Women Novelists and the Ethics of Desire, 1684–1814: In the Voice of Our Biblical Mothers (review)

Ms. Kraft’s latest book deals with the work of “the matriarchs of British fiction,” female British novelists from Behn to Frances Burney. The range is not unprecedented, and most novels discussed will be familiar to such readers as know Ros Ballaster’s Seductive Forms (1982) and Ruth Perry’s Novel Relations (2006). The discussion of “desire,” of course, invokes Nancy Armstrong’s famous Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987).

A distinguished new work, Ms. Kraft’s book on “Biblical Mothers” offers a change of subject and perspective. Since the late 1970s, with the revival of interest in female English novelists, religious elements in their work have been elided. At best, religious references could be treated as forgivable weaknesses perhaps unavoidable at the time. Ms. Kraft boldly argues that the great stories of Eve, Rachav, Rebekah, Sarah, and Hagar illustrate endorsement of women’s desire and need for ethical fulfillment. Above all, “The Song of Songs” invokes the woman’s frank and loving gaze on the man, as the man looks at her with loving desire. These stories, Ms. Kraft argues, endorse desire not as a woman’s weakness, but as her natural strength. Erotic desire is the drive towards ethical relationship, a full acknowledgment of the “other” that entails full acknowledgment of the self, of that which is exterior to the self and is not to be possessed, and of connection. Ms. Kraft’s rationale for dealing only with heterosexual desires and excluding homosexual feelings and relations is not altogether persuasive. Indeed, at moments, as in discussing the relation between Burney’s Ellis/Juliet and Aurora, Ms. Kraft goes beyond her writ.

The author treats as basic biblical texts only stories in Jewish scriptures—which Christians call the Old Testament. Her commentaries carefully go into the meanings of Hebrew words. This discussion enlightens the reader unfamiliar with Hebrew text or commentary. For conventional Christian or “post-Christian” readers, estrangement from the familiar may heighten meaning. Such treatment leaves a gap, however, since these eighteenth-century authors under consideration were neither Jewish nor versed in Hebrew. Most (excluding Catholic writers) would have read the biblical texts in the King James Version. Discussion of what they would have had access to in both text and contemporary commentary (beyond glancing references to Milton) might fill in the gap between novelist and original biblical text. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were marked by great religious ferment. Many developments reflect an endeavor to bring desire—affective, erotic, and spiritual—into relation. This movement can be found in Jakob Boehme and his successors, in St. Francis de Sales, in Quakers and Shakers, in Methodism, and in Swedenborg. At an important moment in the eighteenth century Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov founded Hasidism. There seems to be widespread interest in pursuing love of the divine and search for the self outside boundaries set by orthodoxy conceived as legalism. Were Bible stories as liberating to English women as Ms. Kraft claims? She might well argue that the sense of difference, the slight alienation, helpfully induces us to respond to the otherness of texts (including eighteenth-century biblical writing) and of languages. Looking at material from a different perspective, or through different lenses, is a step toward Enlightenment.

For Ms. Kraft. the novel, like the Bible itself, is undoubtedly a mode of Enlightenment and a means of spiritual insight. She endeavors to make a revolutionary move away from talk of “rights,” and what she evidently believes to be a kind of Whig-based political discourse, to a spiritual and ethical approach to relationships, political, social—and, most important, sexual. Beyond the contractual and beyond greed and fear lie sympathy, empathy, equality. The theorists most strongly behind Ms. Kraft’s approach are Büber, Derrida, and Levinas—though Büber, strangely, is not named. In the formulation of Levinas “there is a crucial discrimination to be made between a desire that...