1 The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture
Sympathy, prophecy, nature
In a letter to her friend Catherine Winkworth in 1855, novelist Elizabeth Gaskell voiced her private sense of God ‘being above all in His great peace and wisdom, yet loving me with an individual love tenderer than any mother’s’.1 To think of God in maternal terms signified very different divine qualities than those embodied by the orthodox lord and father, which Gaskell yearned for: patience, intimacy and care. By voices from within various currents of religious thought in both Britain and the United States, and by means of many literary forms, the motherhood of God was proclaimed through the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, to fill a felt absence in mainstream religion.
Some stated their belief boldly. Some liberal Protestants, such as Frances Power Cobbe, welcomed the image of the Madonna Immacolata as a new symbol of ‘Feminine Divinity’ based on ‘Maternal Tenderness’, while Harriet Beecher Stowe appreciated the same figure as ‘the Goddess of Poverty and Sorrow, of Pity and Mercy’ and scandalised her New England neighbours by hanging an image of Mary on her bedroom wall.2 Transcendentalist Theodore Parker declared that the God immanent in nature and human consciousness was ‘not a King, but a Father and a Mother, infinite in power, wisdom and love’, a perspective shared by others in his intellectual circle.3 Other writers took a more metaphorical approach, with authors including Gaskell, George Macdonald and Frances Hodgson Burnett using their fiction to suggest the maternal nature of divinity through ideal symbolic mother figures, often associated with spiritually animate ‘mother’ nature. Towards the end of the century, the idea of God as a mother was becoming normalised. In a devotional work of 1894, Evangelical feminist campaigner Josephine Butler called the biblical Christian deity ‘the Great Father-Mother’ and compared the work of redemption with the ‘travail’ of childbirth.4 Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland is one of several feminist utopias published during the era of first-wave feminism whose revised spiritual ethos is ‘maternal pantheism’, a theology of divine immanence infused with the values of socialist feminism.5 In the more politicised context of the suffrage debates of the same era, a number of feminists asserted
DOI: 10.4324/9781003035121-1
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The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture that the corollary – even condition – of women’s emancipation was the ‘revelation of the hitherto fact that in God exists the Divine Woman, One with the everlasting Father, both equal’; they claimed that the very notion of ‘God as a single Being Masculine’ was increasingly being recognised as ‘an error’.6 By the early decades of the twentieth century, the motherhood of God was a familiar current within the stream of liberal Christian and post-Christian religious thought.
This book is a study of this tradition. It explores writings by British and North American authors from 1850 to 1915 who imagined God as a divine mother, based on the character of the idealised human mother blended with numinous ‘Mother Nature’. Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine Butler, George Macdonald, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Charlotte Perkins Gilman – as well as a number of their contemporaries – found that a maternal model of deity gave sacred symbolism to their most pressing religious needs, whether to supplement or even supersede the masculine sacred persona. The maternal divine image signified themes felt to be under-represented in the prevailing image of God, namely ‘sympathy’ in both its ethical and ontological sense. For these writers, divine motherhood emphasised compassion at the heart of the godhead and as an ethical ideal for humanity. It embodied a theology of universal salvation, and a social gospel whereby redemption was realised in this world as much as in heaven itself, through the creation of loving community. It signified divine immanence in the world, re-enchanting earthly life and often providing the grounds for an ecological ethic, as well as a sense of the spiritual ‘personhood’ of non-human life forms. The maternal image of God was connected with nineteenth-century feminism, which sought to expand women’s role and extend ‘feminine’ values of nurturant sympathy to the public sphere. This maternal model of the sacred, while never mainstream, was far more widespread than has been recognised and appears in currents of nineteenth-century religious thought ranging from the radically esoteric to the relatively orthodox.
This maternal theological model was created through a reaction against all that the prevailing masculine divine image had come to represent for the disenchanted: punitive authority, and an alienating remoteness from ‘natural’ human concerns. By writers strikingly disillusioned with orthodoxy, however far they departed or not from a Christian base, the idea of divine motherhood was born out of a shared passion to reanimate religion with present-day relevance, based on a new appreciation of the qualities deemed feminine according to prevailing constructions of gender. A new relativism regarding religious language rendered it permissible for the more liberalminded to rewrite the sacred metaphor in order to revive religion’s existential vitality and social relevance. This was achieved primarily through a feminising of the monotheistic deity inherited through Christian culture,
The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture 3 but increasingly through the location of God in nature, through the trope of ‘Mother Nature’ as an indwelling nurturing and progressive power. Figures such as the Roman Catholic Madonna, and ancient goddesses like Demeter and Isis, provided ready-made images of sacred female power which became reinvested with nineteenth-century concerns, along with maternal metaphors rediscovered in the Bible that had been suppressed through translation or liturgical selection. The result was a feminised panentheism, or occasionally pantheism whereby the transcendent dimension is entirely absorbed, the vision of an immanent sacred life force that bears the character of the idealised human mother.
