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A Queer Orthodoxy: Monastic Socialism and Celibate Sexuality in Vida Dutton Scudder and Ralph Adams Cram

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 May 2017

JONATHAN MCGREGOR
JONATHAN MCGREGOR*
Affiliation:
Department of English, Washington University in St. Louis. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This essay analyzes the writings of two American Anglo-Catholic socialists, Vida Dutton Scudder and Ralph Adams Cram, on medieval monasticism. Writing at the turn of the twentieth century, Scudder and Cram appealed to monasticism to fold together their nonnormative sexualities with their radical anticapitalism. Nevertheless, they rejected the ideology of social progress common to most forms of liberalism and socialism. By attending to the past examples of St. Francis and St. Benedict, they produced surprisingly forward-looking critiques of modern capitalist society.

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Articles
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Journal of American Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , February 2018 , pp. 65 - 90
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2017 

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References

1 Yeames, James, “The Church,” The Dawn, 2, 1 (May 1890), 40–43, 42Google Scholar. The quoted phrase is taken from a collect prayer in the Book of Common Prayer.

2 Scudder, Vida Dutton, On Journey (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1937), 165 Google Scholar. See also Markwell, Bernard, The Anglican Left (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1991), 276–77 n. 106Google Scholar.

3 The Book of Common Prayer, 1892 standard edn (New York: Protestant Episcopal Church, 1892), 22 Google Scholar.

4 Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994; first published 1981), 201 Google Scholar.

5 Cram, Ralph Adams, Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1919), 21 Google Scholar. In this book, as in the contemporaneous Walled Towns, treated below, Cram attempts to extend the principles undergirding the monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to the bourgeois family. In effect, this was an effort to reconcile his 1890s enthusiasm for same-sex monastic community with his post-1900 life as a well-to-do husband, father, and prominent architect. As Walled Towns demonstrates, however, that hoped-for reconciliation remained incomplete.

6 Scudder, Vida Dutton, A Listener in Babel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), 4 Google Scholar.

7 McGarry, Molly, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 158, 157Google Scholar. Coviello, Peter, in Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, notes the paradoxical relation of Mormonism to Christian (and Jewish) traditions: on the one hand, Joseph Smith inaugurated a “fundamentalist return to Old Testament origins” (106). On the other, Smith rejected outright two thousand years of “Christian tradition” as a canon “of growing estrangement, of mistranslation, misapprehension, and finally apostasy” (116). It is precisely in that two-thousand-year record that Cram and Scudder sought models for their own forms of life.

8 Freeman, Elizabeth, “Sacra/Mentality in Djuna Barnes' Nightwood ,” American Literature, 86, 4 (Dec. 2014), 737–65, 737CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Ibid. McGarry, Coviello, and Freeman are united in their determination to contest the secularization story of sexuality, derived from Foucault, that makes the Catholic confessional the genealogical ancestor of the psychoanalyst's couch and/or the closet. See also Freeman, Elizabeth, “Sacramentality and the Lesbian Premodern,” in Giffney, Noreen, Sauer, Michelle M., and Watts, Diane, eds., The Lesbian Premodern (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 179–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Scudder, Vida Dutton, The Franciscan Adventure (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, 1931), 320 Google Scholar.

11 Though Anglican socialists were not invariably Anglo-Catholic, there was a strong overlap between the two groups. On this see Markwell. Scudder's father was a Congregationalist missionary, while Cram's was a Unitarian minister in rural New Hampshire.

12 Scudder's and Cram's careers present American Anglo-Catholic parallels to British and French Roman Catholic contemporaries, including writers G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) and Hillaire Belloc (1870–1953), poet Charles Péguy (1873–1914), and philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), each of whom, partially inspired by the papal social teaching inaugurated by Rerum Novarum, also sought a medieval antidote to modern social poisons.

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14 James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, 2nd edn (Mineola: Dover, 2002; first published 1902), 31 Google Scholar, original emphasis.

15 Scudder, On Journey, 363, 434.

16 Ibid., 234.

17 Cram, Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh, 84–85.

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21 Hinson-Hasty, Elizabeth Beyond the Social Maze: Exploring Vida Dutton Scudder's Theological Ethics (New York: T & T Clark, 2006), 24, 30–33 Google Scholar; Corcoran, Teresa, S. C., Vida Dutton Scudder (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 56–57 Google Scholar.

