Abstract
Veiled Intent is a study of six eighteenth-century Englishwomen whose religious works place them outside the conventional parameters of formal Protestant theology: Anna Barbauld, Phillis Wheatley, Helen Maria Williams, Joanna Baillie, Felicia Hemans and Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck. Writing in a culture where women’s spirituality was mainly viewed as a form of emotionalism or domestic piety, they smuggled religious concepts into print in the guise of ‘feminine’ literary genres such as lyrical poetry or literature for children. In doing so they not only achieved a broader readership and a degree of popularity (and notoriety); they also extended the parameters of Protestant religious discourse far beyond those of their male co-religionists. As Duquette writes, “these poets together place the realities of material existence, the articularities of specific female friendships, and the sensations of the body, in dialogue with sublime transcendence.… their poetry combines politics with spirituality, social consciousness with prayer, and human affection with glimpses of powerful divinity as evoked in scripture” (32).
Having expressed their religious concepts in unusual and popular genres, these and other women went on to challenge the aesthetic theories of contemporary male philosophers and theologians, most notably Edmund Burke’s philosophy of the sublime and the beautiful. “Edmund Burke’s philosophical Enquiry uses severe and gendered binaries to define the masculine sublime against its foil: the feminine beautiful … For Burke, merciful virtues—such as generosity, compassion, or loving kindness—are lesser, softer, and by implication more ‘feminine’ virtues, which therefore belong in the category of the beautiful rather than the sublime.” This binary thinking makes a holistic appreciation of Christianity impossible. “[H]is Enquiry cuts off the beautiful mercy of Christ from the sublime power of the Father and cannot account for the redemptive justice of the cross, which is both terrible and awe-inspiring” (39).
Women responded forcefully to these ideas, not so much to imitate or reverse Burke’s polarities but to analyze the nuances embedded in them, most importantly in their valorization of emotion and the introduction of motherhood into the conversation as a kind of third category that is both feminine and masculine. “Women poets at times explicitly and respectfully referenced ‘Mr. Burke’s’ definition of the sublime, but then continued to build on and expand his work by intentionally supplementing Burke’s focus on sublime fear of paternal punishment with their own biblical examples of female, generative, and healing forms of power” (31). Like all the Dissenting women in this study, Barbauld “presents embodied, affective forms of perception as legitimate modes of biblical interpretation” (5). Thus we find her focusing on Burke’s notion of power alongside her own notion of generativity or maternal discourse. “Barbauld’s poems, hymns, and essays draw on biblical texts to focus the reader’s attention on the powerfully generative maternal aspects of an affectionate and relational God” (47).
Helen Maria Williams takes a different approach. Her poetry offers a heart-wrenching depiction of a mother and her dying child. She thus bridges Edmund Burke’s false theological and aesthetic division between the punitive justice of God the Father as sublime and the compassionate suffering of Christ the Son as beautiful. “Williams also refused to see a dichotomy between Burke’s categories of the sublime and the beautiful; rather, she imagined sublime forms of merciful justice. Williams's contemplative sublime illustrates how friendship can bring about justice through acts of courageous intervention … Williams tactically veils aesthetic theory in verse, biblical exegesis in scriptural paraphrases, and prophetic calls for merciful justice in lyric poetry. Williams's urgent calls for social justice periodically break through her aesthetic veils, making her even more adamant than Phillis Wheatley or Anna Barbauld and rendering her the most politically radical woman writer treated in this study” (117, 118, 119).
Perhaps most interesting to this reader is Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck’s aesthetic approach to biblical hermeneutics. Duquette emphasizes her connections and intellectual influence in her discussion of Schimmelpenninck’s concept of the contemplative sublime. Duquette sees Schimmelpenninck as more flexible than Burke, making room for what exists in the gap between the sublime and the beautiful. For Schimmelpenninck, “the contemplative sublime is characterized by … full-bodied tastes such as English roast beef … or peaceful but solemn scenery, such as Tintern Abbey….” Schimmelpenninck’s use of roast beef as an example of contemplative sublimity risks tipping from the sublime to the ridiculous, but nevertheless the reader can see how Schimmelpenninck expands to create a more gender-inclusive contemplative sublime in which intense experience becomes more, not less, complex. “Let any of my readers examine their own hearts; have they not observed that in all the deep passions of the mind, they have experienced this alternation and revulsion of feeling. In grief, for example, are here not paroxysms of feeling and of rest? Are not alternate high and low spirits esteemed the symptoms of deep distress?” (228–9).
