SOURCE: "Mary Baker Eddy and Sentimental Womanhood," in The New England Quarterly, Vol. XLIII, No. 1, March, 1970, pp. 3-18.

[In the following essay, Parker discusses Mary Baker Eddy and the Victorian notion of women as purely moral beings.]

As Mark Twain described her, Mary Baker Eddy was the very type of the American businessman, with a mouth full of moral phrases, and a totally unscrupulous head for profit. "She was always in the front seat when there was business to be done; in the front seat, with both eyes open, and looking out for Number One; in the front seat, working Mortal Mind with fine effectiveness and giving Immortal Mind a rest for Sunday." For Twain, Mrs. Eddy's hypocrisy reached a peak in her denial of the existence of matter. "From end to end of the Christian-Science literature not a single (material) thing is conceded to be real, except the Dollar," and the dollar was hunted down in a dazzling variety of ways. The "Mother-Church and Bargain Counter in Boston peddles all kinds of spiritual wares to the faithful, and always on the one condition—cash, cash in advance. The Angel of the Apocalypse could not go there and get a copy of his own pirated book on credit."

Twain's characterization reveals a great deal about Mrs. Eddy, and about Twain, but not if it is accepted as literal truth. Twain was outspoken in his repugnance for sentimentalism in all its forms, and felt particularly uncomfortable about the notion that women were the conscience of the nation. Preternaturally alert to the emasculating implications involved in equating the female of the species with what we would now call the superego, he was able to deal directly with the fakery of Walter Scott and the Southern Female Academy, but was profoundly uneasy about opening fire on the formidable Mary Baker Eddy. Only after turning her in his own mind into a masculine type of the Gilded Age could he vent his hostility freely. Twain's nightmare vision of a nation of superwomen concealing their lust for power behind claims to a monopoly on virtue seemed to him to have come to life in Mrs. Eddy.

Always strong-minded and histrionic, Mary Baker at the age of ten kept her family in an uproar with her tantrums and was known around the neighborhood as the spitting image of her irascible father. However, with the approach of adolescence she suddenly changed her tactics. Many years later she attributed this change of heart to an overwhelming religious experience in which she overcame in a moment the horrible decrees of both disease and predestination. Mark Baker's "relentless theology emphasized belief in a final judgment-day, in the danger of endless punishment, and in a Jehovah merciless toward unbelievers; and of these things he now spoke, hoping to win me from dreaded heresy." But her mother, as she bathed Mary's "burning temples," bade her "lean on God's love, which would" rest her if she "went to him in prayer." And as she prayed, "a soft glow of ineffable joy came over" her. The fever was gone. Her mother "was glad. The physician marvelled.… "Mary Baker had discovered a way to rebel against her father and a masculine Jehovah without leaving herself open to punishment. She would no longer play the dangerous game of childish willfulness; she would become a woman, and thus so spiritually perfect that man and God together could pose no threat. Sublimation, not screaming, was the secret of power.

This is not to imply that Twain's dream come true had a rare talent for hypocrisy. The inherent logic of her relationship with her father, the physiological and psychological imperatives of puberty, all those pressures upon her to become more womanly, were strongly reinforced by certain cultural assumptions about what being a woman really meant. And these assumptions, synthesized in what Leslie Fiedler has called the Sentimental Heresy, taught that women, woman in general and some women in particular, were absolutely pure and could themselves do Christ's work in this world. Mrs. Eddy represents to Fiedler the fulfillment of his own vision of American history. It seems peculiarly fitting to him that a country in which national and individual life has been dominated by first rejecting the (European) father and then filling the symbolic vacuum left by his deposition with a composite Maiden-Mother image should be "the only Christian country in which a major religious denomination was founded by a woman."

Where Twain made Mrs. Eddy into a monster of American success, Fiedler sees her as a kind of culture hero; neither of these interpreters of her career was intrigued by the possible meanings of her failure. In fact, the combination pope and holy mother of Christian Science consolidated an empire and healed thousands without ever really integrating her own conflicted personality. At the end of a long life Mrs. Eddy fell prey to kidney stones and paranoia, proving just how vulnerable she had always been despite her energetic role-playing. Fearing the very ambitions that would have made her a superb captain of industry, she had sought the safety and sanctity of sentimental womanhood. But her naked urge to dominate could never be fully clothed in a garment of spiritual superiority tailored for the average American woman, and Mrs. Eddy was fatally tempted to try divinity on for size. What she continually sought was a way of life in which she could sublimate her drives so completely that she never really had to acknowledge them; what she found was that sublimation quickly became indistinguishable from exploitation, and that the role of Mother Mary that had once seemed so fitting was somehow sullied by contact with her own willful personality.

