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Review of Our Lady of Victorian Feminism
Review Author: Miriam Burstein
Affiliation: State University of New York, Brockport
During the past few years, Victorian scholarship has seen the return of a repressed of sorts: religion. Although it had been consigned for a time to the analytical dustbin, religion was bound to return once scholars realized that, for the Victorians, it was just as important as, and in many cases more so than, the new Holy Trinity of race, class, and gender. While anyone historically minded should welcome the return to religion in Victorian studies, this particular project displays both strengths and weaknesses.
In Our Lady of Victorian Feminism: The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot, Kimberly VanEsveld Adams argues that the three women under discussion found in the Madonna not a symbol of repression, but rather a means of imagining female empowerment. Although the choice of writers may strike the reader as rather odd, as Adams herself acknowledges, there is method to the madness: the three women were roughly contemporaries; led lives that were to greater or lesser extent outside the pale of normative Victorian domesticity; and, most importantly, influenced or were influenced by each others' work. The "works" in question include Jameson's copious writings on art history and historical biography, most notably Legends of the Madonna (1852); Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845) and other political writings; and Eliot's Adam Bede (1859), Romola (1862-63), Middlemarch (1871-72), Daniel Deronda (1876), and The Spanish Gypsy (1868-69).
In all three instances, Adams tries to tease out the writer's theology and Mariology from their historical, political, and fictional texts. Jameson's representations of the Madonna try to rejuvenate a Christian Goddess-figure for an age fearful of Mariolatry; without pandering to Protestant bigotry on this particular issue, she argues for a Madonna who is "the beneficent, pure, and powerful goddess of Christianity, the feminine face of the divine" (101). For Fuller, the Madonna becomes particularly significant as the "Virgin Wife"; virginity here is not sexual abstinence but, rather, a state of mind or "self-intactness" (127), one that allows women to marry while maintaining their independence. However, Adams argues, Fuller abandons the Madonna once she actually sees her used as an instrument of political conservatism during the Italian uprising of 1848. Finally, Adams suggests, Eliot becomes increasingly jaded about the possibility of using the Madonna in any fashion in a world from which religion has been reduced to mere form. In late novels like Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, there is no real historical "fit" for the Madonna; as Adams demonstrates, the Madonna of Middlemarch can never be much more than "a decorative Virgin," an aesthetic icon instead of a spiritual one (165). In other words, what Adams traces here is as much about the emptying-out of the Madonna as a satisfactory feminist figure as it is about her continuing symbolic power.
Adams is at one with other recent scholars of Victorian religious culture in her insistence that religion is, in a sense, power-neutral. In particular, she continues the important recent trend of insisting that religious convictions were as much of a help to feminist thought as they were a potential hindrance. Her writing is lucid and uncluttered by jargon, and she generally explains her terms of engagement with great care. Further, her close readings of selected texts are, in the main, both convincing and generous to scholars with whom she disagrees.
There are, however, a few problems. Most seriously, Adams' bibliography is top-heavy with secondary texts. Aside from gestures to contemporaries like John Henry Newman, Coventry Patmore, John Ruskin, William Henry Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the German theologians and philosophers Ludwig Feuerbach, A. W. Schlegel, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, we hear virtually nothing from other nineteenth-century figures -- especially nineteenth-century British figures. As a result, we have no real discussion of the Protestant evangelical theology that shaped many Victorians' attitudes to Mary; scanty context for Jameson's feminist medievalism and her representation of "queenship"; and little background for Eliot's attitude to asceticism (something of a hot topic for Victorian religious novelists). Adams' excuse that "fierce anti-Romanists were likely to be Evangelicals suspicious of novel reading (and therefore unlikely to have literary Madonnas as household icons)" (7) doesn't quite surmount the obstacle posed by those Protestants, evangelical and otherwise, who used the novel to disseminate anti-Marian views, although she is correct when she insists that Victorian intellectuals were not all "no Popery" types. Along the same lines, I fear that Adams' reliance on contemporary feminist theology will not stand her in good stead with historians of religion. It is not altogether clear to me that one can draw a genealogical line of descent from, say, Anna Jameson to Mary Daly. Adams' arguments would have been strengthened by less time looking "forward" and more time looking "around," as it were.
Nevertheless, Adams has written a thought-provoking book. It should be of interest to anyone studying Victorian women writers, literature and religion, or feminism, especially those studying the role of Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century thought.
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