes the religious beliefs Stowe wishes to impress on her audience are modeled by the black slave, Candace. When Dr. Hopkins tries to instruct Candace in the doctrine of total depravity, she remarks, “I didn’t do dat ar’, for one, I knows. I’s got good mem’ry,—allers knows what I does,—nebber did eat dat ar’ apple,—nebber eat a bit ob him” (82). Moreover, when Mrs. Marvyn delves into grief-induced sickness and madness after the supposed death of her son, Candace announces, “I’m clar Mass’r James is one o’ de ‘lect [the Elect] and I’m clar dar’s consid’able more o’ de ‘lect dan people tink” (202). The beginning of her statement, “I’m clar,” demonstrates an alternative to the harrowing uncertainty of traditional Calvinist beliefs. It does not make sense for Christ to have died for a few elect people, Candace asserts. Additionally, she implies that the Holy Spirit could accomplish the work of conversion without the person in question demon-strating all the appropriate signs. Further evidence that Stowe unquestionably prefers Candace’s beliefs over any other character appears when Virginie parses difficult theological questions regarding God’s goodness in the midst of suffering and concludes, “I try Candace’s way” (207). For Stowe, and for her characters, “Candace’s way” is a form of Christianity that, influenced by the philosophical assumptions of sentimentality, does not require its followers to live in uncertainty regarding their salvation. It is a religion that, in contrast

9 In 1822, Stowe’s sister lost her fiancé, who had not demonstrated the signs of conversion, when he drowned at sea, an event that was incredibly difficult for the Beecher family (Harris vii).



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to Calvinism, can be defined by its clarity and reasonableness and thus better aligns with one’s feelings.10

Sentimentality characterizes both Sedgwick’s and Stowe’s portrayals of prodigal sons whose behaviors result from Calvinism in America. To use, again, Stowe’s phrase from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Calvinism that creates prodigals like David Wilson, James Marvyn, and Aaron Burr does not feel right. Jane Elton’s perspective, which rejects the idea of a predetermined nature, empha-sizes the efficacy of good influence, and believes in human ability to affect virtue, better appeals to readers’ feelings than the Wilson’s deterministic worldview. Jane exudes confidence in the moral sense of human beings and appeals to the audience’s reason, through their emotions, by demonstrating the absurdity of Calvinist thinking along with the deleterious effects of its ideas on the human mind, heart, and behavior. The Wilsons are, in nearly every way, dehumanized by their Calvinism. Similarly, Stowe’s sentimentality asks readers to feel the pain and injustices associated with Calvinism and to turn those feelings into judgments. For example, when James Marvyn is pronounced dead, the Calvinist belief system nearly drives Mrs. Marvyn insane with its harshness. Readers are subsequently expected to feel pity for Mrs. Marvyn and to move from those feelings to the reasonable assertion, as articulated by Candace, that “Jesus didn’t die for nothin’” (202). Readers should, as Virginie does, “try Candace’s way” because it agrees with their sentiments.

Grace and Mystery: Robinson’s Prodigal Sons

While her American predecessors are critical of Calvinism for depriving Christians of agency and certainty, Robinson recasts the Calvinist doctrines of limited atonement and total depravity through the concepts of grace and mystery that speak to the very issues against which Sedgwick and Stowe strug-gled. Robinson presents divine grace as the foremost mover and she repre-sents uncertainty not as madness-inducing, but as a mystery that can bring

10 For a description of the conventions of conversion narratives, see Brauer or Caldwell (Brauer 233; Caldwell 1–2). Although Stowe took issue with many aspects of Calvinism, Charles H. Foster acknowledges that her characters “said both yes and no to Calvinism,” which is evident in the way that Candace debunks Calvinist beliefs while other sympa-thetic characters, such as Mary Scudder, accept them (Rungless Ladder 111). For a more recent nuanced view of Stowe’s attitude toward Calvinism, see Peter J. Thuesen’s essay, in which he asserts that for Stowe, Calvinism “was synonymous with the sober, virtuous Yankee yeoman” (“Geneva’s Crystalline Clarity” 226).


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peace to troubled minds. In Gilead, the Reverend John Ames accepts a level of mystery in his understanding of two prodigal sons: his brother Edward and his godson Jack. From Ames’s very first story about Edward, he confides that he is uncertain about the state of his brother’s soul—the question of all questions for a Christian. As Ames describes Edward as a precocious child and ulti-mately “Herr Doktor” who returns from Germany a non-believer, he hesitates to accept his brother’s self-definition as an atheist: “That’s what he claimed to be, at any rate” (25). Later, Ames describes a game of catch between himself and Edward that resulted in a sublime moment wherein Edward poured a glass of water over his head and recited Psalm 133. Recalling this episode, Ames describes Edward’s salvation as a mystery by writing, “after that day I did feel pretty much at ease about the state of his soul. Though I am not compe-tent to judge” (64).

