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Religion, gender, and the Virgin Mary: Catholics and Protestants
“Prior to the Henrician Schism, Marian devotion was an integral part of English Roman Catholicism. The Rosary was a popular devotion, Marian shrines and festivals abounded, and Elizabeth of York, the wife of Henry VII, followed the practice of well-born women to wear a girdle, supposedly the Virgin Mary’s, during pregnancy. While the sixteenth-century reformers sought to reduce the attention paid to Jesus’ mother, they were not hostile to her, especially in comparison to their Victorian successors. They praised her as a model of faith; they wanted merely to lower her status, not denounce her.
Their condemnation of Marian shrines and relics differed more in degree than in kind from the critiques of their Roman Catholic contemporaries like Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More. As England slowly became a (predominantly) Protestant nation during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603), Marian imagery was appropriated to describe the Queen. Scholars disagree about the extent to which the Virgin Mary continued to be invoked or whether Marian icongraphy was subsumed by descriptions of Elizabeth I.
However, their agreement that the imagery of the Virgin Mary continued to be used in a positive way suggests a continuation of the pre-Reformation tradition, even if the object of that idealisation may have changed. At the same time, an Anglican tradition of restrained Marian devotion began to develop, beginning with Lancelot Andrewes in Elizabethan England and continuing in the seventeenth century by Andrewes as well as other Caroline divines, including William Laud’s protégé Jeremy Taylor, Mark Frank and Herbert Thorndike, and the devotional writer Anthony Stafford, whose The femall glory was republished in 1869 by Orby Shipley, an Anglo-Catholic clergyman (and eventually a convert to Roman Catholicism).
At the parish level, after the Restoration Anglican clergymen held up the Virgin Mary as an examplar of adherence to church teachings. This tradition of a restrained Marian devotion was apparent in the poetry of Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath and Wells and a nonjuror after 1689. Ken praised Mary as ‘The true Idea of all Woman-kind’ and described her as ‘Mary ever bless’d, whom God decreed,/ Shou’d all in Glory, as in Grace, exceed’. This positive tradition coexisted with one that used the Virgin Mary as shorthand for unorthodox beliefs and practices.
Although the complaints could seem trivial – among the charges filed against Archbishop William Laud at his trial in 1644 was that, while he was chancellor of Oxford University, a statue of the Virgin Mary had been erected over the porch of the University Church of St Mary the Virgin – the fact was that even the apparent trivialities showed how widespread was the assumption that invocations of the Virgin Mary were sufficient evidence of deviation from Anglican orthodoxy. Anti-Marian rhetoric was one component of the anti-Roman Catholicism that characterised England during the reigns of Elizabeth and her successors.
The secret Jesuit missions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the attempted invasion by the Spanish Armada (1588), the Gunpowder Plot (1605), the periodic Jacobite invasions after 1688, and French involvement in the 1798 rebellion in Ireland all contributed to the popular stereotype of English Roman Catholics as actual or potential traitors. Partly because of a perceived link between Roman Catholicism and absolutism, anti-Roman Catholicism was one of the factors that helped incite the English Civil Wars (1642–49) and the ‘Glorious Revolution’ (1688–89).
Even a century later, when religious tensions had somewhat subsided, violent anti-Roman Catholicism briefly reappeared with the Gordon riots in London (1780). Anti-Roman Catholicism revived in the nineteenth century and was in some ways more significant than earlier manifestations of the prejudice. The vitality of religious conflict in this period has led Arnstein to argue that ‘it is more fruitful to look upon the Victorian conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism as a separate chapter rather than as a mere footnote to studies of the Reformation’, while Paz describes anti-Roman Catholicism as ‘an integral part of what it meant to be a Victorian’.
Many Victorians voiced the standard objections to Roman Catholicism: that the priesthood denied the believer a direct relationship with the Trinity; that Roman Catholics paid more attention to objects and saints than to the Trinity; that Roman Catholicism was not scripturally based; and that Roman Catholics’ blind obedience to priest and Pope predisposed them to prefer absolutist governments. The reinvigoration of anti-Roman Catholicism was partly a response to the increasing numbers of Roman Catholics.
The Roman Catholic population multiplied almost ten times, from 80,000 in 1770 to 750,000 in 1850, or to 3.5 per cent of the population, and became more urban and less dependent on the gentry. Much of the increase was due to the immigration of Irish people: by 1851 Irish Roman Catholics outnumbered English Roman Catholics by about three to one. However, anti-Roman Catholicism was so well-established prior to the 1820s that there was no obvious relationship between the number of Irish and the level of anti-Catholicism in any particular area. Roman Catholics’ higher public profile in the nineteenth century also contributed to the inflammation of prejudices against them.
Catholic emancipation (by the Catholic Relief Act of 1829) allowed Roman Catholic men who met the property requirements to enter Parliament. In the next decades the prayer campaigns for the conversion of England, which included daily repetitions of the Hail Mary, led by the converts Father Ignatius Spencer (born George Ignatius Spencer, a younger son of the second Earl Spencer) and Ambrose Phillips de Lisle (also Ambrose Lisle Phillips), revived the fear that English Protestantism was under assault, a fear that seemed to be confirmed by the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850.
This event, popularly derided as the ‘Papal Aggression’, marked the end of the missionary period in England and the regional missionary government, and gave Roman Catholics a leader within their country: Nicholas Wiseman, born a Roman Catholic, who had spent most of his adult life in Rome, first as a student and then as rector at the English College there. His return to London as the new cardinal of Westminster in November 1850, only days before Guy Fawkes’ Day, gave an added intensity to the annual anti-Roman Catholic activities and marked the apogee of public anti-Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century.
Anti-Roman Catholicism was further fuelled by the conversions of prominent Anglicans. A small number of privileged Anglicans, like Phillips de Lisle and Spencer, converted in the 1820s, but the public impact of these early conversions was limited. Anglicans became seriously concerned in the 1840s, when converts became both more numerous and of more prominent position. The most famous and, for Anglicans, unsettling conversion was that of Newman, in 1845.
His conversion had been some time in coming: dismayed by the 1841 controversy over his Tract 90, which argued at length that there was no contradiction between Roman Catholic doctrine and the 39 Articles, in 1843 he resigned as vicar of the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford. Even with these warning signs, his late-night, rural conversion in October 1845 sent shock waves throughout the Church of England. Tractarians lost one of their most prominent and articulate spokesmen, while their Anglican opponents seized on it as proof that Tractarianism ‘has furnished, and continues to furnish, to Romanism all its most valuable converts’.
…In particular, Anglicans worried that the material aspects of Roman Catholicism would seduce good Protestants. Sinclair warned: ‘Going merely to hear music at the convents and Popish churches often ends in going there to worship ... the excitement of listening to the Stabat Mater and such beautiful music in honour of Mary, is not only profane, but dangerous’. That the prevailing concern was with defections from within rather than assaults from without, when born Roman Catholics far outnumbered converts, suggests that Anglicans perceived weaknesses in their Church.
What Jenny Franchot has noted about anti-Roman Catholicism in antebellum America is also true for Victorian anti-Roman Catholicism: ‘anti-Catholicism operated as an imaginative category of discourse through which antebellum American writers of popular and elite fictional and historical texts indirectly voiced the tensions and limitations of mainstream Protestant culture’. Few were as sanguine as William Lockhart’s grandfather, who, on hearing that his grandson had converted, said: ‘Well, young men take odd courses, now-a-days; he might have taken to the turf.’
More typically, these conversions profoundly affected those involved, whether they remained in the Church of England or became Roman Catholic. Those who converted suffered many hardships, including, as David Newsome has noted, ‘social ostracism, alienation of friends, loss of money, position, and employment’. For twenty years after his conversion Newman did not see Keble and Edward Bouverie Pusey, two close friends with whom he had shared leadership of the Oxford Movement.
The grief felt by those who stayed was expressed by the high churchman and future Prime Minister Gladstone in a letter that in hindsight is doubly sad, given that its receipient, Robert Isaac Wilberforce, was to convert several years later: I do indeed feel the loss of [Henry Edward] Manning, if and as far as I am capable of feeling anything – It comes to me cumulated, and doubled, with that of James Hope. Nothing like it can ever happen to me again. Arrived now at middle life, I never can form I suppose with any other two men the habits of communication ... and dependence, in which I have now for fifteen to eighteen years had with them both.
…Gladstone’s and Wilberforce’s experiences were not uncommon for men of their class, for as Arnstein has observed: ‘Most significant nineteenth-century Englishmen had either a close friend or relative who became a convert to the Roman Catholic faith.’ Many converts were motivated by a search for the authority they believed to be absent from the Church of England. Their pre-conversion attitudes towards the Virgin Mary differed. For some, Marian devotion – or at least the desire for it – preceded conversion.
The year before he converted, Faber begged Newman for permission to pray to the Virgin Mary. (Permission was denied, on the grounds that religious practices should remain distinct.) On a trip to Paris in 1845, Sophia (Sargent) Ryder, whose late sister Caroline had been married to Manning, her husband George, and George’s sister Sophy purchased rosaries. Sophy was given a book of Marian devotions by Manning, who was in Paris at the time. All three Ryders converted in the spring of 1846.
Phillips de Lisle believed that the Virgin Mary encouraged his conversion to Roman Catholicism, which occurred in 1825, when he was 16 years of age. However, Marian devotion was a stumbling-block to others. Newman confessed that even in 1843, when he had essentially given up ministry in the Church of England, ‘I could not go to Rome, while I thought what I did of the devotions she sanctioned to the Blessed Virgin and the Saints.’
Some converts never did develop a warm Marian devotion. Manning, his gift to Sophy Ryder notwithstanding, was one of them. Nevertheless, the Virgin Mary was blamed for many of those conversions. The Anglo-Catholic bishop Edward Stuart Talbot remembered his mother saying ‘that those who went [into the Roman Catholic Church at mid-century] were those who had begun to practise devotions to the Blessed Virgin’.
This displacement conveniently allowed Anglicans to ignore the fundamental issues of ecclesiastical authority that troubled the converts and to dismiss them as having an inferior religiosity. While converts were not necessarily motivated by a desire for more Marian devotion than was allowed in the Church of England, once within the Roman Catholic fold they were likely to practise it. Those converts were a key reason why Marian devotion, which had not been a significant part of recusant Catholicism, revived from the 1830s.
