Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies: Women, Sexuality, and Religion in the Victorian Market (review)

The Victorian "Family Bible with Notes" was, according to Mary Wilson Carpenter, a "uniquely British institution," first prompted by restrictions on the printing of the Bible in Britain and its colonies. From the early eighteenth to the late nineteenth century the publication of Bibles with notes and commentary allowed printers to avoid restrictions on the printing of the King James or Authorized Version. Printers added engravings and illustrations and sold these Bibles in inexpensive serial editions which, Carpenter argues, are "an important resource for learning how British families read their bibles, or how their bibles read them, interpellating them as certain kinds of 'authorized version' subjects" (xv-xvi).

Carpenter traces three phases in the development of the family Bible. The earliest family Bibles—which appeared in the first half of the eighteenth century—promoted themselves as a source of "universal knowledge," providing notes and commentary that attempted to make the whole contents of the Bible (including the story of Sodom and Gomorrah and other similar passages) accessible and intelligible to all members of the family. As Carpenter puts it, "Commentary on what is marginalized in relation to the 'family' … suggests that the homosexual subject was even better known than studies of molly houses have proposed." Texts such as The Compleat History of the Old and New Testament; or, A Family Bible, with … annotations, extracted from the writings of the most celebrated authors (first published in 1735) not only provided frank discussions of sodomy and effeminacy but also exhibited a fascination with transgressive and undomesticated womanhood that would have been remarkable even in secular publications of the time (17, 20–21). By the early nineteenth century, however, some parts of the Bible came to be considered as unsuitable for family reading. Certain passages were bracketed off or printed in smaller type, with the instruction that they were "To be omitted from family reading." Biblical knowledge was divided between that which was appropriate for the family and that which was to be confined to the "closet," or study by the head of the household: "These Family Bibles market access to the power of secret knowledge, to be the exclusive possession of a privileged family member, typically specified as the 'Master of the family'" (xx, 8). As the century progressed, however,

British Family Bibles demonstrate[d] more and more consciousness of feminine tastes: the frontispieces of patriarchal figures so common in eighteenth century bibles—the "author" of the bible, Moses with the tablets of the Law, or Jesus as princely dispenser of mercy—are replaced by representations of Moses as a baby, far too chubby to float in his wicker basket, or the boy Samuel kneeling in his little nightshirt to say his prayers.

(56)

Drawing on well over a hundred examples of family Bibles, spanning the period from 1690 to 1886, Carpenter begins to develop a number of suggestive arguments. In addition to her exploration of gender and sexuality she also (as the book's title suggests) places these Bibles in an "imperial" context. One important result of the "bracketing" or "closeting" of certain passages was to mark out much of the sexually explicit material (such as the stories of Sodom or Onan, or Levitical texts on bodily practices) as matters "peculiar to the Jews," so that the figure of the Jew came to represent "'unnatural' sex" (34–38, 44). In this way, Carpenter argues, "the pathologization of sexuality was intimately linked with the production of a sense of national and imperial identity" (37).

The second half of the book re-reads well-known Victorian women's writings in the context created by the circulation of these "Family Bibles with Notes and Commentary." So, for example, Carpenter devotes one chapter to a discussion of the biblical discourse on menstruation as it appears in Charlotte Brontë's Villette and another to an exploration of the theme of (female) circumcision in...