“‘Nauseous Fiction’: Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science Novel, 1900-1910”

Stiles, Anne. “‘Nauseous Fiction’: Mary Baker Eddy and the Christian Science Novel, 1900-1910.” Studies in the Novel, Johns Hopkins University Press, Vol. 56, Number 1, Spring 2024, pp. 1-20.

Stiles examines Christian Science novels written in the early 1900s in light of Mary Baker Eddy’s views on “nauseous fiction,” or that which fills “our young readers with wrong tastes and sentiments” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, 195). Stiles sees Eddy’s stance regarding these novels as restricting the way followers could promote Christian Science. Eddy’s ambivalent views toward fiction is understood as having several causes: early nineteenth-century attitude toward fiction as corrupting of youth; Eddy’s concern for unauthorized interpretations of her work; her equating novels with the false beliefs that fostered illness and sin; and the scandalous fictionalized biographies published on Eddy’s own life such as by Mark Twain, and Georgine Milmine’s series published in McClure’s Magazine. Stiles studies Eddy’s correspondence with, and tentative support of, Christian Scientist authors of some of the more wholesome fictions for youth such as Mrs. Georgie Sheldon, Clara Louise Burnham and Katherine Yates. She then compares them with the more secular novelists who often mixed Christian Science and New Thought beliefs in their fiction, such as Frances Hodgson Burnett, Theodore Dreiser, and L.M. Montgomery. Eddy never authorized the fiction of Christian Science authors who sought her endorsement.

View this resource on the web.

ISSN: 1934-1512
Print ISSN: 0039-3827