At first glance, this childhood memory may appear very similar to the one in which Candace announces that James Marvyn was one of the elect even though he had not demonstrated the signs of conversion. This scene does not exude certainty; rather, it contains a feeling of peace that follows the mystery of God’s grace. Ames conveys that salvation is a mystery only known to God, and the idea that a self-proclaimed atheist may belong to God is neither cer-tain nor impossible. It is the mystery of it, the not knowing as well as the inabil-ity to judge, that gives Ames the freedom to feel “pretty much at ease” about his brother’s salvation. When one relies on the grace of God to enact salvation and neither the prodigal’s confession nor a demonstration of faith, a situation that may appear hopeless is actually never completely devoid of hope. The idea that God’s grace is a mystery that allows one to hope in a seemingly impossible situation is what Robinson conveys at the end of Home as Glory is energized by the hope that one day Jack’s son will come to her house, sit on her porch, and answer the prayers of his father.

Although Robinson does not portray uncertainty in as negative a light as Stowe, the mystery of God’s grace is nevertheless a burden for the prodigal and for those who love him. Like James Marvyn and Aaron Burr, Robinson’s Jack Boughton craves another nature. He craves the assurance of Christian belief, if only for his father’s sake, yet he cannot will himself to believe. Because he has not been gifted with belief, he regrets that he is a “sort of proof” of predestina-tion (Home 225). Similarly, Jack understands his misdemeanors as a child as part of his predetermined nature when he reflects on them. He tells Glory, “all my offenses were laid to a defect of character,” and “I have no quarrel with that” (202). Although Jack relates his predetermined nature in a mild and accepting manner, the scene is tinged with his pain at not being able to understand him-self as well as the pain of remembering the seemingly senseless grief he caused



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his family during childhood. This grief is just as poignant for the family of the prodigals. For example, in the wake of Edward Ames’s rejection of Christianity, John Ames’s mother warns him “If you ever spoke to your father that way, it would kill him” (27). Similarly, when Edward refuses to bless a meal, his mother weeps while his father retreats to “the attic or woodshed, in some hidden, quiet place” where he is “down on his knees, wondering to the Lord what it was that was being asked of him” (27).

Robinson’s portrayal of the Boughton family’s grief over Jack is even more intense than the situation between Edward Ames and his father. The entirety of Home is devoted to exploring this particular kind of sorrow, as Glory describes, “They were so afraid they would lose him, and then they had lost him, and that was the story of their family, no matter how warm and fruitful and robust it might have appeared to the outside world” (66). Or, as Boughton puts it in a conversation with Jack:

My life became your life, like lighting one candle from another. Isn’t that a mystery? […] And yet you always did the opposite of what I hoped for, the exact opposite. So I tried not to hope for anything at all, except that we wouldn’t lose you. So of course we did. That was the one hope I couldn’t put aside. (116).

Glory and Boughton’s expressions of grief in these passages are just as real and distressing as Mary Scudder’s or Mrs. Marvyn’s grief over the loss of James at sea.

Robinson, however, did not write Gilead and Home to challenge Calvinism, as did Sedgwick in A New-England Tale and Stowe in The Minister’s Wooing. Instead, Robinson’s revision of the nineteenth century fictionalization of the prodigal son parable not only affirms Calvin’s loving God, but also portrays sen-timentality as Calvinism’s nemesis, as an antidote to grace and mystery. Using old Robert Boughton as the preeminent expression of divine grace, Robinson demonstrates that her (and her character’s) version of Christianity does not always feel right. Boughton’s love is anything but sentimental. He is often unpleasant. He scolds Jack, expresses his disappointment to his son’s guilt-ridden ears, and he prioritizes Jack’s concerns over Glory’s though she too is marred by her past. As Robinson says in an interview about the biblical prodi-gal son story, “whom God loves he loves, and no choice the erring son makes or fails to make changes that” (Painter 489). In other words, God’s grace is nei-ther reasonable nor comprehensible. Neither does it align with human senti-ments, according to Sedgwick and Stowe. Despite Jack’s consistent prodigality, Boughton’s love for him never subsides.


