Elizabeth Hayes Alvarez loves to draw outside the lines, and that is a very good thing indeed for students of American religion. Her monograph connects a number of important topics within the field of American religion with a sure hand: Catholic-Protestant relations in the nineteenth century, the role of religion in the debates over the “domestic sphere” and the “New Woman,” American encounters (religious and otherwise) with the European tradition of “high art,” Roman Catholics as “outsiders” in U.S. mainstream culture, and the role of aesthetic and religious artifacts in nineteenth-century domestic economy.
Her thesis is both simple and provocative in the best sense: despite the purported identification of the Virgin Mary with “suspect” Roman Catholic theology and piety among mainstream Protestants, Marian imagery was widespread in both Protestant and Catholic popular culture in nineteenth-century America. Building on previous historical studies that uncovered surprisingly widespread positive Marian themes in the writings and artistic creations of Protestant elites (Harriet Beecher Stowe being among the most famous), Alvarez illustrates how Mary's image and importance as a strong and valiant woman proliferated in American popular culture as well. Her monograph is thus a very smart study of the ways Americans of various denominations imagined Mary and the cultural “meanings” her figure produced: Mary became a culturally constructed symbol of both motherhood and “true womanhood” whose content was crafted by both Protestant and Catholic middle-class women.
Along the way, the author uncovers important data whose significance stands out in light of her narrative. Alvarez observes that while contemporary readers might have difficulty in seeing “the Madonna” as anything other than a Catholic religious icon, in fact it is important to recognize that Mary only gradually came to represent Catholic religious identity in America: Protestants, no less than Catholics, were also interested in Mary as both the mother of Jesus and as the most prominent woman in the New Testament. And as support for this reminder, Alvarez turns to both seventeenth-century Puritan naming practices (which reveals “Mary” as a perpetual favorite among baptismal names in colonial America) and to twentieth-century Fundamentalism, which listed Mary's virginity at Christ's birth as one of the “Fundamentals” that defined the entire movement itself.
But instead of focusing on Marian art as the site of devotional or liturgical attention, the author focuses on non-liturgical contexts, and explores the impact of popular understandings of Mary on cultural constructions of womanhood. This focus reveals the under-appreciated (or totally ignored) fact that the Virgin Mary became an increasingly important figure for both Protestants and Catholics in the course of the nineteenth century, precisely as middle-class Americans were grappling with anxieties caused by both economic change and shifting gender expectations (the latter being especially evident among middle-class Protestants). Alvarez's book elegantly demonstrates that because of Mary's role as exemplar of Christian womanhood, Mary developed into a shared, culturally constructed symbol that linked together both Catholics and Protestants under an attractive symbol of virtuous and powerful female agency; and it was precisely as a symbol of such sanctified agency that Mary shaped the period's gender ideology.
A number of facts that the author uncovers in the course of her study can be both counter-intuitive (at least initially) and extremely important for understanding how religious art influenced nineteenth-century domestic culture: Alvarez finds that, despite the consistent Protestant rejection of what they considered “Mary worship,” Protestants created and reproduced Marian images whose characteristics and iconic meanings evinced surprisingly similar characteristics to Catholic types: images of Mary that conveyed both purity and power, compassion and transcendence, and—perhaps most surprisingly—maternity and “queenship.” This last characteristic was due in significant part to the widespread middle-class hunger for reproductions of great European artworks: affordable reproductions of Titian's “Assumption of the Virgin,” Raphael's “Madonna of the Chair,” and Murillo's “Immaculate Conception,” began to appear on parlor walls with Currier and Ives's “Ascension [sic] of the Virgin” in middle-class Protestant and Catholic homes throughout the United States.
But Alvarez's narrative buttresses important insights already made about nineteenth-century Catholic culture as well: R. Laurence Moore adumbrated decades ago how the category of “outsider” played a pivotal role in shaping the identity and success of various religious groups in the United States—Catholics among them. Alvarez both builds on that insight and provides important details for unpacking it. She documents both how the nineteenth-century Protestant use of terms like “Romish” and “Papist” projected an imaginary of unified Catholic “otherness” on very different styles of Catholic identity, and how Catholics in the United States shared in that endeavor. In her recounting of the story, Catholics had as much to gain as their often-hostile Protestant neighbors in constructing an imaginary unified Catholic identity—a unified communal persona that hid the often-warring ethnic groups that constituted the Catholic community in the United States. The figure of the Virgin Mary played a crucial role in constructing that unified identity by offering a common site for developing communal understandings of female identity in a new land. The figure of Mary thus provided important resources for Catholics navigating the messy process of “becoming American” as the nineteenth century unfolded.
Among the several strengths of this book is the inclusion of a number of visual sources—photographs of Renaissance paintings and nineteenth-century American lithographs—because such objects formed the most important site for the transmission of Marian tropes in U.S. culture. Precisely because these images remained open to a range of interpretations and were reprinted in various contexts, they provide an effective window into understanding how a wide range of norms, assumptions, and cultural expectations evolved in contact with other groups. It is here, among other places, where the author's drawing outside lines provides the narrative with compelling examples of how the figure of Mary was much more complex among American Christians than we had thought.
