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BRLSI BELIEF LECTURE SERIES Faith & Gender:from Eve theTemptress to subversive Angel the flowering of FeminismThis lecture was illustrated with slides of Victorian paintings Marie-Louise Luxemburg BRLSI Member 14 July 2004 The 19th century was an age of paradox, in which life-changing scientific discoveries fuelled both a surge in religious doubt and religious revival, and prompted many Victorians to ask the questions: What does it mean to be a Christian in a scientific world? – and more importantly - What does it mean to be a Christian man or woman? The seeds of these questions were planted in the 18th century - itself an age of extraordinary change and upheaval - which had far-reaching implications for the structure and outlook of Victorian Society. Revolution broke out in the American colonies in 1781. Eight years later, Revolution broke out in France. Many British radicals, watching developments in France first-hand, became intoxicated with the new ideas of liberty, freedom and the Rights of Man. Then Revolution turned to bloody Terror, and French aristocrats and Catholic refugees arrived by the boatload - many to set up new religious establishment on these shores. There was just as much upheaval in this country. Smoke-choked cities were springing up where once woods and fields had been. Coalmines scarred the landscape. The countryside was divided and partitioned against rural communities. After the Enclosure Acts, the dispossessed flocked to the cities looking for work in the new burgeoning factories. Men and women, who had lived in villages for generations, now found themselves anonymous and sucked into the maelstrom of city life. Instead of clean country air, chimneys belched acrid smoke day and night; the poor slept 20 to a room; overflowing cesspits spread typhoid, typhus and cholera, and life expectancy drooped to 26 years. It must have seemed to simple folk that this was God’s retribution for man’s sinfulness – the Devil had encroached on an unchristian world. It is hardly surprising that in this turbulent climate there was resurgence in religion in the form of Evangelism. People yearned for stability in their lives, old values that they could cling to in a world that made little sense. Evangelism infused the religious texts and the conduct manuals, and even introduced a new dynamic Christian theology into the popular novel to inspire the moral direction of the home and family. Evangelical discipline and training was based on the breaking of the will and the denial of the flesh in a resolute quest towards purity. Only when the self had been destroyed could the crusade to regenerate a sinful world have purpose. William Wilberforce and John Wesley, on their travels across the country, were stirring up fervour as they preached a religion of the heart, a doctrine of love and forgiveness, with its focus on man’s sinfulness. This was predominantly a religious revival of the rural classes, practised in the home by both sexes with great enthusiasm and zeal. (‘Enlightened’ members of the middle and upper classes were more concerned with metaphysical questions, such as reassessing the natural laws that governed morality, or questioning the need for a revered religion at all.) But Wesleyan Methodism proved especially popular with female converts, for as they embodied the qualities of the newborn Christian, women were finding the courage to ‘reform’ their husbands (wife-beating was particularly criticised) and their separate sex prayer meetings helped them develop strong bonds with other women outside the home environment. Wesley allowed some women to preach in the 1760s; others played a role in organising the forms of worship, or became active, philanthropic members of their communities. Society was in flux; long-held values were being questioned. Society’s rapid transition from a rural to a largely industrial community was leading to new forms of anxiety. How could men find the opportunity for religious observance in the ruthless, fast-paced world of commerce? And what exactly defined a man’s duties, and what a woman’s? In 1852 a Congregationalist declared: ‘In the married state, [the wife’s] sphere of labour… is the family; it belongs to the husband to earn by the sweat of his brow, not only his bread but that of the household.’1 The new industrialists, mimicking the aristocracy, decided that it was unseemly to send their wives and daughters out to work. So their wives reclined on their new damask sofas and employed a multitude of servants. Their daughters were kept at home or sent to one of the new boarding schools springing up across the country, to be groomed for a life of refinement and leisure. Education was of secondary importance - the fundamental duty of these daughters was to marry, and to marry well. Aspiring mothers might have consulted a conduct book, such as Hannah More’s The Education of Daughters (1777), in which she states: ‘Bold, enterprising spirit… so much admired in boys, should not in the other sex, be encouraged, but suppressed. Girls should be taught not perniciously to carry on a dispute, even if they know themselves to be right… [Girls] should acquire a submissive temper and a forbearing spirit.’ This advice seems no more than an endorsement of the French philosopher Rousseau’s views on the education of women, which became fashionable in England at this time. Rousseau’s views of woman as a mindless coquette were said to have so incensed Mary Wollstonecraft that she wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) in reply. Euphoric from her adventures in France, her mind overflowed with new ideas of liberty, justice and equality. But she was received with hostility and suspicion in England, in a society anxious not to upset the status quo. Her views on free love outraged patriarchal society and threatened to destabilise the basic teachings of the Church that sanctified sex though marriage. She died in 1797 at the age of 38, misunderstood and vilified. One contemporary said that her work should be read: ‘with disgust by every female who has any pretensions to delicacy; and with detestation by every one attached to the interests of religion and morality’.2 It was a sober warning to women to keep their views and opinions to themselves. So as men and women’s spheres of activity diversified (women into the private domain of the home, and men out into the public arena of commerce and politics), the man’s world of work and the woman’s domestic realm began to take on a quasi-religious significance. Man’s work gave him dignity, virtue and independence. His ability to support his family on his breadwinner’s income reinforced his ‘manliness’. In contrast, his wife at home, sheltered from the evils of the world, became the custodian of religious observances for her family. After all, her humility, piety, and compassion made her so much more ‘naturally’ religious. The Woman’s Mission (like other conduct manuals flourishing at this time) abounds with stirring terms such as ‘duty’, ‘self-sacrifice’, ‘moral regeneration’ and ‘influence’- words that were calculated to awaken womanly aspirations and curtail her activities. Society, yearning for some stability, found it in the sanctity of the home. Supposedly revered in the home – as the influence of women outside the home declined, women began to find themselves suppressed and silenced. Ten years after John Wesley’s death in 1791, women preachers were being actively discouraged in the Methodist Church and by 1850 there were no women preachers left at all in Methodism. (The Society of Friends was an exception: Quakerism had recognised female preachers since the 17th century; but even Quaker women in England did not achieve full equality with men until 1896.) The Anglican Church had always been opposed to women preachers. The evangelical editor of the Christian Lady’s Magazine writing in 1842, denounced women preachers as contrary to the injunctions of St Paul and the Apostles. But why did the position of women deteriorate so markedly during the early 19th century, when women had shown exciting sparks of assertiveness in so many fields during the latter half of the previous century? I suggest that Britain, with one eye focused on the bloody Revolution across the Channel, was terrified of any changes that might destabilise society. And this desire for stability was later reinforced by the homely ideas of ‘Kirche, Kuche und Kinder’ brought over by Prince Albert, endorsed by Queen Victoria, and quickly copied by her subjects. Women, of course, had not always been in a secondary position. In ancient societies, women were often worshiped as goddesses. Great Goddesses, like the multi-breasted Diana of Ephesus was revered for thousands of years in the ancient Near East as the giver and taker of life, conceived by those who worshiped her as a Being whose power was infinite. ‘In Hellenistic times Jewish women, who lived in the extreme limits of Upper Egypt, at Elephantine are known to have had a cult of a female goddess, consort of the Hebrew god Yahweh, who was called Asherah – a version of the goddess that was worshipped in Syria.’3 But as Karen Armstrong points out in A History of God: ‘The rise of the cities encouraged the more masculine qualities of martial, physical strength... Women became marginalized. Israelite society was also becoming more masculine in tone. ...After Yahweh had successfully vanquished the other gods and goddesses from Canaan and the Middle East and became the only God; his religion would be managed almost entirely by men. The cult of the goddess would be superseded and this would be a symptom of a cultural change that was characteristic of the newly civilised world.’4 ‘Early Christianity… like other ideologies of the period also developed misogynistic tendencies... The fall of Rome influenced Augustine’s doctrine of Original Sin, which would become central to the way Western people viewed the world. Women were at heart all Eve who could lead Adam into iniquity.’5 Several Gnostic Gospels, contemporary to the writings of the Canonical Gospels, offer us an intriguing alternative to the position of Eve, as we have come to know her, in which Eve - instead of tempting Adam - gives life to him and instructs him: ‘After the day of rest, Sophia [literally "wisdom"] sent Zoë [literally "life"] her daughter, who is called Eve as an instructor to raise up Adam… When Eve saw Adam cast down, she pitied him, and she said, "Adam, live! Rise up upon the earth!" Immediately her word became a deed. For when Adam rose up, immediately he opened his eyes. When he saw her, he said, ‘You will be called "the mother of the living", because you are the one who gave me life.’6 Somehow this ‘life-giving Eve, the instructor, and spiritual principle in humanity’ was suppressed in favour of Augustine’s ‘Eve the Temptress’, who passed not only the contagion of ‘Original Sin’ in perpetuity, but a loathsome and sinful sexuality. Morally deficient and sexuality insatiable, she had to be kept subordinate and under control to prevent her from being a danger and temptation to men. This misogynistic attitude filtered down through the centuries until in the new Protestant evangelical climate, women came to be seen as a paradox, for the qualities of the newborn Christian - humility, submissiveness, self-denial and obedience – were qualities that were regarded as quintessentially