…The increase in Marian devotion may have been, as Susan O’Brien argues, attributable in part to the congregations of French and Belgian nuns who began to establish English houses in the 1830s, and it may also have been, as Barbara Corrado Pope has suggested, an expression of anti-modernism. Regardless of their motivations, in practising Marian devotion the converts enacted on a personal level what was occurring on an institutional level.
In the Roman Catholic Church the century 1850–1950 is called the Marian age because of the many reported Marian apparitions, the declaration of the Immaculate Conception (1854), and a general increase in Marian devotion. Marian devotion had polemical as well as religious uses. Unlike their recusant forebears, who were forced by the legal and social situation to suppress public expressions of their faith, Victorian Roman Catholics were emboldened by their civic equality. Their greater confidence led them to invoke the Virgin Mary as a means to assert their identity as Roman Catholics.
…The Virgin Mary’s prominence in nineteenth-century England was not attributable solely to Roman Catholics, either their theology and devotional practices or the animosity these inspired. Keble’s and Sellon’s desire for limited Marian invocations demonstrates that the development of what came to be called ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ also played a role in generating those controversies. Anglo-Catholicism grew out of the high-church wing of Anglicanism.
High-church Anglicans emphasised ritual, ecclesiastical authority, and the Catholic identity of the Church of England; in politics their interests were often identified with those of the Tory Party. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, there were three main types of high-church Anglican: traditionalists, Tractarians, and ritualists. Traditional high church Anglicans defended both the English Reformations and the establishment of the Church of England.
They valued the writings of the early church, but they used them conservatively and in conjunction with the reformers, always insisting that Scripture was the basis of belief and that the Established Church had the right to abandon ancient traditions. They (along with many evangelicals) held the mainstream receptionist view of the Eucharist, that is, that Christ was present in the communion elements only to believers rather than to all who partook of the sacrament.
Although its fondness for ritual and tradition could lead to accusations that it was too close to Rome, traditional high-church Anglicanism was characterised by a fierce anti-Roman Catholicism, which was pungently expressed by the declaration of the clergyman Walter Farquhar Hook: ‘I have always hated the Church of Rome as I would hate the bitterest Enemy of my God.’ Other high-church Anglicans declared the Roman Catholic Church to be ‘a grossly idolatrous Church, debasing and enslaving her adherents’, as well as being the ‘twin sister’ of paganism, and they described Roman Catholics as indifferent or irreverent worshippers who had little knowledge of the Bible.”
- Carol Engelhardt Herringer, “Religion, gender, and the Virgin Mary.” in Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England 1830-1885
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The Protestant Virgin Mary: Protestants and the Catholic Mary
“Because the Protestant Virgin Mary was conceived in part as a means by which to undermine the Catholic version, Protestants had to confront that image directly. One of their principal objections to the Catholic Virgin Mary was theological: that, by becoming an object of devotion in her own right, she claimed the attention due to the Trinity alone. Protestants frequently criticised Roman Catholics for praying to Mary in the same way as they prayed to God, thus erasing the distinction between Creator and creature.
The anti-Tractarian evangelical divine Edward Bickersteth (who worked to convert Jews as well as Roman Catholics) charged that ‘in their ordinary worship they [Roman Catholics] intermingle devotions between God, the Virgin, and the saints’. Worse still, Roman Catholics were said to ignore God in order to pray to Mary. A member of the Northampton Mission of the Protestant Reformation Society described a ‘GREAT VOTARESS’ of the Virgin Mary who refused to listen to any talk of God, but insisted to her Protestant interrogator ‘betake yourself to the blessed Mother of God’, whom she credited with saving souls from hell.
This complaint was sufficiently familiar to have appeared in fiction, as well: the Roman Catholic priest in Kingsley’s novel Yeast prays to Mary instead of to God. As William Palmer of Worcester College, Oxford – a traditional high-church cleric who was one of Froude’s ‘Zs’ and (at the time) a friend of Newman – summed up the situation in the first of eight public letters he wrote in defence of the Church of England to Nicholas Wiseman, the Catholic Mary ‘receive[d] honours which are due only to the Trinity – honours which interfere with the sole prerogatives of the Deity’.
Protestants described Mary as having been deified by the Roman Catholic Church being ‘directly worshipped in the Roman Church’, and even as having been ‘installed as a fourth person of the Godhead!’ Because Protestants hardly ever publicly disagreed with the contention that Roman Catholics essentially worshipped Mary, Protestant controversialists could then argue that the powerful, prominent, Catholic Mary demonstrated ‘the absolute conformity of modern popery to ancient paganism’.
Protestants declared that Mary was but an updated version of ancient goddesses, including Juno, Venus, Isis, Astarte, and Minerva. Walter John Trower, the Anglican Bishop of Gibraltar, confided to his close friend the anti-Tractarian clergyman Charles Pourtales Golightly that his tours of the Continent had left him ‘convinced that the religion of these countries (especially Spain) is virtually Semi-Pagan; & ... the worship of B[lessed] V[irgin] M[ary] is the legitimate progeny of a substitute for the worship of the Magna Dea’.
While Trower made his point in a private letter, the characterisation was common enough to be found in popular novels like Romola, in which the rededication to the Virgin Mary of Pallas Athena’s Temple in Athens implied a connection between the two women. The frequency and confidence of such assertions made it easy for Catherine Sinclair to conclude: ‘The religion now taught by Romanists cannot be called Christianity, but is Mariolatry, a perfectly different faith.’ As evidence for these charges, Protestants generally cited earlier continental rather than contemporary English devotional sources.
To some extent they were forced to do so, because the relatively more restrained recusant and Victorian prayers provided few examples of the devotional fervour necessary to build their case. Additionally, continental sources allowed Protestants to depict Catholicism as a foreign religion, one that should be repudiated by good English men and women. Evidence for idolatrous Marian devotion was found in the Psalter reputedly compiled by St Bonaventure, which, as Tyler chided, ‘substitut[ed] Mary’s name for the God of Christians’.
Another favoured example was the medieval story of the two ladders. Birks warned the Bristol Protestant Alliance: Pictures have been printed and circulated, under the sanction of priests, in which two ladders are set up, reaching into heaven. At the top of one ladder is Christ; of the other, the Virgin. Those who strive to ascend the first, are seen falling back into the flames of hell through the inexorable severity of the Judge; but those, who choose the other ladder, are received into heaven, through the grace and intercession of the Virgin.
Protestants regularly invoked this story as evidence that ‘Romanism teaches that Mary is more merciful, and more willing to welcome sinners, than that Divine Saviour’. The Church and state gazette, an Anglican weekly newspaper, went further, declaring that it offered ‘proof of what the cardinal [Wiseman] and his co-religionists so often deny – namely, that the most blessed Virgin is exalted by the Romish Church into an object of worship, and invested with a power, unwarranted by Scripture, above that held by her gracious Son, our Lord and Saviour’.
By far the most frequently invoked example of ‘Mariolatry’ was an eighteenth-century work, Alphonsus Liguori’s The glories of Mary, a compilation of ‘miracles, revelations, favours, and particular cases’ demonstrating the efficacy of Virgin Mary’s intervention. Thomas Hartwell Horne, an evangelical Anglican clergyman and biblical scholar, condemned Liguori’s Marian devotions for exhibiting ‘idolatry’; Charles Hastings Collette, a solicitor who wrote numerous anti-Roman Catholic works, found those devotions to be ‘gross and glaring blasphemies’.
Palmer’s conclusion that Liguori ‘declares that the Virgin is a Goddess’ was widely shared by Protestant controversialists. One of the main objections to Liguori was his acceptance of the medieval belief, popularised by St Bernard of Clairvaux: ‘No grace, no pardon, emanates from the throne of the King of kings without passing through the hands of Mary.’ Collette complained that, in The glories of Mary, ‘Innumerable miracles are, likewise, said to be performed through the instrumentality of the Virgin, to attest [to] her all-powerful and omnipresent existence’.
Those miracles, which included securing confession for severed heads, saving a young man who sold his soul to the devil, and securing the escape of birds from hawks by crying out ‘Hail Mary’, were, the Church and state gazette declared, ‘enough to make the hair stand on end on the head of every one who is not willingly and blindly an idolator’. Using continental sources to prove their point that the Catholic Virgin Mary was a pagan goddess allowed Victorian Protestants to argue that Roman Catholicism was a foreign religion, and thus that neither it nor Anglo-Catholicism should be countenanced by the English.
Italian Marian images were most often invoked as evidence that Roman Catholics were pagan idolators. The geographical coincidence that Italy was both the seat of the Roman Catholic Church and the site of numerous pagan ruins enabled Protestants to link paganism and Roman Catholicism: they ridiculed the Pope as ‘the trembling, temporising Priest of the Virgin’ and Italians in general as ‘a superstitious people’.
‘If the “devotional feelings” of an Italian towards the Virgin are greater than towards his God’, Palmer argued, ‘I cannot but think that (whatever his faith may be in theory) the Virgin is practically his God’; while Seymour concluded that ‘the religion of Italy ought to be called the religion of Mary, rather than the religion of Christ!’ These Victorians are the counterparts to those described by Maura O’Connor in The romance of Italy and the English political imagination, whose support for the political unification of Italy led them to describe the Italians as rational citizens who were worthy of self-government.
Those Victorians who feared the adulteration of their Protestant religion were motivated instead to describe Italians as the childlike practitioners of a corrupt religion. As an Italian Jesuit reportedly assured Seymour, ‘the Italians were a people very different from the English; that the English loved a religion of the heart, and the Italians a religion of the senses; the English a religion of the feelings, and the Italians a religion for the taste; the English an inward and spiritual religion, and the Italian [sic] an outward and visible religion’.
Whether or not Seymour had an actual source for these comments, they did convey his belief, which was shared by many Victorian Protestants, that national differences manifested themselves in religious differences. Roman Catholics, who were synonymous with foreigners, were repeatedly described as practising a superficial, sensual religion, in contrast to the Protestant English, who sought a more reflective, spiritual relationship with their God. Surprisingly, Protestants paid little attention to Ireland and France, the two countries that historically had given the English the most worry.
