American Quaker Romances: Building the Myth of the White Christian Nation

By Carolina Fernández Rodríguez

Quaker characters have peopled many an American literary work—most notably, "Uncle Tom's Cabin"—as Quakerism has been historically associated with progressive attitudes and the advancement of social justice. With the rise in recent years of the Christian romance market, dominated by American Evangelical companies, there has been a renewed interest in fictional Quakers. In the historical Quaker romances analyzed in this book, Quaker heroines often devote time to spiritual considerations, advocate the sanctity of marriage and promote traditional family values. However, their concern with social justice also leads them to engage in subversive behavior and to question the status quo, as illustrated by heroines who are active on the Underground Railroad or are seen organizing the Seneca Falls convention. Though relatively liberal in terms of gender, Quaker romances are considerably less progressive when it comes to race relations.
Thus, they reflect America's conflicted relationship with its history of race and gender abuse, and the country's tendency to both resist and advocate social change. Ultimately, Quaker romances reinforce the myth of America as a White and Christian nation, here embodied by the Quaker heroine, the all-powerful savior who rescues Native Americans, African Americans and Jews while conquering the hero's heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Release date: Dec 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9788491349099

Book preview

AN INTRODUCTION

QUAKER ROMANCES

Quakers and their Testimonies

The Religious Society of Friends, as Quakers are officially known, began in the 1640s in the North of England, at the end of the Civil War. George Fox (1624-1691) was the primary founder of the movement, though he was supported by many other religious seekers in this turbulent time. His ascent of Pendle Hill in May 1652 is considered a critical moment in Quaker history as it marked the idea of starting the new church (Dandelion 2008: 7). Fox’s movement soon stood out due to several features that seemed revolutionary and threatening. Above all was the belief that God had placed within every person an Inward or Inner Light that they could turn to, which allowed for a direct relationship with God. The consequences of putting this belief into practice were enormous. There was no longer a need for ministers, pastors, priests, and the like, as Friends required no intermediary with God. With the discarding of ministers came, too, the irrelevance of sacraments (Dandelion 2008: 9). Scripture became secondary, used to confirm individual revelations.

All this was seen by members of the Church of England, and even the Puritan rebels who had won the Civil War, as potentially destabilizing for the status quo. According to Quakers, all were equal under God. Quakers refused to pay church tithes, doff their hats in front of authorities, or use titles. Besides, they would not swear oaths, as they believed God wanted humans to always tell the truth, not just on special occasions. Early Friends also objected to using the names of days and months which derived from pagan gods and used numbers instead (Dandelion 2008: 12). For example, Sunday became First Day, and January, First Month. Their wedding ceremonies were also different from those of other Christian groups, as were their Meetings for Worship, which were mostly carried out in silence, without prepared sermons, readings from Scripture or the singing of hymns. The apparent lack of respect to conventions and superiors added to the perception that they were troublesome people. Since they were at the same time rapidly attracting members, authorities tried to stop them from growing. Their meetings were banned, and thousands were cast into prison.

Their concern with the so-called Testimonies, nowadays often referred to as SPICES (Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship), made Quaker deviations from cultural norms even more conspicuous. ¹ Their Testimony of Simplicity led them to renounce outward markers of wealth or high status. Consequently, they chose to dress in a simple manner, and to wear clothes that had no embellishments and were made in fabrics of dull colors, often brown or gray. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many Quakers, most notably John Woolman (1720-1772), also refused to wear dyes and fabrics that came from slave labor (Dandelion 2008: 25). Quakers decided that their speech, too, would remain plain. In the seventeenth century the English began to use the grammatical form you in all cases, singular or plural, a feature that characterizes Modern English. Quakers chose to retain the forms of Middle English pronouns for the singular (thou, thee, thy, thine, thyself), which in practice had been kept primarily only when referring to a person of lower social standing, such as a servant (Hamm 2003: 21-22).

