Annie Besant and Charlotte Perkins Gilman Dphil The
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
NAUGHTY STORIES: NARRATIVE AND THEODICY IN THE WRITINGS OF ANNIE BESANT AND CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN MALINA MAMIGONIAN DPHIL THE UNIVERSITY OF YORK DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND RELATED LITERATURE SEPTEMBER 2000 Abstract By recovering non-canonical works of female social reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and reading them in light of more recent historical researchon late-Victorian secularisation and religion, Darwinism and the women's movement, this dissertation examines the intellectual histories of Annie Besant and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, whose works reflect a predominant concern with religious matters. Heavily influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition, Besant and Gilman also develop views on the social applications of scientific methods and incorporate these into their theodicies, or solutions to the evils they perceive in society. Formal choices and rhetorical modes employed by Besant and Gilman in the interests of redefining gender and thereby reforming society include autobiographies, novels, tracts, pamphlets, speeches or sermons and poetry. These are intended to bring audiences and readers to a conversion to principles established by the authors' respective ethical systems. However, relationships between theory and practice, ethics and doctrine are shown to be determined largely by choices of narrative and genre, which are paradoxically dependent on pre-existing concepts of progress or degeneration and the use of religion in the interest of legislating for the body. Chapter One examines similarities and differences between Besant and Gilman, the conflict of scienceand religion, the secularisation debate, and issues of social reform pertaining to feminism more generally. Chapter Two discussesBesant's autobiographies as proselytising works of sagewriting. Chapter Three describes Theosophy's development in light of Judeo-Christian rhetoric and ideology and how it helps fulfil Besant's theological and political mission. Chapter Four introduces Gilman's sociology of women and details the influence of Christianity and science on Gilman's philosophy through non-fiction prose, short stories and poetry. Chapter Five explores concepts of utopia and Gilman's early utopias. Chapter Six discussessexual difference in Gilman's most famous utopian novel, Herland (1915). CONTENTS List of Abbreviations 5 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 7 I. A New Reformation: Intellectual History 34 H. From Propagandato Prophecy 79 III. Some ProgressToward Utopia: A Theosophical The(odyssey) 139 IV. `Whoso doeth the will shall know of the doctrine': God's immanence and human responsibility 173 V. Woman on the Edge of the Twentieth Century: Rediscovering Utopia 252 VI. His Religion and Herland: The Re-education of Desire 294 Conclusion 327 Bibliography 337 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Works by Annie Besant: AA An Autobiography, 1893 AS Autobiographical Sketches,1885 Works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman: H Herland, 1915 HH His Religion and Hers, 1923 Living The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1935. MTM Moving the Mountain, 1911 MMW The Man-Made World or Our Androcentric Culture, 1911 WE Womenand Economics, 1898 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My gratitude goes out to those who have tried to help me maintain a straight and narrow path (and transoceaniclifestyle) through my researchand writing. First, I would like to thank members of the English Department for guidance and support both personal and academic, including (in alphabetical order) Zoe Anderson, John Barrell, JacquesBerthoud, Claire Lindsay, Jane Moody, Felicity Riddy, and my extraordinary supervisor Hugh Stevens. Trev Broughton, of the Department of Women's Studies, also helped set me on the right track by reading early drafts, offering wisdom, and providing certain valuable materials I would have had much difficulty obtaining otherwise. Many thanks are due also to the various libraries I have been fortunate to use: the J.B Morrell at the University of York, the British Library, the Theosophical Society Library in London, the library at Indiana University and Purdue University, Indianapolis, the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, the Houghton Library at Harvard University, The Library of Congress,the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Henry Madden Library at California State University, Fresno and, most especially, the Doe Library at the University of California, Berkeley. Barnes and Noble Booksellers has also provided excellent service and speedydeliveries for many months. Finally, I would like to thank an elderly Armenian translator for reminding me that `life is a series of salvage operations, ' my parents for teaching me the craft of salvation (secular or otherwise), and my sister, Katina, for all the encouragement and comic relief. But I could not have done this without James. INTRODUCTION Much Western political philosophy of the last two and a half centuries or so implies that church and state may be segregate institutions without detriment to concepts of citizenship and peaceful society. That religion does not need to play the major role in the formation of the character and behaviour of the citizens of a nation has been acceptedin France, in England and North America without much legal dispute.' When the concept of organised traditional religion is challenged and then modified, removed, or replaced with something else, the processhas been called secularisation. But what are the ethical implications of ecumenical or even secular thought and are they a practicable ethics amongst increasingly diverse and ostensibly democratic Western societies? How, amongst such religious diversity, is consistency to be obtained, if a truly harmonious, embracing and universally beneficial system of belief and practice is in fact deemed desirable and possible? In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the notion of an Esperanto-like solution in the discovery or composition of a universal religion or at least universal solidarity of some kind did not seem absurd to many. But in order to see why such apparent A notable exception to this, of course, is the continuing controversy over abortion rights in the United States which rights are challenged from a religious point of view. Very few complain about the more general ideal ensconced in the Pledge of Allegiance, memorised by every child at school, and repeated often as effective rhetoric in political campaign speeches:that Americans are one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. ' idealism was possible, it is necessaryto sketch out some very general details. Experiencing the pressuresof increasing immigration and post-Civil War politics on one side of the Atlantic and the consequencesof imperial rule and the conquest of nations and cultures on the other, the relatively homogenous American and English societies of the late- nineteenth century, where those of white, Northern European descent were still in the majority, formed crucibles for religious and social change which has been documented and studied, especially in more recent decades. The increased activism of women, who were sometimes involved on all of these fronts while simultaneously making a case for their own literal and figurative emancipation, applied the lens of gender to such questions. This confrontation with other religions and social and religious histories was occurring while two somewhat allied currents in Western intellectual history came to cross each other: the rationalism championed by eighteenth-century scholars of `Enlightenment' which produced schism in the churches and progress in the sciencesand the Romantic reaction of the poets and philosophers 2 See, for example, William Ralph Inge, Christian Ethics and Modern Problems (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1930), Warren Sylvester Smith, The London Heretics, 1870-1914 (London: Constable, 1967), Hugh McLeod, Class and Religion in the Late Victorian City (London: Croom Helm, 1974), Owen Chadwick, The Secularisation of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1975), Donna A. Behnke, Religious Issues in Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Troy, NY: The Whitsun Publishing Co., 1982), Richard J. Helmstadter and Bernard Lightman, ed., Victorian Faith in Crisis: Essays on Continuity and Change in Nineteenth-Century Religious Belief (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990), Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: CUP, 1993), John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland 1843-1945 (London: Routledge, 1994), S.J. D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and experience in industrial Yorkshire 1870-1920 (Cambridge: CUP, 1996). who refused to deny man his own individual destiny and purpose in the universe. The influence of the Enlightenment created alternative views of faith, including the classic example of religious ecumenism found in eighteenth-century Freemasonry3and also what has been called `natural religion' or Deism. A prominent affiliation amongst scientists, philosophers, and other sceptics in the seventeenth,eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Deism negatesrevelation and assertsa rational and materialist approach to divinity, allowing natural phenomenato determine the attributes of an immanent God who has created but does not intervene in the universe. Interested in revealing rather than disproving God, Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) or Isaac Newton (1642- 1727)