The Reinterpretation of Biblical Symbols through the Lives and Fictions of Victorian Women

333 Pages·2013·2.11 MB·English

by  Kara Lynne Pickens

Pickens, Kara Lynne (2012) The reinterpretation of biblical symbols
through the lives and fictions of Victorian women: “To come within
the orbit of possibility”. PhD thesis.

http://theses.gla.ac.uk/4093/

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Glasgow Theses Service
http://theses.gla.ac.uk/
THE REINTERPRETATION OF BIBLICAL
SYMBOLS THROUGH THE LIVES AND FICTIONS
OF VICTORIAN WOMEN
“To Come Within the Orbit of Possibility”

Kara Lynne Pickens
August 2012

This thesis is submitted to the College of Arts, Department of Theology and Religious Studies,
Centre for the Study of Literature, Theology, and the Arts at the University of Glasgow in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy.

©Kara Pickens 25 August 2012
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THESIS ABSTRACT

his thesis argues that nineteenth-century shifts in hermeneutics enabled women to re-
vision Victorian conceptions of womanhood by reinterpreting biblical narratives within
fictional texts. Due to these shifts, the meaning of biblical symbols was increasingly
T tied to the personal experience of the reader. This enabled women to reinterpret these
symbols to reflect their own experiences as women. This hermeneutic approach was formulated
out of critical enquiry into the nature of the biblical text which resulted in questioning the
authority of the Bible. Questions regarding the authority of scripture opened up the possibility
for Victorian authors to use fictive texts in order to reinterpret biblical symbols, resulting in the
constant re-visioning of biblical symbols by readers and writers. As the authority of scripture
became unstable, gender roles, which were rooted within a biblical symbolic, also became
destabilized. The novels of female authors who reimagined biblical symbols gave voice to these
authors’ own experiences as women as they embodied these symbols within their life and work,
resulting in new understandings of Victorian womanhood.

George Eliot was particularly conscious of the hermeneutic shifts which were taking
place throughout the century due to her extensive involvement in the philosophical and
theological movements of the era, and her novels demonstrate how these shifts influenced her
work. The reinterpretation of biblical narratives within her novels also reflects how she
embodied these female biblical symbols within her own life. While Eliot’s awareness of the
shifts taking place within hermeneutic practice is evident in her work, she was not alone in
adopting this hermeneutic practice. Novelist Elizabeth Gaskell also reimagined and embodied
biblical symbols, yet her experience as a Victorian woman was strikingly different from Eliot’s
own and led her to distinct reinterpretations of these symbols in her life and novels. Likewise,
social activist Josephine Butler reinterpreted female biblical narratives in order to understand her
life in relation to the ‘fallen’ women she worked with. These three women have been chosen for
this project because of how they represent nineteenth-century shifts in hermeneutic practice
toward biblical symbols in addition to the shared affinities and prominent differences between
them.

To explore these issues requires a theoretical framework which encompasses literature,
philosophy, sociology, history, theology, and feminist theory; however, fundamentally this
project is concerned with theological hermeneutics and the nature of biblical symbols. This
project examines the influence of nineteenth-century theologians David Friedrich Strauss and
Ludwig Feuerbach on Victorian hermeneutics and applies more recent work by Paul Ricœur,
Jacques Rancière, and Caroline Walker Bynum to formulate a framework through which to
understand the Victorian interpretation of biblical symbols. As Victorian women readers re-
visioned female biblical symbols as encountered through sacred and fictive texts, the fresh
interpretations of these symbols enabled women to negotiate new ways of understanding gender.
These hermeneutic shifts toward biblical symbols created a symbolic understanding of
womanhood which was able to better convey the complexity of female experience, providing
women with an understanding of womanhood that better correlated with their own experience as
women.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

his work would not have been written were it not for the contributions of family, friends,
professors, and colleagues. My primary debt of gratitude is to my advisors David Jasper
T and Heather Walton at the University of Glasgow for both encouraging and challenging
my work through their feedback. Their kindness, honesty, good-humor, and wisdom have been
invaluable to both my personal and professional development. I am also grateful to my university
professors, particularly Gary Schnittjer, RoseLee Bancroft, and John Oliff, for providing me with
the opportunities and encouragement to advance my academic research.