Their Peace Testimony made them abhor war, which brought them reprisals, as seventeenth-century England did not recognize the concept of conscientious objection. However, the concern with Integrity would bring them economic rewards in the long run, especially after the passing of the Act of Toleration in 1689 which granted freedom of worship to nonconformists in Britain. In fact, as time went by, Quakers became very prominent as businessmen and bankers (Dandelion 2008: 24) because people trusted them in business transactions and as money lenders. They also invented the fixed price for merchandise at a time when haggling was the standard in business. Quakers believed that it was immoral to charge one person more than another for the same thing. This revolutionized commerce and drew in customers.

With the expansion of the British Empire, the Religious Society of Friends saw its transportation to America. The first Quakers who came to the American colonies, in the 1650s, were missionaries who faced stiff resistance, particularly in Puritan Boston, where four were hanged (Dandelion 2008: 89-90). However, in the colonies of Rhode Island and North Carolina, where freedom of religion had been established, they quickly found a foothold. The need for a refuge for the Quakers being persecuted in Britain weighed heavily on William Penn, an English Quaker. His deceased father had made a large loan to the government, and the debt was now owed to the son. Penn requested payment in the form of a grant of land; consequently, the Religious Society of Friends saw its first-scale transportation to America. In 1681 the colony of Pennsylvania, the so-called Holy Experiment (Dandelion 2008: 15; Hamm 2003: 27), was founded by William Penn as a refuge for Quakers. Penn’s belief in Equality, Peace, and Integrity led him to negotiate a series of purchases of land from Native Americans (the Delaware or Lenni Lenape), despite having the land grant from the King. Penn also negotiated several treaties to maintain peace, so there would be no wars with the original inhabitants as had been the case in other colonies (Hamm 2003: 28). The Holy Experiment, however, was not free from contradictions, as Penn himself was the owner of several slaves. Notwithstanding these and other incongruities, and despite the persecution they endured in the New England colonies, American Quakers kept growing in number, their communities establishing strongholds during the Colonial period not only in Pennsylvania, but also in places like Nantucket Island or, as said, North Carolina. The capital of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, known as the City of Brotherly Love, was, by the time of the American Revolution, one of the largest and most prosperous cities in what would become the United States. Quaker strongholds like Nantucket and New Bedford, to cite another example of the prosperity brought about by Quakers, became the centers of the whale industry in the eighteenth century. At the time of the American Revolution, whale oil was the most valuable commodity exported to England from Massachusetts and Quakers supplied the whale oil to light London’s streets at night.

New opportunities opened up after the Revolutionary War and the passing of the Northwest Ordinance (1787) by the Confederation Congress. The Northwest Ordinance provided a method for admitting new states to the Union from the Northwest Territory. Many Quakers began to move to the newly created Territory and, later on, to the states that sprang from it. They were particularly attracted by the fact that the Northwest Ordinance had banned slavery in those states (Hamm 2003: 39). Indeed, by the end of the eighteenth century many American Quakers were already convinced that slavery could not be accepted by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Hamm 2003: 34-35). Their loathing of slavery led them to move away from slave states, most notably North Carolina, but also to actively engage in the anti-slavery movement and in the Underground Railroad (Dandelion 2008: 29-30).

The Testimony of Equality also made them believe that women and men should have the same rights within a Quaker Meeting; when prompted by the Inner Light, both could equally speak up and minister to others (Hamm 2003: 184). Women became itinerant ministers, and left to visit other meetings, leaving the childcare and household duties behind, sometimes for months at a time. Thus, Quaker women got used to travelling far and wide, even across the Atlantic, speaking in public, and seeing their contributions respected. In early Quakerism, Meetings for Business were segregated: men held theirs, and women handled their own (Dandelion 2008: 22). Though the issues dealt with by women were usually less important, that women had authority over any businesses was radical in the seventeenth century; besides, being in charge of their own business meetings gave women experience in running organizations. For decades there were partitions in Quaker Meeting houses so that men and women could conduct their Meetings for Business separately. Those spaces became a cradle for women’s rights associations, and Quaker women rose as mothers of feminism (Hamm 2003: 184).

