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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 50, no. 1 (Winter 2001), p. 5-9
"Evidence of Things Not Seen": Greater Light as Faith Manifested
by Angela Mazaris
WHEN WE CONSIDER THE INTERSECTIONS of religion and art, what often comes to mind is the depiction through an art object of a religious figure or event. Statues of Buddha, paintings of the Madonna and child, the frescoes adorning churches; these are the most obvious examples of the artistic manifestations of spirituality. I want to consider here another aspect of religion and art, an angle that is harder to pin down, more difficult to identify and articulate. This understanding of the creative process and its relationship to the divine takes as its cues not what is represented by the art object itself, but rather, the belief system that inspires the very act of creation.
The story of Hanna and Gertrude Monaghan is well known to many Nantucketers. Arriving on island in the summer of 1929, the young Quaker sisters from Philadelphia discovered and fell in love with a late eighteenth-century pig barn that still sits on Howard Street, just outside of the town center. Persuading the owner, the grocer on Main Street, to sell it to them, the sisters transformed the structure into a studio space and summer home. They gutted parts of the barn, built stages and lofts, shipped in stained-glass windows, iron grilles, and cartons full of antiques. They called the building "Greater Light," in reference to the Quaker concept of the spirit that resides within each person, the "inner light." The house is still studied today for its architectural uniqueness and beauty, and for the diversity of treasures collected within.
By no means was Greater Light universally welcomed on the island. The sisters were harassed regularly by islanders who considered their renovation of the barn showy, excessive, and inappropriate. In a time when Nantucket's prominence as a summer holiday destination was far less developed than it is today, off-islanders were regarded as "strangers" and treated with suspicion, if not derision. In addition, limited contact with the mainland had left the island cloaked in the vestiges of the Victorian era. Change of any sort was considered somewhat radical, and the idea of two "strangers" so dramatically altering a piece of the town's traditional architecture was more than many locals could bear. The sisters thus endured taunts, slurs, and a general lack of privacy as all of their doings were closely observed and commented upon.
Whether amazed by the sisters' architectural foresight or horrified by their disregard for tradition, people were clearly moved by the sisters' project. In her book Greater Light on Nantucket, Hanna Monaghan describes the reaction of many townspeople to the changes wrought upon the barn: "The sleepy little town woke up, not with an indifferent yawn, but with a decided jolt," she writes. Often the sisters would look up from their naps on the patio to find camera lenses pointed at them from above the fence. There were those who were "for" the barn, and those who were "against," and the "againsts" rarely missed an opportunity to let the sisters know just what they thought of the house. One night, after retiring to her room to avoid the "peepers" surrounding the house and peering through the gate, Hanna listened to the following scene:
There were voices outside the board fence. I sat up in bed. The light from the street filtered in through the leaded windows, making small circular patterns on the tile floor. I listened intently as a cheap tobacco smoke drifted in, mingling with the white summer fog. "These people," a deep voice thundered, "These people have not the interest of the old town at heart." ... I listened intently and out of the window flew my peace. "Had they loved the old town they would have copied its houses. And," his voice was raised so that we inside could hear, "look, they have cut a hole in the middle of the house. ..."
There were, nevertheless, townspeople who recognized in Greater Light a thing of beauty, and offered the sisters support. In planning the garden, Hanna and Gertrude enlisted the help of "a charming old lady from Main street," who, people assured them, would not deign to set foot on the sisters' property. The garden lady, however, saw creation where others saw controversy, and transformed the Monaghans' yard from a pile of rocks and ashes into a space of natural beauty and serenity. She was, Hanna writes, "true blue through it all. She would come hurrying down the street, knowing of the eyes watching behind closed blinds in the houses as she passed. On she came, her basket over her arm with peony roots and iris tubers to plant. She would scuttle by the curtained windows as though snipers were after her, and arrive quite out of breath." Believing that the sisters did in fact care very much for the character and aesthetic value of the island, the "charming old lady from Main street" was willing to risk the disapproval of her neighbors in order to help the sisters in their mission.
