ABSTRACT
By the time Catharine Maria Sedgwick had published her first novel, A New-England Tale; or Sketches of New-England Character and Manners (1822), she had changed the focus of her personal religious faith from the Calvinism of her father, Theodore Sedgwick, to the more liberal Unitarianism of William Ellery Channing. Sedgwick illustrated the ways in which the family affected and was affected by the upheavals of America’s Second Great Awakening. This tale of Jane Elton, an orphaned young woman coming of age, is the story of the process of individuation of the new republic. Jane’s spiritual progress from the Calvinism of her Aunt Wilson, a self-appointed member of God’s elect who persecutes Jane as reprobate, to the Quakerism of Mr. Lloyd personifies the new republic’s post–Revolutionary War progress from an authoritarian theology to a more democratic one.
Hope Leslie; or Early Times in the Massachusetts (1827) fictionalizes the colonial roots of a riven nation, figured as the struggle between Puritans and Pequots, and Sedgwick’s short tale “The Catholic Iroquois” (1825–6) sets a young woman’s Native American culture against her adopted Christian faith. Sedgwick took on the challenges of representing the problems inherent in practicing Christianity in an increasingly diverse, new republic. In various scenarios of martyrdom, apostasy, and redemption, Sedgwick’s early fictions offer not only a survey of lived, theological conflicts in early America, but, when considered together, these works also tell a greater story of the transformative, hegemonic battle over the soul and moral conscience of a new nation.
