Early American Literature

"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...