In this Book
- Victorian Women Writiers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: The Ohio State University Press
- Series: Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies
summary
If Victorian women writers yearned for authorial forebears, or, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words, for “grandmothers,” there were, Gail Turley Houston argues, grandmothers who in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries envisioned powerful female divinities that would reconfigure society. Like many Victorian women writers, they experienced a sense of what Barrett Browning termed “mother-want” inextricably connected to “mother-god-want.” These millenarian and socialist feminist grandmothers believed the time had come for women to initiate the earthly paradise that patriarchal institutions had failed to establish. Recuperating a symbolic divine in the form of the Great Mother—a pagan Virgin Mary, a female messiah, and a titanic Eve—Joanna Southcott, Eliza Sharples, Frances Wright, and others set the stage for Victorian women writers to envision and impart emanations of puissant Christian and pagan goddesses, enabling them to acquire the authorial legitimacy patriarchal culture denied them. Though the Victorian authors studied by Houston—Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Anna Jameson, and George Eliot—often masked progressive rhetoric, even in some cases seeming to reject these foremothers, their radical genealogy reappeared in mystic, metaphysical revisions of divinity that insisted that deity be understood, at least in part, as substantively female.
Table of Contents
Download Full Book
- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. 2-7
- Acknowledgments
- pp. ix-x
- List of Abbreviations
- pp. xi-xii
- Bibliography
- pp. 155-170
Additional Information
ISBN
9780814270219
Related ISBN(s)
9780814212103
MARC Record
OCLC
868220080
Pages
208
Launched on MUSE
2014-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
Yes