female. ‘Eve the Temptress’ was now seen as more virtuous and less prone to temptation than Adam. Now it was women’s righteousness that could keep men in check.7 So woman became the sole preserver of Christian values for her family. For Sarah Lewis writing in the Woman’s Mission (1839) the essential quality on which woman’s moral worth depended was her ‘renunciation of self’ embodied, in its most perfect form - maternal love. She defines her role: ‘Women may be the prime agents of God in the regeneration of mankind... she is not, however, to teach virtue but to inspire it… Maternal love [is] the only purely unselfish feeling that exists on this earth... nothing can check the flow of maternal love. By intrusting to woman such a revelation of himself, God has pointed out whom he intends for his missionaries upon earth, - the disseminators of his spirit, the diffusers of his word. Let men enjoy in peace and triumph the intellectual kingdom which is theirs, and which doubtless was intended for them… the moral world is ours by the indication of God himself.’8 The speaker then displayed the first slide:
The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. [Insert illus: The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti © Tate Gallery, London] The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) was part of a nostalgic yearning in the mid-19th-century to return to the values of the pre-industrial age – and especially the Middle Ages. The PRB saw the Middle Ages as a period of purity and simplicity, uncorrupted by the materialistic industrial world, where Truth both in Art and Religion reigned supreme. The courtly woman-worshipping rituals of the Middle-Ages appealed to the Brotherhood, and this growing Victorian cult of ‘woman-worshipping from afar’ brought the Virgin Mary back into prominence; for a society that idolized Motherhood, saw the Blessed Virgin as the Supreme Mother, whose innate spirituality, passivity, and motherly devotion made her the ‘Female of Excellence’ (as Rossetti called her). Rossetti’s painting of the self-effacing Virgin being trained to fulfil her ‘pre-elected’ role also served as a role model for all women to emulate. The revival of interest in the Virgin Mary grew out of a resurgence of interest in Roman Catholicism as promoted by John Henry Newman, a key figure in the Oxford Movement (or Tractarians as they were called) which started in 1833 and aimed to restore High Church ideals to the Church of England. (Roman Catholics had been granted full emancipation in Britain only four years earlier.) Newman, in a sermon pronounced that the Virgin Mary had changed Eve’s curse into a blessing ‘and this very dispensation… was the means by which salvation came into the world.’9 The Reverend Charles Dodsworth (better known as the writer Lewis Carroll) was a Tractarian, and regarded by Newman as ‘one of the great preachers of the Revival’. The Rossetti family worshipped at Christ Church, London where he was the minister, and under his influence, the women of the Rossetti family became fervent disciples of High Anglicanism. Dante’s sister, the poet Christina Rossetti, modelled for the painting. Christina, I think, symbolises the diffident, devout woman, typical in Victorian times, who modelled her life on a Christian ideal, and for whom her faith became a great source of strength and empowerment. But I shall relate the following story just to show how her life (and other women’s lives and intellects) was being controlled and managed: In 1832, at King’s College where the Rossetti father taught, professors’ wives and daughters were flocking eagerly to hear Charles Lyell (the geologist) give a series of lectures that argued for the non-literal meaning of Genesis. But the governing body of the College became so alarmed of the effect these ideas would have on susceptible female minds that they immediately banned ladies from attending any more lectures.10 Charles Lyell was a friend of the Rossetti family. Long before Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species destabilized the Victorian view of the world, Lyell’s Principles of Geology, published twenty years earlier, was sewing seeds of doubt into the Christian theory of Divine Providence. The poet Alfred Tennyson was one of many Victorians deeply affected by Lyell’s suppositions. His epic poem In Memoriam (1850) records his religious crisis that was prompted by mounting scientific evidence and the death of his dear friend Hallum. Written as a cathartic exercise, the poem attempted to answer the Great Victorian Questions of life and death, and universal purpose. Tennyson was clearly troubled that Nature ‘red in tooth and claw’ was not concerned with the life of the individual, but mankind as a whole. In the face of compelling fossil evidence, Nature’s deeds were callous and mindless. How could a benevolent God exist that wiped out life so neglectfully and cruelly? The poem caught the mood of the time. Many Victorian were deeply troubled by the new scientific evidence coming out, but the Tractarians carefully avoided the problem by denying the relevance of science, and became even more resolute in their beliefs. The Rossetti family’s religious faith, however, never wavered: Dante Rossetti submerged himself further into the world of Tractarian symbolism, medieval romanticism and Arthurian legend, and Christina retreated deep into her religious psyche to examine her own unworthiness. The speaker then displayed the second slide: Life Well Spent (1862). Artists such as Charles W. Cope excelled in painting sentimental scenes in the popular genre of ‘sacred Motherhood’ - quasi-religious paintings that paid homage to the ‘Angel in the House’. (It was the