The Irish were rarely accused of ‘Mariolatry’, even though many of the more baroque images of the Virgin Mary came from periodicals published in both London and Dublin (the most famous of which was the Dublin review). This absence was due partly to the fact that anti-Roman Catholic and anti-Irish feelings were not necessarily identified one with the other in Victorian England, for anti-Roman Catholicism was already well-established by the time waves of Irish immigrants entered England in the 1840s.
Given the regularity with which the ‘Irish question’ intruded on Victorian Britain’s politics, and the frequent intermingling of political and religious questions in the nineteenth century, this absence is also likely a result of the scarcity of Irish contributions to Victorian discourse about the role and nature of the Virgin Mary. Most of the extant sources are printed texts, which would have been the most widely circulated and thus the best means for entering the arena.
None of those texts seems to have been the work of any members of the largely working-class Irish immigrant population. In addition, Roman Catholic priests usually relied on sermon notes rather than writing out their sermons, and thus it would not have been easy for them to publish their sermons, as their Anglican and dissenting counterparts often did. The lack of published sermons removed a source to which Protestants could respond.
The scarcity of examples of Irish idolatry also reflected the travelling and living habits of those with the greatest access to the pulpit and the press: the English were far more likely to go to the Continent for the Grand Tour or for reasons of health or economy than to go to Ireland. (It was not until 1877 that Gladstone, whose career was so connected to the ‘Irish question’, made his first and, except for an extremely brief visit of several hours in 1880, only visit to Ireland; Benjamin Disraeli never crossed the Irish Sea.)
Therefore, although it loomed large in the English imagination, few Victorians had any first-hand experience of Ireland. In addition, while the English had long viewed Ireland as populated by inferior people who were potentially or actually subversive, self interest encouraged them to see the Irish as closer to being their equals, as Catholic emancipation (1829), the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland (1869), and the drive for Home Rule gave the Irish more of a role in political affairs.
Furthermore, Irish peasants represented little threat to English superiority: English men and women who were worried about protecting their political, social, and cultural hegemony were threatened more by the well-born, well-educated, and prominent Anglican converts to Roman Catholicism than by Irish peasants, about only half of whom were practising Roman Catholics, and in whom Roman Catholicism was understood to be an hereditary disability rather than a conscious choice.
French devotional practices were condemned somewhat more frequently, but again less than might be expected. This has much to do with changing circumstances in which foreign policy was made. As Linda Colley has noted, by 1837 ‘[v]ictory at Waterloo, and the onset of peace with dominance, meant that Britons were less likely to associate the Catholic presence at home with a military threat from abroad’.
With the proviso that the English continued to perceive a Catholic threat to their Protestant religion, I would extend Colley’s view to say that England’s growing military dominance and the improvement of AngloFrench relations under Victoria – notwithstanding occasional invasion scares, as at mid-century – meant the English were less likely to fear French invasions, either military or religious. In spite of the centuries long animosity between the English and the French, Britain and France allied themselves for the Crimean War (1853–56).
After Napoleon III (r. 1850–70) came to the throne, the ruling families of Britain and France became friendly, even exchanging family visits. These developing connections, along with the anti-clericalism that had characterised a significant part of French society since the Revolution, made it in general less appealing to target the French as pagan idolaters. As the identification of Marian devotion with other countries, especially Italy, shows, Victorian anti-Roman Catholicism was one expression of the traditional belief of the English in their national superiority, or rather of the traditional project of the English, evident since at least the eighteenth century, to convince themselves of their national superiority.
In the nineteenth century this national stereotype was often expressed in racial terms. As L. P. Curtis has noted: ‘Eminent Victorians, all of them intolerant to some degree, who were looking for a simple, unalterable, and universal affirmation of the superiority of English or Anglo-Saxon civilisation, clung to the notion of hierarchy or worth among the races of man.’ Victorian racial theories held that Anglo-Saxons were a superior group of people with a common Teutonic origin, thereby separating the English first from the Celts and then from ‘the savages of the non-Western world, in whom the Celtic character was painted with a darker brush’.
Victoria and Albert’s clothing, including their costumes for the masked balls Albert enjoyed during the early years of their marriage, were chosen, often by Albert, to identify them as British, even Anglo-Saxon, thus asserting a shared racial past in hopes of contradicting the reality that Albert was a foreigner. English Protestants were not entirely convinced, however, that their position at the apex of the hierarchy was secure.
In an age of pseudoscientific racial theorising, Victorians worried about the contamination of Anglo-Saxon purity by other groups, including continental ‘races’. They worried also that the growth of Catholicism would corrupt the Protestant religion which was integral to their sense of superiority. In 1864, the cleric Gordon Calthrop preached that the rapid growth in the number of Roman Catholic convents made it ‘absurd to shut our eyes to the fact, that Romanism is lengthening her cords, and strengthening her stakes, and extending and consolidating her influence, in the very heart and centre of this Protestant opposition’.
As late as 1875, when anti-Roman Catholicism was waning, a Protestant journal could report: ‘People are alarmed at the progress Romanism has made of late years. When they see here a convent and there a church, they lift up their hands in amazement and ask, Are the old times to return, and is Rome once more to enslave the land?’ The popular depictions of English Roman Catholicism as a foreign religion had little basis in fact, especially given the continuation of the recusant spirituality that Mary Heimann has shown characterised Victorian Roman Catholicism.
Although Susan O’Brien and other traditionalists have noted the influence transmitted by, for example, continental religious orders, the continued popularity of recusant devotional works throughout the nineteenth century provides strong evidence of a more moderate, and traditionally English, style of Roman Catholicism. While Protestants were far more likely to cite continental sources to buttress their portrayal of Roman Catholicism as a corrupt foreign religion, these were too fervent and florid to be typical of English Roman Catholicism.”
- Carol Engelhardt Herringer, “The Protestant Virgin Mary.” in Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England 1830-1885
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The Virgin Mary and the Formation of Victorian Masculinities: Masculinity and Christianity
“In the nineteenth century clerical authority declined as Christian beliefs, and the biblical backing on which they depended, were increasingly challenged by a variety of new ways of thinking, including evolutionary theories and the development of Higher Criticism. Clerical authority was challenged also by the laity within the Established Church, as was shown by Parliament’s decision to abolish many of the Irish bishoprics in 1833 (the impetus for Keble’s ‘National apostacy’ sermon that marks the beginning of the Oxford Movement) and by the lay Privy Council’s Gorham decision.
Furthermore, declining church attendance meant that fewer people heard, or apparently even thought they needed to hear, the sermons that constituted a primary means by which clergymen exerted their authority. The 1851 religious census revealed that only about half the people in England and Wales attended church services. The downwards trend continued over the course of the nineteenth century, especially in urban areas. By the beginning of the twentieth century only about 20 percent of London’s population regularly attended church.
Another, albeit more nebulous, potential challenge to the authority of the clergy was the popular notion that women were more spiritual than men. Crediting women with a higher spirituality was not intended to challenge clerical authority, because female influence was supposed to be simple and confined to the domestic sphere, leaving public pronouncements and the study of theology to men. However, in practice it could do so: if women were innately spiritual, they might reasonably conclude that they had no need to subordinate themselves to male religious guidance.
A few women did seem to reach that conclusion: in 1860 Catherine Booth began preaching alongside, and sometimes in place of, her husband (a decision that eventually allowed other Salvation Army women to preach), and Florence Nightingale recorded her heterodox religious views in Suggestions for thought (the proofs of which led Manning to discourage her from converting to Roman Catholicism). Scholars have described some Victorian women writers, including Christina Rossetti, Harriet and Jemima Newman, and Charlotte Yonge, as theologians, arguing that their contributions to religious discussions merit that title.
This valorising of women’s fiction and poetry would likely not have been understood by their Victorian readers or perhaps even by the women themselves. However, the limited number of public challenges to male religious authority did not necessarily lessen the clergy’s perception that the spiritual woman was a competitor. Certainly Protestant clergymen’s highlighting Jesus’ rebuke of Mary when she interfered in his public work suggests an anxiety that a stated belief in women’s moral superiority could allow women to challenge men’s monopoly on religion in the public sphere.
While Catholicism’s emphasis on priestly authority could forestall a feminist challenge, Protestants found it difficult to access that option, given their less exalted view of the clerical role and the fact that some Protestant denominations either allowed women to preach or had done in the recent past. The erosion of clerical authority was especially evident in the Church of England’s loss of cultural and political as well as religious authority throughout the nineteenth century.
Anglicans lost their monopoly on parliamentary seats from 1828 onwards, when dissenters were admitted, followed by Roman Catholics (1829), Jews (1858), and atheists (1886). They lost their monopoly on the ancient universities in 1854, with the abolition of religious tests at Cambridge and Oxford. The problem of lay authority over the Church, exercised through Parliament and the Privy Council, was compounded when non-Anglican laity entered those bodies. As Paz notes, in the nineteenth century ‘the Church [of England] had an embattled mentality, largely because it really was threatened from all sides’.
The secular world offered little support to clergy undergoing this erosion of authority. Clerics were unable to conform to the dominant Victorian models of masculinity, which demanded worldly success and stature that were at odds with many of the professed values of Christianity. The erosion of clerical authority was also related to the decline of men’s domestic authority, as the ideology of separate spheres designated the home as the woman’s sphere. This occurred in spite of the fact that the unstable ideology of separate spheres was not, nor could ever be, fully implemented.
Nevertheless, it was a powerful cultural force, especially for the middle and upper classes who were most associated with it. John Tosh has shown that separate spheres were maintained even in middle-class families where the father worked in or close to the home: ‘the separation of spheres was centrally a matter of mental compartmentalisation which did not necessarily depend on a physical gulf between home and work. Whether the husband worked at home or used it merely as a refuge, he had little to do with domestic labour or domestic management.’
This does not mean that domesticity was divorced from masculinity. On the contrary, as Tosh has persuasively argued, domesticity was a key factor in asserting a masculine self-identity, beginning with the process of establishing a household. Nevertheless, the psychological gulf created in part by men’s overall lack of involvement in the daily household management would have been more likely to affirm, rather than to contest, the ideology of separate spheres on the individual level.
The effects of industrialisation, including the increasing separation of home and work and the gradual withdrawal of children from the labour force, would also have led, especially in the working classes, to the father’s growing distance from his children. This the educated classes had already experienced: boys of the elite could be sent to boarding school as early as the age of 3. Certainly many of the men who wrote about the Virgin Mary, including Pusey and Kingsley, experienced this distance from their fathers.
