Organic Angels: Innocence, Conversion, and Consumption in the Antebellum American Novel

Midcentury American novelists variously reworked the traditional conversion narrative to reflect a marked cultural shift in attitude towards human nature, newly conceived as innocent and inclined to salvation. This liberalized aesthetic of conversion takes shape through the trope of the organic angel, a developmental female figure whose journey from childhood innocence to saintly womanhood merges the processes of sexual maturation and Protestant conversion. Because she purifies self-interested desire by redirecting it towards spiritual ends, the organic angel provides a symbolic reconciliation of the young nation\u27s budding imperial capitalism with its millennial expectations. While traditional emphasis on a maternal ethos at work in sentimental fiction has obscured the thematic and generic traction of this nonmaternal female saint, my project traces her structural impact across a surprisingly diverse range of authors and works—Sylvester Judd\u27s Margaret, Maria Cummins\u27 The Lamplighter, Hawthorne\u27s The Marble Faun, Melville\u27s Pierre, Stowe\u27s Uncle Tom\u27s Cabin, and Harriet Wilson\u27s Our Nig. At once a remarkably flexible and legibly constraining trope, the organic angel determines the relationship between narrative form and nationalist commitment; her relative efficacy as an agent of conversion measures authorial confidence in a pre-Civil war era vision of a unified, prosperous, and evangelical nation