title of an epic poem by Coventry Patmore, in which he describes the virtues and self-sacrifice of his wife, who died after ten years of marriage in which she bore six children). The catch phrase ‘Angel in the House’ became synonymous with angelic Victorian female virtues that embodied sexual purity and a strong sense of Christian morality. Cope’s painting idealises the purity and purpose of woman’s ‘Christian mission’, which this ‘Angel’ is disseminating by example and culture to her children.11 This mother’s young daughter (dressed in purity of white) is an ‘angel in the making’, who reads her lessons solemnly and who one day will almost certainly emulate her Mamma’s exemplary behaviour. Idealised paintings of pretty, spotless women cocooned in high-walled gardens with their plants or pets were also popular, and seemed to reinforce Victorian beliefs about feminine frailty, withdrawal and innocence. ‘Her home and garden’ John Ruskin patronisingly endorsed, ‘is a place of peace: the shelter not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division.’12 Florence Nightingale was particularly scathing about this well-meaning, but misguided pampering, and vented her concerns into a vast part philosophical, part theological- critique in which she writes: ‘If women are to be saved, they must first be awakened from their infantile unconsciousness. Women must be able to suffer if they are to grow. Experience, frustration and discontent… suffering all its pangs, is the price for adulthood. To deny, suppress, and stupefy these emotions leads to madness, hysteria and mental deterioration.’13 (Incidentally, Nightingale’s opus was deemed too explicitly angry for publication, even after heavy censoring – and it only saw the light of day as an appendix in a history of the Woman’s Movement published in 1928. ‘It was,’ suggests Elaine Showalter, ‘one of the most striking examples of the Victorian silencing of female protest.’14) As the Victorian age matured, cocooned and pampered women grew ‘frailer and more delicate’ – words that became synonymous with ‘refinement’ and ‘good breeding’. It is little wonder that a ‘sickness culture’ developed. The sick, consumptive, dying girl or woman became a stock character in Victorian literature and painting, often serving as an embodiment of virtue and selflessness - too perfect to survive, yet eminently worthy of emulation by readers. The sensitive, self-denying Christina Rossetti, herself, suffered numerous mysterious illnesses, and it has been suggested that her semi-invalidism suited her reflective life as a poet, and subconsciously freed her from economic and social respon-sibilities.16 But what was the fate of those women who questioned or protested against their lot? One of the most quoted Biblical texts in early 19th century evangelical writings is that of ‘Ephesians’ v.22: ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husband, as unto the Lord. For the husband is head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church: and he is saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.’ 17 Wives who did not ‘submit to their husbands’ were considered mentally unbalanced and could be sent to the asylum. They could also be locked up if they questioned male opinions or male authority; if they were considered promiscuous; had born an illegitimate child, or had been sexually assaulted or raped. 18 What makes this all the more disturbing is that many women were locked up - not because they were ill - but because they dared to question their position in society. Women had to be controlled and managed, and their minds reconditioned to conform to Victorian patriarchal values. ‘Silenced, frustrated and denied self-fulfilment, women became more dependent on their inner lives, more prone to depression and breakdown. Sickness and silent withdrawal were tempting escapes – indeed, subversive forms of female protest. In a society that not only perceived women as childlike, irrational and sexually unstable but also rendered them powerless and economically marginal, it is not surprising that they should have formed a greater part of the asylum population.’19
Ophelia (1852) John Everett Millais © Tate Gallery, London Ophelia (1852) John Everett Millais Ophelia was a compelling figure for Victorian artists and writers. (In the Royal Academy show of 1852 there were two paintings of Ophelia: Arthur Hughes’ sexless creature perched on a tree truck by a stream, and John Everett Millais’ Ophelia.) I consider this painting one of the iconic images of the period. Ophelia takes the Victorian ideal of the passive, beautiful female to its ultimate conclusion – she withdraws from the world in the only way open to her – by taking her own life. She represents all the silent, repressed women of mid 19th century society. Her mouth is open in a kind of silent scream - of protest. Showalter suggests in The Female Malady (1987):‘Ophelia became the prototype not only of the deranged woman in Victorian literature and art but also of the young female asylum patient. Doctors and psychiatrists were mesmerised by the sexual vulnerability of the Ophelia-type character. Her helpless childlike beauty seemed in some perverse way to epitomise the Victorian female ideal. They even encouraged some of their young women asylum patients to dress up in Ophelia-like clothes with garlands of wild flowers in their hair and have their photographs taken.’20 This childlike woman put a tremendous strain on her male counterpart, for the frailer and more helpless she became, the greater was his responsibility to support her. Many men were finding their part of the equation as difficult to sustain as women did theirs, and this became a source of great