It does not seem to have determined their views of the Virgin Mary, however, as Pusey had, in general, a positive view of her, while Kingsley ultimately saw her as a threat to masculine self-rule. Laymen from the middle and working classes could respond to these changes by emphasising characteristics designated masculine, especially competitiveness, physicality, and an aggressive sexuality.
Victorian clergymen, however, found it increasingly difficult to conform to the dominant models of masculinity, thanks in large part to the evangelical revival, which began in the second half of the eighteenth century, and the Oxford Movement. Both movements emphasised personal holiness and discouraged clergymen from pursuits that were typically masculine (at least for the educated and property-owning classes) such as riding, shooting and hunting, dancing, and gambling.
Mark Robarts, the cleric in Anthony Trollope’s Framley parsonage, illustrates the dilemma men in his profession faced: as he is drawn into the aristocratic world of debts, high-priced horses, and dubious morals, he is uncomfortably aware that all of this is especially forbidden to him. His patroness, Lady Lufton, condemns him with her remark: ‘Mr Robarts’ character as a clergyman should have kept him from such troubles, if no other feeling did so.’
Pusey, though never so gay a figure as Mark Robarts, avoided such chastisement when he gave up pleasures such as hunting and novel-reading following his encounters with Pietists in Germany. Since clerics were generally barred from demonstrating physical prowess – or at least this was not a source of stature for them – some sought to define their intellectual work as masculine against the common perception that it was feminine and passive.
As Adams has noted, they could do so by emphasising their self-discipline and identifying themselves as gentlemen: ‘The gentleman was thereby rendered compatible with a masculinity understood as a strenuous psychic regimen, which could be affirmed outside the economic arena, but nonetheless would be embodied as a charismatic self-mastery akin to that of the daring yet disciplined entrepreneur.’
A more obvious role model for clergymen was Jesus. Unfortunately for them, however, traditional representations of Jesus bore little resemblance to the ideal Victorian man: ‘the meek and lowly Jesus’, as an anonymous female writer described him at mid-century, was born into poverty, lived in relative obscurity, and died one of the most disgraceful deaths the Roman Empire could impose. He was a far cry from the ideal Victorian man who was supposed to strive and win, first on the playing fields, and then in the brutally competitive marketplace, in the military, or in Parliament.
Jesus’ apparent celibacy placed him further at odds with the masculine ideal. The importance of the family meant that life-long celibacy was not a Victorian value, especially for men. This was clear in the accusations that priestly celibacy – which was mandatory for Roman Catholics and increasingly popular among advanced Anglicans – was unnatural. Kingsley condemned Roman Catholic priests as ‘prurient celibates’ and scorned celibate men as ‘not God’s ideal of a man, but an effeminate shaveling’s ideal’, while the historian Richard T. Hampson was convinced that the ‘Celibacy of priests is of Pagan origin and signification’.
The vast majority of Victorian Christians who rejected life-long celibacy had to acknowledge, however, that Jesus was apparently a celibate. There is no suggestion in Scripture that he had a wife or children, which in any case would have enormously complicated Christian theology by positing a race of semi-divine descendants. In order to allow a celibate Jesus to fulfill the masculine role of creating a family, Protestants insisted that his dismissive response to his mother and brothers’ interruption of his preaching demonstrated that he had abandoned his biological family for the spiritual one he had formed.
Jesus, William Thomas Maudson declared, ‘took occasion from the circumstance, to disparage, and almost to disclaim, this earthly relationship, and to represent it as decidedly inferior to that resulting from a spiritual connexion’. In spite of the gulf between the biblical Jesus and the ideal Victorian man, the Victorian church witnessed the curious attempt to merge the two, or at least to make them compatible.
Muscular Christianity, described by Adams as a ‘peculiar amalgam of athletic and devotional rhetoric’, was more significant in its cultural outreach to working-class men than in its reconfiguring of Jesus’ image, but it was nevertheless important as a symptom of the anxiety some Victorian men felt about their self-identity. One of the classic expressions of this attempt to describe Jesus as the premier example of masculinity was Thomas Hughes’s ‘arresting little book’, The Manliness of Christ.
Better known as the author of the Tom Brown books, Hughes found Christ to be ‘the true model of the courage and manliness’ because he was patient, disciplined, focused, and reliable. Although Hughes believed that ‘[t]rue manliness is as likely to be found in a weak as in a strong body’, he hoped that Jesus’ cleansing of the Temple ‘should satisfy those who think courage best proved by physical daring’.
Muscular Christianity had at best limited success in redefining the image of Jesus. Peter Gay has argued that the Jesus described by Hughes did not exemplify muscular Christianity because his masculinity was ultimately premissed on his suffering. I would broaden the focus to argue that the suffering of Hughes’s Jesus was only the final example of his submission to God’s will, for Hughes describes Jesus as being ‘in perfect accord with the will of God’ throughout his life.
While submission to the will of another was hardly a hallmark of Victorian masculinity, the noted Brighton preacher Frederick W. Robertson attempted to redefine it as a masculine quality by describing Jesus’ suffering as exemplifying masculine self-sufficiency: [T]he strength that is in a man can be only learnt when he is thrown upon his own resources and left alone. What a man can do in conjunction with others does not test the man ... It is one thing to rush on to danger with the shouts and the sympathy of numbers: it is another thing when the lonely chieftain of the sinking ship sees the last boatful disengage itself, and folds his arms to go down into the majesty of darkness, crushed, but not subdued. Such and greater far was the strength and majesty of the Saviour’s solitariness.
Robertson’s image was unconvincing because the comparison was inexact. While Robertson deemed the captain who drowned rather than to take up a place in a rescue boat noble and courageous, at the most – and this part is not clear – the captain may have allowed someone else to be saved. In contrast, Christians believed that Jesus’ death saved all of humanity. Because Robertson does not explicitly say that the captain gave up his life to save another’s, an alternative but equally plausible reading of his analogy is to conclude that the captain’s death was an act of self-destruction in the guise of noble sacrifice.
While Robertson’s example illustrates the difficulty of finding contemporary comparisons to Jesus’ suffering as described in all four gospels, the problem lay in the attempt generally, rather than in the specific example. In fact, all of the efforts to define Jesus as an impressively self-reliant man failed, because the gospels describe a man whose actions and sense of self are at odds with the values of muscular Christianity. The impossibility of remaking the image of Jesus to conform to the demands of muscular Christianity was only the most obvious reason for the failure of that movement.
Another was that defining both Christ and his worshippers as masculine excluded women, who made up the majority of worshippers. When the Anglican cleric George Croly determined that Christianity was ‘a manly religion, addressed to manly understandings, and to be taught in manly language’, and called for ‘a large body of active, vigorous, and learned men, superintending the Establishment, and especially marshalling its learning and ability, for the contest with Sectarianism’, or when Hughes assured his audience that the ‘conscience of every man recognises courage as the foundation of manliness, and manliness as the perfection of human character’, they blatantly ignored more than half of their congregations.
Even when Hughes acknowledged the reality of female Christians he did not modify his basic understanding of Christianity as a masculine religion: ‘And then comes one of the most searching of all trials of courage and manliness, when a man or woman is called to stand by what approves itself to their consciences as true, and to protest for it through evil report and good report, against all discouragement and opposition from those they love or respect.’ He left his audience with the ludicrous image of a woman undergoing ‘trials of courage and manliness’.
Furthermore, the vigorous, at times even martial, language of those clergy who preached muscular Christianity left little room for traditional Christian virtues such as patience, humility, and charity. Finally, by positing a more limited and rigid definition of masculinity that virtually excluded women, muscular Christianity created the opportunity for a separate feminine presence to emerge; and that may have been an underlying factor in the failure of the movement.
In part to avoid this complication, Victorian Christians often abandoned the manly Jesus in favour of a Saviour who was described in feminine terms, a project that had a counterpart in Victorian paintings – including William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World, The shadow of death, and The finding of the Saviour in the Temple; Ford Madox Brown’s Christ washing Peter’s feet; and John Everett Millais’s Jesus in the house of his parents – that depicted Jesus as feminine, or even effeminate.
Mrs Ellis defined Jesus, in The daughters of England, as the exemplar of feminine virtues to the extent that, as Claudia Nelson has argued: ‘By the climax of the book, indeed, she is implicitly comparing women to Christ, the only man ever to exhibit the feminine self-sacrifice, pure devotion, and “capacity for exquisite and intense enjoyment.”’
The nonconformist cleric Henry Hamlet Dobney found Jesus to be ‘the compassionate Redeemer’ and assured Victorians that artists generally ‘assume a predominance of the feminine in him’, while the traditional high-church cleric Augustin Gaspard Edouart relied on ‘the Lord Jesus’s boundless mercy, tender love, and abundant compassion’, and praised Jesus as ‘an omniscient, merciful, all-powerful, tenderly loving Mediator, who is exactly suited to our need and requirements’.
Feminine and masculine qualities alternated here, as if Edouart wanted to insist that they were as completely intermingled as were Jesus’ human and divine natures. The Victorian stereotype of the loving mother as the counterpoint to the stern father who went out into the brutal world of the marketplace provided the antidote to the brutal competition associated with the public sphere. Jesus, as he was traditionally represented, did not require a feminine counterpoint to his work of salvation, which ignored the boundary between public and private, as he himself was represented in the gospels and in the Christian tradition as obscuring the distinctions between masculine and feminine.
Describing Jesus as both masculine and feminine eliminated Mary (and the feminine generally) as a competitor to the masculine as embodied by the Saviour, the role model especially for the clergy. It did not, however, solve the problem for Victorian clerics, who did not generally see themselves as embodying feminine as well as masculine traits. A more promising solution to the quandary of their declining authority was to define the Virgin Mary as a particular type of the feminine, against or in conjunction with which they could define themselves as independent men.”
- Carol Engelhardt Herringer, “The Virgin Mary and the Formation of Victorian Masculinities.” in Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England 1830-1885
#carol engelhardt herringer#victorian#history#victorians and the virgin mary#gender#religion#christian
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The Catholic Virgin Mary: Mary as the Model Christian
“Because she was defined as being uniquely close to God and one who had shown herself capable of freely choosing to do God’s will, the Catholic Mary was held up as the prime exemplar of Christian faith. Catholics believed that Mary’s faith was evident throughout the gospels. They were sure that her mere presence at the wedding at Cana was due to her faithfulness to her son’s mission, and when the hosts ran out of wine her faith was displayed in her ‘humble yet fearless confidence in the power and readiness of Jesus to supply the lack’.