Mary Baker's first hope after her conversion to the Sentimental Love Religion was to carve a niche for herself in the temple of art. And although she eventually chose enshrinement in the First Church of Christ Scientist, Boston, she never really gave up the idea that her genre was inspired verse. The very real differences between Mrs. Eddy's poems, at least her mature poems, and the effusions of more typical sentimental poetesses, provide a good way to begin to see the difficulties she faced when she attempted to take female divinity literally. Women such as Lydia Huntley Sigourney who were never tempted to stray from sentimental stereotypes into religious typology never had to confront their exploitation of female spirituality—at least within the context of their verse. Sentimental formulas could contain and channel these women's ambitions; no one, and particularly not the poetesses themselves, was moved to ask whether they were secretly usurping masculine prerogatives, either in their careers or their art.

Mrs. Sigourney's muse was so methodical that she could, on request, write tributes to dead people she had never met. Even when she did draw from personal experience she never really lost herself in emotion, but moved, sometimes with almost indecent haste, from grief to Christian triumph. In "'Twas But a Babe," for example, she spoke first as a kindly passerby who comes upon a new grave and asks, "Who goeth to his rest in yon damp couch? / The tearless crowds pass on—"twas but a babe.'" Appalled by their callousness, she cries, what of a mother's love, a mother's woe; what of the father whose agonized prayer is heard only by God? This is her cue, and quietly, between stanzas, the motherly stranger is transformed into the Great Sympathizer, and Mrs. Sigourney speaks, if not precisely with the voice of God, with all the assurance of an experienced clergyman. "Trust to Him," she calls, "whose changeless care.… / Passeth a mother's love." The child is with cherubim and seraphim; "Can ye not hope? When a few hasting years their course have run, / To go to him, though he no more on earth / Returns to you?"

Mrs. Sigourney had lost her first three children in infancy and undoubtedly found personal comfort as well as a ready market when she wrote her poems of consolation. Mrs. Eddy was unable to care for her only child, and eventually allowed his nurse to adopt him, while she spent the months immediately following parturition being rocked by an attendant in an adult-sized cradle she insisted her father build for her. When she pictured glad reunion in the skies it was not between mother and child, but in one curious poem at least, the "Meeting of My Departed Mother and Husband." The poem begins with her mother's welcoming Mr. Eddy; "Joy for thee happy friend! thy bark is past / The dangerous sea, and safely moored at last—/ Beyond rough foam." Only the title at this point gives the reader any clue as to who is speaking, the tone is one of perfect omniscience from the beginning; there is no emotional arousal; there is no universal consolation. Instead the poem spirals around to end on a note of megalomania. When Mr. Eddy finally interrupts his mother-in-law it is not to talk of heavenly bliss, but of Mary, the girl they left behind. "She that has wept o'er thee, kissed my cold brow, / Rears the sad marble to our memory now, / In lone retreat." Yet in the end it is not Mary but her loved ones who are bereaved, and we see them trying to keep each other's spirits up by envisioning that time when she "shall mount upward into purer skies" and at last make heaven seem like home.

The ineffable joy in God's love that Mary Baker Eddy had experienced as a girl, that passive satisfaction in the arms of a maternal deity, was no longer hers. Instead, the full responsibilities of divinity were on her shoulders—she had to stand everything for everyone and always stand alone. Once she had gone beyond the limits of sentimental womanhood to explore the possibilities of a more than mortal purity, she had forever left behind the traditional consolations of the sentimental genre—the pleasures of dependency.

If it is easy enough in retrospect to see that Mrs. Eddy's solipsistic mentality was not to be the source of great cathartic art, the limits of the divine role were only finally brought home to her in terms of religious typology. In 1938 the Board of Directors of the Christian Science Church officially announced what Mrs. Eddy had hinted years before—she had been the spiritual idea of God, typified by the woman in the Apocalypse, and at last made flesh. It is only too easy to understand the appeal that this kind of typological play had for Mrs. Eddy; if she were the fulfillment of prophecy and in the direct line of Holy Mothers, she could hardly be accused (or accuse herself) of a lust for notoriety. The apotheosis of the Sentimental Love Religion need never fear Mark Twain's perceptions. Sometime in her adolescence, if her memory can be trusted, Mary Baker first seized upon the strategy that so appalled Twain; she could rebel against the authority of her father and Jehovah without laying herself open to their wrath if she but sided once and for all with her mother and the God of Love. Ironically, the problem with this logic lay in its very success. The allegiance of her most devoted disciples to her typologically proven divinity was what finally revealed to Mrs. Eddy how the passive Holy Mother image had been permanently tainted by contact with her own will-to-power.

