George Herbert and Women: How Much Can We Know?

In John Donne’s Sermon of Commemoration of the Lady Danvers, George Herbert’s mother, he distinguishes between “those that have laid hold upon God,” that is, Christians, and those who “have laid hold upon God, by the right handle,” that is, members of the Church of England.¹ As with theology, so with criticism: we want to lay hold upon correct interpretations, and to do so we must lay hold “by the right handle.” There are many forms of biographical criticism because the “facts” of a biography are interpreted and reinterpreted by biographical critics. Accordingly, we must review several biographical “handles” to see which, if any, is “the right handle.” Regrettably, Donne’s complete assurance that his Church offers the correct way to lay hold upon God cannot be claimed for any of the several biographical approaches rehearsed here, especially those dealing with his poems written as a memorial to his mother, which were published as Memoriae Matris Sacrum. Rather, we can find their weaknesses more readily than their strengths. Beyond Herbert’s relationship with his mother we can speculate about Herbert and women generally, which takes us into a discussion of gender roles in marriage and the economics of that union in Herbert’s time, all of which will be shown to be similarly tenuous.

We should note that there is undoubtedly something about the intensity of emotion in Herbert’s poems that prompts critics to try to look behind the texts for the inner life of the man. That he wrote a poem of commemoration of his mother has attracted particular critical surmise. Nevertheless, there is a cultural divide that is hard to bridge between our own ideas about the inner life and what we can reconstruct about the inner life of a seventeenth-century poet and parson. When we go further into the inner life and discuss relationships we add to our difficulties, and when we examine mother–son relationships from our post-Freudian position we must continually remind ourselves of George Herbert’s innocence of modern conceptions about these things.

Not every seventeenth-century devotional poet has been favored with an article in the medical journal Psychiatry, but George Herbert has been so examined by William Kerrigan.² In this overview of Herbert’s inner life his relationship with his mother is examined and the author concludes that “ultimately [Herbert’s] inspiration [in Memoriae Matris Sacrum] is seen as a disillusioning mother, a mother of false images, and language has freed itself from her.”³ That Herbert’s mother disillusioned him, that she presented false images, and that Herbert needed somehow to free himself from this negative influence is a strong conclusion to be drawn from a series of complex memorial poems written in Latin and Greek. These poems, written with adherence to classical conventions, demand that our interpretation show some mediation between the speaker in the poems and the psychiatric conclusions about the author who wrote them.

The biographical “handle” of psychiatry seems at best a slippery handle for our use. A more basic biographical approach, by E. Pearlman in 1983, finds the style of the poems “extravagant and baroque,” and goes on to describe Herbert’s “relationship to his mother” as “extraordinary and perfervid,” which seems to assume that the extravagant poetic style was chosen because of the author’s extravagant feelings.⁴ The metaphors and images of the poem are treated the same way: “when Herbert writes poetry, he does so as his mother’s surrogate.”⁵ Similarly, Pearlman concludes that because “Lady Danvers and [Herbert’s] God are celebrated in similar terms,” therefore “Herbert’s sense of the sacred cannot be divorced from his relationship with his mother.”⁶ The underlying assumption here is that the language of the memorial comes from Herbert’s deepest feelings, which skates past the entire issue of tonality in Renaissance classical verse, which was conventionally florid. This approach does not allow for any cultural divide, but reads the poems directly from a modern perspective.

While Pearlman finds that Herbert’s relationship with his mother was very close (remember “perfervid”), Deborah Rubin...