I am thankful to my family for their support of my work. To my parents, Jim and Nancy
Zuck, I am grateful for instilling in me a love for reading and education. I thank my siblings and
their spouses, Nate and Joanna Zuck, Amy and Joel Haldeman, and Julie and Will Lopez, for
their encouragement and patience. My grandparents, Elsie and Lawrence Reynolds have always
made my education a priority and continually encouraged me to finish this degree. My
grandmother, in particular, has been a feminist role model to me and her influence in this way
has shaped my own beliefs on Christian womanhood. I am thankful to Bill and Janice Pickens
for their support and constant willingness to help out in any way possible so that I could
complete this project. I appreciate Aaron and Shanna Johnson for their encouragement and
contributions to this project.

Many of my friends both at home and abroad have also given encouragement and
conversation that have sustained and shaped this project. I am particularly grateful that their
friendship provided me with a community of scholars while living in rural southern Indiana as
we gathered around various tables to share our ideas, often in the midst of delightful food and
beverages. These individuals include Elizabeth Anderson, Julia and Michael Delashmutt, Rachel
Kent-Lawson, Chris Kopel, Allen Smith, Alana Vincent and Mark Godin, Anna Fisk, Lucy
Baber, Elizabeth Berthoud, Lauren Cline, Emily Lofquist, Charity and Dave Mackey, Brad
Alstrom and Anne Brookhyser, Darren and Espri Bender-Beauregard, Dan and Julie Burks,
Robert and June Douglas, Palmer and Tina Gregg, Beth and Matt Polley, Brad and Mandy
Polley, Joana Jones, Wendy West, and Brad and Katrien Johnson. I am also grateful to my
students at West Washington High School and principal Karen York for encouraging and
supporting my work. I would like to particularly thank Janet Metzger and the group of women in
her community who enthusiastically read this project and provided me with encouragement by
responding with dialogue on the necessity of such a work for religious women. I am especially
indebted to the work of Rebecca Armstrong, who both meticulously proofread this project and
provided engaging discussion about the central issues within my argument.

Most of all I owe this work to my husband, Bradley Pickens, who has supported me in
this project from its inception. He has been my biggest advocate by providing me with constant
feedback, encouraging me in my research, helping me in my share of household work, nurturing
my thoughts, and making me laugh in the midst of frustration and hardship. It has been my
privilege to share in life together with him and it is this life together which has chiefly sustained
me through this work.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS

THESIS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................... iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .......................................................................................................................... ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................................................ iii
ABBREVIATIONS ......................................................................................................................................... v

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1
 Methodological Concerns ............................................................................................................ 6
 Key Terms: Social Imaginary, Gender, Victorian Reader, and Embodiment ..................... 14
 Chapter Summaries ..................................................................................................................... 24

CHAPTER TWO: INTERPRETING VICTORIAN WOMANHOOD........................................................ 36
 The ‘Angel in the House’ and ‘Fallen’ Woman ...................................................................... 37
 Feminist Literary Criticism of Victorian Womanhood .......................................................... 45
 Influence of Post-structuralism on the Understanding of Victorian Gender Roles ............ 51
 Religious and Theological Interpretations of Victorian Womanhood ................................. 55

CHAPTER THREE: VICTORIAN HERMENEUTICS—THE THEORY OF EMBODIMENT .............. 61
 George Eliot and the Victorian Social Imaginary ................................................................... 64
 Strauss’ Word Made Flesh: the Incarnation of Christ through Christian Community....... 79
 Feuerbach’s Flesh Made Word: Uncovering the Humanity of God ..................................... 85
 The Word of God as Fiction ...................................................................................................... 87

