| Nineteenth-century American women frequently used unorthodox, even subversive, tactics in order to marry a minister, for marriage was an ordination into a ministry career otherwise denied them. Texts in which heroines marry ministers, such as Augusta Jane Wilson's St. Elmo; or, Saved at Last (1867), Josiah Gilbert Holland's Fanny Gilbert: An American Story (1860), and Bayard Taylor's Hannah Thurston: A Story of American Life (1864), must be re-interpreted according to this overlooked fact.; Women of the Holiness and Pentecost movements rejected ordination through marriage, arguing that the Holy Spirit ordained them for religious speech even though male-dominated institutions refused to. They believed that the ordination occurs when a woman loans her voice and body to the Spirit, becoming His vessel and speaking with “tongues of fire” called glossolalia (Acts 2:4). More specifically, the Spirit replaces male-constructed language, a language of dependency and subordination for women, with His powerful, public language.; Nineteenth-century fiction frequently references its heroines' ordination by the Holy Spirit but nonetheless does not grant them full permission and power to speak. The heroine of Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing (1859) is ordained by the Holy Spirit to a “silent ministry.” The heroines in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar (1868) and Margaret Deland's John Ward, Preacher (1888) are ordained with the “ordination of experience,” but they never preach. The heroines in Elizabeth Wooster Stuart Phelps's The Sunny Side; or, The Country Minister's Wife (1851) and Charles Sheldon's In His Steps (1896) are ordained for limited speech. Henry James's The Bostonians (1886) and Margaret Deland's “The Voice” (1902) depict even more perverted versions of Pentecost.; In The Silent Partner (1871), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps creates a heroine who preaches publicly—she literally preaches in the streets without church support. Phelps's “A Woman's Pulpit” (1870), which builds for its heroine a public pulpit within a church, is, ironically, silent on the spiritual debate over her right to preach behind it.; If fiction was not designed to tame the Holy Spirit's fiery tongues, it nonetheless does so, for the novel, like a woman, cannot hide its female form. |
