The Marriage of Art and Belief: Women Writers and Victorian Theological Debates

Abstract

The Marriage of Art and Belief: Women Writers and Victorian Theological Debates Given their exclusion from centres of theological authority, one of the few ways women could voice their response to religious change in the Victorian era was through fiction. This thesis considers Anglican women’s literary challenge of traditional gendered morality and their commentary on increasing tolerance of nonconformity and the rise of doubt. Scholarship on Victorian women and religion has tended to focus on Dissenting voices, and many of the texts selected for this project have received less critical attention due to the assumption that women within the religious establishment merely regurgitated traditional patriarchal conventions. Instead, this thesis argues that Anglican women writers were often enabled by their faith to challenge simplistic constructions of femininity. Drawing from a diversity of traditions within the Church of England, this project compares women’s visions of the future role of the established church and engages in conversations with notable Dissenting writers such as Elizabeth Gaskell and Mrs Humphry Ward. Comparing Dinah Craik’s A Life for a Life (1859) and Emma Jane Worboise’s Married Life (1863), Chapter One considers women’s reshaping of gendered virtue in relation to Victorian debates on the doctrine of Atonement and the role of suffering. Craik’s use of the diary form challenges men and women’s sharply delineated religious roles, whilst Worboise’s intrusive narrator complicates her portrayal of women’s self-sacrifice. The Chapter compares Craik and Worboise’s response to Thomas Arnold’s ideal of ‘religious tone’, arguing for the creativity employed by women to produce fiction with substantive theological engagement whilst avoiding Victorian antipathy to ‘preaching women’. Contrasting Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854) and Margaret Oliphant’s Phoebe Junior (1876), Chapter Two explores portrayals of women’s relationship to church authority in the context of Anglican and Dissenting conflict. It pays particular attention to representations of women as advocates of tolerance and their critical engagement with church authority as embodied in its ministers. Gaskell’s Dissenting views shape her Anglican heroine’s journey of tolerance whilst maintaining theological distinctions, whereas Oliphant’s novel diminishes inter-denominational difference, satirizing both Anglican and Dissenting clergymen in contrast with her sensible heroine. Chapter Three considers the transformation of the religious heroine from the mid to late century in Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) and Charlotte Yonge’s Hopes and Fears (1860). In the context of Victorian gendering of reason as masculine and religious feeling as feminine, the chapter explores how both writers disrupt the model yet reach different conclusions on contemporary challenges to biblical reliability and ecclesiastical authority. Ward’s portrayal of her religious heroine as antiquated and irrational destabilises the role of the religious heroine yet fails to present an alternative, whilst Yonge portrays faith as a source of strength and individual agency for her heroine. The Conclusion argues that Anglican women’s voices in the nineteenth century were rooted in and amplified by their faith rather than undermined by it. After considering the significance of women’s portrayals of Anglican identity and the church, the conclusion considers George Eliot’s critiques of religious literature. Drawing on Middlemarch, I juxtapose Eliot’s vision of realism with that of the writers previously examined, and the portrayal of her heroine’s journey of faith with the more formative role of faith for the heroines in this project.