Mrs. Eddy, like Mrs. Sigourney before her, had seen in sentimentalism not only a literary technique by which an all-male ministerial corps might be deprived of its copyright on publishing the word of God, but, in plain terms, a job opportunity. And once Mrs. Eddy switched her energies from poetry to Christian Science, other women were quick to perceive the possibility of new careers for themselves. Augusta Stetson was easily Mrs. Eddy's most devoted follower, and necessarily, in a hierarchical organization such as the early Christian Science Church, her greatest rival. No one could have hewed more closely to the party line in believing women the chosen of God.

It was a woman who put the leaven into the meal which leavened the whole lump. It was a woman who poured the precious ointment, an offering to the divine inspiration. A woman knelt at the foot of the cross when all the terrified men, save one, forsook Jesus in self-protection. To a woman Jesus first revealed himself after the resurrection. It was the woman in Revelation who was to be clothed in light to interpret the Word of God. Woman's spirituality first discerned Truth, and she will finally lead to spiritual heights all who have heretofore failed to discern the immutable things of the Spirit.

Despite her doctrinal purity, however, Augusta Stetson had an unparalleled ability to embarrass Mrs. Eddy by making the inconsistencies in Christian Science (and in the life of its founder) glaringly obvious. It was impossible, for example, to pass off the diamond brooch she gave "Mother Mary" as a fit emblem of disdain for material concerns simply because the diamonds were set in the shape of a cross. Before the outbreak of World War I, Mrs. Stetson had become even more notorious for taking it upon herself to hand out peace flags to "deserving" nations. Mrs. Eddy eventually found it necessary to rebuke her for this particular bit of public relations. To a sharply worded command to stop giving symbols and reflect upon spiritual substance which alone brings true peace, Mrs. Stetson replied contritely. "When I received your loving warning … I was aroused, and had the nations been a unit in demanding a peace flag to be presented by me, or take the consequences of universal war, I should have said, 'Go and destroy yourselves.'"

When the redoubtable sensitivity of women was raised to a supernatural pitch it was not a viable basis for widespread feminism. Significantly, a number of the most powerful women affiliated with Christian Science during Mrs. Eddy's lifetime quit to find room to express their own personalities. But Mrs. Stetson was not a quitter. Instead she hung on until she was excommunicated, reaf-firming the glory of "Mother Mine," "My Precious Leader," and raising vast sums of money to build churches in New York. Mrs. Eddy, like Mrs. Sigourney before her and Mrs. Stetson after, was fairly candidly interested in parlaying female spirituality into upward mobility, and each of these women managed through her own efforts to rise to the ranks of the upper-middle class. Still, when Augusta Stetson passed the hat in her own inimitable style it was difficult for Mrs. Eddy to ignore certain anomalies at the heart of Christian Science. How could Scientists simultaneously deny the existence of matter and pride themselves on becoming the new success heroes in the field of church finance?

It was perhaps inevitable that Mrs. Stetson would rely more and more on typology to disguise her personal triumphs as impersonal victories for the spirit; Mrs. Eddy had after all pioneered in turning sentimental stereotypes into justification for a whole way of life. In a letter to Mrs. Eddy dated March 12, 1909, Mrs. Stetson wrote: "I think it is needless to tell you that during the twenty-three years of my work in this city, I have never attended places of amusement nor participated in social functions." However, she went on to qualify this statement, confessing that she had heard one opera, witnessed two plays, and attended several oratorios and symphony concerts. But mat was all long ago. More recently she had accepted the invitation of a "dear student" to attend a private rehearsal of his orchestra. "I was greatly impressed with the object lesson and its application to Christian Scientists; and may I tell you, dearest, how I read it? If I am trespassing on your time, just forgive me and put this letter out of mind." The relationship of the orchestra to the conductor, Mrs. Stetson began, showed the necessity for obedience so indispensable for Scientists. Even the first violinist had to bend to the leader's will. Then, turning from the baton to the tuning fork, she observed that like true pitch, the Scientific Principle of Being was never affected by mortal opinions. Thus in a stroke she had defied Mrs. Eddy's censure of any and all amusements and used the sacred instrument—the type—to justify her rebellion. With another twist she managed to read the lesson of obedience into forbidden experience, and finally, to assert mat truth had been revealed once and for all.

