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

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Finally, chapter five offers a case study of the only romances that take place in the twentieth century, namely, Suzanne Simmons Guntrum’s The Golden Raintree, which is set against the backdrop of the Great War, and Anna Schmidt’s The Peacemakers trilogy, which takes place during the Second World War. As in the romances that feature previous periods, in these novels, too, history, religion, gender roles and race relations play a vital role. However, they present Quaker heroines who are quite distinct from nineteenth-century Quakers in that they use neither plain dress nor plain speech and practically the only thing that sets them apart from other Christians is their out-and-out pacifism or, as Friends would put it, their Peace Testimony, especially remarkable during the two world wars. Most conspicuously, these twentieth-century romances, especially Anna Schmidt’s, offer a change in the minoritized Other, who is no longer an African American or a Native American, but is now a Jew. For these reasons, that is, the alterations they offer in the outer portrayal of Quakers, their shift in the ethnicity of the characters in the victim role, and their closeness in time to the present, they can be considered as an interesting corpus which deserves a separate and more in-depth study.