The missionary-protestant novel Candida: female authorship and gender relations in the work of Mary Hoge Wardlaw (19th-20th century)

Abstract

Among the numerous writings produced by Protestant missionaries who worked in Brazil during the nineteenth century is a novel published in the United States in the year 1902 titled Candida; or, by a way she knew not. A story from Ceara, which was written by the Presbyterian missionary Mary Hoge Wardlaw. This work of fictional character aimed to demonstrate to its readers the process of insertion of Protestantism in the Province of Ceará in the 1880s. Nevertheless, more than an account of missionary activity, Mrs. Wardlaw's novel was also inserted in a context of broadening the spectrum of female performance in the North American Protestant universe of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. At this moment several women, through the missionary action and the writing (of memories, letters, novels, etc.) operated a certain feminine protagonism inserted in a network of asymmetric relations of gender, acting constantly in the field of accommodations and cunning. The present article aims to discuss, focusing on the novel of Mrs. Wardlaw, how some women Protestant missionaries in foreign lands - sometimes neglected in studies of Protestantism - acted and expounded their worldviews while they were embedded in a broad and complex set of gender relations, where negotiations and confrontations are not always easy to perceive.