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Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God

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Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies Lori Branch, Series Editor Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God GAIL TURLEY HoustoN THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PREss | COLUMBUS Copyright © 2013 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Houston, Gail Turley, 1950– Victorian women writers, radical grandmothers, and the gendering of God / Gail Turley Houston. p. cm. — (Literature, religion, and postsecular studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1210-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9312-6 (cd) 1. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 2. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 3. Women authors, English—19th century. 4. Religion and literature. 5. Religion in literature. 6. Goddess religion in literature. 7. Brontë, Charlotte, 1816-1855—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Jameson, Mrs. (Anna), 1794–1860—Criticism and interpretation. 9. Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 1806–1861—Criticism and interpre- tation. 10. Nightingale, Florence, 1820–1910—Criticism and interpretation. 11. Eliot, George, 1819–1880—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. Series: Literature, religion, and postsecular studies. PR115.H68 2013 820.9'928709034—dc23 2012032539 Cover design by Mia Risberg Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Garamond Pro and Delphin Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my grandmothers Divinity is what we [women] need to become free, autonomous, sovereign . If women have no God, they are unable either to communicate or commune with one another. —Luce Irigaray, Sexes and Genealogies 62 What does our great historical hunger signify . our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb? —Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy 137 Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations xi Chapter 1 Introduction: Antecedents of the Victorian “Goddess Story” 1 Chapter 2 “Gods of the old mythology arise”: Charlotte Brontë’s Vision of the “Goddess Story” 24 Chapter 3 Feminist Reincarnations of the Madonna: Anna Jameson and Ecclesiastical Debates on the Immaculate Conception 49 Chapter 4 Invoking “all the godheads”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Polytheistic Aesthetic 73 Chapter 5 Eve, the Female Messiah, and the Virgin in Florence Nightingale’s Personal and Public Papers 98 Chapter 6 Ariadne and the Madonna: The Hermeneutics of the Goddess in George Eliot’s Romola 121 Afterword 143 Notes 145 Bibliography 155 Index 171 Acknowledgments THERE ARE numerous people and institutions to be recognized for their assistance during the research, writing, and revision phases of this proj- ect. First of all, with funding from the University of New Mexico Femi- nist Research Institute and Research Allocations Committee, I was able to do research at the British Library, the J. P. Morgan Library, the Hunting- ton Library, the Brontë Parsonage Museum Library, the New York Public Library, and the UCLA Library. The staff at these facilities were very gener- ous and helpful. In particular, I must thank Michael St. John-Mcalester, Manuscripts Collections Cataloguing and Processing Manager at the British Library, for going beyond the call of duty in responding to my queries. The staff at the University of New Mexico Interlibrary Loan Office as well as Steven R. Harris, Director, Collections & Acquisitions, University Libraries at the University of New Mexico, also must be thanked for the resources they provided. Colleagues who read or heard earlier versions of this manuscript and took the time to offer their insights provided immeasurable support during the writing process: they include Saree Makdisi, Anita Obermeier, Sarah Don- aldson, Marissa Greenberg, Aeron Hunt, Scott Rode, and the dear departed Hector Torres. Stacey Kikendall and Ashley Carlson were meticulous and precise in the tasks they performed. The readers chosen by The Ohio State University Press provided scrupulous, painstaking critique, which inevitably informed the rewriting phase, helping me to crystallize and hone my ideas. John Hulse and Maggie Diehl made the production process as seamless as it could possibly be. Many kudos to them. Finally, I want to express my admiration for my sister-in-law Nancy Freestone Turley, who has inspired my thoughts on the topic of gods and ix x Acknowledgments grandmothers over the years. And, once again, I thank my husband for his patience and support as I worked on this project. That I was blessed with two strong, independent, blunt-speaking grandmothers who watch over me from some