Willful Submission: Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious Poetry

By Amanda Paxton

Victorian England: a Jesuit priest writes of wrestling with God at night, limbs entangled; an Anglican sister begs Jesus, her divine lover, to end her aching anticipation of their union; a clergyman exhorts nuns to study the example of medieval women who suffered on the rack in order to become "brides" of Christ. Alongside the march of nineteenth-century progress ran a seemingly paradoxical fascination with a dark, erotically suggestive side of religious devotion: the figuration of the Christian God as a heavenly bridegroom who doles out punishment to his bride, the individual soul.

Through innovative case studies of Victorian religious poetry, Amanda Paxton reveals that while the punitive model proved a convenient rhetorical tool with which to deflate burgeoning nineteenth-century campaigns for women’s rights and challenges to Church authority, in the hands of several writers it also provided a means of resisting patriarchal institutions and interrogating distinctions between science and religion. Willful Submission is the first full-length volume to examine the interplay of sex, suffering, and religion as a touchstone in Victorian culture and verse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jan 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9780813940786

Book preview

University of Virginia Press

© 2017 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2017

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Paxton, Amanda, author.

Title: Willful submission : sado-erotics and heavenly marriage in Victorian religious poetry / Amanda Paxton.

Other titles: Sado-erotics and heavenly marriage in Victorian religious poetry

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2018. | Series: Victorian literature and culture series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017024793| ISBN 9780813940779 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813940786 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: English poetry—19th century—History and criticism. | Christian poetry, English—19th century—History and criticism. | Religion and poetry. | Eroticism in literature. | Sexual dominance and submission in literature. | Patriarchy—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Women’s rights—Great Britain—History—19th century. | Literature and society—Great Britain—History—19th century.

Classification: LCC PR595.R4 P39 2018 | DDC 821/ .809382—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024793

Cover art: A detail of St Elizabeth of Hungary’s Great Act of Renunciation, 1891, Philip Hermogenes Calderon (1833–1898). (©Tate, London 2017)

Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Herbert F. Tucker, Editor

William R. McKelvy, Jill Rappoport, and Andrew M. Stauffer, Associate Editors

Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

ONE Bridal Desires

TWO Anti-Catholicism and Nuptial Anxieties

THREE Tractarian Poetry and Radical Masochism

FOUR Catholicism and the Metaphysics of Longing

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

THE RESEARCH FOR this volume was made possible in part by generous funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from the Faculty of Graduate Studies at York University. Stemming from my doctoral dissertation, the project began when Lesley Higgins, who would become my PhD supervisor, seduced me from the wilds of Canadian poetry to the debauches of Victorian religious verse. As a mentor, colleague, and friend, Lesley remains infinitely generous with her limitless expertise and matchless wit. Kim Michasiw, Tina Choi, Scott McLaren, and Dennis Denisoff have provided careful and immensely valuable readings of my work. David Latham continues to give me valued guidance and encouragement. Over the years, members of the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario and the Victorian Studies Network at York have afforded warm and inviting conversation and exchange.

I am grateful to the staff at the British Library, the Bodleian Special Collections Reading Room, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for their help in the research process. Thanks also to the licensing departments at the British Library, Birmingham Museums, and the Victoria and Albert Museum for granting me permission to reproduce images from their holdings. I extend particular thanks to Gladys Fung and the other determined souls at York University’s Scott Library Resource Sharing Department, who went into battle for me with what must have been every book-holding institution in the world. The quotations and illustrations from Charles Kingsley’s manuscript Elizabeth of Hungary are reproduced here with the kind permission of Professor Peter Covey-Crump.

I presented extracts from this work at various conferences, including ACCUTE, MMLA, ACLA, and INCS. I am grateful to the panel organizers, participants, and audience members who helped me to develop the ideas herein. A modified section of chapter 2 appeared as Charles Kingsley’s Saintly Trials and Husbandly Duties in Journal of Victorian Culture 18.2 (2013): 213–29. The journal editors and the anonymous reviewers graciously provided thorough readings and suggestions.

