This literary study concerns the spiritual autobiographies of seven nineteenth‐century American women who found themselves called, often by way of wild visions, to become itinerant evangelists. Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Nancy Towle, Lydia Sexton, Laura Haviland, Julia Foote, and Amanda Berry Smith, though living and writing in an age which perfected the ideology of domesticity, chose literal homelessness for long periods of their lives, thus renouncing their claim upon the paradigm by which many northern women, black and white, measured their lives. Such itinerant lives were no doubt hard to li ... More

This literary study concerns the spiritual autobiographies of seven nineteenth‐century American women who found themselves called, often by way of wild visions, to become itinerant evangelists. Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, Nancy Towle, Lydia Sexton, Laura Haviland, Julia Foote, and Amanda Berry Smith, though living and writing in an age which perfected the ideology of domesticity, chose literal homelessness for long periods of their lives, thus renouncing their claim upon the paradigm by which many northern women, black and white, measured their lives. Such itinerant lives were no doubt hard to live; they were even harder to write. All autobiographies, of course, attempt to make a story out of the welter of remembered events which constitute the writer's raw material; they attempt, that is, to discover the pattern and the meaning in experience. But if the experiences in question are new and unfamiliar, where will the autobiographer find the cultural reference points which can reveal, or impose, pattern and meaning? The autobiographies which these women wrote are remarkable documents—sometimes artless, often long, and nearly always desperate attempts to assemble, out of familiar cultural materials, plausible representations of lives which were anything but familiar. Invoking in quick succession different and even contradictory models of self—the biblical paradigm of the suffering servant, the domestic ideal of the nurturing mother, and the capitalistic image of the fantastically productive entrepreneur—they attempt to patch together comprehensible Lives which would somehow be equal to their radically original lives. Literally, psychologically, and ideologically, these female preachers were “out of place,” both in the world of nineteenth‐century evangelicalism and in American culture generally. It was in the hope of situating themselves in that culture, of assuring their readers and themselves of their place in nineteenth‐century America, that they wrote their books. Ultimately, however, these women would write somewhat anxious narratives, itinerant autobiographies still in search of their endings and meanings, books which attempt to summon up the interpretive communities capable of understanding strangers and pilgrims. These are, then, stories about the poetics of itinerancy and also about gender and genre, about the particular predicament of women negotiating with their culture for identity.