Willful Submission

Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious Poetry

Amanda Paxton, Herbert F. Tucker

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780813940779
• eBook ISBN: 9780813940786
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Victorian England: a Jesuit priest writes of wrestling with God at night, limbs entangled; an Anglican sister begs Jesus, her divine lover, to end her aching anticipation of their union; a clergyman exhorts nuns to study the example of medieval women who suffered on the rack in order to become "brides" of Christ. Alongside the march of nineteenth-century progress ran a seemingly paradoxical fascination with a dark, erotically suggestive side of religious devotion: the figuration of the Christian God as a heavenly bridegroom who doles out punishment to his bride, the individual soul.

Through innovative case studies of Victorian religious poetry, Amanda Paxton reveals that while the punitive model proved a convenient rhetorical tool with which to deflate burgeoning nineteenth-century campaigns for women's rights and challenges to Church authority, in the hands of several writers it also provided a means of resisting patriarchal institutions and interrogating distinctions between science and religion. Willful Submission is the first full-length volume to examine the interplay of sex, suffering, and religion as a touchstone in Victorian culture and verse.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• One Bridal Desires
• Two Anti-Catholicism and Nuptial Anxieties
• Three Tractarian Poetry and Radical Masochism
• Four Catholicism and the Metaphysics of Longing
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index