Scholarship on the religious history of female sacred metaphor regularly refers to the ‘divine feminine’. In the context of the nineteenth century, the ideal construction of femininity was inescapably maternal, given that marriage and motherhood constituted the expected destiny, and social reality, of most women. Motherhood was exalted through literature of all forms as women’s primary contribution to society, especially in the middle-class milieu to which the authors addressed in this study generally belonged. When women took on roles beyond the home, this was often supported by a rhetoric of extending their maternal care to the public sphere, as ‘mothers in heart’ with a passion ‘to foster, to cherish, to take the part of the weak, to train, to guide’ individuals in society at large.7 In Victorian essentialist gender discourse, for many motherhood symbolised the highest ethical ideal that humanity could attain.
A religious model based on this ideal serves the agendas of nineteenthcentury feminism, which combined liberal aspirations to extend women’s sphere of activity with deeply ingrained faith in essential gender differences that made women distinctive from, and often morally superior to, their male counterparts.8 Re-gendering the sacred image female on the one hand affirmed individual women’s full human status and redressed at symbolic level the problem feminist theologian Mary Daly pithily diagnosed in her announcement: ‘[i]f God is male, then the male is god’, faced with which ‘truth’ a woman experiences herself ‘as an outsider, as an alienated person, not a daughter who belongs or who is appointed to a marvellous destiny’.9 But female divine images were also icons of the cultural feminine, granting absolute status to the sympathetic and relational qualities believed to be ‘a fount of public regeneration’.10 Many pro-active Victorian women sought opportunities of action in the wider social sphere in order to ‘feminise’ it.11 Of course, as numerous feminist religious historians and theologians have pointed out, a maternal divine image affirms women only as mothers (whether in the personal or social sense), an act which itself can be exclusionary, biologically reductive and misandrist.12 These implications are sometimes present in the writers considered in this book, who are gender essentialists to a high degree and hold exalted ideas of the redeeming power
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The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture of the cultural feminine which is applied to various social and theological agendas.
This is not the first substantial study of ‘the divine feminine’ in nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature. Historians have shown how female divine symbols were venerated in popular radical millenarian movements during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.13 Joy Dixon has demonstrated how a similar utopian spirit inspired images of the divine hermaphrodite in strands of esoteric religious thought present in the women’s movement around the turn of the twentieth century.14 There are three important monograph studies of metaphorical representations of the divine feminine in literature (encompassing fiction, life writing, social commentary and devotional works) from the 1840s to the 1920s. Kimberley Van Esveld Adams, Gail Turley Houston and John Gatta have discussed ways in which authors of Protestant backgrounds from Britain and North America elevated female divine symbols to represent spiritual values felt to be lacking in mainstream religious culture. They collectively show George Eliot, Anna Jameson, Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harold Frederic, Henry Adams and T.S. Eliot to be engaged in literary expressions of what Houston calls ‘mother-god-want’.15 While Adams and Gatta focus exclusively on engagements with the Madonna, Houston shows that creative images of divine motherhood were not only about Mary, but drew also on biblical and pre-Christian sources, as well as the authors’ mystical experiences. Like these works, I avoid any implications of an eternal goddess ‘archetype’ which applies a predetermined meaning to all female divine personifications regardless of time and location, but instead recognise the historical specificity of what these nineteenth-century images signify.16
Adams and Houston emphasise the use of the female divine image by women writers as a tool for feminist self-empowerment in a patriarchal society underwritten by androcentric religion. They show how female sacred symbols were deployed to ‘subversively critique nineteenth-century gender politics’ and to authenticate ‘the divine potentiality’ of women, or ‘the self-perfection and completion that ordinary women would achieve when freed from social restraints’.17 In these studies, the female divine is the heavenly patron of women on a quest for full personhood, authorising their social equality and literary authority. While Houston and Adams recognise in the female divine image a mandate for social renewal in terms of revised gender relations, they do not consider it as representing a broader structure of the ‘cultural feminine’ which demands other social, theological and sometimes ecological reforms. Class attitudes are absent from Adams’ discussion, and addressed only briefly by Houston.18 Gatta considers an aspect of the cultural feminine in his study of the Madonna as a semi-divine
The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture 5
‘symbolic compensation’ for deficiencies in North American Protestant commercial culture – intuition, creativity and relationality.19 He usefully recognises that this consolatory symbolism can be, but is not inevitably, feminist in terms of ‘enhanc[ing] the social possibilities and autonomy of women in the empirical world’, more often a symbol of personal solace rather than of social protest or reform.20 Ecological concerns are absent from all three studies.
