The Crashavian Mother

Richard Crashaw’s graphic depictions of the body seem to consternate scholars far less than they once did, in part because an artistic focus on wounds, blood, and milk can be read as influenced by the various religious and intellectual movements of Crashaw’s time. But historical and/or iconographic explanations have frequently had the effect of glossing over the more troubling aspects of the poet’s relationship to women. This paper will argue that two of Crashaw’s most familiar epigrams, “Luke 2. Quærit Jesum Suum Maria” and the much-maligned “Luke 11. Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked,” reveal a more complicated relation to the maternal body than re-evaluations of Crashaw’s aesthetic have suggested. The question remains a difficult one, particularly in view of recent studies whose explicit concern to address the roles of Mary and St. Teresa in Crashaw’s œuvre have presented a more uniformly “feminist” Crashaw than was formerly acknowledged, but which also seem to minimize the psychological conflictedness about maternal figures clearly exhibited in certain poems.

In drawing on the paradigms of Melanie Klein’s object-relations theory—specifically her concept of the child’s ambivalent relatedness with a radically split mother figure—my aim is neither to reprise the all-too-familiar epithets of infantile grostesquerie that have haunted psychoanalytic Crashavian scholarship in the past, nor to reassert Crashaw as misogynistic. Rather, Klein’s vision of consciousness as animated by complex “phantasies” ¹ about the mother offers a compelling model for unpacking Crashaw’s poetic relation to the figure (and body) of Mary and to the question of gender. Klein posited an ongoing exchange of psychical “positions” in which the infant’s overwhelming anxiety about the mother’s body and phantasized destruction of it would be replaced by guilt and an effort to “repair” that body. Her belief that the dialectic between those positions can be discovered in especially vivid ways in the artistic work of adults seems well suited to account for the fluctuations of Crashaw’s depictions of women—at times highly idealized, at others more prone to anxiety and even deliberately damaging. A depiction of the intense satisfaction of nursing, for instance, will be poised against fantasies of attack on the same life-giving body, while what seems at first to represent plentiful nourishment in a poem will, as if at the turn of a corner, divulge a more primordial worry about deprivation and loss.

Several critics have taken up the charge, popularized by Mario Praz, that Crashaw’s poetry is marked by “feminine tenderness” and lacks a certain “manly” or “heroic note” ² (i.e., it is neither historicized and political nor [hetero]sexualized). ³ “Manliness,” in Praz’s formulation, becomes equated with rhetorical restraint, imagistic simplicity, and “logic,” “femininity” with a kind of unseemly excess, emotional vulnerability, and irrationality. Against this older interpretative vein, recent scholars have argued not only that Crashaw’s poetry consistently valorizes women as either loci of or thresholds to spiritual power, but also, more provocatively, that a kind of spiritual androgyny results from Crashaw’s poetic transgressions of traditional gender categories. ⁴

Such accounts do much to correct prevalent (over)reactions to the elaborate emotional register of Crashaw’s verse, and they are compelling in their attempt to ground the prominence Crashaw grants to women in a potentially empowering Mariolatry. But they also seem problematic. To the extent that ecstatic union is held to be the desired end of a journey forwarded by the poems’ descriptions of female saints or mother-son scenarios, the wilder psychological elements of Crashaw’s depictions of mothers and femaleness tend to be domesticated, and the thematics of gender too easily contained and simplified within the parameters of Catholicism. That Crashaw made women the primary subjects of his religious verse obviously requires critical attention, but surely it is not enough to claim repetition as valorization. And though Crashaw’s attachment to a range of spiritual “mothers” may suggest his hope to redress the early losses of mother and stepmother and fulfill a need for religious “asylum,” ⁵ it does not in any consistent...