I extend warm thanks to the University of Virginia Press, in particular Eric Brandt, Ellen Satrom, Bonnie Susan Gill, Mark Mones, and the editors of the Victorian Literature and Culture series. Their unflagging enthusiasm and professionalism have made the publication process a pleasure. George Roupe has provided exceptional copy-editing. I am very grateful to the manuscript’s anonymous reviewers, whose comments have been tremendously constructive. Special thanks go to Roger Lohmann, whose deadlines and anthropological skepticism did much to bring this project to completion, and Jonathan Vandor and Rachelle Stinson, who provided skilled research assistance.

Endless thanks are due to my friends and family, whose support, patience, and humor have sustained me throughout the writing process. Jordana Greenblatt, Arby Siraki, Molly McKibbin, Amy McKee, Ava Aqui, Tom Piliouris, Shangeetha Jeyamanohar, David Humphrey, James Papoutsis, Bill Kelly, Sean Braune, and Stephanie Horgan have all given me exceptional support and cheer throughout this project. My parents, Zdenka and Dennis Paxton, have shown me a lifetime of devotion, care, and encouragement, for which I am forever grateful.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Mysticism isn’t everything that isn’t politics. It is something serious.

—Jacques Lacan, Feminine Sexuality

ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1887, Coventry Patmore burned the sole copy of his prose manuscript Sponsa Dei. Available accounts reveal that the text described the metaphysical union between the soul and the divine in nuptial terms: heavenly love figured as earthly desire. The fate of the work purportedly rested on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s disapproving declaration, upon reading it in 1885, That’s telling secrets (qtd. in Champneys 2:249). Oddly enough, however, the depiction of the human soul as bride of the divine Bridegroom was already a potent motif in Victorian Christian culture—Hopkins himself used it in poems including his celebrated The Wreck of the Deutschland, which culminates in the death of a German nun pleading with Christ, her lover, to come quickly (ll. 195, 191). Although erotic depictions of divine love are most familiar from medieval religious writing (in the work of Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard von Bingen, and Marguerite Porete, among others) and early modern writers (such as John Donne and Richard Crashaw), the trope regained attention in nineteenth-century England, resonating throughout popular verse, serialized novels, marital handbooks, Christian hymns and sermons, and public debates. Wives were told to respect their husbands as the Church respects God; religious tracts instructed believers to surrender their souls to God as a divine Lover; poets addressed Jesus as their Beloved. If Hopkins did indeed object that Patmore’s text was crossing a line, the accusation is curious. Given the extent to which religious eroticism circulated in Victorian culture, the conceit was an open secret at best. Much meaning, however, lies in secrets that are at once hidden and spoken aloud. Willful Submission traces the secrets that lie in the Victorian bridal paradigm, uncovering the anxieties of power, gender, and identity that were concealed (and proclaimed) through figurations of God as Lover.

Medieval, early modern, and Victorian writers often depict mystical marriage as the culmination of the soul’s ascent into heaven at the end of the individual’s life. Far from merely promulgating images of heavenly wedded bliss, at times such texts feature sadistic and masochistic elements involving the soul’s suffering, with the painful love of the divine eventually consuming the individual. Medieval English anchorites, who had withdrawn from society to lead hermetic lives of prayer, were encouraged to imagine themselves hanging on the cross alongside Christ their lover in passionate co-suffering (Wohunge 284). The twelfth-century Scottish mystic Richard of St. Victor identified four stages of mystical love, each more disabling than the last: that which wounds, that which binds, that which makes ill, and that which brings about cessation (qtd. in McGinn 156). St. Bernard describes the soul’s longing for the divine Bridegroom as so violent, so ardent, so impetuous that it monopolise[s] both her heart and her tongue (435). Moreover, as Bernard’s use of the feminine pronoun indicates, the soul is gendered female in the mystical marriage, regardless of the gender identity of the believer.