This book builds on Gatta’s, Houston’s and Adams’s insights to address the implications of divine motherhood for British and US authors in terms of theology, a range of socio-political significations, and relations between humans and the non-human world. The writers I give most attention to connect the revelation of divine motherhood with a realised eschatology achieved through the creation of maternal, and maternalist, communities, in the spirit of liberal progress or a form of socialism. All believe that salvation will ultimately be universal, rejecting the doctrine of everlasting punishment in favour of reform and a progress towards perfection begun in this world but usually completed in the next. Three of the five authors under focus include animals as spiritual fellows in the redeemed community, while some bring other aspects of environmental responsibility into the work of cosmic housekeeping. I show the Victorian divine maternal image to be a public symbol which challenges the status quo regarding doctrine, social reform and ecology, while empowering women in the spirit of ‘difference’ feminism.
This monograph sets in a broader context the handful of isolated studies on ‘God as mother’ in the works of individual writers, such as Claudia Stokes’ chapter on Mormon Eliza Snow, and Jacqueline Labbe’s discussion of children’s literature.21 These are here shown to be part of a wider cultural project of religious revision. George Macdonald’s works, which uniquely among my major examples have already received considerable attention in relation to its divine mother symbols, have been overwhelmingly subjected to an archetypal approach based on an ahistorical Jungian notion of the ‘eternal feminine’.22 Here they are instead given a historicist treatment which places Macdonald in dialogue with his contemporaries, particularly with women writers. In longer histories of ‘goddess’ symbolism, the nineteenth century is represented almost exclusively with reference to anthropological writings rather than to theological debates or literary representations, a gap this work seeks to fill.23
More broadly, this book contributes to a rich literature on feminised, and feminist, religion in the nineteenth century. Christine Krueger, Anne Mellor and Ruth Jenkins among others have shown how women preachers, poets and novelists of social protest in Britain claimed spiritual authority for women’s voices in the public sphere to preach a gospel of ‘feminine’ values.24 Jane Tompkins and Claudia Stokes vigorously oppose
The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture
Ann Douglas’s seminal argument that feminised religion in the mid-century US equated to enervating sentiment, in order to show women’s religion to be experiential, practical and justice-oriented, themes developed also in Mary McCartin Wearn’s essay collection on American women writers.25 Historians such as Eileen Janes Yeo have shown how spiritual womanhood could be interpreted radically to shape controversial public identities.26 Chapters by Emma Mason, Elizabeth Ludlow and Jo Carruthers in The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century show women Christ figures in poetry and fiction – potent exemplars and saviours, not the ‘mighty victims’ delineated in Julie Melnyk’s earlier study.27 This book draws attention to another significant aspect of the ‘feminisation’ of nineteenthcentury religion focused on re-gendering the godhead itself, where femininity is endowed with power.
The writers focused on in this book include some fairly well-known names whose theological concerns have not had detailed treatment – such as Gaskell, Gilman and Burnett – as well as authors whose works on religion and gender merit a fresh approach – such as Macdonald and Butler. To contextualise these, less known writers are brought to light, such as contributors to the feminist journal Shafts, and authors of late-century feminist utopias. Authors from Britain and the USA are considered alongside each other, since the maternal religious metaphor is shared across these national contexts and draws on transatlantic cross-currents of thought relating to religion, gender, nature and social progress. Many of the writers themselves engaged in trans-Atlantic intellectual exchange and several had both British and US readerships. This combined attention to British and North American contexts is typical of some recent studies in the field of nineteenth-century literature, religion and gender, although not yet commonplace.28 Denominationally speaking, these writers hail from liberal Protestant backgrounds, or from a confluence of post-Christian religious thought that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the movements of Transcendentalism and Theosophy. All share a common reaction against the orthodox transcendent male divinity, whom they caricature as a Puritan patriarch. Given the range of denominations and movements that rendered Christianity itself a contested phenomenon, the term ‘orthodoxy’ serves as a crude shorthand for the religious system against which these writers rhetorically construct their ‘maternal’ theology. This book shows another way in which Victorian writers formed creative negotiations between faith and modernity, adding to the complication of the once-popular simplistic thesis of progressive secularisation.
