SAMPLE THESIS TITLE WITH A CONCISE AND ACCURATE DESCRIPTION EVANGELICALISM AND THE MAKING OF SAME-SEX DESIRE: THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF CONSTANCE MAYNARD (1849-1935) by Naomi Lloyd A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (History) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2011 © Naomi Lloyd, 2011 ii ABSTRACT Although a devout Evangelical Anglican, living in an era that largely pre-dated the dissemination of sexological discourses of female same-sex desire, Constance Maynard, the prominent Victorian feminist and educational reformer, pursued a series of same-sex relationships. Religion is often understood to exercise a repressive influence on sexual desire. This study, however, takes as its starting point the historian of sexuality Michel Foucault‘s contention that sexual regulation produces desire rather than repressing it. It charts the role of Evangelical discourse – both regulatory and non-regulatory – in the structuring of Maynard‘s dissident sexual subjectivity. Arguing that sexuality, and female homoeroticism in particular, is crucial to an understanding of turn-of-the-century British culture, this dissertation explores transitions in Maynard‘s same-sex desire as they were occasioned by shifts in her religious subjectivity, examines the role of other cultural discourses in precipitating changes in her religious beliefs, and delineates the implications of transitions in the relationship between Evangelicalism and these other discourses for turn-of-the-century British society. A central focus of this dissertation is the discourse of modernity. Modernity is often represented as the product of the triumph of science, reason, and progress over an out-dated, irrational, repressive religion. This dichotomy is a gendered one; masculinity is often aligned with the former terms and femininity with the latter. Dominant narratives of modernity also fail to take into account the indebtedness of the latter to imperialism. The making of Maynard‘s same-sex desire disrupts the science/religion, masculine/feminine, and metropole/colony binaries that inform narratives of modernity. Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity and her modernizing sexual discourse were the products of Evangelicalism in dynamic interaction with, rather than in opposition to, the scientific discourses of natural theology, evolution, eugenics, and psychoanalysis. The constitution and contestation of Maynard‘s religio-scientific imperialist iii discourse in her same-sex relationships demonstrates the role of imperialism in the production of modern sexuality. Discourses of modern sexuality feature prominently in the making of contemporary geopolitical divides. To move beyond these divides it is necessary to recognize the complex interactions between religion and science that have produced modern western sexuality, and to situate its production in the context of the uneven relationship between metropole and colony. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................................. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ............................................................................................................ iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................................... v Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 1 Chapter 1: Religious Desire and Human Eros: Childhood and Early Adulthood ............... 34 Chapter 2: “That Infidel Place”: Women’s Higher Education, the Crisis of Faith, and Dissident Sexuality ...................................................................................................................... 92 Chapter 3: Familiar Desires: Evangelicalism, Familial Discourse, and Homosexual Subjectivity ................................................................................................................................ 155 Chapter 4: Motherhood: A Class Act? Class, Race, and Empire in the Evangelical Middle- Class Family .............................................................................................................................. 227 Chapter 5: Queer Intimacies: Evangelicalism, Homoeroticism, and Empire ..................... 301 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 362 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 374 Appendices ................................................................................................................................ 388 Appendix A: Chronology of Constance Maynard‘s Life ...................................................................... 388 Appendix B: Dates of the Writing of the Autobiography ..................................................................... 389 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation is the product of a solitary journey in which the support of others has, nevertheless, been crucial. I am particularly grateful to Prof. Joy Dixon, my research supervisor. Not only is she a leading scholar in the field of religion, gender, and sexuality in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain but she has also been an attentive and generous supervisor. Her clear and incisive criticism of my work has been invaluable, as has her confidence in my ability to make a contribution to the field. The innovative theoretical frameworks that she has forged in her work have enabled me to think in more nuanced ways about the complex relationship between religion, gender, and sexuality. I have also been fortunate to have committee members who have provided valuable input at various stages of my project. I have appreciated Prof. Pamela Dalziel‘s ability to hone in on weaknesses in my work and to articulate these unflinchingly, while expressing a sustained confidence in it. Prof. Robert Brain joined the committee late in the process. I am indebted to him for his reading of my dissertation at short notice and his well-formed, thorough, and perceptive suggestions. Prof. William Pinar, with his wide-ranging and interdisciplinary interest in religion, queer sexuality, and critical race theory has prompted some important lines of enquiry. In the history department of UBC I have found an intellectually engaged, rigorous, and hospitable scholarly community. Faculty members have been willing to give generously of their time to students. I have also benefitted from the administrative expertise of the head of the department, Prof. Daniel Vickers, and two graduate advisors, Prof. William French and Prof. Alejandra Bronfman. The graduate secretary, Gloria Lees, has negotiated the complex bureaucratic processes with a well-practiced ease, has communicated the latter clearly to vi students, and has persevered with both. This, along with the efficiency and flexibility of all the staff of the history department, has made the process a smoother one. My research has entailed intermittent trips to the archives of Queen Mary College, University of London and I have valued the assistance of the archivist, Lorraine Screene. Closer to home, the librarians and the staff in the reference, interlibrary loan, and thesis formatting departments of Koerner Library at UBC have also provided much-appreciated support, as have the staff at the Faculty of Graduate Studies. I started this intellectual journey in the women‘s and gender studies program at UBC. Prof. Sneja Gunew played an important formative role in the early stages of my scholarly development and I also benefitted from the support of Professors Geraldine Pratt and Valerie Raoul. The lively and welcoming student body produced friends who have been an inspiration through this process. My thanks, in particular, to Xin Huang who has demonstrated that rare combination of an intrepid, clear-sighted, and efficient approach to her own work with a generous interest in that of others. I am also indebted to Almas Zakiuddin and Itrath Syed whose interest in religion and gender has prompted some very fruitful conversations. Time spent in San Diego led to a friendship with Evelyn Kirkley and Jill Bormann; I have valued their unstinting and gracious support. It is often families who bear the brunt of sustained scholarly ventures such as this one. I am particularly grateful to my partner, Bethan Theunissen, for her unwavering conviction that this project was worth the many sacrifices entailed, her consistent interest in it, and her generous emotional and financial support. I have also benefitted from the support of my parents, Leslie and Jeannette Lloyd, and that of my siblings; they, along with my partner, have modeled the diverse ways in which faith might be negotiated. Finally, this project would not have been possible without generous funding from the University of British Columbia and for this I am very grateful. 1 Introduction Marion and I stood on opposite sides of the tall white china stove, warming our hands . . . I could tell now that Marion was praying, and that God was near. I could only see part of her serge dress, and her knee and her foot. Once her long fingers came around the angle of the stove and we held hands for half a minute and then parted again. There was a thrill, a strange momentary smiling of the heart, an actual physical sensation, and I knew that I loved her. I had thought that never again should I love in the sense of having my heart‘s life implicated, and here the deed was done, and could not be undone, and a sense of awe and even terror came over me as well as a wave of extraordinary sweetness. 1 Thus wrote the prominent Evangelical Anglican and Mistress of Westfield College Constance Maynard (1849-1935) of the final moments of a religious retreat she had convened for her students in the Thuringian Forest in Germany in 1897. 2 Marion Wakefield, a young Anglo-Irish woman imbued with the optimism of a recent spiritual experience, was the guest 1 Constance Maynard, Unpublished Autobiography, 1897, 411-12, Constance Maynard Papers, Queen Mary College, London (hereafter cited as Autobiography). The autobiography is also available on microfilm: Constance Maynard, The Diaries of Constance Maynard, The Origins of Modern Feminism, pt. 1 (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Microform, 1987). Maynard divided her autobiography into parts, which she subdivided into chapters. With some exceptions the page numbering starts afresh with each new part. The chapter numbers run in a single sequence from one to fifty-five. I have cited the part number and chapter using numbers for ease of reading rather than the spelled- out form (―Part 6, Chapter 6,‖ rather than ―Part Six, Chapter Six‖) favored by Maynard. I have also included the year, which refers to the year of her life that she is chronicling. From her account of 1893, Maynard forewent part and chapter numbers in favour of years and I have followed this schema. Maynard wrote the autobiography over a twenty-year period, from 1915 until her death in 1935. Where it is significant, I have thus also included the date of the writing of the account (for a list of dates at which the various sections were written, see Appendix B). Unless otherwise indicated, italics are in the original. The autobiography is comprised of long, transcribed passage from the journals of her ―inner spiritual life,‖ her Greenbooks. These are supplemented by details from a parallel set of Diaries, a record of the ―external events‖ of her life, interleaved with commentary on both from the time of writing the autobiography. In all her notebooks, Maynard records her conversations with family and friends as direct speech. In the absence of other sources, it is these that have been drawn upon. It is important to remember, however, that as the product of her memory, they may not be entirely accurate. 2 The word ―evangelical‖ (derived from the term ―evangel‖ or gospel) had been used from the time of the Reformation to denote Protestantism. However, during the eighteenth-century revivals it came to denote a particular configuration of faith within Protestantism, namely, as historian of evangelicalism David Bebbington notes, a fourfold emphasis on the necessity of conversion, on the atoning work of Christ on the cross, on the Bible as the Word of God, and on good works as the outcome of the individual‘s experience of the grace of God at conversion (David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992], 2-3). Evangelicalism was a cross-denominational movement: George Whitefield and John and Charles Wesley were Anglicans, but the movement they founded seceded from the Anglican Church upon their deaths, and was known as Methodism. By the last two decades of the eighteenth century evangelicalism had permeated most Protestant denominations including Baptists, Independents (or Congregationalists), and the Society of Friends (Quakers). In this study I follow the convention of capitalizing the word ―evangelical‖ to refer to Anglican Evangelicalism, and use the lower case when referring to evangelical Nonconformity or evangelicalism generally. 2 speaker at Maynard‘s retreat. The touching of their hands, the ―strange momentary smiling‖ of Maynard‘s heart, and her sense of her heart‘s life becoming implicated in Wakefield‘s, were the product of a spiritual intimacy cultivated during the retreat. The emergence of homoerotic desire within contexts of Evangelical devotion was not new to Maynard. Raised in ―the full light of Evangelical doctrine,‖ 3 and remaining an Evangelical until her death, she had nevertheless pursued a series of homoerotic relationships through the course of her life. Her eight-year relationship with Wakefield was the last and most significant of these; it commenced, after some delay, in 1899. Maynard kept a careful account of her homoerotic relationships in a series of spiritual diaries which she named her Greenbooks, or ―the story of my own Christian life & those things that touch it most nearly.‖ 4 Her use of a religious genre, the spiritual diary, to describe these relationships attests to the Evangelical piety from which they had emerged and within which they were conducted. 5 Maynard‘s dissident sexual desire was inextricably intertwined with her pursuit of religious aspirations. In 1899 or 1900 Edith Ellis (1861-1916), the wife of the renowned English sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), commenced a relationship with Lily Kirkpatrick, an Irish artist living in St. Ives. This was also the most significant of a number of same-sex relationships she had pursued. Havelock Ellis published Sexual Inversion, the first English medical text on homosexuality, in 1896 and Edith is widely believed to be the subject of one of Ellis‘s six 3 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 1, 1849-1860, 3. 4 Constance Maynard, Greenbook, 27 October 1903, 249, Constance Maynard Papers, Queen Mary College, London (hereafter cited as Greenbook). The Greenbooks (also designated ―Green-books‖ and ―Green Books‖ by Maynard) are also available on microfilm: Constance Maynard, The Diaries of Constance Maynard, The Origins of Modern Feminism, pt. 1 (Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Microform, 1987). 5 Pauline Phipps notes that Maynard‘s ―outpourings about love‖ were ―analyzed within the context of faith.‖ Pauline Phipps, ―Faith, Desire, and Sexual Identity: Constance Maynard‘s Atonement for Passion,‖ Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 no. 2 (May 2009), 265. 3 studies of ―female inversion,‖ ―Miss H.,‖ case study 36. 6 Sexual Inversion, which represented female homosexuality as the product of a male psyche at odds with a female body, marked the beginning of the scientific study of female homosexuality in Britain. Havelock presented homosexuality as a harmless anomaly and thus challenged the contemporary legal, medical, and social censure of it. He was more sympathetic to male inversion than female inversion, but Edith nevertheless understood her same-sex desire in sexological terms; in an undated letter to her close friend, the homosexual activist and sexual utopian, Edward Carpenter, she took up the discourse of inversion to describe her same-sex desire: ―my inversion is the talk of [the] Higher Thought. How it has got out heaven knows or whether they only think it or know it I don‘t quite realize.‖ 7 Although Sexual Inversion was published in Britain in 1897 (it was first published in Germany in 1896), sexological explanations of female same-sex desire remained the preserve of a small medical elite in the ensuing thirty years. In 1928 the author Radclyffe Hall published her novel, The Well of Loneliness, which drew on sexological discourse to represent female homosexuality; Hall was prosecuted for obscenity in the same year. It was only at that point, as a consequence of the publicity surrounding the trial, that the broader British public became acquainted with sexological discourse on female ―sexual inversion.‖ Despite the relatively late dissemination of sexological discourses of female inversion, sexology has predominated in scholarly studies of modern British homosexuality. While acknowledging its largely unsympathetic approach to female homosexuality, historians have nevertheless argued that in an era in which sexual relations between women were inconceivable 6 Jo Ann Wallace, ―Edith Ellis, Sapphic Idealism and The Lover‘s Calendar (1912)‖ in Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and English Culture, ed. Laura Doan and Jane Garrity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 189. 7 Wallace, ―Edith Ellis,‖ 189. Of ―Miss H.‖ Havelock Ellis noted, ―she believes that homosexual love is morally right when it is really part of a person‘s nature, and provided that the nature of homosexual love is always made plain to the object of such affection. . . . The effect of her loving women is distinctly good, she asserts, both spiritually and physically, while repression leads to morbidity and hysteria.‖ Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (New York: Random House, 1942), 226, quoted in Wallace, ―Edith Ellis,‖ 189. 4 to most (the ostensibly passive sexuality of women was believed to require an active male participant), sexology, by naming female sexual inversion, gave women a public language for same-sex desire, lent legitimacy to physical expressions of that desire, and enabled like-minded women to identify one another. 8 Intimate and demonstrative expressions of ―love‖ such as Maynard‘s are either deemed the product of romantic friendships (friendships between women informed by the heightened sentiments of the Romantic movement and often represented as platonic) or, if understood to be sensual or erotic, they are situated on a teleological trajectory as the less coherent, less self-aware, and less sexual products of the pre-sexological era. The scholarship on female homosexuality has, as Harry Cocks asserts of the history of modern sexuality generally, tended to ―recapitulate existing stories of modernity.‖ 9 Positing a singular trajectory of secularization, with the late-nineteenth century as a watershed moment in Britain‘s transition from a religious to a secular society, historians have represented science as the paradigm within which modern sexual discourse emerged. 10 Singular trajectories of secularization that posit science as a simple advance on religion have, however, precluded scholars from considering the possibility that religiously inflected homoerotic relationships such as Maynard‘s, rather than simply an antecedent to modern homosexuality, constitute a different and equally valid genealogy of it. 11 8 Lucy Bland thus argues that sexology gave women the means by which to ―claim the right to be sexual.‖ Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex and Morality (London: Tauris Parke, 1995), 256. 9 H. G. Cocks, ―Religion and Sexuality,‖ in Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (London: Palgrave, 2006), 157-79. For the study of sexology and female homosexuality, see Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Lisa Duggan, ―The Trials of Alice Mitchell: Sensationalism, Sexology, and the Lesbian Subject in Turn-of- the Century America,‖ Signs 18, no. 4 (1993): 791-814; and Siobhan B. Sommerville, ―Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body,‖ in Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 60-76. 10 Joy Dixon, ―Sexology and the Occult: Sexuality and Subjectivity in Theosophy‘s New Age,‖ Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 3 (1997): 411. 11 Important exceptions, discussed below, include Martha Vicinus, ―‗The Gift of Love‘: Nineteenth-Century Religion and Lesbian Passion,‖ Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23, no. 2 (2001): 241-64; Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 265-86; 5 In recent years feminist historians of religion, amongst others, have begun to question the secularization theory that has informed the scholarly aligning of modernity with science. While noting the range of ways in which the term ―modernity‖ has been used by historians, 12 they have been particularly concerned with the notion of modernity as a period of ―disenchantment‖ consequent on the eschewal of religion, following Max Weber‘s formulation in his 1917 lecture ―Science as a Vocation.‖ 13 Alex Owen, exploring the fin-de-siècle mystical revival, argues not only that ―belief was capable of renegotiating the rationalism and even scientism of the period‖ 14 but also that turn-of-the-century religion was ―itself constitutive . . . of key elements of modern culture.‖ 15 Joy Dixon has drawn attention to the failure of proponents of secularization theory to take gender into account. Nineteenth-century women were aligned with spirituality and the religious language evident in turn-of-the-century feminist rhetoric points to the persistence of religion as a discourse of cultural authority for women. 16 For Owen and Dixon the problem with the contemporary mobilization of the category ―modernity‖ is that the binary terms through which it is defined – secular/religious, science/religion, sexually liberated/repressed, and masculinity/femininity – derive from the discourse of secularization itself. Rather than allowing Wallace, ―Edith Ellis‖; and Joanna Dean, Religious Experience and the New Woman: The Life of Lily Dougall (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007). 12 For example, the term ―modernity‖ has been used to describe the socio-economic transformation from agrarian to industrialized societies; the rise of rationality, science, and the pursuit of human progress during the Enlightenment era; the emergence of the modern nation state, the advent of mass democracy, and the processes of rationalization that accompanied these; the advent of industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century and, more recently, new modes of producing knowledge, and new specifications of collectivities and identities. Stuart Hall, introduction to Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall et. al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 3-17. 13 Joy Dixon, ―Modernity, Heterodoxy, and the Transformation of Religious Cultures,‖ in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, ed. Jacqueline deVries and Sue Morgan (London: Routledge, 2010), 212. 14 Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 11. 15 Owen, Place of Enchantment, 8. 16 Joy Dixon, ―A New Age for Women: Suffrage and the Sacred,‖ in Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 177-205. See also, Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge, 2001). 6 for the investigation of the process through which ―modernity‖ was constituted, including how these terms were consolidated and came to exist in opposition to one another, the current understanding of ―modernity,‖ allows only for the confirmation of these terms and their oppositional relationship. 17 Feminist historians of sexuality have also begun to undertake a gendered critique of the exclusionary effects of secularization theory on their field of study. Lesley Hall observes that histories of sexuality have ―placed most weight on scientific, medical and legal treatises or articles in learned journals by men with the appropriate professional qualifications.‖ 18 Victorian women, however, worked in different genres, including ―polemic literature, religious discourse, works of popular instruction, essays, social surveys, textbooks for social workers,‖ many of which have not been considered by historians of sexuality. 19 While some scholars have argued that Victorian and Edwardian women‘s religious beliefs led to inherently conservative views of sexuality – they draw attention to women‘s campaigns to resist the state legislation of prostitution and their involvement in the prostitute ―rescue‖ mission and the social purity and eugenics movements, for example 20 – others have noted the opportunity such campaigns afforded women to speak about sex publicly for the first time. 21 The latter have explored Victorian women‘s recourse to religious language to develop independent and even dissident 17 Dixon draws attention to the ―radical contingency of our analytic categories and the need to subject those categories to an ongoing historical critique.‖ Joy Dixon, ―‗Out of Your Clinging Kisses . . . I Create a New World‘: Sexuality and Spirituality in the Work of Edward Carpenter,‖ in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Wilburn (London: Ashgate, forthcoming). 18 Lesley A. Hall, Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women’s Writing on Sex, 1870-1969 (London: Routledge, 2005), 2. 19 Ibid. 20 Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 21 Bland, Banishing the Beast, xix; Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), 86; and Hall, Outspoken Women, 12. 7 understandings of sexuality. 22 The historian of religion and gender Sue Morgan notes the indebtedness of Marie Stopes‘s Married Love (1918), the paradigmatically modern text on sexuality, to the writings of Victorian Christians such as the physician Elizabeth Blackwell and, paradoxically, the social purity reformer Ellice Hopkins, both of whom made recourse to later nineteenth-century incarnational theology to validate the body and its desires. Morgan suggests that religious discourse was in fact ―deeply imbricated in the making of modern British culture‖ and that women played a central role in the religious making of modern sexuality. 23 In the early 1980s historians of same-sex desire began to explore the role of religion in the making of Victorian homosexuality. They focused primarily on male homosexuality and Anglo- and Roman Catholicism. David Hilliard‘s 1982 essay ―UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo- Catholicism and Homosexuality‖ inaugurated this field. Hilliard argued that the homosociality of the Anglican priesthood and of the monastic orders, the aestheticism of Anglo-Catholic religious practice, and the marginality of Anglo-Catholics within the Church of England rendered this tradition attractive to male homosexuals. Taking up Hilliard‘s work and focusing on both men and women, Frederick Roden delineated a three-stage model of the emergence of modern homosexual identity in literary religious discourse, from an erotic interest in homosocial religious institutions in the work of John Henry Newman and Christina Rossetti, to a troubled awareness of the possibilities of homoeroticism in the religious poetry of Gerald Manley Hopkins and Eliza Keary, to a fully-fledged, religiously-constituted homosexual identity in the writings of the aunt-niece couple Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (who published under the pseudonym ―Michael Field‖) and in the work of Oscar Wilde.‖ 24 In a ground-breaking essay 22 Sue Morgan, ―‗The Word Made Flesh‘: Women, Religion and Sexual Cultures,‖ in DeVries and Morgan, Women, Gender and Religious Cultures, 162. 23 Ibid., 159. 24 Frederick S Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 8 that addressed both women and Protestantism, Martha Vicinus argued that the same-sex relationships of Mary Benson, the Evangelical Anglican wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury Edward Benson, were the product of the spiritual mentoring that was central to Evangelical piety. 25 In the only essay to explore Maynard‘s religious beliefs and her same-sex desire, Pauline Phipps suggested that a Puritan theology of atonement provided Maynard with a discourse of penance in advance of her ―sin,‖ thus facilitating Maynard‘s pursuit of illicit sexual desire, and that it enabled her to achieve a modern sexual identity similar to that of sexological discourse. 26 As persuasive and as path-breaking as these studies have been, the relationship between religion and homosexuality has sometimes been under-theorized and, as a result, the relationship of religiously-structured homoeroticism/homosexuality to modern sexuality either unexplored or oversimplified. In undertaking an assuredly useful examination of religious institutions, practices, and theologies, these scholars nevertheless adopt an instrumentalist approach to religion; religion is seen to ―facilitate,‖ ―foster,‖ ―create space for,‖ ―provide a vehicle for,‖ ―underwrite,‖ or ―legitimate‖ homosexual desire. 27 The assumption of many of these scholars that same-sex desire and homosexual identity pre-existed religious belief precludes the possibility of exploring the role of religious discourse in the constitution of sexual subjectivity, 28 and of a religiously structured dissident sexual subjectivity in the making of modern sexuality. A too-rapid attribution of sexual identity of the sexological kind prevents an exploration of the 25 Vicinus, ―Gift of Love,‖ 242. 26 Phipps, ―Faith.‖ See also, Pauline Phipps, ―An Atonement for Ambition and Passion: The Experience of British Victorian Educational Pioneer, Constance Louisa Maynard (1849-1935)‖ (Ph.D. dissertation, Carlton University, 2004). 27 Phipps, for example, asserts that Maynard ―adopted‖ faith as ―a means of understanding and resisting her same- sex desire‖ and that Maynard used religious discourse (the notion that love was a gift from God) to ―justify‖ and to ―rationalize‖ her illicit desires. Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 266. 28 Dixon, ―Your Clinging Kisses.‖ 9 intersections between pre-sexological and sexological discourse, whether in the form of resistance, convergence, or mutual constitution. The possibility of iterations of desire that are both self-aware and non-identitarian is overlooked and the diversity and complexity of modern iterations of same-sex desire is reduced to identitarian formulations. In order to fully understand modern sexuality, the complex relationship between religion and science from which it emerged, and broader transformations in late nineteenth-century British culture within which it was constituted, it is necessary to explore the role of the religion in the constitution of sexual subjectivity. By charting the role of religious discourse in the making of Constance Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity, this dissertation challenges the binary categories that inform secularization theory (secular/sacred, science/religion, sexual liberation/sexual repression, amongst others), maps the historically particular, dynamic, and diverse relationships between these discourses, and suggests that the process of social transformation evident in turn-of-the-century Britain was more complex than singular trajectories of secularization have allowed. The making of Maynard‘s same-sex desire suggests that Evangelicalism, rather than an anachronism, was integral to the production of modern sexuality. Maynard is best known for her pioneering work in the British movement for women‘s higher education. The daughter of Henry Maynard (1800-1888), a prosperous colonial merchant with offices in Pancras Lane, London, and of a mother of French Huguenot descent, Louisa Maynard, nee Hillyard (1807-1878), she was one of the first women to pursue a university education. She gained admission to Girton College, Cambridge (or, more accurately, its predecessor, the College for Women at Hitchin), the first British residential college for women, in 1872, just three years after it had been founded by Emily Davies. She was the first Girton student to sit the Moral Science Tripos examination. In 1882, at the age of thirty-three, Maynard 10 established Westfield College (since incorporated into Queen Mary, University of London), the first British college to formally grant degrees to women; she served as its principal until her retirement in 1913. 29 Over the course of her life Maynard published just under thirty books, primarily smaller ―shilling books‖ of a theological, instructional, or devotional nature, and over thirty essays, of a similarly religious nature, in a wide range of primarily Christian periodicals. 30 Towards the end of her life Maynard, who was not given to self-aggrandizement, perceived herself to have attained a unique position among Anglican Evangelicals: ―I cannot but feel that I hold a place in the true Evangelical Church of today that I think no other woman holds.‖ 31 Maynard was indeed a prominent Victorian Evangelical; she knew and was known to many other leading Evangelicals. Lord Shaftesbury had attended the planning meetings for Westfield College in 1880 and well-respected Evangelicals such as Dr. Henry Wace, who had been principal of King‘s College, Dr. W. H. Barlow, and Canon James Fleming sat on the Westfield Council. Others, such as the Evangelical Bishop of Durham, Handley Moule, sent their daughters to Westfield. 32 Josephine Butler, whom Maynard met at the 1881 Christian Women‘s Union Conference in Liverpool, where Maynard presented her proposal for a Christian women‘s college, encouraged her in this endeavor. 33 Catherine Marsh, the daughter of 29 Oxford granted degrees to women in 1921 and Cambridge in 1948. Women had graduated from the University of London, in small numbers, from 1880. Bedford College, founded in 1849, prepared students for London degrees, and University College admitted women to most of its faculties after 1878, when the University of London opened its degrees to women, but these colleges were not residential. In 1882, the year Westfield opened, Maynard counted eleven women amongst two hundred men at the University of London graduation ceremony. In 1989 Westfield merged with Queen Mary to become ―Queen Mary and Westfield College.‖ The college moved from Finchley Road, Hampstead Heath (its home from 1891) to the Queen Mary campus in Mile End. The Hampstead Heath campus was purchased by King‘s College, but parts of it have recently been sold. In 2000 the name ―Queen Mary and Westfield College‖ was changed to ―Queen Mary College.‖ 30 This is a rough count since some of Maynard‘s articles were published anonymously as was the convention in most journals of the period. Although Maynard mentions some of her publications in her diaries, it is difficult to ascertain whether the list is definitive. 31 Autobiography, 1919, 76. 32 Autobiography, 1903, 502. 33 Autobiography, Part 6, Chapter 41, 1881, 84. 11 the Evangelical theologian William Marsh, whom Maynard met in 1905 when Marsh was eighty-seven, was similarly supportive. 34 Through her involvement with the Salvation Army in the early 1880s, Maynard was also well-acquainted with William and Catherine Booth. Maynard was also a feminist. In addition to her work in women‘s higher education, she supported suffrage and spoke enthusiastically of Millicent Fawcett, the moderate suffragist and president of the National Union of Women‘s Suffrage Societies. Her support for suffrage is evident in an account of the 1908 suffrage march, written for the benefit of former Westfield students: It was not thought well that our College should take the prominent part others did – Girton, Somerville etc. marching under their distinctive banners. Neither did we forbid it as Holloway authorities did to their present Students. The result was that all the Staff (save of course Miss Whitby) and five of the elder students went. I am too much identified with Westfield to be able to go. . . . It was all most orderly and quiet and those who went enjoyed it very well, seeing Miss Fawcett, Miss Davies, and all the other celebrities concerned. 35 Maynard was also an avid supporter of Josephine Butler and her campaign in the 1870s and 1880s to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts and, like many Victorian feminists, she endorsed the social purity movement that emerged from that campaign. 36 Maynard also participated in early efforts to consolidate an international women‘s movement. At the invitation of Lady 34 ―It was a wholly new world to her, but her ready sympathy came forward & embraced it. . . She saw clearly how one generation cannot serve another but each must serve its own, & there was not a trace of being shocked or of standing aloof from what I had to tell.‖ Autobiography, 1905, 540. 35 Constance Maynard, Budget Letter, 30 June 1908, quoted in Sondheimer, Castle Adamant, 66. Like other forerunners in women‘s higher education, she did not engage actively in the suffrage campaign for fear of alienating her already uncertain constituency. Emily Davies had withdrawn from suffrage work for similar reasons. M. C. Bradbrook, “That Infidel Place”: A Short History of Girton College, 1869-1969 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), 13. 36 The Acts allowed for the medical examination of women suspected of prostitution in garrison towns and ports and the incarceration in ―lock hospitals‖ of those found to have contracted sexually transmitted diseases until they were deemed healthy. Their male clients, military men for the most part, were exempt. The Acts were thus seen by those who sought their repeal to sanction the sexual double standard as well as prostitution. The social purity movement sought to procure the support of the state, including law-makers and the police, to eradicate prostitution. 12 Aberdeen, Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, she presented the report on women‘s education at the 1899 Quinquennial Meeting of the International Council of Women. Maynard can thus be considered an evangelical feminist and located in the very diverse company of other such women, including Butler (1828-1906) and Booth (1829-1890), the latter of whom was not affiliated with the women‘s movement but nevertheless promoted women‘s rights within Salvationism. Despite Maynard‘s prominence amongst evangelical women, she has been largely overlooked by historians of both British evangelicalism and Anglicanism. While she is known to historians of gender, feminism and sexuality, no full-length study of her life has emerged from these disciplines either. The only biography of Maynard was published in 1949 by Catherine Beatrice Firth, a Westfield graduate, a friend of Maynard‘s, and one of the five women literary executors to whom Maynard entrusted her manuscripts. 37 Firth‘s biography, while excluding Maynard‘s homoerotic relationships, gives due consideration to both her religious beliefs and her educational achievements and remains a largely reliable and informative account. 38 More recent work on Maynard has, for the most part, been subject to what Dixon refers to as the ―historiographical division of labor‖ that has seen ―women‘s politics and women‘s spirituality . . . dealt with in separate literatures, and only a few attempts made to map the relationships between them.‖ 39 Studies of Maynard as a pioneer in the campaign for women‘s higher education rarely explore the relationship between her work in education and her 37 Firth entered Westfield in 1901 and studied under the well-respected historian Caroline Skeel, won the prestigious University of London Gilchrist Scholarship for her work in history in 1904, and in 1912 was the first Westfield student to attain a D. Lit. Sondheimer, Castle Adamant, 8, 56. 38 Firth found Maynard‘s outpourings about love ―startling, sometimes painful‖ and ―which [wished?] that she could turn away from records which, it seemed, no stranger‘s eye should read.‖ Catherine Beatrice Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, Mistress of Westfield College: A Family Portrait (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949), 5. 39 Dixon, Divine Feminine, 2-3. 13 Evangelicalism. 40 Maynard‘s founding, of the first college to grant women‘s degrees, as one in which ―the name of Christ is loved & honoured‖ 41 may also have proved problematic for historians of feminism; despite a growing scholarship on religion and feminism, the indebtedness of the latter to the former has yet to be fully acknowledged. 42 Certainly, the Puritanical framing of Maynard‘s Evangelicalism, her religious dogmatism, and her proselytizing are impediments to empathy for twenty-first century feminists. Maynard‘s feminist engagement with women‘s higher education was nevertheless driven by Evangelical aspirations. She believed herself to have received a prophetic calling as a child and soon after entering Girton, at the age of twenty-three, identified women‘s higher education as the arena within which she was to exercise that calling. She saw as her predecessors Christian women who had engaged in social reform, including ―the pioneers of nursing – Florence Nightingale, sweet Agnes Jones, and grave Sister Dora; the true hero, Josephine Butler; the single woman theologian of the nineteenth century, Dora Greenwell; the helpers of the utterly degraded, Mrs. Raynard and Mrs. Bayley; the persuaders to righteousness, Miss Marsh, Mrs. Pennefather, and Mrs. Catherine Booth; the sailor‘s friend, Miss Weston.‖ 43 Her taking up the cause of women‘s higher education was a variation of the characteristic Evangelical theme of 40 Maria Tamboukou, ―Erasing Sexuality from the Blackboard,‖ Australian Feminist Studies 17, no. 38 (2002): 135- 49; ―Of Other Spaces: Women's Colleges at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century in the UK,‖ Gender Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 7, no. 3 (2000): 247- 63; and ―Spacing Herself: Women in Education,‖ Gender and Education 11, no. 2 (1999): 125-39. Also, Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) and Deirdre Raftery, ―The Opening of Higher Education to Women in the Nineteenth Century: ‗Unexpected Revolution‘ or Inevitable Change?‖ Higher Education Quarterly 56, no. 4 (October 2002): 330-46. 41 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 11, 1872, 355-56. 42 Two articles on Maynard attempt to bridge some of the divides that characterize the scant scholarship on Maynard. In ―‗One Life to Stand Beside Me‘: Emotional Conflicts in First-Generation College Women in England,‖ Vicinus examines the relationship between Maynard‘s educational endeavours and her homoeroticism (Feminist Studies 3 [Fall 1982]: 603-28) and Phipps examines the relationship between Maynard‘s faith and her homoerotic desire (―Faith,‖ 265-86). 43 Constance Maynard, ―From Early Victorian Schoolroom to University: Some Personal Experiences,‖ Nineteenth- Century 76 (1914): 1069. 