After bridal mysticism reached its cultural peak in the writings of medieval mystics and early modern successors, its popularity declined throughout the eighteenth century. Reemerging in the Victorian era, its narratives of spiritual violence took on fresh cultural purposes and subtexts. Members of the Broad Church valorized earthly marriage as a reflection of divine relations and championed the role of the husband as a type of household deity. For Broad Churchman Charles Maurice Davies, over a "wife’s mind broods no unseen spell to her more sacred than her husband’s (2:66; emphasis added). Other popular views imagined the bride of Christ to be a collective being: Christ is the husband of the one collective and corporate person, called the Church" (Kingsley, Letters 1:255). By contrast, followers of the Oxford Movement adhered to a more personal interpretation of the bridal metaphor. The poet Christina Rossetti, for instance, writes of a female martyr’s desire coming pantingly as she yearns for union with the divine (The Martyr l. 45); in a later text she writes in the first person of her longing for the Heavenly Lover (Till Tomorrow l. 15). In St. Agnes’ Eve (1837), Tennyson would develop the theme to reflect a nun’s desire to be received by the Heavenly Bridegroom and made pure of sin (ll. 31, 32). Inspired by biblical texts, artists like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and Simeon Solomon would visit the theme of divine marriage in visual renderings of the heavenly Bridegroom and bride.¹

As with its medieval manifestations, the Victorian mystic’s soul is often imagined to suffer blows and even destruction at the hands of the divine lover, as we find with Hopkins’s nun, who perishes in a shipwreck, at the mercy of God’s cold (l. 129). Similarly, the suggestively titled poem St. Teresa: ‘To Suffer or to Die’ recounts the vision reported by St. Teresa of Ávila in which her heart was pierced by a seraph’s lance, a penetration leaving her Unsated and calling for More suffering, Lord, yet more! (M. S. P. 174). The speaker of the 1882 poem Subjection by Methodist hymnist Lucy Ann Bennett shows a comparable eagerness for punishment, imploring the Beloved to take Thy rod—/ Compel each wayward heart to swift contrition, / Constrain each broken will to full submission (34). Bennett’s poem invokes the traditional domestication of the heavenly family, with the Bridegroom doubling as the father whose punishment is inextricable from his love: And so we would not shrink from Thy correction—/ The sure, sweet pledge of Fatherly affection (34). Despite the delight signaled on the part of Teresa’s and Bennett’s speakers, the Evangelical poet Eliza Keary would articulate an unsettling aspect of this narrative arc with her description of the mystic-bride as one who indulges in the slave’s ignominy, / Base, with adoring face / Turned heavenwards to the smiter (C and M 162). Regardless of the shape it took, the bridal schema was unmistakable by virtue of the passionate charge it carried.

Seen in the context of Victorian England, bridal mysticism’s trajectory of suffering, submission, and subsumption resembles a spiritualized rendition of the power dynamics at work in dominant discourses of nineteenth-century identity formation, such as religion, gender, and sexuality. Social structures governing these discourses faced radical challenges in the nineteenth century; at the same time, a renewed cultural interest in medievalism coincided with anxieties about the changes under way in national and domestic norms. In this perfect storm, the medieval bridal model gained new intensity as a site in which Victorian complexities emerged, gathered force, and collided.

By no means marginal or specific to any one Christian group, the bridal motif permeated nineteenth-century English culture in various guises. In her immensely popular conduct books, Sarah Stickney Ellis counseled wives to treat their husbands as representatives of God; the celebrated religious leader Rev. Edward Bouverie Pusey advised that husbands love their wives as Christ loved the Church—that is, as its head (Value 391); Christian pundits figured the Victorian household as a microcosm of heavenly order, replete with a paternal leader. The Swedenborgian Rev. Jonathan Bayley announced that the relation between the Lord and the Church is most correctly represented by the relation between a true husband and a faithful wife (483). Such examples of Victorian bridalism naturalized earthly hierarchies through promoting particular patterns of subject formation predicated on the dominance of one unifying power (be it husband, God, or institution) over another (wife, believer, or church member).

