Читать книгу American Quaker Romances. Building the Myth of the White Christian Nation онлайн

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Admittedly, Ann Turnbull’s romance shares some characteristics of inspirational romances. Quakerism, for example, plays an essential part in it, as does the beginning of the colony of Pennsylvania, conceived as a haven for British Quakers, and even the contribution of the Quakers from Germantown, Pennsylvania to the abolitionist movement; the novel also refrains from including premarital sex, though one might argue that rather than showing a concern with “clean” or sex-free romance, the author may be simply bearing in mind that hers is a book for young adults. Carla Kelly’s romance, for its part, features a Quaker protagonist. Her faith is, more often than not, irrelevant, merely a detail in her characterization that is intended to add some distinctiveness or exoticism to the character, but that happens to be the case in some Evangelical romances that feature Quaker heroines too. For their part, Joanne Sundell’s novels clearly depart from the Christian fiction requirement that romances show no explicit sexual scene (which, incidentally, is also the case in Loving Charity, Tucker’s Claim, Spindrift and The Turncoat). Indeed, Sundell’s novels go as far as presenting a hero and a heroine who have pre-marital sex, and a hero who divorces his first wife. Still, the weight of Quakerism in the characterization of the hero is such that I have decided to keep them both as part of the corpus. More strikingly, Eileen Charbonneau’s The Randolph Legacy, despite being a secular romance, partakes of a characteristic that is considered quintessential of the Christian romance: that of featuring a love triangle formed by the hero, the heroine and God, whose preeminence over the hero is unquestionable. In Charbonneau’s romance, indeed, Ethan Randolph, the novel’s atheist hero, doubts that he will ever gain the love of the heroine, the Quakeress Judith Mercer, because he is clearly at a disadvantage within the triangle: “Did he dare think a woman who spoke with God might love him forever?” (1997: 345). This, I argue, is definite proof that the distinction between Christian and secular romances with Quaker protagonists is not always obvious, which is the reason why I have decided to include both categories in my analysis.