Not quite ecumenical
Next week, I'll be delivering a paper in Boston at a colloquium on problems in feminist historiography. (Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt: "See, you're a historian." Me: "I'M AN ENGLISH PROFESSOR. GRAR.") In any event, I'll be discussing one of my hobbyhorses, which is the danger of collapsing nineteenth-century Christian narratives about female "progress," empowerment, freedom, and so forth into feminist narratives about same. Sometimes the two coincide, but frequently the linguistic and rhetorical similarities conceal major conceptual divides. (Marianne Thormahlen's The Brontes and Religion addresses these problems in Jane Eyre in particular.) Moreover, it's equally problematic to claim texts as feminist without noting their implications for women of the "wrong" religion (whatever it might be). For example, Rebecca Styler identifies the "feminist implications" of Emma Jane Worboise's "anti-clericalism"1 in the anti-Ritualist Overdale, while skipping the novel's stereotypical reading of Anglo- and Roman Catholicism as anti-family, the confessional as a space of sexual perversion (a young maiden finds herself asked questions that "drove the blood from her heart, and coloured her cheeks with burning blushes"2), Catholic priests as dangerous infiltrators of the Church of England, nuns as doomed to eternal misery, and so forth. The novel's point, after all, is that Ritualism is "sapping the very foundations not only of the Anglican Church, but of our national glory, and of our social and domestic joys and responsibility" (462). Given that anti-Ritualist sentiment frequently spilled over into outright violence directed at church property, priests, and sometimes sisters themselves, Worboise's novel doesn't just offer positive feminist critique--it participates in and cheers on some especially ugly theological warfare. Worboise's vision of feminine spiritual community cannot be separated from the rest of the message, and she herself explicitly links the one to the other. Similarly, my old friend Emily Sarah Holt, who has some of the most progressive gender attitudes of any controversial novelist--she argues that women are men's spiritual and often intellectual equals, supports them making a living in various professions (including fine art and medicine), and pointedly notes that not all women are maternal--is also one of the most reactionary anti-Catholic novelists of the later Victorian period. Again, her gender politics derive from her evangelical Protestantism, and are equally inseparable from her vituperations against both Ritualism and Roman Catholicism. (If you're wondering, this also works the other way, with some Roman Catholic novelists arguing that Protestantism leads to demoralized and abused women.) Both novelists are concerned about women, yes, but in what context?
1 Rebecca Styler, Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), 35.
2 Emma Jane Worboise, Overdale; Or, the Story of a Pervert (1869; London: James Clarke, n.d.), 352.