Indeed, Quaker women had an important role in their communities that allowed them to see themselves as equal, which explains their active involvement in a number of reformist groups in the nineteenth century and, most notably, in the abolitionist cause. By 1840, several renowned American Quaker women like Lucretia Mott, her sister Martha Coffin, Abigail Kelley, and Susan B. Anthony, among others, realized the need to work not only in favor of the abolition of slavery, but also to attain the suffrage for women. Their contribution to female suffrage became paramount, until in 1920, and thanks to the invaluable role played by Alice Paul, another Quaker (Hamm 2003: 188), American women were granted the right to vote.

Given their history, it is no wonder that the allure of Quakerism for writers and readers alike is great and has been so for decades. Anna Breiner Caulfield’s Quakers in Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography (1993) offers a thorough compilation of works that depict Quakers in fiction. James Emmett Ryan’s Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650-1950 (2009) is, like Caufield’s book, out of date by a few decades, but Ryan’s volume has the merit of showing the appeal of Quakerism not only in literary works, but in American popular culture at large. Jennifer M. Connerley’s Ph.D. thesis, Friendly Americans: Representing Quakers in the United States, 1850-1920 (2006a) also examines popular representations of Quakers. More recently published is Farah Mendleson’s Creating Memory: Historical Fiction and the English Civil Wars (2020), where there is a section dedicated to the analysis of literary works which feature Quaker characters in the years of the English Civil Wars. Other scholars have more narrowly focused on the representation of specific Quaker distinctive signs in both literature and popular culture, like Jennifer Connerley, who has turned to the significance of the Quaker bonnet in two papers: Fighting Quakers: A Jet Black Whiteness (2006c) and Quaker Bonnets and the Erotic Feminine in American Popular Culture (2006b). The latter traces widespread popular representations of Quaker women’s bonnets from the 1850s through the 1930s in fiction, image, film, and music.

When Americans in this century think of Quakers, many will recall the image of a Quaker man wearing a broad-brimmed hat on a box of oatmeal. For over a century, images of Quakers have been used to sell many different products, often with absolutely no connection with anyone in the Society of Friends, but simply because Quakers acquired a reputation as honest people. Quakers have not only been preyed upon by a consumerist society for their peculiar image or the waves of positive associations that emanate from their bonnets and broad-brimmed hats. Their spiritual values and their social commitments have set them apart as special people. As is often noted, Quakers had an influence beyond their numbers (Dandelion 2008: 1). Certainly, their influence on many historical processes and social movements has been profound, and so has been their presence in American popular culture, where they are frequently presented as pioneers of the most noble causes and beacons of moral integrity at times when the nation has discussed issues of paramount importance like the abolition of slavery, gender equality, pacifism and even ecology.

Despite salient continuities, one should nonetheless note that Quakerism has diverged and splintered since its inception in the seventeenth century. Plain dress and speech have long been abandoned by most Friends, as have the strict rules that determined who was to be disowned, for example, for marrying outside the Quaker Meeting or for disobeying the Elders’ admonitions. Today, there is a Quaker population worldwide of approximately 380,000 (Staff 2017: n.p.) belonging to different branches which, in America, resulted from several nineteenth-century splits, though the separations did not affect British Friends in the same way. In brief, there are three branches of Quakers today (Dandelion 2008: 17-18). First, there are Evangelical Friends Churches which have pastors and give great importance to Scripture. This is the largest group worldwide and they represent an important and aggressive strand of American Quakerism today (Hamm 2003: 5). Second, there is a small group of Conservative Friends who still adhere to silent worship and plain dress. Finally, there are Liberal Friends, who are the most doctrinally permissive about matters of belief, and consequently include theist and even non-theist Quakers. They tend to be ideologically more progressive and to involve themselves as activists in various causes like disarmament, anti-racism, or environmental issues, to cite a few examples.

Many portrayals of Quakerism are bound to be loosely based on popularly held stereotypes rather than on actual Friends and they disregard the diversity that has existed within Quakerism since the nineteenth century. There is therefore a risk in approaching those, at times, inaccurate portrayals of Quakerism, especially if whoever deals with them is, like myself, an outsider to Quakerism, and who, unintentionally, may be further reproducing incorrect representations. On my behalf I can only say that I am conscious of that danger and have done my best to avoid it. This book’s main goal is to study the reasons why Quakers have come to inhabit the pages of many a romance, not to further exoticize or stereotype them.