anxiety for them. In a climate where some unfortunate women could be sent to the asylum for questioning male authority, how did women find the courage and means to liberate themselves? Young women were receiving covert messages both from their fiction and from the didactic works of religious and temperance writers. Jane Eyre, the plain heroine in Charlotte Bronte’s novel who refuses to marry the respectable Anglican minister, and Aurora Leigh, the heroine of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s epic poem who chooses a career instead of marriage, caused shockwaves in Victorian society. It is difficult from our 21st century perspective to understand why – but these independent, passionate women had a strong sense of ‘self’, a new self-consciousness, which was contrary to the selfless ideal of the Angel in the House. Such women were branded ‘strong-minded’, a derogatory term for the outspoken female agitators campaigning for ‘Woman’s Rights and Duties’. Women were learning the subversive art of female cunning from their fiction - from characters like Anne Catherick, wrongly imprisoned in an asylum in Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White (1861). ‘It was easy to escape,’ said Anne Catherick, ‘I was so quiet and obedient, so easily frightened.’ In other words, she exaggerated her female helplessness and vulnerability to such an extent that she lulled her oppressors into a false sense of security. M.E. Braddon takes this premise even further in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) where her pretty, angelic-looking protagonist becomes a ruthless would-be murderess. This ‘sensational’ novel, as it came to be called, was extremely successful and led to countess imitations. Women writers were killing off the Angel in the House and replacing her with a passionate, determined and often heartless heroine. Orthodoxy worried about this alarming trend. ‘The New Woman, as we read of her in recent novels,’ writes the Westminster Review (1865) ‘possesses not only the velvet, but the claws of the tiger. She is no longer the Angel, but the Devil in the House… The Fathers, after all, were right when they said that Adam was more tempted by Eve than the devil.’21 The temperance writer Sarah Strickney Ellis (who was involved in the anti-slavery campaigns of the 1830s, and then in the Temperance Movement of the 1840s) was weaving covert warnings into her fiction. (And incidentally, it was probably the formation of the anti-slavery societies that first gave women the opportunity to publicly challenge the accepted position of women, by pointing out the similarities between the status of the slave and that of the wife.) Mrs Ellis wrote as a serious Christian, and because she never overtly challenged patriarchal authority, and presented women as sympathetic creatures who were dedicated to their men folk, she avoided censure. But she was one of the first temperance writers to expose the violence and disruption of alcoholism in middle-class society, and she added her own particular Christian perspective to the gender debates of the 1840s by highlighting the anomaly between ideology and reality in patriarchal society.22 While revealing the potential problems and dangers her female readers might encounter in marriage, Mrs Ellis was at the same time subversively encouraging the manipulation of men under the guise and appearance of womanly submission. Their eyes opening, women were beginning to question the value of matrimony. Florence Nightingale, declining one suitor, decided that she could not sign away her freedom. She went to the Crimea at the age of thirty-four, claiming that the right to work was part of her secularised religious duty. She had spent many bitter years struggling against family objections to let her work. She never married, but devoted her life to nursing reform. 23 Religious Sisters From childhood women were taught that marriage was their religious mission – in marriage they would find fulfilment. But in the 19th century, women in increasing numbers were beginning to reject marriage (even though unmarried women were pitied and stigmatised, and considered a social problem). John Henry Newman did concede, however, that convent life could function as a refuge for ‘redundant’ females under the ‘proper precautions’. Anglican Convents were a Victorian phenomenon, a result of the resurgence of High Church ideals in the Church of England, and which coincided with the reestablishment of monastic communities in 1840s (and the number of religious establishments escalated as the century progressed). Many, however, viewed this development with suspicion; and an ominous sign of Roman Catholic encroachment. Both communities were considered subversive to the ‘naturalness’ of the society. High Anglican men were branded ‘effeminate’ and communities of women ‘unhealthy’. A society that idealised motherhood could not readily concede that virginity was a more honour-able spiritual state than matrimony – or more importantly - that women should have the affront to exercise their independent choice by opting to dedicate their bodies and souls to God instead of a husband. Christina Rossetti joined an Anglican religious order, and became an associate ‘Sister of Mercy’ at the Highgate Penitentiary, a refuge for the recovery of fallen women. But she never took the veil like her sister Maria eventually did. In her theological critique, Letter and Spirit, Rossetti wrote provocatively that women who marry do ‘well’ (but) those who choose to be brides of Christ do ‘better’. 24
