American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture

American Madonna: Images of the Divine Woman in Literary Culture. By John Gatta. Religion in America Series. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 179 pp. $39.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

This book's cover art perfectly encapsulates this study of nineteenthcentury Protestant authors' use of the Madonna motif: the central figure is not, as first glance might suggest, the sinless Virgin Mary but rather Hester Prynne, the adulteress of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. The essays in this volume explore the literature of both well-studied and overlooked American authors. Gatta considers not only Nathaniel Hawthorne's vision of a morally ambivalent madonna and T.S. Eliot's ideally redemptive madonna, but also the maternal virgin in the writings of Margaret Fuller and Harriet Beecher Stowe; the eroticized virgin in Harold Frederic's work; and the inspirational "dynamo" madonna of Henry Adams.

Gatta focuses more on the mythic expressions of the madonna as "archetypal expression of psychic femininity" (p. 8) than on the effect of this piety on historical women. Nevertheless, this project is strengthened by the ways it pulls together what seem to be inimical historical forces, in literature and in life. Gatta is at his best when showing how social and psychic tensionsbetween the masculine and rational New England Puritan tradition and the feminine qualities of the Madonna-played themselves out in literature. Gatta's psychological guesswork seems, at times, a bit overdrawn, although he generally chooses exacting specificity over reductionism. Overall, Gatta concludes that the American madonna becomes "a realized archetype of the soul," a model of "primal femininity," in a masculinized "land of pragmatism and commerce" (p. 138).

This book is a much-needed addition to the burgeoning field of Marian studies, which has hitherto generally ignored both Protestant and literary dimensions of the phenomenon. This study of a literary counterculture will be appreciated by all with interests in American literature, Marian piety, and the intersection of religious literary motifs and social reality.

JOANNE MAGUIRE

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Charlotte, North Carolina

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 1999
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