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Chapter 4 - Beyond

Spiritual Materialism, Sentimentalism, and the Afterlives of Embodiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2025

Matthew Rebhorn
Affiliation:
James Madison University, Virginia
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Summary

As the providers of care work, women experienced the painful losses of male bodies during the Civil War acutely. This chapter explores the way Elizabeth Stuart Phelps used her works—particularly her successful sentimental novel, The Gates Ajar (1868)—to imagine faith as a way to manage this pain. Yet, Phelps’s popularity stemmed from the way her notion of faith also complicated the orthodox Calvinist belief in a disembodied spirit: an ontology premised on the soul’s difference from, and superiority to, the body. By developing what Phelps calls “spiritual materialism,” she puts the lived experience of embodiment at the very center of belief, not drifting or working between mind-centered and body-centered paradigms, as we have seen, but operating beyond them both at the level of faith. Precisely the way this re-embodied faith moves beyond mind-centered and body-centered ontologies allows Phelps’s sentimental novel itself to move beyond the restrictive gender politics of sentimentalism, “minding the body” to tell a less repressive story of domesticity and reveal a more capacious understanding of female desire.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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  • Beyond
  • Matthew Rebhorn, James Madison University, Virginia
  • Book: Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • Online publication: 29 June 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009527699.005
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  • Beyond
  • Matthew Rebhorn, James Madison University, Virginia
  • Book: Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • Online publication: 29 June 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009527699.005
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Beyond
  • Matthew Rebhorn, James Madison University, Virginia
  • Book: Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
  • Online publication: 29 June 2025
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009527699.005
Available formats
×