Catholics found contemporary praise for Mary in the unnamed woman who called out to Jesus, ‘Blessed is the womb that bore thee, and the paps that gave thee suck.’ Jesus deflected the praise, saying, ‘Yea rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.’ However, Catholics turned Jesus’ apparent rebuke to Mary’s advantage, arguing that Jesus had not denied the worth of Mary’s motherhood, but had only praised her faith more than her maternity. Jesus had acknowledged, Williams contended, only that ‘it was by the faith of the Blessed Virgin that our Incarnate Lord was to be born of her’.
Roman Catholics even transformed that praise into a prayer: ‘Blessed is the womb of the Virgin Mary, that bore the Son of the eternal Father. And blessed are the paps that gave suck to Christ our Lord.’ A key component of the feminine ideal was the belief that women were more spiritual than men. The Virgin Mary, already the exemplar of female piety in Catholic discourse, was enlisted to serve as a model of female behaviour.
…the Catholic Mary modelled the sort of behaviour that conduct manuals constantly urged on Victorian girls and women. She could also serve as a model of maternal religious behaviour. Scandalised by the ‘extremely negligent’ mothers who allowed their children ‘to wander from home without necessity, to amuse themselves in public streets, to play in bye-ways and roads, in a word, to do just as their whims suggest’, Father Sebastian urged the women who read his Manual of devotions in honour of the seven dolours of the Blessed Virgin Mary: ‘Imitate the example of the Blessed Virgin; she, like a prudent and virtuous parent, took to the Temple whilst very young her Divine Son Jesus; she did so, as you have seen, for your particular instruction.’
In these ways the Catholic Virgin Mary could seem like the type of woman who was frequently praised by Victorian commentators: she was a cheerful helper whose responsibilities were domestic and religious. However, a woman’s sphere of action was usually limited to her own family or, at most, her own community. This was generally true even after the 1860s, when women were urged, in exhortations such as John Ruskin’s popular lecture ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’, to apply their domestic virtues to the outside world.
Even in those representations of female influence, women were never envisioned as competitors to men. The Catholic Virgin Mary, however, was given no such limitations, for her sphere became the entire world when Catholics described her as being the mother of all believers. The scriptural basis for that belief was Jesus’ assigning his mother and his favourite disciple into each other’s care just before he died.
Phillips de Lisle explained that ‘by bearing him she became entitled spiritually to be the mother of all the elect; for they are the mystical members of Christ, and they are also called in scripture his brethren: so that the church interprets our Lord’s words on the cross, wherein he commanded St John to look upon Mary as his mother, as addressed to all the elect’. This traditional belief had been maintained by recusants, but in the Victorian era it became more popular and was even adopted by some advanced Anglicans.
In ‘Mother out of sight’, Keble urged Christians to turn to Mary, ‘[o]ur own, our only Mother’,142 while Shipley found evidence for this trope in the traditional parallel between Mary and Eve: ‘If we say that the latter is the Mother of all sinners, because of her consent to sin, so we must say that our Lady is the Mother of the righteous, through her consent to the Incarnation.’ Lay orders such as the Confraternity of the Scapular of Mount Carmel and sodalities like the Children of Mary encouraged Roman Catholics to think of Mary as a protective mother.
…Catholics further expanded Mary’s sphere of action when they posited her as a model for male as well as female behaviour. Although Protestants frequently complained that the Catholic Virgin Mary stood between the divine and the devout, there was a strain of Catholic thinking which said that believers who imaginatively experienced what Mary experienced would become closer to God. Thus Catholic men as well as women were told to imagine Mary’s experiences in their prayers.
…the Catholic Mary did not merely uphold existing gender boundaries: she also undermined those boundaries, which many Victorians struggled so hard to maintain, when she was enlisted in the project to urge men to imagine the experience of pregnancy. Furthermore, the celebration of her pregnancy as a creative endeavour that all Christians should imagine for their spiritual profit severed pregnancy from its traditional associations with nature and in opposition to masculine reason.
Instead, pregnancy was re-imagined in this case as something creative and desirable. The Catholic Virgin Mary was never merely a promoter of those feminine virtues that restricted women to the domestic sphere: she could also undermine the theory of separate spheres that supported the feminine ideal.”
- Carol Engelhardt Herringer, “The Catholic Virgin Mary.” in Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England 1830-1885
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The Protestant Virgin Mary: Mary as an Ordinary Woman
“The Protestant portrait of the Virgin Mary was at its most positive in its depiction of her at the Annunciation, when she was described as having done God’s will in bearing Jesus. James Endell Tyler, a traditional high-church and anti-Roman Catholic writer who became canon of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1845, lauded Mary at the Annunciation as ‘a spotless virgin, humble, pious, obedient, holy: a chosen servant of God’, while the Methodist minister and professor Thomas Jackson was certain that in her ‘early life Mary was an example of deep piety’.
Drawing on legends from the early church and the Middle Ages, the nonconformist minister Henry Hamlet Dobney described the young woman whom the angel encountered as one whose ‘youth had been consecrated to God. Her mind was familiar with the high and holy themes on which the psalmists and prophets of Israel had loved to dwell, and she nourished her heart with the sublime hopes that they inspired.’ However, the Protestant Mary exercised those virtues passively rather than actively when, with ‘prompt resignation’, she ‘meekly ... yielded up her entire self, body, soul, and spirit, to the will of the Highest’.
When Protestants could describe the Virgin Mary as embodying the traits they believed were inherently female – purity, obedience, maternity – they could praise her as an admirable woman. For example, at the Annunciation she closely resembled the modest, devout, young women praised in Victorian texts. Here she could be imagined as exemplifying Sarah Ann Sewell’s advice that ‘it is a man’s place to rule, and a woman’s to yield. He must be held up as the head of the house, and it is her duty to bend so unmurmuringly to his wishes.’
Womanly submission led to household harmony, or, as at the Annunciation, harmony between heaven and earth. It is here that we can accept Sally Cunneen’s assertion: ‘In part because Mary seemed so much like the Victorian ideal, especially because of her maternity, she began to receive a curiously positive reception among some distinguished Protestant writers.’ Her virtues of humility, piety, and obedience notwithstanding, the Protestant Mary was not uniquely blessed by becoming the mother of Jesus. (She was not the Mother of God, a title the traditional high-church cleric Edward Wilson dismissed as an affectation, but only ‘the mother of our Lord’s humanity’.)
A variety of Protestants cited Deborah’s praise of Jael – ‘Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber be’ – to show that it was no extraordinary mark of praise to call a woman ‘blessed’. On the surface, this was simple textual criticism, evaluating one phrase in its larger context in order to argue against using even the scriptural first half of the Hail Mary. However, likening Mary to a minor biblical figure also subtly undermined even the praise she had earned at the Annunciation and thus laid the groundwork to reduce her status to that of an ordinary woman.
This opportunity was taken by the writer Annette Calthrop when she argued that Jael was no heroine but a ‘traitress’ and a ‘murderess’ for inviting Sisera into her tent in order to kill him. Thus she reminded her readers that Jael had done a man’s work and claimed a man’s honour when she took revenge on Sisera. Although Calthrop purported to contrast Mary, who had been praised by an angel, positively against Jael, who had been lauded by mere mortals, her disparaging of Jael tainted Mary also, given the tradition of equating the two women.
Invoking Jael also could be a reminder of the popular stereotype of women as duplicitous, a stereotype that coexisted with and was not eradicated by the stereotype of women as morally superior to men. Finally, the comparison with Jael – who performed a symbolic rape when she murdered Sisera by driving a tent peg through his head – could subtly strengthen the criticism that Mary interfered with Jesus’ work, either by trying to involve herself in his public work or by diverting attention away from him.
The equating of Mary and Jael defined Jesus’ mother as an unnatural woman. Pregnancy was historically one of the markers of women’s closeness to nature; it was taken to signify that women, like animals, were governed by their bodies rather than by their minds, as men constantly were claimed to be. However, the lengthy Catholic tradition of describing Mary’s pregnancy as a manifestation of her unique relationship with the divine, coupled with the centrality of the Incarnation in Christian tradition and the privileging of maternity in Victorian culture, made it difficult to redefine it as a negative.
Protestants rarely described the Virgin Mary in positive terms. Here their traditionally close reliance on the gospels’ narrative allowed them to ignore, for the most part, Mary’s pregnancy. The Protestant Mary, like the scriptural Mary, made only brief appearances while pregnant. On the rare occasions Protestants acknowledged her pregnancy, they did so usually in the manner of the traditional high-churchman Samuel Wilberforce, who in 1842 airily assured Queen Victoria and her court: ‘At length the months of waiting passed away, and the gracious birth was come.’
(Given the Queen’s dislike of childbearing, one wonders whether she had sardonically wished that the months of pregnancy were so fleeting or had scorned Wilberforce for being unrealistic.) The anonymous author of The Virgin Mary, a married woman was unusual in choosing to discuss Mary’s pregnancy in more detail, but he did so only to assert that she remained unchanged by her close contact with the divine. He rejected Ullathorne’s thesis that the blood flowing between Mary’s heart and the developing Jesus had, with every heartbeat, ‘enrich[ed] her with His divinest spirit’.
Instead, he argued: ‘The child ... takes from the mother but imparts nothing to her, and not one particle of the Godhead of Jesus was imparted to Mary, nor could she by becoming His mother derive from Him any of His special attributes, whether fleshly or otherwise; nor by giving birth to the sinless did she herself attain that perfection’. Describing pregnancy as a one-way process (as indeed, biologically, it was), this anonymous Protestant author subverted the traditional image of the selfless pregnant woman when he implied that the Catholic Virgin Mary was a potentially predatory mother who would steal Jesus’ divinity.
Having undone the connection between Mary’s pregnancy and her close relationship with the divine, he may have hoped that his readers would be mindful of the negative tendencies associated with women’s fertility, including their alleged susceptibility to hysteria, a medical term that itself asserts the connection between women’s childbearing capacities and their irrationality. The Mary he described, who was spiritually removed from the child she carried, had all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of pregnancy. Curiously untouched by her pregnancy, she was equally detached from the divine.
