Religious historians have also been influenced by post-structural work in their exploration of the shaping of gender roles by the Church in Victorian Britain. Because of their focus on the role of religion in the culture, recent work in the field of religious studies serves as an appropriate companion study to the work of feminist literary scholars in the area of Victorian sexuality, as religion often drove Victorian culture and, therefore, functioned in forming gender roles. Jenny Daggers’ research on the Woman’s Christian Movement and first-wave feminism in Britain clarifies the role Victorian religious beliefs had in emphasizing the qualities of idealized femininity for women. Rather than
understanding the Victorian idealized woman as a negative symbol for women that was promoted by a patriarchal system, Daggers argues that this idealization—which she terms
“spiritual womanhood”46—was embraced and emphasized by women as a way of actually creating gender equality. Daggers claims that throughout the nineteenth century female spirituality began to increasingly exist outside of “domestic confinement,”47 leaving women with an amplified voice in the public forum when it came to issues of
46 Daggers. The British Christian Women’s Movement: a Rehabilitation of Eve, 98.
47 Ibid, 100.
religion and morality. She writes, “In consequence, we discover spiritual womanhood as the chosen vehicle of British ‘first-wave’ feminism after the 1840s,”48 as first-wave feminists took advantage of their reputation as spiritual role models in order to argue that they deserved certain equal rights. They also used their moral authority to demand that men be held to similarly high moral standards, further advancing gender equality.
Daggers’ assertion contradicts some earlier feminist literary critics in that it maintains that Victorian women tended to perpetuate “assumptions of a restricted, maternal and
‘spiritualised’ women’s sexuality,”49 in order to advance in society rather than using subversive figures to overturn patriarchal power structures. Although the early demands of first-wave feminists did not parallel the tenets of sexual equality found in second-wave feminism, and the emphasis on spiritual womanhood met its demise in the mid-twentieth century, Victorian women’s embrace of spiritual womanhood provided the medium through which later feminism could grow by advancing certain aspects of sexual equality and advocating women as voices of authority and power.
Religious and cultural historian Callum Brown’s work The Death of Christian Britain complements Daggers’ argument by contending that the history of religion in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can best be understood by analyzing a history of gender. Arguing against the commonly held view that the secularization process in Britain began in the Victorian era, Brown asserts that Christianity maintained power during the nineteenth century through its promotion of the conjoined discourse of piety and femininity before rapidly falling out of favor in the 1960s as “domesticity died
48 Ibid, 2.
49 Ibid, 2.
as a dominant discourse.”50 For example, Brown claims that “Before 1800, Christian piety had been a ‘he’. From 1800 to 1960, it had been a ‘she’. After 1960, it became nothing in gendered terms.”51 Whereas, prior to the nineteenth century, females had been identified as a threat to piety through negative narratives such as that of the harlot or witch, the Victorian era’s segregation of the home and public spheres caused women to be understood as the “heart of family piety, the moral restraint upon men and children.”52 Brown’s work helps to explain Jenny Daggers’ supposition that first-wave feminism embraced their reputation as spiritual role models, as the shift that took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries granted women the possibility of being
understood positively within the Church and society as a whole, while also appropriating to women a sphere of their own to work. From a twentieth-century feminist perspective, the domestic sphere and idealized spiritual model for women appears limiting, and certainly had negative ramifications for women, particularly in regard to sustaining such spiritual perfection. Placed within its context, this shift put women in positions of potential power resulting in a trajectory that birthed second-wave feminism and, as Brown argues, simultaneously brought about not only the “de-pietisation of femininity and the de-feminisation of piety” in Britain, but also, ultimately, secularization.53 In short, because the practice of Christianity in Britain became increasingly dependent on gender roles that assumed female piety, the sexual emancipation that took place in the mid-twentieth century broke down gender roles and Christianity at the same time.
Brown’s work is integral to this project because of his explanation regarding the complex
50 Brown. The Death of Christian Britain, 200.
51 Ibid, 196.
52 Ibid, 179.
53 Ibid, 192.
gender issues that were involved in the sacralization of women and the domestic sphere throughout the nineteenth century.
