ABSTRACT

This chapter considers how Philip Amory and Gerty arrive at an awkwardly eroticized moment of reunion as the result of two significant narrative choices: first, Cummins's deliberate incorporation of cultural and social developments associated with nineteenth-century liberal Christianity; and second, her emphasis on fatherhood, rather than courtship, as the narrative impulse behind Gerty's story. It expresses that the broader cultural transition from belief in a patriarchal Calvinist God, whose authority is absolute and fearsome, to a more loving and affectionate deity. his theological shift, one that both occasioned and reflected a similar transformation in models of earthly fatherhood, is instantiated in the novel's contrast between the authoritarian patriarch Mr. Graham and the gentler, more paternal approach of Philip Amory—an intervention Cummins exploits with respect to the role of the daughter, Gerty. The emergence of a Christian fatherhood that united parental duty and affection thus gradually supplanted earlier Puritan parenting practices, which had emphasized obedience and discipline rather than tenderness.