The rarity of this line of reasoning, however, suggests the difficulty of defining Mary’ pregnancy as anything other than a positive event, in her life as well as in the Christian history of salvation. It was perhaps for this reason that Victorian Protestants usually declined to discuss Mary’s pregnancy. The growing importance of Christmas as a holiday, encouraged in part by Charles Dickens’s A Christmas carol (which itself places the mother, Mrs Cratchit, at the centre of family life) and Victoria and Albert’s popularisation of the Christmas tree, meant that Nativity images became more common.
For example, most of the references to the Virgin in Hymns ancient & modern – which, although produced by Tractarians and their sympathisers, was determinedly ecumenical – are in Christmas hymns. Images of the Virgin and Child inspired diverse reactions, tempered by an individual’s position and goals. Elite Protestants, especially those with no particular public anti-Catholic agenda, were the most likely to respond neutrally to these images which, when they encountered them abroad, they could regard as aesthetic objects or local curiosities rather than devotional aids that were an affront to their own religiosity.
They often noted images of the Madonna and Child in continental churches and village shrines with little, if any, negative comment. They generally regarded them as charming examples of a foreign culture, albeit one that was deplorably over-emotional and ignorant of the true faith. They responded more positively to artistic images, perhaps because they could be approached as aesthetic rather than religious objects. The politician Austen Henry Layard, who was convinced that the Roman Catholic Church was filled with ‘superstitions, and clogs upon the intellectual development of men’, nevertheless described a Giorgione painting of the Madonna and Child he saw in Madrid in 1872 as ‘very charming’, with no mention of either goddess worship or superstition.
Thirty-seven years earlier, as a young man visiting the Louvre, he had been impressed by ‘a Virgin and Child by Murillo which I thought wonderful’. Although the art historian and author Anna Brownell Jameson was unsympathetic to Roman Catholicism and ‘the worship of the Madonna’ she believed it to promote, her tone softened noticeably when she discussed representations of the Madonna and Child in her Legends of the Madonna as represented in the fine arts.
She decried those images, so beloved by Catholics, of the baby Jesus and Mary embracing as ‘a deviation from the solemnity of the purely religious significance’, but she found more formal pictures of the Madonna and Child to be ‘sublime conceptions’. When viewing these works, she admitted, ‘it is difficult, very difficult, to refrain from an Ora pro Nobis (Pray for us)’. Not everyone could accept such images of the Virgin Mary as aesthetically pleasing depictions of a loving mother or as charming foreign relics.
Those who recognised the polemical value of anti-Roman Catholicism described Mary as the anxious, unsure mother of an aloof infant. Samuel Wilberforce described an uneasy Nativity scene in which a humble and awestruck Mary made a futile attempt to understand her newborn son. There was the full tide of a mother’s love for the Babe which slept beside her; there was the awful reverence of her pious soul for the unknown majesty of Him who of her had taken human flesh. Depths were all around her, into which her spirit searched, in which it could find no resting-place. How was He, this infant of days, the everlasting Son? How was He to make atonement for her sins and the sins of her people? When would the mystery begin to unfold itself? As yet it lay upon her thick and impenetrable; all was dark around her.
…While the figure of the Virgin Mary had less cultural authority in Protestant than in Catholic cultures, representations of her as the mother of Jesus carried more weight than those of other mothers, such as appeared in novels, conduct manuals, or parliamentary commissions. In shifting the power balance from the mother, who should have been the protector, to the son, Wilberforce and Barrett also subtly undermined the image of mothers in general as the loving and powerful protectors of their infants. Unflattering portraits such as Wilberforce’s and Barrett’s were unusual, however, because it was difficult to describe any mother of a newborn, let alone the woman Christians believed to be the mother of the Saviour, in negative terms.
Protestants who wished to limit the attention paid to the mother and focus on the infant usually ignored, as much as possible, the Virgin Mary at the Nativity. ‘S.M.’ deflected attention away from Mary when she instructed her readers in Charlotte Elizabeth’s evangelical and anti-Roman Catholic Christian lady’s magazine: ‘Take notice, the wise men paid no adoration to the virgin mother, but to the child only; they fell down and worshipped Him.’ When the clergyman (and friend of the Ruskins) Daniel Moore mentioned Mary in his 1854 lectures on the birth of Jesus, he usually coupled her name with that of Joseph, thereby implicitly equating the relationship of mother and foster-father.
Demonstrating the latent anti-Semitism characteristic of even well-educated Victorians, Moore ascribed Mary and Joseph’s lack of knowledge of Micah’s prophecy regarding Bethlehem to the ‘very low condition ... of the whole Jewish nation, in regard to their religious intelligence, coupled with the obscurity and impoverished circumstances of Joseph and Mary’. For the Protestant Mary and Joseph, poverty and obscurity were not signs of praiseworthy humility but an occasion for condemnation. Devotional images of the Madonna and Child were another matter, however, especially for the Protestant controversialists who sought inflammatory images to support their charges that Catholicism was a pagan religion.”
- Carol Engelhardt Herringer, “ The Protestant Virgin Mary.” in Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England 1830-1885
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Religion, Gender, and the Virgin Mary: The Feminine Ideal
“Competing religious traditions were one of the major sources of the Marian debates, but they were not the only source. Indeed, conflicts between Catholics and Protestants had characterised England since the sixteenth century, yet representations of the Virgin Mary were the subject of lengthy and intense public discussions only in the nineteenth century. The peak years for concern over the Catholic Virgin Mary were roughly 1830–85, the same period in which the feminine ideal – that contradictory, ever-evolving image of woman as the embodiment of selfless, sexless love – was ascendant.
There was, of course, no single model embodying the feminine ideal, but the repeated descriptions in a variety of genres – including novels, poetry, sermons, parliamentary reports, medical books, and conduct manuals – of women who were characterised primarily as pure and loving shaped an iconic figure. That figure was recognised (and parodied) by Victorians, and has been analysed by scholars of the period, even as the emphasis in the latter decades of the twentieth century has been on deconstructing and destabilising this figure.
Not just for simplicity’s sake, but also to acknowledge the power of those representations as injunctions, especially over women, the term ‘feminine ideal’ has utility. The timing as well as the content of the Marian debates suggests that the other significant factor in inspiring them was the anxious attempt, characteristic of much Victorian discourse, to define woman’s nature and duties. One of the main disputes between Catholics and Protestants was whether, and if so to what extent, Mary embodied the three major characteristics most often asserted to be innately feminine: whether she was sinless; whether she remained a virgin; and whether she was a model mother.
While the theological, liturgical, and cultural differences between Catholics and Protestants provided the foundation for and one of the sources of the Marian debates, the timing and content of the critique of the Catholic Virgin Mary make it clear that a desire to define woman’s nature also was a motivating factor. I do not posit a crude correlation in which a Victorian concerned to limit or extend the scope of the maternal role would seize on representations of the Virgin Mary as a vehicle to express those concerns, but rather a less conscious relationship in which those who lived in a culture preoccupied with defining woman’s nature were drawn to this figure who had traditionally embodied one of the dominant types of the feminine.
The opposite also happened, that those drawn to the Virgin Mary for religious reasons viewed her through the prism of their culture’s gender norms. Personal motivations played a role for some: those, for example, who idealised their own mothers or who wished they had had an ideal mother may have been drawn to describe the Virgin Mary as the mother they either remembered or wished they had known. Some men whose mothers had died when they were young had a strong Marian devotion, like the Roman Catholic converts Faber and Phillips de Lisle. However, men who had a distant or otherwise unsatisfactory relationship with their mothers – including Newman, Ullathorne, and Williams – also championed Marian devotion.
Even men who resisted maternal interference – like Wiseman, who suppressed his mother’s written protest to his vicar when he took minor orders at the age of 18 – could imagine that Mary influenced Jesus, even in heaven. Likewise, those who described the Virgin Mary as an ordinary woman could have difficult mothers, as Samuel Wilberforce did, or one like the leading evangelical Edward Bickersteth’s, who ‘was a woman of uncommon mental strength and energy, too firm and wise to be over-indulgent, and yet so loving that she secured the fondest affections of her children’.
Men could also express reservations about Marian devotion while still praising their wives as pious helpmeets. In general there is no overall correlation between the Catholic or Protestant images of the Virgin Mary and individuals’ experiences with women, especially their mothers. In any event, when Victorian Christians praised or condemned how they believed the Virgin Mary had acted, they also revealed what they thought was properly feminine or masculine behaviour.
This use of the Virgin Mary is unsurprising: in his survey Mary through the centuries: her place in the history of culture, Pelikan has argued that historically the Virgin Mary ‘has provided the content of the definition of the feminine in a way that he [Jesus] has not done for the masculine’. This flexibility is possible because so little is known about this woman who was both physically absent and yet symbolically central to the Christian story of redemption.
Except for the narratives of the Annunciation and Nativity in the Gospel of Luke, Mary appears only briefly in the gospels; sometimes she does not even speak. The lack of detailed information about her has allowed Christians to define her in ways that are useful to them. As Cunneen has noted: ‘For centuries, ordinary people, as well as theologians and artists, have projected their own needs onto Mary.’ Scholars have usually assumed that nineteenth-century Marian representations merely ratified the rather uninteresting status quo of the docile domestic woman.
Cunneen has asserted that ‘Mary seemed ... much like the Victorian [feminine] ideal’, an equation later repeated by Kimberly van Esveld Adams, who makes ‘the Angel in the House’ synonymous with ‘the domestic Madonna, who is one of the most familiar icons of Victorian womanhood’. Claudia Nelson has argued that in some of her many guises the Angel in the House could ‘expand into a semisecular Virgin Mary’, and, with Ann Sumner Holmes, refers to the Victorian idealisation of the mother as ‘widespread secular mariolatry’.
The apparent correlation between the two figures has led Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach, and William Veeder Sheets to conclude that in the Victorian era ‘the Anglo-American attitude toward Mary herself is generally positive’ and even that ‘[t]his self-effacing, Mary-like ideal remains a female standard for the rest of the era’. The equation of the Virgin Mary with the evolving composite known as the feminine ideal is problematical in part because it assumes a single representation of the Virgin Mary.
