THE SOCIAL BIBLE: SCRIPTURAL EXCHANGE AND INTERRACIAL FELLOWSHIP IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

This dissertation examines how nineteenth-century American authors represented the Bible as a shared public text that people read together while they were on trains, in hospitals, on the battlefield, and abroad. By engaging with recent scholarship on postsecularism, deliberative democracy, and the jeremiad, this study seeks to show how authors brought the Bible into the public sphere and figured shared reading as a site of democratic collaboration across cultural and racial divides. These writers also used biblical allusion to rebuke the nation for failing to meet its democratic ideals and to urge social reform. The Bible’s significance as a cultural touchstone offered writers a canvas to both critique the nation’s prejudice and invite readers into a fellowship of equals. Chapter 1 examines how Herman Melville’s Omoo (1847) uses nineteenth-century perceptions of the Apostles Peter and Paul to decry abusive missionary contact in Polynesia and to advocate for a more tolerant approach to intercultural contact. In these scenes of multicultural encounter, racial equality depends on white Christian readers surrendering their claims to interpretive dominance and social supremacy and showing a willingness to learn new spiritual insights from Indigenous Polynesian readers. Chapter 2 explores how Harriet Beecher Stowe and Hannah Crafts envision African American bible readers as knowledgeable and empowered interpreters and use these interpreters to defy white oppression and form a multicultural democratic space. Chapter 3 examines how Native American authors S. Alice Callahan, Zitkala-Ša, and Leslie Marmon Silko integrated the Bible into Indigenous spirituality and used biblical prophecy to rebuke white colonialism. Chapter 4 analyzes how Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902–1903) uses biblical references to challenge Jim Crow segregation and encourage interracial community. Each of these authors urges greater respect for marginalized communities while also rebuking those in power and warning of future desolation if they continue their oppression. Bible-reading scenes envision collaborations that transform one or both readers, with the democratic ideal being found in the equal meeting of minds.