The literary focus of this book assumes a regard for literature as a means by which to ‘do’ theology, and for metaphor as ‘a unique cognitive vehicle’ through which new understandings of the ineffable can be given form,
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The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture 7 beyond the language of dogmatic statement.29 Literary theology, as Sallie McFague argues, follows the method of the Bible which does not present ‘a theology of the kingdom’ of heaven so much as stories and metaphors ‘which image it forth’.30 This is not just an insight of modern theologians, but a perception that was taking hold in the nineteenth century itself, when religious language was increasingly regarded as having ‘only relative and provisional value’ which must necessarily adapt to changing sensibilities.31 As the Bible was coming to be understood as a work of literature through the influence of Higher Criticism, so the spiritual status of ‘secular’ literature rose, embodying ‘creative and original engagements with religious text and theology’ in which the nature of the divine, and divine–human relations, were reinterpreted.32 Furthermore, the meritocratic spirit was democratising religious discourse as the work of authors in the literary marketplace rather than religious ‘experts’. Thomas Carlyle proclaimed that ‘the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the real working effective Church of a modern country’.33 Journalist and cultural commentator Walter Bagehot observed how religious amateurs had broken the professionals’ monopoly on religious discourse through their greater empathy with the spiritual anxieties of their readership:
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.34
Their authority was enhanced by a post-Romantic emphasis on feeling as the basis for spiritual truth, a more meritocratic source than specialist theological education or clerical authority.35 Another writer put it more bluntly: ‘theology is everyone’s business. We cannot afford to leave it to experts’.36 So writers who were not among the ordained, including women, and men such as Macdonald expelled from the pulpit for heresy, held all the tools necessary in their hands to forge new religious ideas and images for their times, and to communicate them to a wide audience beyond the strictures of organised religion.
This book is unusual for addressing writings purportedly ‘for children’ alongside texts oriented towards adults, with the sense that the boundaries between these two are more porous than might at first appear. Writers of children’s fiction such as Burnett and Macdonald did not believe they were exclusively addressing the young – partly because the notion of a separate literature intended exclusively for children is a preoccupation of the children’s literature ‘industry’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries more than a reality in the nineteenth.37 And as Peter Hunt explains, literature is rarely ‘for children’ in any straightforward or clearly defined way, given the instability of age as a category of taste, opinion, or literacy level,
8 The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture and that a book’s mode of address is rarely stable in terms of its implied readership.38 Even books purportedly written for children often betray a dual sense of audience with (as is the case with Burnett) messages built in for parents and educators. More importantly, she, and Macdonald, wrote with the Romantic faith that adults contained the child still within, so that the imagined ‘child’ reader or character was in fact the adult’s authentic self, being recalled into existence: Macdonald claimed to write for ‘the childlike’ of all ages, kindling a sensibility that transcended age distinctions.39 In the era between Wordsworth and Freud, the Romantic child was used as a sympathetic vehicle of protest by writers disenchanted with reductive utilitarianism, religious dogma and (especially for female authors) restrictive codes of femininity.40 Given the more central figure of the mother in a child’s social reality – at least when young – the choice of a child protagonist lent itself to representing a world with a maternal cosmic governor, and with a greater sense of impunity than if voiced through the perspective of an adult.41 And whatever a reader’s age, in religious terms they were still a ‘child of God’ relating to a universal parent, so that a child character in literature metonymically suggests a potentially universal religious experience. The period addressed by this book, 1850–1915, was the heyday of literary expressions of divine motherhood in the modern era, prior to the emergence of the ‘goddess’ movement in the context of late-twentiethcentury ecofeminism. As Houston has shown, this literary tradition can be seen in part as an indirect legacy of the female divine symbols venerated in popular millenarian sects of the Romantic era,42 albeit in bourgeois mode. More broadly, it drew on the cultural currents that made such heretical ideas possible, when maternity was idealised and provided a powerful rhetoric for theological and social reform, and when ‘Mother Nature’ appeared both spiritually potent and benign. From the mid-nineteenth century to the era of the first organised women’s movement, the idea of divine motherhood flourished among cultural conditions which did not survive long into the twentieth century. In a more egalitarian, sceptical and secular atmosphere the religious model of divine motherhood lost relevance. When the idea of a divine earth-goddess came again to the fore in the 1970s, it drew on some of the same nineteenth-century anthropological myths and gender stereotypes (regressively, for its critics), but was far more radically green, pagan and sexualised – and seemingly unaware of its Victorian literary forerunners.43
The rest of this chapter sets out the cultural contexts informing the model of divine motherhood from 1850 to 1915, referring to a wide range of writers to demonstrate the popularity of maternal theology, and the varied currents of religious thought in which it emerged. I begin by showing the feminisation of God through the ‘cult’ of motherhood and simultaneous doctrinal developments, and the empowerment of the cultural feminine as
The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture 9 a force for utopian social reform through the ethos of women’s prophecy. I show how the trope of ‘Mother Nature’, expanded by Romanticism and anthropology into a theological model and read as the cosmic parallel to ideal human motherhood, was united by some with the prophetic ethos of the Mother in Israel and the cause of Victorian feminism. The chapter then traces the fate of this sentimental myth of feminised nature through the revelations of evolutionary science, which for some gave maternal divinity a basis in natural law and aligned humanity’s physiological development with millenarian ideals of female-led social progress. The connections are shown between this theology of maternal divine immanence and the nascent ecological movement, as well as sometimes with eugenicist ideologies of a divinely ‘perfected’ humanity. The chapter concludes with some explanation for the demise of the image of God as a mother in the new cultural conditions of the early twentieth century.