Phillis Wheatley could not have been more different than the respectable middle-class women discussed above; yet she harbored the same concern to reject binary thinking, inflected by her own experience as a black American slave. Wheatley lived almost as an adopted daughter in Boston. Educated as a house slave, she was baptized as an adult. Her writing and speaking was supported by her church connection, and she was visited by Boston clergymen to hear her discuss biblical hermeneutics, lyric poetry, and theological philosophy, “in a manner similar to … European Salons” (91). In Wheatley’s own philosophic theology “she ultimately affirms the beauty of diverse colors, including the very darkest shades, in order to counter the racist idea of a singular ‘diabolic die’ … Phillis Wheatley crafted her own African American theological aesthetic by writing about grace, variegation, freedom and sublimity … . She counters dichotomous distortions of reality into black and white extremes with her verse celebrating … natural multiplicity” (83).
Throughout women’s writings we find a strong, recurrent scriptural focus: “Supplementing Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, and following scripture, Dissenting women emphasized maternal strength and the painful danger of birth … Freedom is also an important philosophical and theological theme … most evident in the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, written and published while she was still a slave … [and in] Helen Maria Williams’s critiques of colonial oppression” (258). “Williams’s portrayal of steadfast contemplative figures as uplifting oppressed communities is a step towards what Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck would later theorize as the “dauntlessness” of the “contemplative sublime,” embodied ultimately for Schimmelpenninck by a wise “pontiff’ or spiritual leader” (118–19). Anti-slavery and prison reform movements were also important to Barbauld and to Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck. Schimmelpenninck’s depiction of socially conscious female spirituality encouraged her Quaker cousin Elizabeth Fry, who worked to raise the living standards and literacy levels of women in prison.
Until fairly recently, most secular scholars (including feminist scholars) have acknowledged the courage and intelligence of eighteenth-century women but treated their religiosity as secondary to what they consider more important issues like social oppression or political activism. Indeed, women who were both religious and activist have always posed problems for western feminist scholars. Most obvious is their difficulty in reconciling women’s assumption of authority alongside their assertion of their own passivity, and their refusal to take seriously women’s insistence on their writings and assertions of authority as divinely inspired.
In contrast, Veiled Intent is an extremely impressive, highly substantive analysis which takes full account of women’s spirituality and religious ideas as theologians, poets, and critics, but slights their personal development and social connections. We want to know more about their Dissenting communities, the details of their activism (particularly their involvement in the abolitionist movement), and their sociability. The reader wants to know whether women had female spiritual teachers or female networks, and there are hints of this kind of discussion throughout. For example: “Eighteenth-century Dissenting women’s art and literature … enabled Schimmelpenninck to compare the youthful consciousness of King David to that of a woman poet and artist dauntlessly defending her friend, her voice, and her Dissenting community” (235). We read that Dissenting women gathered socially and referred to each other in their writings; so Mary Ann Galton read Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children early in life, and enjoyed her hospitality in her twenties. Yet although they were formally equal members of worship groups, many of the women were critics of their co-religionists and were criticized in turn by their own communities. Anna Barbauld, for example, was a religious dissenter who criticized the discourse of other Dissenters as too unemotional and was in turn criticized by the male members of her group for the intensity of her writing. Clearly there is ample material for a more detailed and speculative analysis of women as both spiritual leaders and social actors. In a study of religious beliefs and theology that is as exhaustive and trenchant as this one is, these tantalizing facts and anecdotes of women’s lives are all too few.