Gilead Study Guide

Novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson grew up in Idaho and graduated from Brown University’s former women’s college, Pembroke College, in 1966. She later earned her PhD in English from the University of Washington in 1977. Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, was a Pulitzer finalist in 1982. She has also published several essay collections, including When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012) and The Givenness of Things (2015). She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Gilead in 2005, as well as the National Humanities Medal in 2012 and the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction in 2016. Robinson taught at the Iowa Writers Workshop from 1991 until 2016. Raised Presbyterian, she later became a Congregationalist and has sometimes preached at the historic United Church of Christ congregation she attends. Religion, theology, and spirituality are recurrent themes in her fiction and essays. She married Fred Miller Robinson in 1967 and they had two sons, James and Joseph, before divorcing in 1989. As of 2021, Marilynne Robinson still lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Much of the Ames family legacy traces back to John’s grandfather’s involvement in the antislavery abolitionist movement in the years before and during the American Civil War. The eldest John Ames moved to Kansas from Maine in order to help the Free Soilers, a third party formed in 1848 with the main purpose of halting slavery’s expansion into the United States’s western territories. The party also worked to end discriminatory laws against free Black people. The Free Soilers’ motto was “Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor and Free Men.” The Free Soilers were active until 1852, after which point its members were absorbed into the mainstream Republican party. The creation of the Territory of Kansas in 1854 had further inflamed tensions over slavery, and the debate over slavery’s legality there exploded into a series of violent conflicts throughout the 1850s, a sort of Civil War prelude that became known as “Bleeding Kansas.” The United States Senate was basically deadlocked over slavery at the time, so the question of whether Kansas would enter the Union as a free state or a slave state would tip the balance one way or the other. Though many Free Soilers opposed slavery on ethical and religious grounds (as John’s grandfather did), many also argued that making Kansas a slave state would prohibit poor non-slaveholders from acquiring land there. One of the best-known antislavery activists was the controversial John Brown, who led his followers in brutally murdering five pro-slavery men in the so-called Pottawatomie Massacre in 1865. Brown is alluded to several times in Gilead, and John’s grandfather gave him aid and support, though he doesn’t appear as a character. Kansas was ultimately admitted to the Union as a free state early in 1861. Gilead also touches on anti-miscegenation laws (laws prohibiting interracial marriage) and the havoc they created in families’ lives. In the state of Missouri, where Jack Boughton attempted to establish a life with his wife Della and their son, a law prohibiting white people from marrying Black people passed in 1835, and it wasn’t repealed until 1969 (more than a decade after Gilead takes place). It was finally overturned because of the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia, which struck down an interracial couple’s 1958 conviction under Virginia’s anti-miscegenation law and also struck down such laws in 16 other states.

John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion was both one of Robinson’s inspirations for the novel and features as one of the protagonist’s favorite books in the novel. Written and revised in both Latin and French editions between 1536 and 1560, the Institutes are one of the foundational works of the Reformed branch of Protestant Christianity and continue to be widely studied today. German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841) is another book John Ames cites as important in the development of his faith. Feuerbach stated that his object with this book was to offer “a philosophy of positive religion,” which included the idea that “God” is ultimately indistinguishable from reason, and that Christianity’s essence is really the divinity of humanity. Even though Feuerbach didn’t uphold traditional Christian theology, John appreciates his observations about religion’s joyful aspects. At one point, John recalls being mesmerized by the popular French novel The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos, which was published in English in 1937. The novel focuses on a young priest’s daily interactions with his parishioners and his belief that God’s grace works through his own weakness, themes that would resonate with John’s experiences in Gilead. A favorite book of Lila’s is The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a popular 1908 Western romance by John Fox, Jr. Though John didn’t like the book at first, he seems to appreciate the novel’s heroine’s loyalty to an older man, which he probably sees as a parallel to Lila’s relationship with him. Gilead is followed by three sequels tracing events in the Ames and Boughton families: Home (2008), Lila (2014), and Jack (2020).