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John Ames of Gilead expresses what perhaps could pass as the sentimental perspective on Boughton’s and Jack’s relationship when he admits his difficulty accepting the demonstration of divine grace it expresses: “there is an absolute disjunction between our Father’s love and our deserving. Still, when I see this same disjunction between human parents and children, it always irritates me a little” (73). The sentimental perspective, which prioritizes both reason and feelings, is incompatible with Calvinism because it requires its adherents to live with a God who “loves whom he loves,” even if it makes no sense and even if it does not feel right. As a result, writers such as Sedgwick and Stowe have written stories that debunk this unreasonable brand of Christianity by casting the concept of irresistible grace as cruel because it drives men like David Wilson and Aaron Burr into immoral behaviors. Similarly, they cast the mystery of God’s ways as unacceptable because it deprives women such as Mrs. Marvyn of the comfort they need following the death of loved ones.

Critics who have written about the prodigal son story in Gilead and Home also want to make the story more sentimental and thus more consistent with the perspectives of Sedgwick and Stowe. For example, Rebecca M. Painter argues that the best examples of grace in the novels extend from Jack to his father and from Glory to Jack (337). Aligning herself with reviewers Simon Baker and James Wood, Painter and others tend to see Boughton’s sternness, his unequal treatment of Glory and Jack, and his multiple chastisements of his reprobate son as evidence of his own selfishness and his inability to extend forgiveness and grace to the person who most needs it.11 They prefer to see the Christian God in characters who are nicer to one another, whose words and actions better agree with their sentiments because it is less unsettling to see Jack or Glory as the emblematic loving father of the prodigal rather than the cantankerous Boughton. This interpretation is not only misguided but also demonstrates twenty-first century biases against certain aspects of Christianity, such as the notion of God’s wrath or anger.12 Contemporary believers and non-believers alike are resistant to embracing the paradox of God’s wrath and love. This resistance is one of the reasons that Congregationalist Jonathan

11 In his review “Homeward Bound,” Baker asserts that Boughton “cannot forgive Jack for anything: forgiveness is merely a doctrine he aligns himself to in conversation.” Like Baker, Wood argues that Boughton “is a fierce, stern, vain old man, who wants to forgive his son and cannot” (“Homecoming” 78).

12 For example, in early 2013, the Presbyterian Committee on Congregational Song removed a hymn titled “In Christ Alone” from a new hymnal after the authors of the song refused to change a line that referred to “the wrath of God” being satisfied by Christ’s death on the cross (Smietana “Presbyterians”).



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Edwards’s sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) is known in mainstream culture as an example of a repugnant form of Calvinism, before Christianity had become more humane with the aid of nineteenth century Christians like Sedgwick and Stowe. Yet this sermon brims with God’s grace just as much as God’s wrath, for it communicates that there is no depth of sin from which God cannot save a person even as it stresses no height of piety can save someone not summoned by God. As Edwards says, “God hath had it on his heart to show to angels and men, both how excellent his love is, and also how terrible his wrath is” (100–101).13 Yet contemporary difficulties with accepting the para-dox of God’s love and wrath preclude many readers from seeing the loving con-cept of grace in Edwards’s sermon as well as in Boughton’s approach to his son.14

Characters in Gilead and Home, however, recognize the parallels between the Christian God and Boughton, particularly John Ames. When he hears of Jack’s intentions to return to Gilead, Ames reflects, “He is not the eldest or the youngest or the best or the bravest, only the most beloved. […] [Boughton] has some fine children, yet it always seemed this was the one on whom he truly set his heart. The lost sheep, the lost coin. The prodigal son” (Gilead 72–73). In addition to explicitly viewing his friend Boughton as representative of God and Jack as the prodigal son, Ames sees himself as the older brother in the biblical parable who struggles to accept the mystery of divine grace and love, which appears unreasonable to him as it did to Sedgwick and Stowe. Although Ames is supposed to be a second father to Jack, who is both Ames’s namesake and godson, he struggles, until the very end, with the bitterness of the older brother. As quoted above, he is “irritat[ed]” by having to witness the “absolute disjunc-tion between our Father’s love and our deserving” in Jack’s and Boughton’s relationship (73). Like the older brother in the biblical story, Ames’s stance toward Jack is almost always defensive. He wants to keep his wife and child

13 For issues of space, a discussion of Robinson and Jonathan Edwards has not been included here, though these novels clearly explore Edwards’s impact on American religion. Edwards’s thought is present in Ames’s writing, especially in his statement that “it is reli-gious experience above all that authenticates religion, for the purposes of the individual believer” (Gilead 145). At the same time, the character named after Edwards in Gilead succumbs to Feuerbach and German Higher Criticism, which could suggest that Edwards’s attempts to defend Christianity in the Age of Reason end in atheism. As Perry Miller asserts, “Edwards is a great modern in his refusal to confess that the eternal world is an utter mystery” (237). Furthermore, “he could criticize the Enlightenment because he was enlightened” (Miller 238).

