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  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE GATES AJAR

  ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS (1844–1911) grew up in Andover, Massachusetts, the daughter of Andover Theological Seminary professor Austin Phelps and popular children’s novelist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. Phelps published her first works before she turned twenty, but she achieved international literary renown with The Gates Ajar (1868), a bestselling novel that depicted the pandemic of grief in the aftermath of the Civil War (1861–65) and portrayed heaven as the site of reunion between loved ones. Following the success of The Gates Ajar, Phelps published two sequels—Beyond the Gates (1883) and The Gates Between (1887)—as well as a play, Within the Gates (1901), that expanded on her vision of the afterlife. Across her long and prolific literary career, Phelps often promoted women’s independence in novels like The Story of Avis (1877) and Doctor Zay (1882), in which she addressed the limitations posed by marriage and encouraged female employment as a necessity for independence and satisfaction. As a columnist, poet, and novelist, Phelps addressed contemporary social concerns, as with her depiction of the plight of factory workers in The Silent Partner (1871), her foray into the Social Gospel movement in A Singular Life (1895), and her opposition to vivisection in Trixy (1904). Phelps also contributed to The Whole Family (1908), a collaborative novel that included the work of William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. In 1889, Phelps married Herbert Dickinson Ward, with whom she collaborated on several novels, including The Master of the Magicians (1890), but the marriage was unhappy and they eventually separated. A lifelong resident of Massachusetts, Phelps died at home in Newton Centre in 1911.

  ELIZABETH DUQUETTE is Professor of English at Gettysburg College. Her areas of specialty include literature of the American Civil War era and transnational literary culture. She is the author of Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America (2010) and the coeditor, with Cheryl Tevlin, of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: Selected Tales, Essays, and Poems (2014). She is completing a book about tyranny, ubiquity, and Napoleon Bonaparte’s nineteenth-century American empire. With Stacey Margolis, she edits J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

  CLAUDIA STOKES is Professor of English at Trinity University. She is the author of The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth-Century American Religion (2014). She is also the author of Writers in Retrospect: The Rise of American Literary History, 1875–1910 (2006) and coeditor, with Michael A. Elliott, of American Literary Studies: A Methodological Reader (2002). She is currently writing a book about unoriginality and familiarity in nineteenth-century American literature.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

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  First published in the United States of America by Fields, Osgood, & Co., 1869

  This edition with an introduction by Elizabeth Duquette and Claudia Stokes published in Penguin Books 2019

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Duquette and Claudia Stokes

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 1844–1911, author.

  Title: The gates ajar / Elizabeth Stuart Phelps ; introduction by Claudia Stokes ; introduction by Elizabeth Duquette.

  Description: New York : Penguin Classics, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018058945 (print) | LCCN 2019001302 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525505709 (E-book) | ISBN 9780143133919 (paperback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Classics. | HISTORY / United States / Civil War Period (1850-1877). | FICTION / Christian / Historical.

  Classification: LCC PS3142 (ebook) | LCC PS3142 .G3 2019 (print) |

  DDC 813/.4—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018058945

  Cover illustration: Monica Ramos

  Version_1

  Contents

  About the Authors

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction by ELIZABETH DUQUETTE and CLAUDIA STOKES

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Note on the Text

  THE GATES AJAR

  Dedication

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Introduction

  What happens to us when we die? Most Americans today believe in the existence of heaven, and many imagine that heaven will entail the joyful reunion with family members and other loved ones.1 But where does this expectation originate? It does not derive from the Bible, which offers few specifics about the afterlife, nor does it derive from Christian doctrine or Jewish tradition. Though the belief in heavenly reunion may seem timeless, it is in fact a fairly new addition to mainstream Christian theology. It emerged about a hundred and fifty years ago with the 1868 publication of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s novel The Gates Ajar.

  One of the bestselling novels of the nineteenth century, The Gates Ajar ranks among the most influential novels ever published by an American. Written in response to the American Civil War (1861–65), The Gates Ajar recounts the inconsolable grief of Mary Cabot, an unmarried New England woman, after the death of her beloved brother, Royal, in the war. Rather than providing her comfort, her local clergy, and the Calvinist doctrine they preach, worsen Mary’s sorrow, and she withdraws into depression and isolation, finding relief only with the appearance of her widowed aunt, Winifred Forceythe, and her young daughter, Faith. Drawing upon her own experience of loss and knowledge of scripture, Winifred offers Mary an unconventional vision of the afterlife, depicting heaven as a “beautiful home” where she will be reunited with Roy. As Winifred counsels Mary, her vision of the afterlife circulates in the town of Homer, attracting additional adherents. This alternate vision of heaven, which differed significantly from the traditional Calvinist view, made The Gates Ajar an international bestseller and eventually lodged in the public imagination, acquiring widespread international acceptance. Despite the absence of either formal doctrine or explicit scriptural support, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s depiction of heaven changed the way generations of people around the world, of innumerable faiths, understand the afterlife and expect the joyful reconstruction of families.