Concurrent with such representations, however, were alternative versions that resisted such prescribed mandates, validated the preservation of difference, and suggested reformulations of sexuality beyond limiting heteronormative structures. Oftentimes, the greatest challenges to disciplinary bridal strains came from believers themselves. By the end of the century, tensions between the autonomy of the individual and the impositions of heavenly marriage appear in the work of women writers such as the Catholic convert Harriet Hamilton King, whose 1902 poem The Bride Reluctant describes the speaker’s marriage to Christ as a spiritual reflection of women’s precarious legal rights: Rather am I His bondmaiden, / Compelled by law and not by love. / Oh, would I were enfranchised (97). The trope undergoes even more complex cellular mutations in the hands of midcentury writers who used it to revise and reimagine gender relations and subjectivity in radical ways.

Although bridalism informs Victorian fiction and nonfiction, there is a specifically poetic claim to the metaphor of God as Lover that makes poetry the centrifugal point from which I investigate the idea. Tellingly, in 1873 Matthew Arnold defined God as "a literary term, noting that mankind mean different things by it as their consciousness differs" (171). Arnold’s words just as easily apply to the enormously malleable bridal trope, which is inherently poetic (or, as Arnold would have it, literary) in its indeterminacy, centering as it does on the metaphorical conceit of mystical marriage. Very much in line with Arnold, Sarah Dille notes that the idea of God does not represent a clear or objectively verifiable reality; instead, it can only derive that meaning from already accepted, conventional metaphors and analogies. Consequently, metaphors used to describe the idea of God take on a circular quality, since ‘God’ is metaphorical and [the image of the divine Bridegroom] is applied to God metaphorically (18). Nineteenth-century writers may well have deployed the metaphor with confidence that its meaning would be understood as conclusively as any other, but its ambiguity remains inescapable. Because of this polysemy, the spousal schema is equally available for the reinforcement or the subversion of traditional orthodoxies. The paradox recalls the radical potential that Julia Kristeva finds in poetic language, which introduce[s] through the symbolic that which works on, moves through, and threatens it (Revolution 81).

Finding the Victorian Bride

Why the Victorian fascination with the concept of mystical marriage? The question might best be approached through George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s famous claim that language—in particular, metaphorical language—conditions human experience: Metaphors may create realities for us, especially social realities. A metaphor may thus be a guide for future action. Such actions will, of course, fit the metaphor. This will, in turn, reinforce the power of the metaphor to make experience coherent. In this sense metaphors can be self-fulfilling prophecies (156). What, then, are the self-fulfilling prophecies of the bridal metaphor within Nineteenth-century England, and how do they lay the groundwork for the realities that arise through them?

The biblical roots of Christian nuptialism lie in the Song of Songs, an Old Testament text unique in biblical scripture for its apparent depiction of earthly love.² Traditionally attributed to King Solomon, the poem takes the form of a dialogue between a Shulamite maiden and her beloved (who is identified alternately as Solomon, or, depending on one’s interpretation, a shepherd). The lovers call to each other, express their desire, and describe each other’s bodies through metaphors and analogies. Love is troped as an instrument of ravishment and mastery: He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love (2:4). Interpretation of the Song has historically been vexed; although the bridegroom/Solomon is usually identified as the deity, the role of the bride/maiden has been variously ascribed to the Church, the individual soul, the Virgin Mary, Israel, and other figures.³