CHAPTER FOUR: VICTORIAN HERMENEUTICS—THE PRAXIS OF EMBODIMENT ................... 89
 Pietism and the Embodiment of Scripture ............................................................................... 90
 Romanticism and the Embodiment of Texts ........................................................................... 95
 Higher Criticism, Pietism, Romanticism and the Victorian Social Imaginary ................... 98
 Fictional “Experiments in Life” as Hermeneutic Practice ................................................... 102
 Embodying the Divine through Fiction .................................................................................. 104
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 Gendering of Biblical Symbols in Victorian Britain ............................................................ 108
 Embodying Feminine Sacred Narratives ............................................................................... 119

CHAPTER FIVE: “HERE AND THERE IS BORN A SAINT:” FEMALE RELIGIOUS
SYMBOLS IN THE VICTORIAN NOVEL .............................................................................................. 123
 Biblical Female Symbolic ............................................................................................... 126
 Self-Interpretation through the Written Word ....................................................................... 140

CHAPTER SIX: VICTORIAN HERMENEUTICS AND THE GENDERING OF THE TEXT ............... 148
 Identifying the Gender of the Text .......................................................................................... 150
 Gendered Texts and Experience .............................................................................................. 161
 The ‘Dear Reader’ of Gendered Texts ................................................................................... 169
 Embodying the Gendered Text ................................................................................................ 172
 The Word Made Word: the Embodiment of the Biblical Narrative within the Novel ..... 178
 The Embodied Word and Authored Body ............................................................................. 180

CHAPTER SEVEN: NOBLE BOOKS AND SOILED AUTHORS ........................................................... 183
 “She Knew What She Was Losing”: Reception of the ‘Fallen’ Author ............................ 190
 The ‘Fallen’ Saint: George Eliot finds Redemption through her Fiction .......................... 195
 G.H. Lewes and His Relationship with the Author George Eliot ....................................... 200
 Self-Interpretation of the ‘Fallen’ Woman ............................................................................ 208
 Attaining Sainthood: “Her Marriage was a True One” ........................................................ 215
 The Literary Journey toward Sainthood ................................................................................. 224
 Eliot as the Magdalene and Madonna..................................................................................... 226
 The Sainted Women in Eliot’s Fiction ................................................................................... 232
 Embodying the Madonna through the Fictional World of the Novel ................................. 240

CHAPTER EIGHT: “ONE WOMANHOOD SOLIDAIRE” .................................................................. 244
 The Identity of Elizabeth Gaskell: a Great Number of “Mes” ............................................ 249
 The Fictionalization of the ‘Fallen’ Woman ......................................................................... 262
 Elizabeth Gaskell as a ‘Fallen’ Magdalene ............................................................................ 270
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 Ruth as a ‘Fallen’ Madonna ..................................................................................................... 274
 Reception of Ruth: Re-Interpreting the ‘Fallen’ Woman .................................................... 281
 Josephine Butler and Ruth ........................................................................................................ 286
 Attaining Sainthood through the Embodiment of Biblical Symbols .................................. 294

CHAPTER NINE: CONCLUDING THOUGHTS .................................................................................... 296
 Entering the Orbit of Possibility between Two Worlds ....................................................... 298
 Implications ................................................................................................................................ 300
 Closing Meditation .................................................................................................................... 301

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................................... 303
 Victorian Fiction Works ........................................................................................................... 303
 Victorian Non-fiction Works ................................................................................................... 305
 Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Works ......................................................................... 312
 Church Historical Works .......................................................................................................... 325
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ABBREVIATIONS

GEL, followed by volume. The George Eliot Letters. 9 vols. Gordon S. Haight, editor. New
Haven: Yale UP, 1954-1978.

EGL. The Letters of Mrs. Gaskell. J.A.V. Chapple and Arthur Pollard,
editors. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1966.

