Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Aesthetic Approach to Biblical Interpretation by Natasha Duquette (review)

Veiled Intent is a study of six eighteenth-century Englishwomen whose religious works place them outside the conventional parameters of formal Protestant theology: Anna Barbauld, Phillis Wheatley, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Felicia Hemans and Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck. Writing in a culture where women’s spirituality was mainly viewed as a form of emotionalism or domestic piety, they smuggled religious concepts into print in the guise of ‘feminine’ literary genres such as lyrical poetry or literature for children. In doing so they not only achieved a broader readership and a degree of popularity (and notoriety); they also extended the parameters of Protestant religious discourse far beyond those of their male co-religionists. As Duquette writes, “these poets together place the realities of material existence, the articularities of specific female friendships, and the sensations of the body, in dialogue with sublime transcendence... . their poetry combines politics with spirituality, social consciousness with prayer, and human affection with glimpses of powerful divinity as evoked in scripture” (32).

Having expressed their religious concepts in unusual and popular genres, these and other women went on to challenge the aesthetic theories of contemporary male philosophers and theologians, most notably Edmund Burke’s philosophy of the sublime and the beautiful. “Edmund Burke’s philosophical Enquiry uses severe and gendered binaries to define the masculine sublime against its foil: the feminine beautiful ... For Burke, merciful virtues—such as generosity, compassion, or loving kindness—are lesser, softer, and by implication more ‘feminine’ virtues, which therefore belong in the category of the beautiful rather than the sublime.” This binary thinking makes a holistic appreciation of Christianity impossible. “[H]is Enquiry cuts off the beautiful mercy of Christ from the sublime power of the Father and cannot account for the redemptive justice of the cross, which is both terrible and awe-inspiring” (39).

Women responded forcefully to these ideas, not so much to imitate or reverse Burke’s polarities but to analyze the nuances embedded in them, most importantly in their valorization of emotion and the introduction of motherhood into the conversation as a kind of third category that is both feminine and masculine. “Women poets at times explicitly and respectfully referenced ‘Mr. Burke’s’ definition of the sublime, but then continued to build on and expand his work by intentionally supplementing Burke’s focus on sublime fear of paternal punishment with their own biblical examples of female, generative, and healing forms of power” (31). Like all the Dissenting women in this study, Barbauld “presents embodied, affective forms of perception as legitimate modes of biblical interpretation” (5). Thus we find her focusing on Burke’s notion of power alongside her own notion of generativity or maternal discourse. “Barbauld’s poems, hymns, and essays draw on biblical texts to focus the reader’s attention on the powerfully generative maternal aspects of an affectionate and relational God” (47).

Helen Maria Williams takes a different approach. Her poetry offers a heart-wrenching depiction of a mother and her dying child. She thus bridges Edmund Burke’s false theological and aesthetic division between the punitive justice of God the Father as sublime and the compassionate suffering of Christ the Son as beautiful. “Williams also refused to see a dichotomy between Burke’s categories of the sublime and the beautiful; rather, she imagined sublime forms of merciful justice. Williams’s contemplative sublime illustrates how friendship can bring about justice through acts of courageous intervention ... Williams tactically veils aesthetic theory in verse, biblical exegesis in scriptural paraphrases, and prophetic calls for merciful justice in lyric poetry. Williams’s urgent calls for social justice periodically break through her aesthetic veils, making her even more adamant than Phillis Wheatley or Anna Barbauld and rendering her the most politically radical woman writer treated in this study” (117, 118, 119).

Perhaps most interesting to this reader is Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck’s aesthetic approach to biblical hermeneutics. Duquette emphasizes her connections and intellectual...