14 social reformism, only in this instance directed as much at Evangelicals themselves as non- believers. At Westfield Maynard sought simultaneously to promote the cause of women‘s higher education amongst traditionally conservative Evangelicals and to promote the gospel amongst educated women. The same-sex desire and the homoerotic relationships pursued by this prominent Evangelical Victorian emerged as a product of her prophetic calling as she undertook it within the context of women‘s higher education. At first glance the idea that Victorian Evangelicalism should produce same-sex desire, structure homosexual subjectivity, and provide a language for homoeroticism/homosexuality seems counter-intuitive. For contemporary historians, Victorian Evangelicalism seems quintessentially sexually repressive. Evangelical discourse was taken up in the late eighteenth century by an emerging middle class intent on consolidating class and racial difference. 44 Evangelicals aligned sexual continence with respectability and juxtaposed these with the ostensibly lax sexual morality of the upper and working classes and the putative sexual excesses of the indigenous peoples of the empire. 45 The repressive effects of Evangelicalism were evident at the level of public policy as the Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Encouragement of Virtue promoted the vigorous prosecution of obscene publications from 1850, and the National Vigilance Association (NVA), which succeeded it in 1875, pursued harsh measures to eradicate prostitution. Understandings of Victorian Evangelicalism as singularly sexually repressive have, however, often been informed by ahistorical notions of both religion and sexuality, which have 44 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780- 1850), rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002). 45 Catherine Hall, ―Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century,‖ in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46-76; Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Philippa Levine, ―Sexuality, Gender, and Empire,‖ in Gender and Empire ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 134-55; Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 15 precluded an exploration of other ways in which Evangelicalism and sexuality may have intersected. Scholars of religion and sexuality have often understood sexual desire to be the result of a biological drive that is unchanging in form. While the diversity of religious traditions has been acknowledged, religion has nevertheless often been represented as a response to spiritual or psychological needs deemed similarly universal and transhistorical. In making recourse to psychoanalytic theory, scholars of religion and sexuality often re-inscribe the essentialism inherent in ahistorical readings of sexuality and religion. They represent religion as the product of the sublimation of sexual desire, thus assuming a pre-constituted sexual drive and religious traditions that are unchanging in their motivation. If readings of religion as sexually repressive represent religion and sexuality as inherently antithetical, this usage of psychoanalytic theory collapses ―religion‖ into ―sexuality.‖ 46 Religion is deemed simply a manifestation of sexual desire. The possibility that religious discourse produces and structures sexual desire is precluded. Such readings of the relationship of religion and sexuality are not uniform within psychoanalytic theory. Freud, in fact, by opposing the biological models of sexuality promulgated by earlier sexologists and by arguing for the role of parents in the structuring of infants‘ otherwise polymorphous or undifferentiated sexuality, presented a more dynamic model of sexuality which attempted to take cultural factors (the family) into account. Freud did not historicize the family, however; his theory of the child‘s psychosexual development depended on the nuclear, middle-class family of western culture. He did not theorize the role of religion in either the constitution of the family or in the structuring of the child‘s sexual subjectivity. Some gender historians have attempted to do this. Thus Barbara Taylor, in her analysis of the erotic history of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, takes as her starting point the Freudian notion that ―the worshipful identification with deified parents . . . are the threads from which our 46 Joy Dixon, ―Your Clinging Kisses.‖ 16 subjectivity is woven,‖ but goes on to argue that Wollstonecraft, confronting a lack of parental affection, pursued an amorous relationship with the divine. She explores the key role of ―the religious imagination in the formation of [Wollstonecraft‘s] sexual subjectivity.‖ 47 The Freudian focus on the nuclear family is thus extended to include the divine. 48 Taylor does not, therefore, represent religion as the product of the sublimation of sexual desire; instead, she suggests that religious desire and human eros are independent and parallel discourses which may nevertheless intersect. While her use of psychoanalytic theory is more nuanced than that of other historians of religion and sexuality, Taylor nevertheless still tends to construe religion and sexuality in ahistorical terms. 49 Michel Foucault‘s The History of Sexuality, Volume One (1976), arguably the text that established the modern study of sexuality, provides an often overlooked framework for investigating the historical particularity of religion, sexuality, and their relationship to one another. Foucault refuted prevailing psychoanalytically indebted readings of Victorian sexuality 47 Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 116. 48 For an example of a related, though not historical, approach, see the work of the Lacanian feminist Julia Kristeva, particularly In the Beginning Was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith (1987) and Tales of Love (1987). Kristeva suggests that the successful negotiation of the loss of the mother (in Lacan‘s reworking of Freud‘s oedipal theory), entails the child identifying with a third party, or the Other, which Kristeva defines as an illusion or fantasy. As Dawn McCance notes, Kristeva suggests that in Catholicism, Christ and the Virgin Mary constitute the Other; they serve as the mirror in which the child may construe her/his unity and thus attain subjecthood. Dawn McCance, ―Kristeva‘s Melancholia: Not Knowing How to Lose,‖ in Religion in French Feminist Thought: Critical Perspectives, ed. Morny Joy, Kathleen O'Grady and Judith L. Poxon (New York : Routledge, 2003), 139. 49 Taylor thus notes that the primary demand we make of ourselves, each other and our gods . . . is the demand for a viable self- identity that is psychically and culturally viable. How such a viable subjectivity is established is in part – but only in part – a matter for history. Clearly the components of selfhood change over time – does it for example include a soul? – but the fundamental psychological processes through which self-identities are forged, I am proposing, are ubiquitous and constant. It is these processes that give persuasive weight to religion‘s universalist claims: not the claim of this or that religion to the exclusive possession of universal truth, but rather the capacity of all religions, as [William] James suggests, to speak to the demand of our being human.‖ Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, 128; Taylor is referencing William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Penguin, 1985), 259, first published in 1902. While Taylor goes to some pains to refute ahistorical notions of religion, she nevertheless asserts the ubiquity of the individual‘s need to forge identities and represents that process as the transhistorical purpose of religion. 17 as ―repressed‖ (the ―repressive hypothesis‖) and resisted predominantly Marxist notions of power as singularly oppressive or restrictive. He took historically specific discourses as his point of departure (―the history of sexuality – that is the history of what functioned in the nineteenth century as a specific field of truth – must be written from the viewpoint of a history of discourses‖ 50 ). By discourses he meant the institutions, practices, and language associated with a field of knowledge. Foucault argued that the proliferation of discourses on sexuality in a variety of disciplines during the Victorian era – sexology, psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, and demography, for example – attested to the productive rather than restrictive nature of power and had the effect of saturating Victorian society with sexual desire rather than repressing it. Foucault did not eschew the notion of repression altogether, but saw it as part of a dual dynamic – repression/proliferation – intrinsic to the operation of power. The veiled or oblique terms in which sexuality was framed in Victorian discourse, the heightened significance sex gained as a result, the consequent notion that sex was a secret that required discovery and that it comprised the truth of the self, and the individual‘s recourse to sexual discourse to ascertain the truth of sex, produced and proliferated sexual desire. This desire, in requiring management, appeared to legitimate the regulatory discourse that produced it; the reach of power was thus extended into the intimate lives of Victorians. Foucault‘s analytic of modern power was concerned not only with the production of sexual desire but of sexual subjectivity and the sexual subject. He argued that individuals, by making recourse to sexual discourse to speak their truth, gained sexual subjectivity while simultaneously rendering themselves subject to that discourse. Foucault charted the transition from the religious regulation of sexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to the scientific regulation of sexuality in the nineteenth century. He argued that an increasing focus on sexual sin during the Counter Reformation, and 50 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1., An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 69. 18 the meticulous charting of sexual desire in the Catholic confession, produced rather than repressed sexual desire. At first glance his work may seem to support secularization theorists‘ aligning of modernity with science and secularization, including the failure to gender secularization theory. Foucault did, indeed, overlook the Victorian alignment of women with religion and the persistent role of religion as a source of cultural authority for nineteenth-century women. One objective of this study is to gender his account of Victorian sexuality by taking as a starting point for an analysis of Victorian women‘s religiously inflected sexual discourse, the theoretical approach he developed to investigate the relationship between religion and sexuality in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. His analysis of the Catholic regulation of sexual desire allows for the possibility that the regulatory discourse of Victorian Evangelicalism and women‘s sexual discourse in particular, rather than being singularly repressive, produced sexual desire and structured sexual subjectivity. At the same time this dissertation refutes the notion that Foucault endorsed simple, unilinear trajectories of secularization. By arguing that the Catholic confession provided the prototype for modern medical epistemology, the modern subject, and the modern operation of power, he drew attention to the imbrication of religion and science in the later Victorian period, and opened the way for more nuanced analyses of the relation of religion to modern sexual discourse. 51 Some historians have begun to pursue a Foucauldian approach to religion. Dixon thus argues that religion, rather than being an ―ontological category,‖ 52 is a cultural formation, one that informs, and is informed by, other cultural discourses. 53 51 David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 106; and Cocks, ―Religion and Spirituality,‖ 157. 52 Dixon, Divine Feminine, 13. 53 To approach religion as a cultural discourse is not to arbitrate on, or to provide rational explanations for, numinous elements within it. Rather it is to chart the broader cultural discourses that structured such expression of the numinous and to trace their culturally specific effects. 19 This study examines Evangelicalism as a cultural discourse and explores the historically specific structuring of Maynard‘s sexual desire. It argues that if sexual subjectivity is discursively constituted it is also multivalent and dynamic. The dissertation thus identifies five chronological but overlapping phases of Maynard‘s religious history, situates these within wider transitions in Victorian religious culture, and investigates Maynard‘s shifting sexual subjectivity as a product of changes in her religious subjectivity. It examines the Puritan, Presbyterian- indebted, Anglicanism of her parents‘ faith, her subsequent encounter with Evangelical revivalism in the form of the Ulster revivals of the late 1850s, her entering Girton College as a young adult in the early 1870s and undergoing a crisis of faith, her rapprochement with Evangelicalism through her involvement with the holiness movement in the 1880s, and her engagement with theological modernism from the late 1890s until her death in 1935. The larger shifts in Victorian religious culture which gave rise to Maynard‘s changing religious beliefs, were themselves the product of interaction with other cultural discourses. This study focuses on intersections between Evangelicalism, on the one hand, and gender, science, and imperialism, on the other. While Foucault‘s notion of the productive nature of power provides a starting point for this dissertation, it also requires qualification. Victorian Evangelical regulatory discourse did not address female same-sex desire directly. It was only in the 1920s, as sexological explanations of female same-sex desire gained prominence, that religious authorities began to censure female homosexuality or ―sexual inversion.‖ (In 1924, the COPEC Commission asserted that while the Church ―might view ‗the pervert with deepest sympathy,‘ it should ‗regard him or her as a defective whose abnormality must be isolated and submitted to special treatment‘‖ 54 ). Nevertheless, Victorian Evangelicals were centrally preoccupied with the possibility that human 54 Christian Conference on Politics, Economics, and Citizenship (COPEC), ―The Relations of the Sexes‖ (London; Longmans, Green and Co., 1924), 31, quoted in Morgan, ―Word Made Flesh,‖ 178. 20 love in any of its forms might eclipse the love of God. Here they were in continuity with their eighteenth-century Puritan forebears. As one Puritan divine noted, to love family and friends was acceptable, but ―to love them with a particular love, as things distinct from God, to delight in them merely as creatures; to follow them as if some good, or happiness, or pleasure were to be found in them distinctly from what is in God: this is a branch of spiritual Adultery, I had almost said Idolatry.‖ 55 Maynard understood the elevation of human love over divine to be her ―besetting sin,‖ her single most significant temptation. In 1927 she wrote to her future literary executors: ―My life has had golden opportunities, but looking back I see it is full of inadequacies and failures and bitter disappointments, and these chiefly founded on the mistake of preferring Human love to Divine.‖ 56 This dissertation thus modifies Foucault‘s approach to regulatory sexual discourse by examining the effects on Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity of the Evangelical monitoring of the affections. For Evangelicals, as for Foucault‘s sixteenth-century Catholics, confession was central to piety. It was a confession that did not require the mediation of a priest, but was made through prayer to God; nevertheless, the presence of other believers or the recording of confessions in spiritual diaries lent urgency and legitimacy to confession. For Maynard the confessional aspect of diary writing was primary. ―People say that sometimes confession to another human being is good for one,‖ she wrote in 1903: ―the accusation we make against ourselves before God are so dim & vague, but to a man we give the details of our sin, time & place & opportunity. This 55 Catherine A. Brekus, ―Writing as a Protestant Practice: Devotional Diaries in New England,‖ in Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630-1965, ed. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006), 25. A clear discourse of affective idolatry was evident in nineteenth-century Britain also, as Vicinus notes: ―all who read Jane Eyre (1847) knew the danger of making an idol of one‘s beloved. Jane is justly punished for loving Mr. Rochester too much, for making him stand ‗between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun.‘‖ Vicinus, Intimate Friends 87, quoting Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 287. 56 Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, 306. 21 effect was produced on me by writing this last page or two.‖ 57 Driven by religious imperatives, she confessed both fully and quite frankly to her privileging of human desire over divine, with an urgent Evangelical sense of the necessity of maintaining a righteous relationship with God. ―All is open & acknowledged now, to God, to myself, to this book, & cannot again be hidden & slurred over,‖ 58 she observed in 1885 after her short-lived homoerotic relationship with fellow Westfield teacher, Frances Ralph Gray. In her autobiographical account of this period she notes, ―If I die, I must die in the attempt to belong only to God.‖ 59 The effects of Maynard‘s diary- based confession were unstable, however; the naming of desire, even in the process of renouncing it, proliferated that desire and facilitated its enactment. If Foucault‘s work on sexual regulation constitutes one framework within which to explore the relationship between Maynard‘s Evangelicalism and her dissident sexual subjectivity, it is not the only one. Foucault‘s relatively narrow focus on sexual regulation prevented him from considering the role of religious desire in inciting human eros, structuring sexual subjectivity, facilitating erotic relationships, and producing discourses of sexuality. 60 An erotic discourse of religious desire, or the longing for spiritual intimacy with Christ, existed alongside repressive Evangelical sexual discourse, but has been largely overlooked by historians of sexuality. With the evangelical revivals of the Victorian era – the Irish revival of 1859, the holiness movement which emerged in the 1860s, the Moody and Sankey campaign of the 1870s, 57 Greenbook, 23 March 1903, 192. 58 Greenbook, 5 April 1885, 40. 59 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 48, 120. 60 He nevertheless gestured towards this possibility: ―The ars erotica did not disappear altogether from Western civilization. . . . In the Christian confession, but especially in the direction and examination of conscience, in the search for spiritual union and love of God, there was a whole series of methods that had much in common with an erotic art.‖ Foucault, History of Sexuality, 70. He defined ars erotica as ―truth is drawn from pleasure itself . . . [pleasure is understood] first and foremost in relation to itself; it is experienced as pleasure, evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specificity, its duration, its reverberations in the body and soul‖ (57). See chapter three for a discussion of this. 22 and the turn-of-the-century Torrey, Chapman, and Alexander revival meetings – Victorians made increasing recourse to metaphors of love, courtship, and marriage, all of which derived from the Christian scriptures, to define their relationship with Christ. Effusive articulations of spiritual desire, articulated in the language of human eros, led to slippages between the two. Metaphors of human eros had been an integral part of the Evangelical discourses of conversion and spiritual mentoring from the eighteenth-century revivals. John Wesley had argued that individuals‘ attraction to one another elucidated God‘s love for humankind; he went on to suggest that ―in human relations, spiritual knowledge can best be conveyed and absorbed when teacher and pupil gaze at each other ‗with a lover‘s eye.‘‖ 61 For Maynard it was only through human love, including love ―in its form of passion,‖ 62 that the would-be believer understood God‘s love. 63 She believed an erotically inflected love to be the context within which spiritual birth took place and early spiritual mentoring was conducted. Cases such as Maynard‘s suggest that contemporary evangelical notions of homosexuality as alien to the tradition or as the product of modern and degenerate discourses of sexuality are misplaced. Female homoeroticism was a product of Evangelicalism and, in an era in which women predominated in Evangelicalism and in which devotional friendships were homosocial, an unacknowledged female homoeroticism both structured and sustained Evangelicalism. The Evangelical discourse of the family was, however, the most significant non- regulatory mechanism to structure Maynard‘s same-sex desire. The mutual constitution of Evangelical discourses of literal marriage, motherhood, and the family on the one hand, and their spiritual counterparts on the other – the use of the earthly family as a metaphor for the 61 Mack, Religion of the Heart, 135, 142. 62 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 49, 1885, 139. 63 Here she resembled Mary Benson, whose ―intense Evangelical belief in a personal savior began in earthly love.‖ Vicinus, ―Gift of Love,‖ 242. 23 spiritual and vice versa – rendered the discourse of the literal family unstable. The representation of the believer‘s relationship with God as a father-child relationship and with Christ as a bride-bridegroom relationship, and the depiction of the church as the ―family of God,‖ provided a challenge to the literal family by allowing for the possibility that relationships within the spiritual family might trump earthly ones. Maynard‘s same-sex desire emerged as she took up the mother-daughter metaphor for her spiritual friendships along with the notion that it was through an erotically inflected love that individuals apprehended the love of God. Maynard‘s subsequent struggle with her ―besetting sin‖ led to the emergence of what I designate a ―homosexual subjectivity.‖ The necessity of combatting the attractions of ―human love‖ led to an unrelenting investigation of its nature; Maynard came increasingly to insist on the difference between her homoerotic desire and platonic notions of love. Eventually she turned to heterosexual discourse and ritual to argue for the sexual valence of her intimate same- sex relationships, even while rejecting the love that characterized those relationships as inimical to her love of God. She came to an awareness of the sexual nature of her desire in the course of repudiating it; that awareness was, nevertheless, not cast in identitarian terms and is best characterized as a homosexual subjectivity rather than a homosexual identity. Maynard‘s religiously structured homosexual subjectivity contests the alignment of modernity with secularization; it also challenges the category ―modern sexuality.‖ Frank Mort notes that ―sexual theory is littered with reductionisms, they have proved simplistic because they fail to grasp the plurality of sexual systems and force disabling choices around polarised oppositions.‖ 64 These ―reductionisms‖ derive in part from the notion that Foucault aligned modern sexuality with sexual identity and juxtaposed the latter with the sexual acts that were the 64 Mort, Dangerous Sexualities, xx. 24 focus of his study of the earlier religious regulation of sexuality. 65 Eve Sedgwick has criticized New Historicist scholars for inadvertently replicating the teleological thinking of the Whiggish histories they seek to critique when they make rigid distinctions between sexual acts and identities, and position the latter as an advance on the former. 66 Queer postcolonial scholars have extended this critique by drawing attention to the imperialism inherent in this teleology: the singular sexual identities that have come to define modern sexuality are western and are contrasted with the ostensibly less advanced, fluid, and less visible iterations of same-sex desire evident in non-western cultures. 67 In response to both these criticisms, New Historicist David Halperin theorizes the present as sexually heterogeneous, comprised of diverse sexual practices and identities with varying genealogies. 68 For historians of Victorian sexuality the question of what constitutes ―modern‖ sexuality has been complicated by the question of whether women‘s same-sex relationships were in fact sexual and how the term ―sexual‖ should be defined. Historians have debated whether the lack of textual evidence for female same-sex genital activity in the Victorian era reflects the lack of a concomitant practice and have asked whether the absence of public discourses of female same- sex sexuality rendered it impossible for later Victorian women to understand and to pursue sexual relationships with one another. Vicinus‘s answer to these questions represents a growing 65 David Halperin believes this widely held reading of Foucault‘s History of Sexuality to be inaccurate; he suggests it represents Foucault‘s approach to sexology but not to homosexuality generally. David, M. Halperin, How to do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9. 66 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California, 1990), 47, quoted in Halperin, History of Homosexuality, 10. 67 Gayatri Gopinath,―Homo-Economics: Queer Sexualities in a Transnational Frame‖ in Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary Marangoly George (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 102-24; Geeta Patel, ―Home, Homo, Hybrid: Translating Gender,‖ in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, eds. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 410-27. 68 Halperin, History of Homosexuality, 12. Here Halperin draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty‘s work on modernity and religion in ―Minority Histories, Subaltern Pasts‖ in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 200), 97-113. 25 consensus in the field. She argues that ―erotic play was an integral part of [Victorian women‘s] lives‖ 69 and that expressions of the erotic ranged ―from the openly sexual, to the delicately sensual, to the disembodied ideal.‖ 70 Vicinus suggests that a pre-sexological censuring of female same-sex relationships as morbid, damaging, or ill-pursued led Victorian women to forego accounts of such relationships. Others scholars have noted that Victorian women generally (like most Victorian men) rarely wrote about genital sexuality in their diaries. Yet others have pointed to ostensibly non-genital sexuality, such as the sadomasochism of Victorian barrister Arthur Munby and maid-of-all-work Hannah Cullwick, and questioned whether genital sexuality should be the index against which sexual intercourse is defined. 71 Debates regarding the sexual practices that accompanied the same-sex desire of Victorian women have contributed to variations amongst scholars regarding the appropriate terms with which to designate such women and their relationships. Thus, while Vicinus believes ―all categories and definitions must remain provisional,‖ she uses the term ―lesbian,‖ which she expands to include a ―range of activities and identities,‖ as a ―a convenient linguistic reminder that sex matters.‖ 72 Other historians, taking up the critique of identity inherent in queer theory – the notion promulgated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Judith Butler that the act of classifying 69 Vicinus, Intimate Friends, xix-xx. Early work on this question, by the historians Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman, yielded the answer that Victorian women‘s homosocial relationships, their ―romantic friendships,‖ were rarely sexual. The publishing of Anne Lister‘s diaries by Helena Whitbread in 1998 challenged Smith-Rosenberg‘s and Faderman‘s analyses; Lister described genital sexuality with women and kept a tally of the orgasms she experienced. In 2004 Martha Vicinus revisited the female friendships Faderman had studied and drew attention to articulations of sexual desire intrinsic to them. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, ―The Female World of Love and Ritual: The Relations between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,‖ Signs 1, no. 1 (1975): 1-29; Faderman, Lillian. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 11-36; Anne Lister, The Diaries of Anne Lister, 1791-1840, ed. Helena Whitbread (London: Virago, 1988); and Vicinus, Intimate Friends. 70 Vicinus, Intimate Friends, xx. 71 Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 43. See also Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 72 Vicinus, Intimate Friends, xxiii, xxii. 26 and categorizing homosexuals is intrinsic to their subjugation – reject the term ―lesbian‖ as an identitarian formulation. Joanna Dean, while not espousing queer theory, nevertheless echoes the approach of its practitioners, when she argues that the ―retroactive application [of the term ―lesbian‖] imposes a modern identity politics on a more multivalent past‖ and suggests of the relationship between the Anglo-Catholic Lily Dougall and Sophie Earp that it ―could no more be ‗romantic friendship‘ in the asexual terms of the mid-nineteenth century, than it could be a ‗lesbian‘ relationship in the highly sexualized terms of post-1928 modern lesbian identity.‖ 73 Maynard was well able to identify sexual desire. As early as 1872 she had pursued a flirtation with her cousin‘s husband, the St. Andrews Classics professor Lewis Campbell, and had come to an understanding of her own erotic power and of the possibly sexual valence of touching. She recognized parallels between the articulation of desire in this relationship and caressing, kissing, and sharing a bed in the later 1870s with Louisa Lumsden, her first female love; she described the effects of touch in both relationships as an ―electric thrill.‖ 74 She understood her capacity to awaken sexual desire in women; she described herself as inciting her love‘s sexual ardor, ― it was I, I who had lighted the fire.‖ 75 She was intent on distinguishing sexual desire from platonic love, and used a variety of terms to do this: ―[love] in its form of passion,‖ 76 ―passionate affection,‖ 77 ―strong personal love,‖ 78 ―thrill of excitement,‖ 79 and 73 Joanna Dean, Religious Experience and the New Woman: The Life of Lily Dougall (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 72. 74 Greenbook, 30 December 1877, 270. 75 Autobiography, 1899, 448. 76 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 49, 1885, 139. 77 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 46, 1885, 58. 78 Greenbook, 28 June 1907, 173. 79 Autobiography, Part 5, Chapter 34, 1878, 355. 27 ―raptures.‖ 80 In a characteristic Victorian discourse of sexuality, she ultimately acknowledged that, in her relationship with Wakefield, the ―white rose‖ of purity had been supplanted by the ―red rose‖ of passion. 81 Maynard never understood her same-sex desire to represent the truth of herself or to constitute a sexual identity, however. Her homosexual subjectivity represents an articulation of Western female same-sex desire that cannot be classified using identitarian formulae. The queer theorist Judith Halberstam has coined the term ―perverse presentism‖ for a methodology in which the past throws into question accepted understandings of the present. 82 Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity raises questions about the contemporary alignment of female same-sex desire with lesbianism; it suggests that other discourses of female same-sex desire may characterize contemporary western culture and disrupt the western privileging of discourses of sexual identity over sexual acts. In examining the relationship of religion, science, and modernity in the making of Maynard‘s dissident sexual subjectivity, this study is indebted not only to the work of Foucault but also to a number of more recent works in the field. Dixon challenges singular trajectories of secularization by demonstrating that the categories of analysis upon which it depends, and which we think of as ―either/or‖ – such as the secular and sacred or science and religion – were actually 80 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 46, 1883, 59. In the late 1890s she the same metaphor to describe heterosexual transgression and her own same-sex desire. See chapter five for a fuller discussion of this trope. 81 In this study I eschew the term ―lesbian‖ in order distinguish between Maynard‘s same-sex sexual subjectivity and contemporary sexual identity. I use the term ―same-sex sexuality‖ to denote genital sexuality between women, ―homosexual subjectivity‖ to denote Maynard‘s recourse to heterosexual discourse to validate a specifically sexual desire, and ―same-sex desire‖ or ―homoerotic desire‖ to denote a less clearly defined erotically inflected desire for women. Following Jeffrey Weeks, I use the term ―sexuality‖ in a broader sense than Foucault, to denote ―a general description for the series of historically shaped and socially constructed beliefs, behaviours, relationships, and identities.‖ Jeffrey Weeks, ―The Body and Sexuality‖ in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert and Ken Thompson (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 368. 82 For Halberstam, Anne Lister‘s masculinity raises questions about the subordination of gender to sexuality in lesbian feminist representations of female masculinity. She notes: ―what we do not know for sure today about the relationship between masculinity and lesbianism, we cannot know for sure about historical relations between same- sex desire and female masculinities.‖ Female Masculinity (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 54. 28 often ‗both/and‖ for Victorians. 83 Richard Dellamora, pointing to the persistence of religious discourse in literary modernism, as evidenced in Radclyffe Hall‘s The Well of Loneliness, argues that the ―religious discourse of sexual difference stands in complex, ambivalent, often resistant relationship to sexological discourse. Chronologically, it can precede, parallel, dialogue with it, and contest the truths of emergent sexology.‖ 84 Wallace, turning to Edith Ellis, asserts that it was ultimately less Havelock Ellis‘s sexology that provided the explanatory framework for her same-sex sexuality than the esoteric spirituality of Edward Carpenter. 85 She suggests that Ellis found Havelock‘s ―rationalist, ‗scientific‘ analysis a necessary but not sufficient way of understanding and representing the experience of being an invert.‖ 86 Cocks summarizes this new direction in the field when he argues that the history of sexuality should be read ―not as a simple story of secularization which is shaped by the death of religion, but one that is informed by a dialogue between the secular and the spiritual.‖ 87 If Maynard‘s homoeroticism emerged as a product of her Evangelicalism, and she did not engage overtly with sexological discourse, she nevertheless took up scientific discourse to understand sexuality, both her own same-sex desire and the ―deviant‖ sexuality of her adopted daughter Stephané Fazulo (―Effie Anthon‖). Natural theology – or the belief that God could be 83 Ruth Livesay, Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880-1914 (Oxford, 2007), 6, quoted in Dixon ―Your Clinging Kisses.‖ Dixon notes that Livesay is addressing the relationship between politics and aesthetics, but she argues that the same may be said for politics (and other categories) and religion. 84 Richard Dellamora, ―The Well of Loneliness and the Catholic Rhetoric of Sexual Dissidence,‖ in Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, ed. Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden, and Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007), 114. 85 Wallace, ―Edith Ellis,‖ 193. 86 Jo-Ann Wallace, ―‗How Wonderful to Die for What You Love‘: Mrs. Havelock Ellis‘s Love-Acre (1914) as Spiritual Autobiography,‖ paper presented at the Religion and Sexuality in Britain 1870-1930 Workshop held at the University of British Columbia, 27-30 August 2009, 10. 87 Cocks, ―Religion and Spirituality,‖158, my emphasis. Martha Vicinus anticipated this line of enquiry when in 1984 she observed that ―a major contribution of the sexologists, and perhaps one reason why they came to be accepted, was their vocabulary, which made it possible to describe the complex connections among spirituality, sexuality, and personal emotions.‖ Martha Vicinus, ―Distance and Desire: English Boarding-School Friendships,‖ Signs 9, no. 4 (Summer, 1984): 621. 29 known through nature and thus through scientific enquiry – was integral to Maynard‘s parents‘ Evangelicalism and her childhood was characterized by amateur scientific pursuits such as astronomy, geology, botany, and physiology. Maynard‘s attempt to synthesize Darwinism and Evangelicalism in the early years of the twentieth century attests to the esteem in which she held science. Her adoption of Fazulo in 1888, her discovery in the mid-1890s of Fazulo‘s purported sexual deviance (her masturbation), and her recourse to eugenic discourse to deter Fazulo from marrying, further illustrates the imbrication of science and religion in Evangelical discourses of sexuality. When, in 1915, Maynard started to write her autobiography, she turned to another scientific discourse, Freudian theory, to attempt to understand her homoerotic desire. This study thus charts not only the religious genealogy of Maynard‘s homosexual subjectivity but the scientific discourse that existed in a variety of relationships to that genealogy. Maynard‘s writings suggest that neither a simple model of the ―ascendancy‖ of science, nor a model that posits the discrete existence of religious and scientific discourse in turn-of-the-century Britain, is adequate in understanding either modern sexuality or modernity. If for historians of religion the category ―modernity‖ has precluded the study of the role of religion in the making of modernity, for historians of empire the category ―modernity‖ has prevented an adequate consideration of the role of imperialism in the discursive and material production of British modernity. The raw materials, labour, and land upon which the industrialization – and thus ―modernity‖ – of Britain depended were the product of imperialist expansion which, for indigenous people, did not represent ―progress.‖ Scholars of religion and gender have begun to attend to the imperial framing of religious women‘s activism in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Historians of Christianity have noted that missionary women wrote many of the articles and tracts that shaped metropolitan Britons‘ understanding of empire, while metropolitan women associated with the missionary movement disseminated their 30 writings. 88 A recent literature within the history of sexuality, yet to be taken up by scholars of religion, turns to intimate domestic relationships as sites at which colonial ―grammars of difference‖ were constituted. 89 Ann Stoler, whose work has played a key role here, has demonstrated how the racial categories of the empires of nineteenth-century Europe were made, un-made, and re-made in changing colonial policies on miscegenation, marriage, prostitution, and concubinage and in the intimate relationships that both conformed to and challenged such policies. Studies of female sexuality, and female homoeroticism in particular, have been absent from this scholarship which, for the most part, addresses colonial contexts. In the scholarship on homosexuality and religion, Hilliard inaugural essay charted the ways in which both Catholicism and male homoeroticism disrupted dominant discourses of masculinity as they defined the British nation. Few subsequent scholars have taken up the nation as a frame for their enquiry into Victorian religion and homosexuality, however. 90 Maynard‘s father, Henry, was a colonial merchant. As a young man he had made his fortune in the Cape Colony, and after returning to Britain he pursued a lucrative trade with this 88 Antoinette Burton draws on postcolonial feminists‘ description of the subjugation of indigenous women upon which Western women based their autonomy and notes how the Evangelical feminist Josephine Butler positioned British women as the guardians of ostensibly helpless ―native‖ women in her campaign against the Indian Contagious Diseases Acts in the late 1880s. Turning to theosophy, Dixon notes that ―the racial politics of empire were crucial in framing the context for the emergence of feminine/feminist spirituality within the Theosophical Society‖; the rewriting of Hinduism and Buddhism by British theosophists was characterized by ―inequalities of power that structured exchanges in the colonial context‖ (Dixon, Divine Feminine, 11). See also: Hall, ―Of Gender and Empire‖; Patricia Grimshaw, ―Faith, Missionary Life, and the Family,‖ in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 260-80; Susan Thorne, Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in Nineteenth-Century England. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999); Rhonda A. Semple, ―Professionalising their Faith: Women, Religion and the Cultures of Mission and Empire,‖ in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, eds. Jacqueline deVries and Sue Morgan, (London: Routledge, 2010), 117-37; Dixon, Divine Feminine. 89 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, ―Between Metropole and Colony. Rethinking a Research Agenda,‖ in Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in the Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 3. 90 David Hilliard, ―UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,‖ Victorian Studies 25 (1982): 181-210. Hilliard noted that the widespread characterization of Anglo-Catholicism as effeminate and foreign comprised an effort by the middle class to consolidate its power by aligning the British nation with a robust and masculine Evangelical Anglicanism. 31 colony. References to the empire, or even to the Cape, are rare in Maynard‘s early writings. Where they do appear, they demonstrate the inextricably intertwined relationship of Evangelicalism, imperialism, and commerce. The 1880s saw the emergence of high imperialism which brought to the fore conjunctions that had long existed between Christianity and the British Empire. In 1886 and 1896 Maynard also undertook trips to the Cape Colony. Her scientific ventures in these and subsequent years – her synthesis of Darwinism and Evangelicalism and her appropriation of eugenic discourse in the early 1900s – demonstrate the increasing prominence of imperialism in her Evangelicalism. Taking up Stoler‘s work, I examine two sites of imperially and religiously inflected intimacy in Maynard‘s life at the turn of the century – her mothering of her adopted Italian daughter, Effie Anthon, and her homoerotic relationship with the young Anglo-Irish Wakefield – and ask what may be learnt about the construction and contestation of the ―intimate frontiers of empire‖ at these metropolitan religious sites. 91 In particular I am interested in investigating the metropole/colony dichotomy as it has informed narratives of modernity and as it was constituted and contested in Maynard‘s intimate relationships. Equally importantly, these chapters explore the dynamic process through which scientific discourses of gender, class, and race gained prominence in Maynard‘s making of a ―modern‖ Evangelicalism, while at the same time drawing attention to the strands of resistance to dominant constructions of gender, class, and race inherent in Evangelicalism itself. Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity and her sexual discourse are thus explored as products of a religious subjectivity in dynamic interaction with the broader cultural discourses of science and empire. These chapters, like the dissertation as a whole, challenge the notion of Victorian women as peripheral to both later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperialism and to the making of modernity. 91 Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 1999). 32 At the start of this introduction I noted that only one scholar has published a biography of Maynard and I suggested that the conjunction of Evangelicalism and feminism may have rendered Maynard a less congenial biographical subject for feminist scholars. In some ways she is appealing as she evinces many of the traits of contemporary representations of the New Woman: an early graduate of Girton College and an educational entrepreneur, an avid cyclist (―the very putting of my pack together & setting off in complete freedom with no guide but the map, has a real charm for me‖ 92 ), a committed vegetarian (primarily as a result of her struggle with gout), and an advocate of such innovative practices as massage (―then my little massage lady would come up at 9 oc, & give me ‗such a lovely pinching, such a good hard scrubbing‘, that I could sleep‖ 93 ). Even her sexual purity stance (along with its paradoxical sexual transgression) was not unknown to the New Woman. However, Maynard‘s Evangelical support of the missionary cause, her endorsing of the racial discourse that permeated it, her later engagement with evolutionary discourses of race, and her turn to eugenics towards the end of her life would be objectionable to most contemporary feminists. 94 Her Evangelically inflected, self-assured sense of racial and class superiority, her jingoism, and her political conservatism render her difficult to like or to admire. Moreover, while her life demonstrates the role of religion in the making of dissident sexuality, it is not a sanitized, laudatory, or exemplary sexuality, and neither is it a dissidence that Maynard embraced wholeheartedly. She is not a heroine of the kind usually featured in biographies of sexual dissidents or of feminists. 92 Autobiography, 1904, 526. 93 Autobiography, 1902, 487. 94 New Women were, of course, also implicated in imperialist discourse. See Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Iveta Jusova, The New Woman and the Empire (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005); and Lloyd, Naomi. ―The Universal Divine Principle, the Spiritual Androgyne, and the New Age in Sarah Grand‘s The Heavenly Twins,‖ Victorian Literature and Culture 37, no. 1 (March 2009): 177-96. 33 It may be tempting to exonerate Maynard from her class and racial discourse by noting the pervasiveness of such sentiments amongst middle-class Victorian women. Maynard herself, however, set the precedent for a different approach to biography, what may be deemed the ―anti- heroine‖ approach. In her biography of Dora Greenwell she wrote: ―it was not a satisfactory life. She herself described it in unflinching terms as consisting in ‗total inadequacy,‘ and in truth those who love her best can scarcely demur to this verdict.‖ Maynard went on to ask, ―Why, then, is her life worth writing and reading?‖ and answered in a characteristically Evangelical manner: ―Because of the inner struggle and victory on ground which is now the battle-field, the ‗storm-centre‘ of our generation.‖ 95 Greenwell had successfully navigated the late Victorian crisis of faith. For the contemporary historian Maynard‘s life is ―worth writing and reading‖ because it elucidates a religious genealogy of modern sexuality. It contests the secular/sacred, science/religion, metropole/colony binaries that have defined narratives of modernity by demonstrating the diverse and dynamic intersection of these discourses in the making of modern sexuality. Discourses of modern sexuality, characterized by a religion/science dichotomy, feature prominently in the making of contemporary geopolitical divides; they are part of a neo- imperialism that juxtaposes a scientific, rational, and progressive west with a religious, irrational, and regressive east. One way in which to move beyond these divides is to recognize that modern western sexuality is not the singular product of scientific discourse but rather the effect of complex interactions between religion and science and to chart the varied legacies of these intersections. It is also important to situate the production of modern western sexuality in the context of the uneven relationship between metropole and colony. A study of Maynard‘s same-sex desire demonstrates the significance of female sexuality, and female homoeroticism in particular, to this venture. 95 Constance Maynard, Dora Greenwell: A Prophet for our Own Times on the Battleground of Our Faith (London: H.R. Allenson, 1926), 175. 34 Chapter 1: Religious Desire and Human Eros: Childhood and Early Adulthood When in 1915 Constance Maynard (1849-1935) sought to recapture the ethos of her childhood for the autobiography she had begun writing, she turned to Edmund Gosse‘s 1907 memoir of his Plymouth Brethren upbringing, Father and Son. Maynard‘s mother Louisa (1807- 1878), like Edmund‘s father Philip, had been ―the over-powering force . . . that ruled us all.‖ 1 Although an Anglican, like Philip Gosse she embraced the Puritan belief in ―the total depravity of human nature,‖ propounded a dichotomous theological anthropology (―flesh & spirit, earth & heaven, carnal & spiritual, the old man & the new man, there stood the two natures, & there was practically no communication between the two‖), and advocated a decisive rejection of ―the world.‖ 2 While not ―evangelistic‖ like Gosse, she had nevertheless plied her Puritan beliefs unrelentingly, attempting to inculcate in her children ―a humble, teachable, unworldly spirit.‖ 3 Maynard described her upbringing as ―of the very strictest sort, guarded & repressive to the last point of anything fanciful, foolish, or exaggerated.‖ 4 Fearful of the corrupting influence of an inherently sinful world, Louisa eschewed the season in London, deterred her children from befriending neighbors, and barred them from attending the theatre, playing cards, and reading most novels. 5 At Oakfield Lodge, the family home, she implemented an austere emotional regime, requiring of her children a ―brisk attentive cheerfulness‖ that induced ―a kind of bright 1 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 7, 1869, 157. 2 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 1, 1849-1860, 10 and Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 242. I am capitalizing the word ―Puritan‖ in this study to denote some of the continuities of Henry and Louisa Maynard‘s religious beliefs with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritanism and to distinguish this sense of the term from its more general usage in the Victorian era. 3 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 7, 1869, 145. 4 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 1, 1849-1860, 4. 5 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 4, 1865-1866, 62. 35 hardness of manner‖ and ―good strong self-control.‖ 6 Maynard‘s father Henry (1800-1888), who like Philip Gosse had come under his wife‘s religious sway, worked ―in a much milder, quieter way . . . along precisely the same lines.‖ 7 It was the sexually repressive aspects of her mother‘s Puritanism that most preoccupied Maynard when in 1915 she sat down to write her account of her childhood. She suggested that by prohibiting her daughters from making friends, her mother had denied them potential suitors. Sexual attention was central to young women‘s self-esteem, Maynard asserted, and deterring it had potentially deleterious effects on women. ―I [later] read, e.g. in Mrs. Humphrey Ward‘s books, of ‗the little flatteries & courtesies that every girl should have,‘‖ she wrote, ―how they ‗make her feel her own worth,‘ how sorry she is for a heroine who is 6 months cut off from them, & does not wonder that ‗the hot red blood of youth‘ led her into mischief.‖ 8 By deterring her children from reading novels Louisa had put a significant source of knowledge of courtship and marriage beyond her daughters‘ reach. ―Love & Marriage were great things,‖ Maynard observed, ―must they be for ever hidden away, & never touched on by speech or writing[?]‖ 9 She recognized a gendered element in Louisa‘s undervaluing of ―love & marriage.‖ ―Even an ordinary girl‘s heart, had not that some sort of importance of [in] the world?‖ she asked the anticipated readers of her autobiography. 10 In a modernist remaking of Victorian childhood that constitutes a gendered counterpart to that of Edmund Gosse and Samuel Butler, Maynard thus suggested that her childhood had been sexually repressive and that that repression was the consequence of her mother‘s Puritanism. 6 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 4, 1865-1866, 62 and Part 2, Chapter 8, 1870, 194. 7 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 7, 1869, 146. 8 Ibid.,163. 9 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 6, 1868, 128. 10 Ibid. 36 Historians of sexuality have, from the early twentieth century, presented science, and particularly sexology, as the discourse that liberated Victorians from the repressive effects of religion such as those described by Maynard and Gosse. Adopting singular trajectories of secularization, they argue that Britain‘s transition from a religious to a secular society in the later nineteenth century was marked by a shift from repressive, religiously based approaches to sexuality to enlightened, liberated attitudes that were the product of modern science. However, by deriving their frame of reference from secularization theory, scholars of modern sexuality have tended to replicate, rather than investigate, the binary terms – secular/sacred, science/religion, sexually liberated/repressed, amongst others – upon which their histories are predicated. 11 For Maynard, religion was not singularly sexually repressive. If in her autobiography she was intent on chronicling the repressive effects of her mother‘s Puritanism, she was equally concerned with delineating the effects of a revivalist Evangelicalism in validating her feelings, inciting religious desire, and through the latter providing her with a discourse for sexual desire. Although she remained an Evangelical Anglican through the course of her life, and lived during a period in which the sexological discourse of female ―sexual inversion‖ did not circulate widely, she pursued a series of erotic relationships with women. 12 In her autobiographical writings she represented Evangelicalism as the framework within which her sexual desire had been incited, her dissident sexual subjectivity constituted, and her same-sex relationships 11 Joy Dixon, ―‗Out of Your Clinging Kisses . . . I Create a New World‘: Sexuality and Spirituality in the Work of Edward Carpenter,‖ in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult, ed. Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Wilburn (London: Ashgate, forthcoming). 12 While discourses of female homosexuality were known to some women in same-sex relationships, to the creators and consumers of Victorian pornography, and to members of the legal and medical professions, it was only with the trial of Radclyffe Hall in 1928 for the publication of The Well of Loneliness, which made a plea for the tolerance of female inverts based in part on sexological discourse, that the wider British public became acquainted with female ―sexual inversion.‖ 37 pursued. 13 She thus differed from the modernist Gosse in depicting religion rather than secularism as the antidote to the Puritan repression of her childhood. This chapter examines Maynard‘s Puritan upbringing, her encounter with revivalist Evangelicalism, the awakening of her religious desire, and the religious structuring of her homoerotic subjectivity. The role of a historically specific Puritan Evangelical discourse in the constitution of Maynard‘s homoerotic desire demonstrates the cultural contingency of sexual desire and sexual subjectivity. Maynard‘s religiously structured homoerotic desire also contests the secular/sacred, science/religion, modern/antiquated, liberationist/repressive alignment of binaries that underpins secularization theory. More than this, however, the making of Maynard‘s dissident sexual desire reveals the dynamic, variable, and historically particular relationship between the terms of these binaries. It suggests that sexuality is a particularly productive site for analyzing the varying relationships between scientific and religious discourse, in particular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For a young Maynard religion and science were not opposed to one another but intricately interconnected. Like many Evangelicals her parents endorsed natural theology, the belief that God was known not only through scripture (revealed theology) but through nature, and specifically through the intricate adaptations of organisms to their environment. As a child and young adult, Maynard pursued a variety of scientific pursuits under this rubric. Scientific discourse was thus intrinsic to her early religious beliefs and it informed her religiously structured sexual subjectivity. Maynard‘s 1915-1925 account of her childhood demonstrates a different conjunction of religion and science. Here she brought what she deemed two discrete discourses, Evangelicalism and psychology, into dialogue with one another in a way that illuminates both their co-constitution of and the contestation between Evangelicalism and 13 Pauline Phipps, ―Faith, Desire, and Sexual Identity: Constance Maynard‘s Atonement for Passion,‖ Journal of the History of Sexuality 18 no. 2 (May 2009), 265. 38 psychological discourse. The diverse relationships of religion and science in the making of Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity and her discourse of sexuality suggest that the antithesis between religion and science, sometimes represented as natural by scholars of secularization, is actually historically specific and variable. Maynard‘s early erotic history also suggests a more complex relationship between the sexual liberation/sexual repression binary; it not only reveals an interdependence between these discourses but, paradoxically, demonstrates their inadequacy in delineating sexual histories. Constance Maynard was born on 19 February 1849, the fifth of six children of Henry and Louisa Maynard. The Maynard family was representative in many ways of the well-heeled, entrepreneurial upper-middle-class constituency of Evangelical Anglicanism. Henry was a colonial merchant and a banker in a family-based business. He and his brother, Charles, had been sent by their father to the Cape Colony in 1819 to work as agents for the Cape Town firm of an uncle, Henry Nourse. 14 The two brothers had established a family firm, Maynard Brothers, in Grahamstown on the Cape‘s eastern frontier during the 1820s and made their fortunes in the lucrative wool trade. 15 In 1837 Henry returned to England to marry Louisa Hillyard, whom he had courted for ten years. Louisa was the descendant of well-to-do Huguenot émigrés who had settled near Selborne in Hampshire in the late seventeenth century. The family had subsequently joined the Church of England; her grandfather, Gabriel Talhourdin (b. 1743), had been rector of Bentley, near Selborne, for forty years. 16 Louisa had been raised on the family estate, Thorpelands, in Hampshire. 14 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 7, 1869, 150. 15 Basil Alexander Le Cordeur, The Politics of Eastern Cape Separatism, 1820-1854 (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1981), 42, 54. 16 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 2,1861-1862, 25. 39 After marrying in 1837, Henry and Louisa Maynard settled in affluent north-west London, in Henry‘s rented terrace home, Chalcots, on Haverstock Hill. Henry managed the London branch of Maynard Brothers from its Pancras Lane offices. Their first two children were born at Chalcots: Josephine, who was called ―Tissy‖ (b. 1839), and Henry who was called ―Harry‖ (b.1840). In 1843 the family moved to 17 Park Terrace, Highbury, where Gabrielle, or ―Gazy‖ (b.1845), Dora (b. 1847), Constance (b. 1849), and George (b. 1850) were born. In 1853, with the extension of the railway beyond London, the Maynards, like many wealthy Londoners, moved to the countryside. They lived in Southborough near Tunbridge Wells for a year. In 1854 Henry Maynard purchased Oakfield Lodge in the village of Hawkhurst in Kent, the family home for the next forty years. Oakfield Lodge was, as Maynard‘s first biographer Catherine Firth avers, ―discreetly opulent‖ with its wide front porch supported by four Greek pillars and its fourteen acres of land. Stables with living quarters for the groom were located on the estate – the family owned a number of carriages – in addition to cottages for the butler and gardener. The Maynards employed numerous servants; just before her death in 1878 Louisa requested that her coffin be carried to the graveside by six manservants in the family‘s employ. Family holidays were spent at Folkestone, Eastbourne, Hastings, or Tunbridge Wells, and in 1857, when Constance was eight, the Maynards went to Switzerland for the summer. By the early 1870s the financial prospects of the Maynard daughters were very good (―those were the years we were really rich, & Father put aside a sort of minimum of ₤20, 000 for each daughter with more in the distance‖ 17 ). In their seminal study of the English middle class, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall draw attention to the significance of Evangelicalism to the consolidation of the collective identity of the middle class and to its political influence. Eschewing the radical rhetoric of 17 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 7, 1869, 175. 40 French or American revolutionaries, and asserting the primacy of the ―spiritual condition of humanity,‖ an emerging middle class extended its public influence in the campaigns for moral reform, including the anti-slavery campaigns of 1780-1820 and the campaign for the reform of manners and morals. 18 Like earlier generations of Evangelicals, the Maynards combined a political conservatism with the refusal of overt political interests. During Maynard‘s childhood ―no newspapers were read, no politics talked over at meals, no books discussed or great questions broached.‖ 19 Rare expressions of interest in national life focused, for the most part, on the ―spectacular‖ rather than the ―political,‖ as Maynard‘s biographer Catherine Firth notes; Maynard watched the fireworks in Paris for Napoleon III‘s birthday in 1867, shared public concern over the illness of the Prince of Wales in 1871, and discussed the capitulation of Paris to the Prussians during the Franco-Prussian war. 20 A typically Evangelical gendering of roles characterized the Maynard family. Henry left Oakfield twice a week for his London offices while Louisa was responsible for establishing and sustaining the religious tenor of Oakfield, and for undertaking the religious education of the Maynard children. 21 In later years Maynard observed that her upbringing was ―was more than Evangelical, it was Puritan in its exclusion of all but the eternal interest.‖ 22 The term ―Puritan‖ had emerged in the seventeenth century to refer to those Anglicans who sought to ―purify‖ (the word from which the term ―Puritan‖ derives) the Church of England of all vestiges of Catholicism for which they 18 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780- 1850, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002), 82-83. 19 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 2, 1861-1862, 31. 20 Catherine Beatrice Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, Mistress of Westfield College: A Family Portrait (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949), 62. 21 Mary King, Reminiscences of the Henry Maynard Family, 9. Constance Maynard Papers, Queen Mary College, London (hereafter cited as Reminiscences). This text is also available on microfilm: Constance Maynard, The Diaries of Constance Maynard, The Origins of Modern Feminism, pt. 1. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Microform, 1987. 22 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 1, 1849-1860, 4. 41 could not find biblical substantiation, and which they believed to be idolatrous – ornaments, vestments, the sign of the cross, the ritual directions and formulas of the Book of Common Prayer, and the episcopal courts. Theologically, Puritans drew on the teachings of the sixteenth- century French reformer, John Calvin; they espoused two key doctrines: the ―total depravity‖ of human nature and the doctrine of election. Scholars have debated the extent to which Evangelical Anglicanism was in continuity with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritanism, 23 however a more direct link with Calvinism is evident in Louisa‘s Huguenot heritage and her engagement with Presbyterian theology, which was also indebted to Calvin‘s teachings. Louisa and Henry turned to the teachings of a small but influential group of Church of Scotland theologians: Edward Irving (1792-1834), John McLeod Campbell (1800-1872), Thomas Erskine (1788-1870), and Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847). 24 In this they were in accord with shifts in Evangelical Anglicanism in the late 1830s which saw an earlier ―moderate‖ phase of Evangelical Anglicanism, led by William Wilberforce (1759-1833) and the ―Clapham Sect,‖ give way to a more rigid, second-generation, Calvinist iteration of the movement. Henry and Louisa also made recourse to the teachings of the Anglican divine William Law (1686-1761), particularly his Treatise On Christian Perfection (1726) and A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728) which had influenced John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, and the senior Henry Venn. 23 Herbert Schlossberg contends that it was Dissent rather than the Church of England that retained the Calvinist spirit of the Puritans. The Silent Revolution and the Making of Victorian England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000), 48. Nigel Scotland sees greater continuity between the revivalism of the eighteen century and the Puritans of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Evangelical Anglicans in an Age of Revolution, 1789-1901 (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2003), ix. Josef Altholz agrees with Scotland arguing that the ―evangelicalism that remained within the Church of England [after the Wesleyan secession] link[ed] up with the survivals of seventeenth- century Puritanism and produc[ed] the most active Church movement in the new century.‖ The Religious Press in Britain, 1760-1900 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1989), 15. Raphael Samuel, on the other hand, argues that the term ―Puritan‖ was almost obsolete by the nineteenth century but was brought back, and reworked, for primarily political purposes – aligned with Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth – to forward the democratic cause of Nonconformity. ―The Discovery of Puritanism, 1820-1914: A Preliminary Sketch‖ in Revival and Religion Since 1700, ed. Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew (London: Hambledon Press, 1993), 201-47. 24 So important were these Scottish theologians to Henry Maynard that in 1871 he and Constance visited the ailing Campbell in Rosneath. Campbell gave Henry and Constance first-hand accounts of the other heroes of their faith: Dr. Chalmers ―was a man of grand catholicity of spirit‖ while ―everyone who came near Irving felt the noble simplicity & intense devotion of his character.‖ Greenbook, 30 May 1871, 164. 42 While the Maynard family was characteristic in many ways of the well-to-do constituency of Evangelical Anglicanism, the indebtedness of Henry and Louisa to Presbyterianism caused their theology to diverge from mainstream Evangelicalism. Like many Evangelicals, they took as the starting point of their theology the doctrine of original sin and the inevitable sinfulness of human nature (―total depravity‖). With the fall humans had forfeited their ―spiritual nature‖; the ―natural man‖ was alienated from God and his efforts of no merit in God‘s sight. Following William Law, however, the Maynards rejected the Evangelical atonement doctrines of substitution (the notion that Christ had died in the place of sinners) and of imputed righteousness (the notion that at conversion Christ‘s righteousness was imputed to sinners) as ―unjust & unfair.‖ 25 They turned instead to Irving and Campbell‘s low Christology. In his The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of our Lord’s Human Nature (1830) Irving argued that Christ‘s Atonement could only be understood through his incarnation and lifelong obedience to God. In his The Nature of the Atonement and it Relation to Remission of Sins and Eternal Life (1856) Campbell concurred. Although Irving and Campbell sought to effect a shift away from the crucifixion to the incarnation as the means of atonement, and their theology thus ultimately had a liberalizing effect on Presbyterianism, Maynard‘s parents re-inscribed the centrality of the crucifixion in their reading of Irving and McLeod Campbell. 26 Christ had taken sinful human form and had redeemed humanity not in the single event of the crucifixion, but in a lifelong crucifixion of the ―old nature.‖ He had thereby demonstrated both his divinity and the means by which humanity was to be redeemed. Human redemption required a similar, metaphorical and life-long crucifixion of ―the natural man.‖ For Louisa Maynard the ―great death of our Lord 25 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 243. Robert Story of Rosneath and Erskine had adopted similar views. Greenbook, 4 December 1870, 7. 26 Gerald Parsons, ―Victorian Britain‘s Other Establishment: The Transformation of Scottish Presbyterianism,‖ in Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. 1, Traditions, ed. Gerald Parsons (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 124. 43 Jesus Christ & His perfect atonement‖ was inextricably linked to the ―death, the humiliation & crucifixion that must go on in every believing heart.‖ 27 Maynard‘s Greenbooks, the spiritual diaries she commenced in January 1866 at the age of sixteen, reflect the influence of her parents‘ theology on their daughter. Mary King, Maynard‘s older cousin and the spiritual mentor of her adolescence and early adulthood, had explained the implications of Henry and Louisa Maynard‘s theology to Maynard: ―The Spirit of God must enter our hearts, & there nail the old nature to the cross.‖ 28 She entreated Maynard to ―ask every day that you may be shown what your cross is, & be made willing to bear it.‖ 29 Maynard endorsed King‘s teaching. ―It was the Master‘s path, perfect self-crucifixion,‖ she wrote, ―so we cannot walk after Him in the same path without meeting the cross too. And this not once but every day.‖ 30 She nevertheless struggled with the renunciation of self that King enjoined. ―I think it is a more difficult thing than people generally suppose,‖ she observed in 1867, ―to open one‘s heart for the Lord to enter, & tell him we always want to live just as He would have us, & be trained for Him alone, because that involves such endless humiliations & crossing.‖ 31 A pervasive and characteristically Puritan sense of the ―conviction of sin‖ and spiritual failure characterized her early adult piety (―when I have time to think there are always sad thoughts ready to come, thoughts that I have forsaken the right way, & am letting myself go, & losing ground, & that it will be a hard toil up to the point again‖ 32 ). 27 Greenbook, Good Friday 1869, 145. 28 Greenbook, 7 December 1867, 151. 29 Ibid., 154. 30 Greenbook, 16 August 1871, 221-22. 31 Greenbook, 1 April 1867, 50-51. 32 Greenbook, 13 March 1868, 41. 44 For many Evangelicals, the rejection of ―the world‖ was balanced by a necessary engagement with it through evangelism, philanthropy, and social reform. These were absent from Henry and Louisa Maynard‘s piety, however. Although the Maynards followed Erskine, Campbell, and Irving in adopting Arminianism (or the belief in the universality of salvation) at a time when most nineteenth-century evangelicals, including Anglicans (but not Methodists and some Baptists), propounded a version of the Calvinist doctrine of election, Arminianism did not lead to a clear discourse of conversion in the Maynard household. Maynard notes that ―until I reached Belstead [School] at 14 ½, I had heard very little of conversion as a real personal matter, for it was never pressed, &, within the walls of my home, the term was never used.‖ 33 Instead, her parents embraced ―quietist‖ forms of ―mysticism‖ from a broad range of sources (including William Law, Jacob Boehme, the fourteenth-century mystical treatise the Theologica Germanica, the French Quietists Madame Guyon (1648-1717) and François Fénelon (1651- 1715), the Pietist Philip Jacob Spener (1635-1705), the Moravian Count Zinzendorf (1700- 1760), and Plymouth Brethrenism) to advocate a ―stillness‖ before the crucified Christ that eschewed activity for complete reliance on Christ. For Maynard‘s parents, holiness ―did not depend on . . . any good works we may say or do, but simply on the growth of the new nature, & the crucifixion of the old.‖ 34 If Maynard‘s parents‘ quietist Puritanism led to the eschewal of evangelism, philanthropy and social reform, it nevertheless found an outlet in an all-encompassing intellectual engagement with theology and a characteristically Puritan search for doctrinal truth. For Henry Maynard even the most reputable of theologians had made egregious errors. He advised Constance ―to [be] always on guard, to take no one on trust, to weigh all things in the balance of the sanctuary . 33 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 243. 34 Greenbook, 10 March 1867, 47. 45 . . no matter who says it.‖ 35 He believed spiritual error to be the result of ―the plain logic of cause & effect which guide men in life . . . forsak[ing] them in religion.‖ 36 Looking back on her parents‘ religion in 1925 Maynard noted that ―the object of life on earth I was told was to secure Truth – ‗My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge,‘ – that I think was dear Father‘s favourite text, & all else was secondary.‖ 37 A paradoxically Enlightenment commitment to reason informed Henry and Louisa Maynard‘s search for religious ―truth.‖ While the intellect of the ―natural man‖ was of little use to him, the regenerated intellect was crucial to following Christ after redemption. Louisa advised her children that Christians were ―not called to follow blindly, but to pray that we may spiritually understand & so be able to intelligently obey His will.‖ 38 The nineteen-year old Maynard compared her religious training to that of a more characteristically Evangelical friend, Julia Walford: ―I love & admire her spirit as I do but few others, & yet . . . we have been educated differently . . . I look at religion from an abstract point of view, to look for reasons & principles of things. . . . Her one thought is that she knows enough to save a soul from death.‖ 39 Henry and Louisa Maynard‘s elevation of reason suggests a more complicated relationship between the secular/sacred and rational/irrational alignment of binaries promulgated by secularization theorists. A discourse of reason featured prominently in Henry and Maynard‘s Puritan Evangelicalism. It points to the necessity of historicizing reason itself. Rather than a discourse outside of history, its meaning was shaped in particular historical contexts, including religious ones. 35 Greenbook, 13 April 1869, 166-67. 36 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 6, 1868, 131 and Greenbook, 12 April 1869, 165. 37 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 2, 1861-1862, 29. 38 Greenbook, 19 February 1867, 41. 39 Greenbook, 13 July 1868, 163-64. 46 An interest in science accompanied Henry and Louisa Maynard‘s elevation of reason and was integral to their Puritan Evangelicalism. Henry Maynard‘s espousal of natural theology was evident as he read his daughter Joseph Butler‘s Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed (1736) and William Paley‘s A View of the Evidences of Christianity (1794) and asserted that these ―bore permanent witness to some of the foundational truths of our religion.‖ 40 Henry encouraged his children in a variety of scientific pursuits. Their 1860s schoolroom was equipped with a microscope, telescope, and aquarium. As the result of a rare encouragement of friendship they became acquainted with the family of the well-respected mathematician, astronomer, and chemist Sir John Herschel. The Herschels‘ home, Collingwood, was in Hawkhurst, just a mile from Oakfield. 41 Like Herschel, the Evangelical vicar of the village, the Rev. Fred Howlett, was a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society; Maynard noted that he ―gave his life to the Sun, & made some real discoveries & threw sun-spots on a white screen in his garden for us to see.‖ 42 The pursuit of science had been part of British evangelicalism from its start. John Wesley had written admiringly of Newton in his Concise Ecclesiastical History (1781) and had published two scientific works: the two-volume Survey of the Wisdom of God in the Creation (1763) and The Desideratum: or Electricity Made Plain and Useful (1760). In fact, Bebbington argues that the dynamism of the revivals was the result of Wesley‘s and Jonathan Edwards‘s ―re- 40 Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, 56-57. 41 In her autobiography Maynard notes that ―once in the dark he played notes on the violin & threw patterns on the ceiling, & gave us a lecture on the connection between Light & Sound.‖ Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 2, 1861- 1862, 32-33. Maynard also learnt to make crystals from the Herschels, and writes in the 1870s of buying ―Alum, Sulphate of copper, Ferrocyanide of potassium, and a few other things‖ to demonstrate this to her students. Autobiography, Part 5, Chapter 36, 1880, 414. She was to remain lifelong friends with the Herschel daughters. 42 When as a nine-year-old Maynard visited Howlett‘s home, she ―saw one of the very first Spectroscopes that ever was made; a clumsy enough affair I doubt not, but it did its work, for I saw sodium and magnesium wire and other such things make blazing alterations in the spectrum.‖ Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 2, 1861-1862, 33. 47 writing‖ of Protestantism in the idiom of Enlightenment science. 43 Adopting an empiricism characteristic of Enlightenment thought, Wesley spoke of personal religion as ―practical‖ or ―experimental,‖ argued that the presence of God could be experienced at salvation, and enjoined would-be believers to test it for themselves. 44 Bebbington contends that although evangelical formulations differed from those of other Enlightenment thinkers, ―evangelicals accepted the standard method of the Enlightenment as the high road to knowledge‖; science, ―as an essential component of the Enlightenment worldview, came naturally to most evangelicals.‖ 45 For Bebbington, it was thus Enlightenment science that gave rise to evangelicalism. His hypothesis suggests that the discourse of reason evident in Henry Maynard‘s theology derived from evangelicalism‘s scientific legacy. If evangelicalism was in some respects a product of Enlightenment science, in the first half of the nineteenth century some of the most prominent scientists were evangelicals and science was pursued within the framework of natural theology. At Cambridge, Evangelicals Isaac Milner (1750–1820), Francis Wollaston (1762- 1823) and William Parish (1759–1837) successively held the Jacksonian Professorship of Natural Philosophy. 46 In Scotland a group of evangelical scientists gathered around the prominent Presbyterian minister Thomas Chalmers. 47 Chalmers was the leader of the group of Presbyterians who seceded from the Church of Scotland to form the Free Church in the 1843, but he was also a well-respected mathematician associated with the University of St. Andrews. He had written The Adaptation of External Nature to the 43 David Bebbington, ―Science and Evangelical Theology in Britain from Wesley to Orr,‖ in Evangelicals and Science in Historical Perspective, ed. David N. Livingstone, D. G. Hart, and Mark A. Noll (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 126. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid., 126, 124. See also Phyllis Mack Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008),13-14, 15, 178. 46 Ibid., 123, 127. 47 Ibid., 123. 48 Moral and Intellectual Condition of Man in 1833, the first of the Bridgewater Treatises. The Bridgewater Treatises, published between 1833 and 1840, were central to natural theology, as their subtitle, ―The Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation,‖ suggests. Hugh Miller, second only to Chalmers, his mentor, in leading the 1843 Disruption, had in the course of his work as a stone-mason made significant advances in geology; his findings garnered praise from no less than Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, Charles Lyell, and Louis Agassiz. 48 As an adolescent Maynard encountered Chalmers‘s work through her parents‘ interest in Presbyterianism and read his contribution to the Bridgewater Treatises. In 1866 Maynard wrote, ―I also want very much to see Paley‘s Natural Theology, for somehow, everything of that sort of clear resoning [sic] seems getting more & more valuable to me.‖ 49 It was the evangelical Scottish amateur geologist Hugh Miller, however, whom a young Maynard most admired. In July 1871, at the age of twenty-two, she read his The Two Records: Mosaic and Geological, lectures given to the Young Men‘s Christian Association between November 1853 and February 1854. 50 Maynard‘s ready recourse to scientific discourse to describe her parents‘ theology illustrates the imbrication of science, reason, and religious discourse in the late 1860s: At one time people said there were four elements __ that seemed very simple, every child could learn it, & apparently test it‘s [sic] truth, but in questions of chemistry or indeed any science, this arrangement led to inextricable difficulties. There are now declared to be more than sixty elementary substances, all with hard names . . . Better to have one fixed unvarying knowledge of what the elements are which will guide us through the perplexities of doctrine & practice, as well as everyday life, than to be dazzled by a 48 David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders: The Encounter between Evangelical Theology and Evolutionary Thought (Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 1987), 9. 49 Greenbook, 8 September 1866, 139. 50 An interest in science was evident in Maynard‘s other reading matter during this period. She read Edward Tylor‘s Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the development of Civilization (1865), John Herschel‘s Familiar Lectures on Scientific Subjects (1866), Rev. T. R. Birks‘ The Treasures of Wisdom: Or Thoughts On The Connection Between Natural Science, and Revealed Truth With An Essay On The Analogy Between Mathematical and Moral Certainty (1855) and Mrs. E. C. C. Baillie‘s The Protoplast. A Series of Papers (1853). 49 delusive simplicity, which we must renounce & begin on a new plan if we would learn anything of the deep things of God. 51 Maynard‘s statement not only demonstrates faith in science as an appropriate means of elucidating, in a rational manner, the necessary complexity of her parents‘ theology, it also reveals the scientific structuring of Evangelical faith. Insofar as natural theology was concerned, the ―fixed unvarying knowledge of . . . the elements‖ was literally the building block of religious belief. However, Maynard‘s comment has as much to do with the epistemology of Evangelicalism as its content. For her religious knowledge was similar to scientific knowledge; it was synonymous with the ―fixed unvarying knowledge of . . . the elements.‖ Maynard‘s comment points to the role of the methods and doctrines of science in the codifying of Evangelical values. 52 If a discourse of reason was intrinsic to the Maynard‘s Puritan Evangelicalism and disrupts the alignment of the rational/irrational and secular/religion binaries that secularization theorists have sometimes assumed to be inevitable, Maynard‘s interest in science disturbs the allied science/religion binary. It points to the necessity of charting the historically specific and varied relationship of religious and scientific discourse. The more complex relationship between science and religion inherent in Maynard‘s parents‘ Evangelicalism and in her own childhood faith anticipates the varied relationships between these discourses in her adulthood. For the remainder of her life Maynard was to value the amateur scientific education her upbringing had afforded her. At the same time she was to become profoundly ambivalent about the rationality that characterized her parents‘ faith. She argued of her childhood that ―the spiritual life was over-balanced on the intellectual side as against the volitional, & so the 51 Greenbook, 17 March 1868, 46-47. 52 Robert Brain, e-mail message to author, 8 April 2011. For a further discussion of this issue, see chapter four. 50 emotional side suffered.‖ 53 Her parents had failed to train their children in ―real, devotional, practical Religion.‖ 54 Her mother‘s ―mind was half Greek Philosopher [Stoic] as well as half Christian,‖ Maynard wrote, ―& her reticence on the devotional side was complete.‖ 55 There was ―not much about definite prayer, not much about reading the Bible.‖ 56 Religious emotion was discouraged; she had been ―early taught that emotion, & feelings of happiness & security were not the test.‖ 57 For Maynard the overly cerebral nature of Henry and Louisa Maynard‘s Puritanism was responsible not only for the repression of religious emotion but also for the austere emotional regime Louisa Maynard had instituted at Oakfield and for her undervaluing of ―love & marriage.‖ In her autobiography Maynard represented an emotionally charged revivalist Evangelicalism as the antidote to her mother‘s repressive Puritanism. In Family Fortunes, Davidoff and Hall argued that Evangelicalism was taken up in the late eighteenth century by an emerging middle class intent on consolidating a collective identity distinct from that of the working and upper classes. Subsequently they and other scholars have suggested that sexual discourse played an important role in this endeavor. 58 Aligning respectability with sexual conservatism, the middle class propounded chastity before marriage and sex only for reproductive purposes within marriage, prohibited masturbation, repudiated divorce, and eschewed birth control. 59 While such discourse has been characterized as sexually repressive, what has been largely overlooked by historians of sexuality is the erotically inflected 53 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 6, 1868, 140. 