All Bible references are from the New Revised Standard Version (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.)
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CHAPTER ONE:
INTRODUCTION

ne of the first novels I remember reading in early adolescence was
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. The novel’s first scene, which depicts Jane
O
escaping with her cousin’s book to the window seat ensconced behind red
drapery, immediately resonated with me. I, too, often took refuge from the world
around me by disappearing into a world of written words and images. As I began the
research for this project I returned once again to the Victorian novels I read in my
youth, but this time I initially found myself disappointed by them. As I was raised
within the context of late twentieth-century American Christianity, Victorian novels at
points sounded almost identical to the teaching about sexuality and gender roles I
grew up with—teachings which I had since rejected.
I was not the first to note the similarities; several scholars argue that the
evangelical Christian concept of the traditional family and spiritual womanhood is
rooted in the Victorian ideal of domesticity and the symbolic figure of the ‘angel in
1
the house.’ Likewise, American Evangelicals remain uncomfortable with female
sexuality in a way that bears resemblance to the Victorian valorization of women’s

1 Rosemary Radford Ruether writes, “What emerged was a Victorian ideal of the family—the ‘modern
family’—that continues to function today in the nostalgic imagination as a normative model.”
(Christianity and the Making of the Modern Family. Boston: Beacon, 2000, 102.). She later adds that
“the cult of true womanhood of the Victorian era was restated in the 1970s in new evangelical tracts
that claimed that traditional gender relations reflected the divinely mandated biblical form of the
family.” (158) See also: Amy Johnston Frykholm. Rapture Culture: Left Behind in Evangelical
America. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004, 98; John Stratton Hawley. Fundamentalism and Gender. Oxford:
Oxford UP, 1994, 181; and Susan Hill Lindley. “Gender and Social Roles.” Encyclopedia of Women
and Religion in North America. Vol. 1. Rosemary Skinner Keller, Rosemary Radford Ruether and
Marie Cantlon, editors. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 2006, 23-32, 31.
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chastity and the demonization of ‘fallen’ women. It is difficult not to notice, for
instance, the parallels between twentieth-century Christian author Elisabeth Elliot’s
teachings on womanhood and that of nineteenth-century lecturer John Ruskin. In an
1864 speech entitled “Of Queen’s Gardens,” Ruskin calls the home “a sacred place, a
vestal temple” that is established “wherever a true wife comes” and exists as a
2
“woman’s true place and power.” Elliot, in a 1976 book defining what it means to be
a Christian woman, writes: “You can create a climate for [your husband] according to
your attitude, and this is part of your job as a wife…Let it be a place of beauty and
3
peace.” Both Elliot and Ruskin understand that a woman’s fundamental role is found
within the home creating a place of refuge for her husband. As I returned to reading
Victorian novels as an adult, they initially seemed to reinforce the same teachings
which were emphasized within the evangelical instruction of my youth, idealizing the
‘angel’ and denouncing the ‘fallen.’
However, when I was younger and attempting to figure out what it meant to be
an evangelical Christian woman, Jane Eyre proved to be a formative text, providing
me with a particular image of womanhood. I specifically identified with the tension
Jane felt between her piety and self-reliance. I was a voracious reader; characters
within both American and British Victorian novels such as Jo March and Catherine
Earnshaw filling my imagination with strong images of independent womanhood
which I admired. However, my understanding of Christian womanhood was more
immediately shaped by the sermons on gender roles I heard preached at my church
4
and the Christian books I read claiming to teach about dating and marriage. In

2
John Ruskin. Sesame and Lilies. London: Smith, Elder, 1865, 148-149.
3
Elisabeth Ellio t. Let Me Be a Woman. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1976, 101.
4
These works included works by Elisabeth Elliot ( Passion and Purity: Learning to Bring Your Love
Life Under God’s Control and Let Me Be a Woman) and Brio Magazine, a magazine for teenage girls
published by the American evangelical organization Focus on the Family. (A critique of the gender
roles proposed by James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, can be found here: Eithne