Nineteenth-century interest in the bridal metaphor led to the publication of more than 350 hermeneutical readings of the Song of Songs in Great Britain and America during this period. The suggestiveness of the text’s content was not lost on readers like Algernon Charles Swinburne, who in 1870 cited it as an example of mystic bawdy poetry, adding that it might just as well have been titled "the Nunc Emittis" (Swinburne 2:79). Nonetheless, the conviction that the text held profound meaning beyond its surface narrative is attested by Charles Spurgeon’s remark on Harvard Professor George R. Noyes’s 1846 commentary on the Song: This author sees nothing but a collection of amatory songs, written without express moral purpose or design. Blind! (116). In England, the theme of mystical marriage was the subject of countless sermons, pamphlets, treatises, novels, poems, and works of visual art. New editions and modern English translations of texts by medieval bridal mystics such as Julian of Norwich (1342–ca. 1416) and Richard Rolle (1300–49) appeared throughout the century.

Several factors account for the Victorian reemergence of the trope and, more broadly, the heightened somatic quality found in Victorian depictions of religious experience. First, popular preoccupation with the Middle Ages in Western European culture continued from the eighteenth century. Compounding this interest was the rise in the 1830s of the branch of Anglicanism known as the Oxford Movement, which advocated a return to pre-Reformation ritual and tradition. Discussed further in chapter 1, corporeal and affective motifs were common markers of the pre- and early modern Christian traditions informing the Oxford Movement. Equally significant is the hermeneutic tradition of higher criticism that pursued historical and literary rather than faith-based studies of scripture. Primarily associated with German scholars such as Johann Gottfried Eichhorn, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Julius Wellhausen, and David Friedrich Strauss, higher criticism gained traction in England in the nineteenth century. In his contribution to the volume Essays and Reviews (1860), for example, Benjamin Jowett notoriously argued in favor of reading the Bible through a historicized framework. In The Life of Jesus (La vie de Jésus) (1863), Ernest Renan used such an approach to provide a scholarly portrait of Jesus as a historical figure and, consequently, a human being subject to the full range of physical experience. This concern for the humanity of Jesus is pronounced in the attendant nineteenth-century interest in the Incarnation, Jesus’s adoption of human form. Boyd Hilton identifies a shift in nineteenth-century Christianity away from a focus on the doctrine of Atonement (humanity’s redemption through the suffering and crucifixion of Jesus) and toward an emphasis on the Incarnation. By 1870, Hilton claims, it was commonplace for Anglicans to assert that a theological transformation had recently taken place, whereby a worldly Christian compassion, inspired by the life of Jesus, had alleviated such stark Evangelical doctrines as those of eternal and vicarious punishment (5). The unity of Jesus and humanity represented by the Incarnation not only gave rise to a theology concerned less with punishment and more with compassion but also made room for heightened affective devotionalism in the work of writers such as Hopkins, as outlined in chapter 4.

Most fascinating are the specific cultural conditions that contributed to the paradigm’s distinctly Victorian form. Lakoff and Johnson assert that the language of metaphor enables its users to make sense of the world: by patterning existence in terms of various gestalts, we can categorize the experience, understand it, and remember it (83). The nineteenth-century concern with biblical analogy and typology, promulgated especially in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, encouraged the use of biblical metaphor to explain and naturalize contemporary British cultural practices. Within this hermeneutical context, bridal analogies served in much mainstream discourse to legitimize gender binarism and hierarchy at a time when the distinction between two sexes became a matter of heightened social anxiety. These concerns, elaborated in chapter 1, were in part brought on and reflected by paradigm shifts in anatomical and ontological understandings of gender, by changes in the labor market and the agitation for women’s rights, and by revisions to legislation surrounding marriage and divorce. Such changes in nineteenth-century understandings of gender were paralleled by concurrent transformations in religious belief, which were challenged by geological and evolutionary thought, as well as higher criticism.

