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Literary Sophias: the Esoteric Female in Romanticism

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Literary Sophias: the Esoteric Female in Romanticism Literary Sophias: The Esoteric Female in Romanticism _____________ Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy _____________ by Judith Dobson April 1, 2019 Abstract This thesis explores the Romantic representation of femininity in relation to elements of the Western esoteric tradition. In particular, it discusses the presence of Gnostic themes and gender imagery and the ways in which Romantic writers incorporated these concepts into their works as a means of articulating discourses that could challenge mainstream trends. I propose that Romantic writers engaged with an image of the feminine that elevated the female within the epistemological hierarchies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and whose precedents lie in the traditions of Gnosticism and other esoteric schools of thought. This feminine image resurfaced within dissenting movements like the Moravians, Behmenists and Swedenborgians, who emphasised the feminine aspects of God and creation. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these movements, and the ideas they espoused, became intertwined with apocalyptic concepts which entailed the spiritual renewal and the betterment of humanity, and in which the feminine was a central component and catalyst. These concepts acquired greater socio-political significance during and post-Revolution and, within this socio-political climate, Romantic writers challenged the binary constructions of gender and epistemological hierarchies. This thesis demonstrates the ways in which Romantic writers—S.T. Coleridge, William Blake, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the transitional figure, Elizabeth Barrett Browning— incorporated alternative religious representations of gender into their writings in ways that subverted established discourse, depicting the feminine as a source of spiritual wisdom and creative transcendence, a mode of representation that mirrors such figures as the Gnostic Sophia. Table of Contents Acknowledgments iv Introduction: Gender and Gnosticism in Romantic Literature 1 I. Concepts of the Feminine in Gnostic Thought 8 II. Scholarly Approaches to Gender and Esoteric Thought in Romanticism 17 Chapter One: Coleridge’s Redemptive Unity 37 I. Coleridge, Femininity and Women’s Rights 40 II. Boehme and the Sophianic Feminine in Coleridge’s Language of Unity 43 III. The Abyssinian Maid and the Paradisial Self in “Kubla Khan” 47 IV. The Unifying Feminine in “An Allegoric Vision” and “The Ancient Mariner” 58 V. The Transnatural Female in Christabel 66 Chapter Two: ‘Fleshly Spirituality’: Blake, Sacred Sexuality and the Alternative Religious Contexts of the Eighteenth Century 78 I. Blakean Women: A Critical Overview 79 II. Blake’s Poetic Philosophy 85 III. ‘Mystical Unions’: Blake and the Moravians 88 IV. The Theosophy of Desire: Blake and Swedenborg 99 V. Conclusion: Blake’s Alternative Circles 104 Chapter Three: Sacred Sexuality and the Elevation of the Female in Blake’s Vala and Jerusalem 105 I. Sexuality and Esoteric Themes in Blake’s Early Works 105 II. The Sophianic Female in Vala and Jerusalem 108 III. Vala: An Overview 110 IV. Vala and the Division of the Sexes 121 V. Vala and the Subjugation of the Female 125 VI. Vala and the Redemptive Female 128 VII. Jerusalem: An Overview 134 VIII. Jerusalem and the Universal Female 139 IX. Conclusion: Blake’s Sexual Apocalypse 143 Chapter Four: The Unseen Feminine: Gnosticism and Gender Politics in Frankenstein 145 I. The Modern Prometheus: Frankenstein and the Feminine Principle 151 II. Cornelius Agrippa, Paracelsus and Esoteric Gender 158 III. The Feminine Presence in Frankenstein 163 IV. Conclusion: Mary and Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Myth 169 Chapter Five: The Revolutionary Feminine in Prometheus Unbound 172 I. Shelley’s Philosophical Ideas and Esoteric Language 174 II. Critical Perspectives on Shelley and Prometheus Unbound 176 III. Shelley and Gnosticism: The Ophitic Serpent in The Assassins 183 IV. Shelley’s Version of the Prometheus Myth 187 V. Politics and Prometheus 190 VI. Revolution as Internal Transformation 194 VII. Conclusion: Shelley’s Gnostic Promethean Ideal 200 Chapter Six: The Poet and the Prophetess: Barrett Browning’s Feminist Discourse in Aurora Leigh 203 I. Romantic Women Writers and Literary Theology 204 II. Barrett Browning and Swedenborg: The Development of the Female Poet as Prophet 212 III. The Feminine Principle and the Female Poet as Prophet in Aurora Leigh 219 IV. Conclusion: Barrett Browning’s Literary Sophia, Continuing a Legacy 233 Conclusion: Unity in Polarity: Romanticism and the Sophianic Female 235 Bibliography 244 Appendix 276 iv Acknowledgements This thesis would not have been possible without the financial support of the University of Otago Doctoral Scholarship. I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr. Thomas McLean and Dr. Shef Rogers, for their invaluable feedback and support in helping me achieve my goals. I am also grateful for the continuing support of my family and friends who made me dinner and endless cups of tea during the writing process. 