Gail Houston: Publication News

In Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God, recently accepted by Ohio State University Press for publication, I assert that if Victorian women writers yearned for authorial forebears, or, in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s words, for “grandmothers,” perhaps that longing had something to do with what Barrett referred to as “mother-want,” a sense of the actual and metaphorical absence of a maternal entity (Letters of EBB, ed. Kenyon 1: 232).  While a multitude of orphans crowd the pages of Victorian fiction, anecdotal and statistical evidence testify to the all too common incidence of mothers felled by childbirth. But, as my study  shows, “mother-want” is also inextricably connected to what I call “mother-god-want,” for, as I suggest, the lack of an earthly maternal presence also exacerbated the need for a Mother in Heaven, which Victorian Protestantism was unprepared to supply. The women writers taken up here--Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Anna Jameson, and George Eliot--respond to this lack by imagining symbolic female divinities that allowed them to acquire the authorial legitimacy patriarchal culture denied them.

If these writers confronted a want of earthly and divine mothers, I suggest that there were grandmothers who, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, envisioned powerful female divinities that would reconfigure society in dramatic ways. These millenarians and socialist feminists felt that the time had come for women to bring about the earthly paradise patriarchal institutions had failed to establish. Recuperating a symbolic divine in the form of the Great Mother, a pagan Virgin Mary, a female messiah, and a titanic Eve, Joanna Southcott, Eliza Sharples, Frances Wright and others set the stage for Victorian women writers to envision and impart emanations of puissant Christian and pagan goddesses. Though the Victorian female authors I study often mask progressive rhetoric, even in some cases seeming to reject these foremothers, their radical genealogy appears in mystic, metaphysical revisions of divinity.