Instead, there were two competing images. The Catholic Virgin Mary was a sinless virgin mother who retained her extraordinary influence with her son throughout eternity and was a model for Christian behaviour. In contrast, the Protestant Virgin had a limited maternal role, bore subsequent children, and shared with all humans the guilt of both original and actual sin. This Virgin was a development of the Protestant reformers’ desire to limit the attention the faithful paid to Jesus’ mother.
Thus they sharply scaled back addresses to her, rejected relics associated with her, and abandoned Marian shrines (including Our Lady of Walsingham in England). The reformers had, however, reduced the emphasis on Jesus’ mother while still believing that she was the ever-virgin mother who exemplified Christian virtues. In contrast, Victorian Protestants paid more attention to the Virgin Mary in order to describe her as an ordinary and not particularly admirable woman.
Thus a spectrum developed in which the idealised woman was positioned between the two Marys. Although these three types overlapped to some degree, the Victorian ideal was less powerful than the Catholic Virgin but more admirable than the Protestant Virgin. This is not so much a disagreement with as a modification of Singleton’s delineation of three Virgin Marys visible in Victorian England: the one loved by Catholics and the two produced by Protestants, ‘the mother of Jesus, who was a respected figure from the pages of Scripture, and the Virgin Mary, who was the personification of Irish superstition and Romish idolatry’.
…Victorian Protestants viewed the Virgin Mary described by Catholics as a woman who used her motherhood to usurp her son’s role. At the forefront of describing the Virgin Mary thus were Protestant clergymen. This was the group most closely associated with defining and deploying the feminine ideal after it had been described by evangelical clergymen in the late eighteenth century; they were crucial in ensuring that it was part of mainstream culture by the 1830s. In this effort they were joined by others who influenced contemporary opinion, including writers and politicians.
The Catholic Virgin Mary was the prototype for this figure: both were defined as maternal, non-sexual, and morally superior. One crucial difference between the two women was that the feminine ideal, especially as described in canonical literature after mid-century, often had to develop these characteristics, whereas in Catholic tradition the Virgin Mary had them from the moment of her conception.
Although the Catholic Virgin Mary was the prototype for the feminine ideal, Protestants nevertheless criticised her for possessing those characteristics that they declared were integral to woman’s nature. Their choice to critique the Catholic Virgin Mary can be only partially explained by the religious antagonism that characterised Victorian England; their timing and their heated rhetoric suggests that they were actually uneasy with envisioning women as powerful by virtue of their motherhood and moral superiority.
I do not suggest that their representations of the Virgin Mary were calculated to limit women’s public power, but the effect of their repeatedly describing a woman who overestimated the influence she could have on her son in his work was to define the public sphere as male. Furthermore, they went beyond trying to limit Marian devotion, as their predecessors had, when they described the Virgin as a bad mother. They also declined the obvious opportunity to assert any sort of admirable woman in the place of the Virgin Mary.
The result was that the most famous exemplar of feminine virtues in Western Christianity was set aside and not replaced, even with a more ordinary example of praiseworthy female behaviour such as might come from their congregations. In the late twentieth century, scholarship on the realities and representations of women in Victorian England has been both prolific and profitable, extending and complicating our knowledge of Victorian women of all classes, regions, and occupations.
The casual assumption, evident in Walter Houghton’s The Victorian frame of mind, that the feminine ideal described the reality of most women’s experiences began to be challenged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the influences of social history and the ‘second wave’ of feminism began to result in investigations of the experiences of ordinary women and groups of women. Scholars came to understand that the ideal was, as Mary Poovey has said of the ideology that produced it, ‘both contested and always under construction; because it was always in the making, it was always open to revision, dispute, and the emergence of oppositional formulations’.
Nelson, Catherine Robson, and Meredith Veldman have traced back the instability of separate spheres to childhood. Those oppositional formulations included the presence of prostitutes and other ‘fallen women’, as well as those, like John Stuart Mill and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, who campaigned for more equal treatment for women. A more recent attack on the ideal’s relevance comes from those scholars who question whether the Victorian era marked a significant break with earlier ideologies and assumptions.
The ideology of separate spheres, which relied heavily on the construction of a feminine domestic presence to counterbalance a more aggressive masculine presence in the public sphere, has traditionally been interpreted as a response to industrialisation, yet recently some have questioned the degree to which industrialisation removed women from the workforce. Amanda Vickery has argued that Victorian constructions of femininity were not substantially different from those of previous eras.
She rejects ‘the conceptual vocabulary of “public and private” and “separate spheres” deployed so extensively in women’s history ... [because] it has little resonance for the prosperous women’ in Georgian England. Her argument in The gentleman’s daughter is undermined, however, by its definition of ‘public’ as leisure spectacles rather than the more traditional one of the marketplace or the ‘public square’.
More recently, Judith S. Lewis has confirmed, in Sacred to female patriotism: gender, class, and politics in late Georgian Britain, the traditional view that, by the end of the eighteenth century, political reform movements and the rise of evangelicalism combined to shift women’s activities from political and public ones to more private endeavours such as philanthropy and religion. The deconstructions of both the feminine ideal and the ideology that produced it are useful reminders that this composite iconographic figure was not monolithic and could never be fully implemented.
However, we risk going too far and relegating it to the margins when in fact its psychological power enabled it to play a significant part in the lives of many Victorians. This image of womanhood was associated most with the middle classes, but it touched all levels of Victorian society. Working-class movements like Chartism adopted it as proof of their respectability, while its intimate affiliation with organised religion ensured that it had a wide influence.
The feminine ideal, in spite of its necessarily imperfect implementation, was one of the defining characteristics of Victorian culture. The many Victorians who criticised the Catholic Virgin Mary for precisely those ways in which she conformed to and extended the ideal, and their positing a less attractive version of this woman, suggest that those most closely associated with promoting the ideal had doubts about its effects on society or its attainability.
Protestant Victorians’ new interest in defining the Virgin Mary as a woman of limited power and virtue coincided with the period when women were urged to model themselves after this complicated and contradictory image of womanhood. This timing, as well as the often harsh rhetoric, suggests that they were responding to factors besides religious differences. The Catholic Virgin Mary demonstrated that the very virtues that were intended to restrict women to the domestic sphere were in fact means by which to access the public sphere.
Roman Catholics addressed prayers to her, exhibited and paraded statues of her, and believed she could intercede with Jesus on their behalf. The hostile reactions to this woman suggest that the feminine ideal failed not merely because it was internally contradictory and therefore unstable, nor because it was difficult if not impossible for women to incorporate its precepts into their private lives.
A third reason for the ideal’s collapse was that those who promulgated it realised, when confronted with the Catholic Virgin Mary, that an exceptionally virtuous woman could access a great deal of power. The Catholic Virgin Mary thwarted the purpose of the ideal, which was designed to prevent women from competing with men in the public sphere. Because the Marian debates were part of a diffused cultural dynamic, no evidence exists of an absolute connection between hostile reactions to the Catholic Virgin Mary and anxiety about the power implicit in representations of woman as morally superior and self-sacrificing.
The absence of absolute evidence does not undermine my argument, however. That argument is made by the preponderance of evidence that the Protestant hostility to the Catholic Virgin Mary, which differed in quality and quantity from that of the Reformation and post-Reformation critiques, was encouraged by something other than theological or liturgical differences. The Marian controversies became most heated during the decades in which the feminine ideal was dominant, and they focused on the three characteristics alleged to be essentially feminine: virginity, maternity, and moral superiority.
The Marian debates were dominated by men, especially the clergy. Few women wrote publicly and extensively on the Virgin Mary, partly because they were less likely than men (especially clerics) to have either the training or the outlet for such writing. More significantly, neither Virgin Mary was a viable role model for Protestant women: the Catholic Mary was culturally too foreign, while the Protestant one was too docile.
The Virgin Mary was not so obviously a role model for men, but they had a specific motivation that women lacked: by defining the Virgin Mary, they could define their own masculine identity. Catholic men generally described a woman who ultimately ratified masculine authority, either because she was so exceptional that her power and prestige could not be accessed by other women or because she was a loving mother who ultimately submitted to divine authority, which was understood to be masculine.
Protestant men used harsher language to achieve the same goal of strengthening masculine authority. The degree of animosity they expressed suggests that they perceived masculine authority as being threatened by the figure of a strong mother. Their willingness to denounce the Catholic Virgin Mary, the woman who exemplified the virtues said to be innately feminine, and to replace her with a more ordinary woman indicates that the potential challenge to masculine prerogatives was most apparent to the Protestant clergy who were, ironically, closely identified with the promulgation of the ideal.
Peter Gay, James Eli Adams, Sean Gill, Nelson, and Veldman have described how the feminisation of religion in the nineteenth century, coupled with the ungendered virtues promoted by Christianity– including charity, chastity, and humility – made it difficult for Christian men, and especially the clergy, to defend the ideology of separate spheres on which the masculine ideal was premised.
One solution to that quandary was to reject a woman whose virtues and power made her preeminent among humans in order to reclaim religion as a masculine enterprise, thus justifying the clerical monopoly on the pulpit, and by extension male control of the public sphere. An analysis of the Marian debates therefore addresses what Michael Roper and John Tosh call the ‘crucial problem’ of analyses of masculinity, that ‘women are almost entirely absent from these accounts, seemingly on the assumption that masculinity takes on a sharper focus when women are removed from the scene’. On the contrary, those debates reveal that masculinity is shaped with an awareness of, and often in response to, femininity.”
- Carol Engelhardt Herringer, “Religion, Gender, and the Virgin Mary.” in Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England 1830-1885
#carol engelhardt herringer#history#victorian#gender#religion#christian#victorians and the virgin mary#english
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The Protestant Virgin Mary: Limitations on Mary’s Influence
“Protestants generally described Mary as an ordinary mother not just in her childbearing but in her relationship to Jesus; and occasionally this could inspire praise. For example, some Protestants had kind words for the Virgin Mary’s intervention at Cana, because they could interpret her actions there as being appropriately feminine. Edouart praised ‘the amiable thoughtfulness exhibited by her at that time in her quick-sightedness and eagerness to have removed a difficulty which might have caused their friends not a little distress and embarrassment’.