22 Scudder, On Journey, 371.

23 Cram, Ralph Adams, The Great Thousand Years (Chicago: Brothers of the Book, 1918), 31 Google Scholar.

24 Scudder, On Journey, 78–85, 135.

25 Markwell, The Anglican Left, 170–72.

26 Scudder, Vida Dutton, Socialism and Character (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), vii Google Scholar.

27 Scudder, On Journey, 180–83; Lears, No Place of Grace 212–13.

28 Scudder, Socialism and Character 286–87.

29 Scudder, Vida Dutton, Social Ideals in English Letters, 1st edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898), 178–79Google Scholar.

30 Scudder, Socialism and Character, 365. The example of St. Catherine of Siena, about whom Scudder wrote two books, was more immediately helpful to Scudder's mental health, but Francis's influence was longer-lasting. See Markwell, 203–5.

31 Shand-Tucci, Douglass, Ralph Adams Cram, Life and Architecture I: Boston Bohemia, 1881–1900 (Amherst: UMass Press, 1995), 60–75 Google Scholar.

32 Cram, Ralph Adams, The Decadent: Being the Gospel of Inaction: Wherein Are Set Forth in Romance Form Certain Reflections Touching the Curious Characteristics of These Ultimate Years, and the Divers Causes Thereof (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1893), 31 Google Scholar.

33 Ibid., 24–25.

34 Scudder, Vida Dutton, Social Ideals in English Letters, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1923), 320 Google Scholar.

35 Cram, The Decadent, 33.

36 Ibid., 29.

37 Stein, Jordan Alexander, “American Literary History and Queer Temporalities,” American Literary History, 25, 4 (Winter 2013), 855–69, 863CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Stein refers to turn-of-century British sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) and the “British homophile writers” with whom he was in contact, whose c.1890 discovery of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) was prescient by comparison with American literary historians.

38 Scudder, On Journey, 126.

39 Ibid., 212.

40 In other words, I'm connecting the medievalist form that Scudder's political imagination took to her dissent from the American chronobiopolitics that aligns national and economic progress with sexual development towards the telos of heterosexual marriage with children. On chronobiopolitics see Luciano, Dana, Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: NYU Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

41 Ralph Adams Cram, Editor's Note, in Adams, Henry, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, 1st edn (Boston and New York: Harper & Row, 1913), v–viii, viiiGoogle Scholar.

42 Cram, The Great Thousand Years, 35–36. Intellectual historian McCarraher, Eugene opens his book Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000)Google Scholar by quoting this neo-Benedictine prophecy. But McCarraher doesn't note the original publishing context – or the implicit queerness – of Cram's prediction.

43 At Caldey, Cram enjoyed the fruits of the Anglican reception of a widespread liturgical renewal movement begun by Roman Catholic Benedictines on the Continent in the nineteenth century. See Keith F. Pecklers, “The History of the Modern Liturgical Movement,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, Sept. 2015, at http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-19, accessed 8 Nov. 2016.

44 Shand-Tucci, Douglass, An Architect's Four Quests: Medieval, Modernist, American, Ecumenical: Ralph Adams Cram, Life and Architecture II (Amherst: UMass Press, 2005), 28 Google Scholar.

45 Hilliard, David, “Unenglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies, 25, 2 (Winter 1982), 181–210, 194Google ScholarPubMed.

46 Shand-Tucci, An Architect's Four Quests, 24.

47 Boswell, John, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 221–26Google Scholar. Aelred of Rievaulx has become a contested icon in contemporary religion-and-sexuality debates. Integrity USA, an organization that is “working for the full equality of LGBT persons in every part of the Episcopal Church” – Cram and Scudder's church – claims Aelred as its “Patron Saint.” See Integrity USA, “Resources for St. Aelred's Day,” at www.integrityusa.org/aelred, accessed 8 Nov. 2016. Meanwhile, the group blog Spiritual Friendship, named for Aelred's treatise, hosts “discussion of celibacy, friendship, [and] the value of the single life,” largely by celibate queer Christians who “embrace the traditional understanding that God created us male and female, and that His plan for sexual intimacy is only properly fulfilled in the union of husband and wife in marriage,” but remain frustrated by “prevailing narratives about homosexuality from those who embrace this traditionally Christian sexual ethic: an excessive focus on political issues, and the ubiquity of reparative therapy in one form or another.” See Ron Belgau and Wesley Hill, “About Spiritual Friendship,” at http://spiritualfriendship.org/about/, accessed 8 Nov. 2016.

