ABSTRACT
In Phelps’ 1868 novel The Gates Ajar, Mary Cabot loses her beloved brother in the Civil War. When Mary bemoans never being able to touch Roy again or see him in heaven, her aunt Winifred endeavors to teach Mary about a “real,” “actual” afterlife through intimate touch; she insists that the Bible’s descriptions of the afterlife be read figuratively rather than literally. Thompson suggests that Mary and Winifred’s interactions illustrate Phelps’ engagement in the theological debates around reason and revelation that energized the seminary in her hometown of Andover between the 1820s and 1850s. Although scholarship on The Gates Ajar often acknowledges Phelps’ rootedness in Andover, it rarely places her writing alongside the theological scholarship of its seminarians. Such scholarship used reason to rationalize the Bible as revelation, bringing materialist reason and immaterial faith into tension.
This chapter argues that we ought to read Gates as Phelps’ intervention in and adaptation of Andover’s theological tensions. Phelps’ theology uses touch to make reason, and a reasonable heaven, compatible with the ravaging needs of loss. In Gates, Winifred’s touch crystallizes the abstract solace of heaven into something Mary perceives with her physical senses. As Winifred uses fleshly comfort to evidence her faith in heavenly comfort, Phelps develops Andover’s tension between reason and revelation for women grieving the losses of the Civil War. In Phelps’ novel, women’s bodies illuminate her theological preoccupation with loss in the context of the materialist, reason-based scholarship that was igniting New England’s nascent universities in the mid-nineteenth century.