supernal place surely impelled this work and my life. Abbreviations BL British Library BPM Brontë Parsonage Museum CB Charlotte Brontë EBB Elizabeth Barrett Browning EN Ellen Nussey FN Florence Nightingale GE George Eliot GEL George Eliot Letters HM Huntington Museum JPM Morgan Library MRM Mary Russell Mitford NP Nightingale Papers NYPL New York Public Library xi ¹ Introduction ANTECEDENTS OF THE VICTORIAN “GODDEss STORY” England has had many learned women, not merely readers but writers of the learned languages, in Elizabeth’s [page break] time and afterwards—women of deeper acquirements than are common now in the greater diffusion of letters; and yet where were the poetesses? The divine breath . why did it never pass, even in the lyrical form, over the lips of a woman? How strange! And can we deny that it was so? I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none. It is not in the filial spirit I am deficient, I do assure you—witness my reverent love of the grandfathers! — The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, edited by Frederic G. Kenyon, 1:231–32 I felt a mother-want about the world[.] —Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh 1:40 IF VICTORIAN WOMEN WRITERS yearned for authorial forebears, or, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words, for “grandmothers,” perhaps that longing had something to do with what Barrett referred to as “mother- want,” a sense of the actual and metaphorical absence of a maternal entity (Letters of EBB 1:232).1 While a multitude of orphans crowd the pages of Victorian fiction, anecdotal and statistical evidence testify to the all-too- common incidence of mothers felled by childbirth. But, as this study shall show, “mother-want” is also inextricably connected to what I call “mother- god-want.” Indeed, the lack so keenly indicated in the phrase “mother-want” exacerbated the need for a Mother in Heaven, which Victorian Protestant- 1 2 Chapter 1 ism was unprepared to supply. The women writers taken up here—Bar- rett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Anna Jameson, and George Eliot—responded to this lack by imagining symbolic female divini- ties that allowed them to acquire the authorial legitimacy patriarchal culture denied them. If these writers confronted a want of earthly and divine mothers, I sug- gest that there were grandmothers who, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, envisioned powerful female divinities that would reconfigure society in dramatic ways. These millenarians and socialist femi- nists felt that the time had come for women to bring about the earthly paradise that patriarchal institutions had failed to establish. Recuperating a symbolic divine in the form of the Great Mother—a pagan Virgin Mary, a female messiah, and a titanic Eve—Joanna Southcott, Eliza Sharples, Frances Wright, and others set the stage for Victorian women writers to envision and impart emanations of puissant Christian and pagan goddesses. Though the Victorian authors I study often mask progressive rhetoric, even in some cases seeming to reject these foremothers, their radical genealogy appears in mystic, metaphysical revisions of divinity. Marianne Thormählen remarks that it is a disservice to imagine Victo- rian religious life as anything less than variable and complex, perhaps more so for the female adherent (2). In keeping with this insight, I assume that while the patriarchal language of Christian God talk was omnipresent in the nineteenth century, it did not prevent the strong agency of women who utilized Christian dogma for progressive purposes.2 Indeed, though from the Althusserian and Foucauldian perspective religion may be viewed as a disci- plinary apparatus, it is also true that women who were profoundly engaged in institutionalized religion were not merely automatons reproducing patri- archal religious systems, for women’s involvement in radical spirituality has historically been aligned with demands for their rights (Rickard 143; Braude xv; Knight 8–9). Recognizing that patriarchal Christianity is powerful but not monolithic, I couple analysis of the historical record with respect for the writer’s intel- lectual labor and spiritual—even mystical—pursuit of knowledge. I should firmly state here that my purpose is not to argue that a maternal deity exists. Nor am I interested in debates about matriarchy and goddess worship as precursors of patriarchy or in their contributions to what is called the mod- ern “goddess movement.” While this study provides historical background for the “goddess movement,” I am more drawn to the tantalizing relation- ship between nineteenth-century British women’s radical politics and the woman writer’s tortuous engagements in gender politics vis-à-vis her profes- Antecedents
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