At first glance, the Monaghans and their creation may seem best considered within the framework of either Nantucket history or art history. In many ways they epitomized a moment on the island in which Nantucket shed the last remnants of its whaling industry and made the transition to a tourist economy. From an artistic perspective, the sisters filled their house with art objects from a wide range of cultures, locales, and time periods. Greater Light's inventory reads like an exotic travelogue: the house contained, among other things, six gold-plated Italian pillars, a Mohammedan harem curtain, a set of eight-foot-long Venetian plaques engraved with lions and bearing a coat of arms, a vase brought on a clipper ship from China, and a seventeenth-century camphor sea chest. The sisters also created an architectural style that, while referencing many others, was uniquely their own. However, a full understanding of the Monaghans and their art requires an examination not just of the town, the house, and its objects, but also of the spiritual beliefs that drove the Monaghans to acquire and create the way they did.
Quakerism, founded by George Fox in mid-seventeenth-century England, was in many ways a response to the excesses of both Roman Catholicism and Anglicanism. Fox felt oppressed by the layers of ritual and ceremony that surrounded the celebration of God's word, and became convinced that instead of bringing people closer to an understanding of the divine, those mechanisms actually served to separate people from it. Fox spent years walking through the British countryside, seeking God's truth. The understanding that he eventually espoused, while rooted in the scriptures and the teachings of Jesus, differed sharply from most other Christian practices of the day. George Fox had come to the radical conclusion that to find God, one must look inward.
This then became one of the basic tenets of Quakerism: that God resides in each individual. Quakerism held that spiritual enlightenment and an understanding of divine truth should not come from a priest or the clergy but from one's own direct and unmediated experience of the Holy Spirit. This spirit was housed in each person, and was manifested as the spirit of truth. Thus, any person could be moved directly by God. Men and women alike traveled both the British Isles and colonial America throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries preaching this faith that was fueled by an inner light — a God within.
Hanna and Gertrude Monaghan were raised as Quakers. Born to an educated family in Philadelphia at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Monaghan sisters were brought up in a household that encouraged intellectual experimentation while also holding in reverence the family's Quaker legacy. Hanna's mother often told them stories of their Quaker ancestry, as well as tales of prominent Quakers she had known: Lucretia Mott had been a guest of her family.
In many ways, Quakerism set the stage for the sisters' adventure on the island. Nantucket was long a bastion of Quaker thought and tolerance, and though the religious community had dwindled by the twentieth century, the island still held fast to its Quaker history. The sisters both attended meetings at the Quaker meeting house and held meetings of their own at Greater Light. Quaker belief in the equality of men and women also meant that the Monaghan sisters were raised to consider possibilities for their lives that were by no means universally acknowledged. In 1929, most young women were expected to marry and raise a family. Hanna and Gertrude, however, remained unmarried and dedicated themselves to their artistic endeavors, including the project of Greater Light, in a way that probably would not have been possible had they had husbands and families.
However, traditional Quakerism prescribed a plainness of speech and dress that was meant to eliminate the material vanities that estranged one from God. The image of the seventeenth-century Quaker woman is to some degree inseparable from the image of the unadorned black dress and bonnet. While dress codes became less stringent with the passage of time, there still prevailed in the early twentieth century a notion that simplicity was in order, and that unnecessary decoration ran counter to God's will. For many Quakers, this meant too a rejection of art, as valuing a thing based on aesthetic merit seemed a flagrant disavowal of the plainness and simplicity that brought enlightenment. Hanna and Gertrude Monaghan broke this mold. From a young age the sisters were affected by the power of the art object. Misquoting Keats to the shocked mother of a young Quaker friend, Hanna proclaimed, "Art is beauty, beauty truth." To this, her friend's mother could only repeat that art for art's sake must certainly be wrong. After all, she argued, what help did art bring the world? To Hanna and Gertrude, though, an appreciation of artistic creation and beauty seemed a natural extension of Quaker tenets. If God resided in each person and, with the spirit of truth, moved those who listened, was not the art object a physical manifestation of this truth?