  Phelps wrote The Gates Ajar because of the grievous suffering she witnessed among countless numbers of women, like Mary, across the 1860s. When the Civil War began, politicians in the Confederacy and the Union promised worried citizens that the conflict would be brief and mainly bloodless: they were wrong. By the war’s end, more than 620,000 soldiers had died, approximately 2 percent of the American population, with countless others maimed, displaced, or traumatized. The death toll was unfathomable. Although the war formally concluded when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox court house on April 9, 1865, the suspension of armed conflict did not end the suffering of the women and men whose loved ones had died. “At that
time . . . our country was dark with sorrowing women,” Phelps wrote in her memoir. “The regiments came home, but the mourners went about the streets,” bereft and unconsoled by conventional religious beliefs.2

  Phelps herself was one of these mourners. While details about her early romantic life are sparse, scholars believe that she shared a romantic bond with Samuel Hopkins Thompson, a student at the Andover Theological Seminary who died at the Battle of Antietam (September 17, 1862), which remains the single bloodiest day of military combat in US history. Phelps never discussed Thompson’s death publicly, but her first published story, “A Sacrifice Consumed” (1864), details the grief of a woman whose lover similarly dies at Antietam. More than three decades later, Phelps’s semiautobiographical story “The Oath of Allegiance” narrates the suffering of a young woman who endures the “unnamed, unauthorized, unmaidenly anguish” of a love that had been neither formalized nor sanctioned by the era’s conventions (125). “How do women bear their lives?” this young woman asks (125). A lifelong effort to answer that question shapes Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s long literary career, which launched on the national stage with The Gates Ajar. In a nation ravaged by the devastating losses of the Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the novel found a warm public reception among readers, selling more than 80,000 copies in the United States, and an additional 100,000 in Europe. Critical reviews, some of which deemed the novel heretical, did little to dampen public enthusiasm.

  The author was born in Boston on August 31, 1844, to Austin and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and christened Mary Gray. As she explains in her 1896 autobiography, Chapters from a Life, hers was a literary family, and she was thus predisposed by both nature and nurture to become a writer herself. The prior example of each of her parents helps us to understand the famous novel she would come to write. Phelps’s mother was a successful author of two book series, the Kitty Brown series (1851–53) and the Sunnyside series (1851–53), which typified the enormously popular literary mode known as sentimentalism in their depiction of developing piety and virtue in young women. Literary sentimentalism in the United States originated with such popular eighteenth-century seduction novels as William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple (1791), which document the perils of uncontrolled sentiment and the ease with which even the best affections may become a path to ruin. In the nineteenth century, sentimental novels and verse typically portray the struggles of isolated young women, often orphaned or abandoned, who find contentment and female community in Christian faith. Largely written by female authors for female readers, literary sentimentalism produced some of the century’s biggest US bestsellers, among them Susan Warner’s The Wide, Wide World (1850), Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–52), and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868). The immense popularity of sentimentalism famously led Nathaniel Hawthorne to complain about the “damned mob of scribbling women” who were his biggest market competitors.3 Despite the enthusiasm of readers, and in keeping with Hawthorne’s remarks, critics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries openly ridiculed sentimentalism and its focus on female experience. With the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, however, major nineteenth-century sentimental novels such as The Gates Ajar and Uncle Tom’s Cabin were recovered, introduced to the classroom, and rendered the subject of active scholarly study.

  In The Gates Ajar Phelps draws on many of the features of the sentimental writings of authors like her mother. The novel’s central premise—a solitary, bereft young woman finds faith and community thanks to the wise counsel of an older woman—echoes the plots of such sentimental works as The Wide, Wide World and Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854). Like Cummins and Alcott, Phelps mines John Bunyan’s popular religious allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678, 1684) in The Gates Ajar, creating characters whose descriptive names reflect their role in Mary’s religious life, such as the uninspiring Dr. Bland, and Faith, Winifred’s young daughter. Like its sentimental predecessors, The Gates Ajar also uses Mary’s disordered emotional life—her grief as well as her anger at clergy and community members—to register her spiritual “rebellion” and consequent need for religious counsel. And, finally, the novel joins its sentimental peers in depicting a religious community outside the confines of the church or meetinghouse, where women—not clergy—serve as the principal sources of religious instruction and counsel.