48 My thesis about Caldey's communal love of incarnate friendship does not depend on monks either having sex or not having sex with each other at the abbey. Caldey's practices must not be thought of as wholly aberrant to monastic tradition. The transformation of desire – and not its repression or manipulation – has long been a primary function of monastic discipline, as Talal Asad argues with respect to Aelred of Rievaulx's more famous Cistercian colleague and contemporary, Bernard of Clairvaux, in “On Ritual and Discipline in Medieval Christian Monasticism,” Economy and Society, 16, 2 (May 1987), 159–203, 174–75Google Scholar. Aelred, in his Mirror of Charity, trans. Webb, Geoffrey and Walker, Adrian (London: A. R. Mowbray & Co., 1962)Google Scholar, finds physical attraction to be good in itself if appreciated with moderation. But Aelred's language of moderation belies the intensity of connection – portrayed with imagery of kissing and sleeping together – that he attributes to a virtuous friendship.

49 Kahan, Benjamin, Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 5 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Shand-Tucci, An Architect's Four Quests, 33, original emphasis.

51 Cram, Ralph Adams, Walled Towns (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1919), 36 Google Scholar.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid., 20.

54 Cram, Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh, 14.

55 Since this work chronicles Dante's love for Beatrice, invoking it reinscribes the queer community of the estate within heteronormativity. But it is also interesting to note that, like the male–male desires intimated in The Decadent, Dante's desire for Beatrice remains unconsummated, and is indeed dramatically transformed, as through monastic discipline, into love for God.

56 Cram, The Decadent, 12.

57 Ibid., 37.

58 Ibid., 41.

59 Kahan, Celibacies, 17.

60 Cram, The Decadent, 41.

61 Cram, The Great Thousand Years, 63, original emphasis.

62 Cram, Walled Towns, 71–72.

63 Ralph Adams Cram, “Scrapping the Slums,” American Architect, 25 Dec. 1918, 761.

64 Scudder, Social Ideals, 2nd edn, 339.

65 Scudder, Socialism and Character, 286.

66 Ibid., 287.

67 Scudder, The Franciscan Adventure, 313.

68 Francis of Assisi continues to serve as a powerful social icon for contemporary writers and thinkers. For example, Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, in Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Prtess, 2000)Google Scholar, present Francis as the model for a newly joyful communist militant. Moses, Journalist Paul, in The Saint and the Sultan: The Crusades, Islam, and Francis of Assisi's Mission of Peace (New York: Doubleday Religion, 2009)Google Scholar, finds in Francis a precedent for peaceful Christian–Muslim dialogue. Most recently, Pope Francis has taken the Poor Man of Assisi for his namesake and for a type of Christian environmentalist in his 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, available at http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html, accessed 8 Nov. 2016.

69 Scudder, Vida Dutton, Brother John: A Tale of the First Franciscans (Boston: Little, Brown, & Co., 1926), 30 Google Scholar.

70 Ibid., 33.

71 Ibid., 311–23.

72 Ibid., 27.

73 Muñoz, José Esteban, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 90–91 Google Scholar.

74 Markwell, The Anglican Left, 233–34.

75 Corcoran, Vida Dutton Scudder, 108–9.

76 Scudder, Socialism and Character, vi.

77 Maglin, Nan Bauer, “Vida to Florence: Comrade and Companion,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 4, 3 (Autumn 1979), 13–20, 18–19 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

78 Scudder, On Journey, 220. Scudder strongly implies – not least by dedicating this late book again to her “Comrade and Companion,” as she had Socialism and Character – that this most intimate friend is Converse without actually naming her.

