Heavenly Temperaments

The nature of the afterlife became the subject of public debate in the United States after the Civil War, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868) and Mark Twain’s “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven”... [ view full abstract ]

The nature of the afterlife became the subject of public debate in the United States after the Civil War, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868) and Mark Twain’s “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” (1907) offer two competing visions of whether heaven existed, and what it would look like if it did. The secular narrative that scholars have used to align Phelps’s belief in, and Twain’s suspicion of, heaven—where the trauma of the Civil War leads to emotional consolation, which leads to intellectual disillusionment—fails to account for the endurance of their respective, irreconcilable orientations toward the afterlife, however. This paper uses temperament, a concept that both Phelps and Twain discuss in their autobiographies, to reframe the heavenly debate in terms of mutual persistence, not mutability. Paradoxically, I argue, it is by acknowledging the irreconcilable difference inherent in heavenly temperaments that the antagonism that so often accompanies disagreement of this kind can be modulated. The recent success of Phelps’ and Twain’s temperamental heirs—like the film adaptation, Heaven Is for Real (2014) and the television series, The Good Place (2016)—suggests their heavenly temperaments endure still.            

The academic argument I describe above, which is invested in understanding new ways to think about seemingly irreconcilable difference, is informed by the current temperamental climate of American culture. Rather than insinuate how the present environment informs my reading of the past, I am eager to translate my academic writing to use the past to elucidate and more fully engage the present.