Annotations Related to Sentimentalism

Stokes argues that Mary Baker Eddy’s human story resembles the plot line of American literary sentimentalism of the 19th century, but she cautions that such sentimental narratives were not as emotionally overwrought as critics have charged. Sentimentalism did not merely trace tragedies but offered readers a protocol for managing agony and loss. It constituted Christian piety as incompatible with body glorification.

Corbett examines the ways that Eddy exercised effective leadership in increasingly male-dominated fields from which women were excluded: education, health care, and religion. She is particularly interested in the way Eddy incorporated obstetrics into her system of healing. Corbett also responds to claims that Eddy expressed an ambiguous feminism by championing women’s authority yet promoting male authority within her Church.

Eddy’s Science and Health critiqued the contemporary ideology of invalidism. Male doctors had a vested interest in women’s weakness, making their own treatments necessary. Eddy, by contrast, validated the authority of the patient to bring about healing, thereby giving women more control over their bodies. Eddy’s message emphasized vitality and health for women and diminished biological differences between the sexes.

Piepmeier studies five women, including Mary Baker Eddy, as examples in 19th-century America of the ‘outing’ of women’s bodies in the public sphere in ways not easily categorized. They had to address the powerful ideologies of domesticity and sentimentality to distinguish their own ideologies. Eddy’s textbook was a rewriting of major discourses, representing a significant rethinking of women’s roles and rights.

Hansen examines the formative period of the Christian Science movement and discovers not only restorations of health but also healing as a religious act. From this, Hansen distinguishes Christian Science from the women metaphysical healers of the same period who eventually formed the New Thought movement. Eddy’s declaration, “This is woman’s hour” conveys the female contribution to Christian Science.

Fox, a social anthropologist, claims that Mary Baker Eddy and the early Christian Science movement functioned socially as a protest movement against 19th-century social assumptions and roles assigned to women. Eddy and the women who followed her found leadership and healing roles independent of the social, religious and medical authority of men. But Christian Scientists did not recognize their historical role.

Modern scholars explain Mary Baker Eddy’s frequent childhood illnesses from a variety of perspectives. Setta argues they were symptomatic of the 19th-century form of American Calvinism. Eddy’s illnesses were pronounced when her femaleness was most pronounced (marriage and birth). Rejecting the 19th century female role, Eddy reinstated feminine qualities of Deity, whereby women and men are both seen as spiritual beings.

Parker’s psychoanalytical approach to understanding Mary Baker Eddy brings Twain’s ambition analysis and Fiedler’s sanctity of 19th-century female spirituality into tension. Parker sees Eddy’s desire to sublimate her willful personality through submission to the purity and safety of the feminine, while exploiting the culture of womanhood to fulfill her drive for success in leading a religious movement and hiding her ambition.