Reviewed by:

• Faith in Exposure: Privacy and Secularism in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Justine S. Murison
• Ray Horton (bio)

"Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again," exclaimed a banner at the Women's March on Inauguration Day in January 2016. One of the great protest slogans to emerge from the presidency of Donald Trump, this comparison between the regressive state of Gilead in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and the future portended by Trump's coziness with the Christian Right illuminates a key tension within American secularism. On the one hand, in a secular age, many people routinely think of religious faith as a matter of private rather than public concern; on the other hand, as Justine Murison argues in the introduction of Faith in Exposure, "secularism is not so much the absence of religion from the public sphere … but is instead a prescriptive orientation to the world" (4), one that presumes religion's banishment to the private sphere even as it enables "secular institutions to retain their Protestant structures" (7). The nightmare invoked by The Handmaid's Tale and the protest signs it inspired hinge on the danger that the private religious convictions of some, by way of the public mechanisms of politics and law, will trump the right to privacy enjoyed by others, especially where the right to privacy concerns gender, sexuality, and reproduction.

In Faith in Exposure, Murison historicizes this contested terrain between privacy and secularism in American literature and culture, explaining "how, over the course of the nineteenth century, privacy came to encompass such contradictions—underpinning the right to sexual and reproductive rights but also undermining them in the name of religious freedom" (1). To this end, Murison's thorough and persuasive cultural history of religion and privacy in the nineteenth century proves to be a master class in what Victorianists affiliated with the V21 Collective call "strategic presentism," an approach to literary history that highlights how contemporary concerns animate our investment in questions about earlier periods ("Manifesto of the V21 Collective," http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/). For Murison, "a study of the nineteenth-century [End Page 187] American novel," which she calls "the literary form most closely associated with modern subjectivity and the private lives of individuals" (2), not only reveals how fiction happened to respond to nineteenth-century debates about privacy; it also illuminates the religious subtext of twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates over the right to privacy, from Roe v. Wade (1973) to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) to the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022). Behind this argument lies an important commitment to what the study of literature can offer to interdisciplinary fields such as secular studies. Nineteenth-century novels don't just shed light on the problems of the nineteenth century; they also offer resources for grappling with difficult questions that vex us today. Fiction itself, Murison implies throughout her book, might help us as we try to figure out how to make Margaret Atwood fiction again.

As a contribution to the growing field known variously as postsecular criticism, secularization theory, or secular studies, Faith in Exposure builds explicitly on the work of other Americanists who, like Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman in their introduction to a 2014 special issue of American Literature titled "After the Postsecular," have pronounced the secularization thesis "dead." The postsecular, Coviello and Hickman argue, "dares to suggest that we might do our thinking about modernity … under a sign other than 'the secular'" (649), a line of inquiry that asks "what, if anything, the secular might mean in the context of US literary history" (650). In close dialogue with Tracy Fessenden's Culture and Redemption (Princeton UP, 2007), John Lardas Modern's Secularism in Antebellum America (U of Chicago P, 2011), Elizabeth Fenton's Religious Liberties (Oxford UP, 2011), Claudia Stokes's The Altar at Home (U of Pennsylvania P, 2014), and Ashley Barnes's Love and Depth in the American Novel (U of Virginia P, 2020), Faith in Exposure adds a significant new...

审阅者：

• 对曝光的信仰：十九世纪美国的隐私和世俗主义作者：Justine S. Murison
• 雷·霍顿（简介）

2016 年 1 月就职日妇女游行中，横幅上写着“让玛格丽特·阿特伍德再次成为小说”。这是唐纳德·特朗普总统任期内出现的最伟大的抗议口号之一，它与阿特伍德的《使女的故事》中基列的倒退状况进行了比较（1985）以及特朗普对基督教右翼的友好所预示的未来揭示了美国世俗主义内部的一个关键紧张关系。一方面，在世俗时代，许多人通常认为宗教信仰是私人问题而不是公共问题；另一方面，正如贾斯汀·穆里森（Justine Murison）在《暴露中的信仰》的介绍中所说，“世俗主义与其说是公共领域中宗教的缺席……不如说是对世界的规定性取向”（4），它假定宗教的存在放逐到私人领域，即使它使“世俗机构能够保留其新教结构”（7）。《使女的故事》引发的噩梦及其引发的抗议迹象取决于这样一种危险，即一些人的私人宗教信仰通过政治和法律的公共机制，将压倒其他人享有的隐私权，特别是在权利受到侵犯的情况下。隐私涉及性别、性行为和生殖。

在《暴露的信仰》中，穆里森历史性地阐述了美国文学和文化中隐私与世俗主义之间的这一争议领域，解释了“在 19 世纪的过程中，隐私如何包含了这些矛盾——支撑了性权利和生殖权利，但也破坏了性权利和生殖权利”。他们以宗教自由的名义”（1）。为此，穆里森关于 19 世纪宗教和隐私的透彻而有说服力的文化史被证明是 V21 集体下属的维多利亚时代主义者所称的“战略当下主义”的大师课，这是一种文学史方法，强调当代关注如何激发我们的生命力。对早期问题的投资（“V21 Collective 宣言”，http://v21collective.org/manifesto-of-the-v21-collective-ten-theses/）。对于穆里森来说，“对十九世纪[完第 187 页]美国小说的研究”，她称之为“与现代主体性和个人私生活最密切相关的文学形式”(2)，不仅揭示了小说是如何发生的回应十九世纪有关隐私的辩论；它还阐明了二十世纪和二十一世纪有关隐私权的辩论的宗教潜台词，从罗伊诉韦德案（1973年）到奥伯格菲尔诉霍奇斯案（2015年），再到多布斯诉杰克逊妇女健康组织案的后果（ 2022）。这一论点的背后是对文学研究能为世俗研究等跨学科领域提供什么的重要承诺。十九世纪的小说不仅揭示了十九世纪的问题，而且还揭示了十九世纪的问题。它们还提供了解决当今困扰我们的难题的资源。穆里森在她的书中暗示，当我们试图弄清楚如何再次创作玛格丽特·阿特伍德小说时，小说本身可能会帮助我们。

作为对后世俗批评、世俗化理论或世俗研究等不断发展的领域的贡献，《暴露中的信仰》明确建立在其他美国主义者的作品之上，例如彼得·科维洛和贾里德·希克曼在 2014 年美国文学特刊的介绍中题为“后世俗之后”的文章宣布世俗化论点“已死”。科维耶洛和希克曼认为，后世俗“敢于建议我们可以在‘世俗’以外的标志下思考现代性……”（649），这是一个询问“世俗可能会发生什么（如果有的话）”的问题。在美国文学史的背景下意味着“（650）。与特雷西·费森登的《文化与救赎》（普林斯顿大学，2007）、约翰·拉达斯现代的《战前美国的世俗主义》（芝加哥大学，2011）、伊丽莎白·芬顿的《宗教自由》（牛津大学，2011）、克劳迪娅·斯托克斯的《家里的祭坛》密切对话（宾夕法尼亚大学 P，2014 年）和阿什利·巴恩斯的《美国小说中的爱与深度》（弗吉尼亚大学 P，2020 年），《暴露中的信仰》增加了一个重要的新内容……