Doughface Nation, What do you do when nobody cares?

[G_j]

http://charlotte.creativeloafing.com/news_feature.html

Doughface Nation
What do you do when nobody cares?

BY HAL CROWTHER

Excise a few historical and cultural references and Marilynne Robinson's new novel Gilead, set in 1956, could have been written in 1880. An extended soliloquy by an aging Iowa clergyman with a failing heart, Gilead is water from another well, from another time - a time when Americans were less puzzled by moral earnestness and sane, quiet devotion to the difficult task of living decently. Religious readers will search in vain for the comfortable platitudes, doctrinal affirmation and philosophical fantasies that seem to drive the recent bull market in Christian publishing. No quick fixes, no chicken soup from Sister Robinson. Her narrator, the Rev. John Ames, raises only the eternal questions, which he respectfully leaves unanswered.

Aside from eternal questions, the most urgent issue Gilead examines was resolved by the Civil War. In religious terms it was a question of engagement — whether a Christian or any devout believer is required to make specific moral choices and act on them in the real world. In 1850 it was an unavoidable question of conscience: Could a man of God obey the law when the law supported slavery? Ames' ferocious grandfather answered with his blood. Allied with John Brown and the jayhawkers in the Kansas wars, Old Ames fought slavery from the pulpit on Sunday mornings and from the saddle, pistol at the ready, on weekday nights. He fought on in the Civil War, enlisting in the Union Army and losing an eye at Wilson's Creek. His own hero, an evangelist named Theodore Dwight Weld, once preached "every night for three weeks until he had converted a whole doughface settlement to abolitionism."

Old Ames symbolizes an antique righteousness that has been lost. "Doughface" is a word of its time that has also been lost, but may need to be resurrected. "Dough-face Song," by the abolitionist poet Walt Whitman, was published in the New York Evening Post in 1850:

"We are all docile dough-faces,

They knead us with the fist,

They, the dashing southern lords,

We labor as they list....."
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[G_j]

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