Convent Thoughts (1851) Charles A Collins © Ashmolean Museum, Oxford The cult of the ‘pretty young nun’ was a variation on the ‘pretty young woman’ theme.25 Just as the Pre-Raphaelite artists, unable to come to terms with modern industrial society, continued to paint blinkered fantasies of chivalric life in a bygone age, so the majority of (male) writers and poets, writing about the nun in her cloistered world of feminine virtue, focused on her life as a contemplative rejecting the world - despite the fact that there was ample evidence that Anglican sisterhoods were prominently and actively involved in charity work. These sentimental images of the angelic martyr in her religious prison only seemed to heighten her desirability, making her both sexy and unobtainable,26 and were possibly a fanciful artistic solution to ‘control’ what seemed a threatening trend towards the self-empowerment of religious women.27 In contrast to the male view of the vaporous nun, the religious women in Christina Rossetti’s theological writings have an intense, almost erotic relationship with their spiritual husband – and seem more fulfilled and in control of their lives than their married, earth-bound ‘sisters’. In her writings she envisages a utopian life beyond the grave where men and women are equal. These were provocative ideas, for she was not only challenging the institution of marriage but patriarchal authority. And because of her subversive radical views, Christina Rossetti has been proclaimed ‘a foremother of contemporary feminist theology’.28 Christian Manliness As the New Woman emerged with characteristics that had previously been considered ‘unfeminine’, Men began to question their own sexual identity. Images of masculinity were just as idealised and rigid as those of femininity. The ideal man was strong, brave self-disciplined and hard working – the perfect compliment for the feminine female. Some Christians feared that in emphasising the supposed ‘naturalness’ of women for piety and holiness, they were inadvertently alienating men from religion. More alarming, the insidious influence of Catholicism was encouraging men to adopt ‘effeminate’ attitudes. Advocates of Christian ‘manliness’ (or ‘muscular Christianity’ as it came to be known) despised Newman and his High Church influence. The rise of Anglican monasteries, with their effeminate trappings of Catholic ritual and emphasis on celibacy, was an obvious example of how the manly ideal was being blatantly castrated. Friendship, independence, aggressive patriotism and self-discipline were the qualities of the manly boy, who stands up for weaker boys, reads his Bible and says his prayers. The sports field not only worked off boyish energy but developed moral qualities such as courage, fair play and team spirit. (There might also have been a subconscious ‘Darwinian’ motive. Summarised briefly: Darwin’s theory suggests that ‘Life is a conflict, strength comes through struggle and success is the prerogative of the strong.’29 Therefore the strong manly-man had everything to gain.) One advocate, searching for ways to make the gospels more appealing to men, was the Christian Socialist writer Charles Kingsley, who believed passionately in the spiritual significance of sex in marriage, and accused Catholics of denigrating marriage by implying that celibate Christians were more spiritual than married ones. Like Kingsley, Thomas Hughes promoted manliness in his fiction. Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) is about the everyday life of a boy at Rugby School, who excels on the sports field rather than the classroom. After the phenomenal success of Tom Brown (which triggered a new popular genre of boys’ adventure stories) Hughes turned his attention to the image of Christ. He was uncomfortable with the portrayal of the ‘gentle Jesus meek and mild’ of the New Testament gospels, who was engaged in such unmanly activities as washing the feet of his disciples, and tried in his theological work, The Manliness of Christ (1879), to present a heroic Christ, who was more acceptable to the Victorian ideal. The Fallen Woman In the mid-19th century, a perverse fascination developed for the ‘Fallen Woman’ both in art and literature. Dante Rossetti, once obsessed with images of the Virgin Mary, now became fascinated, like other artists, with the Mary Magdalene character. In an age obsessed with both virginity and sexual promiscuity, the two extremes became paradoxically entwined. Gentlemen had placed their ‘Angel’ on such a high pedestal, that her extreme ‘goodness’ was making her undesirable. Victorians (especially men) believed that the whore was a permanent and integral part of society, a safely valve who deflected hot-blooded gentlemen from the temptation to seduce respectable young ladies and leave their wives unmolested. While male artists painted the fallen angel in her degradation, it was mainly women writers and campaigners who tried to find a solution to her plight. Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Mrs Gaskell scandalised society by portraying the prostitute as victim not predator. (After Ruth many of Mrs Gaskell’s friends shunned her.). But it was the feminist campaigner Josephine Butler who suggested that it was the subsistence wages of the seamstress or shop girl had forced so many of them into prostitution, not her insatiable sexual appetite. She fought a twenty-five year ‘double-standards’ battle to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, and the greatest obstacle she faced was the scandal that a respectable woman should wish to defend the civil rights of the prostitute. One MP told the House of Commons in 1872: ‘I look upon these women who have taken up this matter as worse than prostitutes.’31 Butler retorted angrily: ‘Is it possible that pure and Christian women can bear any longer to look on in silence at