The Cliffs

The Shaker religion plays an important part in the history of Maine, and through Eliza’s experience in The Cliffs, J. Courtney Sullivan delves into the Shaker community of Sabbathday Lake to share the history and culture of the Shaker religion from Eliza’s perspective:

[Shaker founder] Mother Ann Lee started out a blacksmith’s wife in Manchester, England, an unremarkable member of the Wardley Society which had broken off from the Quakers in 1747. They called themselves the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. Outsiders, in mockery, called them Shaking Quakers, or Shakers, because of their ecstatic way of worshipping (289).

Throughout the novel, Sullivan highlights the unique lifestyle and beliefs of the Shakers. Eliza notes that the children, who were raised in a dormitory separate from the adults, nonetheless participated in the daily chores: “Our lives were ruled by order. Hands to work, hearts to God. We woke at 4:30 in summer, 5:30 in winter, at the ringing of a bell” (289). She adds that upon entering the Sabbathday community, families were dissolved: Husbands and wives didn’t relate as such anymore, and children were considered as belonging to all. Eliza points out that “the Shakers had sinks and pumps and stoves beyond anything the world’s people had yet incorporated into daily life. The brethren erected mechanical lifts that hoisted our heavy wet clothes and bedsheets into an attic to dry” (303), in contrast to the tedious ways in which she labored in Hannah’s household.

In addition, Eliza notes how progressive the Shaker religion was for its time. She shares that “[t]hey believed the second coming of Christ would arrive in the form of a woman” (289). They were pacifists, steadfastly refusing to participate in the Civil War. When Agnes accused the Shakers of being cowards who didn’t believe in abolition, Eliza “told her of the runaway slaves taken in by the Shakers when [she] was a child. How, from a start, Blacks and whites lived together in our communities” (322). She contrasts this with the fact that although the North supported abolition, on a practical level, life in the North was still deeply segregated and that, even if people in the North didn’t enslave people, they still benefited from enslaved people “laboring in the Caribbean, out of sight” for their sugar and tobacco (323). Eliza points out that many people sought out the Shakers for insight into their unique beliefs and lifestyles. Influential men “visited to learn what they could from [Shaker] ways” (288), including first US President George Washington (profiled in the 2004 biography His Excellency: George Washington by Joseph J. Ellis), third US President Thomas Jefferson (who wrote the 1785 book Notes on the State of Virginia), and transcendentalist philosopher/author Ralph Waldo Emerson (who authored the essays Self-Reliance (1841) and Nature (1836).

The novel highlights Spiritualism as an important component of the Shaker faith: “They believed in spiritualism and messages received directly from God” (289). Eliza illustrates this connection through the example of “gift drawings,” which Shaker girls created and were “works of art that defied the girls’ own artistic abilities, and as such were believed to be gifts from God. These […] were understood to contain messages from spirit, interpretable only by she who had created them” (293). The fact that such gift drawings were created by Shaker girls again highlights the importance of women to their religion. Bringing the Shaker religion to life in The Cliffs is one way that Sullivan emphasizes women’s importance to history and culture. This complements the interest of the novel’s protagonist, Jane, in documenting women’s history.