“Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy: Gendering the Transpersonal Subject”

Schrager, Cynthia D. “Mark Twain and Mary Baker Eddy: Gendering the Transpersonal Subject.” American Literature 70, no. 1 (1998): 29–62.

Schrager finds commonality between Mary Baker Eddy’s “theological/therapeutic movement” and Mark Twain’s “mental telegraphy” (30). Both sought legitimacy by associating their convictions with the “newly professionalizing discourse of science” (31). However, Schrager sees tension between the autonomous individualism (i.e., masculine) characterizing the sciences, and Twain’s and Eddy’s transpersonal, self-abandoning, subjective, “mystical belief in the transcendental power of the mind” (30) (i.e., feminine). According to Schrager, to deal with the tension, both sought to “displace the anxieties generated by the anti-individualistic implications of a transpersonal theory of consciousness onto the opposite sex” (31). For Twain the autonomous, democratic individualism of the male is threatened by Eddy’s transgression of 19^th-century female norms—her daring public ministry, “monopoly of religious interpretation” and power (43), and her hierarchical, corporate church structure. For Eddy, the integrity of womanhood is threatened, if not mentally seduced, by the aggressive masculinity of mesmerist and physician—”a materialistic, masculine agent who, wresting moral authority from the clergy, invaded and violated a specifically feminine realm of the spirit” (34). Although Schrager documents the tensions and contradictions of Eddy and Twain, a few of her less-than-credible sources would have been balanced by access to the archival materials later made available in the Mary Baker Eddy Library that capture more of Eddy’s faith and character.

ISSN: 1527-2117
Print ISSN: 0002-9831

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2307/2902455

See also annotations:

Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism by Stephen Gottschalk

Mary Baker Eddy by Gillian Gill

“Mary Baker Eddy and the Nineteenth-Century ‘Public’ Woman: A Feminist Reappraisal” by Jean McDonald