54 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 241 55 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 7, 1869, 163. 56 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 244. 57 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 6, 1868, 140. 58 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes. 59 Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000). 51 discourse of religious desire evident in the evangelical revivals of the later nineteenth century. Maynard encountered revivalist Evangelical Anglicanism in 1859, at the age of ten, while visiting a former governess, the Irish Miss Richardson, in Brighton. This iteration of Evangelicalism, in all likelihood a product of the Ulster revivals of 1859-1859, awakened Maynard‘s religious desire. ―At Hawkhurst,‖ she wrote in later years, ―it [church] had been nothing but a form, but here Mr. Vaughan‘s sermons brought something that appealed to one‘s heart, & that one could carry away.‖ 60 It was not only Mr. Vaughan‘s sermons that incited Maynard‘s religious feeling but the ―responses of a crowded hearty Evangelical congregation that I heard for the first time.‖ 61 These gave her ―a sort of thrill, & the dull Prayer-book suddenly became interesting.‖ 62 A new emotionally engaged discourse of religious longing is evident as Maynard recounts that ―at the beginning of the Litany I used to watch for the solemn words, – ‗O holy blessed & glorious Trinity, three Persons & one God,‘ &, sinking right down in the high old pew, say them slowly to myself out of a full heart, as though I were committing my whole being to a stupendous & merciful power far above me.‖ 63 Subsequent accounts of religious desire are characterized by a similar longing for an escape from the narrow confines of human life. Two years after the awakening of her religious desire, when she was twelve, Maynard wrote of a spiritual experience with her governess, Miss Armstrong (known as ―Grandam‖): I remember sitting particularly by the schoolroom window one evening in Oct. 61, & watching the full moon rise behind the oak trees, clear & still & perfect. We were silent a long time, both our thoughts being lifted off this world, mine in vague longings & lofty aspirations after I knew not what, hers, I doubt not in confident anticipation of what 60 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 1, 1849-1860, 9. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 52 awaited her when the time of her trial should cease. At last she spoke, telling me the thoughts & longings of her heart about the world to come. 64 Maynard‘s description of religious longing demonstrates the Puritan coloring of her revivalist Evangelicalism. Her parents had taught her that Christians were ―pilgrims & strangers‖ in a foreign country, that the world was inherently sinful and posed a threat to the spiritual life, and that earthly life was thus a struggle. 65 The hymns the Maynard family recited and sang on Sunday evenings described the arduous nature of earthly existence, the transience of human life, and the enduring value of spiritual pursuits; they expressed a longing for a timeless eternity of the kind articulated by Maynard‘s governess. These hymns, which derived from the first thirty years of the century, were slow and solemn, and had titles such as ―What is life? ‘tis but a vapour,‖ ―Change is our portion here,‖ and ― O Zion, when I think of thee.‖ A favorite hymn of Maynard‘s began: This world I deem But a beautiful dreams Of shadows that are not what they seem and continued: I gaze aloof On the tissued roof Where Time and Space are the warp and woof, Which the King of Kings As a curtain flings O‘er the dreadfulness of Eternal things. 66 64 Greenbook, 11 July 1867, 90-91. 65 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 7, 1869, 145. 66 Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, 29. 53 Maynard‘s desire to transcend the constraints of earthly life was, like her initial religious awakening, accompanied by a longing to relinquish the self to an all-powerful divine: I had a row of tiny little dwarf cactus plants on a stand in my bedroom, & one night the full moon shone on them. I can re-call the feeling now that came over me, for it was of an endless, timeless, white peace, which . . . was beautiful. It was like a wave of Eternity coming over my little warm hurrying life & sweeping it away. And yet I loved it, & wanted to be one with it! 67 In charting the relation of religious discourse to sexual desire historians have often turned to psychoanalytic theory and have described religious eros as the sublimation of sexual desire. E. P. Thompson is the best-known proponent of this approach. In The Making of the English Working Class he drew attention to Methodist hymns in which believers articulated the desire to abide in the wounds of the crucified Christ. Thompson argued, making recourse to the Freudian unconscious, that such articulations were evidence, as historian of Methodism Phyllis Mack puts it, of ―the twisted fantasies of sexual release merg[ed] with a profound death wish, the desire for the obliteration of the ego in a final disappearance into Christ‘s wound/womb.‖ 68 More recently scholars of religion have challenged such psychoanalytic readings. Their resistance to them is part of a broader critique of the unthinking mobilizing of political, economic, and social factors to explain religious phenomena. Mack thus argues that in Methodism ―words like sacrifice, redemption, conversion, repentance, or ecstasy are not understood in terms of their stated meaning or their meaning for historical actors, but as pointers to other, more profound meanings: poverty, social marginality, sexual desire, the desire for power – terms that have come to define . . . the categories of modern social science.‖ 69 Dixon 67 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 2, 1861-1862, 27. 68 Mack, Heart, 19, referencing E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Victor Gollancz, 1980). 69 Mack, Heart Religion, 9. 54 argues, speaking of readings of religion that prioritize psychoanalysis in particular, that ―the primacy of an a-historical sexual domain tends to leave the category of the spiritual . . . untheorized.‖ 70 The a priori subordination of religion to psychoanalytic explanation does not allow for the examination of religion as a historical phenomenon, for the analysis of the aspirations of religious adherents as historically contingent, or for the plotting of the diverse, historically specific intersections between religion and sexuality. The French philosopher Georges Bataille, whose transgressive writing on religion and sexuality may seem to have little in common with most scholarship on Victorian religion and sexuality, nevertheless provides a useful starting point for the renewed discussion of the latter. In Erotism: Death and Sensuality Bataille refuses psychoanalytic readings of religious desire and maintains that while religious experience may evince elements of the erotic, religious desire and human eros are separate and parallel discourses. 71 In his study of religious desire and human eros in seventeenth-century English devotional literature, Richard Rambuss provides some important guidelines for scholars of religion and sexuality: ―Our aim should be neither to reduce religion into sex nor to desexualize devotion. At the same time, we need to be wary of any blanket spiritual allegorization of the more sensual and corporeal provocations of religious experience.‖ 72 The feminist historian Barbara Taylor, in her biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, observes a similar distinction between religious desire and human eros and charts intersections between the two in Wollstonecraft‘s life. An erotic element was inherent in Wollstonecraft‘s piety, Taylor avers: ―For Wollstonecraft, to know God is not merely to appreciate Him . . . but to adore Him – and this not only because His perfections inspire adoration but because the 70 Dixon, ―Your Clinging Kisses.‖ 71 Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1962), 223-26. 72 Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 100-101. 55 epistemic impulse toward Him is essentially imaginative and erotic in character.‖ 73 For Taylor, to render religion a primary category of analysis is thus not synonymous with refusing the erotic in religious desire. Maynard, living in a later era than Wollstonecraft‘s and engaging with a different religious tradition (Wollstonecraft‘s piety had been forged both as part of, and in opposition to, Unitarianism), evinced a religious desire that had some similarities with Wollstonecraft‘s. Her longing to be subsumed by a divine being who is all-powerful, illimitable, and beyond time, evinces sensual elements. However, her religious longings are not simply reducible to sexual desire; she aspired to a union with the divine that would exceed finite human love. In later years, after satisfying human eros, she nevertheless continued to pursue what she deemed a more significant and enduring religious desire. Maynard‘s religious desire was, like Wollstonecraft‘s, historically contingent; it was the particular product of mid-nineteenth-century Puritanical Evangelicalism. The role of natural theology in its structuring constitutes one aspect of her religious desire‘s historical specificity. Her Evangelical piety was constituted within, and intrinsic to, her adolescent and early adult interest in science, such as astronomy. In 1862 Constance‘s brother George brought home a map of the stars that he had traced from an atlas at school and ―every clear night we ran out to study [the stars]. We got hold of the Zodiac after a while, & then as winter drew on came the supreme joys of seeing the Pleiades rise above the great belt of oaks to the east, followed by the splendour of Orion.‖ 74 In accordance with natural theology, astronomy had religious resonances for Maynard: ―here was a sort of outlet into Eternity, & I seemed to lose myself in vague glory.‖ 75 73 Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 108. 74 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 2, 1861-1862, 32. 75 Ibid. 56 The Romantic poetry Maynard had read as a child – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the predecessor of Romanticism, John Milton – facilitated the commutation of natural theology to religious desire. Of a stay in Frant in East Sussex in 1866 Maynard wrote in later years, ―I smelt the wet earth fragrant after the rain, I saw the moon fly through the clouds, & my whole soul seemed to be drawn out of me into a wider nobler world . . . far from this burst of Nature-worship obscuring spiritual religion, it seemed to lead me to prayer of a higher & more intimate sort, so that it was entirely good.‖ 76 Maynard‘s religious desire attests to the imbrication of religion and science during this period; it reveals the historical particularity of Evangelicalism, science, and their relationship with one another. The God whom Maynard desired was to be found in the wonders of the natural world as revealed by science. From the early 1860s Maynard encountered mainstream Evangelicalism in a more sustained way. These years were, Maynard asserted in her autobiography, the ―glory days‖ of Evangelicalism, and her oldest brother Harry was ―our chief, & almost only, outlet into the life & labour of the Evangelical world . . . he was in with the central workers.‖ 77 Harry had started work at his father‘s London firm in 1859, and had become involved in Evangelical circles in London. He led a Sunday afternoon service for the patients of the Consumption Hospital and later preached for the Evangelization Society. 78 The Maynard family visited him in London regularly. In the winters of 1862-3 and 1863-4 Henry Maynard rented houses in Highbury and Manchester Square respectively and Constance heard sermons by prominent evangelical preachers such as Sir Arthur Blackwood, Sir Emilius Bayley, Mr. Henry Grattan Guiness, Mr. Langston, Marcus Rainsford, Donald Fraser, Mr. Aitken, and Lord Radstock. There were 76 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 4, 1865-1866, 78. 77 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 5, 1867, 86. 78 Ibid. 57 connections between these preachers and some of the most illustrious figures of Evangelical history. Mr. Langston, whom Maynard heard preach frequently, had been a tutor in William Wilberforce‘s (1759-1833) household; the Evangelical divine William Romain (1714-1795) had laid his hand on his head. 79 Mr. Blackwood, in whose parish Harry resided, had turned to serious Christianity after being challenged by prominent Evangelical Catherine Marsh on going to balls (―Did it ever strike you that you are pursuing shadows?‖ 80 ). In the ensuing years Maynard started attending annual evangelical meetings, such as the May meeting at Exeter Hall and the annual London Week of Prayer held at the Freemason‘s Hall. From her cousin, Mary King, she learned of the Mildmay Meetings. 81 Through Evangelicalism she encountered the devotional side of religion; she learnt from Evangelical preachers that ―the new birth within was a real experience, a whole life, & the food it took in was from reading the Bible, & the air it breathed was from prayer.‖ 82 Maynard juxtaposed the Evangelicalism to which she was increasingly exposed with the cerebral Puritanism of her parents: ―I so greatly loved the sermons I heard, the hymns I learned . . . when something more central than reason & judgment was appealed to.‖ 83 Maynard‘s admission to Belstead School in Ipswich, Suffolk, in the autumn of 1863, when she was fourteen years old, extended her engagement with revivalist Anglican Evangelicalism. The Maynard daughters had, like most middle-class Victorian daughters, received an education from a succession of governesses until at around the age of fourteen they were sent to school for a couple of years. Unlike the newer girls‘ schools such as Frances Mary 79 Greenbook, 24 August 1871, 230 80 Greenbook, 4 January 1871, 37. 81 Greenbook, 29 October1870, 260. 82 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 246. 83 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 2, 1861-1862, 29. 58 Buss‘s North London Collegiate School for Girls or Dorothea Beale‘s Cheltenham Ladies College, Belstead was structured on the older, family-based model of girls‘ boarding schools. 84 It was run by the Evangelical Mrs. Umphelby, who assumed the role of ―mother‖ to her students and undertook the religious duties commensurate with that role. ―Mamie‖ Umphelby endorsed a revivalist Evangelicalism that was more mainstream than that of Maynard‘s parents; she embraced susbstitutionary theory and imputed righteousness. (―‗He died for me,‘ was the summary of her adoring devotion‖ 85 ). From Mrs. Umphelby Maynard became acquainted with a more optimistic Evangelicalism that focused not on the conviction of sin, but on the assurance of salvation. Umphelby informed her students ―as a certain & direct promise,‖ that ―sin shall not have dominion over you.‖ 86 Belstead and Mrs. Umphelby had come under the sway of the Ulster revivals of 1859. Maynard wrote of the religious ethos at Belstead: [it] was strong, and quite different from that at home, though the strongly emotional wave, caught from the revival of 1859, was dying down. In Gazy‘s years – 1860 to ‘63 – the girls used to have special Prayer meetings among themselves, and used to shout the Revival hymns when out on walks in the country . . . all was so utterly unlike the slow and generally mournful songs to which I was accustomed, and I could not but enjoy them. . . . Not a word did I hear now about ―truth,‖ but the stress was on devotion. 87 The hymns Maynard learnt at Belstead were characterized by ―glad certainties and ringing melodies.‖ They had words such as: He is fitting up my mansion Which eternally shall stand, For my stay shall not be transient In that holy, happy land. 84 Martha Vicinus, ―Distance and Desire: English Boarding-School Friendships,‖ Signs 9, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 600-22. 85 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 243. 86 Greenbook, 14 March 1866, 43-44. 87 Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, 51. 59 On the other side of Jordan, In the sweet fields of Eden, Where the tree of life is blooming, There is rest for you. 88 Maynard wrote later of this period that ―it was one of those happy times (so very very seldom do I feel so on account of sin & weakness) when my heart felt somewhat at leisure from itself, to flow upwards to its Maker & Saviour.‖ 89 Belstead offered Maynard a rare opportunity to befriend other Evangelical middle- and upper-class girls. She became enamored of two fellow students, Virginia Dalrymple and Fanny Williams. ―Of all the thirty,‖ she wrote in later years, ―only two excited that touch of real love that puts the one loved into a separate compartment.‖ 90 Dalrymple was ―loving & teachable, with a beautiful truthfulness & a clear openness of character, & I think the most fearless moral courage I ever knew.‖ 91 The Evangelical Williams‘s heroism in the face of worldly parents and ridiculing brothers inculcated in Maynard a ―private & exstatic love‖ for her. Historians have debated the extent to which the same-sex friendships of Victorian women or girls were erotic. Influenced by the cult of sensibility and the later Romantic movement, and living in an era that pre-dated the circulation of a pathologizing discourse of female ―inversion,‖ Victorian girls and women spoke in emotionally effusive terms of their love for female friends, addressing them as ―darling,‖ ―love,‖ ―my dearest,‖ for example; they touched, kissed and embraced their friends far more than in contemporary British culture, and regularly shared a bed. The initial construal of this register of affection as platonic (and of female same-sex relationships 88 Constance Maynard, ―An Individual Retrospect of the Religious Thought of the Nineteenth Century,‖ Expositor 4 (September 1901): 173. 89 Greenbook, 14 March 1866, 43-44. 90 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 3, 1863-1864, 45. 91 Greenbook, 15 June 1866, 104. 60 as ―romantic friendships‖ after the influence of Romanticism) has been largely supplanted by the recognition that ―erotic play was an integral part of [Victorian women‘s] lives.‖ 92 At the same time Sharon Marcus argues for the careful distinguishing of female homosociality, homoeroticism, and homosexuality in women‘s same-sex relationships. The same expressions or demonstrations of affection might carry different meanings for Victorian women or girls in different contexts, and the meaning of such expressions can only be ascertained within the wider context of the relationship. 93 Marcus‘s injunction to scholars of female sexuality to demonstrate rather than simply assert their claims – whether of friendship, homoeroticism, or homosexuality – is an important one. Maynard‘s account of her 1868 encounter with Dalrymple in Hastings, when she was nineteen years old, renders the erotic nature of the relationship overt: I was walking alone along the Pantiles, when somebody from a shop-door said as it were just in my ear, ―Consy, don‘t you remember me?‖ I turned & there was Virginia Dalrymple, grown up now, dressed in black, tall & beautiful, just 18 almost to the day. I was so utterly bewildered, & such a rush of feeling came over me, that I felt as though I had nothing to say, & had better go away & leave her. I did not know till that minute how much I loved her, & I could only hold her hand & look at her . . . I was bound to go home for tea, & I rather foolishly left her at once, feeling a kind of security that I should meet her again. But I never did, though I hovered about, & ran twice to the station on the day she was to leave, & my heart was rather desolate. I had to content myself with taking down her photograph & enlarging it & colouring it, and subsequently hanging it in my bedroom at Oakfield. 94 Maynard‘s intense emotion, her awkwardness, her belated attempt to meet Dalrymple, her despair at failing, and her subsequent idealization of her friend denote an erotic attachment. Her feelings towards Dalrymple are characteristic of what Martha Vicinus describes as the ―raves,‖ 92 Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xix-xx. 93 Marcus, Between Women, 32. 94 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 6, 1868, 117-18. 61 of girls‘ boarding schools. These erotically inflected relationships, known also as ―pashes‖, ―spoons,‖ ―smashes,‖ ―gonages‖ (for ―gone on‖ someone), and ―flames,‖ usually took place between schoolgirls and older students (such as prefects, games captains, head girls) or young school teachers. Ravees undertook small acts of self-sacrifice – such as making the beloved‘s bed, taking flowers to her room, filling her hot water bottle – while maintaining a distance from her. 95 Desire was enhanced by a play on the public/private divide that saw passion nurtured in private but discussed in public with other students. 96 Until well into the twentieth century raves were considered an inevitable part of schoolgirls‘ lives and potentially beneficial to them; they were seen as the means by which young women honed the emotions required in marriage; their eroticism went largely unnoticed or at least unacknowledged until the dissemination of sexological discourse. 97 At the time of writing her autobiography Maynard was aware of ―raves‖ and deemed them a natural and intrinsic part of girlhood. In an account of her feelings for one of her governesses, Henriete Kröger, she notes: ―I was only nine, rather too young for a passionate attachment, yet I cherished a vague admiration for her.‖ 98 Examining ―raves‖ in the context of the new, larger girls‘ schools that replaced the traditional family-based schools, Vicinus argued that the professionalism that marked relationships between teachers and students in the newer schools intensified students‘ desire, while the esprit de corps that characterized the student body also rendered self-control and the maintenance of personal autonomy an integral part of that desire. The rave ―flourished on a paradox of fulfillment through unrequited love.‖ 99 Maynard‘s seeking but ultimately not 95 Vicinus, ―Distance and Desire,‖ 607. 96 Ibid., 608. 97 Ibid., 617. 98 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 6, 1868, 127. 99 Vicinus, ―Distance and Desire,‖ 608. 62 achieving a meeting with Dalrymple, her private nurturing of her ―love‖ for her by enlarging her photograph, coloring it, and hanging it in her bedroom, the ease with which she accepted this ―service‖ as a replacement for a more direct encounter with Dalrymple, and the prominence of fantasy or imagination in the relationship, are characteristic of the distance-and-desire conundrum of raves in the larger, newer girls schools. In Maynard‘s case, however, the emotional ―distance‖ that precipitated her erotic attraction to Dalrymple was the product not of the professionalization of relationships between teachers and students in the girls‘ schools (Dalrymple was a fellow student and Belstead was an older, family-based school) but of the religious framing of the relationship and of Dalrymple‘s perceived spiritual superiority. If historians of sexuality have drawn attention to the overlooked erotic in Victorian girls‘ and women‘s ―friendships,‖ historians of Victorian religion and homosexuality have begun to explore the religious framing of Victorian homoeroticism. Spiritual friendships have been a central focus of this enquiry. Frederick Roden draws attention to the Victorian interest in biblical accounts of same-sex friendships such as those of Christ and John, David and Jonathan, and Ruth and Naomi. Along with David Hilliard, he argues that Anglo- and Roman Catholics‘ valorization of intense and demonstrative spiritual friendships facilitated expressions of homoerotic desire between men. 100 Vicinus notes a similar effect on women of the Evangelical Anglican elevation of spiritual friendship. 101 While these studies have been both persuasive and path breaking, the relationship between religion and homoeroticism or homosexuality has sometimes been under-theorized. Scholars of Victorian religion and homosexuality have not, for the most part, taken up the tools of postmodern theory to examine in depth the relationship 100 Frederick S Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2002) and David Hilliard, ―UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,‖ Victorian Studies 25 (1982): 181-210. 101 Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 85-108. 63 between the religious discourse that defined these friendships and the dissident sexual subjectivity of some of their participants. In order to order to understand the diverse ways in which religion and sexuality intersected in the Victorian era, and to chart the varying relationships between religion and science in the production of sexual dissidence, it is necessary to explore spiritual friendships not only as sites at which same-sex desire was articulated or even produced, but as sites at which religious discourses structured homoerotic subjectivity in a range of complex ways. Maynard‘s relationships with Dalrymple and Williams demonstrate the structuring of Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity by both Puritan and Evangelical discourse. What drew Maynard to Dalrymple was her willingness to ―own herself wrong, & condemn her faults.‖ 102 ―Oh,‖ she enthused, ―when divine Love acts upon a nature, so naturally lovely as Virginia‘s, how beautiful it is!‖ 103 The role of Puritanism in structuring Maynard‘s homoerotic subjectivity was further evident as she observed admiringly, ―How many more marks she bore, of being under the Master‘s chastening hand than I did,‖ 104 and bemoaned herself in contrast: ―I do not yet fully know how hopelessly lost my nature is, or I should not be in the least surprised. I want to be taught to say, ‗In me, that is in my flesh, dwelleth no good thing,‘ & then surely my way would be clear.‖ 105 Dalrymple‘s renunciation of self, and Maynard‘s admiration of that renunciation, suggests another source of the distance-and-desire dynamic that defined girls‘ erotic attractions in the new, larger schools. The sacrifices for the beloved, including the sacrifice of that desire, may well have been informed by a Puritannically inflected Evangelical discourse. 106 Maynard‘s 102 Greenbook, 15 June 1866, 104. 103 Ibid. 104 Ibid. 105 Ibid., 105. 106 I examine this in greater detail in chapter two. 64 love for Dalrymple found its highest expression in religious solicitude: ―O dear Saviour, tell me, does she indeed flee to Thee to hide her? Then all will be well. Be Thou her strong tower whereunto she may continually resort. Keep her faithful, humble, waiting at Thy feet, & then she will be safe amid all the dreadful vanities, & seductions, & flatteries of the world.‖ 107 The Puritan Evangelical structuring of Maynard‘s early homoerotic subjectivity was also evident in her friendship with Belstead student Fanny Williams. Maynard was attracted to Fanny Williams because she ―knows the Saviour and speaks of what will please Him, in a way no one else does‖. 108 When in the late 1860s the two women‘s intimacy burgeoned it was within the context of Evangelical devotion. 109 They shared biblical texts with one another, gave each other religious literature to read, and discussed the books they‘d read. During an 1869 meeting they spoke of the spiritual struggles they had endured in the preceding year. The primacy of both women‘s religious aspiration was evident as Williams sung Maynard a hymn replete with spiritual longing: ―O to be over yonder.‖ 110 After leaving Belstead in 1864, Maynard longed for further religiously based contact with Williams: ―I feel sure I could help her on, having been far more clearly taught, & I know she would help me by her unworldliness.‖ 111 In 1873 she noted of their burgeoning friendship, ―I think the Master may often give warmth of feeling as a refreshment in our blind fold walking with him & Fan ‗strengthens my hand in God,‘ as no 107 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 6, 1868, 118. 108 Greenbook, 19 January 1873, 23. 109 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 4, 1865-1866, 64. 110 Greenbook, 1869, 140. 111 Greenbook, 13 March 1869, 130. 65 mortal can do except Cousin Mary.‖ 112 Maynard‘s homoeroticism was produced within and framed by more primary and enduring Evangelical aspirations. Historians of Victorian religion and homosexuality have explored the religious institutions, practices, texts, and theologies through which homoerotic desire was expressed, in what we might refer to as ―non-regulatory discourses,‖ yet few have examined the relationship of regulatory religious discourse to same-sex desire. In examining the relationship of Victorian religion to same-sex desire, they have not taken up Foucault‘s notion that the religious regulation of sexual desire produced rather than repressed illicit desire. 113 In subsequent chapters I will explore Foucault‘s assertion in greater depth. Here I would like to take up his work to examine the role of the Evangelical regulation of the affections in the production of female same-sex desire and to simultaneously point out deficiencies in Foucault‘s analysis revealed by the religious production of female same-sex. When Constance and her sisters returned from Belstead their mother put an end to the more exuberant Evangelical piety her daughters had acquired there. In her memoirs of the Maynard family, Constance‘s cousin, Mary King, observed this process: Gazy & Dora brought back Revival hymns from Belstead, & were delighted with their expressions of feeling. The strong personal love to the Saviour, the telling of His tender compassion & the pardon through the blood of the Cross, these hymns were new & glorious to them, especially to Gazy, but they were quietly checked & discouraged, & the young minds were brought back to the thoughts of reverence & duty toward God, that side of religion which belonged to the Protestant, Puritan, & Huguenot attitude of both parents, & of their ancestors. 114 112 Greenbook, 19 January 1873, 24. 113 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1., An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990). 114 King, Reminiscences, 34-35. 66 Louisa Maynard rejected religious emotion of the kind Umphelby encouraged at Belstead; she believed that ―enthusing‖ over conversion ―degenerated into romantic cravings for spiritual experience.‖ 115 She argued of Evangelical hymns that ―the tune was far too quick and shrill, the words were uneducated, the rhymes inexcusable, the meaning superficial, and worst of all, it was putting into the mouths of the young and ignorant a conviction that was to most of them wholly untrue.‖ 116 King also encouraged Maynard to eschew Umphelby‘s emphasis on religious feeling. Umphelby, in seeking to impress upon others the ―love & joy‖ of Christian experience, had forgotten the ―pain, & faith, & self-denial‖ through which they were attained. 117 Young hearts needed to focus on ―the pure go ld & gems of faith & humility & patience‖ 118 and religious emotion shouldn‘t be mistaken for religious treasure itself. Louisa Maynard had also sought rigorously to deter her daughters from befriending other girls, fearing that such friendships might entail an engagement with the world that was deleterious to their piety (she had ―dreaded every sort of external influence for us‖ 119 ). After Maynard left Belstead at the end of 1864 her mother consistently thwarted her attempts to visit Williams, possibly because she disapproved of Williams‘s ―unbelieving‖ and irreverent brothers. In 1871 Maynard noted she had begun ―to feel a great longing for Christian love & fellowship.‖ 120 In 1873 Constance‘s older sister Gabrielle, who was involved in a homoerotic relationship with a woman named Ellen Carfrae, wrote to Constance: ―I think perhaps it is having had few friends that we seem to have a large supply of admiration & affection ready for 115 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 11, 1872, 374. 116 Maynard, ―An Individual Retrospect,‖ 173. 117 Greenbook, 27 April 1868, 87. 118 Ibid. 119 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 7, 1869, 160. 120 Greenbook, 6 November 1871, 287. 67 those who do win an entrance at all; what do you think?‖ 121 At the same time Gabrielle conceded that ―there are so many ‗good‘ people who so not seem to touch one at all, that I dare not say this explains it all.‖ 122 Gabrielle‘s observation both demonstrates and qualifies Foucault‘s contention that regulatory discourse is productive rather than repressive of dissident sexual desire and that, in the Victorian era, the latter emerged as an effect of sexual regulation rather than being suppressed by it. Louisa‘s regulation of her children‘s religious emotion and of her daughters‘ spiritual friendships rendered spiritual women particular objects of desire for them. Gabrielle‘s comments demonstrate that while not all these friendships were desiring ones, the erotic was at the heart of some of them. The genealogy of Constance and Gabrielle‘s homoeroticism disrupts the sexual repression/sexual liberation binary upon which some iterations of secularization theory depend. Their dissident sexual desire was the effect of their mother‘s regulatory discourse; repressive religious discourse and an emancipatory dissident sexual desire were interdependent. The alignment of the repressive/liberation binary with the religion/science one is simultaneously undermined. Lastly, Maynard‘s own aligning of the Puritan/Evangelical and sexually repressive/liberationist binaries is disrupted. Louisa‘s Puritan regulating of her daughters‘ emotions, her repression of her desire, and her restricting of her friendships had actually incited and structured, rather than simply repressed, Constance and Gabrielle‘s sexual desire. Gabrielle‘s suggestion that her mother‘s restricting of her daughters‘ friendships had produced in them an ―excessive affection‖ for certain women suggests a qualification – a gendering – of Foucault‘s work on sexual regulation. It draws attention to the necessity of 121 Greenbook, 9 February 1873, 33. 122 Ibid. Like Constance‘s friendships, Gabrielle‘s erotically inflected friendship with Ellen Carfrae was informed by religious aspiration and an admiration of Carfrae‘s piety: ―Nelly seems to me one who ‗draws all her courage from His love‘‖ (ibid). 68 taking religion into account in histories of Victorian sexuality consequent on the alignment of middle-class women with religion earlier in the century. The ―spiritualization‖ of femininity led to the notion that middle-class women were, for the most part, chaste, passionless, and sexually ignorant. The regulation of a self-aware sexual desire, of the kind described by Foucault, was often deemed unnecessary. Constance and Gabrielle‘s homoeroticism demonstrates an alternative genealogy of same-sex desire than that proposed by Foucault. It was the product not of explicitly sexual regulation, but of their mother‘s monitoring of their affections. It points to the necessity of investigating a greater diversity of discourses in charting the emergence of dissident sexual subjectivity than just the overtly sexual. Just as Maynard‘s Evangelical religious desire had been informed by the scientific discourses of natural theology, so her homoerotic subjectivity was indebted to a scientifically inflected religious desire. The amateur study of astronomy, botany, zoology, and geology within a natural theology framework established the terms of her religious and also of her sexual desire. God was infinite, omniscient, and eternal and yet his intricate working in nature, illustrated by Paley‘s argument from design, attested to the possibility of intimacy with his creation. In future years Maynard understood erotic relationships, which were always pursued as a part of her piety, as a break with the mundane limits of earthly existence, offering an experience of a timeless eternity, while simultaneously allowing for an intimacy commensurate with God‘s work in nature. The role of natural theology in the framing of Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity and of her erotic relationships will be considered more fully in subsequent chapters. Here I will delineate a genealogy of one central scientific metaphor which Maynard mobilized to represent sexual desire, that of electricity, as it emerged within Evangelical discourse. 69 The preachers Maynard heard during the 1860s made frequent recourse to science. Dr. Stevenson thus compared the ―heart of man‖ to a ―photographic camera‖ in 1866, 123 Mr. Grattan Guinness used crystal-making as an image for the Christian life, 124 and Maynard also heard sermons on the spiritual applications of light and a prism of glass, 125 of geology, 126 and of astronomy. 127 Maynard‘s interest in electricity was evident in the summer of 1875 when she attended the annual conference of the British Association in Bristol on the invitation of a fellow student, Isabel Gamble, whose brother, Jack, was Secretary of the ―G. Section,‖ the Mechanics. 128 She wrote in retrospect, ―I went sometimes to Section F, Economics, & again to Section D, Physiology, but I think stayed most in Section G, for there the world seemed to be spinning & buzzing with the expectation of discoveries. They were indeed close, close at hand, for the Xrays, the electric light, telephone, & wireless telegraphy, & many another wonder stood just on the threshold.‖ 129 In 1882 Maynard attended the ―Electric Exhibition‖ at the Crystal Palace and wrote: As evening drew on we had the lights, & I saw . . . ‗some lovely little hen‘s eggs with a knot of incandescent wire inside each.‘ . . . Exactly at 7oc there was a furious splutter, & for a little while ‗the strongest light in the world was turned on, the only light that can throw a shadow in the sunshine.‘ There it was, 150,000 candlepower, & certainly it ignored all the other light, & from high overhead threw black shadows on the palms & ferns upon the floor. 130 123 Greenbook, 21 January 1866, 9. 124 Greenbook, 12 January 1872, 63-64. 125 Greenbook, 27 April 1866, 65-66. 126 Greenbook, 18 August 1867, 105-6. 127 Greenbook, 14 April 1869, 8-9. 128 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 24, 1875, 682. 129 Ibid., 683. 130 Autobiography, Part 6, Chapter 42, 1882, 110. 70 Maynard had encountered Evangelical writing on electricity long before these events, in the 1860s. Like Evangelical preachers, Evangelical authors took up scientific discourse to describe religious devotion. In Tongue of Fire (1856), one of the texts read by Maynard and her parents, William Arthur made extended use of electricity as a metaphor for the Holy Spirit. Electricity explained the omnipresence of the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit was like ―the universal flow of electric power . . . filling up with a finite infinity the whole expanse of the solar system at once.‖ 131 The task of the preacher was to court the divine presence in a manner similar to the storing and transmission of electricity: ―The preacher must first imbibe the Divine fire, and then hold it in his heart, as a Leyden jar will hold the invisible electricity.‖ 132 Finally Arthur described the electric charge as the influence ordinary Christians, charged by the Spirit, had upon one another, a charge that was possible only by ―unearthing‖ themselves. 133 In the late 1860s Maynard adopted the metaphor of electricity to describe the effects of rare meetings with Christian friends. In 1868, she described herself as receiving an ―electric charge‖ upon first making the acquaintance of a young Evangelical neighbor, Lucy Wace, the daughter of a local clergyman. Her sense of the ―charge‖ seems not to have been the result of human eros but of religious desire: Lucy ―was a simple home-loving Christian girl, not at all clever & not very interesting, but she was ready on occasion to talk of the hope that was in her.‖ 134 In later years Maynard drew on the metaphor of electricity to describe a talk she had had 131 William Arthur, The Tongue of Fire, or The True Power of Christianity (London: Hamilton: Adams & Co, 1856), 176. 132 Arthur, Tongue of Fire, 254. 133 ―When a lecturer on electricity wants to show an example of a human body surcharged with his fire, he places a person on a stool with glass legs. The glass serves to isolate him from the earth, because it will not conduct the fire – the electric fluid. Were it not for this, however much might be poured into his frame, it would be carried away by the earth; but, when thus isolated from it, he retains all that enters him. . . . If thou, then, wouldst have thy soul surcharged with the fire of God . . . thou must draw nigh to the source of that fire, to the throne of God and of the Lamb, and shut thyself out from the world – that cold world, which so swiftly steals our fire away.‖ Arthur, Tongue of Fire, 312. 134 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 6, 1868, 116. 71 with a fellow Christian, Annie Boothby: ―I felt the thrill of that wondrous ‗electric battery‘ pass between our spirits when they touched.‖ 135 In the 1870s and 1880s, in developing a vocabulary for sexual desire, Maynard was to return to the metaphor of electricity; she described the experience of being touched by Lewis Campbell and Louisa Lumsden, her first adult loves, as an ―electric thrill.‖ ―If I touched him but by accident a sort of electric thrill passed through him,‖ she wrote of Campbell and of Lumsden, ―if I slept with her, if I touched her the least bit I was kept awake by an electric thrill all the short summer night.‖ 136 Science, pursued under the rubric of natural theology, thus played a significant role in structuring Maynard‘s religious desire in the 1860s and 1870s. By providing her with a vocabulary for religious intimacy and later for sexual intimacy, it also shaped her homoerotic subjectivity. Sexuality was the site at which religion and science converged at other key points in Maynard‘s life; her life demonstrates the significance of sexual subjectivity and sexual discourse in charting the relationship between late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century religious and scientific discourse. In the early 1900s Maynard developed a theory of sexuality that was the product of a theologically modernist attempt to reconcile Evangelicalism with Darwinian evolution. Darwinian theory had disrupted the convergence of religion and science evident in Evangelical natural theology and led to notions of science as ―modern‖ and religion as antiquated. Maynard‘s sexual theology demonstrates the re-convergence of religious and scientific discourse. At around this time Maynard also grappled with the sexual ―deviancy‖ of her adopted daughter, Stephanie Anthon (Anthon‘s habit of masturbation) and took up eugenic discourse to account for it; her eugenic Evangelicalism demonstrates the ascendance of scientific discourse in one iteration of turn-of-the-century Evangelicalism. Maynard‘s imperially inflected 135 Greenbook, 7 April 1878, 69. 136 Greenbook, 17 October, 1880, 70 and Greenbook, 30 December 1877, 270. 