In this Book
- Willful Submission: Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious Poetry
- Book
- 2018
- Published by: University of Virginia Press
Victorian England: a Jesuit priest writes of wrestling with God at night, limbs entangled; an Anglican sister begs Jesus, her divine lover, to end her aching anticipation of their union; a clergyman exhorts nuns to study the example of medieval women who suffered on the rack in order to become "brides" of Christ. Alongside the march of nineteenth-century progress ran a seemingly paradoxical fascination with a dark, erotically suggestive side of religious devotion: the figuration of the Christian God as a heavenly bridegroom who doles out punishment to his bride, the individual soul.
Through innovative case studies of Victorian religious poetry, Amanda Paxton reveals that while the punitive model proved a convenient rhetorical tool with which to deflate burgeoning nineteenth-century campaigns for women’s rights and challenges to Church authority, in the hands of several writers it also provided a means of resisting patriarchal institutions and interrogating distinctions between science and religion. Willful Submission is the first full-length volume to examine the interplay of sex, suffering, and religion as a touchstone in Victorian culture and verse.
Table of Contents
- Title Page, Copyright,
- pp. i-iv
- Acknowledgments
- pp. vii-viii
- List of Abbreviations
- pp. ix-x
- Introduction
- pp. 1-18
- 1. Bridal Desires
- pp. 19-54
- Conclusion
- pp. 183-192
- Bibliography
- pp. 205-218