this costly and impious sacrifice of souls, this wholesome destruction of women born with like capacities with themselves for a life of honour..? I do not believe they can; and when they rise up by thousands to the rescue, it will not be for the reclamation of their own sex only but in order to... elevate the moral standard of men.’31 The Church, conscious of placing her innocent Sisters of Mercy in vulnerable positions while they carried out God’s work, invented elaborate procedures and rules to protect them from contamination by their fallen sisters. But ironically, Christina Rossetti, who as a child had been sheltered from everything that was not ‘pure or high-minded’ and even as an adult had to contend with her brother Dante’s censorship, empathised with the prostitute as her brother from his beguiled viewpoint could not. It is believed that she wrote her extraordinary, sensuous and didactic poem Goblin Market for the fallen women of the Highgate Penitentiary. Woman Preachers Influence was coming from abroad. The American evangelical preacher Phoebe Palmer, touring England in 1859, was promiscuously preaching to mixed audiences. Orthodoxy was outraged. One young woman who came to her defence was Catherine Booth. She was so deeply affected by the vicious attacks of the English ministers on a woman’s right to public ministry and by the constant proclamations of her own minister on a woman’s inferiority, that she decided to preach herself. Catherine Booth argued: ‘There are no less than six prophetesses mentioned in the Old Testament, one of whom was unquestionably judge as well as prophet.’ Now God having once spoken directly by woman, and man having once recognised her divine commission, and obeyed it, what grounds is Omnipotence to be restricted, or woman’s spiritual labours ignored? Why should the swaddling bands of blind custom which in Wesley’s days were so triumphantly broken, and with such glorious results be again wrapped round the female disciples of the Lord?’ (It has been said that Booth’s pamphlet on the defence of woman’s ministry proposed ‘the first major argument for female preachers in Victorian England and helped change the course of Christianity.’32) Catherine Booth not only impressed her husband William Booth, General of the fast-growing Salvation Army, but countless men and women who flocked to hear her preach. By 1875, half the officers in the Salvation Army were women. The Salvation Army was probably the one Christian movement, since the flowering of Methodism in the 18th century, to have the most profound impact and influence on Victorian religious and social life. 33 Evangelical religion The emphasis on evangelical religion was now increasingly on usefulness, both inside and outside the home. Although most women were not allowed to preach, they participated in a wide range of activities: distributing tracts and bibles, teaching in Sunday Schools, fundraising and forming voluntary associations. And philanthropy was not the preserve of any one religious group - Sunday Schools were started by artisans such as weavers, blacksmiths and cobblers. And as ordinary women in increasing numbers took up causes under the authorship of the Lord, not only were they less likely to be censured, but their religion gave them courage and self-confidence. Philanthropy was opening women’s eyes to a side of life that they would otherwise know nothing about. And as they spread the word, women of all classes were drawn together and gaining immeasurable satisfaction from fulfilling their religious duties. There is no doubt that religion empowered women. Once, religion had once kept middle-class women confined to the home, now it gave them the opportunity to venture out in the world. They were respected, needed, recognised, doing something useful and becoming informed. In nearly every cause Victorian women took up; the strength of their religion helped them find their voice. Religious was the one avenue in which patriarchal authority was hard pressed to stifle. How could a husband censure a wife’s Christian activities, when she was being constantly told that it was her womanly duty to be God’s missionary on earth? And as women like Josephine Butler and Florence Nightingale easily proved: woman’s influence could become woman’s power. In the 1850s, Ellen Raynard’s Bible women in London were finding that as they offered aid, assistance and advice to the poor women in their homes, they had become surrogate social workers, doctors and ministers.34 It is hardly surprising that, finding themselves competent and valued in these fields, they should demand to be properly trained in education, law, medicine, and ultimately the church. Astarte Syriaca (1877) Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Astarte Syriaca (1877) Dante Gabriel Rossetti © Manchester City Art Gallery Women’s growing powers were affecting all walks of life – including the arts. Look how Rossetti’s image of woman has changed. This is not the self-effacing Virgin of 28 years ago, or a cowering Magdalene, but a Woman who stares straight out of the canvas, strong and powerful, sensual yet remote. Astarte was the goddess of Love, also known as Venus; she is another representation of the Goddess Ashera, the consort of the Hebrew god Yahweh. Rossetti has provocatively reincarnated this goddess to represent the divine power of woman, a femme fatal who will bewitch countless artists and writers until the end of century. She possesses the confidence and the strength of a man - and in fact could be a man if it were not for her small breasts, her fleshy exaggerated red lips and wild mane of free-flowing hair. Gender politics were influencing the arts. Laus Veneris (1873-8) Edward