"Grand and Sweet Methodist Hymns": Spiritual Transformation and Imperialistic Vision in Harriet Prescott Spofford's "Circumstance"

• Published in: Legacy (Amherst, Mass.) Vol. 18; no. 2; p. 153
• Main Author: Holly, Carol
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Lincoln University of Nebraska Press 31-10-2002
• Subjects: Historical text analysis; Ideology; Imagery; Literature; Music; Racism; Religion; Religious music; Singing; Spirituality; White people
• ISSN: 0748-4321; 1534-0643

In "Circumstance," it is in part the "liturgy engraven" on the heroine's heart in childhood that allows her as an adult to move quickly to the point where, in the midst of her frightening ordeal, she can surrender to God her sense of personal agency and well-being: "`Though He slay me, yet will I trust in him,'" she sings, drawing on the book of Job (91; Job 13:15).(9) What is more, [Harriet Prescott Spofford]'s imagery suggests that this trust is a matter not of grudging necessity but of rare and wonderful beauty. The "hope" that springs from "despair" as she begins her hymn singing is compared to "some snowy spray of flower bells" that grows "from blackest mould." The "sublime faith of our fathers," and the "utter self-sacrifice" and love that inspired them, she claims, is "the fragrance" of "unrequired subjection," sweeter and more pleasant than the aroma "of golden censers swung in purple-vapored chancels." She even draws on a Psalm (105: 7) that begins by summoning the people of Israel to sing praises to the Lord, as the woman herself is now doing, and goes on to demonstrate God's faithfulness to the covenant He made with His people: "`He is the Lord our God; his judgments are in all the earth'" (91). In turn, the heroine lavishly celebrates the self-sacrifice of the "fathers" -- ancient Hebrews like Job -- whose "sublime faith" she is now drawing on for wisdom, fortitude, and strength. At the beginning of the story, the "stealthy native" people who inhabit the wilderness are indistinguishable from the "deadly panther tribes" who live there as well (84). The term that describes the panther who holds the woman captive, "Indian Devil," conflates the beast's predatory designs with those of native people and associates the people themselves with the devil. We learn at the end of the story, Judith Fetterley writes, that "this `Indian Devil' is less deadly than the actual Indians whose `tomahawk and scalping-knife, descending during the night, had left behind them only this work of their accomplished hatred.'" By the end of the story, the meaning of the ghostly warning at the beginning also becomes clear: "`The Lord have mercy on the people.'" "For `people,'" Fetterley notes, "we read `whites.'" (We also read the "chosen people" of God.) "[F] or `mercy,'" Fetterley adds, "we read protection against the Indians who are not people but devils, capable of every atrocity." From beginning to end, Fetterley concludes, the story "exemplifies the insidiousness and pervasiveness of the racist imagination in white American literature" (267). The story's Gothicism only serves to strengthen the potency of this racist image. Charles Sanford notes that the "seeds" of American imperialism can be discerned in such early Puritan texts as John Cotton's God's Promise to His Plantations (1630), a biblically based text which "hardly conceals a chosen people's grand design to dispossess the Indians from their lands" (15). In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, evangelical movements like Methodism shared much in common with the ideology of expansion and conquest that shaped the development of early America. The leaders of the Methodist movement in North America believed that, as one preacher put it, "`God's design in raising up the Preachers called Methodists'" was "`[t] o reform the Continent, and to spread scriptural Holiness over these Lands'" (qtd. in Schmidt 75). Yet another preacher predicted that "`by the goodness of God such a [religious] flame will soon be kindled as would never stop until it reached the great South Sea' [i.e. the Pacific]" (qtd. in [Bucke, Emory] 288). Historians of Methodism observe that Methodism played a central role in "`helping to save the ever advancing American frontier from barbarism'" (qtd. in Bucke 492). They claim that "Methodism was on the march to conquer the land. Its preachers possessed a divine compulsion to enlarge their borders" (Bucke 367). Methodism, it appears, not only flourished in the climate of territorial expansion in the nineteenth century, as histories of Methodism reveal,(16) but fueled by a belief in its own brand of "manifest destiny," -- Methodism, it was thought, "`will take the world,'" -- the Methodist movement inevitably contributed to this climate of expansion as well (qtd. in Bucke 492).