The subversiveness of Augusta Stetson's reasoning here seems at first almost too thorough not to have been malicious. Yet given Mrs. Eddy's unwittingly fertile suggestion that the way to excuse your own willfulness lay in typology, it is not unreasonable to suppose that Mrs. Stetson was no more than a secondrate artist in an already orthodox art form. By pushing that strategy to its logical limits, she made it perfectly clear even to her "Great Teacher" that types at best were a dangerous business, and that any claims to divine inspiration based on a typological reading of the Bible could be devastatingly twisted by the most devoted follower. If lavish temples and costly jewelry could be written off as testimony to spiritual values, what was the meaning of radical idealism, and, even more important, where was its comfort?

Twain read Mrs. Eddy's denial of matter as the strategy of a master hypocrite. It would be fairer to see it as her last, most desperate tactic to avoid any confrontation between the two halves of her profoundly divided personality. For most of her mature life Mrs. Eddy hoped that by selling her own patented brand of mariolatry she might find psychological as well as physical comfort. However, once she reduced divinity to a commodity (no matter how unconsciously) the law of diminishing returns set in. The vision of loving passivity she had had at the moment of conversion was progressively tarnished by experience. And she began to resort more and more to denying the existence not only of her own willfulness, but of anything and everything that might arouse her will. As the role of Maiden-Mother became more unsatisfactory, and the dangers of sublimation clearer, Mrs. Eddy sought refuge with increasing frequency in that fatherless vacuum mat Leslie Fiedler has described.

One of the easiest ways today to see just how Mrs. Eddy transformed her fear of impulse into repugnance for the object that aroused it is to examine her curiously consistent relationships with younger men. In a post-Freudian age it is difficult not to read her mistrust of her own will wholly in these sexual terms; that is, to see in her fervent denials of heterosexual attraction the source of her determination to thwart all impulses. Freud's insight, that there is a dynamic congruence between the way an individual channels his energies and the expression-repression pattern he has developed for handling his sexuality, is illustrated in a classic way by the case of Mary Baker Eddy. Nevertheless, to take her concern with the freedom of the human will and translate it into a recognizable paranoia-with-delusions-of-grandeur syndrome is to make little progress. It is one thing to try to understand the internal connections between, say, her rejection of her own sexual nature and her radical idealism, and quite another to debate whether or not she was insane.

In a book entitled Mental Healers (1932), Stefan Zweig was confident that "the modern psychologist can see plainly enough what was amiss with her.…" After abandoning her own infant son, she devoted herself to compensatory endeavors, alternately trying to marry and adopt young men. In almost every case, her tyrannical ways alienated those she courted. Yet instead of grieving over her losses—which would have entailed confessing her own initial feelings of attraction—she turned on these wretches, complaining that they had let their minds prey upon her. To one of her exfavorites she wrote a confused letter which seems "to the psychiatrist [Zweig here], remembering the writer's sex and age, a plain indication of sexual repression."

Now, Dr. Spofford, won't you exercise reason and let me live, or will you kill me? Your mind is just what brought on my relapse and I shall never recover if you do not govern yourself and turn your thoughts wholly away from me. Do not think of returning to me again. I shall never again trust a man. They know not what manner temptations assail.

The letter was dated December 30, 1876. Less than twenty-four hours later Spofford received a second letter informing him that Mary Baker Glover Patterson was about to marry Asa Gilbert Eddy.

Despite her intimations that even the marriage bed was ungodly, Mrs. Eddy was drawn into marriage three times. Despite her longing for a universe that snuffed out will in a vacuum, she exaggerated the powers of mortal mind into a demonology of mental influence. What might crudely be phrased as her inability to keep her hands off young men was translated by Mrs. Eddy into their inability to get their minds off her. In later years she kept a rotating staff of students in residence at her Brookline mansion whose major responsibility was to ward off the Malicious Animal Magnetism (M.A.M.) generated by her enemies.

