Fanny Crosby & Amanda Berry Smith: The power of the powerless
Today a friend brought to my attention this well-written critical review by Anne Blue Wills of Edith Blumhofer’s recent biography of Fanny Crosby. A quick clip:
“Aided by [a] richly detailed [historical] background, Blumhofer presents compelling readings of Crosby’s most famous lyrics. The deep contextualization helps Blumhofer avoid sentimentalizing the hymnwriter as the blind poetess of legend. She instead depicts Crosby as an independent-minded participant in a vibrant (and profitable) cultural phenomenon.”
This review triggered in me the question in my first paragraph, above–in particular, a throwaway comment by Wills on the “curiosity factor” of Crosby’s disability, suggesting that this, along with her womanhood, may have helped her gain the profile she did as a songwriter. In short, I see real similarities between Crosby and Amanda Berry Smith–and not just because they were “curiosities.” For my complete response to Anne (a colleague from our days at Duke), click here:
Anne,
What a splendidly written review. I can see your critical apparatus is still ticking on all cylinders.
I write you in the spirit of conversation, grabbing hold of one statement you made:
“Blumhofer claims that Crosby’s blindness was more determinative for her life’s direction than her gender. It made her a curiosity and thus opened many doors. Nevertheless, a tantalizing question remains: How might 19th-century conceptions of both disability and womanhood have reinforced one another in Crosby’s case?”
I _did_ find this question tantalizing, along with your use of the term “curiosity.” It reminded me of the case of Amanda Berry Smith.
In the course of preparing an extensive reading from Smith’s _Autobiography_ for a class I’m teaching (“Patron and Matron Saints for Postmoderns”) at Bethel Seminary, I have been again and again running across Smith’s descriptions of folks “gawking” at her.
And so, to your “disability and womanhood,” Smith’s case leads me to add two more social markers that could work in a would-be Victorian-era minister’s favor: non-white race and lower class. And I have thought a bit about what these four things have in common: Each marker had both a “curiosity factor” (at least when the person put themselves forward into public ministry) and something else–a kind of spiritual cachet.
If you’ll indulge me for a moment, take a look at Smith’s account of how the white, middle-class folk at a particular holiness camp meeting early in her public career (I would guess in the late 1860s or early 1870s; it was at Kennebunk) gawked at her:
“It was one Sunday. There had been a great crowd all day, and everywhere I would go a crowd would follow me. If I went into a tent they would surround it and stay till I came out, then they would follow me. Sometimes I would slip into a tent away from them. Then I would see them peep in, and if they saw me they would say, ‘Oh! here is the colored woman. Look!’ Then the rush! So after dinner I managed to get away. I went into a friend’s tent and said, ‘Let me lie down here out of sight a little while.’
“‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the people do not seem to have any manners. I never saw anything like it.’
“So I got down on the floor under the foot of the bed, and I could see them as they would pass by, and hear them say, ‘Where is she, the colored woman?’
“‘I don’t know, but I think she is in here,’ someone would say. But I kept still. . . .”
[Then a bit later, in conversation with her friend Sister Clark:]
“‘The people have followed me about all day, and have stared at me. Somehow I feel so bad and uncomfortable.’
[She was so disturbed by this sense of being a "gazing stock" that she went to prayer. And God, as she told it, reminded her of a crowd she had seen on Broadway, standing and looking at a window containing a picture:]
“‘You heard the remarks of the people [God is speaking this to Smith], and the approvals and disapprovals.’
“‘Yes,’ I said.
“‘Did that picture say anything?’
“‘No.’
“‘Did it injure its beauty?’
“‘No, Lord; I see it.’
“I got up and went on double quick to the tent. I praised the Lord. I laughed, and cried, and shouted. It was so simple, and yet so real. The next morning at the eight o’clock meeting I got up and shouted, ‘I have got the victory! Everybody come and look at me! Praise the Lord!’
“I was free as a bird.”
After that freeing revelation, Smith evangelized, exhorted, testified, and sang more and more at these camp meetings, and also in England, Africa, and India. She had learned to put up with her status as–as you put it–a “curiosity.” More than this, she clearly began to use it to her advantage (“Everybody come and look at me!”). In fact, in her case, I believe that her blackness compounded with her femaleness to make her a “curiosity.”
Moreover, in the white, middle- and upper-middle class circles she moved and ministered in, her low social status also contributed to her public identity as a curiosity (she proclaimed herself “the washerwoman evangelist”).
What do all three of these factors–low class, black race, femaleness–share with physical disability (along with Crosby, I think of Ellen G. White in one phase of her ministry)? Just this: all four were associated with low social power, or indeed powerlessness. And all–not just womanhood and blackness, but poverty and disability–were romanticized by the Victorians. (A complicated fifth factor might be childhood.)
More than this, should we say that these human conditions were not just romanticized but “spiritualized”? Because this, I think, is the punchline: to middle-class conservative Victorian Christians, on top of the world in an economically vibrant West, but feeling guilty and spiritually alienated about that status, powerlessness was next to godliness.
This Victorian spiritual principle could easily be shown, I think: It was not just _any_ curiosity factor that gave a person a boost in public ministry like that experienced by Smith and Crosby (and, I think, White)–rather, only those factors that promised to take “self” out of the picture and allow God to flow through the individual in His Own Power.
In a highly self-assertive, modernizing era, as Hopkins wrote, “all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil; And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell.” The Victorians needed Stowe’s Uncle Tom, Dickens’s Tiny Tim or Little Nell, and the Washerwoman Evangelist and the Blind Songstress–powerless people (theoretically) untouched by that smudge and smell–who could “leverage” (tee hee) their position of powerlessness to reach out and return other people to the Holy Spirit’s “warm breast and . . . ah! bright wings.”
We’ve known for a long time that Victorians put women and children in that “more spiritual” category, turning to them as brokers or ambassadors to bring them into the presence of the _true_ Lord of creation. Some have pointed out that non-whites could also serve this function (e.g. in Stowe’s _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_)–and in Smith, we see this effect amplified by her low class status. And in Crosby, we seem to have a clear case of a physically disabled person serving the same function, for the same reason.
Well, now that I’ve written this, it seems rather obvious! But maybe for those of us working in the borderlands of cultural history and theology, there is more to be learned and said on power and powerlessness in American Christianity.
In any case, I’ll shut up now. Three years without a research outlet, and any excuse makes me go off like this.
Peace,
Chris