1 Introduction: Gender and Gnosticism in Romantic Literature In A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1972), Mary Wollstonecraft presented herself as one lifting the veil of ignorance, for she was using the reason God had given her to communicate “good” (2004, 34). She sought to revise traditional cultural and religious conceptions of the feminine, drawing on an image of feminine wisdom and knowledge and speaking on behalf of what she termed “exquisite sensibility,” which could exercise “understanding” and “amend the heart” (5), thereby acting as an agent of reform within society. Her Vindication is a “revision of established religious, historical and cultural models,” in which gender configurations and sexuality are presented as being socio- politically significant (Nicholson 1990, 402). The text is “a wide-ranging study in the relations subsisting between God, nature, and society,” presenting an argument that aligns with a wider movement in the eighteenth century to redefine God and societal norms (403). On the one hand, the growth of capitalism “implied a god more like an engineer” (ibid), conceptualised by Isaac Newton as a deity “very well skilled in mechanics” (Koyre 1957, 186), and by Thomas Paine as an impersonal stabiliser of natural laws (Nicholson 1990, 405). On the other hand, some, like Blake, advanced a concept of ‘God’ that was beyond the mechanistic limits of human perception, revealed through experiential and revelatory insight rather than through a set of reductive laws. Nicholson observes that, in the wake of the Enlightenment, “the radical mind of the eighteenth century extracted from the Scientific Revolution a reverence for and understanding of nature that rendered the God of traditional Christianity superfluous” (403). The failure of the French Revolution to deliver on equal rights and democratic freedoms underscored the Romantic attempt to 2 rethink and rework traditional ideas about God and humanity—for “an absolute monarch in heaven” was as undesirable as “an absolute monarch on Earth” (404). For many eighteenth-century radicals, the goal of such a re-visualisation was to redefine social hierarchies by moving beyond an autocratic or oligarchic view of God and divinity, so that humanity’s full potential could be realised. However, this movement also entailed the questioning of gender rights, roles and hierarchies, spearheaded by writers like Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Both Wollstonecraft’s individual position as a woman associated with dissenters, and her familiarity with their beliefs and non- conformist ‘group’ position were important in the development of her ideas (Morgan 2007). Although rational scepticism led her to move away from “all brands of Christianity,” she retained what Anne Stott describes as a kind of “eroticized pantheism” (2005, 104). According to her son-in-law, Percy Shelley, she believed that The Deity was a personal power that could be experienced as ecstatic or expanded consciousness, and that the aim of this power was to bring about the renovation of society (Goldberg 1984, 205). Wollstonecraft argues, in terms akin to Blake, that both evil and good originated in the “scheme of Providence, when this world was contemplated in the Divine mind” (52), but that they became polarised due to unequal and unbalanced male/female dynamics that could only be restored to equilibrium through acknowledging the importance of the female capacities and by equalising male/female relations in this life (Nicholson 1990, 416). She discourages sexuality as it was then practiced—as both a reproductive and economic transaction within the social marketplace wherein the subjugation of women, as forms of ‘property’, was an inherent factor, female powerlessness being the “inevitable concomitant of political tyranny” (414). The redefinition of God meant a complete shift in the way that sex and gender relations were perceived. The “ideology of progress” that spurred Enlightenment thought 3 and was intended to bring about “the growth of a humane, rational, and civilised society” became instead “a struggle between the sexes, with men imposing their value systems on women in order to facilitate social progress” (Jordanova 1980, 42–69).1 The blending of a ‘scientific’ approach to sexuality with persisting conceptions of Eve and sin meant the objectification and censure of women. In a model of the cosmos where “nature is a constructed object—not generated but engineered by a male god,” sex becomes “inherently
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