Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century

Rebecca Styler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754667353
• eBook ISBN: 9781317104520
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Examining popular fiction, life writing, poetry and political works, Rebecca Styler explores women's contributions to theology in the nineteenth century. Female writers, Styler argues, acted as amateur theologians by use of a range of literary genres. Through these, they questioned the Christian tradition relative to contemporary concerns about political ethics, gender identity, and personal meaning. Among Styler's subjects are novels by Emma Worboise; writers of collective biography, including Anna Jameson and Clara Balfour, who study Bible women in order to address contemporary concerns about 'The Woman Question'; poetry by Anne Bronte; and political writing by Harriet Martineau and Josephine Butler. As Styler considers the ways in which each writer negotiates the gender constraints and opportunities that are available to her religious setting and literary genre, she shows the varying degrees of frustration which these writers express with the inadequacy of received religion to meet their personal and ethical needs. All find resources within that tradition, and within their experience, to reconfigure Christianity in creative, and more earth-oriented ways.

Chapter 1
The Contexts of Women’s Literary Theology in the Nineteenth Century

Literature as Theology

In the nineteenth century, literature was recognized to have particular strengths as a theological method. Numerous voices claimed that popular, secular forms of writing were a more effective mode of religious communication than the traditional sermon or treatise, on the grounds that the non-specialist writer presented ideas in a more accessible, relevant way. In an 1855 article for the National Review, Walter Bagehot commented on this popularizing tendency:

In religion the appeal now is not to the technicalities of scholars, or the fiction of recluse schoolmen, but to the deep feelings, the sure sentiments, the painful strivings of all who think and hope. And this appeal to the many necessarily brings with it a consequence. We must speak to the many so that they will listen – that they will like to listen – that they will understand. It is of no use addressing them with the forms of science, or the rigour of accuracy, or the tedium of exhaustive discussion. The multitude are impatient of system, desirous of brevity, puzzled by formality.1

The theology of ‘schoolmen’ is here rejected as excessively technical and abstract, and out of kilter with readers’ profoundest needs and aspirations, which religion sought to address. Literature was also felt to engage the reader’s sensibilities more persuasively than dry intellectual discourse, because it appealed also to the imagination and emotions. Faith is embodied in narrative patterns and characters to whom the reader is drawn through empathetic response. Dinah Mulock (later Craik), one of the most popular of mid-Victorian novelists, commented thus on the novelist’s power to convert hearts as well as minds:

His power is three-fold – over heart, reason and fancy. The orator we hear eagerly, but as his voice fades from us its lessons depart: the moral philosopher we read and digest, by degrees, in a serious, ponderous way; but the really good writer of fiction takes us by storm.2

George Eliot, too, felt that ‘art’ could instil a moral or philosophical viewpoint through its subtle, indirect method more effectively than the overt discourse of ‘hundreds of sermons and philosophical dissertations’.3 Women writers were conscious that they were rivalling formal theological discourse, and presented their work as an alternative which better suited the times.

The literary marketplace was also felt to be a more egalitarian field for the airing of religious views than were ecclesiastical structures. The democratization of intellectual discourse is a well-noted feature of the nineteenth century, in which the ‘man of letters’ arose to replace the priest as educator and guide. As T.W. Heyck explains, the writer enjoyed a particularly ‘sympathetic’ relationship with the audience, speaking from a shared lay context:

Whether novelist, poet, historian, philosopher, or social critic, the man of letters was expected to help the audience through the troubles of economic, social and religious change … . In [the] process of secularization, the public encouraged the men of letters to act as preachers, moralists, critics and sages, with essentially didactic and prophetic functions.4

The earned authority of the writer suited the meritocratic tendencies of the times and undermined the authority of the ordained minister, a levelling which was welcomed by many, regretted by others. High churchman and priest John Henry Newman rued the loss of clerical authority, and the fact that ‘[m]en have hitherto depended on others and especially on the clergy for religious truth: now each man attempts to judge for himself’.5 In contrast, Thomas Carlyle’s famous lecture, ‘The Hero as Man of Letters’, celebrated the priest-like role now available through the press, declaring that ‘the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the real working effective church of a modern country …. Books are our church … . The Press is to such a degree superseding the Pulpit’.6 For here, a more secular notion of the priest could be realized, appointed by readers’ consent, to offer ‘spiritual light’ to people with whom he was more closely in touch than clergy who have been set apart by specialist training and ordination.