Quaker Romances: A Subgenre within Christian Romances

The genre of popular romance has not been immune to the appeal of the Religious Society of Friends. The goal of this book is precisely to explore that attraction, although the analysis must first take into account the existence of a subgenre within the field of the romance, that is, the group of so-called Christian or Inspirational romances. Not all the romances that feature Quaker protagonists are Christian romances, however, though many are. Consequently, some notes on the terminology that I will be using to refer to the various types of romances considered in this book seem to be called for.

As a cover term, I will use the category Quaker romances to refer to all the romances with Quaker protagonists, that is, those in which either the heroine or the hero, or both, belong to the Religious Society of Friends. This is therefore the broadest category I will be using. Within it, there are two other categories: Christian or Inspirational Quaker romances, and secular Quaker romances.

Christian romances (often referred to in the romance community as inspirationals) are those romances published by Evangelical Christian publishing houses. As defined in Inspirational Romance by Rebecca Barrett-Fox and Kristen Donnelly (2021), they show the characters’ relationship with God, and a lack of detail about theology or religious ritual; they display no sexual contact (which is why they are also referred to as clean or sweet romances) and they tend to present women characters in traditional gender roles (though heroes may be less traditionally masculine than men in secular romances); finally, they portray a world where there is a brokenness of some kind, but the narrative proves that faith in God will eventually restore the said brokenness.

According to Barrett-Fox and Donnelly, the term inspirational romance is used by U.S. booksellers to refer to romances targeted at conservative, evangelical, Protestants (2021: 192) and it is synonymous, in terms of marketing in bookstores, with ‘Christian romances’ (2021: 206). Kenneth Paradis has more generally defined inspirational fiction (therefore including romances and other types of narratives) as a group of novels that can be read "homiletically, not as replacements for scripture, but as lenses that can mediate and focus certain aspects of scripture, guiding its integration into readers’ lives (2020: 76; emphasis in the original), hence the use of the term inspirational to refer to them. Besides, Paradis, like Barrett-Fox and Donnelly, has pointed out that inspirational fiction constitutes a genre in which the characters spend a lot less time having, or fantasizing about, or talking about, sex, and, instead, spend a lot more time worrying about the relationship of their romantic lives to their spiritual lives and its moral entailments (2020: 73). However, some inspirational romances happen to deviate from the general rule that sex and taboo issues such as rape, abortion, murder or infidelity should not be dealt with; these have sometimes been grouped under the label edgy inspirationals," which I will also make use of.

Though the category inspirational romances has been typically applied to romances published by Evangelical publishing houses or the Christian imprints of publishing houses, it has been argued that writers seeking to address other religions’ takes on romance should also be included in scholarship on ‘inspirational romance’ (Barrett-Fox and Donnelly 2021: 206). This would imply that scholarship on romances featuring non-Christian religious groups like Jews or Muslims should be rightly included within the category of inspirational romance. The romances analyzed in this book are, for the most part, Christian in a conventional interpretation of the term. However, as will be shown, some authors of the romances studied in this book are Quakers themselves, and at least one of them has had her works published by a Quaker publishing house. Their romances tend to deviate from conventional Christian romances in a number of ways, as my book will argue, but I nevertheless agree with Barrett-Fox and Donnelly that their works are, in their own way, inspirational fiction as well.

For their part, secular Quaker romances differ from Christian romances in that they are not restricted by the closed-door treatment to sexual acts, that is, they may be much opener in their depiction of sexual scenes, and their characters may also be more progressive in their behavior, the roles they perform and the moral principles that guide them. Their relationship with God may be outstanding, and their focus on the restorative power of faith of paramount importance, too, but there are also many cases of secular romances in which the characters’ belonging to the Religious Society of Friends only appears as a marker of exoticism, mentioned here and there and soon forgotten, because their faith adds little value to the characters’ motivations.