Callum Brown’s work also hints at the idea that men and women experience religion in different ways in part because of the gender roles that are assigned to them by their culture and religion. The work of religious historian Caroline Walker Bynum, while focused predominately on the religious experience of men and women in the European Middle Ages, can be read alongside Brown’s work to give greater depth of understanding to the gender issues at work within religion and, more specifically, the ways in which men and women appropriate religious symbols. Bynum carefully seeks to avoid a single model through which to understand women’s use of symbols, and, in a criticism that could easily be applied to works such as those by Showalter and Gilbert and Gubar, endeavors to evade “the essentialist and ethnocentric notions of female nature or of the
‘eternal feminine’ that animated early twentieth-century research.”54 Her theory calls for new modes of symbolic interpretation rather than just substituting female-referring symbols for male-referring symbols, such as Goddess for God or Mary Magdalene for Jesus. Rather than understanding historical gender roles through symbols or what gendered symbols signify, Bynum intends to explore how men and women use specific religious symbols. Bynum writes:
Even where men and women have used the same symbols and rituals, they may have invested them with different meanings and different ways of meaning. To hear women’s voices more clearly will be to see more fully the complexity of symbols.55
In other words, while the Virgin Mary is often understood as a female-referring symbol, both men and women used the Virgin Mary as a way of finding meaning in their religious
54 Bynum. “Introduction: The Complexity of Symbols,” 15.
55 Ibid, 16.
experience, even if they might have interpreted her and appropriated her in vastly different ways. In her subsequent research, Bynum claims that even though the patriarchal Church emphasized women’s weakness and incapacity, women paid little heed to these teachings. Rather, if one reads both male and female religious writers in order to look at “their use of gender-related notions, we find not only that men and women use the image of woman differently, but that it is not simply misogyny in either usage.”56
In her work on medieval spirituality Bynum argues against interpreting male and female symbols strictly along gendered lines, a theory that has just as much relevance in studying the Victorian era. Many feminist scholars of the latter half of the twentieth-century have been very quick to emphasize symbols such as the ‘angel in the house’ and the ‘fallen’ woman by understanding them strictly in gendered terms—believing them to be roles created by men to be projected onto women—thus resulting in interpretations of misogyny and sexism in their usage. Bynum’s work is helpful in that it promotes a complexity of meaning for the religious symbol along with an interpretative method that encourages the whole range of voices using the symbol to be heard. Her theory of religious symbols also emphasizes the instability of symbols—religious symbols are constantly and unpredictably appropriated by men and women in ways other than the meaning and usage intended through the teaching of the Church. Victorian women and men certainly adopted masculine and feminine symbols in a variety of ways and for an array of purposes. It is better to avoid saying that the symbols they employed were overwhelmingly positive or negative for women or men, but rather that they were used
56 Caroline Walker Bynum. “‘And Woman His Humanity’: Female Imagery in the Religious Writing of the Later Middle Ages.” Gender and Religion: on the Complexity of Symbols. Eds. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell and Paula Richman. Boston: Beacon, 1986. 257-288, 261.
and understood by both sexes with versatility. Furthermore, biblical symbols were not always used by men and women to understand gender, as Bynum states: “gender-related symbols are sometimes ‘about’ values other than gender.”57 It would be difficult to argue that Mary Magdalene was a completely genderless symbol, but naming her as a symbol of the feminine does not mean that men and women interpreted or appropriated her in similar ways or that she was only used by individuals in order to understand what it means to be female.
Examining the way that Victorian women used biblical symbols reveals that they were using these symbols in a highly complex way to explore their role as women. As will be explored further in the following chapter the theological work of German Higher Critics, such as David Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, shaped the way Victorian readers approached both sacred and fictional texts. German Higher Criticism, along with other theological and philosophical movements such as Pietism and Romanticism, encouraged readers to read the Bible not merely as a historical document but rather as a narrative that could be interpreted through one’s personal, individual experiences. Thus, female biblical symbols such as the Madonna, Magdalene, and Eve were reinterpreted by Victorian women as a means of understanding their own experiences as women. Exploring the range of female interpretations of these symbols reveals the complexity with which Victorian women understood their role as women and demonstrates the capacity for the meaning of biblical symbols to be re-visioned when interpreted through each individual’s life experiences.
57 Bynum. “Introduction: The Complexity of Symbols,” 2.