While Carlyle clearly conceived of this as a masculine ideal, women writers made similar claims for the status of their work. The journalist Frances Power Cobbe declared her regular column in the Echo to be her ‘pulpit’,7 and Geraldine Jewsbury thought of her novel Zoë as ‘a Sermon’.8 Margaret Oliphant, too, claimed a spiritual vocation in writing fiction:

Authors who feel the solemnity of their calling cannot suppress the truth that is within them …. They must go straight on, as the inward voice impels; and He who seeth their hearts will guide them aright.9

Oliphant claims a prophet-like role for authors, as divinely inspired vessels of truth, a characteristic ideal available to women and men alike. The meritocratic principle of the press permitted women to acquire a priestly role which religious institutions forbade, enhanced by the immense appetite for religious reading. More popular in their time than Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and David Copperfield were, respectively, Catherine Marsh’s religious Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars (1856) and Charlotte Yonge’s High Church novel, The Heir of Radcliffe (1853).10

However, literature was powerful not only as a method of communicating religious ideas, but of constructing them. In recent decades, the case has been made for ‘literary’ or ‘metaphorical’ theology, in which figurative language is considered as a unique way of creating understandings of religious phenomena. Metaphor does not merely illustrate pre-existing ideas, which are first expressed in the form of propositions, but is instead a ‘unique cognitive vehicle enabling us to say things that can be said in no other way’.11 This twentieth-century view reverses what Northrop Frye describes as the ‘cultural prejudice’ produced by Enlightenment empiricisim, which equated truth with ‘descriptive verbal structures’ and was suspicious of the literary. Words connected with literary devices, such as ‘myth’, ‘fiction’ and ‘fable’, acquired the connotations of being ‘not really true’.12 Hence John Locke declared figurative language to be productive of ‘pleasure and delights’ but not ‘truth and knowledge’.13 Contradicting this dualism, literary-minded theologians have claimed that metaphor is truth-creating, since the expression of one phenomenon in terms of another enables new understandings. Therefore, figurative language is ‘a way of knowing, not just a way of communicating’.14 Narrative functions in a similar way, its patterns embodying meanings that cannot be reduced to statement. Furthermore, literary theologians point out that this metaphorical approach revives the method of the Bible itself, in which:

We are never given a theology of the kingdom … but we are told stories about it, about people who want the kingdom and why they want it; we are shown metaphors … which image it forth.15

Biblical tradition is therefore closer to literature than to dogma, since its truths are embodied, or suggested, rather than categorically defined.

Literary theology was particularly suited to the sensibilities of a culture in which traditional religious certainties were becoming hard to sustain. The theology of statement assumes an objective divine reality to which belief is directed, and which language can adequately describe. But the ability of language to directly refer to ‘reality’ has been rendered problematic by theorists in the twentieth century. They point to the ideological nature of all systems of language, and to the subjectivity inherent in all perception. Structuralists have argued that language does not refer neutrally to an external reality, but rather itself constitutes a ‘reality’ which cannot claim objective status. Few theologians would go as far as claiming language as an enclosed system with no reference beyond itself, but many have adopted a position that Terry Wright calls ‘critical realism’, believing that language does refer to a divine reality, but indirectly and partially.16 Literary language evades the hard certainties of literalism and dogma, making more modest claims to a truth which is suggested, not defined, and which allows for the tensions of paradox and ambiguity.

Several religious writers of the nineteenth century, who were also poets or novelists, expressed their preference for a religious language centred on symbol rather than statement. Samuel Taylor Coleridge equated faith with imagination, and read the Bible as ‘a system of symbols’.17 John Keble appreciated the indirectness of metaphors and similes which ‘guide us by gentle hints’ and, like the sacraments in his High Church tradition, ‘[preach] silently to man’s aesthetic sensibilities’.18 George MacDonald suggested that there was a certain arrogance, as well as incongruity, about trying to talk about God in conclusive terms:

We are far too anxious to be definite and to have finished, well-polished, sharp-edged systems – forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong, the more impossible it is to be right.19

Having left his pulpit, MacDonald chose mythopoeic fantasy as his theological method, which eschewed any attempts to pronounce ‘the definite’, but had the power ‘to impress’ and to ‘wake things up’ that were deep within the reader’s being.20 It was Matthew Arnold who most explicitly contrasted the ‘scientific’ and ‘poetic’ modes of religious language. While the former speaks of God in terms of ‘substance, identity, causation, design’, the latter admits that even the word ‘God’ is poetic, ‘a term thrown out, so to speak, at a not fully grasped object of the speaker’s consciousness’.21 Writers who used literature as their theological mode were respecting the growing conviction as to the limits of human perception and language.

Nonetheless, literary theology was potent because it was accessible and relevant, particularly to an increasingly secular sensibility. It does not use a specialized religious language but the terms of the everyday, which can be understood by all. Just as the gospels present the kingdom of God through images of coins, seed, oil lamps and weddings, and through parables about employers, widows, publicans and shepherds, so modern religious writers of fiction and verse offer:

… a story of ordinary people and events which is the context for envisaging and understanding the strange and the extraordinary …. People...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Contexts of Women’s Literary Theology in the Nineteenth Century
• 2 Christianity, Gender and the Public Sphere: Emma Worboise’s Fiction and Life of Thomas Arnold
• 3 Romance, Reason and Reality in Anne Brontë’s Poetry
• 4 A Scripture of Their Own: Collective Biography and Feminist Bible Criticism
• 5 Harriet Martineau: Writing Religion for the Rational Citizen
• 6 Josephine Butler’s Liberation Theology
• Bibliography
• Index