Edward Dakin in his Biography of a Virginal Mind (1929) read Mrs. Eddy's early interest in mesmerism and spiritualism, like her diligence in elegiac verse, as simple manifestations of her lust for notoriety. To be sure, all three were art forms which offered untrained girls an opportunity to gain considerable local reputation. Still, the fact that Mrs. Eddy continued to believe in mesmeric and spiritualistic phenomena throughout her life suggests that she was never simply using them as a means to success. What, after all, could have been more fascinating to a woman obsessed by the problem of willfulness-versus-submission than the spectacle of possession, whether by the mesmerist or the legions of an invisible spirit world. To be mesmerized or controlled by spirits might easily seem a perfect way to become the center of attention without having to take personal responsibility for self-assertiveness. Once in a trance it was possible to be as dictatorial as you wished while attributing your revelations to some higher power. The gap between Mary Baker local mesmeric performer, and Mother Mary the fulfillment of Biblical prophecy, was really not so very great. To give orders while feeling perfectly passive, to be the boss and yet still profoundly obedient, was the dream of her life.

However, long before Mrs. Eddy discovered the drawbacks of mariolatry, she began to discern the dangers of yielding to either mesmerizers or the suasions of spirits. To be susceptible to their influence was in some sense to be susceptible to your own impulse to be mastered. Before 1870 Mrs. Eddy had recognized the phenomenon that Freud would call patient transference. Yet, unlike Freud, she did not welcome it as a vital part of the therapeutic process, for it seemed a fundamental denial of all that she had sought in giving herself up to the ministrations of the healer. After years spent cultivating a safe invalidism, she had ventured to hope that cure was possible in submission to an exhypnotist turned healer named Phineas P. Quimby. Passivity might not entail taking to your bed, but might instead be found in perfect receptivity to Quimby's healing message. It took Mrs. Eddy a decade to realize that what she had been yielding to was the irresistible attraction she felt for the person of Quimby himself.

No one can compare Quimby's writings with those of Mrs. Eddy and doubt that at the very least Mrs. Eddy had lusted after her healer's manuscripts. Mrs. Sigourney's insistence that her verses were inspired and not formulaic was of a piece with Mrs. Eddy's protests that God, not Mary Baker Eddy (or Phineas Quimby), had written Science and Health. This was one sentimental strategy that never lost its charms. But Mrs. Sigourney had never pushed the Sentimental Heresy to the point of megalomania and always had the satisfactions of male impersonation open to her in her poetry. Mrs. Eddy, in contrast, could never come to any terms with either a masculine God or the fact of heterosexuality.

Sexual relations, which did violence to her ideal of a perfectly passive self, were always abhorrent—at least in theory. It is not surprising, therefore, to find one of her followers lining her room with pictures of madonnas, instructing her students to live in nun-like cells, and finally taking quite seriously the hints in Science and Health that someday the propagation of the species would be insured without copulation. In June, 1890, this literalist, Mrs. Woodbury, produced a son whom she named The Prince of Peace and for whom she claimed immaculate conception. The publicity surrounding this incident should perhaps have forewarned Mrs. Eddy about the dangers of reading metaphor as prophecy. But there is no real evidence that Mrs. Woodbury prepared her for Mrs. Stetson. Nor did she drive Mrs. Eddy to abandon the hope that sexual differences and thus sexuality would some day be eliminated, although she was careful not to phrase this hope in terms of parthenogenesis again. Fifteen years after the Woodbury incident, Mrs. Eddy wrote a letter to the Boston Herald to suggest that the abolition of sex was the divine solution to the divorce question.

Look long enough, and you see male and female one—sex or gender eliminated; you see the designation man meaning woman as well, and you see the whole universe included in one infinite Mind and reflected in the intelligent compound idea, image or likeness, called man, showing faith in the infinite divine Principle, Love, called God—man wedded to the Lamb, pledged to innocence, purity, perfection. Then shall humanity have learned that "they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage; neither can they die any more; for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God." (Luke 20:35, 36) This therefore is Christ's plan of salvation from divorce.

For a self-avowed gentlewoman living at the end of the nineteenth century, Mrs. Eddy's marital history was complicated, to say the least. She had married three times, and actually divorced her second husband, when he, unlike the others, did not have the tact to die. Perhaps only George Eliot of the notable women of the period had lived a more irregular life. Nor do the parallels between these two stop here, for George Eliot had gone through a distressing experience with an overzealous disciple who insisted on calling her "Mother," an experience that finally forced her to reevaluate the satisfactions of maternal role-playing, and in the process to make some very provocative remarks about heterosexuality in the divine economy.