72 relationship with Marion Wakefield in the years 1897 to 1911 saw Darwinism, eugenics, and Evangelicalism converge and diverge, constituting and contesting one another, at the site of homoerotic desire. Between 1915 and 1925 when Maynard was writing her autobiographical account of her childhood and early adulthood, she turned again to science – psychology and psychoanalysis in particular – in an attempt to account for her homoerotic relationships, as discussed below. Maynard‘s sexual discourse suggests that neither a simple model of the ―ascendancy‖ of science nor one that posits the discrete existence of religious and scientific discourse in turn-of-the-century Britain is adequate for understanding Victorian sexuality or for delineating the process of secularization. The year 1869 marked a new conjunction of religion and sexual desire in Maynard‘s life. She received and rejected a marriage proposal from a family friend, Henry Collisson, and she also experienced the ―second conversion‖ of the holiness or higher life movement. For Maynard the two events were related; she recognised human eros and religious desire as parallel but potentially overlapping discourses and titled her autobiographical account of 1869, ―Love, human and divine.‖ Harry Collisson, the son of an Anglo-Irish Evangelical clergyman and a family friend, proposed to Maynard on the platform of Charring Cross station, as she was leaving for Oakfield after a short stay with the Collisson family. The Greenboook entry of the day of the proposal makes no mention of it but simply cites Jeremiah 2: 17 and 19: Hast thou not procured this unto thyself, in that thou hast forsaken the lord thy God, when He led thee by the way? Thine own wickedness shall correct thee, & thy backslidings shall reprove thee; know therefore & see that it is an evil thing & bitter, that thouhast forsaken the Lord thy God, & that my fear is not in thee, saith the Lord God of hosts. 137 137 Greenbook, 15 July 1869, 64. 73 A few weeks later, Maynard provided a lengthier explanation of her response to Collisson‘s proposal: While I was at Highbury, I was sadly unconcentrated at prayer. I remember finding ―The Vicar of Wakefield‖ in the bookshelf, & reading that one night till very late, & my thoughts were so scattered, it seemed a mockery to kneel down to pray. . . . I seldom prayed with my whole heart. Thus I became earthly minded, & . . . the love of approbation crept in, in all the help I gave in that trying time. 138 Maynard understood Collisson‘s proposal as the consequence of ―two of my most powerful enemies of all the sin that dwelleth in me,‖ namely, ―the want of concentration, &, the love of approbation.‖ 139 She had pursued human approval over divine. In her autobiographical account of her early adulthood, with its focus on sexual repression, Maynard attributed her response to Collisson‘s proposal to her sexual ignorance: ―The quite ordinary tutelage in the approaches of love that is given by novels was absent, & I was left in a whirl of ignorance & even resentment.‖ 140 Maynard‘s Greenbook entries support her sense that her response to Collisson was the product of a lack of sexual knowledge. However there is another factor in play. If Maynard‘s mother‘s Puritanism had precluded an engagement with novels that might have educated her on the issue of ―love & marriage,‖ religion, in the form of Evangelicalism, had provided her with an understanding of religious desire and thus an index against which to evaluate human eros, including Collisson‘s proposal. 138 Greenbook, 17 August 1869, 87. 139 Greenbook, 15 July 1869, 64-65. In 1874 Mary Bethune, a friend of Maynard‘s, was to echo similar Calvinist- inflected response to a marriage proposal. She understood her fear and uncertainty in the face of potential marriage to be God‘s humbling of her for taking pride in a strong faith. ―‗I cannot pray now,‘ she told Maynard, ‗at least I cannot ask for anything except that God would punish me. I used to feel so strong & brave, & like to read the promises, & prided myself on my faith being so strong that I could believe & take them. Now God has humbled me, for I feel so very weak, & scarcely believe anything, & only pray for Him to punish me still more for my wickedness, & have it all out, & set me right.‖ Greenbook, 25 January 1874, 200. 140 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 7, 1869, 176. 74 With the series of revival movements that marked the latter half of the nineteenth century, Evangelicals increasingly structured their relationship with Christ around biblical metaphors of love, courtship, and marriage, evident for example, in depictions of God‘s relationship with Israel as a marriage (Isa. 54; Hos. 1-3; Song of Songs), the Church as the Bride of Christ (Matt. 9; John 3, II Cor. 11), and the return of Christ as a marriage supper (Rev. 19; 22). In 1868 Maynard thus heard a local Evangelical clergyman, Mr. Ridgeway, give a sermon on the erotic poem of the Hebrew Bible, Song of Songs. Ridgeway informed his congregation that ―it is the voice of the bride, & there is no uncertainty in her words: ‗I am my beloved‘s.‘‖ 141 In 1871 she heard a Mr. Sullivan preach on the biblical metaphor of marriage for the relationship between Christ and the believer: ―Christ loves to awake[n] desire in His people; the Beloved withdraws Himself, & all the Bride‘s love is aroused & she cannot rest till she has found Him.‖ 142 If later nineteenth-century evangelicals mobilized discourses of human eros to depict Christian piety, Victorians in general turned to religious discourse to re-conceptualize sexual desire. 143 Writers such as Coventry Patmore (in The Angel of the House [1854]), Alfred Tennyson (in works such as ―The Princess‖ [1847]), Charles Kingsley (in Yeast [1851]), the Brownings, and John Ruskin, influenced by Romanticism, turned to spiritual discourse to reject the commercial spirit of the ―marriage market,‖ to attribute grander dimensions to desire, and to posit love as an antidote for ―the painful mood of baffled thought, and the decline of religious 141 Greenbook, 2 May 1868, 90. 142 Greenbook, 8 January 1871, 41. 143 Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 375. Houghton argues that ―in the literature of love written in the forties and fifties there occurs a persistent note of reconstruction‖ (ibid.). See also H. G. Cocks, ―Religion and Spirituality‖ in Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality, ed. H. G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook (New York : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 157-79. Cocks argues that ―when speaking of the various intimacies, sexual or otherwise, of Victorians, it is impossible to understand them without reference to a religious or spiritual context.‖ Spirituality is ―located at the heart of Victorian marriage, as a key ingredient of sexual intimacy‖ (158). 75 faith.‖ 144 These writers represented love as ―not only the supreme experience of life, but its end and object – the very means by which the soul is saved.‖ 145 Houghton notes the words of Lord Allen in William Hurrell Mallock‘s satirical New Republic: ―What seems to me the thing so peculiarly modern, is this notion of love as something which, once truly attained, would, as Browning says, ‗make Time break, / Letting us pent-up creatures through / Into Eternity, our due.‘‖ 146 The turn to religious language to describe sexual desire had diverse effects. In some instances Victorians sought thereby to counter what they deemed sensual indulgence and carnal desire, particularly that of men. 147 Martha Vicinus suggests that the ―concerted effort to spiritualize all love‖ was partly a reaction to the sexual disorder of the French aristocracy and the frightening consequences of the French Revolution. Presenting women as the ―angel of the house‖ and love not as a ―temptation to be struggled against but a great ethical force which can protect men from lust and even strengthen and purify the moral will,‖ 148 they encouraged a reverent devotion by married men for their wives and chastity in unmarried men. Vicinus nevertheless distinguishes between de-eroticizing and de-corporealizing love. With the mobilizing of religious discourse, desire was not necessarily denied, but it ―was deemed morally superior if its bodily nature was subsumed to its spiritual potential.‖ 149 The turn to religious discourse might have exactly the opposite effect, however. Some Victorians drew on religious discourse to challenge notions of sexual intercourse as inherently 144 Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 375. 145 Ibid., 373. 146 William Hurrell Mallock, New Republic or Culture, Faith and Philosophy in an English Country House, bk. 4, ch. 2, 240-41 (London, n.d.) quoted in Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 373. 147 Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 373. 148 Ibid., 375. 149 Vicinus, Intimate Friends, xviii. 76 sinful or degrading, a product of the lower or animal self. For them sexual desire was ―given by God, and the body the intended means by which, under the control of the soul . . . desire was to be realized.‖ 150 The religious validation of sexual desire and its corporeal manifestation was evident in strands of Victorian Christianity itself. The historian Michael Mason, in an overview of religion and sexuality in the Victorian era, delineates a variety of religious approaches to sexuality ranging from the marital eroticism of the Anglican Church, consequent on a Swedenborgian influence, to the sexual austerity of Unitarianism. Swedenborgians propounded a vision of the afterlife based on the sexual pleasure enjoyed within marriage – a kind of ―transcendental sensualism‖ – that rendered sexual satisfaction within marriage a necessity. Mason argues that there was a revival of marital eroticism amongst Protestants generally in the nineteenth century in response to the celibacy of the Catholic orders, neo-Malthusian principles of population control, and some feminists‘ intentional adoption of celibacy. 151 Anglican clergyman and author Charles Kingsley (1819-1875) epitomizes this eroticism; he ―regarded marital sex as a religious and spiritual rite, a kind of ‗communion‘ between husband and wife.‖ 152 In the late 1870s Ellice Hopkins, the social purity feminist and High Church Anglican, drew on incarnational theology (―the Word made flesh‖) to valorize sexual intercourse; for Hopkins the body‘s ―life-giving functions were an integral part of human spiritual development.‖ 153 Within religious heterodoxy, the turn-of-the-century homosexual activist Edward Carpenter, making recourse to theosophy or esoteric Buddhism, represented the divine as immanent in nature – representing the unity of the physical and spiritual – and argued that 150 Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 376. 151 Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 152 John Maynard, Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 96, quoted in Cocks, ―Religion and Spirituality,‖ 166. 153 Sue Morgan, ―The Word Made Flesh: Women, Religion and Sexual Cultures,‖ in Jacqueline deVries and Susan Morgan, ed., Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain (London: Routledge, 2010),166. 77 sexual intercourse, including homosexual sex, by reconciling these antimonies, effected the individual‘s union with the divine. 154 These religious approaches demonstrate that religious discourse might validate corporeal sexuality and intensify sexual desire by attributing to it dimensions that exceeded those of mundane, earthly love. Not only is the alignment of religion with sexual repression disrupted here but the spirit/body dichotomy with which it is often associated, is also undermined. Maynard had encountered secular discourses of desire during her childhood. Novel reading had been prohibited by her mother but the reading of poetry was permitted. Louisa Maynard had read her children parts of Thomas More‘s ―Lalla-Rookh‖ (1817). As a thirteen- year-old Maynard had listened to her oldest sister, Josephine, read a few chapters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow‘s ―The Song of Hiawatha‖ (1855), and in later years she read Longfellow‘s ―Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie‖ (1847). From the early 1860s she began to read Alfred Tennyson‘s work. In her autobiography she recalled lines from Tennyson‘s ―Fatima‖ (1832), ―O love! O fire! Once he drew / In one long kiss my whole soul through / My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew.‖ 155 Tennyson‘s evoking of spiritual language to describe kissing – his notion that Fatima‘s ―whole soul‖ was drawn through her lips – intensified desire by attributing 154 Dixon, ―Your Clinging Kisses.‖ 155 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 2, 1861-1862, 38. The relevant stanza from ―Fatima‖ reads: Last night, when some one spoke his name, From my swift blood that went and came A thousand little shafts of flame Were shiver‘d in my narrow frame. O Love, O fire! once he drew With one long kiss my whole soul thro‘ My lips, as sunlight drinketh dew. The literary scholar D.G. Riede, addressing the orientalist exoticism of ―Fatima,‖ observes that the sexual frankness of the poem, Tennyson‘s transition from the more covert eroticism of ―Mariana‖ (1832), is made possible by ―displacing desire onto an Oriental subjectivity.‖ ―Tennyson‘s Poetics of Melancholy and the Imperial in ‗Fatima‘ (1832),‖ Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 40, no. 4 (2000): 672. If Christian discourse afforded nineteenth- century poets a new, extravagant register of desire, that discourse was also intimately intertwined with Britain‘s imperial project, as I suggest in chapter five. 78 to it dimensions that exceeded the earthly while at the same time accentuating its corporeality. Tennyson‘s use of spiritual discourse for sexual desire in ―Fatima‖ rendered sexual desire more accessible to Maynard, for whom discourses of religious desire were primary. ―What could that feel like?‖ she asked the anticipated reader of her autobiography and concluded, ―I thought I could guess at it.‖ 156 Maynard‘s holiness conversion in 1869 saw the heightening of religious desire and the further structuring of her sexual subjectivity. The holiness movement emerged amongst British evangelicals in the late 1860s and 1870s and, as Bebbington notes, set the direction of evangelical piety for much of the twentieth century. 157 It originated in America in the 1830s as part of a second wave of revivals or the ―Second Great Awakening.‖ Charles Finney, Phoebe Palmer, and Robert and Hannah Pearsall Smith, amongst others, took up and gave a new emphasis to Wesley‘s doctrine of sanctification through faith and his promulgation of the perfectibility of human nature in Plain Account of Christian Perfection (1766). They argued that a second conversion, known as ―immediate sanctification‖ (or purification from sin), was both possible and necessary; the believer need only profess complete dependence on Christ and a state of perpetual sanctification would be attained. ―Immediate sanctification‖ thus entailed ―resting in God.‖ The Pearsall Smiths, who were Philadelphian Quakers influenced by American Methodist W. E. Boardman‘s Higher Christian Life (1859) and the quietism of their own Quaker tradition, led the movement in Britain, where it was also known as the ―higher life‖ movement and gained momentum in the 1870s and 1880s. In Britain the Church of England was the center of the holiness movement; the Keswick Convention for the Promotion of Practical Holiness, 156 Ibid. 157 David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1992), 151. 79 which took place annually from 1875, rendered the term ―Keswick‖ synonymous with Anglican holiness piety. Maynard first encountered the holiness movement in the late 1860s; her Belstead friend, Fanny Williams, gave her two holiness texts to read in March 1869: The Holy Life (probably John Wesley‘s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life (1728)) and The Secret of Victory. 158 When on November 25, 1869 Maynard was reading aloud from Boardman‘s Higher Christian Life (1859), another classic of the movement, to her brother George, she experienced what she deemed ―second conversion‖ or ―immediate sanctification‖: ―all that I had felt . . . about . . . ‗Abiding in Christ,‘ came over me with a new power, & I saw . . . the secret of His life was perfect faith, & it may be the secret, the spring of mine.‖ 159 Maynard understood dependence upon Christ to be central to sanctification, and represented that dependence as union with Christ. ―I have never before seen the believer‘s union with Christ so thoroughly apprehended & realized,‖ 160 she wrote of the diary of an early proponent of ―entire consecration,‖ Mary Fletcher, a colleague of John Wesley, whose autobiography was widely read by nineteenth-century Evangelicals. 161 In the months that followed her 1869 holiness conversion Maynard read the work of William Romaine (1714–1795), another contemporary of Wesley within Anglican Evangelicalism, in which piety was represented as a state of intimacy with Christ: ―Go to your closet & converse with Him. Go to church to meet Him. Make Him your companion. . . . Pray 158 Greenbook, 21 March 1869, 137. The names of the authors of these works are not mentioned. In the autobiography she describes them as Abiding in Christ and The Joy of Obedience. Autobiography, Part 2,Chapter 7,1869, 184. 159 Greenbook, 25 November 1869, 166. 160 Greenbook, 25 July 1869, 70. 161 Mary Bosanquet Fletcher (1739-1815) was one of Wesley‘s most important women preachers and wife of one of his closest colleagues, John Fletcher. The Fletchers were important theologians in their own right and both endorsed the doctrine of immediate sanctification. 80 without ceasing to Him as your bosom-friend.‖ 162 Holiness piety included a focus on Christ as Friend and Lover that had been absent from Maynard‘s upbringing: We have been brought up to think of our Saviour as abstract Salvation, the Way back to God, the Truth, the Life, more than as a living Friend . . . now I would know more. I would get very near to Him, & ‗touch Him‘ in a way that He does not disapprove, but encourages, because I want Him to do what I cannot do, I want to be made perfectly whole, to be able to love Him with all my heart, & serve & praise Him with every part of my life. 163 A quote in Maynard‘s journal from Deborah Alcock‘s historical novel The Spanish Brothers: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century (1871) exemplifies a religious desire based on the anthropomorphic theology of holiness piety: ―The personal love of Christ to you, felt, delighted in, returned, is actually, truly, simply, without exaggeration, the deepest joy & the deepest feeling that the heart of man or woman can know.‖ 164 The 1873 ―second blessing‖ of Maynard‘s Belstead friend, Fanny Williams, illustrates the eroticism inherent in some iterations of holiness piety. After acknowledging her dependence on Christ for complete consecration, Williams admitted to Maynard that there was an erotic element in her relationship with Christ (―I think there is a sort of natural love mixed up with it, for I seem quite to hold Him, but then that is just what I want‖ 165 ). Maynard recalled her describing her love of Christ with ―perfect contentment‖; it was ―More dear, more intimately nigh / Than even the sweetest earthly tie.‖ 166 The erotic resonances inherent in Evangelical 162 Greenbook, 9 October 1870, 249. Romaine had, until the arrival of John Newton in London in 1780, been the sole beneficed Evangelical in London. His trilogy on Christian spirituality, The Life of Faith (1763), The Walk of Faith (1771), and The Triumph of Faith (1795), set out the elements of his Evangelical Calvinism. Both Romaine and Fletcher were of Huguenot descent. 163 Greenbook, 1 December 1869, 5. 164 Greenbook, 2 July 1871,192. 165 Greenbook, 3 August 1873, 116. 166 Greenbook, 31 December 1872, 275. 81 religious desire were evident in the verse of the hymn she asked Maynard to transcribe in her Bible: ―Both Thine arms are clasped around me / And my head is on Thy breast, / For my weary soul hath found Thee / Such a perfect, perfect rest. / Dearest Saviour, / Now I know that I am blest.‖ 167 The alignment of middle-class women with spirituality provided them a socially sanctioned discourse of desire, the religious desire for Christ. Victorian Evangelicals were aware of the potentially erotic dimensions of such a devotion to Christ; while some propounded it, others refused it. In 1868, when Maynard was nineteen years old, Mary King, her cousin and spiritual mentor, cautioned her against erotic religious desire. ―There is such a thing as idolatry of our blessed Saviour __ do you know what I mean?‖ she asked her. ―You may feel His sacred presence near, & lean your weakness upon his tender love, & yet all the while it may only be the luxury of feeling, & sentiment, you may be treating Him like an earthly friend or lover.‖ She had had a conversation with a local clergyman, Mr. Noel, on revivalism, and asked him whether he ―did not think that the excitement of it is especially bad for the young?‖ He replied, ―I call it being in love,‖ and went on to ―tell her sad cases among poor factory-girls & people in London, where all the feeling had been the merest excitement & romance; which vanished in a year of two, leaving the heart more reckless & hard than before, & bringing the greatest discredit to religion.‖ 168 King contended that the presence of the erotic in Evangelical devotion was the work of the ―natural man‖ rather than the ―spiritual man.‖ She advised her spiritual charge on how to distinguish erotic and thus misguided desire for Christ from legitimate religious feelings. ―You say, I felt Jesus so near me, my whole soul flowed out in love & adoration,‖ she suggested to Maynard. ―Well, & what did He do for you? When Jesus came near to people on earth, I know He never left them without healing them if 167 Greenbook, 19 January 1873, 23. 168 Greenbook, 1 October 1869, 143. 82 sick or giving them sight if blind, & he does the same now __ so what did He come to do for you?‖ 169 For King authentic religious feeling was to be distinguished from erotic human desire by whether or not it was accompanied by tangible improvements in the believer‘s life. Despite King‘s warnings, Maynard was to pursue an erotically inflected relationship with Christ. A year after Collisson‘s proposal she turned again to the relationship between religious and human eros: Yesterday I finished reading the ―Hotel du petit St. Jean.‖ It is only a story, & a love story too, yet I shall always remember it with great pleasure. It shews almost unconsciously to itself I believe, how narrow & selfish is the earthly passion of love even in its most intense form . . . but the love of Christ, O that is growth & expansion, the opening out of ―eternal life‖ in our heart. 170 The more mundane love of Collisson could not compare with the religious eros of Evangelical- ism as she had experienced it as a child or with the spiritual friendships she had pursued with her Belstead peers. Maynard had experienced human and divine love and the latter had proved more compelling. While in her biography Maynard was intent on charting the role of Evangelicalism in awakening her religious desire, she was equally concerned with delineating the repressive effects of her mother‘s Puritanism. She turned to psychology, including psychoanalysis, to describe that ―repression‖ and to explore its effects. She remained ambivalent about her same-sex desire at the end of her life. While she understood some of her homoerotic relationships to be ―gifts‖ from God, she also believed that the religious dimension of her work at Westfield had been compromised by her ―reckless satisfying of passion.‖ 171 At the same time she entertained regrets 169 Greenbook, 16 April 1868, 71. 170 Greenbook, 15 July 1870, 219. 171 Greenbook, 5 April 1927. 83 at never having married. She lived in an era in which married middle-class women were barred from paid employment or the pursuit of a career and her founding of Westfield had required the eschewal of marriage. Although she never doubted the validity of the religious calling, she wondered whether she might find in her childhood a psychological reason, in addition to a religious one, for her failure to marry. Recently historians have turned to sexology and to psychoanalysis, to explore intersections between religion and science in the making of modern homosexuality. Dixon draws attention to the historical conjunction of the emergence of theosophy and sexology and argues that theosophists ―influenced, assimilated, and reworked new sexological and psychoanalytic claims.‖ 172 Cocks suggests that the history of sexuality should be read ―not as a simple story of secularization which is shaped by the death of religion, but one that is informed by a dialogue between the secular and the spiritual.‖ 173 Although Maynard lived and wrote until 1935, seven years after the publication of The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Hall‘s obscenity trial, she did not reference sexology overtly in her life writing. Her turn to psychology nevertheless represents an iteration of the dialogue between science and religion that Dixon and Cocks describe. It constitutes in Maynard‘s life another instance of the co-constitution and contestation of religion and science at the site of sexual discourse. Maynard‘s turn to psychology was most evident in the prioritizing of her childhood to account for her failure to marry and her homoerotic desire. 174 In 1915 when Maynard wrote the autobiographical account of her childhood, she did not have access to Sigmund Freud‘s most comprehensive account of female homosexuality, his 1920 study ―The Psychogenesis of a Case 172 Dixon, ―Sexology and the Occult,‖ 411. 173 Cocks, ―Religion and Spirituality, 158, my emphasis. 174 Phipps draws attention to Maynard‘s ―oddly hybrid statements that mixed the language of faith with psychological notions like that of sexual instinct.‖ Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 281. 84 of Homosexuality in a Woman.‖ 175 However, in 1905 Freud published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in which he established some of the central tenets of his theory of homosexuality. Scholars have rightly pointed to the multivalence of Freud‘s work on this topic. 176 In the Three Essays he argued for the initial bisexuality of all individuals and homosexuality as an innocuous outcome of it, while simultaneously developing his theory of the Oedipus complex and suggesting that homosexuality was the product of ―developmental inhibition and infantilism.‖ 177 The child failed to progress beyond an early identification with the parent of the opposite sex to an identification with the parent of the same sex and thus could not construe the parent of the opposite sex as the object of their desire. 178 It is not clear whether Maynard had access to the Three Essays, and if she did, whether she understood her same-sex desire in the light of the theory of homosexuality presented there. She did not take up identitarian concepts of sexuality but did suggest, at times, that there was ―something wrong‖ in her attraction to women. She did not draw explicitly on the Freudian notion of the Oedipal complex. However, Maynard had in common with Freud the identification of childhood as a crucial stage in the sexual development of individuals and identifies her own 175 He had also written ―A Case of Paranoia,‖ in 1915 dealing with female homosexuality and there had been a footnote to same-sex desire in his 1905 case study of Dora. Teresa de Lauretis, ―Letter to an Unknown Woman,‖ in That Obscure Subject of Desire: Freud’s Female Homosexual Revisited, ed. Ronnie C. Lesser and Erica Schoenberg (London: Routledge, 1999), 42, 45. 176 De Lauretis, ―Letter to an Unknown Woman,‖ 45 and Robert May, ―Re-Reading Freud on Homosexuality,‖ in Disorienting Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Reappraisals of Sexual Identities, ed. Thomas Domenici and Ronnie C. Lesser (London: Routledge, 1995), 156-57. 177 Sigmund Freud, The Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman,‖ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, 155, trans. and ed. J. Strachey, quoted in de Lauretis, ―Letter to an Unknown Woman,‖ 40 and Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 87, quoted in Robert May, ―Re-Reading Freud,‖ 160. 178 In Psychogenesis he represents his young female client‘s attraction to an older woman as the product of the persistence of a pre-Oedipal desire for the mother while also drawing attention to her mother‘s neglect of her daughter (Freud, Psychogenesis, 168-69, quoted in de Lauretis, ―Letter to an Unknown Woman,‖ 46). However he lays greater emphasis on her simultaneous rejection of her father and of all men and, following sexological theory, the innate masculinity of the woman (Freud, Psychogenesis, 157-160 and 168-169, quoted in de Lauretis, ―Letter to an Unknown Woman,‖ 41, 44). 85 mother as playing an important role in that development. She supplemented the notion of her mother‘s repressive Puritanism with the allegation that she had neglected her emotionally. Her mother ―had no delight in actual babies,‖ she asserted in her autobiography; 179 she ―never petted us & seldom caressed us.‖ 180 Her mother had also absented herself from key periods in her daughter‘s childhood. ―I cannot remember any personal intercourse with [her] until I was about four or five years old,‖ she wrote, ―but from that age onward she was both the sun & moon to our little lives, until we were twelve or thirteen, when we seemed again to lose touch with her.‖ 181 Henry Maynard demonstrated a similar lack of affection: ―Our father was a just & good man, but stern, & also possessing a nervous temperament that could not endure the restlessness of early childhood. To us he was an awe-inspiring presence at meals, but not much else, & never once do I remember his playing a game with us, or even letting one of us sit on his knee.‖ 182 This constituted, she says pointedly, ―a rather loveless picture of the crucial years of infancy.‖ 183 In May 1926 she argued that her homoerotic desire was the product of parental emotional neglect: ―There was something within me which seemed to have a foremost and imperious claim, a hunger which must be satisfied whatever kind of food was offered.‖ 184 Maynard‘s notion of ―repression‖ seems also to have had some commonalities with Freud‘s. In his work on neurosis Freud had argued that repression – or the refusal of pleasurable instincts as a result of anxiety consequent on the threat of punishment – was integral to the constitution of the self; abnormal repression occurred when fear of punishment persisted and 179 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 1, 1849-1860, 5. 180 Ibid., 8. 181 Ibid., 5-6. 182 Ibid., 6. 183 Ibid. 184 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 44, 1882, 3, written May 1926. 86 feelings of desire were quashed in ways that were unwarranted. Like many Victorians, Maynard used the term ―repression‖ long before Freud took it up and in ways that both differed from and anticipated Freud‘s theory. 185 An overt referencing of psychology, if not psychoanalysis, was evident in 1915 when she noted of her sister Gabrielle‘s acceptance of her mother‘s austere affective regime that ―her sense of duty must have been so strong that the raging in secret found no expression at all, &, as psychologists tell us, that is the surest way of smothering an emotion in oblivion.‖ 186 As early as 1876 Maynard had linked the suppression of sexual desire with mania, arguing that a young female servant at Oakfield had fallen prey to ―a complete & sudden mania‖ as the result of a long-suppressed and illicit attraction to a male servant. 187 In her autobiography she entertained the idea that her same-sex desire was the result of the repression of her (heterosexual) sexual instinct. In May 1926 Maynard took up psychoanalytic discourse overtly. 188 She suggested that her work at Westfield had been ―spoiled and devastated by love,‖ or ―by what psycho-analysts call by highly disagreeable names, such as ‗the thwarted sex-instinct.‘‖ 189 The ―thwarting‖ of her ―sex instinct‖ seems to refer both to her repressive upbringing, including her mother‘s emotional austerity and her undervaluing of ―love & marriage,‖ and to Maynard‘s refusal of marriage for the pursuit of a religious calling to women‘s higher education. Taking up Catholic discourse to render the latter evident, while at the same time endorsing the psychoanalytic notions of sexual instinct, she wrote in a different context that ―in a passionate nature there are 185 She used the term in the former sense when in 1915 she described her upbringing as ―repressive to the last point of anything fanciful, foolish, or exaggerated.‖ Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 4, 1865-1866, 4. 186 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 6, 1868, 104. 187 Greenbook, 2 March 1876, 247. In her autobiography she wrote, ―This long suppression & sense of guilt was the real cause of her mania.‖ Autobiography, Part 4, Chapter 27, 1876, 25. 188 Phipps points to this in her article on Maynard. Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 280. 189 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 44, 1882, 3, written in May 1926. 87 instinctive elements which make it almost impossible to choose the Cloister.‖ 190 In June 1927, however, after further consideration of this issue, she rejected what she understood to be psychoanalytic explanations of same-sex desire rooted in theories of repression. She set aside the idea that her failure to marry was the product of a repressive upbringing and the lack of opportunity for the expression of heterosexual desire at Westfield. ―It is all very well to call this loneliness ‗sex-feeling,‘‖ she argued of the isolation she felt at Westfield, ―but I can honestly say my thoughts never strayed to a man.‖ 191 Demonstrating the primacy of her religious belief she asserted decisively: ―My craving and loneliness was not the instinct toward marriage, it was the instinct towards God, which can be satisfied with nothing less.‖ 192 If Maynard privileged religion in this contest, her Belstead friendships demonstrated that the ―instinct towards God‖ was nevertheless inextricably intertwined with an erotically inflected intimacy with women. The latter relationships were an integral part of a more enduring pursuit of religious desire. While Maynard‘s positing of an instinct towards the divine in the place of an instinct towards marriage is not helpful to historians (it entails an essentialism that is not conducive to historical enquiry), her refusal of the Freudian notions of sexual instinct is instructive. Her engagement with psychological discourse, her acceptance of the notion of repression, her rejection of her homoeroticism as the product of it, and her reworking of the psychological discourse of ―instincts‖ to legitimize religious aspirations illustrate the complex interactions of religion and science that characterized the early twentieth century. Maynard‘s childhood and early adulthood demonstrate the varying ways in which her sexual subjectivity had been shaped by (a historically specific) religious discourse. Her erotic history is thus better elucidated using a 190 Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, 306. 191 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 52, 1888, 172, written in June 1927. 192 Ibid., 172-7. 88 Foucauldian approach that places greater weight on cultural discourse than a Freudian one that represents sexual desire as a largely ―natural instinct.‖ Maynard‘s overt refusal of psychoanalysis in her autobiography may be matched by a much larger, unnamed project to posit a religious genealogy for her same-sex desire that countered psychoanalytic explanations. There is an urgency and an anger in Maynard‘s account of her childhood that cannot adequately be explained by either her occasional regrets regarding marriage or her attitude to her homoeroticism, which varied over time. Instead, it is possible that her anger was a response to a dawning recognition of psychoanalysts‘ pejorative descriptions of female inversion and that she wrote her account of her childhood and early adulthood in explicit, if largely unnamed, dialogue with them. Such a ―dialogue‖ would explain her persistent assertion of the primacy of religious desire – not as a guise for her homoeroticism but as the framework within which it had emerged. This kind of extended engagement with psychoanalysis is suggested in a poem Maynard transcribed in an unpublished anthology of poems she collated later in life. ―The Psychologist,‖ written by G. A. Studdert Kennedy (1883– 1929), chaplain to King George V, and published in 1927, rejects psychoanalysis; its practitioners are seen as having misconstrued religious desire by subordinating their subjects to scientific analysis: He takes the saints to pieces, And labels all the parts . . . The Freudian unconscious Quite easily explains The splendour of their sorrows, The pageant of their pains. The manifold temptations, Wherewith the flesh can vex The saintly soul, are samples Of Œdipus complex. The subtle sex perversion, His eagle glance can tell, 89 That makes their joyous heaven The horror of their hell. 193 Maynard‘s account of her childhood and early adult sexual subjectivity challenges histories of sexuality that present science, and sexology and psychology in particular, as the discourses that liberated Victorians from the repressive effects of religion. Evangelicalism had awakened Maynard‘s religious desire, Evangelical devotion had structured her erotic subjectivity, and the homosocial contexts of Evangelical devotion had facilitated the expression of the erotic. For Maynard the sexually repressive/liberationist binary did not align with the religious/secular one but with the Puritan/Evangelical one. However, even the latter binary is not borne out in Maynard‘s writings; Louisa Maynard‘s suppression of her children‘s emotions, her deterring them from making friends, her withholding discourses of sexual knowledge from them, and her neglecting ―love & marriage‖ for her daughters served ultimately to produce emotion, sexual desire, friendships, and homoerotic relationships. Maynard‘s early homoerotic subjectivity demonstrates both Foucault‘s notion of the productive nature of power evident in the regulation of desire and the role of the non-regulatory discourse of religious desire in the production of same-sex desire. Maynard‘s early homoeroticism disrupts the alignment of the modern/outmoded binaries with the secular/sacred, science/religion, sexually liberationist/ repressive binaries upon which discourses of modernity rely. It was constituted within the pursuit of intimacy with the divine, the primary objective of her life. If Maynard‘s homoeroticism challenges the binaries of secularization theory that inform dominant notions of modernity, it also challenges the discreteness of these categories; religion and science were profoundly imbricated in Maynard‘s accounts of her childhood. Both her religious and homoerotic desire were inflected by scientific discourses indebted to natural 193 Constance Maynard, Undated Anthology of Poems by Various Poets, Anecdotes and Reminiscences of [Friends and Colleagues], vol. 1. Constance Maynard Papers, Queen Mary College, London. 90 theology. Maynard‘s autobiographical account of her childhood and early adulthood, written much later (between 1915 and 1925), shows the then more distinct discourses of religion and science to converge, constitute, and contest one another in diverse ways. The sexual liberation/repression binary is also destabilized in Maynard‘s autobiography. Evangelicalism had provided Maynard with a register for emotion and a language of desire against which she measured her parents‘ Puritanism; psychology had enabled her to identify the latter as ―repressive.‖ However, while she described her liberation from a repressive Puritanism, she did not believe her ―liberation‖ to be complete or to be a singularly happy one. Her narrative of sexual liberation is part of a broader project to chart the multiple, complex, contradictory, and often painful ways in which religious and sexual discourse had intersected in her life. Her autobiography thus attests to what Foucault deemed the ultimate inefficacy of writing of histories of sexuality as a narrative of progressive sexual liberation. The productive effects of ostensibly repressive sexual regulation render this the repression/liberation dichotomy invalid while the centering of sex as the ―secret of the self‖ that accompanies such histories perpetuates the very operation of power that Foucault exposed. More worthwhile is the charting of the historically specific way in which sexual desire, sexual subjectivity, and sexual identity are constituted. Maynard‘s account of her childhood and early adulthood shows religion, science, and sexual subjectivity constituted within a historically specific iteration of Puritan Evangelicalism. It also demonstrates the dynamic nature of religion, science, and sexuality. As changes in wider Victorian culture took place, the relation between these discourses shifted and with them both Maynard‘s religious and sexual subjectivity. Paradoxically, the Evangelical valorization of natural theology – the turn to science to exemplify religious principles – compelled an engagement with science that was ultimately disruptive to Evangelical faith. The following 91 chapter examines the next significant shift in Maynard‘s piety – a prolonged faith crisis – in the context of the wider Victorian crisis of faith and charts the structuring of Maynard‘s homoerotic subjectivity within its contours. It turns to Maynard‘s years as a student at Girton College, the first residential college for women in the United Kingdom, and her co-founding with fellow Girton graduate Louisa Lumsden of St. Leonards School for girls in St. Andrews, Scotland. Science continued to play a prominent role in this stage of Maynard‘s life. Darwinian evolution was a significant factor in precipitating her doubt and the homoerotic relationship she pursued with Lumsden, the first of her adult relationships, was informed by a scientifically produced doubt. 92 Chapter 2: “That Infidel Place”: Women’s Higher Education, the Crisis of Faith, and Dissident Sexuality In 1869 Anna Lloyd, one of the first students to gain admission to the newly established College for Women in Hitchin, 1 was sharing a railway coach with a clergyman accompanying two ladies to London, when she heard him remark, ―This is Hitchin, and that I believe is the house where the College for Women is – that infidel place.‖ 2 The anecdote is, as Janet Howarth notes, part of the founding myth of Girton College, Cambridge (initially named the College for Women and located in Hitchin), the first residential college for women in Britain; M. C. Bradbrook took up the trope for the title of her centenary history of the college, “That Infidel Place”: A Short History of Girton College, 1869-1969. 3 The accusation of religious infidelity was not unique to the clergyman in Lloyd‘s narrative; the founder of the Christian Women‘s Education Union (CWEU), Miss Cavendish, thought that Girton students ―believed in Darwinism‖ and were ―very atheistical.