Dobney agreed that ‘her behaviour was altogether worthy of the true woman. The delicately sympathising endeavour to spare her humble friends the mortification of finding their supply fail before the festivities were ended led her to draw the attention of Christ to the circumstance.’ However, even when Protestants described the Virgin Mary as a woman properly fulfilling her domestic duties, they did not believe that her maternal authority extended into Jesus’ public life. Her maternal authority ended at the wedding at Cana where, Dobney declared, Jesus ‘intimated that the time was come when maternal influence over him must cease’.
However, the Protestant Mary did not always gracefully relinquish her maternal authority. She ‘assum[ed] too much authority over him’ and attempted to interfere in his mission, forcing Jesus to notify her more than once of the termination of her maternal authority. He did so, they said, by repeatedly addressing her as ‘Woman’ rather than ‘Mother’, an address the evangelical clergyman William Thomas Maudson described as, ‘to say the least, politely distant’ and Miller as ‘cold’.
Protestants also believed, as did Maudson, that Jesus condemned his mother’s behaviour with a ‘harsh and unduteous’ response to her at the Temple and by responding ‘with apparent indifference and contempt’ when Mary tried to interrupt his preaching. In sum, as Francis Merewether, the Anglican clergyman and opponent of both Roman Catholicism and disestablishment, said: ‘The Virgin Mother received more than once from the lips of her blessed Son, during his earthly ministry, words savouring strongly of reproof.’ (Although the disciples were equally liable to the criticism that they misunderstood Jesus’ mission, Protestant authors did not dilute their criticism of the Virgin Mary by pointing out that there was evidence that others close to Jesus did not fully understand his mission.)
Nevertheless, she refused to acknowledge the severed connection and followed Jesus to the foot of the cross. There, according to Charles Thomas Longley, Archbishop of York (and subsequently of Canterbury), ‘bowed down by a weight of grief such as no daughter of Eve ever bore before or since’, her presence multiplied her son’s sufferings: ‘Jesus has thus to bear not His own sufferings only, but hers as well, and seems, as it were, to be dying a double death.’
Michael Wheeler locates ‘Christ’s “hard sayings” to his mother which challenge the ideal of the Holy Family as a model for Christians to follow’ in the twentieth century, but in fact Victorian Protestants’ interpretations of Jesus’ words meant that these ‘hard sayings’ were well-established by the mid-nineteenth century. The Protestant Mary was no model mother, but a woman grasping to remain in her son’s life when she should have gracefully relinquished him to the public world. Deprived of an earthly role, the Protestant Mary was also denied a role in heaven.
The Anglican cleric William Ford Vance, who defended the Protestant identity of the Established Church, was horrified to think that Roman Catholics ‘entreat her to exercise her influence and authority over God, as a mother over her son, that he may save your souls: “Jure matris, imperâ Redemptori”: By the right of a mother, command the Redeemer!!!’ Nor did Protestants consider Mary to be the mother of all Christians. Jesus assigned Mary to John’s care, Sinclair said, only because she was ‘a mere woman ... unable even to succour herself’.
The Protestant Virgin Mary, having been defined as an impediment to Jesus’ work, was thus described as an ordinary woman who had no expansive sphere of influence. ‘A.B.’, a correspondent to the anti-Roman Catholic Church and state gazette who had been greatly impressed by a lecture John Cumming had given in Scarborough in 1853 condemning the Virgin Mary’s position in the Roman Catholic Church, was convinced that ‘it requires a large extension of faith to reconcile the superior homage to the Virgin Mary, as our Mediatrix and presiding Deity, with the woman who doubted or denied the perfectibility of her Son’s mind’.
Protestants were confident that they were guided not just by Mary’s behaviour as recorded in the gospels, but by Jesus’ wishes as well. Deploring the ‘Romanist feelings’ expressed by the woman who praised Mary’s breasts and womb, Edouart declared that Jesus, ‘so far from giving encouragement to such feelings ... at once checked them’. Jesus did so, taught Maudson, in order ‘to lessen the closeness, and destroy the distinction of that earthly relationship, which has been made the very ground of the especial reverence that is rendered to the Virgin’.
In the mid-nineteenth century, a chorus of Protestants agreed with Vance that Jesus had wanted ‘to avoid every thing likely to excite a feeling of undue veneration for her [Mary] in the minds of his disciples’. Protestants also claimed to be following Mary’s wishes. Cumming declared that ‘if the now glorified and happy Virgin could come down to earth, she would call on you to silence for ever the idolatrous accents [of] Ave Maria, and teach you to breathe in language, heartfelt and believing – Abba – Father!’
The Protestant Mary was, then, a model of female self-denial; when Protestants described her as humiliated when she tried to seize a public role, they could also have been warning women against self-aggrandisement. Because they did not believe that Mary’s behaviour made her worthy of devotion, Protestants rejected all forms of Marian devotion, including the scriptural first half of the Hail Mary and prayers using that invocation, such as the Stella Maris.
Protestants as various as Dobney, Edouart, and Tyler found the King James Bible’s more restrained (and, scholars now agree, more accurate) translation of the angelic greeting – ‘Hail, thou that art highly favoured’ – to be more acceptable than the Catholic ‘Hail Mary, full of grace’. They particularly disliked the Rosary – derided by the Congregationalist weekly the British banner as the mindless counting of beads ‘by the million’ – on the grounds that it devoted more attention to Mary than to God.
Seymour made obvious the underlying criticism that the Rosary represented a challenge to God when he described uneducated Italians ignoring the priest, Christ’s representative, in order to say the Rosary during Mass. This view of the Rosary appeared in fiction also. In Eliot’s Romola, the Rosary is associated with Tessa, the charmingly ignorant peasant who is assiduous in her Marian devotions (although she sometimes falls asleep while saying the Rosary), but who knows so little of church ritual that she does not realise her marriage to Tito is a sham.
The discomfort with the older mother, apparent when Mary was discussed, was evident elsewhere in Victorian culture. It shaped descriptions of Queen Victoria, who was perhaps the best-known overbearing mother of the age. As a result both of her disappointment in Bertie, the future Edward VII, and of her reluctance to share power (which was also manifested in her treatment of Albert during the early years of their marriage), Queen Victoria gave her son no real responsibilities.
While Bertie’s penchant for drinking, gambling, and womanising may have justified this treatment, Victoria’s subjects blamed lack of responsibility for his extended adolescence: ‘Kept in childhood beyond his time’, the future Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone lamented, ‘he is allowed to make that childhood what it should never be in a Prince, or anyone else, namely wanton.’ In 1867 Walter Bagehot described Bertie as ‘an unemployed youth’, while the radical politician Charles Bradlaugh’s pamphlet George, the Prince of Wales, with recent contrasts and coincidences, likened Bertie to George IV, whose lengthy wait for the throne had been notoriously dissolute.
Bertie was unfortunately unable to imitate the example of Lord Lufton, one of the heroes of Framley parsonage. Lufton acknowledged that he loved and esteemed his mother, but asserted that ‘nevertheless, I cannot allow her to lead me in all things. Were I to do so, I should cease to be a man.’ Victoria’s popularity revived at her Golden and Diamond Jubilees, in 1887 and 1897, by which time her subjects perceived her as a benevolent grandmotherly figure with limited power.
Discomfort with older mothers was practically a staple of Victorian literature. Although nineteenth-century novels often deliver the message that young women were on the path to becoming mothers, they are generally marked by the absence of parents, especially mothers. Main characters – including Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, and Becky Sharp – are often orphans. Pairs of orphans are also common: in Charles Dickens’s Great expectations, Pip and Estella are brought up by unsatisfactory surrogate mothers; in Eliot’s Adam Bede the cousins Hetty Poyser and Dinah Morris are more fortunate in their choice of guardians.
A significant number of mothers – including those of David Copperfield’s two wives, and of Little Em’ly, Lucy Deane, Philip Wakem, and Mary Barton – either are dead prior to start of the story of their offspring or die during its course. Mrs May is killed in an accident brought about by her husband’s careless driving early in Charlotte Yonge’s The daisy chain, although the memory of her hovers around her husband and children like a guiding spirit. The high mortality rate of mothers is remarkable, given that almost all the heroines are progressing towards what they represented, the supposedly universal goal of women – motherhood.
…A motherless heroine perhaps offered novelists greater dramatic possibilities and was certainly not a demographic oddity. In 1841 the life expectancy was 41.18 years for women and 40.19 years for men. Sheila Ryan Johanson argues that Peter Uhlenberg’s conclusion that in nineteenth-century America ‘only exceptional women managed to live out the “typical” life cycle, which included living long enough to marry, having children and surviving jointly with a husband until the last child married and grandchildren began arriving’, can also be applied to England.
Nevertheless, the near-total elimination of parental figures, especially mothers, in these works that both shaped and reflected mainstream Victorian culture requires an explanation beyond the demands of realism or drama. These missing women suggest that the same culture which exalted mothers also worried that mothers who did exercise the influence they were urged to have would never allow their children – especially their sons – to become independent.
Canonical novels achieve their status by representing a culture’s concerns and assumptions. Other popular works equally demonstrate a discomfort with the older mother. In fact, the absent mother was a characteristic of all genres, Carolyn Dever argues: ‘To write a life, in the Victorian period, is to write the story of the loss of the mother. In fiction and biography, autobiography and poetry, the organisational logic of lived experience extends, not from the moment of birth, but from the instant of that primal loss.’
That an author did not need to dispatch the mother but only to ignore her is evident in Mrs Ellis’s well-known advice manual The mothers of England. When Mrs Ellis does broach the topic of mothers and their grown children, she suggests that mothers and their adult sons continue the close relationship that was formed in childhood, and even that a woman act as a surrogate mother to other young men: ‘in the character of the matron of a family, all young men who are brought within the sphere of her influence, ought to feel that, to a certain extent, they have a mother’.
Although Mrs Ellis seems to extend a mother’s role beyond the childhood of her offspring, she actually limits any power a mother might exercise by assuming throughout this book (as she does in her other works) that women are inferior to men, including their grown sons. Female equality is, she asserts, ‘opposed at once to nature and religion, to philosophy and common sense’. Though apparently exalting a mother’s status, both in the eyes of society and in the hearts of her children, Mrs Ellis actually restricts women to the domestic sphere, where they exercise only influence, which is more easily ignored than is power.”
- Carol Engelhardt Herringer, “The Protestant Virgin Mary.” in Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England 1830-1885
#religion#christian#victorian#english#history#carol engelhardt herringer#victorians and the virgin mary
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