79 Kahan, Celibacies, 3.

80 Scudder, On Journey, 210.

81 Ibid.

82 Ibid., 211–12.

83 Quoted in Corcoran, 109–10. It is signed “F. C. to V.D. S., V.D. S. to F. C., S.C.H. C.,” indicating the women's initials and the Society of the Companions of the Holy Cross. Though apparently written by Scudder to Converse in this context, the signature begins “F. C. to V.D.S.” – Converse to Scudder – and indeed the poem first appears in print as the anonymous dedication (“To . . . . . . . . . . ”) in Converse's novel Long Will: A Romance (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903). “Lo, here is felowschipe” was printed one last time by Converse as the dedicatory poem (“To Vida D. Scudder”) in her Collected Poems (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1937). The same year, Scudder published her autobiography On Journey, with its repetition of Socialism and Character’s dedication to Converse as “Comrade and Companion.”

84 Bray, Alan, The Friend (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 13–41 Google Scholar.

85 Boswell, John, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe (New York: Villard, 1994), 280 Google Scholar.

86 Davidson, James, “Mr and Mr and Mrs and Mrs.”, London Review of Books, 27, 11 (June 2005)Google Scholar, at www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n11/james-davidson/mr-and-mr-and-mrs-and-mrs, accessed 8 Nov. 2016.

87 Freeman, Elizabeth, “Packing History, Count(er)ing Generations,” New Literary History, 31, 4 (Autumn 2000), 727–44, 728–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, original emphasis.

88 Scudder, On Journey, 302–6, 328–29.

89 Cram, Editor's Note, vii. In No Place of Grace, Lears notes the “aesthetic” quality of Cram's critique of capitalism.

90 In a recent survey of postsecular criticism, Peter Coviello and Jared Hickman argue that “postsecular” refers not to any particular historical epoch but to “an epistemological and methodological reorientation from which history might look different,” i.e. shot through with multivariate forms of spirituality, whatever historical or geographical field one investigates. See Coviello, Peter and Hickman, Jared, “Introduction: After the Postsecular,” American Literature, 86, 4 (Dec. 2014), 645–54, 646CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This formulation seems to me more accurately to define postsecularism (rather than “the postsecular”) as a loosely affiliated school of or approach to literary criticism, of which this essay could rightly be considered an iteration. Yet most postsecular criticism has avoided self-consciously traditional articulations of faith such as those advanced by Cram and Scudder. To take two examples whose terms of analysis overlap most pertinently with my own, the trope of Benedictine monastic community is crucial to McClure's, John Partial Faiths: Postsecular Fictions in the Age of Pynchon and Morrison (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007)Google Scholar. Unlike Christian monasteries, however, McClure's postmodern collectives practice “open dwelling” (192–96). Open dwelling is “a form of communion no longer dependent on absolute conviction and doctrinal conformity” but rather on “weak religion” (5, 12). McClure sees this weakened faith as a necessary rejoinder to a dangerous Christian fundamentalism. On this account, monasticism only becomes postsecular when it is detached from specific creedal and ecclesiastical commitments. Joanna Brooks argues that “creative heterodoxies” offer welcome historiographical alternatives to “the old teleological, developmental narrative that runs from orthodoxy to secularization” in her essay “From Edwards to Baldwin: Heterodoxy, Discontinuity, and New Narratives of American Religious–Literary History,” American Literary History, 22, 2 (Summer 2010), 439–53, 449CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One of my aims here is to show that there might be such a thing as a creative orthodoxy, too, that could offer a revelatory new religious–literary narrative.

91 Peter Maurin, “Back to Christ! – Back to the Land!” Catholic Worker, Nov. 1935, 1, 8.

92 See especially an essay written in 1966 for LIFE magazine but unpublished in Auden's lifetime, “The Fall of Rome,” in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose Volume V, 1963–1968, ed. Mendelson, Edward (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 214–28Google Scholar; as well as Auden's poem “The Garrison” (1969), in Auden, Complete Poems, ed. Mendelson, Edward (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), 844–45Google Scholar; and the poem sequence “Horae Canonicae” (1947–1954), in ibid., 627–42.