Burne-Jones This is Edward Burne-Jones’s version of Venus, illustrating Swinburne’s poem of the same name. The power of this androgynous creature is extraordinary. This Venus (like Rossetti’s Astarte) could so easily (from our modern perspective) be ‘a man in drag’. Yet however powerful and threatening she may be, this Venus remains remote and untouchable. Burne-Jones has placed her in a flat, unrealistic setting to dilute her threat, so Victorian viewers can indulge his fantasies of female domination without actual harm. Burne-Jones deliberately set out to subvert the gender ideals. In his Sleeping Beauty series, the images of sickly, defeated and spent men must have disturbed a Victorian society more used to seeing heroic men striding forth to conquer. Orthodoxy worried about the way the sexes were being represented in art and literature, and put the source of the trouble squarely on the shoulders of ‘The Woman Question’. Woman’s influence was to blame.35 Women were shaking off patriarchal shackles, putting on their bloomers and cycling forth. They knew exactly where they were going and had everything to gain in their fight for emancipation. But as women grew in strength, were men expected to grow even stronger? Men were struggling to uphold the manly ideal. The muscular Christian ethos promoted during the latter 19th century, with its emphasis on athleticism, sexual purity and hero-worship, led to the formation of numerous societies such as The YMCA, the Boy’s Brigade and the Boy Scout Movement – all set up to nurture the next generation of stalwart Christian young men. (It also led to a new genre of homocentric novels. Arthur Conan Doyle would one day call Robert Louis Stevenson ‘the father of the modern masculine novel’. But just as women writers had killed of the ‘Angel in the House’, so male writers were beginning to subvert this manly ideal. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1885) is now interpreted as the unconscious expression of a society unable to keep up the pretence of the muscular Christian ethos, and is a manifestation of repressed male anxieties about homosexuality and of Darwin’s theory of degeneration and atavism.) The repressive ethic to produce a generation of pure-minded manly Christian men seems to have misfired, for there was growing public concern that decent men, brought up in the rugged all-male communities of public school and university, who would go on to serve in the armed services or the outposts of Empire, had become so unused to female company, or were so daunted by the prospect of being the sole provider of an expanding family, that they were rejecting marriage in increasing numbers and choosing to remain bachelors. Women Missionaries In Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre is asked by the Reverend St John Rivers to accompany him to India as a missionary’s wife. It required exceptional courage to work as a missionary in the 19th century, and the ‘muscular Christian ethos’ seems to have been especially designed to produced the thousands of brave, deeply convicted religious men who were prepared to convert wild savages in the heart of darkness. (This ethos was also responsible for persuading thousands of brave young men to enlist in the Great War.) In 1847 it was possible for a woman to accompany her missionary husband as his helpmeet, but almost unheard of for her to go on her own, but by the 1890s about 315 British women were applying annually for missionary work against a total of about 9,000 male recruits.36 To conclude, I shall read an extract from a letter of one of those unmarried missionary ladies. The Church Missionary Society published her letters in 1895. Following are her first impressions on visiting a Buddhist temple in India. Nowadays we may find her viewpoint, bigoted and insensitive, but like the Reverend St John Rivers, Miss Gollock believed vehemently in the damnation of those souls who had not received the Gospels. The Evangelical Revival re-established the belief that through the power of the Holy Spirit, unregenerated people (i.e. heathens) could be saved through the repentance of past sins and a commitment to the Christian faith: ‘We had indeed come "where Satan’s seat is", in a place so consciously the stronghold of darkness that our hearts quailed, and we realise with a rush that almost overbore us, that here the devil reigned rampant and unhindered... and all that was "earthly, sensual, devilish" tinctured the worship in the place. What it meant to our spiritual instincts to stand outside the closed shrine… while our guide explained in English that Buddha was the one true Lord… We hurried out, silent and awed, feeling that we had seen the foe, and never again, except with the drawn sword of the Spirit in our hands dare we set foot in the place... ‘In the evening, it was good before we parted to pledge ourselves in that stronghold of Christ, more than ever to fight His deadly foes. Here there is sin, dark and repulsive, not only reigning in the human heart, but seated on what should be the throne of God Himself, usurping His name and rights.’37 I use this missionary lady as an example to show how far the fettered Angel has come in the fifty years since she was imprisoned in the sanctity of home. How her faith empowers her! She has unfurled her wings and has broken free - and with the power of her faith and the aggressive language of a crusader, she takes up the sword of the Spirit to slay her foes in the heart of darkness. She soars with self-confidence and purpose. And as she lands into the 20th century, nothing will deter her in her fight for Emancipation. Marie-Louise Luxemburg References
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