Thereafter, the author-focused chapters proceed roughly chronologically. In Chapter 2, I argue that Elizabeth Gaskell’s maternal theology, shaped by distinctive perspectives drawn from her Unitarian heritage, is articulated chiefly through her engagement with the Madonna symbol, resonant in the wake of the Immaculate Conception debates and Anna Jameson’s influential Legends of the Madonna. Different facets of the Madonna – for example as Mater Dolorosa, the Madonna di Misericordia, and the more pagan Theotokos or god-bearer – resonate in Gaskell’s representation of women’s cultic practice and in her protagonists’ characterisations. Through her short stories ‘Lizzie Leigh’ (1850) and ‘The Poor Clare’ (1856), an episode of Cranford (1852–53), and her infamous fallen-woman novel Ruth (1853), Gaskell both celebrates but sometimes questions human motherhood as the basis of understanding the divine character. Gaskell’s integration of earth mother imagery in Ruth sets her apart from her contemporaries who take the Madonna purely as a symbol of social morality, with radically matriarchal and amoral implications for the status of the female reproductive body.
Chapter 3 considers George Macdonald’s fairy-tale representations of powerful maternal governors in relation to his ideas of the divine feminine, women’s prophecy and a maternalistic social gospel as expressed in some of his poetry, realist novels such as Robert Falconer and The Vicar’s Daughter, and in his Unspoken Sermons. In place of prevalent archetypal readings, I set his images of divine motherhood alongside those of his contemporaries to consider their significations of divine intimacy, universal salvation and women’s liberation into the public realm to form maternalistic communities. These redeemed communities are shown to include animals, in a fellowship that is enlightened by Macdonald’s beliefs about their spiritual status. The stories under focus are The Princess and the Goblin (1872), ‘The Wise Woman’ (1875) and the critically neglected story
10 The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture
‘The History of Photogen and Nycteris’ (1879), which collectively show Macdonald’s interest in divine motherhood to be strongest in this middle decade of his literary career.
While Gaskell and Macdonald went beyond the bounds of their scripture to seek potent images of the divine feminine, Josephine Butler’s striking achievement was to base hers entirely on the Bible. Chapter 4 focuses on the feminist Evangelical’s revelation of the biblical God as a mother in her late life writings and scripture commentaries: Recollections of George Butler (1894), The Lady of Shunem (1894), The Morning Cometh (1906) and correspondence to supporters of her social campaigns against the legalised sexual exploitation and abuse of women and girls. For Butler, the discovery of divine motherhood symbolises the dawn of a woman-led millennium of reconstructed social relations, and the promise of salvation for all human beings and for animals that love them, along with the apocalyptic renewal of the earth. I suggest that Butler drew on Bible-reading strategies, and to an extent ideas, common in late-nineteenth-century esoteric Christianity (such as by Christian Theosophist Anna Kingsford and the feminist journal Shafts) which bled into more orthodox writings beyond just her own, including those of the Anglican Elizabeth Charles.