Unlike Mrs. Eddy, George Eliot did not have the voice of All-Truth in which to rebuke her followers, and when Edith Simcox's devotion grew oppressive she simply told the infatuated younger woman, "She did not like for me to call her 'Mother.' … Not with her own mother, but her associations otherwise with the name were as of a task." Three months later in an even more revealing interview, George Eliot again bade Edith not to exaggerate as she

murmured broken words of love.… I said I didn't—nor could, and then scolded her for not being satisfied with letting me love her as I did—as in present reality—and proposing instead that I should save my love for some imaginary he. She said—expressly what she has often before implied to my distress—that the love of men and women for each other must always be more and better than any other and bade me not wish to be wiser than "God who made me"—in pious phrase.… Then she said—perhaps it would shock me—she had never in all her life cared very much for women—… she cared for the womanly ideal, sympathized with women and liked for them to come to her in their troubles, but while feeling near to them in one way, she felt far off in another; the friendship and intimacy of men was more to her.

For Mrs. Eddy whose fears about openly challenging (and perhaps capturing) traditionally male prerogatives were transformed into a fanatic insistence on the perfect spirituality of the female, frank heterosexuality was unthinkable. George Eliot could speak of her initial willingness to serve as Edith Simcox's "mother" as an impulse; "she was apt to be rash and commit herself in one mood to what was irksome to her in another." Mrs. Eddy's inconsistencies were never the result of rashness; impulse in any form was anathema to her. The way to fulfillment as she saw it lay through rigidly categorizing sensations—will and passivity, manipulation and inspiration, male and female, and firmly subordinating the first set of these categories to the second.

George Eliot celebrated heterosexuality as a way of exploring and valuing the widest possible range of human experience. Sentimentalists like Mrs. Sigourney were staunch advocates of a single standard that covered not only sexual behavior but included all morality as the special province of women. Yet this ethic of female superiority would have been meaningless without the existence of a lower order of humanity. Civilizing efforts could not be carried on in a vacuum; every wouldbe feminine missionary needed a Twain to focus her energies on. In her determination to be perfectly self-reliant Mrs. Eddy went beyond the single standard, all the way to a radical idealism. Still, she ventured into the vacuum only in desperation. During most of her long life she directed her energies into playing the role of sentimental heroine become divine. But by the time she had turned from writing the literature of revelation to addressing letters to the Boston Herald she had abandoned her dreams of glory for the prospect of anesthesia.

Once Mrs. Eddy stopped talking about female superiority and a maternal God and turned to imagine "sex or gender eliminated … the designation man meaning woman as well… the whole universe included in one infinite Mind and reflected in the intelligent compound idea, image or likeness, called man, showing faith in the infinite divine Principle," she had given up the only terms she had for describing, and handling, the tensions she felt in her own personality. Hostile biographers have suggested that in her declining years Mrs. Eddy became a morphine addict; her kidney stones proved what these critics knew all along—mental healing was a humbug. However, it is necessary to assume that Mrs. Eddy seized on Christian Science primarily as a means to physical health if this kind of debunking is to be taken very seriously. Where Christian Science really failed was not in preserving her Ufe, but in preserving her will to live (and to dominate) intact.

Just as it was more than coincidence that Mrs. Eddy chose to side with her mother and a maternal God at puberty when her body was making the fact of her own womanhood unmistakably clear, a certain congruence can be seen between her growing age and infirmity and her longing for anesthesia. But this simple-minded psychodynamism has to be supplemented by an understanding of cultural givens. Everything in Mrs. Eddy's upbringing reinforced the idea that males were to be dominant, manipulative, and even brutal, while females were to be passively receptive and perfectly virtuous. Christian Science was the Sentimental Heresy institutionalized. The holiness of motherhood evolved into a species of mariolatry; the fear of playing any role too actively was exorcised by radical idealism. But in the end Mrs. Eddy found that in a world divided into mutually exclusive categories you ultimately could not have things both ways. In her poetry, her correspondence with Mrs. Stetson, her mature thoughts on divorce, she again and again confronted the truth that she could not go home again. But where else did a woman belong? Enshrinement in the Mother Church was no substitute for a sense of being fulfilled, of being at one with yourself. Christian Science provided no final answers for Mrs. Eddy; its consolations were as limited as her own imagination, and once she had explored the universe of sentimental womanhood she was really left with nothing.