Page 121 - Key Words in Religion Media and Culture

104 David Morgan

Figure 2 “The Heathen Mother,” The Picture-Book, New York: American
Tract Society, 1863, p. 46. Courtesy of Billy Graham Center Museum.

a child’s desperate horror at its mother’s diabolical betrayal. Figure 2 also
portrays a light-skinned child (the better to invite the self-identification of
white children viewing the image) abandoned by a dark-skinned mother. In
contrast to the letter writer, Scudder and Bullard felt that the fear generated
by such an image could be put to effective use.
What was the value of portraying the dead horse? The grimly expired
animal embodies the Protestant belief in soul, a metaphysical substance
that merely inhabited the material body, and departed at death. The pathos
evoked by the horse’s grisly corpse was linked by The Well-Spring to the
horse’s utter loss at death. Child readers were urged in a strongly embodied
way to believe in soul over the temporal, putrefying body. If this emotional
connection to the paper’s young clientele were not enough, the large-eyed,
cutely diminutive colt, which has survived its parent’s demise and gazes
directly at the viewer, establishes a viscerally sympathetic relation with