The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature

Rebecca Styler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9780367473631
• eBook ISBN: 9781000892994
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

This book is the study of a religious metaphor: the idea of God as a mother, in British and US literature 1850–1915. It uncovers a tradition of writers for whom divine motherhood embodied ideals felt to be missing from the orthodox masculine deity. Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine Butler, George Macdonald, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Charlotte Perkins Gilman independently reworked their inherited faith to create a new symbol that better met their religious needs, based on ideal Victorian notions of motherhood and 'Mother Nature'. Divine motherhood signified compassion, universal salvation and a realised gospel of social reform led primarily by women to establish sympathetic community. Connected to Victorian feminism, it gave authority to women's voices and to 'feminine' cultural values in the public sphere. It represented divine immanence within the world, often providing the grounds for an ecological ethic, including human–animal fellowship.

With reference also to writers including Charlotte Brontë, Anna Jameson, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Charles, Theodore Parker, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Baker Eddy and authors of literary utopias, this book shows the extent of maternal theology in Victorian thought and explores its cultural roots. The book reveals a new way in which Victorian writers creatively negotiated between religious tradition and modernity.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture: Sympathy, prophecy, nature
• 2 Faces of the Madonna in Elizabeth Gaskell’s fiction: Feminist justice and the matriarchal divine
• 3 George Macdonald’s fairy god mothers: Romantic religion, female vocation and maternalist communities
• 4 Josephine Butler, esoteric Christianity and the biblical motherhood of God
• 5 ‘The Big Good Thing’: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s maternal gospel of optimism, immanence and Demetrian utopia
• 6 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and ‘maternal pantheism’: Religion in utopian motherlands 1889–1915
• Bibliography
• Index