14 While criticism of Boughton’s complacency regarding the Civil Rights struggle is well-deserved, his love for Jack and the grace he extends to his prodigal son is nevertheless representative of the Christian God.


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from Jack, worrying that Jack intends to manipulate them after Ames’s death. He disinters Jack’s past sins when Jack attends his church and finds himself the subject of the sermon. At one point, he announces, “I don’t forgive him. I wouldn’t know where to begin” (164).

Despite Ames’s struggle with being the self-righteous older brother who cannot stand to see grace extended to so unworthy a recipient, he is gifted at the eleventh hour with the grace already within Boughton and shared abun-dantly with the prodigal. He receives a second chance to bless Jack and then delivers the most explicit and profound expression of divine grace that appears in Robinson’s work, as he finally speaks about Jack from his position as a father and not as a jealous older brother:

I can tell you this, that if I’d married some rosy dame and she had given me ten children and they had each given me ten grandchildren, I’d leave them all, on Christmas Eve, on the coldest night of the world, and walk a thousand miles just for the sight of your face […] And old Boughton, if he could stand up out of his chair, out of his decrepitude and crankiness and sorrow and limitation, would abandon all those handsome children of his, mild and confident as they are, and follow after that one son whom he has never known, whom he has favored as one does a wound, and he would protect him as a father cannot, defend him with a strength he does not have, sustain him with a bounty beyond any resource he could ever dream of having. If Boughton could be himself, he would utterly pardon every transgression, past, present, and to come, whether or not it was a transgression in fact or his to pardon. He would be that extravagant. (237–238)

This passage epitomizes Robinson’s Calvinism and her challenges to nine-teenth century writers like Sedgwick and Stowe who dilute the beauty and mystery of divine grace in Reformed theology by making Christianity more clear, reasonable, and comprehensible as well as more open to human participation in the efficacy of salvation. Sentimentality, which emphasizes feeling right, cannot adequately speak to the Calvinist conception of grace or recognize a moment of it, for grace, as a Presbyterian like Boughton or Congregationalist like Ames conceive it, is incomprehensible. It is pure mys-tery; it simultaneously emphasizes God’s sternness and God’s love.

Following this passage, Ames demarcates sentimentality and grace. Having represented God as a man who would leave his faithful children on Christmas Eve to pursue the one who least deserves his love, Ames explicitly places him-self in the prodigal son story as one of the faithful children whom the father



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leaves. He writes of himself, “I was the good son,” “the one who never left his father’s house,” and “one of those righteous for whom the rejoicing in heaven will be comparatively restrained” (238). To this inequality or injustice that is the bane of the older brother, and that feels wrong to the sentimentalist, Ames responds, “And that’s alright. There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be” (238). Far from emphasizing the injustice of God’s grace, both in terms of its restraint regarding the older brother and its extravagance regarding the prodigal, as nineteenth century writers were prone to do, Robinson provides her readers with a picture of grace that does not quite make sense, that does not necessarily feel right.

Though Ames takes on the role of the older brother in the prodigal son story, a sinfulness that permeates nearly all of his reflections on his namesake until the very end, Glory accepts her father’s love for Jack even though she is closest to the actual domestic position of the older brother in the original story. She has remained in the faith of her father, even though she recognizes the “spiri-tual complacency” of his church, and she is the child who has been home car-ing for Boughton when Jack returns (Home 111). However, she appears to struggle with none of the classic behaviors of the older brother.15 She admits to Jack, willingly and without bitterness, that their father “always loved you more than any of us” (Home 136). She faithfully cares for both her father and brother through the domestic work for which she has limited aptitude and even less love. She subordinates her needs to those of others, especially Jack’s, even though she, like Jack, has returned home with deep wounds. Boughton even recognizes that she too is suffering when he tells Jack, “I know Glory got her feelings hurt something terrible. Terrible” (Home 90). Despite Boughton’s rec-ognition of Glory’s suffering, he continues to privilege Jack’s needs, and Glory not only accepts Boughton’s favoritism, but also views her brother’s problems as more imminent and more important than her own.

Glory follows her father’s example of grace by subordinating her needs to her less deserving brother and thus corrects the response of the older brother in the biblical parable, yet she is arguably the most sentimental character in both Gilead and Home. Her family “always said about her”: “Glory, you take things too much to heart” (Home 14). “She wept easily,” and during her

15 Glory does, however, recognize the injustice: that she had been home caring for her father and upon Jack’s arrival, Boughton immediately prefers Jack’s care over his daughter’s. Even though she ultimately accepts the situation, Glory wonders, “What right did he have to take over the house this way?” (67). Nevertheless, she embodies a biblical representa-tion of service and strength, wherein the first is last and the last is first. Glory is, as Jennifer L. Holberg asserts, “the real presence of God to her family” (“Courage to See It” 293).