Rebecca Larson, in her book Daughters of Light, a study of eighteenth-century Quaker women, notes that Quakerism is essentially experiential. The power of God is not just understood, but is felt, experienced. In Larson's description of Quaker meeting, God is an almost physical presence, both overwhelming and comforting those who have gathered together. Likewise, in the introduction to her 1969 biography of George Fox, Dear George, Hanna Monaghan describes her excitement at reading for the first time the manuscripts of Fox's journal. "They, the early Quakers," she writes, "had unearthed dynamite, the power of God, and how to use it." Here again God is understood experientially: not as a concept, but as an actual force in the lives of believers. For Hanna and Gertrude Monaghan, this force became the drive behind the design and construction of Greater Light.
In Greater Light on Nantucket, Hanna Monaghan details the process of planning and bringing to fruition the sisters' vision for the barn. The story is riddled with coincidences and near impossibilities. Monaghan tells, for example, of purchasing on impulse two twelve-foot -high wrought-iron gates from a junkyard in Philadelphia, before the sisters have even set foot on island. The gates, a seemingly impractical purchase for which Hanna is teased by her friends, fit perfectly into the barn that they discover several months later. Moments like this abound in the book: Hanna dreams of stained-glass windows for her bedroom; the following day, they drive past a building being demolished, with stained-glass windows being given away. The sisters decide that they must have an iron railing to run along the patio; the phone rings and a wrecking company is on the line, offering them an iron railing from a work site.
The sisters do not regard these events as happenstance. Rather, they are considered evidence of a divine intelligence that guides their lives. Often, when faced with problems or complications, the sisters, instead of despairing, ask, "Why limit God?" They trust that God will deliver, and often He seems to. Interestingly, the sisters' concept of God is both internal and external. While the Monaghans believe in a divine order, an external shaping force, they also very much believe in the concept of God within. This inner light guides the choices that they make. There is then a "Divine Mind" that shapes both external realities and the internal choices that each person makes. Hanna Monaghan writes, "Is there a Mind which knows of the past and the future? Some might call all of this tale mere coincidence. I prefer to cling to the hope that the God of the Universe is Intelligence itself." And so, when Hanna is asked how she planned the house, she answers, "Mind knows." The inspiration comes not from her, but from the spirit of truth within.
Greater Light can thus be understood as a physical embodiment of a spiritual vision. Guided by an inner light, or "Divine Mind," the sisters found a way to articulate their belief that the beauty of God can be understood through the beauty of art. The sisters recognized in each art object that they collected an intrinsic truth and goodness. Likewise, in the house that became their own objet d'art, the Monaghans gave voice to their inner truths. In this way, the Monaghan sisters expanded a traditional understanding of Quakerism to include artistic manifestations of the spirit that resides within.
Hanna Monaghan, in Greater Light on Nantucket, describes an annual visitor to the property:
There is a man who comes each summer to our door. He is nameless. Like some migratory bird, we watch for him each year. "My stay on the island is not complete," he says, "without stopping here. It epitomizes to me the charm, the mystery, the old history, all here in this one spot."
Monaghan once claimed that the story of Greater Light could have happened anywhere. She said, "We are not writing about a locality, but a state of mind." Perhaps this is true. There is, however, no doubt that the sisters' faith, as expressed in their remarkable creation, altered profoundly the landscape of the island on which this story happened to occur.
Angela Mazaris is a writer who lived on Nantucket Island.
Ed. Note —Upon her death in 1972, Hanna Monaghan left Greater Light (and a trust to aid in its continued maintenance) to the Nantucket Historical Association. For years the house and its remarkable contents were open to the public. Currently it is closed for structural repairs and stabilization. However, the garden is maintained by Gale Arnold in memory of her mother Betty Palmer for the enjoyment of Nantucket visitors and residents. A copy of Hanna Monaghan's book, Greater Light on Nantucket, is in the collection of the Nantucket Historical Association Research Library.
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