‖ 4 Nor was Girton the only women‘s college to be so designated. The University of London, which had commenced a lecture series for women the year before, had been referred to as that ―godless institution of Gower Street‖ 5 and Bedford College as a ―godless institution‖ also. 6 Despite such allegations the women‘s colleges have 1 The college moved to Girton, just outside Cambridge, in 1873. 2 E. M. Lloyd, Anna Lloyd, 1837-1925: A Memoir with Extracts from her Letters (London: Cayme Press, 1925), 57- 58. 3 Janet Howarth, ―The Church of England and Women‘s Higher Education, c.1840-1914,‖ in Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew, ed. Peter Ghosh and Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 153-70. 4 Autobiography, Part 5, Chapter 36, 1880, 431. 5 N. Harte, The University of London, 1836- 1986 (London: Athlone Press, 1986), 64, 132, quoted in Howarth, ―The Church of England,‖ 159. 6 Oliver Lodge, Past Years (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1931), 160-61, quoted in Howarth, ―The Church of England,‖ 159. 93 received little attention from scholars of the Victorian crisis of faith. 7 These scholars have focused instead on the battles over faith that took place at the men‘s universities, such as the long-running dispute at Oxford between Edward Pusey, the leader of the Tractarian movement who advocated the universal truth of Christianity, and the Broad Church Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Christ Church, who promulgated free enquiry. 8 Scholars have carefully delineated the result of such animosities, such as the dismissal of Frederick Denison Maurice (1805-1872), a professor at King‘s College London, after the publication of his Theological Essays (1853) in which he rejected orthodox notions of hell. The faith crises of individual university men have also been investigated, whether the 1862 loss of faith of the don of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, Leslie Stephen, best known for his work on the Dictionary of National Bibliography and his dissemination of agnosticism, or Henry Sidgwick‘s 1869 repudiation of his Trinity fellowship in order to free himself ―from dogmatic obligations‖ 9 and to protest the mandatory subscription by Cambridge fellows to the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. The focus of historians of the Victorian crisis of faith on men‘s universities is, to some extent, warranted. Oxford and Cambridge were governed by the Church of England, with the training of clergymen as their central purpose; it was there that the challenge of Broad Church theology and agnosticism to Tractarian and Evangelical orthodoxies was most keenly felt. The failure of historians of the Victorian faith crisis to consider the women‘s colleges is, nevertheless, surprising. While women were barred from ordained ministry in most Christian denominations, they had been aligned with religion from the start of the century and exercised 7 Alison Mackinnon, ―Educated Doubt: Women, Religion and the Challenge of Higher Education,‖ Women's History Review 7, no. 2 (1998), 241-259. 8 Peter Hinchliff, ―Religious Issues, 1870-1914‖ in The History of the University of Oxford, vol. 7, Nineteenth- Century Oxford, pt. 2, ed. M. G. Brock and M. C. Curthoys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 97. 9 V. H. H. Green, Religion at Oxford and Cambridge (London: SCM Press, 1964), 303-4. 94 significant religious authority in the broader cultural context; they were responsible for the religious education of their families, disseminated religious belief through a range of local philanthropic activities, and upheld religious values in national campaigns for social reform. Women‘s turn to higher education, where reason, scientific enquiry, and a critical approach to knowledge were increasingly encouraged, renders women‘s colleges a potentially productive site of enquiry. 10 An investigation of the women‘s colleges might also elucidate the often overlooked role of gender in the Victorian crisis of faith. For women the simple act of applying to universities entailed a transgression of religious norms of marriage and motherhood; a crisis of faith contingent on their refusal of religious gender norms (or a reconfiguration of faith in which gender played an important role) may well have accompanied Victorian women‘s pursuit of higher education. Finally, the role played in founding the women‘s colleges by university dons, prominent in histories of the faith crisis, renders the women‘s colleges worth investigating. 11 For example, the Christian Socialist F. D. Maurice was instrumental in founding in 1848 a college for the training of governesses, Queen‘s College in Harley Street in London, an important antecedent to the women‘s residential colleges; he was also involved in establishing Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1871. 12 Henry Sidgwick, and J. R. Seeley, the Regius Professor of Modern History and the author of the theologically liberal Ecce Homo (1866), were involved in the founding of Girton College; Sidgwick founded Newnham College in 1871. The role of these dons in the founding of women‘s colleges, and their influence on the women to whom many of 10 Mackinnon, ―Educated Doubt,‖ 242. 11 Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), quoted in Mackinnon, ―Educated Doubt,‖ 242. 12 B. Megson and J. Lindsay, Girton College, 1869-1959: An Informal History (Cambridge: Girton Historical and Political Society, 1960), 1. The founder of Girton College, Emily Davies had been inspired by Maurice‘s Christian Socialism; Davies‘s brother, Llewelyn, a well-respected Anglican clergyman was a close associate of Maurice and later served as principal of Queen‘s College. M. C. Bradbrook, “That Infidel Place”: A Short History of Girton College, 1869-1969 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1969), 35. 95 them lectured, constitutes another reason for investigating women‘s colleges as potential sites of the Victorian faith crisis. Joy Dixon argues that by excluding women generally from accounts of that crisis, historians have re-inscribed ahistorical Victorian notions of the ―secular man‖ and ―spiritual woman.‖ 13 Her analysis contributes to gender history, which emerged around thirty years ago and sought to address perceived deficits in women‘s history. Historians such as Joan Scott argued that by simply recovering women‘s histories, historians were taking an additive approach that left the methodological assumptions of masculinist histories intact. 14 Drawing on a poststructuralist approach, they sought to examine the processes through which dominant discourses of masculinity and femininity were constituted, how individual gender identities were forged in relation to these discourses, and how the relations between the sexes changed over time. 15 They emphasized the dynamic nature of gender discourse; the meaning of sexual difference was seen to be ―constantly negotiated through competing cultural representations of masculinity and femininity at any given historical moment.‖ 16 The co-constitution of masculinity and femininity, contradictions in gender discourse, and instances of their paradoxical imbrication were brought to the fore. The difference between prescriptive and descriptive discourse was charted. Religion played a fairly minimal role in gender history in its early years. However, as the historian Sue Morgan suggests, religion has the potential to revolutionize gender history‘s theoretical framework; by examining the complex and diverse ways in which 13 Joy Dixon, ―Modernity, Heterodoxy, and the Transformation of Religious Cultures,‖ in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, ed. Jacqueline deVries and Sue Morgan (London: Routledge, 2010), 212. 14 Joan Scott, ―Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,‖ American Historical Review 91, no. 5 (December 1986): 1055. 15 Sue Morgan, ―Rethinking Religion in Gender History: Historiographical and Methodological Reflections,‖ in Gender, Religion and Diversity: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, ed. Ursula King and Tina Beattie (New York: Continuum, 2004), 113-14. 16 Morgan, ―Rethinking Religion,‖ 114. 96 religious women negotiated dominant religious discourses of gender, historians of religion and gender are able to develop more nuanced frameworks within which to analyze gender. 17 Dixon, turning to assumptions of the spiritual woman and secular man in histories of the Victorian era, notes the gendering of trajectories of secularization that align masculinity, rationality, and the secular with the modern and juxtapose these with a femininity, irrationality, and religion considered antiquated. 18 Some scholars have resisted the rigid antimonies of secularization, opting for the notion of religious transformation instead. However, by describing that transformation as the privatization of piety consequent on its ―feminization,‖ they have also reified the secular man/ spiritual woman dichotomy. 19 Dixon takes up the words of Joan Scott to suggest that historians of gender explore ―the production of the category ‗women‘ itself as a historical or political event,‖ along with the historically contingent and dynamic relationship of the secular to the sacred in the later nineteenth century. 20 In a study of the challenges posed to orthodox faith by liberal theology, evolutionary biology, comparative religion, and sexology and psychology, she charts the slippages between the sacred and the secular consequent on the reconfiguration of faith that was one response to the faith crisis; this draws attention to the historically specific constitution and contestation of the ―spiritual woman‖ within the unstable relationship between the sacred and the secular. 21 17 Morgan, ―Rethinking Religion,‖ 113. 18 Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 19-20. 19 Dixon, ―Modernity,‖ 211. 20 Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, rev. ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 206-7, 218, quoted in Dixon, ―Modernity,‖ 212. 21 Dixon, ―Modernity,‖ 226. 97 In Chapter One I drew attention to the dynamic nature of Maynard‘s piety, situating it within the changing contours of Victorian religious culture, and argued that Maynard‘s homoerotic subjectivity was a product of her piety. Her religious and sexual subjectivity were constituted within the Puritanism of her childhood, which itself took place within a wider turn to Calvinism in the Church of England in the 1830s, as it intersected with a revivalist Evangelicalism encountered in the context of the Ulster revivals of the late 1850s. The 1870s saw another shift in Maynard‘s piety; this took place within the broader contours of the Victorian crisis of faith. An 1872 visit to her cousin Fanny Campbell and Fanny‘s husband Lewis, Professor of Classics at the University of St. Andrews, her subsequent admission to Girton in 1872, and her three years of teaching at St. Leonards between 1877 and 1880 brought Maynard into contact with Broad Church theology, Unitarianism, and agnosticism; Maynard found her faith challenged. Encounters with Darwinian theory and early discourses of psychology at Cambridge fractured the science-religion alliance of the natural theology of her childhood and precipitated an enduring faith crisis. In this chapter I explore Maynard‘s erotic subjectivity as it was (re)structured in the context of the later Victorian crisis of faith. While feminist scholars have drawn attention to the aligning of women with spirituality in late eighteenth-century evangelical discourse, and have more recently explored the gendering of faith and doubt, they have not examined the erotic as it underpinned the evangelical structuring of gender. Neither have they charted shifts in the erotic concomitant on the Victorian crisis of faith and the effects of these on gender discourse. They have not asked what sexual subjectivity structured by the crisis of faith might tell us about the relationship between the sacred and the secular. We have still to explore what sexuality might tell us about the relationship between the Victorian crisis of faith, secularization, and the making of modernity. 98 At the outset of her faith crisis, in 1872, Maynard embarked on an erotic liaison with Lewis Campbell – her first self-aware pursuit of sexual desire – and at Girton in 1873 she commenced her first adult homoerotic relationship, a seven-year relationship with fellow Girton graduate Louisa Lumsden. The framing of these relationships by the discourse of faith crisis suggests that sexuality may have played a more significant role in the crisis of faith than historians have allowed – as a factor that precipitated doubt, a site at which to enact the tensions between faith and doubt, an alternative to faith, and/or a starting point for the reconfiguration of faith. Maynard‘s erotic relationships elucidate the complex interactions between discourses of the secular and sacred and of femininity and masculinity. Her erotic relationships of the 1870s demonstrate a doubting Evangelicalism drawn to skepticism and, on the part of her lovers, a skepticism informed by religious hope that disrupts the discrete categories of faith and doubt upon which secularization theory has depended. They also disrupt the alignment of doubt with masculinity and of faith with femininity, an unspoken assumption of much secularization theory, and also of some refutations of that theory that focus on women‘s role in the reconfiguration of religious discourse at the turn of the century. An exploration of the role of religious discourse in the making of sexual desire reveals the diversity of women‘s responses to the faith crisis, responses ranging from agnosticism to a reconfiguration of religion informed by ―modern thought,‖ to a more traditional piety that nevertheless remained crucially engaged with modern science. Higher education comprised the context within which Maynard‘s relationships with both Campbell and Lumsden were pursued and, paradoxically, a focus on sexuality provides one of the most productive sites for the investigation of the faith crisis as it played out in the women‘s colleges. The Victorian crisis of faith was precipitated by a range of factors. Fossil finds by geologists in the late eighteenth century challenged Christian notions of the earth‘s relative 99 youth, while Charles Darwin and Arthur Wallace‘s theory of evolution, first presented publicly at the Linnean Society of London in July 1858, suggested that humans, rather than being the unique creation of God, were the random outcome of the material process of natural selection. Essays and Reviews (1860), the work of six Oxbridge dons and a Cambridge layman, advocated German biblical criticism and the new sciences of geology and biology, and suggested controversial theological innovation; written by church ―insiders,‖ it is rightly believed to have posed a greater threat to Victorian faith than Darwin‘s On the Origin of the Species (1859). German biblical criticism paved the way for Essays and Reviews by approaching the Bible not as a history but as a collection of texts from a variety of genres (genealogies, digests of laws, biographies, folk myths, erotic songs), while simultaneously disputing the age, authorship, and historical veracity of the books that comprise it. The ethical evaluation of the Bible, using its own standards of morality, has also been acknowledged as a significant threat to the faith of Victorian Christians; the doctrines of original sin, atonement, and eternal punishment were increasingly seen by Victorians to be incompatible with the biblical values of compassion, justice, and human dignity. Scholars of the mid-century crisis of faith have been slower to examine the rise of the chronologically congruent women‘s movement and the ―woman question‖ as a factor that precipitated doubt; they have also overlooked the ways in which sexual discourse was interwoven with faith crisis. Maynard‘s faith crisis was precipitated by a visit to her cousins, Lewis and Fanny Campbell, in St. Andrews, Scotland, in February 1872 when she was twenty-two years old. Lewis Campbell (1830–1908) was professor of Greek at the university; his translations of Plato and his work on Greek tragedy had won critical acclaim. Campbell‘s work in the Classics was indebted to Benjamin Jowett; he had studied with Jowett at Balliol College, Oxford in the early 1850s. Much later in his life, in 1894, Campbell co-edited Plato‘s Republic with Jowett, 100 published extracts from Jowett‘s work on Plato (1902), and edited his theological essays (1906); with Evelyn Abbott, he wrote a biography of Jowett, Life and Letters of Benjamin Jowett (1897) and edited his correspondence, Letters of B. Jowett (1899). Jowett was a leading Broad Churchman and a key contributor to the Broad Church Essays and Reviews (1860); his theologically liberal influence on Campbell was evident in Campbell‘s The Christian Ideal (1877). At the start of this chapter I argued that the role of theological liberals in the cause of women‘s higher education is one reason to consider the new women‘s colleges as sites of faith crisis. The Broad Church Campbell demonstrates this role in relation to Maynard, a soon-to-be Girton student. During long walks to the mouth of the Eden river or along the cliffs of St. Andrews, Campbell discussed his religious beliefs with Maynard and their differences soon became apparent. Where Maynard, like her parents, understood the Bible to be the ―voice of God,‖ and infallible in its original languages if not in translation, Campbell, in a characteristically Broad Church manner, deemed the Bible a ―collection of the writings of the best & most inspired men of old days,‖ documenting their ―aspiration[s] after goodness,‖ but not infallible. 22 In contrast to Louisa Maynard‘s Puritan notion of the Christian as a ―stranger and pilgrim,‖ Campbell valued the world and saw worldly knowledge as an important resource for faith: ―I hold Christianity to be the chief light of the world given by God to men, but there are many other lights we should not despise. Plato for instance, & all the lights of philosophy are very grand, & there are also the lights of reason, science, nature & art – these all come from God & we should take them thankfully.‖ 23 Campbell also rejected the Puritan division between the ―spiritual man‖ and ―natural man‖ and the condemnation of the latter; ―[One] must condemn 22 Greenbook, 21 April 1872, 122. 23 Ibid., 128. 101 sin,‖ he averred, ― – [but] the world is in our hearts.‘‖ 24 He cautioned Maynard to be ―very careful not to define too strictly between flesh & spirit,‖ observing that ―whatever touches us deeply on any side, surely touches our inner man, our spirit.‖ 25 Maynard was appalled by Campbell‘s ―heresy.‖ She wrote of his admiration of Shakespeare: ―Shakespeare . . . who wrought to the highest pitch of excitement the very faculties of the ‗old nature‘ the Gospel came to crucify.‖ 26 She informed Campbell that those who sought ―to live to God must condemn the world.‖ 27 Campbell and Maynard‘s religious differences illustrate a characteristic nineteenth- century gendering of faith and doubt. Earlier in the century women had been aligned with spirituality, motherhood, and the home; this, and the passivity, imitation, and emotion that characterized Victorian discourses of femininity, resulted in the representation of women as repositories of religious belief during the faith crisis. Men, aligned with the secular workplace, and endowed with the characteristics of action, originality, and rationality, were represented as engaging in a vigorous battle with doubt and more likely to chart the lesser known paths of theological liberalism, agnosticism, or atheism. Campbell‘s construal of worldly knowledge as a resource for theological reflection, his conflating of the ostensibly secular ―flesh‖ or body with the religious ―spirit,‖ and his subsequent representation of himself as Maynard‘s ―secular conscience‖ evinces a paradoxical process of rewriting the spiritual in a secular idiom. However it was a ―rewriting‖ that consolidated dominant discourses of masculinity; it was the male Campbell who ventured into the public world of the ―secular‖ to re-write the spiritual for Maynard, who was located in the ―private‖ world of orthodox faith. A hierarchical ordering of 24 Ibid., 124. 25 Ibid., 130. 26 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 274. 27 Greenbook, 21 April 1872, 124. 102 gender contingent on the privileging of masculine doubt or the masculine reconfiguring of faith over orthodox faith was evident as the liberal Campbell positioned himself as Maynard‘s mentor: ―I must be your secular conscience, & I want you to read books of a more hard worldly character. All your heroes are religious heroes . . . Dr. C. [Campbell], Fenelon, & Mdme. G. [Guyon] give you one side only, & though it is a beautiful & exalted one it will not do alone.‖ 28 ―I cared most about ‗confessing Christ,‘‖ Maynard was later to write, ―& he cared most about getting me out into a good strong current of secular thought.‖ 29 Her observation not only describes the Victorian gendering of faith and doubt but also anticipates its disruption, a disruption that was effected at the site of sexual desire. Walter Houghton argues that Victorian discourses of gender were informed by sexual discourse; the ―Angel of the House,‖ or the figure of the woman as the ―teacher, the natural and therefore divine guide, purifier, inspirer of man,‖ as Charles Kingsley put it, was erotically inflected. 30 With the crisis of faith ―women worship,‖ as it was known in the sixties, was taken up as an antidote for ―the painful mood of baffled thought, and the decline of religious faith.‖ 31 The doubter ―could find in love . . . a religion, naturalistic or Platonic, to take the place of Christianity.‖ 32 Houghton attributes much of Victorian love poetry, and Robert Browning‘s in particular, to the desire to establish a spiritual dimension to human love in the face of a dissipating faith. Leslie Stephen, one of the period‘s most vociferous proponents of agnosticism, demonstrated this function of sexual desire when he observed to Julia Duckworth, his future wife, ―[I] always shall feel for you something which I can only call reverence as well as love. . . . 28 Greenbook, 7 July 1872, 182. 29 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 10, 1872, 307. 30 Fanny Kingsley, Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memoirs, vol. 2 (London, 1877), 283, quoted in Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830-1870 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), 351n27. 31 Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 375. 32 Ibid., 385. 103 You see, I have not got any saints and you must not be angry if I put you in the place of where my saints ought to be.‖ 33 Maynard‘s relationship with Campbell also demonstrates the role of the erotic in inflecting a traditionally feminine piety with an ostensibly masculine doubt. It shows the efficacy of the erotic in effecting reversals in the dominant discourse of gender and religious belief and points to the dynamic nature of both. Theological debate inculcated intimacy between Campbell and Maynard: ―In spite of these contradictions which I felt to be grievous,‖ Maynard wrote, ―so gentle was his spirit that we became much more intimate.‖ 34 In addition to presenting himself as Maynard‘s theological mentor, Campbell took up the role of her tutor on the subject of love and provided her with a knowledge of ―love‖ that had been missing from her childhood. He defined love as an ―irrepressible yearning‖ that entered the heart and sought to ―help, & protect, & shield it‘s [sic] object from pain & evil.‖ 35 Passion was all-consuming: ―Every one who has suffered from one of the two great human passions, ambition & love, must feel for a time at least as if nothing on the face of the world were worth the doing.‖ 36 He nevertheless believed the ―passion of love‖ was ―in some degree a weakness – ‗a letting one‘s whole being out on one side‘‖ 37 ; it undermined the self-control necessary for a strong character. Maynard 33 Noel Gilroy Annan, Leslie Stephen. His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1951), 75, quoted in Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 390. A similar tone characterizes Matthew Arnold‘s ―Dover Beach‖: Ah, love, let us be true To one another! for the world . . . Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain (lines 1-2 and 5-6, quoted in Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind,389). 34 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 274-75. 35 Greenbook, 21 April 1872, 126. 36 Ibid., 125. 37 Ibid. 104 was grateful for Campbell‘s mentoring in love. ―It was like letting me see into a new world,‖ she wrote, ―for though I have my own ideas & feelings, I have scarcely read any novels, & never heard anyone speak of it before.‖ 38 She recognized Campbell‘s erotic interest in her; in the evenings sitting over her needlework, she would ―look up to find his eyes fixed on me, sometimes with a vague regret, and sometimes with the sweetest playfulness it is possible to imagine.‖ 39 If Evangelicalism had provided Maynard with a discourse of religious desire, religion – the religious discussion characteristic of the Victorian faith crisis – also constituted the framework within which she gained an education in human eros. The proximity of religious and sexual discourse during the faith crisis, the rewriting of the sacred and the secular at the site of the erotic and concomitant slippages between masculinity and femininity were evident as the world-weary Broad Churchman Lewis Campbell became enthralled with the Evangelical Maynard. In later years Maynard observed that Campbell was ―very lonely, and wandered about in the vast region he had chosen without companionship.‖ 40 His wife Fanny ―lived in her busy world,‖ and ―the long starvation of his life only made the craving greater.‖ 41 A week after she left St. Andrews, Campbell wrote her a sonnet describing her influence on him during the preceding weeks: Angel, that when like summer dust my heart Was hot & dry within me, didst not fear To whisper comforts in a grief-dulled ear And pour thy balm upon a desperate smart, – Forgive, if blameless of dissembling art, Too eagerly I drank when thou was here The proffered benediction from thy clear Deep eyes, strong pleaders for the holier part. 38 Ibid. 39 Catherine Beatrice Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, Mistress of Westfield College: A Family Portrait (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949), 99. 40 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 269. 41 Ibid. 105 And oh forgive, now thou art no more near, If on my desert soul scant trace remain Of all that thou didst water with such care. My thirst returns. Yet milder doth appear The aspect of the old familiar pain, And happy memories linger in the air. 42 At first glance Campbell‘s poem demonstrates a characteristic gendering of faith and doubt within the discourse of sexual desire. He portrays Maynard, to whom he is attracted, as the ―Angel‖ who has attempted to bring him spiritual relief. Taking up a prominent biblical metaphor he represents her efforts towards his spiritual restoration as the cultivation of verdant gardens in desert landscapes (―For the LORD shall comfort Zion: he will comfort all her waste places; and he will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the LORD; joy and gladness shall be found therein, thanksgiving, and the voice of melody‖ [Isaiah 51:3]). 43 This trope from the Hebrew Bible is reworked in the Christian New Testament to represent Christ‘s redemption of an errant humanity (―whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life‖ [John 4:14]). While Maynard seeks to bring spiritual relief to Campbell, Campbell perceives his desolation as the consequence of the absence of human love (―Forgive, if blameless of dissembling art, / Too eagerly I drank when thou was here / The proffered benediction from thy clear / Deep eyes‖ [lines 5-8]). Although Campbell represents the absence of love as his primary privation, and Maynard‘s spiritual endeavors as having only a negligible effect (―on my desert soul scant trace remain‖), his poem betrays religious longings. He slips back and forth between religious and 42 Greenbook, 17 May 1872, 145. 43 The origin of this trope lies in the story of Israel‘s exodus from Egypt and Moses smiting the rock in order to provide water for the Israelites in the desert (Exod. 17:6). It becomes a key metaphor for God‘s restoration of his relationship with Israel: ―He turneth the wilderness into a standing water, and dry ground into watersprings‖ (Ps. 107:35) 106 sexual desires (his heart ―hot & dry‖ and his ―desert soul‖) and between the ―wounds‖ of doubt and despair and the painful absence of human love (the uncertain referent of ―that old familiar pain‖). He seeks a ―benediction‖ (line 7) from the ―deep eyes‖ that have been ―pleaders for the holier part‖ (line 8). By representing Maynard as a Christ-like figure offering life-giving water, he acknowledges his spiritual need. His notion of Maynard applying a balm to the ―desperate smart‖ of his parched heart reconfigures biblical discourse to represent the erotic as the site of the spiritual (the term recalls the biblical notion of the ―balm of Gilead‖ 44 ) and exemplifies Campbell‘s contention that ―whatever touches us deeply on any side, surely touches our inner man, our spirit.‖ 45 His turn to the erotic is not devoid of faith. He recognizes in Maynard‘s love both a spiritual and an erotic effect. Campbell had turned to the Evangelical Maynard for respite not only from his loneliness but also his spiritual desolation; the erotic had prompted the re- emergence of the spiritual. By utilizing spiritual discourse for an ostensibly ―secular‖ love, and by slipping back and forth between the expression of religious and sexual desire, Campbell demonstrates the imbrication of the secular and sacred. He had appropriated a spiritualized discourse of the erotic to replace orthodox faith and had thus rewritten the ―secular‖ in a ―spiritual‖ idiom. Campbell‘s articulation of religious desire at the site of the erotic also evinces slippages between femininity and masculinity. By assuaging his doubt through adopting a discourse of desire which, in utilizing a spiritual vocabulary, was feminine, he blurred the boundaries between masculinity and femininity. His erotic discourse thus undermines the notion of the genders as entirely discrete and in a singularly oppositional relationship to one another. Iterations of desire such as 44 The prophet Jeremiah, speaking for God to an indifferent and idolatrous Israel, used the metaphor of a wound to describe the sins of Israel and balm (a medicinal salve) as its antidote: ―Is there no balm in Gilead; is there no physician there? why then is not the health of the daughter of my people recovered?‖ (Jer. 8:22). 45 Greenbook, 21 April 1872, 130. 107 this show gender distinctions to be unstable and dynamic; neither femininity nor spirituality was necessarily fixed to a particular sex (i.e. femaleness). Sexual desire also precipitated a reversal of the traditional gendering of faith and doubt for Maynard. If Campbell was drawn to Maynard‘s piety, Maynard was attracted to Campbell‘s skeptical intelligence. ―I love to know his beautiful mind, & am grateful for his affection,‖ she wrote in the summer of 1872. 46 Her attraction to Campbell allowed her to entertain doubts that she might otherwise have eschewed. She found herself ―obliged to think, & no longer to admire the ‗child-like‘ faith I had been taught was supreme.‖ 47 Maynard did not renounce her Evangelical faith but she began to question some of its central tenets. The sacred and the secular intersected as doubt permeated her faith. ―This my first going ‗into the world,‘‖ she wrote, ―has shaken all that was in me of mere education & the principles taken on trust from others.‖ 48 Maynard understood sexual desire to be in close proximity to faith crisis; she saw her sexual awakening and her crisis of faith as intertwined, and dealt with them simultaneously in her autobiographical account of 1872. ―Mind was awakened,‖ she observed, ―so that I felt I could appreciate something of the learning & talents of others, but far more than this love was awakened.‖ 49 Sexual desire precipitated shifts in the gendering of faith and doubt in Maynard‘s and Campbell‘s relationship; the erotic reveals the dynamic nature of both gender and religious belief. The physical expression of Maynard‘s relationship with Campbell entailed little more than an instance of Campbell‘s passionately kissing Maynard‘s hand (―taking my little cold hand 46 Greenbook, 7 July 1872, 183. 47 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 10, 1872, 288. 48 Greenbook, 21 April 1872, 132. 49 Greenbook, 31 December 1872, 273. 108 in his gave it long, long kisses‖ 50 ). The gesture should not be underestimated, however, as hands had a heightened sexual resonance for Victorians. A few years later Maynard described a suitor who ―gently laid one of his hands over mine,‖ and her ―hastily‖ drawing her hand away and putting ―both [her hands] behind my back.‖ 51 In 1872 she was aware of the awakening of sexual desire. In later years, she wrote of her relationship with Campbell: It was slow, very slow, in coming on, & he did not hurry me. To him I know it was an enchantment beyond words to come upon a heart still locked, a deep cold well still covered, & the first delicate solicitations to open were accompanied by a depth of deference never omitted, never forgotten. It is not one girl in a thousand that has experienced a wooing so noble, so pure, so enchantingly respectful, as that he gave to me then. I reciprocated it, of course I did, for the feeling was epoch-making, & stood alone. 52 At the age of twenty-three, and within the context of the crisis of faith, the middle-class Maynard had come to recognize her erotic/sexual power. ―He made me aware that this power was mine,‖ she confided to her Greenbooks in December that year. 53 In her autobiography she elaborates: ―I think the pleasure arose in great part from an unexpected consciousness of power. I thought I was almost nothing in the world, & it was a complete surprise to feel I had power.‖ 54 Like most of her contemporaries she understood female sexual desire in heterosexual terms only. For Maynard the awakening of sexual desire, although contingent upon the traditional gendering of faith and doubt, not only gave rise to doubt that was deemed masculine but also resulted in an 50 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 279. 51 Autobiography, Part 5, Chapter 33, 1878, 299. 52 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 278. 53 Greenbook, 31 December 1872, 273-74. 54 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 11, 1872, 379. 109 awareness of her own erotic power that disrupted notions of middle-class women as singularly passionless or sexually passive. 55 At St. Andrews, Maynard had encountered pleasure of varying kinds: ―youth, & energy, & high spirits, & gentleness, & power to charm & please, were real things.‖ 56 Her liaison with Lewis Campbell prompted romantic fantasies; she found herself dwelling ―with pleasure on . . . the love which Cousin Lewis gave me,‖ 57 and noted in the months after her return to Oakfield, ―there are long stories in my imagination & trains of passionate excited feeling, in which if I once get involved I am almost helpless.‖ 58 The eschewal of pleasure, or self-denial, was central to the Puritan crucifixion of the old nature. ―Happiness consists in the denial of that self, which it is the aim of Pleasure to feed & gratify,‖ Maynard‘s mother had advised her.‖ 59 The imagination was a particular source of pleasure to be guarded against. Her cousin and spiritual mentor Mary King had warned her that the central chambers of the heart were where Christ dwelled, and if this was not the case the heart sought satisfaction in secondary chambers such as the imagination. 60 While the body and the mind were neutral territories, the heart was the seat of corruption. For King and for Maynard the primary fault of fantasy was the elevation of the self 55 The diaries of Mabel Loomis Todd (1856-1932), a well-respected New England wife and editor of Emily Dickinson‘s work, are another exception to representations of the passionless and prudish middle-class woman. Discovered by Peter Gay in 1984, they show Todd, raised in the Puritan tradition to value sexual experience, seek sexual gratification, and share sexual knowledge with close friends. Peter Gay, Education of the Senses, vol. 1, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 71-89. 56 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 15, 536. Maynard did not eschew ―earthly‖ pleasure altogether, but grappled with whether ―inner‖ and ―outer‖ pleasures could ever be compatible. However, as a young adult, and for most of her life, she believed pleasure to be a besetting obstacle to her spiritual journey. ―In my heart ‗the pleasures‘ are more apt than ‗the cares of this life‘ to overrun the growing seed,‖ she wrote an observed that ―pleasant time[s]‖ . . . have been ―signal failures‖ spiritually. Greenbook, 25 June 1871, 191. 57 Greenbook, 28 April 1872, 133. 58 Greenbook, 6 January 1868, 6-7. 59 Greenbook, 1 May 1866, 68. 60 Greenbook, 4 July 1872, 178. 110 (they ―nearly always tend to the exaltation of myself‖ 61 ). Maynard strove, in characteristically Evangelical terms, to ―bring into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ.‖ 62 At key moments in the history of Christianity the need has arisen to reconcile human eros and religious desire. 63 The tension between them heightened during the Victorian era, as sexual discourse was applied to religious experience (through the appropriation of biblical notions of Christ as lover, suitor, or bridegroom to describe piety) and as religious discourse was taken up to describe sexual experience. For those Christians living in the centuries directly before the nineteenth, Neo-Platonism, or the notion that earthly reality comprises a foreshadowing of the divine ideal, provided a place for sexual desire within a religious framework; human eros was seen to anticipate but not to eclipse union with the divine. 64 Mary Wollstonecraft articulated a Neo-Platonic discourse of human eros: ―would not the object, not seen through the medium of the imagination, soon reduce the passion to an appetite, if reflection, the noble distinction of man, did not give it force, and make it an instrument to raise him above this earthly dross, by teaching him to love the centre of all perfection . . .?‖ 65 There is some evidence that Victorian Evangelicals espoused Neo-Platonic notions of love. Social purity reformer and High Church Anglican Ellice Hopkins thus described conjugal intimacy as ―an anticipation of the delights of heaven, where ‗the soul surrender[ed] herself . . . to the eternal Loveliness, as a bride surrenders 61 Greenbook, 2 June 1872, 161. 62 Greenbook, 6 January 1868, 6-7. 63 Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 109. 64 Ibid. 65 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, with Strictures on Moral and Political Subjects (1792), in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft vol. 5, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (London: Pickering, 1989), 180, quoted in Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, 113. 111 herself in unutterable love to her husband.‘‖ 66 Human love could also be seen as a ―gift from God‖ and a necessary antecedent to divine love. 67 In the 1870s, however, Maynard turned to an evangelical theology of God‘s providence – of God working through the circumstances of one‘s life – as a framework for understanding the relationship between sexual desire and religion. She laid particular emphasis on the role of emotions in enabling the believer to discern the intentions of the divine. In her study of early Methodism, Phyllis Mack notes that the revivals precipitated a transition from the notion of emotion as an external force that invaded the believer (―fevers put inside him by Satan‖) to a process intrinsic to the self and a means through which the divine might communicate with the believer. 68 The unregenerate soul was one in torment, conversion produced joy, and sanctification brought an all-encompassing sense of assurance. 69 The new convert thus ―tried to attune himself to the flow of emotion moving between himself and others and between himself and God.‖ 70 Maynard espoused a similar theology of feeling, one that had become characteristically Victorian. ―As for my feelings,‖ she wrote, ―whether physical or mental, they are like the strings of a harp which our Maker can tighten or slacken at will, & I am in His hand.‖ 71 In 1872 she understood her sexual feelings to be an indication of God‘s intention 66 Sue Morgan, ―‗The Word Made Flesh‘: Women, Religion and Sexual Cultures,‖ in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, ed. Jacqueline deVries and Susan Morgan (London: Routledge, 2010), 162. 67 Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 85. 68 Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 15. Mack later references the literary critic G. H. Barker-Benfield in this regard: ―he observes a cultural shift from passions to sentiments, from emotion understood as an external force that overwhelms the individual, to emotion as innate feeling or sentiment emanating from an inherent tendency to compassion.‖ G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) 270, quoted in Mack, Heart Religion, 19-20. 69 Mack, Heart Religion, 15-16. 70 Ibid., 15. 71 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 11, 1872, 347. 112 to bring the theologically liberal Campbell to a knowledge of the Christ of Evangelical Anglicanism. ―Circumstances are the expression of His will,‖ she observed, ―& I cannot think that I should have been brought to St. A. just when he [Campbell] wanted me, & our love awakened, if I am to leave him where I found him [spiritually].‖ 72 Sexual desire was an instrument through which God revealed God‘s salvific intentions for others. Of herself Maynard asserted, ―the temporary excitement seems to draw me closer still to my Saviour.‖ 73 Evangelicalism had provided her with a discourse of feeling, had awakened religious desire and had presented her with contexts for the expression of homoerotic intimacies; in her relationship with Campbell, at a time of imminent faith crisis, Evangelicalism legitimated a self-aware sexual desire. While Evangelicalism validated human eros, it also established the limits of the erotic; the broader religious framework within which Maynard understood sexual desire required the ultimate subordination of desire to spiritual imperatives. She determined to surrender her new- found erotic power ―into my Master‘s hands.‖ 74 She strove to commute human eros into purely spiritual desire, ―tak[ing] it back anew from Him as spiritual undying love, not the mere gratification of natural instinct.‖ 75 It was, she reasoned, ―through the [spiritual] love of our fellows that the Friend who sticketh closer than a brother, sends some of His sweetest messages & mercies.‖ 76 Maynard‘s attempts to ―convert‖ Campbell did not meet with success; he remained avowedly theologically liberal. Her liaison with him ended soon after she left St. Andrews, was 72 Greenbook, 14 September 1872, 206. 73 Greenbook, 7 July 1872, 183. 74 Greenbook, 31 December 1872, 273. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 273-74. 113 resumed briefly during a trip with Lewis and Fanny to Italy in 1880, but came to an end in 1882 when their theological differences proved insurmountable. With the exception of an infatuation with a young man late in her life, Maynard was to pursue desiring relationships only with women in subsequent years. Forty-three years later she wrote, ―Love for a man has never come since, no, not even a moment‘s illusion of it.‖ 77 Maynard‘s 1872 visit with the Campbells paved the way to her admission to Hitchin in October 1872. Campbell was, like Maurice and Seeley, a proponent of educational reform and of women‘s higher education. He had tutored one of the first two women to successfully sit the Classics Tripos at Cambridge before she left for Girton: Rachel Cook, the daughter of the Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews (1860-1868). During Maynard‘s stay at St. Andrews he gave her Greek lessons three times a week. At St. Andrews Maynard engaged with a university community for the first time (―there were all the University Professors to learn by sight, & which chair they each held, & the two towering Principals, Dr. Tulloch for Theology, & Dr. Sharp for all the other subjects‖ 78 ), met a number of St. Andrews‘ and other professors at social functions at the Campbell‘s home (including Edward Caird, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University and Thomas Spencer Baynes, Professor of Logic at St. Andrews) and attended lectures at St. Andrews. The Campbells also introduced Maynard to the widow of Professor Cook and Cook‘s oldest daughter, Isabella, who informed Maynard about the College for Women at Hitchin, founded just three years earlier, where her sister Rachel was pursuing the Classic Tripos. Maynard‘s decision to apply to Hitchin was made during this visit. Her pursuit of higher education emerged from the broader context of her relationship with Campbell; it demonstrates the significance of theologically liberal men to women‘s higher 77 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 278. 78 Ibid., 256. 114 education and suggests the role they may have played in the faith crises women experienced while at college. In her autobiography Maynard represented her admission to Girton as the attainment of ―freedom.‖ She ―got liberty, got it as exceedingly few girls in the seventies got it, got it in full measure.‖ 79 She had depicted her childhood as ―a cage with bars, too narrowly restraining.‖ 80 Her mother had curtailed her freedom by preventing her from forming friendships and thus experiencing the ―knock-about of real life‖; she had ―damped down‖ her children‘s ambition. 81 Maynard‘s characterization of her parents‘ Puritanism as singularly repressive and her pursuit of higher education as an escape from it, is not entirely accurate, however. Women‘s higher education was a controversial endeavor amongst Anglicans (and Victorians generally). It was seen to be impious because it deterred women from marriage, motherhood, and the home, the telos of middle-class femininity. 82 Women who pursued higher education were often deemed ―unnatural‖ and their education ―unsexing.‖ The alignment of a university education with masculinity was evident as the Evangelical Mrs. Umphelby, whose school Maynard had attended for a year, informed her in later years that her decision to enter Hitchin made her almost ―give me up‖: ―The cause of ‗Women‘s Rights,‘ the Suffrage, anything that seemed like ‗imitation of men,‘ was to her a thing positively to shudder over.‖ 83 Medical discourse bolstered the gendering of intellectual endeavor; medical professionals made ―repeated allegations of possible 79 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 237. 80 Autobiography, Part 5, Chapter 34, 1878, 336. 81 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 6, 1868, 103. 82 Bradbrook, “That Infidel Place,” 4. 83 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 17, 1874, 648. 115 infertility, brain damage, or a mental breakdown from overwork‖ consequent on women‘s pursuit of a university education. 84 The rigorous Puritan pursuit of the truth that had been part of Maynard‘s parents‘ piety had, however, produced a respect for intellectual endeavor that allowed them to override anxieties surrounding women‘s higher education. 85 Louisa Maynard agreed to Constance applying to Girton because ―learning was a beautiful thing; and more especially Philosophy and Greek. Then there was Science, too, she knew I loved Science.‖ 86 The theological discussion and debate that characterized her childhood and the more weighty religious reading encouraged by her parents had fostered Maynard‘s intellectual development and supplemented the otherwise paltry education she had, as a middle-class girl, received from intermittent governesses and a year at boarding school. 87 Maynard‘s parents‘ earnest pursuit of doctrinal truth, their valorization of intellectual endeavor, and their recourse to reason were, like the naturalist societies, intellectual periodicals, and debating clubs, aspects of the amateur intellectualism of the early Victorian middle class. In 1866 her father gave her a Hebrew-Greek-Latin Bible; she studied Latin with her brother George and Greek with her sister Gabrielle. Exegetical texts were staple reading matter. 88 In the years 84 Martha Vicinus, ―‗One Life to Stand Beside Me‘: Emotional Conflicts in First-Generation College Women in England,‖ Feminist Studies 3 (Fall 1982): 607. 85 Pauline Phipps draws attention to Maynard‘s ―strict yet oddly progressive parents‖ who acquiesced to her pursuit of higher education, but she does not explore the religious practices and beliefs that underpinned their ―progressiveness‖ (Pauline Phipps, ―Faith, Desire, and Sexual Identity: Constance Maynard‘s Atonement for Passion,‖ Journal of the History of Sexuality 18, no. 2 (May 2009): 266. 86 Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, 103. 87 In a 1914 article Maynard described the paltry formal education she had received as a child: ―Think of a bright, pleasant schoolroom in a country house . . . a room containing many things, but witnessing no real teaching.‖ Constance Maynard, ―From Early Victorian Schoolroom to University: Some Personal Experiences,‖ Nineteenth- Century 76 (1914): 1060-73. 88 For example, she read Robert Ridgeway‘s The gospel in type; or, The evangelical meaning of the Hebrew ritual (1865), F. W. Krummacher‘s Relics of Elijah the Tishbite: Being a Selection of the Most Striking Passages Omitted in the Existing Translation, and Luther‘s commentary on Galatians. 116 after Maynard returned from Belstead school she read the classics that had shaped her parents‘ theology, including William Law‘s The Way to Divine Knowledge (1752) and Spirit of Love (1752-1754), Jacob Boehme‘s Dialogue Between an Enlightened and an Unenlightened Soul, selections from Theologia Germanica and works by Thomas Erskine (in all likelihood his On the Unconditional Freeness of the Gospel [1828] and The Brazen Serpent [1831]), parts of Edward Irving‘s Collected Writings and Orations (For the Oracles of God, Four Orations (1823)). With her mother she compiled a book of extracts from William Law (published in 1867) and in 1869 the two developed a catechism delineating ―the first principles of our most holy faith.‖ 89 In 1871, Maynard and her parents commenced and completed the ambitious task of revising the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (Henry Maynard was a member of the Prayer Book Revision Society led by Lord Ebury from 1859 to 1889). In an essay on her early years at Girton she acknowledged, ―Outside the schoolroom there was in my home a real education of the powers of mind and will, and I was better equipped for prosecuting higher studies than were many.‖ 90 In June 1872 Maynard sat the Hitchin Entrance Exam and later that month learnt that she had passed; in October 1872 she entered the college as one of its fourth cohort of students. Her parents allowed her to attend the college for a year on condition she returned home and did not seek paid employment thereafter. Maynard won each extra year successively from her parents. In 1875 she became Girton‘s first student to successfully sit the Moral Science Tripos exam. 91 When, in 1869, the derisive clergyman had described Hitchin as an ―infidel place,‖ Anna Lloyd had responded fervently, ―Oh, no! not infidel: why do you say that?‖ and had gone on to explain ―that the College for Women was founded on the same principles as the men‘s Colleges 89 Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, 68. 90 Constance Maynard, ―Girton‘s Earliest Years,‖ in Between College Terms (London: James Nisbet, 1910), 179-80. 91 She received a second class. Two Cambridge men had received first class passes, and three second; Maynard had placed second in her class. 117 of Cambridge, & did not their founder desire and provide for religious observance?‖ 92 In taking Lloyd‘s response at face value, some historians have assumed that the students who attended the College for Women conformed to one form of Anglican orthodoxy or another. It is certainly true that Davies, eschewing Henry Sidgwick‘s advice, had aligned the College with Anglicanism (Sidgwick felt the college should take the nondenominational path the men‘s colleges were starting on). Lloyd‘s assertion, in response to the clergyman‘s derision, that the College for Women was founded on religious principles, was itself a skillful negotiation of Hitchin students‘ liberal theology, heterodoxy, and agnosticism. As Maynard wrote of Girton students in later years, ―it may seem but a poor object for which to work, that we might win the commendation given by that exclusively feminine word ‗nice,‘ but it was the best of all shelters for our secretly growing and maturing cause.‖ 93 ―The main idea,‖ she adds, ―was to escape observation.‖ 94 The perceived ―masculinity‖ of university education prompted a strategic adoption of femininity by Hitchin students and because femininity was aligned with spirituality the presentation of an orthodox piety ensued. When, in October 1872, Maynard commenced her studies the student body consisted of thirteen students and almost all had been influenced by Unitarianism or agnosticism. A member of the first cohort of students, the Unitarian Miss Townshend, ―a dim, lanky aesthetic creature, embodying the wholly new ‗pre-Raphaelite‘ ideas‖ 95 had, along with the rationalist Miss Gibson, established the freethinking ethos of Hitchin. 96 Of the three other senior students at Hitchin, Sarah Woodhead (the first woman to sit a Cambridge Tripos exam [Mathematics]) was a Quaker 92 Lloyd, Anna Lloyd, 57-58. 93 Maynard, ―Girton‘s Earliest Years,‖ 190. 94 Ibid., 189-90. 95 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 11, 1872, 339. 96 Greenbook, 1 December 1872, 260. 118 who had moved to the ―Unitarian side of Quakerism‖ and was ―likely to go further,‖ 97 and Louisa Lumsden, an Anglican, and Rachel Cook, a Presbyterian (the first Girton students to sit the Classics Tripos), were on a similar trajectory. Isabel Gamble, the niece of John Addington Symonds, had been raised in an Evangelical household but was now the ward of her uncle and had, Maynard contended, been ―soaked in doubt & paganism day after day.‖ 98 In October 1873 two free-thinking students, Henrietta Müller and Malvina Borchardt, arrived at Girton. Borchardt, who was from a Jewish family, was ―a blank materialist,‖ and Müller ―had made Suffrage her religion.‖ 99 Both led an aggressively agnostic campaign until their influence was exceeded by that of a Miss Kilgour and Joan Grüner, ―agnostics of a gentler type.‖ 100 In 1872 only two students evinced an orthodox faith of the kind with which Victorian women were usually associated: Elizabeth Welsh was an Irish Evangelical Presbyterian (but even she was in the throes of faith crisis), while (Jane) Frances Dove, a devout High Church Anglican, was ―the one contented conservative among them.‖ 101 The Girton students‘ questioning, rejection, and/or reworking of faith was not merely an interesting anomaly, nor were the women involved unimportant. Most students went on to exercise significant influence on education, suffrage, and British politics, albeit in diverse ways. Louisa Lumsden (1840-1935) gained renown as a public speaker on women‘s suffrage, women‘s higher education, and animal rights. Rachel Cook (1848-1905) became a well-respected educationist, journalist, and public speaker. She led a successful campaign to open the 97 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 11, 1872, 341. 98 Ibid., 351. 99 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 14, 1873, 489. 100 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 25, 1875, 725. 101 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 11, 1872, 341. The theological liberalism and agnosticism of Girton students has been acknowledged by some commentators; in their history of Girton Megson and Lindsay note in passing the ―agnosticism of the rebellious ‗Pioneers.‘‖ Megson and Lindsay, Girton College, 36. 119 University of Manchester to women and played a prominent role in Liberal politics, chairing the Lancashire and Cheshire Union of Women's Liberal Associations from its formation in 1893 and becoming its president in 1900. In 1874, after marrying Charles Prestwich Scott (1846–1932), editor of the Manchester Guardian, she contributed frequently to that newspaper. Elizabeth Welsh became the principal or Mistress of Girton in 1885. Henrietta Müller became a women‘s right activist, a prominent suffragist, and a member of Karl Pearson‘s Men and Women‘s Club. Malvina Borchardt (d. 1916) became Headmistress of Devonport High School for Girls and later opened a hostel for women students on Gower Street, London. With their firm rejection of traditional feminine norms and their engagement with significant political issues, these women were the antecedents of the ―New Woman‖ of later decades. In her study of the life of the Anglican modernist Lily Dougall, Joanna Dean draws attention to the difficulties confronting women who questioned orthodox belief and/or sought to re-configure or relinquish it. Accounts of faith crisis, such as Thomas Carlyle‘s Sartor Restartus (1833-1834), J. A. Froude‘s Nemesis of Faith (1849), J. H. Newman‘s Loss and Gain (1848), Samuel Butler‘s The Way of All Flesh (1903), and Edmund Gosse‘s Father and Son (1907) rendered doubt and the reconfiguration of faith a masculine endeavor. Dean argues that ―it was not simply that the models were masculine or that the narratives drew upon the male – and upper class – trajectory of university education and clerical careers, but that the very nature of the crisis was conceived of in ways that conformed to a masculine sense of religious identity.‖ 102 The religious/agnostic or orthodox/liberal divide was itself a gendered one; it was more difficult for women to cross than men. Dean suggests that it was for this reason that women writers chose male protagonists in their fictional delineations of their own faith crises. She cites as examples Mary Ward‘s bestselling Robert Elsmere (1888), Margaret Deland‘s John Ward, Preacher 102 Joanna Dean, Religious Experience and the New Woman: The Life of Lily Dougall (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 47. 120 (1888), and the New Woman novels such as Olive Schreiner‘s The Story of an African Farm (1883), and Dougall‘s unpublished Lovereen (1891). 103 While Dean‘s gender analysis is astute, not all Victorian women confronted doubt with this caution. The Hitchin students demonstrated an assertive doubt, agnosticism, and atheism. Their ready engagement with skepticism disrupts the Victorian gendering of faith and doubt. They were ―accustomed to doubt everything & distrust everything,‖ Maynard wrote. 104 Sundays were not observed; church services were often skipped and students defied Sabbatarianism by meeting on Sunday evenings to discuss politics or to analyze the latest novel. 105 Expressions of outrage at Christian theology were not unusual (―‗Any good man could manage the world better!‘ one would exclaim with hot indignation, ‗it is a disgrace to anyone who had charge of it. Nothing shall tempt me to worship Him‘‖ 106 ), along with a snide derision (―flippant quoting of Bible texts to give them an absurd meaning‖ 107 ) and a jaded dismissal (Seeley‘s Ecce Homo [1866] was deemed ―the only sensible book on Religion that had been written during the last forty years‖ 108 ). The ―masculine‖ skepticism of the Hitchin students calls into question the singular trajectories of secularization (and opposing representations of the turn-of-the-century transformation of religion) that rely on the notion of the ―spiritual woman‖ and ―secular man.‖ They also challenge the alignment of masculinity with maleness and femininity with femaleness. Even where Hitchin students did not reject faith but reconfigured it, they demonstrated a rationality, intellectual audacity, and resolve, that were aligned with masculinity in dominant 103 Ibid., 55. 104 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 12, 1873, 445-46. 105 Ibid., 390. 106 Firth, Catherine Louisa Maynard, 124. 107 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 12, 1873, 390. 108 Firth, Catherine Louisa Maynard, 124. 121 Victorian discourse. Rachel Cook ―could not see how one man‘s life could reveal the infinite God.‖ 109 She propounded a radical immanentism instead: ―every man & woman . . . revealed Him in some degree.‖ 110 Isabel Gamble rejected the Evangelical doctrines of original sin and humanity‘s alienation from God (―I cannot believe that there is, or ever can be any separation between God & us‖) and posited in its place a faith characterized by a high view of humanity (―God made us, & I think a little child is perfectly good & innocent, only contact with the world defiles & lowers them‖ 111 ). Like Cook she rejected the divinity of Christ, and Christian anthropomorphism, for a more diffuse and abstract understanding of God: ―God is love, & I want no Mediator,‖ she informed Maynard, ―it is only because you are so used to the idea of Christ coming between, that you make him God.‖ 112 The influence of Townshend‘s Unitarianism was evident in Gamble‘s and Cook‘s reconfiguration of their faith. Unitarianism, a rationalist Christian movement, emphasized freedom of thought, rejected the divinity of Christ, and promoted an engagement with scientific and philosophical discourse. Unitarians endorsed a high view of humanity and an optimistic worldview. They also often resisted dominant Victorian gender norms; girls were given the same schooling as boys and sometimes treated as their equals. 113 It was therefore unsurprising that some Girton students should turn to Unitarianism upon pursuing higher education and encountering challenges to their faith. Girton‘s acceptance of Unitarians in 1869 demonstrates the influence on Girton of educational reformers such as Sidgwick and Seeley who, while not Unitarians themselves, sought to wrest the universities from the control of the Church of 109 Greenbook, 24 November 1872, 254. 110 Ibid. 111 Greenbook, 3 November 1872, 242. 112 Greenbook, 22 March 1874, 230-31. 113 Rita McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge: A Men’s University – Though of a Mixed Type (London: Victor Gollancz, 1975), 23. 122 England; it also points to the importance of the very earliest women‘s colleges as sites of advanced theological debate. The Hitchin students‘ radical questioning did not simply constitute a transgression of gender norms, it was also the product of them. They had had to contravene dominant notions of femininity in order to seek admission to higher education; their refusal of norms of femininity and their doubt were intricately intertwined. Their contravention of feminine gender norms was evident as they took an independent, active, and even commanding interest in the policies of the college. When Seeley failed to address the subject matter for the Little-Go (or Previous) examinations, which preceded the final examinations at Cambridge, they informed him they would no longer attend his classes and would study for the examinations instead; he resigned. In 1873 they petitioned the Girton administration to be exempt from taking the Little-Go examinations, which detracted from their study for the final examination, and recruited seven of the lecturers to their cause. Davies wrote to Mme. Bodichon, a friend and a key supporter of Girton, ―Is it not vexing to see such a spirit shown? I am afraid we shall have no lasting peace while any of the Pioneers remain.‖ 114 A willingness to contravene dominant norms of gender, and perhaps even a self-conscious experimentation with masculine subjectivity, was evident as the students attempted to stage a Shakespeare play, ―taking male parts and dressing accordingly,‖ at a time when middle-class women‘s cross-dressing was considered scandalous. 115 When Davies intervened and the plans were brought to a halt, the college was almost closed as Miss Gibson and other key students considered leaving ―as a protest against tyranny.‖ 116 114 Megson and Lindsay, Girton College, 21. Long after the pioneers had departed, in 1879, the principal Miss Bernard still noted of one student ―I Suppose Miss ---‘s idea is that the students must be protected from the tyranny of the Mistress: but I think on the whole the Mistress needs protection from some of the students‖ (ibid., 36). 115 McWilliams-Tullberg, Women at Cambridge, 65. 116 Megson and Lindsay, Girton College, 14. 123 Their repudiation of orthodox Christianity led Hitchin students to question the ethics with which it was associated: ―religion [was] first (of course) [to be doubted] but after that ethics . . . any sort of rule of absolute & final Right & Wrong was discarded, & every thing was for growth, self-expansion, and trial of the native powers of experiment.‖ 117 Maynard noted that Woodhead ―seems in theory (though not in practice) to have reached a point where right & wrong are undistinguishable.‖ 118 The critique of Christian ethics led to the questioning of conventional sexual morality; Hitchin students doubted ―the very foundation stones of society, such as marriage.‖ They would ―talk as though their object was to establish ‗Free Love, & the Crêche.‘‖ Conversation, Maynard noted, frequently ―veer[ed] downwards through the pages of Swin- burne.‖ She acknowledged that ―some part of the Early Victorian standard of right & wrong had been formed of the merest conventions, & flimsy in the extreme,‖ but believed it had ―died an over-violent death at the hands of these daring young women.‖ It was a death in theory, for the most part (―it was wonderful the restraint they exercised‖); nevertheless, the questioning of marriage, the anticipation of ―free love,‖ and their Swinburne-type discussions constitute a marked transgression of dominant middle-class norms of femininity. 119 If the rationality that characterized the Hitchin students‘ rejection or reconfiguration of their beliefs was one site at which the alignment of femininity with religious orthodoxy was contested, Maynard‘s Puritan Evangelical piety and her response to a crisis of faith, was another. In pursuing a severely scriptural and doctrinally precise theology, Puritans valorized the intellect and reason rather than emotions and experience. Maynard believed her faith to be founded on reason. In elevating reason, Maynard‘s Puritan Evangelicalism also contained within it the 117 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 12, 1873, 445-46. 118 Greenbook, 1 May 1873, 66. 119 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 12, 1873, 445-46. 124 potential for doubt. Paradoxically, a long-held respect for the truth that was the legacy in part of her parents‘ faith compelled Maynard to engage fully with the skepticism of her peers. In Chapter One I examined the imbrication of science and religion in natural theology and the religious and erotic subjectivity to which it gave rise. Maynard‘s enthusiastic pursuit of amateur science as a child and young adult were perpetuated at Girton. Even while visiting St. Andrews in 1872 she had attended a course on ―the Circulation‖ by Dr. Oswald Bell: ―We learned all the valves of the heart ‗from life,‘ & we had a sheep‘s lungs on a plate & inflated them by blowing, & we heard all about ventilation, & what the blood did as it courses about.‖ 120 In Girton in 1872 a chance clash between the Logic and Physiology classes, and her decision to pursue the former, quashed her hopes of pursuing a degree in Natural Science. She nevertheless sought every opportunity to study science informally. During one lunch hour she ―ran up to the Laboratory . . . & bent glass tubes with a blow-pipe, successfully,‖ 121 she attended lectures in which ―we had sheep‘s liver & kidneys to dissect & learn their uses‖ 122 or they dissected bullock‘s eyes, and she purchased dead rats from the local Rat-catcher for the purpose of dissection. 123 She was able to attend the occasional physiology class and consulted frequently with the science lecturer, Mr. Hicks. 124 Hicks informed Maynard that ―he wished I were a Science Student,‖ and Maynard contended, ―I wished it too.‖ Both the rationalism of Maynard‘s Puritanism and her elevation of science – the pursuit of science under the rubric of religion evident in Evangelicals‘ endorsement of natural theology – fostered Maynard‘s faith crisis at Girton. Drawing on the empiricist methodology of the 120 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 254. 121 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 14, 1873, 393. 122 Ibid. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid., 414. 125 Evangelical revivals, and evincing an admiration of science from which it had emerged, she asserted: A number of independent witnesses to any fact make it worthy of consideration. . . . Now as every Christian is a fresh signature to God‘s covenant, so the same advantage must be allowed to the other side, & the array of the best & brightest minds backed by the whole range of the Natural Sciences, seems to me to be cumulative evidence of a very formidable character in defence of Deism. I believe I could see their side & admit that the Bible account of man‘s creation & fall is almost impossible in the face of these facts. 125 The most serious threats to her faith were scientific: psychology and Darwinism. Although in later years Maynard understood her studies to have contributed to her faith crisis, she did not recognize this in the 1870s and it was engagement with fellow students that rendered the challenges of psychology and Darwinism apparent to her. 126 Cook inflicted one of the most severe blows to Maynard‘s faith when she posited a psychological explanation for it; she contended that Maynard had ―first created the belief & then act[ed] upon it . . . your belief is just the natural outcome of your feelings & aspirations of faith & love.‖ 127 The ―suggestion that Religion had its parent in Desire & not Reason‖ 128 was shocking to Maynard; it was a ―shaft of doubt . . . [that] pierced my heart.‖ 129 The study of an emerging psychology that was part of the Moral Science Tripos between the years 1872 and 1875 exacerbated her doubt: It is rather trying to see how very much education & mere habit does for one. Prayer, remembrance of God, & all these things seem to me much more habits of mind & much less directly supernatural than they did before, & it is somehow humiliating that these high things should be subject to the ‗Law of Contiguity,‘ &c that we read of in our 125 Greenbook, 23 November 1873, 171. 126 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 13, 1873, 480. 127 Greenbook, 24 November 1872, 256. 128 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 24, 1875, 703. 129 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 12, 1873, 400. 126 Psychology. I wonder if God confines Himself now a days to observing the laws of mind as He does those of matter. I always held that miracles on mind had not ceased. 130 As an adolescent Maynard had rejected material miracles after reading the work of evangelical scientists such as Hugh Miller; she had nevertheless believed in God‘s miraculous intervention in the minds of believers through prayer, Bible reading, and religious discussion. She now doubted that even the mind was the site of God‘s miraculous intervention in human lives and in human history. The middle-class‘s avid interest in science was paradoxically to challenge the religious rubric under which it was pursued. Maynard‘s years at Girton demonstrate the rift between science and religion occasioned by Darwinian theory. In November 1873, the senior student Louisa Lumsden confronted her with Darwinian evolution: [she] held that the world is certainly improving (paradise of course having given place to Darwin‘s theory), & though Christianity was a great advance on old Jewish tradition, it has not done very much for the world, & is not the right religion for such an age as this. The only hope lies in the further discoveries of Natural Science, & they at present seem drawing near to the doctrine that mind is only the subtlest form of matter, & if so of course finishes with it. 131 Maynard had long accepted the challenge to traditional evangelical notions of time posed by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century geologists but evolution presented a further challenge. In 1874 she read a characteristically Broad Church essay by Emily Davies‘ brother, Llewelyn, the close associate of F. D. Maurice: ―The Debts of Theology to Secular Influences,‖ published in his Theology and Morality: Essays on Questions of Belief and Practice (1873). She paraphrased Davies on the bifurcation of science and religion that was taking place in her era: 130 Greenbook, 24 September 1873, 148-49. 131 Greenbook, 13 November 1873, 167. Lumsden eventually drew back from her early materialism and, espousing a characteristically New Woman heterodoxy, advocated ―a bond of perfect brotherhood under any religion.‖ ―Was this not a grand & wide thing? Was this not loving God Himself, as all good came from Him?‖ she asked Maynard. Autobiography, Part 4, Chapter 31, 232. 127 For long it was held, Religion & Science must agree __ God‘s word & work must declare the same truths, but we are being forced fr. this position. The principle of continuous evolution is the pride of modern science, & the transmutation of force is struggling to extend itself to the evolving of life. What then is the meaning of Creation, wh. is associated with interruptions of order? Time also is pushed away to an infinite distance, & where is God our Creator? Is He not being explained away? And not only so, but implicit life in Adam & Eve, the Flood, &c, exposes us to the most serious difficulties. 132 The lowest point of Maynard‘s Girton faith crisis took place in 1874: ―On [Wednesday] night . . . I sat on my floor in the dark & cried bitterly. . . it seemed as if everything will be analysed away. Am I then losing my early faith? Oh it cannot be. 133 Heart and mind warred with one another in a battle that was structured as much by a Puritan/Evangelical dichotomy as a secular/religious one: The heart & the reason are in deadly opposition, pulling as it were in a great Tug of War without intermission day & night, though it is the heart makes the outcries & prayers & laments, it is the reason that wins, gaining slowly inch by inch & step by step. You cannot stand out against clear reason, & reason whispered day & night that the foundation on which the vast & splendid superstructure was built was untenable, was rotten, & that the whole thing could not bear examination.‖ 134 The materialist implications of Darwinian theory were evident a year later as she asked herself ―Was I merely the result of my organization?‖ 135 Although scholars of religion and sexuality have begun to explore conjunctions between the Victorian faith crisis and sexual subjectivity, they have not yet developed a fully-fledged theoretical framework within which to pursue this enquiry. Anne McClintock, exploring Victorian sexuality in a very different context, provides one possibility for understanding the 132 Greenbook, 26 April 1874, 240. 133 Greenbook, 15 March 1874, 227-28. 134 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 19, 1874, 746-47. 135 Greenbook, 17 May 1875, 109. 128 public structuring of private desires. Drawing on Leonore Davidoff‘s work, she argues that the sadomasochistic relationship of the middle-class English barrister Arthur Munby and maid-of- all-work Hannah Cullwick was informed by broader social divisions. Munby and Cullwick‘s fetishizing of the domestic constituted an attempt to remediate the psychic injuries they had sustained as social divides impacted their lives. Hannah Cullwick sought to render visible, and to ameliorate, the painful invisibility of servants and their work in middle-class homes and Munby sought to remediate the injury sustained by middle-class boys at the mandatory spurning of infant intimacies with working-class nurses. In the following section I explore the (re)structuring of Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity within the context of the broader crisis of faith by arguing that the erotic generally, and not only fetishism, is structured by broader social divisions and that the crisis of faith produced keenly felt religious divisions in Victorian society. Maynard‘s erotic liaison with the Lewis Campbell had taken place in the context of a society riven by religious divisions. Their sexual desire was constituted amidst tensions between theological liberalism and Evangelicalism. While Maynard had initially embraced her intellectual awakening, she ultimately deemed her encounter with Campbell‘s skeptical intelligence injurious. She noted in later years that ―a cleft had come in the familiar territory, and there was a distance between me and my kin, that I did not know how to bridge over.‖ 136 This injury was exacerbated by her encounters with the freethinking and often agnostic Girton students. In 1874 she had observed in anguish, ―doubt can wound, most painfully wound, where it does not slay.‖ 137 She nevertheless pursued brief homoerotic relationships with Rachel Cook and Isabel Gamble, and towards the end of her studies commenced a seven-year relationship with the near-agnostic Louisa Lumsden. Maynard‘s erotic relationships of the 1870s, and 136 Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, 102. 137 Greenbook, 3 May 1874, 243. 129 particularly her seven-year relationship with Lumsden, were an attempt to revisit the site of the injury sustained by her encounter with the discourses of doubt and to ameliorate its effects. 138 Her attempt to remediate the ―wound‖ of doubt in her erotic relationships reveals the proximity of religion and sexuality during the faith crisis. When Maynard entered Hitchin in 1872 her approach to the students was dictated by her Evangelical beliefs; she strove to ―shew love, His love, that I may shew them Him, & bring their hearts to surrender all to Him.‖ 139 Her evangelism was not the broad-based or ―indiscriminate‖ variety of later generations; rather, as with Lewis Campbell, she believed her erotically inflected feelings towards particular Girton students to indicate God‘s salvific intentions for them. Seeking the conversion of friends was the highest outworking of her love for them. She was drawn to Cook and Gamble, but both rejected Maynard‘s proselytizing efforts decisively. She nevertheless attempted to establish the devotional practices that were central to her friendship with Fanny Williams; for Evangelicals religious and emotional intimacy were indistinguishable. Gamble, who had been raised an evangelical, tried to meet her halfway. ―I asked Isabel to sing to me,‖ Maynard wrote, ―& she chose, ‗As pants the heart,‘ & then ‗Eternal Father‘ & other well-known hymns. All night I could have listened to her clear voice & held her hand.‖ Since Gamble lacked faith, the rituals of Evangelical devotional practice were meaningless: ―yet it filled me with sadness & longing, because her heart does not believe what she sang.‖ 140 Maynard nevertheless pursued night-time intimacies with Gamble. ―I had some happy minutes with Isabel in bed in the moonlight & firelight,‖ she observed in her Greenbook, ―& I said her my dear evening hymn, ‗Giver of sleep, unsleeping Lord,‘‖ but she conceded that ―through it all 138 Vicinus notes Maynard was ―greatly preferred the sophisticated . . . agnostics‖ to the orthodox religious women who entered Girton in subsequent years. Vicinus, ―One Life,‖ 610. 139 Greenbook, 1 January 1873, 2. 140 Greenbook, 14 December 1873, 178. 130 I think I never felt so helpless . . . to do the least bit of good.‖ 141 Maynard continued to think about and pray for Gamble: ―Now, night by night I think, ‗Isabel is lying down without one word of prayer. I must say it for her‘; then I fancy her beside me & beg that we may both see the truth, whatever that sight may cost.‖ 142 Her desire was enacted at the site of faith and doubt. Eventually Cook and Gamble‘s determined resistance of Evangelicalism brought an end to Maynard‘s intimacies with them. The role of Evangelicalism in structuring Maynard‘s erotic desire was evident as she contended that Isabel‘s religious difference rendered her ―a fair soulless Undine [rather] than a warm living friend.‖ 143 If Maynard‘s sexual desire was structured by religious discourse, the religious desire inherent in her crisis of faith was also informed by sexual discourse. Maynard believed her persistent questioning to have incurred God‘s displeasure and her failure to win Girton students to Christ to be the result of a Christian witness rendered ineffective by doubt. Prayer, which she deemed central to spiritual life, was difficult. Maynard turned to her homoerotic relationships to articulate a longing for Christ: Oh to sleep with Him, & wake with Him morning by morning! Oh to work in His presence, looking for every half hour, to feel how near He stands __ to be with Him at meal times, & singing, & when I walk with any one of the others, to have Him ‗draw near & go with us‘ – to really touch Him that ½ hour, when however busy I break my morning‘s work to read the Bible __ & at night to pour out my heart before Him in praise & intercession! Is it too high a standard? too religious an ideal for this active, hard- working world? I think not. 144 The relationship between religious and sexual discourse was a reciprocal one. Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity was structured by religious discourse and her homoerotic relationships pursued as 141 Greenbook, 8 March 1874, 224. 142 Greenbook, 9 April 1876, 19. 143 Greenbook, 31 December 1876, 132. 144 Greenbook, 8 February 1874, 206. 131 part of larger religious aspirations, but those relationships also informed Maynard‘s understanding of the divine. Maynard‘s seven-year relationship with Louisa Lumsden, the first of her substantial homoerotic relationships, demonstrates the role of the faith crisis in structuring Maynard‘s desire, the imbrication of faith and doubt in some iterations of dissident desire, and slippages between discourses of masculinity and femininity in erotic relationships structured by the crisis of faith. Lumsden, the daughter of an upper-middle-class Scottish family, had been the acknowledged leader of the Girton students from the inception of the college. Austere and sometimes severe, she was a formidable presence (she ―stood at the head of the College, aloof & dignified, an object of some fear to all the younger sort‖ 145 ). Lumsden successfully sat the Cambridge Classics Tripos exam in December 1872 and in May 1873 was appointed Classics lecturer at Girton. She was nine years older than Maynard, who confessed to being more afraid of her than of any of the male lecturers with the exception of Sidgwick. 146 Fear and admiration were intertwined, however: ―we all heartily admired her, & felt how much the College owed to her perfect standard of refinement, & her lofty aspirations for the whole cause of ‗Higher Education‘ which was then on its trial.‖ 147 Lumsden had been raised in the Scottish Highlands, the most conservative region of Presbyterianism, and had endured an upbringing similar to Maynard‘s – one in which Calvinism was embraced – but her years at Girton had precipitated a crisis of faith. Like Cook and Gamble, she rejected the notion of Christ as mediator to God. 148 A familiarity with biblical criticism informed her refutation of the divinity of Christ (―The 3 Gospels Matt, Mark, & Luke do not 145 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 12, 1873, 420. 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid., 438-39. 148 Greenbook, 25 May 1873, 77. 132 represent Him as God at all, neither does St. Paul. John certainly does, but then his Gospel was written much later when Christianity was deeply tinctured with Alexandrian philosophy, as is shewn by his using the strange term [‗logos‘]‖ 149 ). Ethical concerns contributed to Lumsden‘s doubt, and the problem of evil in particular (―sad sad wail over the suffering & fear & agony & cruelty in the world rising up in a great cry to heaven, & yet God looks on silently‖ 150 ). A commitment to animal rights and anti-vivisectionism informed her struggle with the problem of evil (―I can only hope that in another life animals will be better off, & free from man‘s rule‖ 151 ). Lumsden‘s attempt to pursue a friendship with Maynard in May 1873 was precipitated by her desire to confide her doubts to Maynard: In a little while she hesitated & stopped & said, ―Are you proof against being shocked?‖ And on my assuring her that I was, she unfolded to me her thoughts by separate scraps. How brought up in Scotch calvinism [sic] her whole soul rebelled at the extreme injustice – then she took up Dr. Campbell‘s view, & said it was a grand idea, but then gradually came the disclosure, ―What was the life of Christ? Surely He is not God.‖ 152 Maynard was also entrenched in a faith crisis. The subsequent relationship between the two women was framed by their respective but quite different faith crises: Maynard‘s questioning of Evangelicalism and Lumsden‘s more radical entertaining of Unitarianism and even agnosticism. Despite the threat that Lumsden‘s questioning posed to Maynard‘s foundering faith, Maynard responded to Lumsden with alacrity. She had earlier recognized her attraction to theological liberals or near-agnostics. ―Oh why is it that I must love just the very two who do not seem able to believe Revelation!‖ she wrote of Cook and Gamble in 1873. 153 When, in early 149 Ibid., 74-76. 150 Greenbook, 1 February 1874, 204. 151 Greenbook, 27 October 1873, 158. 152 Greenbook, 25 May 1873, 74-76. 153 Greenbook, 13 November 1873, 168. 133 1875, Lumsden resigned from Girton, Maynard noted, ―For me personally, perhaps her absence was good, for I had a real touch of love for her, & love across such a chasm as divided us, tends to be a painful thing.‖ 154 Despite love across the ―chasm‖ of religious difference being a ―painful thing,‖ in the summer of 1876, after Maynard had graduated from Girton and had been living at home for six months, she sought to renew her friendship with Lumsden. She wrote to her proposing to visit her at her home at Glenbogie near the town of Lumsden in Aberdeenshire. Despite marked religious differences, incipient antagonism, and even frustration with Lumsden, Maynard moved with her to St. Andrews and co-founded St. Leonards School for Girls with her in 1877; she spent a number of vacations with her. In her autobiography Maynard wrote of the summer of 1877 that ―for all my griefs I could not keep my hands off Miss Lumsden, and begged her to come home with me.