Includes bibliographical references (pages 151-172) and index
This book explores a notable if unlikely undercurrent of interest in Mary as mythical Madonna that has persisted in American life and letters from 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. Author John Gatta delineates a countercultural pattern of mythic assertion that has yet to be acknowledged in standard surveys of American cultural or literary history. 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 these 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
1 - 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 -- - 2 - 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 -- - 3 - 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 -- - 4 - The Sexual Madonna in Harold Frederic's Damnation of Theron Ware