Within the romance industry, so-called inspirational or Christian romances are considered one of the bestselling subgenres (Barrett-Fox 2016: 348). In economic terms, the Christian market may be a relatively thin slice of the romance market, but Christian romance publishing is nevertheless a vibrant one (Markert 2016: 207), said to generate upwards of $50 million in annual sales, which is not an insignificant sum (Markert 2016: 261). Christian houses initially entered the romance field in the mid- to late 1980s in response to the overt sexuality of secular romances flooding the market during the height of the romance revolution in the early to mid-1980s (Markert 2016: 207-208). Matthew Kapell and Suzanne Becker concur that [t]he rise in acceptance of IRF [Inspirational romance fiction] was the result of a backlash among fundamentalist Christians against the onslaught of sexual permissiveness and the growing feminist movement that advocated women’s right to move out of domesticity and into the workplace with equal status to men (2005: 151). Similarly, Barrett-Fox and Donnelly agree that it was in the 1980s that Christian romances underwent a transformation caused by major changes in American society:

the white conservative Protestants who make up the bulk of the market for evangelical Christian media began to mobilize politically around opposition to policies and cultural shifts that they saw as threatening the traditional family and, by extension, American civilization: advances in abortion rights and access to abortion, nofault divorce, gay rights, and (more covertly) desegregation […]. (2021: 194)

As happens in every cultural field, race also plays an important role in the rise of Christian romances. Barrett-Fox and Donnelly (2021) note that major publishing houses of Christian romances include few novels by or about people of color. If one is intent on reading books that deal with the romantic experience of people of color or interracial couples, one must look for such books among the novels published by imprints that focus on racial and ethnic minorities or by presses that concentrate on women of color, or by smaller presses. Harlequin and other major publishing houses are definitely not the answer. Thus, Harlequin’s Love Inspired line has few books which feature people of color as main characters, Barrett-Fox and Donnelly assure; Harlequin’s imprint on characters of color, Kimani, launched New Spirit in the mid-2000s promising to release African American Christian fiction, but it failed to do so, and its final books came out in May 2019 (Barrettt-Fox and Donnelly 2021: 202). Though there are few African American writers publishing African American Christian fiction, Beverly Jenkin being one of those exceptions, the situation is even more lamentable in the case of other minorities: for readers seeking depictions of Latinx or Asian American characters, the choices are relatively few (Barrett-Fox and Donnelly 2021: 202).

Despite its importance in both economic and cultural terms, the field of Christian romances has received little in-depth analysis. In 2005, Matthew Kapell and Suzanne Becker stated that while there [was] considerable historic criticism of the secular romance fiction market, few [scholars] have ventured into the magnetism of the IRF [Inspirational romance fiction] market (147). Years later, Barret-Fox and Donnelly present a similar picture, confirming that there is still relatively little scholarship published on Christian romance novels, adding that it comprises only two books […][,] three book chapters, and fewer than a dozen articles (2021: 204-205). Alternatively, when it has been studied, the field has been approached in a number of biased ways. John Markert, for example, refers to Peter Darbyshire’s article, The Politics of Love: Harlequin Romances and the Christian Right (2002), as proof of those prejudiced approaches; in particular, he criticizes Darbyshire’s assessment of the field as based on only "one Harlequin Love Inspired novel, Heiress (Markert 2016: 212). Barrett-Fox and Donnelly also point out that the existing scholarship tends to focus on the genre’s messages about gender and how those messages resonate with broader evangelical teachings, or on the relationship between readers and their texts (2021: 205). Barrett-Fox and Donnelly cite as examples the articles written by Laura Clawson (2005) and Neal Christopherson (1999), both of which show that the messages about gender tend toward the conservative (2021: 205), and Peter Darbyshire’s already referred to 2002 article, where Christian romances are presented as nothing but Religious Right propaganda" (Barrett-Fox and Donnelly 2021: 205).

Notwithstanding the lack of proper critical attention, the popularity of Christian or inspirational romances in the past few decades, especially of novels featuring Amish protagonists (amply studied by Valerie Weaver-Zercher in her 2013 monograph, Thrill of the Chaste: The Allure of Amish Romance Novels), is undeniable, as is, to a lesser extent, the appearance of various subgenres spawned by the Amish craze, that