Chapters 5 and 6 take the maternal divine image into more post-Christian territory, through the influence of new religious movements, although some Christian roots remain. I turn first to the transatlantic author Frances Hodgson Burnett, whose novel The Secret Garden (1911) counters sterile, patriarchal religion with a maternal force vital in all life, a personification shaped by Burnett’s syncretic religious influences including Spiritualism, New Thought and the connected movement of Christian Science. I explore Burnett’s depiction of the spiritual feminine as a force of optimism and the social gospel, in fictional works such as That Lass O’Lowrie’s (1877), The Dawn of a Tomorrow (1906) and her autobiography The One I Knew Best of All (1893). The Secret Garden is then read as a maternalist utopia of reformed relations which deconstruct class, gender and species boundaries, as well as embodying a maternal cosmic force that powerfully connects its children to immortality. How far the prophetic potential of this utopian space is realised in the novel’s ‘real’ world is a matter for discussion.
Finally, Chapter 6 extends the North American focus through a consideration of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s underrated religious thought which was filtered entirely through the sociological category of gender, albeit in terms of ideals about women’s maternal natures that were by then becoming old-fashioned. Writings including A Woman’s Utopia (1907) and His Religion and Hers (1923) are drawn on to contextualise and interpret the ‘maternal pantheism’ of Gilman’s most radical literary utopia Herland (1915) which locates the divine entirely in the natural, temporal world. This earth-bound philosophy redefines the human as a radically collective
The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture 11 ‘post-human’ entity, and nature as a resource for maternalistic subjugation from which perfection is wrought, with ambiguous implications for ecological ethics and problematic eugenistic ideals of ‘perfection’. Herland is also contextualised among a number of feminist literary utopias of the 1880s, 1890s and 1900s, whose reconstituted societies venerate a divine mother, showing that first-wave feminist utopias were as much concerned with religious as with political reform, regarding the two as intrinsically connected.
Ideal motherhood and the feminisation of God
Much has been written of the nineteenth-century ‘cult’ of motherhood, and it was on this rhetorical exaltation of women’s traditional parenting role that ideas of the maternal divine were built. By the mid-century, the image of the ‘ideal, ever-present, ever-loving, all-responsible mother’ pervaded advice books, periodical articles, medical discourse and fiction, in which the primary carer was frequently likened to God in her sacred mission.44 Modern analysis of the cult of motherhood has tended to focus on its implications for the rhetorical policing of women’s social role, but little has been said about its theological significance. Likening mothers so closely to God implied new understandings of the divine as itself maternal. As Janet Soskice has explained, the ‘interanimation theory’ of metaphor involves a partial collapse of the distinction between vehicle and tenor, so that not only do we see the tenor in a new light (mothers are like God), but the vehicle itself becomes ‘animated’ by the new associations evoked through the analogy (God is therefore like a mother).45 So, while mothers were being semi-apotheosised as divine agents on earth, purportedly to develop women’s understanding of their parenting responsibilities, the image of God was itself being redrawn with a woman’s face.
Mothers were frequently compared with the deity in their attributed capacity for enduring, inexhaustible love. For Sarah Stickney Ellis, author of the advice work Mothers of England, maternal affection was a foretaste of heaven, a ‘sanctuary’ of ‘meekness, charity, and peace’ which countered the selfish spirit of the world.46 Others concurred that maternal love was a ‘holy passion’, ‘a sacred flame on the altar of the heart’ by which a mother was no less than ‘the first likeness on earth of God himself’.47 The unconditionality of mother-love was championed in contrast with more meritbased paternal affection. Ellis argues that a mother’s indulgent affection is a tender reminder of the love of the ‘merciful and gracious Father’ towards sinners,48 while Sarah Lewis claims that a woman yearning after her errant child ‘even when the father’s heart was turned to stone’ is ‘typical of the divine love’ which redeems: God ‘has deigned to put into woman’s heart the only feeling … which affords us the faintest representation of his most
12 The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture inextinguishable love to us, his erring and strayed children’.49 This contrast was exploited by many writers for whom the maternal divine image was taken to signify universal salvation, in contrast with a more punishing patriarch, a theme that recurs even for writers as late as Burnett and Gilman. The literature of exalted motherhood emphasised women’s power to shape not only her children’s characters but also their immortal destinies. While ‘as companion and soother of man’ she was expected to be ‘weak and gentle’, as a mother she became ‘the source of all human power and dignity’.50 Through Enlightenment theories of the pliability and perfectibility of human nature, mothers were credited with the power to recreate humanity: ‘what might not be hoped from the labours of a race of enlightened mothers, who would early impress on their children’s minds lessons of piety and wisdom, and who would make the first sentiments of their souls noble and enlarged?’51 From a contrasting philosophical perspective, the Evangelical movement intensified the Christian sense of original sin, but pressed upon mothers their vital responsibility to train their children in the ways of holiness and prepare them to receive God more fully through conversion.52 Like the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, mother-love is a ‘wonder-working principle’ which brings unregenerate souls to God, effectively a co-progenitor of born-again souls.53 Mothers were divine ministers within the home, shunning the clumsy forms of masculine power – instruction and command – to embrace the subtler strategy of sympathetic influence through almost omniscient insight into her child’s motivations and weaknesses.54 Even in the mother’s absence she is powerful, internalised as kind of guardian spirit (or constraining super-ego) to prompt her children to virtue even after her physical death.55 Whether in heaven or on earth mothers were saviours whose work was to restore the divine image in the human soul, no less than the prime instruments of ‘regeneration’ in a fallen world.56 While such idealisations of women were at their peak from the 1830s to the 1860s, they lingered in a late-century form of feminism that rested on a similar exaltation of ‘woman’ as powerful redeemer conspiring with God to bring about salvation.