  While many sentimental novels helped to prepare women for domestic lives and focused on marriage and motherhood, some were more polemical, engaging political crises with implications beyond the home. The bestselling novel of the nineteenth-century United States, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, argued powerfully against slavery by focusing in part on the specific ordeals suffered by enslaved women. Just as Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in outraged response to the passage of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, so Phelps penned The Gates Ajar to ease the pandemic of grief, especially among women, in the aftermath of the Civil War.4 In her memoir, Phelps described The Gates Ajar as a divine message sent to address this widespread problem. The novel “came so plainly from that something not one’s self,” she wrote, that “there are times when it seems to me as if I had no more to do with the writing of it than the bough through which the wind cries. . . . The angel said unto me, ‘Write!’ and I wrote” (Chapters, 95). This description recalls Stowe’s famous claim that “God wrote” Uncle Tom’s Cabin and suggestively positions The Gates Ajar as a postwar successor to this antebellum bestseller.5 In the conservative literary climate of the mid-century, assertions like these affirmed a woman writer’s modesty and piety, but they also presented the authors as prophets and their novels as literary new testaments, sent by a Christian god to correct pressing social problems.

  These key points of overlap notwithstanding, Phelps was eager to differentiate herself from the sentimental women writers who preceded her. In her earliest short story, “A Sacrifice Consumed,” she anticipates the criticism that the story might be mere “sickly sentimentalism.”6 Rather than dismiss all female-authored accounts of women’s suffering, she urges readers instead to value the strength and heroism in women’s responses to loss. Both women and men suffered during the Civil War and, regardless of gender, their stories should be told, she insists. With Rebecca Harding Davis, who also focused on the plight of common women, Phelps may thus be understood as an early practitioner of literary realism, the popular late-century movement that, as formulated by William Dean Howells and others, deplored the overwrought emotions associated with sentimentality and promoted instead the putatively more dispassionate literary depiction of everyday life. In 1868, the year The Gates Ajar appeared, Phelps also published “The Tenth of January,” a carefully researched story about the January 10, 1860, collapse of the Pemberton Mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, one of the worst industrial accidents of the nineteenth century. Focusing her account of the disaster on a young female worker’s heroism, Phelps coupled the representation of a poor mill hand with the possible consolation religious faith could offer in the face of certain death. Unlike her more famous novel, “The Tenth of January” drew immediate praise from notable readers like Thomas Wentworth Higginson and John Greenleaf Whittier. Phelps would go on to publish other works in the realist vein, such as Hedged In (1870), The Silent Partner (1871), and The Story of Avis (1877); in these later works, she maintained that literature must support social reform, a position endorsed by numerous other realists. In The Gates Ajar, as in her subsequent novels, Phelps uses realist technique to address the sentimental subject of female suffering and presents womanly sorrow as a major social ill in need of reform. In keeping with the practical aims of many literary realist texts, The Gates Ajar offers a solution to the pandemic of grieving women: the promotion of a new vision of the afterlife and a female-centered spirituality that she hoped would bring comfort to women otherwise unconsoled by religious teachings.

  It is not hard to see the influence of Phe
lps’s mother on her career and life; indeed, she changed her name from Mary Gray Phelps to Elizabeth Stuart Phelps during her youth. Yet, just as The Gates Ajar was visibly influenced by her mother’s work as a sentimental writer, so too was it shaped by the career and beliefs of her father, Austin Phelps, an influence she broadcast by dedicating the novel to him. An ordained minister, Austin Phelps spent most of his career as a professor at the Andover Theological Seminary, the intellectual center of Calvinism in the mid-nineteenth century. Although Calvinism had thrived under the Puritans, by the time of Phelps’s early life its dominance had receded sharply, thanks to the rise of such populist new movements as Methodism and the attraction of Unitarianism. Phelps herself witnessed firsthand the efforts of Calvinist leadership to adapt to this changing climate, and in her memoir of her father she noted how arduously he labored to produce several influential volumes that addressed changes in religious music and pulpit oratory. Phelps did not openly repudiate the religious tradition in which she was raised, but the novel nonetheless depicts many of the challenges facing Calvinism, such as its clergy’s reputation for cerebral inaccessibility and unemotional detachment as well as its inability to provide comfort to the bereaved.

  Reflecting in her memoir on the composition of The Gates Ajar, Phelps observes that she came to recognize that theology was “made by men” and was thus of limited use to women in crisis (Chapters, 99). Though in her youth she did not have an “interest at all in any especial movement for the peculiar needs of women as a class . . . [and] was taught the old ideas of womanhood, in the old way,” Phelps’s observation of numberless grieving women caused her to revise these ideas. She came to believe that Christianity needed to foreground female religious authority and center women’s needs. In Chapters from a Life, Phelps wrote,

  For it came to seem to me . . . that even the best and kindest forms of our prevailing beliefs had nothing to say to an afflicted woman that could help her much. Creeds and commentaries and sermons were made by men. What tenderest of men knows how to comfort his own daughter when her heart is broken? What can the doctrines do for the desolated by death? They were chains of rusty iron, eating into raw hearts. The prayer of the preacher was not much better; it sounded like the language of an unknown race to a despairing girl. (98)