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Marriage and Paradoxical Christian Agency in the Novels of Mary

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Marriage and Paradoxical Christian Agency in the Novels of Mary View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Kent Academic Repository Marriage and Paradoxical Christian Agency in the Novels of Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Anne Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell Dalene J. Fisher Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Kent March 2016 Word Count: 88,462 Table of Contents Abstract: .................................................................................................................................. i Acknowledgements: .............................................................................................................. ii Introduction: .......................................................................................................................... 1 The Ideological Work of the Novel ............................................................... 15 Challenging Coverture ................................................................................... 21 Authorship and Christian Practice ................................................................. 26 Re-visiting Christianity and Feminism .......................................................... 40 Chapter One: “Through a Glass Darkly”: Mary Wollstonecraft and Christian Agency in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria. A Fragment (1798) ............................................... 49 Rejecting Blind Submission: Spiritual Disentanglement .............................. 55 Transcendent Intellectualism: Maria’s Contemplations ................................ 66 Sacred Sexuality: Flawed Protection and “Prostitution” ............................... 86 Imagining Salvation: The Female Agent ..................................................... 101 Chapter Two: “Fanny, So Odd and So Stupid—”: Christian Resistance and Rational Change in Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814)........................................................................ 119 Educating Fanny: Cultivating Disposition .................................................. 125 Compatible Virtue: Anglican Morality and Marriage ................................. 139 Challenging the Clergy: The Influence of “Improvement” ......................... 161 Active Resistance: Undergirded by Faith .................................................... 168 Chapter Three: “Devotion to Her Earthly Lord”: Redemptive Marriage in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) ......................................... 177 Rejecting Victorian Gender Ideals .............................................................. 179 “Working Out” Salvation: Evangelical Womanhood .................................. 182 Reforming Schemes: Helen as Subservient Saviour ................................... 197 Leveraging Virtue and Abandoning Reform ............................................... 212 Chapter Four: “All and Everything”: Rebellion, Responsibility, and Redemption in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) ............................................................................................ 223 She “does not preach”: Narrative Transformation in Ruth ......................... 229 Innocent Victim, Fallen Woman ................................................................. 233 Obedience and Contemplation: Introspective Reform ................................ 238 Rejecting Marriage and Embracing Virtue: Ruth’s Resistance ................... 246 Exposing the Pharisee: Revelations of Ruth’s Fall ..................................... 254 Vindicating Ruth: Jemima’s Rebellion and Repentance ............................. 258 Epilogue: ................................................................................................................ 271 Fisher i Abstract Between 1790 and 1850, the novel was used widely “for doing God’s work,” and English female authors, specifically those who identified themselves as Christians, were exploiting the novel’s potential to challenge dominant discourse and middle- class gender ideology, particularly in relationship to marriage. I argue in this thesis that Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, Anne Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell used the novel to construct Christian heroines who, as unlikely agents, make resistive choices shown to be undergirded by faith. All practicing some form of Christianity, Wollstonecraft, Austen, Brontë and Gaskell engage evangelicalism’s belief in “transformation of the heart.” They construct heroines who are specifically shown to question the value of a narrative that assumes wayward husbands would somehow be transformed as a result of the marriage union. The heroines in this study come to resist such reforming schemes. Instead, they paradoxically leverage the very Christian faith that dominant discourse would use to subjugate them in unequal unions. Fisher ii Acknowledgements The construction of this thesis would not have been possible without the attentive, detailed feedback provided by my research supervisors, Dr Jennie Batchelor and Professor Catherine Waters. They have given me articulate and valuable input at each step, always encouraging me to put forth better work. Time and time again, they have empowered and challenged me in new and unexpected ways. Their extensive knowledge astounds, and my work is the better for it. I am also indebted to my examiners Professor Elisabeth Jay and Dr Vybarr Cregan-Reid. Their close reading and subsequent feedback undoubtedly sharpened the focus of this thesis. I would like to give special thanks to my colleagues for supporting me during the past several years while I have been completing this project. They have been the backbone of my moral support and encouragement. My mother and father have stepped in as surrogate parents when my parenting responsibilities took a backseat to this project. My children are all the better for it. As for my children, some may wonder how a mom with four kids could take on such a project. I wonder how people do it without the support of an entire family. Steve has been truly “companionate,” without complaints or demands. Fisher 1 Introduction There seems nothing improbable in the thought, that this supremacy of woman over the novel is one which will go [on] widening and deepening, and that only through her shall we learn what resources there are in it for doing God’s work. (Ludlow qtd. Easson 285) The above statement, made by John Malcolm Ludlow in an unsigned review of Ruth in the North British Review (May 1853), delighted Elizabeth Gaskell. By the time this was written, women had indeed proved their supremacy over the novel. Furthermore, as this thesis will demonstrate, the novel was already being used widely “for doing God’s work,” and female authors were exploiting the novel both to embrace and to challenge Christianity’s transformative potential by constructing heroines who leveraged their faith in order to question marriage as a narrative resolution. Instead, these heroines employed differing types of agency to assert their spiritual equality with men, thereby challenging the doctrine of coverture. This research begins by examining proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whose Christian Rational Dissent has been relatively ignored by critics until recently. She died while writing the novel The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798) as a sequel to her influential treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).1 In Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft demonstrated that the union of spiritually equal agents in marriage was an essential prerequisite for the educational and legal reform she envisioned for the women of England. Individual agency, an emerging ideology of the revolutionary 1790s, was particularly important to Wollstonecraft, and the same concern is evident, although in slightly different forms, in the writing of other authors: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814), Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth. These authors use the novel to 1 Subsequently referenced as Vindication and cited parenthetically as VRW. Fisher 2 confront the contemporary paradox of religion that could be manipulated to confine women while at the same time insisting upon feminine redemptive influence within marriage. The four novels around which this research is structured were written by women who not only leveraged Christian narrative, but more precisely, who self- identified as Christians. Given the era in which the novels were written, this designation seems unexceptional. The choice of widely read and much-discussed novels for this thesis is not a recapitulation of other scholars’ previous arguments; rather, this thesis challenges previous readings of these texts. In particular, it asserts that the pervasive religious bias of the authors as well as the societies wherein these texts were received has been too-much disregarded or maligned by scholarship of the late 20th century. Recently, historical scholars have situated these texts more fully within their original context, but this work looks microscopically at how spiritual agency, a term I subsequently detail, sat in concert with the secular culture of individualism and its evangelical twin that negotiated “transformation of the heart.” Each heroine is shown to focus upon the individual paradoxically to manipulate the very Christian narrative that threatens to confine her. Christianity, I argue throughout, was not wholly oppressive as some scholarship suggests—neither is it shown to be embraced without question by the heroines discussed here. The paradoxical nature of spiritual agency this thesis explores exposes the
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