As Charles LaPorte points out, however, rumors of the death of God in the nineteenth century have been greatly exaggerated: If Victorian religion declines at all before the twentieth century, it declines from a high tide in the 1850s (3). In fact, LaPorte contends, if higher criticism approached the Bible as poetry rather than as revealed truth, the result was not necessarily to diminish the status of the Bible, but rather to enrich that of poetry. Poetry is no longer merely associated with religious truth here; they are effectively synonymous (10). William McKelvy traces the growth of this religious vocation of literature to the period between 1774 and 1880, which witnessed religious and literary discourses intermingle in complex ways: just as literary culture evince[d] a longing to participate in the most sacred rites[,] . . . an embattled religious culture often saw its most promising future in literary terms (3, 4). Given the turbulent cultural context of the nineteenth century, the impulse to classify and understand the increasingly unsteady ground of both gender and religion is not hard to fathom, nor is the use of poetry to do so. Rather than merely serving as a substitute for a discredited Bible, poetry became a type of scripture in itself, its metaphors a way to underwrite or challenge existing beliefs. Uniting the contested faith systems of sexual dualism on the one hand and Biblical veracity on the other is the bride-of-Christ metaphor.

Broadly speaking, my goal is to examine how nuptial language informed the subject formation of the nineteenth-century Christian—that is, to uncover how it worked ideologically to shape the ways that the Christian understood herself. Kirstie Blair observes, Victorian poets and their readers shared a vocabulary relating to contemporary religious debates that we have largely lost (5). By excavating this language we can access features of Victorian self-fashioning and self-understanding. I take as my starting point two positions advanced by Michel Foucault concerning religion as a force that produces certain types of subjects. The first holds that the individual as we understand it arises from discourses of power at play in social and cultural environments. The subject self-fashions in response to the models that he finds in his culture and [that] are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society, and his social group (Ethics 291). As Linda Shires reminds us, the subject embedded in a specific spatial-historical context is neither fully autonomous nor a social idiot, but rather comes into being through a dynamic process in which she responds to the discourses available to her (188). The fabric of identity is constantly woven and rewoven in tandem with changes in one’s surroundings.

The question of what kind of subject is produced by the bridal metaphor is a thorny one, particularly in light of Foucault’s assertion that the traditions of Western religion serve to inscribe obedience and self-annihilation in the individual, requiring humility and mortification, detachment with respect to oneself and the establishing of a relationship with oneself which tends towards a destruction of the form of the self (On the Government 157). By a seemingly counterintuitive operation, Christian doctrine compels the adherent towards a self-definition predicated to some degree on the evacuation of selfhood. The disavowal of self is, of course, a fundamental feature of many religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions, and the ideal of losing the self within a larger unity—what Freud called the oceanic feeling that characterizes much religious experience (723)—is hardly exclusive to the Victorian era. Similarly, issues of existence, individuality, and the relationship between the divine and the created world take shape in eroticized discourse in a variety of traditions.⁴ The allure of eroticized mystical experience continues to attract the attention of even devoutly secular modern critics and philosophers—most notably, Simone de Beauvoir, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, and Luce Irigaray. Bataille, for one, describes mystical subsumption through the arresting analogy of a drone bee who dies upon conjugation with the queen: I might call the religious in his temptation a lucid drone, one who knows that death would follow the satisfying of his desire (Erotism 234). In eroticized Christian contemplation, the discrete subject is said to dissolve into an undifferentiated continuity accessible only through eroticism and death, and is consequently lost in the indistinct and illimitable presence of the universe (249).