This alignment of divine and maternal natures was all the more possible because of parallel religious developments that in a sense ‘feminised’ the character of God. Evangelicalism brought a new personal intensity to faith, while Romanticism and Transcendentalism emphasised feeling as the basis for spiritual experience, intuiting a God who was readily available through poetic perception of the world around.57 Christian virtues – moral purity, love and self-denial – were widely thought to be ‘more easily practised by women than by men’, a connection which the discourse of ‘Christian manliness’ had to work hard to undo.58 The ‘sentimental’ emphasis in American Protestantism was regarded as a (sometimes unwelcome) feminisation which foregrounded the experiential over the intellectual, and
The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture 13 which was often embodied by mother characters in fiction whose wisdom is superior to that of religious authorities.59
As well as this emphasis on emotion and intimacy, mercy was a growing theme in liberal salvation theology which arose from a growing revulsion against the doctrine of everlasting post-mortal punishment. The radical universalist hope that ultimately all would be saved, voiced first by Unitarians, was increasingly adopted by liberal-leaning Christians from the 1840s onwards, and was taken for granted in new religious movements such as Transcendentalism and Theosophy.60 Frances Power Cobbe, who broke from her Evangelical background to embrace Theism, argued that a ‘Feminine Divinity’ would embody ‘the modern idea of Divine Goodness, that is, of a Goodness which must exclude the existence of Hell’.61 In the last quarter of the century a flurry of books such as William Dorking’s The Larger Hope for the Future of the Human Race (1875), and Samuel Cox’s Salvator Mundi (1877) and its sequel The Larger Hope (1883), argued that universal salvation was in fact a thoroughly biblical doctrine, encouraging news to Evangelicals like Josephine Butler. For writers including Butler, Macdonald, Gilman and others this hope was frequently grounded in the model of mother-love, more merciful but also committed to the education of her offspring, salvation not an instantaneous event but a slow perfecting begun on earth and continued in heaven.
In light of these ideas, Theodore Parker draws an emphatic gendered binary across competing models of the divine nature, protesting that ‘the popular theology’ (by which he means the most ascetic form of Calvinism) ‘leaves us nothing feminine in the character of God’. As part of his argument that the expansion of women’s sphere of action would be a public good, he asserts ‘[i]f women had been consulted, it seems to me theology would have been in a vastly better state than it is now’, free of the doctrines of ‘infinite wrath, of eternal damnation, and total depravity’.62 Such beliefs he attributes to the diseased imaginations of a celibate priesthood, who were never fully humanised (he implies) through marriage or fatherhood, a fact he blames for the Christian tolerance of gender injustice and brutal social policies. Parker’s ideas, disseminated further through Frances Power Cobbe’s British edition of his works, shaped the Transcendentalist tradition inherited by writers such as Burnett and Gilman, and consolidated the more implicit gendered schema of liberal versus Calvinist theology that is also visible in Gaskell’s and Macdonald’s writings.
Of course, these softer qualities were not excluded from the social reality of nineteenth-century fatherhood which, contrary to popular stereotypes of remote authoritarianism, often involved deep attachment and tenderness.63 F.D. Maurice and others (including, much of the time, George Macdonald) encapsulated intimacy and even universal salvation in their idea of God as a loving father, not a warrior lord or a domineering patriarch, a distinction
The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture
Theodore Parker makes when he declares that ‘God is not a king, but a father and a mother’.64 But the ideal, and to some degree the reality, of the middle-class breadwinner and paterfamilias made paternal intimacy often difficult to achieve, or at least to demonstrate, so that mothers of the middle classes could more easily claim superior parenting capacities given the new emphasis on parenting as an emotional and moral, not just economic, role.65 While, as historians show, the social reality of male and female parenting was more nuanced than the notion of ‘separate spheres’ suggests, gender provided a convenient if oversimplified schema to signify contrasting interpretations of the divine character, and of its relationship with human beings and with the earth in which they spend their mortal existence.
