"Little Pharisees in Fiction" by Agnes Repplier is an essay critiquing the morally oppressive and emotionally damaging literature produced for children under the influence of Puritanism and evangelical religious culture, primarily in England and America. Repplier opens by examining the grim reading diet imposed on Puritan children in colonial New England, as documented by Alice Morse Earle. Works such as "Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes" and Cotton Mather's various compilations of dying pious children filled nurseries with terror rather than comfort, producing children like Betty Sewall, who wept uncontrollably at nine years old, convinced she was damned. Repplier contrasts this morbid precocity with healthier expressions of religious imagination, such as the young St. Theresa setting off to be martyred, or adventurous schoolboys searching for a desert island, arguing that the instinct toward grand spiritual and physical adventure is natural in children and should be encouraged rather than suppressed. She then turns to the English tradition exemplified by the "Fairchild Family," a work she regards as a monument to wretchedness and self-righteousness. In it, children as young as nine solemnly discuss the total depravity of mankind and compose prayers cataloguing their own sinfulness in exhaustive detail. The author, Mrs. Sherwood, apparently believed even infants were alert to moral corruption, as illustrated by her own memoir's account of her three-year-old self detecting indecency in a dinner guest's remark. Repplier finds both the piety and the implied psychology incredible. The essay's central target is the American contribution to this tradition, particularly the "Elsie Dinsmore" books, whose heroine Repplier regards as the apex of the insufferable pious child in fiction. Elsie, introduced at eight years old, reproaches adults with scripture, refuses to read secular fiction on Sundays, delivers verdicts on her father's spiritual state, and dissolves into tears on virtually every page. Repplier catalogs the relentless weeping with sardonic precision, noting that Elsie progresses from quiet tears on her pillow to fainting in a swoon when spoken to harshly. That such a character has been celebrated as a beloved heroine of American juvenile fiction strikes Repplier as baffling evidence that children have changed enormously, or that critics have misread what children actually enjoy. Beyond the emotional damage wrought by such models, Repplier objects to the theological controversialism that pervades this genre. The "Elsie" books freely identify the Roman Catholic Church with the Whore of Babylon on the grounds that "she and she alone answers to the description," a piece of circular reasoning Repplier calls the finest specimen of Sunday-school logic she has encountered. Captain Raymond, a recurring character in the later Elsie volumes, casually converts a Scottish Mormon woman in a single conversation and describes both Mormonism and Roman Catholicism as systems that teach lying and murder. Repplier quotes the Ettrick Shepherd to make her point about how disagreement ought to be expressed: with good manners, charity, and humility, calling no man a liar. The essay also mocks the stilted, unnatural language in which virtuous and repentant characters throughout this literature are made to speak. A contrite burglar confesses that his sins outnumber the sands of the seashore. A father responds to his daughter's simple question with a paragraph-long disquisition on the epistemology of inquiry. These characters do not speak like human beings because the genre has no interest in human beings as such, only in moral demonstrations. Repplier concludes with a direct argument against the pervasive gloom of religious fiction for children. The literature trades in crippled children, dying mothers, infidel fathers, famished families, and falsely accused orphans as though suffering were the only terrain on which virtue could be displayed. As an illustration, she describes discovering, on her housemaid's chair, a missionary volume whose nine stories bore titles including "The Drunkard's Death," "The Miser's Death," "The Wanderer's Death," and "The Broken Heart." She finds it entirely understandable that a young woman nourished on such material should cast a shadow of gloom over an otherwise cheerful household. Her essay ends with a plea that religious fiction acknowledge the conscious joys of ordinary life, and that children be permitted to read books in which virtue does not require the systematic destruction of childhood itself.
By Agnes Repplier · First published 1909 · Genre: Literary Criticism, Essay, Social Commentary