Although the abdication of self seems at odds with modern Western ideals of individualism, it also promises a liberatory potential. Indeed, as Judith Butler notes, the firmly held belief—one might say, faith—in one’s identity may function through a certain ethical violence, which demands that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same (42). The demand that one present a coherent, unified self to the world may actually be limiting. Despite the coercion that may underwrite one’s everyday performance of individual identity, however, the alternative offered by mystical self-dissolution remains vexed. Amy Hollywood crucially observes that, although the ideal of unsaying the self through mystical union with the divine is appealing, it nonetheless presupposes a privileged subject position that has been reified enough to be unsaid. In Hollywood’s understanding, there exists a qualitative difference between the mysticism imagined by white, educated, European men (particularly nonreligious theorists of mysticism like Bataille and Lacan), whose subject positions are supported by cultural structures, and the mysticism proposed by female writers, whose subjectivities are not similarly upheld by the culture around them (18). In other words, not all brides are created equal. Questions of power, gender, and difference are often elided in the conventional scholarly approach to religious discourse, which assumes universality for the believing subject, and an unspoken, stable identity for the deity.⁵

Importantly, none of the writers under discussion makes any claims to mystical experience, and, although virtually all of them draw on mystical accounts of one tradition or another, their writings are in no way under consideration as engagements with the numinous. Ultimately, my interest lies not with the evacuation of selfhood per se, but with the social import of the idea of evacuation of selfhood. In other words, I will not be evaluating erotic mystical accounts qua religious practice, but rather examining religious poetic discourses and the subject positions made available by those discourses in the context of Victorian England. As Roland Barthes asserts, Ancient or not, mythology can only have a historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the ‘nature’ of things (218). Barthes’s concern, and mine, is with the cultural processes by which religious beliefs take shape. Briefly put, no bride exists in a vacuum.

The language through which one might discuss the bridal metaphor carries its own difficulties, particularly given the various discourses that converge in it: religion, Christianity, gender, sexuality, sadism, masochism, and figurative expression, to name a few. Kristeva’s holy violence, Lacan’s jouissance, Irigaray’s la mystérique: these are only a few examples of terms that appear in conversations around the bridal phenomenon, each with its own theoretically distinct connotations. For the purposes of coherence, I use a set of terms that will, I hope, work to clarify rather than confuse the landscape, and that stand at a remove from any single theoretical tradition. First, the phrase religious poetry has a specific valence here, one that is based on (but extends beyond) that proffered by G. B. Tennyson in his landmark study of Victorian devotional poetry. Tennyson defines religious poetry as that in which a commitment is made or implied to an established belief, or system of ideas, or body of faith, that is, to a religion (4); to a great extent this definition accommodates the scope of poetry under investigation in this study. I broaden this definition to encompass poetry that concerns religious systems of belief, be it overtly or covertly, with or without the attendant religious commitment that Tennyson requires. In fact, certain religious convictions may be held by the poet, but the poetry itself can be far more ambiguous in the affiliations that it suggests.

In my discussions of sadism, masochism, desire, and power, I use the terms sado-erotics and masochristianity to denote separate yet related phenomena. Whereas by sado-erotics I mean the invocation of eroticized punitive imagery accompanied by an implicit approval, by masochristianity I refer to a Christian tradition of gratifying self-denial, be it in the form of asceticism, self-imposed suffering, or ultimate self-sacrifice.⁶ Informing this latter term is John Kucich’s understanding of masochism as a fantasy structure rather than a specific set of practices (3). With this understanding in mind, I define masochristianity not by explicitly sexual relations but rather by a structure of desire that may be mobilized diversely to achieve extraordinary affective power (27).⁷ Last, I use terms such as bridal metaphor, nuptial Christianity, erotic devotionalism, and affective tradition more or less interchangeably to denote the bride-of-Christ schema, along with its variants.

Sex, God, and Modern Readers

Whereas the topic of religion tended to arouse distaste in postmodern scholarly circles because of the perceived musty odors of antiquation and traditionalism, Victoria Morgan and Clare Williams observe that recent literary studies have begun seriously [to] reconsider the space/place of belief as a locus for the varying energies and tensions inherent in literature as well as in society more generally (xviii). Willful Submission builds on the efflorescence in recent decades of research into religious writing and gender in the nineteenth century.⁸ On a wider scale, the so-called religious turn currently at work in fields as diverse as international relations and philosophy