Rethinking God in terms of motherhood was not confined to writers of Protestant Christian heritage, although it seems that the idea was most widespread among them. Claudia Stokes has shown how Eliza Snow, later wife to Joseph Smith and designated a prophetess as well as poet laureate of the Latter-Day Saints, invoked the Heavenly Mother which, while controversial to many, was accepted by some into Mormon doctrine.66 As is shown in Chapter 5, Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science movement, likened God more to a mother than a father on the basis of women’s higher capacity to love. Although in Roman Catholicism Mary was not divine, but a mediator between God and humanity, convert Adelaide Procter evades this nicety by making Mary the sole deity to whom a charity-focused convent community pays homage in her medieval poetic narrative ‘A Legend of Provence’ (1862). Mary appears in a vision not only to grant forgiveness to a fallen nun, but to wipe the community’s memory of her error, in order to allow her full rehabilitation without condescension.67 As well as being a reposte to the many fallen woman narratives which resolve in obligatory penitence and often death, the poem is a parable of divine mercy in autonomous female form.
Grace Aguilar, ‘the most important Jewish writer in nineteenth-century England’,68 also made moves towards a maternal theology, combining the resources of her tradition with her own independent interpretations. While not questioning the ideology of separate spheres, she is credited with ‘feminiz[ing]’ Judaism by reversing the hierarchy which valued public collective practice (in which women were largely passive) over private and domestic religious experience.69 Emphasising ‘the private sphere as the essential realm of true Jewish practice’, Aguilar elevated women’s spiritual wisdom and emphasised intimacy and mercy as the heart of her faith.70 As Nadia Valman has argued, the idea of God as a mother is implicit in some of Aguilar’s works, modelled in the patient and compassionate woman protagonist who becomes a conduit of salvation to all who dwell with
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The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture 15 her or pass through her house.71 In The Women of Israel, Aguilar, keen to dispel the cultural myth that only in Christianity were women extolled, reminds readers that God was often depicted in Hebrew scripture through maternal metaphor.72 These works by Snow, Eddy, Procter and Aguilar show that the discourse of exalted maternity prompted revisionary ideas of the divine image from writers of a variety of religious backgrounds, who felt that God’s ‘feminine’ aspect, and women’s spiritual experience, had been suppressed to humanity’s detriment.
Millenarian feminism and ‘Mothers in Israel’: the feminine social gospel
As Rosemary Radford Ruether has shown, symbols of the ‘spiritual feminine’ which linger in the margins of patriarchal religious systems often serve consolatory and compensatory functions, but lack power to challenge or change the status quo.73 The nineteenth-century exalted feminine often served as such, celebrating the counter-cultural qualities of mother-love while reinscribing female passivity. To Ellis, maternal love stands in ‘righteous indignation’ towards ‘injustice, oppression, and cruelty of every kind’, yet only through domestic influence,74 while fictional female saviours often imitate Christ through self-sacrifice rather than triumph over worldly powers.75 But the ethos of women’s prophecy, alive in popular millennialist movements and in some traditions of religious dissent, and still an influence at the turn of the twentieth century, provided an empowering rhetoric that endowed sympathy with power, which breathes through nineteenthcentury images of female divinity.
Utopian socialist-feminist movements of the Romantic era aspired to no less than the regeneration of society through the emancipation of women and the extension of sympathy through the public sphere. This millenarian or apocalyptic feminism sought a world-focused redemption that would usher in ‘a new era of community and love’, whereby heaven would be realised on earth.76 This vision was profoundly immanentist, inspired by post-millennial beliefs that the golden age would be brought about by human agency before the messiah’s final return, as well as by more secular notions of the ‘divine’ manifest in a perfected humanity. Many of these utopian movements believed this mission would be furthered by veneration of a female sacred symbol, such as Eliza Sharples who proclaimed:
This is the time, when woman shall reign, and the kingdom of man shall be no more. The man and the woman are the two Messiahs of the Bible. … Woman is the bride – the lamb’s wife, and the Bible says that she comes, when the millennium begins.77
By Evelyn De Morgan
