Christian Science and American Literary History

Abstract

The religious turn in American literary studies has produced new interest in religious movements from the turn of the 20th century, and due to the opening of archives, Christian Science is one possible direction that research in this area might turn. Yet until very recently, literary scholarship related to Christian Science has been extremely f lawed, due mostly to over-reliance on a few problematic sources. This article offers an overview of the issues that have impacted that research while suggesting that promising work is beginning to emerge.In 1899, a Christian Science healer named Josephine Woodbury sparked a nation-wide scandal by suing her former teacher, Mary Baker Eddy, for libel. 1 Eddy founded Christian Science in 1866, claiming to have healed herself from a fatal injury by reading her Bible and meditating on her conviction that sickness, sin, and suffering were illusions. In the decades that followed, she spread her doctrine and her healing methods -which involved helping the patient realize that God created them to be perfect and therefore that they could not be really sick -beyond New England and across the continent. By the end of the century, Christian Science was one of the fastest growing and most controversial religious groups in the United States with a growing transatlantic presence. A variety of people, including European aristocrats, women of modest means looking to make a living, and neurasthenic novelists like Frances Hodgson Burnett and Theodore Dreiser visited Christian Science healers and studied the writings of Mary Baker Eddy, despite (perhaps even because of ) the fact that the movement was denounced by religious and medical authorities alike.Josephine Woodbury was one of many fascinating women to have risen up through the ranks of Christian Science. She traveled throughout the United States and, through the power of her magnetic personality, built a following of her own, a community of Christian Scientists who sometimes practiced asceticism and celibacy (at Woodbury's behest) and had mystic experiences. Due to her unsanctioned cult of personality and outlandish behavior -which included instructing her students to venerate her son as the second coming of Christ -Woodbury was