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childhood, her siblings made a game of reading sad stories to her for the pur-pose of evoking emotion (15). The token phrase associated with her was “tears […] Ah, tears” (15). Although Robinson’s depiction of the Christian God and his mysterious ways could not be expressed using the “sentimental formula,” Glory demonstrates that feelings as well as experiences that grate against one’s sense of reason are indeed essential to human experience (Brown 176). Human feel-ings and reason, however, do not form the basis of reality for Robinson’s exem-plary characters. They suspend their sense of justice or their desires to “feel right” and, instead, they submit to what John Ames calls the “incomprehensi-ble reality” of God’s love and his involvement in ordinary human lives (Gilead 238). Therefore, Ames accepts the notion that “the rejoicing” for him “in heaven will be comparatively restrained,” and Glory accepts that her father’s love for Jack is greater than his love for herself and her more deserving siblings (Gilead 238). Differing from Sedgwick’s and Stowe’s characters, Ames’s and Glory’s observations are hard truths, but they yield to them because they both live with openness to the incomprehensible.

Works Cited

Baker, Simon. “Homeward Bound.” Review of Home by Marilynne Robinson. The Observer (October 4, 2008). n. pag. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.

Braudy, Leo. “The Form of the Sentimental Novel.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 7.1 (1973): 5–13.

Brauer, Jerald C. “Conversion: From Puritanism to Revivalism.” The Journal of Religion 58.3 (1978): 227–243.

Brown, Herbert Ross. The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789–1860. Durham: Duke University Press, 1940.

Caldwell, Patricia. The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Channing, William Ellery. Selected Writings. Ed. David Robinson. New York: Paulist Press, 1985.

De Jong, Mary G. Introduction. Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices. Ed. Mary De Jong. Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013. (1–12).

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Doubleday, 1977.Edwards, Jonathan. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” 1741. A Jonathan Edwards

Reader. Ed. John E. Smith, et. al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. (89–105).Foster, Charles H. The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England

Puritanism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1954.



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Harris, Susan K. Introduction. The Minister’s Wooing. New York: Penguin, 1999. (vii–xxiii).

Holberg, Jennifer L. “‘The Courage to See It’: Toward an Understanding of Glory.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (2010): 283–300.

Kimball, Gayle. The Religious Ideas of Harriet Beecher Stowe: Her Gospel of Womanhood. New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982.

Miller, Perry. Jonathan Edwards. New York: William Sloan, 1949.Noll, Mark. America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York:

Oxford University Press, 2002.Painter, Rebecca M. “Further Thoughts on a Prodigal Son Who Cannot Come Home, on

Loneliness and Grace: An Interview with Marilynne Robinson.” Christianity and Literature 58.3 (2009): 485–492.

———. “Loyalty Meets Prodigality: The Reality of Grace in Marilynne Robinson’s Fiction.” Christianity and Literature 59.2 (2010): 321–340.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Gates Ajar. Boston: Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1869.Reynolds, David S. Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America.

Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.Ritter, Carla R. Insurrection behind the Veil: Religious Heterodoxy in Sedgwick, Child and

Stowe. Dissertation: Temple U, 1999. ProQuest. Web. 26 Nov. 2012.Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Picador, 2004.———. Home. New York: Picador, 2008.Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. A New-England Tale; or, Sketches of New-England Character

and Manners. 1822. Ed. Victoria Clements. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.Smietana, Bob. “Presbyterians’ Decision to Drop Hymn Stirs Debate.” USA Today

(August 5, 2013). n. pag. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. New York: Penguin, 1986.———. The Minister’s Wooing. 1859. New York: Penguin, 1999.Thuesen, Peter J. “Geneva’s Crystalline Clarity: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Max Weber

on Calvinism and the American Character.” John Calvin’s American Legacy. Ed. Thomas J. Davis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. (219–237).

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Van Dette, Emily. “‘It should be a family thing’: Family, Nation, and Republicanism in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale and The Linwoods.” American Transcendental Quarterly 19.1 (2005): 51–74.

Williamson, G.I. The Westminster Confession of Faith. 2nd edition. Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2004.

Wood, James. “The Homecoming: A Prodigal Son Returns in Marilynne Robinson’s Third Novel.” Review of Home by Marilynne Robinson. The New Yorker 84.27 (Sept. 2008): 76–78.

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Sentimentality and Grace: Marilynne Robinson and Nineteenth-Century Prodigal Son Narratives

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