‖ 155 In Easter 1878 they again vacationed together on the west coast of Scotland, at Brodrick, Arran, and Maynard wrote in her spiritual journal: ―Why am I thrown thus against L. over & over again?‖ 156 Despite her discomfort at being continually ―thrown against L.,‖ she noted, ―each time is now sweeter than the last . . . & night by night folded close, ah so close. With me such a life seems to touch a sweetness beyond words.‖ 157 Religious difference did not preclude erotic attraction for Maynard at this time; it fostered it. During Maynard‘s visit with Lumsden in Scotland in the summer of 1876, she came to a self-aware love of her friend. Her father‘s business, Maynard Brothers, was facing bankruptcy. Her brothers Harry and George had moved into their father‘s firm after their schooling, 158 and 154 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 22, 1875, 544. 155 Autobiography, Part 4, Chapter 31, 1877, 237. 156 Greenbook, 21 April 1878, 71-72. 157 Ibid. 158 Autobiography, Part 1, Chapter 2, 1861-1862, 35. 134 Harry‘s repugnance for his father‘s business and his ineptitude brought the family close to financial ruin in the mid-1870s. Maynard‘s confiding of these details to Lumsden drew the two women together. ―Now at last we were in each other‘s confidence,‖ she wrote in her Greenbook, ―& had taken at least a few steps toward mutual understanding. To know = to love her.‖ 159 The term ―love‖ was a capacious one for Maynard. Lewis Campbell had described love as an ―irrepressible yearning‖ that entered the heart and sought to ―help, & protect, & shield it‘s [sic] object from pain & evil.‖ 160 This discourse of love was, with its lack of gendered referents, a wide-ranging and unstable one. The multiple meanings of ―love,‖ the absence of pejorative discourses of female homosexuality, and the belief that female sexual desire was inherently heterosexual, allowed Maynard to address, even in unselfconscious ways, the sexual desire inherent in her homoerotic friendships. She spoke of love as a rare phenomenon that was the result of a highly selective process. Beginning to love someone was a sudden and decisive event more akin to ―falling in love‖ (a term Maynard was later to use of her relationships with women) than to becoming friends as it is currently understood. In later years Maynard described her sister-in-law Jean Maynard ―coming to love‖ Marion Wakefield: She told me how her love for M. came about. . . . [Jean] looked in on M. who sat up in bed & asked her in. Jean came & gave her a kiss, & then laid down her head on the pillow beside her & there was silence. After a while Marion put her arm over her & said ―Oh Jean, this is peace!‖ & J. replied, ―Yes, this is the true Sabbath rest.‖ Again there was a long silence, but the touch of personal feeling had come to J. in those two seconds . . . & she felt she loved her with a love she never again could lose. Beginning to love someone thus had heightened significance for Maynard. When in 1901 a Mrs. Maitland-Herriot came to love Maynard, Maynard could not reciprocate the sentiment. 159 Greenbook, 30 July 1876, 70. 160 Greenbook, 21 April 1872, 126. 135 Love was ―such a great word to use‖; she hoped for ―intercourse & help & even friendship, but scarcely love.‖ 161 In late 1876, confronting the need to seek employment in order to alleviate her family‘s financial stress, and with Lumsden‘s encouragement, Maynard sought and was given a temporary position at Cheltenham College, where Lumsden was working as Classics tutor. 162 Maynard worked as Lumsden‘s assistant from October 1876 to July 1877. The early months at Cheltenham were a highpoint in Maynard‘s relationship with Lumsden. Lumsden was gratified by Maynard‘s joining her at Cheltenham; upon her arrival ―[she] drew me on to her knee as she sat in the deep arm-chair, and told me it was ‗beyond her wildest dreams,‘ to have me really there and all her own.‖ 163 The two shared a room and a bed 164 and Maynard wrote enthusiastically of this period: ―work, pleasure, sympathy, friends – all is shared, & then the long, long clasp of living love.‖ 165 Lumsden evoked a discourse of marriage to describe the pleasure of her relationship with Maynard: ―many different times did she express her joy at the 161 Greenbook, 7 September 1901, 51. When, in 1896 Maynard‘s friend and first convert, the social reformer Mary Higgs (nee Kingsland), challenged Maynard‘s exclusive notions of love by noting that the mandate of Christians was to love broadly, Maynard answered, ―Mary listen. I have never deluded myself that I had that Divine love, never.‖ For Maynard, ―love to the individual is a strange thing & can‘t be created at will.‖ Greenbook. Long Vacation of 1896, 388. 162 Maynard‘s decision to seek employment was also the product of the Puritan work ethic that Louisa Maynard had inculcated in her children; she believed herself not to be making the most effective use of her time or abilities: ―[the] thought of . . . the undefined monotonous ease of home going on & one for years, seemed to me too terrible to bear . . . Somehow at home I can live & do well & yet not be using more than ½ or ⅓ of myself.‖ Greenbook, 31 December 1876, 132. 163 Autobiography, Part 4, Chapter 30, 1876, 152. 164 Autobiography, Part 4, Chapter 31, 1877, 224. 165 Maynard renders this text in the following way in her autobiography: ―the work of the day, and then coming home to be alone with a noble heart, a high refinement yet a perfect simplicity of taste, and then to crown all, the abandonment of enthusiastic love.‖ Autobiography, Part 5, Chapter 35, 1879, 374. Lumsden, in her short, sanitized biography (she had been appointed DBE by the time she wrote it and was ninety-two-years old), noted only that she ―had a very happy year‖ at Cheltenham and that she and Maynard had ―charming rooms on the Royal Parade.‖ She suggested that Maynard had gone to Cheltenham after Lumsden had asked the principal Miss Beale to let her have an assistant because Latin had become so popular. Louisa Lumsden, Yellow Leaves (Edinburgh : Blackwood, 1933), 60. 136 thought of having me there for her ‗wife.‘‖ 166 According to Maynard, Lumsden later averred, ―I am only too happy; my work, my home, my wife, all are good and I am satisfied.‖ 167 Maynard took up the marriage metaphor in a similar manner. ―Sometimes it seemed as if I were going through the whole deepening & expanding story of love, betrothal, & marriage in all its unutterable sweetness,‖ she observed. 168 Maynard‘s and Lumsden‘s respective faith crises structured their sexual subjectivity and their erotic relationship in significant if different ways. Maynard understood her feelings for Lumsden to be indicative of God‘s salvific intentions for her and believed her move to Cheltenham to serve the higher purpose of procuring Lumsden‘s conversion. ―What [was] the meaning of my Girton training, of my long love of her, of this strange coming to Cheltenham, & of the warm invitation fr. the Committee [if not to draw her to Christ]?‖ she asked herself. 169 Maynard sought to achieve Lumsden‘s conversion as a means to allay some of her own doubts – her foundering faith had come to rest increasingly on the testimony of fellow Christians, including narratives of conversion. Paradoxically, however, her erotic attraction to Lumsden was more centrally indebted to an urgent desire to re-stage, in the realm of human relationships, a relationship with the divine that was besieged by doubt. By becoming enamored of an agnostic, Maynard was able to re-create and to re-visit the struggle, suffering, sense of failure, and ultimately the spiritual desolation that marked her relationship with God. Lumsden‘s relationship with Maynard was similarly informed by the orthodox Christianity it supplanted. Paradoxically, her eschewal of faith took place alongside a religious longing that took Maynard as its object and her representation of her sexual desire was informed by religious discourse. 166 Greenbook, 30 July 1876, 70. 167 Greenbook, 12 November, 1876. 168 Greenbook, 30 December 1877, 268. See chapter three for a full discussion of the marriage metaphor as it was evoked by Maynard and her lovers. 169 Greenbook, 30 December 1876, 127-28. 137 Victorian homosexuals, like their heterosexual counterparts, often turned to love as an antidote to doubt. John Addington Symonds thus observed, ―in my sorest needs I have had no actual faith. . . . To the skirts of human love I have clung, and I cling blindly.‖ 170 The re- emergence of an explicitly spiritual discourse at the site of a dissident erotic is evident in the writings of the homosexual activist George Ives, who presented homosexuality as ―the Faith‖ and argued that ―Love is the centre, the First Cause of the universe, therefore everything that is of Love is holy. . . . We must not despise the Form, yet without the Soul it is nothing.‖ 171 Homosexual men drew on spiritual discourse to vindicate a sexual intercourse not only deemed the product of the lower animal self (as it was in heterosexual discourse), but with the passing of the 1885 Labouchère Amendment, as illegal. 172 Unlike Ives, neither Maynard nor Lumsden self-consciously re-configured religious discourse to sacralize dissident sexual desire. Like most Victorian women they did not identify their desire as ―sexual.‖ Nevertheless the near-agnostic Lumsden turned to religious discourse to express her love for Maynard. She took up a biblically inflected Greek phrase to speak of her love: ―‗έν σοί έσμεν, ξγμέν έν σοί‘ [―we are in you, we live in you‖]; she said looking deep into my eyes.‖ 173 The phrase had resonances of Christ‘s farewell address to his disciples (―Yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because I live, ye shall live also. At that day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and ye in me, and I in you‖ (John 14;19-20). 170 Horatio Brown, John Addington Symonds. A Biography (London: Smith, Elder, & Co, 1903), 185, 238 quoted in Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 388-89. 171 Joy Dixon, ―‗Love is a Sacrament That Should Be Taken Kneeling‘: Sexuality, Religion, and the Troubled History of ‗Secularization‘‖ (keynote address presented at the Annual Meeting of the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario, Toronto, ON, May 2006). 172 Ives wrote in 1894 that the ―Faith or Higher Philosophy or whatever you like to call it,‖ demonstrated that while ―what they see is beastly and low, what We mean, the angels could sing upon their harps, or ponder in the woods of Paradise.‖ Dixon,―Love is a sacrament,‖ 7. 173 Greenbook, 12 November 1876, 115-16. Maynard referred to Lumsden‘s Greek expression again in 1880, when she left St. Leonards: ―At Cheltenham she said ‗En soi zymen, esmen en soi‘ Was that true? . . . I almost think it was.‖ Autobiography, Part 5, Chapter 37, 460. 138 Lumsden‘s ―we are in you, we live in you‖ also echoed Acts 17:28, ―εν αυτω γαπ ζωμεν και κινουμεθα και εσμεν (―For in him we live, and move, and have our being‖) part of Paul‘s speech to the Athenians, in which he cites the poets of ancient Greece: ―as certain also of your own poets have said, ‗For we are also his offspring.‘‖ Just as Paul appropriated the words of the Greek poets for his Christian message, so the Classicist Lumsden re-situated Paul‘s words in an ostensibly secular discourse. The devout, enthusiastic, and compassionate young Maynard represented a Christ-like figure for the doubting Lumsden. 174 Maynard occupied the space in Lumsden‘s life and psyche that had been vacated by orthodox religious belief. The contours of that space were structured by the religion it displaced. 175 By emulating a predominantly masculine ―woman worship‖ of the kind identified by Houghton and exemplified by Lewis Campbell, Lumsden evidenced the unstable relationship between both the secular and the sacred and masculinity and femininity. The dynamic nature of the relationship between the secular and the sacred was evident as Lumsden subsequently entertained a notion of God as the ultimate Fulfiller of human desire: ―can there be food for hunger, & love for the affections, & after all no God to fill all these desires?‖ 176 Lumsden‘s religious dissidence was accompanied by a more overt transgression of dominant norms of femininity; she articulated what we might now characterize as a transgender or transsexual subjectivity. For a number of nineteenth-century women homoerotic desire coincided with a transgender subjectivity and/or a masculine appearance. Vicinus notes that 174 Robert Barrett Browning articulated a similar sentiment in his ―Two in Compagna‖: I would I could adopt your will, See with your eyes, and set my heart Beating by yours, and drink my fill At your soul‘s springs – your part my part In life, for good and ill (Stanza 2, quoted in Houghton, Victorian Frame of Mind, 388) 175 Joy Dixon, examining the life and beliefs of Ives, notes how ―the spaces available to dissident desire were shaped, given their contours, by the spaces no longer occupied by faith.‖ Dixon, ―Love is a Sacrament,‖ 3. 176 Greenbook, 22 February 1874, 217. 139 ―[Rosa] Bonheur regularly wore trousers and a smock. Boys and men ridiculed [Anne] Lister for her stride and manner. [Harriet] Hosmer went about Rome at night unaccompanied. [Charlotte] Cushman wore tailored jackets and ties and spoke in what critics called a ‗man-ny voice.‘‖ 177 In 1873 Lumsden spoke to Maynard ―a good deal about her endless longings to have been a man.‖ 178 Maynard in turn noted that Lumsden ―had naturally the longest and most steady stride I have ever known in a woman,‖ and in later years observed admiringly, ―there was a good deal of the man about her, and the best side came out here, when the strong and weighty became so exquisitely tender, so delicate and considerate.‖ Lumsden welcomed Maynard‘s notion that sex was an effect of earthly existence only: ―Ah, if I believed so, what could it matter that I was compelled to be a woman this little time, 50 or 60 years at most, & then a free spirit with all eternity before me!‖ 179 Lumsden‘s faith crisis, and her reconfiguring of religious discourse at the site of the erotic, also illustrates the dissident gender subjectivity that might inform doubt and which doubt itself might foster. Her relationship with Lumsden in all likelihood contributed to Maynard‘s later theological effort to interrogate gender and to validate female masculinity. In a 1910 essay, ―The Creation of Eve,‖ she demonstrated a sense of the contingency of sex/gender by seeking a reason for sexual difference. She argued that ―from the physiological standpoint there seems to be no absolute necessity for the cleavage among living creatures that we know as sex. Reproduction is carried on without it in large families of the lower creatures, and our life-history might conceivably have been arranged without this duality that cuts so deep into our existence.‖ 180 Ultimately she contended that sexual difference was necessary for the spiritual 177 Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 3. 178 Greenbook, 7 June 1873, 84. 179 Ibid. 180 Constance Maynard, ―The Creation of Eve,‖ in Between College Terms (London: James Nisbet, 1910), 66. 140 progress of individuals (―the Creator designed the cleft of physical sex . . . in order that it might be the basis of mental and spiritual divergences, and thus each might lead the other upward‖ 181 ). She argued that the purpose of marriage was to model gender complementarity. In 1924 she took this argument a step further, in terms characteristic of Victorian sexual difference feminism (but also somewhat circuitously), suggesting that sexual difference was necessary if women, who represented maternal love, were to lead men, who were responsible for the gains of an earlier material age, towards the new spiritual era. Maynard‘s gender theory was not as dualistic as first appears, however. In a 1924 text, We Women: A Golden Hope, she developed a more dynamic approach to gender informed by Darwinian theory. She suggested that the development of gender in the individual paralleled that of the history of the human race as expounded in Genesis. In the individual, the ―Man-spirit‖ was evident in the early, destructive phases of childhood, the ―Woman-Spirit‖ appeared much later in both boys and girls, just as Eve had been created after Adam. She argued for the co-existence of both genders in most individuals: I hope I am making it clear that we deal with ―spirits‖ and not with the outer form of the individual. Every soul is said to be a ―microcosm,‖ and there is no doubt at all but that every noble character shows forth both these ―spirits.‖ It is a poor, cowering, weak woman who has not within her some of the love of adventure with a spice of peril, some of the virility and endurance that is part of our primary inheritance; and he is a barbarous and contracted man within whose soul the Woman-spirit, Eve, does not reign with all the compassion for the weak, with the gentler, persistent, home-producing powers that she, the mother of life, brings with her. 182 Christianity, with its notion of a body that was distinct from the spirit, enabled Maynard to distinguish between gender – the ―Man-spirit‖ and ―Woman-spirit‖ – and biological sex. A sexual equality discourse emerged more prominently as Maynard contended, contrary to Darwin, 181 Ibid., 83. 182 Constance Maynard, We Women: A Golden Hope (London: Morgan & Scott, 1924), 49. 141 that ―where the cleft of sex is emphasized (as among the nobles of France in the reigns of Louis XIV. and XV.) there society is debased and weak, and where the cleft is slurred over and the sexes treated as nearly alike as possible (as in the Society of Friends), there it [society] is noble and strong and does great things.‖ 183 She had actually endorsed a more fluid notion of gender in her 1910 essay, also arguing that ―we all, whether we are man or women, inherit the nature of both parents, and there may be found men who, quite unconsciously, inherit the best instincts of woman, even as there are certainly some women who, without a shade of foolish affectation, are strong men at heart.‖ 184 For Maynard the discourse of masculinity was mobile and not fixed to a particular sex; the most successful women demonstrated both the ―man spirit‖ and the ―woman spirit,‖ but for some women the ―man spirit‖ was predominant. 185 The latter reference seems to be to Lumsden, the most masculine of Maynard‘s loves. In that essay Maynard also suggested that individuals of the same sex might model the gender complementarity of marriage (it was ―quite possible that two women, and perhaps more rarely two men, should have this effect on one another‖ 186 ). Ultimately, however, Maynard saw physical sex as aligning with gender for the most part (―but the main number of men and women will ever, by the secret instructions of Nature, observe the lines allotted to them‖ 187 ). Within what may appear to be a characteristically Victorian endorsement of sexual difference, Maynard nevertheless accommodated the notion of continuity between the sexes and had also argued for the possibility of women and men crossing that divide altogether. It would be a mistake, however, to see her theology as approximating contemporary queer disruptions of a 183 Ibid., 133. Here the influence of Westfield Vice-Principal, the Irish Quaker Anne Richardson is evident. 184 Maynard, ―The Creation of Eve,‖ 83-84. 185 Maynard, We Women, 133. 186 Maynard, ―The Creation of Eve,‖ 83. 187 Ibid., 84. 142 binary system of sexual difference. To Maynard‘s mind, transgendered subjects conformed to binary sexual difference rather than challenging it; her understanding of variations in sexual identity were theorized within, rather than disruptive of, binary categories of sexual difference. She nevertheless looked forward to a future dispensation in which sexual difference would be eradicated: ―Sister and Mother singly, and Bride collectively,‖ she wrote in 1924, ―such is our portion until we are finally made one with the whole human race, so completely one that not even the least scar remains to tell of the cleft between the sexes that had such power to determine our lot on earth.‖ 188 Maynard‘s belief that the afterlife offered an existence free of sexual difference was matched by the conviction that sexual difference was inconsequential in undertaking spiritual work in the earthly realm (―wherever each soul can go it may go, whether to withdraw into the lonely solitudes of prayer, or to work in the streets of its busiest cities, or to climb the heights of self-sacrifice, and reach the very snows of martyrdom . . . the whole country is open to those who have the courage to explore it‖ 189 ). St. Paul had made no distinction between men and women in his prayer for the Colossian converts. ―Does he pause here and add a little rubric to say that the splendour of this outlook is for men,‖ she asks her readers, ―and that the women must be content with a lower stage and humbler duties . . . Not by the slightest hint does he qualify the grand sweep of his hopes, and expressly states in Eph. iv. that they are for everyone.‖ 190 In mid-1877 Lumsden and Maynard left Cheltenham to found St. Leonards School for girls in St. Andrews, Scotland. The school was to be the first of the new public schools for girls in Scotland, modeled after the English girls‘ schools. Lewis Campbell was involved in its founding and Fanny Campbell approached Maynard and Lumsden to assist them with the 188 Maynard, We Women, 126. 189 Ibid. 190 Maynard, We Women, 127. 143 project. Maynard suggested Lumsden as headmistress and agreed to accompany her. At St. Leonards the women‘s religious differences gained heightened significance with the question of the place religion would have at the school. Maynard sought to make religious education central to the curriculum, while Lumsden strove to minimize it. Maynard wrote, ―the line of our separation glows like red hot iron, & not a day passes without my touching it & suffering keenly.‖ 191 Her relationship with Lumsden was not, however, pursued despite religious difference; it was taken up because of it and perpetuated by it. The ―line of . . . separation‖ between the two allowed Maynard to re-visit the psychic injury sustained in her encounter with the forces of theological liberalism and agnosticism at St. Andrews and Girton College and to restage her own foundering relationship with God. She was thus able to re-enact in a human relationship – and thus to validate – the distress she was experiencing in her relationship with God. At St. Leonards, Maynard‘s relationship with Lumsden, like her relationship with God, became increasingly difficult to sustain. She found living day by day with an unconverted Lumsden demanding, in the same way that she found living with an unresponsive and distant divine arduous. She had described her spiritual desolation as ―a blank empty space above me.‖ 192 She spoke of her sense of distance from Lumsden in terms that echoed her crisis-ridden and embattled relationship with the divine. ―I saw & felt the barrier strong & high as ever,‖ she wrote, ―& could not help crying when alone in my room.‖ 193 ―What can I answer,‖ she asked herself with some anguish, ―when the nearer she draws to me in the full grandeur of her 191 Greenbook, 31 December 1878, 176. 192 Greenbook, 30 December 1877, 268-69. 193 Greenbook, 26 November 1876, 117. 144 woman‘s nature, the more fearfully I feel the blank and dissatisfaction.‖ 194 As Maynard re- enacted her embattled relationship with the divine in her relationship with Lumsden, the Puritan theology of her childhood became increasingly prominent, eclipsing the Evangelicalism she had later espoused and precipitating a shift in her sexual subjectivity. In her essay on Maynard, Pauline Phipps argues that the Puritanism of Maynard‘s upbringing produced a sadomasochistic sexual subjectivity in adulthood. She suggests that ―in her early adulthood she assumed a submissive feminine role in her relationships‖ but that from her early thirties, after she had become Mistress of Westfield, she ―reversed the role,‖ ―toying with‖ and ―controlling‖ students who ―craved the love of their older and wiser mistress.‖ 195 I argue instead for more nuanced and diverse shifts in Maynard‘s religious and sexual subjectivity and more complex relationships between her religious belief and sexuality. Nevertheless, Maynard‘s relationship with Lumsden can be characterized as a masochistic one, and that masochism derived from her Puritanism. The Puritan notions of self-sacrifice, the alignment of love and suffering, and a quietist understanding of piety as self-abnegation informed her relationship with Lumsden. While the espousal of Puritan theology does not inevitably lead to masochism, submissive relationships, or ―passivity,‖ these characteristics were instantiated in Maynard‘s relationship with Lumsden, because it was a re-staging of Maynard‘s embattled relationship with God. Love, submission, and suffering were intertwined in Maynard‘s parents‘ Puritan theology. God demonstrated His love for humankind through the suffering of Christ on the Cross and the believer reciprocated this love by embracing a similar ―crucifixion‖ of self, with the help of Christ. Mary King, Maynard‘s childhood spiritual mentor, prayed with Maynard ―for 194 Greenbook, 3 June 1877, 195-96. 195 Pauline Phipps, ―Faith, Desire, and Sexual Identity: Constance Maynard‘s Atonement for Passion,‖ Journal of the History of Sexuality 18, no. 2 (May 2009): 268. 145 a perfect subjection of will, & whole-hearted surrender to death of the old nature.‖ 196 Maynard concurred; Christ called believers to follow him ―in his crucifixion of the flesh & self- abasement.‖ 197 She understood that such crucifixion and self-abasement could only be accomplished as a response to Christ‘s love for her (―Only love can do it. Let me know more of Thy great & constant love of me, and it will not be hard‖ 198 ). Maynard‘s understanding of divine chastisement saw love, submission, and suffering similarly imbricated. In 1869, she wrote of her sense of spiritual transgression: ―I do not wish to hold out, but fully surrender, & come to be forgiven at once, & punished if must be.‖ 199 God‘s punishing the believer was a sign of His love. ―I can feel love, not anger, thro it all,‖ she observed, ―so though I am very sorrowful, I cannot despair, & it only makes me cry to Him & pray the more.‖ 200 The holiness piety that Maynard embraced in 1869 perpetuated some of the emphases of her parent‘s Puritan faith; the renunciation or emptying of the self was a prelude to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Strength was attained in the believer‘s utter weakness. The influence of her parents‘ Puritanism on Maynard‘s piety had been evident during her visit to St. Andrews in 1872. Here she had befriended Mary Bethune, a serious Christian of around her own age. One night after attending a concert, Maynard ―slipped into her room . . . tho it was very late‖ with a view to sharing religious devotions with Bethune. Bethune, like Maynard, held the Calvinist doctrine of ―total depravity‖ and bemoaned her sinful state: ―[how] thoroughly I hate, how I despise myself!‖ 201 In her Greenbook Maynard observed that ―Cousin 196 Greenbook, 11 October 1868, 27. 197 Greenbook, 19 February 1869, 107. 198 Greenbook, 12 August 1868, 111. 199 Greenbook, 18 July 1869, 69. 200 Ibid., 65. 201 Greenbook, 14 April 1872, 120. 146 L. [Lewis Campbell], could he have heard her, would have thought it a morbid exaggerated feeling, induced by too narrow a religious education, & that it would have been truer to rejoice in her natural gifts & be thankful for them.‖ 202 ―But ah,‖ she continues, ―I fear he does not know what it is to stand convicted of sin before the pure, unflinching, consuming love of God.‖ 203 She and Bethune read Psalm 130, De Profundis, together, which begins with the words: 1. Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD. 2. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. 3. If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? 4. But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. Maynard, who described Bethune as ―a great noble creature, a sort of ‗lion cub,‘ with a disposition & abilities many might well envy,‖ admired her humbling of herself before God. 204 Her intimacy with Bethune was thus predicated on a shared Puritan piety characterized by an acute conviction of sin, a sense of unworthiness, and self-abnegation before the divine. Maynard‘s relationship with Lumsden saw the outworking of the terms of Puritan theology not in the women‘s piety but in their relationship with one another. The Puritan regulation of the imagination evident in Maynard‘s effort to quell all romantic thoughts of Campbell in 1872 did not ultimately so much thwart her imagination as structure it along Puritan lines. Similarly, the hesitancy around pleasure of that period did not repress the erotic as much as give it a particular form. The Puritan structuring of Maynard‘s homoerotic subjectivity was evident in the later 1870s in her desire to suffer for Lumsden. During July 1877 she revisited the life and works of Jean Baptiste Vianney (1786-1859), the Curé d'Ars (the parish priest of the French village of 202 Ibid. 203 Ibid. 204 Greenbook, 7 March 1872, 119-20. 147 Ars) and a hero of her parents‘ faith. Vianney asserted that there was in mortification ―a sweetness & a consolation wh. when once tasted, it is impossible to dispense with; you must exhaust the cup to the bottom.‖ 205 Maynard admired Vianney‘s ―intense humility & unswerving mortifications.‖ 206 She took up the ―cup‖ of suffering that came with her pursuit of Lumsden‘s salvation, ―begging only that I may bear the full cup steady . . . leaving the results to Him who dictated them.‖ 207 Maynard‘s suffering for Lumsden was informed by, and resembled, Christ‘s crucifixion and its redemptive objective as well as the believer‘s consequent crucifixion of the self. Maynard sought not only Lumsden‘s salvation, but also the restoration of her own relationship with God. More importantly, and more poignantly, by using the crucifixion as a metaphor, she sought also to render apparent her own anguished suffering and isolation before an apparently absent God. Her language echoes that of Christ on the cross. In later years she wrote of Lumsden (and by extension God) that it was ―as though having once clinched my will it was not within my power to unclinch it again.‖ 208 Maynard‘s erotically inflected Puritan masochism was enacted in her physical relationship with Lumsden. She observed that ―the talks on the Religious Instruction . . . were the saddest, & all that time if I slept alone I used to cry bitterly.‖ She continues, however, ―if I slept with her, if I touched her the least bit I was kept awake by an electric thrill all the short summer night, with but the shortest snatches of sleep till the red sunlight lay in streaks on the wall.‖ 209 Elsewhere she notes, ―L‘s physical power over me was so painful that I think she could 205 Greenbook, 22 July 1877, 210. 206 Ibid. 208-9. 207 Greenbook, 3 June 1877, 196. 208 Autobiography, Part 4, Chapter 31, 1877, 218. 209 Greenbook, 30 December 1877, 270. 148 have kept me awake til I died of it, so intense so unsparing was it.‖ 210 The details of her physical relationship with Lumsden are not given further articulation, although she does note that on one occasion of discord with Lumsden she awoke to find that Lumsden had ―[begun] some of her old tender caresses.‖ 211 It seems likely that at this early stage of Maynard‘s erotic history, genital sexuality was not part of her expression of same-sex desire. She was nevertheless aware of the importance of the body to her ―love‖ of Lumsden. In her most candid discussion of homoerotic desire, she compared her relationship with Lumsden and with Dr. James Robertson, an unsuccessful suitor who had courted her while she was at St Leonards. ―Strange it is to look back on these two kinds of love, thus brought into a sharp contrast,‖ she wrote, ―and it shows once more how certain superficial matters, things almost belonging to the body rather than the soul, have their weight in ‗l‘amour tout simple.‘‖ 212 She continues: ―This would be very humiliating did one not take the body as the exponent of the mind.‖ 213 Paradoxically, in re-staging her relationship with God in the intimacy of her relationship with Lumsden, and in pursuing religious aspirations, Maynard had come to recognize the significance of the body to sexual desire. Maynard‘s enactment of her faith crisis in her relationship with Lumsden demonstrates not only the imbrication of faith and doubt and the interdependence of the spiritual and the secular, but also of the soul and body, with which these former terms are often aligned. She had found it necessary to address the injuries of her faith crisis with an embodied entity (Lumsden) and as religious desire had informed sexual desire, she had gained an appreciation of the corporeality of the latter. 210 Greenbook, 3 May 1883, 70. 211 Greenbook, 15 June 1877, 200. 212 Autobiography, Part 5, Chapter 35, 1879, 354. 213 Ibid. Grappling with sexual desire, and specifically with homoerotic desire, at this time (she wrote this part of her autobiography sometime between 1917 and 1924), she notes ―Even now, at the close of my life, I do not understand the matter so I need not write anymore‖ (ibid.). 149 The religious difference that had informed the eroticism of Maynard‘s and Lumsden‘s relationship ultimately led to its demise. Lumsden‘s refusal to convert precluded the possibility of the shared spiritual intimacy upon which Maynard‘s friendships, like those of most Evangelicals, were predicated. In her Greenbook she noted: ―simply hundreds of things, my dearest things, I cannot tell her, for scornful silences, rebuffs and misunderstandings are too much for me.‖ 214 Lumsden in turn was frustrated to learn that Maynard‘s confidence went not ―with length of acquaintance, nor similar circumstances, nor even affection, but with a fellow- feeling on certain points.‘‖ 215 Maynard had by this time begun to question the Puritan prioritizing of reason that had informed her faith crisis and to turn back to the revivalist Evangelicalism of her childhood. Her decision to return to Evangelicalism demonstrates not so much a capitulation to dominant discourses of femininity, as a self-aware recuperation of faith on the basis of an esteem for Evangelical discourses of religious feeling. While Maynard did not turn back to Evangelicalism because it was the context in which she could pursue sexual desire, her sexual subjectivity was inextricably intertwined with Evangelical discourse; Evangelicalism had provided her with a discourse of emotion, desire, and intimacy. Lumsden could not countenance Maynard‘s Evangelicalism and her valorizing of emotion. She was opposed to discourses of religious feeling and evangelical revivalism: [She] had been in a ―Revival‖, & hated & dreaded the whole thing – that girls of that age were so susceptible a touch would send them off, but that she wd rather some bad habit went through the School (as boys sometimes take to drinking) than that such a spirit shd enter, because the excitement flared up & passed, & the heart was left closed & cold to all real good for years after. 216 214 Autobiography, Part 5, Chapter 37, 1881, 456. 215 Greenbook, 15 June 1877, 199. 216 Greenbook, 25 March 1877, 166. 150 She believed Maynard to have succumbed to the easy sentiment of an intellectually impoverished evangelicalism. Of Maynard‘s devotional reading she noted, ―I wonder at you so much, that you who have read the really strong meat of philosophy & thought shd put up with a weak senseless little modern book like that.‖ 217 Lumsden seems to have understood her same-sex desire in transgender/transsexual terms; her rational rejection of orthodox Christianity was one outworking of her masculinity. Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity was intricately intertwined in Evangelicalism, however. It was compelled less by a desire to recuperate femininity than as a way to privilege desire, both religious and sexual. It offered a long-sought after alternative to the emotional austerity and sexual repression of her Puritan childhood. It demonstrates the significance of religious discourse to the making of some Victorian women‘s sexual desire and suggests that sexuality is a factor that requires further investigation when accounting for the perpetuation, by women themselves, of the trope of the ―spiritual woman.‖ For these women the loss of religious discourse entailed a loss of a discourse of sexual desire. Maynard‘s turn back to Evangelicalism also points to the need for a more extensive theorizing of the relationship of femininity to same- sex desire, different from but as comprehensive as the kind that has been undertaken by historians of sexuality in relation to female masculinity and same-sex desire. 218 In July 1880 Maynard resigned from St. Leonards. The religious framework within which she had conducted her relationship with Lumsden was evident when, addressing God, she wrote in her Greenbook that ―I thought I was sent to lead that noble heart to Thee, and all this very day has ended in wreck and failure and grief.‖ 219 Referencing the New Testament parable 217 Greenbook, 1 April 1877, 168. 218 See, for example, Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1998). 219 Autobiography, Part 5, Chapter 37, 1881, 460. 151 in which a man buys a field to procure the treasure within it (an analogy for the sacrifices that are to be made in attaining the Kingdom of Heaven), Maynard wrote: ―I gave up so much to win this prize, – ah, perhaps too much! – to win it. I have spent my whole treasure, I‘ve got nothing left; I have suffered and spared nothing, nothing, and yet she is not the richer.‖ 220 The imbrication of Maynard‘s relationship with God and her relationship with Lumsden – not as either/or but both/and – is evident in this transposition of the biblical text. In accompanying Lumsden to St. Leonards Maynard had not only sought to attain the salvation of Lumsden and, indistinguishably, to attain Lumsden herself, she had also sought to restage the injuries sustained in her relationship with God as a result of her crisis of faith and to attempt to ameliorate those. Maynard moved to London after her resignation and pursued part-time study of art at the Slade School. Lumsden remained at St. Leonards; there is no evidence to suggest that she pursued other erotic relationships with women, or any erotic relationships at all, in subsequent years. Maynard‘s religious subjectivity and the homoerotic relationships she pursued during the 1870s, like those of her adolescence and early adulthood, demonstrate the central role of piety in the constitution of her sexual subjectivity, the influence of wider religious trends on her religious beliefs, and the dynamic nature of her religious and sexual subjectivity. During the 1870s her religious subjectivity shifted; she moved from a confident Puritan Evangelical faith to a characteristically Victorian crisis of faith which resulted in a transition in her sexual subjectivity. The relationships she pursued with both Lewis Campbell and Louisa Lumsden were, unlike her school girl ―raves,‖ forged across the chasm of religious difference; the erotic became the site at which her crisis of faith was precipitated and at which she sought its resolution. Maynard‘s erotic relationships with Campbell and Lumsden demonstrate the importance of sexuality as a site of enquiry for scholars of the Victorian crisis of faith. Her attraction to 220 Ibid. 152 agnostics or near-agnostics and her re-staging of her relationship with the divine in these ostensibly ―secular‖ spaces evidences the unstable relationship between the secular and the sacred during her faith crisis. The turn to sexual desire by the theologically liberal Campbell and the near-agnostic Lumsden, and the spiritual terms in which they described the erotic, suggests that discourses of religion and sexuality were in close proximity during the crisis of faith; it demonstrates the consequent blurring of what scholars have deemed ―secular‖ (the rejection of faith and the privileging of the erotic) and ―sacred.‖ Maynard and Campbell‘s relationship also illustrates the historically specific constitution of the ―spiritual woman‖ and the ―secular man‖ of dominant Victorian discourse. However, Campbell‘s re-writing of the sexual in a spiritual idiom and Maynard‘s entertaining of a masculine doubt illustrates the fluidity of masculinity and femininity and of their respective alignment with doubt and faith. The faith-crisis erotic, as it was instantiated in Maynard‘s life, produced doubting belief and faith-inflected doubt. It illustrates, in the realm of sexuality, the inadequacy of the discrete, binary categories of doubt and faith, secular and sacred, body and soul, and masculinity and femininity that inform dominant theories of secularization. Maynard‘s erotic relationships of the 1870s suggest that it is not simply a case of ―slippages‖ between the secular and sacred, their ―blurring‖ or ―imbrication‖ – these are merely heuristic devices for a contemporary readership. Rather, Maynard‘s relationships illuminate the indistinguishable nature of doubt and faith, evident in a variety of forms of doubting-faith and faith-inflected doubt. Maynard‘s erotic relationships of the 1870s also demonstrate the importance of the women‘s colleges as sites of investigation for scholars of the Victorian faith crisis. Her faith crisis was precipitated by Lewis Campbell, a Classics Professor, proponent of women‘s higher education, and exponent of liberal theology. It suggests that other prominent theological liberals or agnostics involved in women‘s higher education – Maurice, Sedgwick, Seeley – may have had 153 a similar influence on college women. Maynard‘s relationship with Lumsden constitutes a valuable example of the outworking of the crisis of faith amongst college women. Lumsden‘s dissident gender subjectivity points to a broader discomfort amongst college women with Victorian norms of femininity and the role of gender (specifically the transgression of gender norms required to pursue higher education) in precipitating a faith crisis. It points to the importance of taking gender into account as a factor in investigating the Victorian crisis of faith. Lumsden‘s forthright, assertive doubt and her rational reconfiguration of a tentative faith, along with her reworking of the erotic as a site of the sacred, resulted in a ―blurring‖ of masculinity and femininity similar to that of Campbell. Maynard‘s rational Puritanism and her reasoned questioning of her faith demonstrate what has often been deemed a masculine vigor and intellectual rigor. Even after her turned back to Evangelicalism, reason and emotion co-existed uncomfortably in her religious subjectivity. Rather than a simple reprisal of femininity, her return to Evangelicalism was the effect of her indebtedness to its discourse of feeling and of sexual desire. The fact that this entailed an adoption of dominant norms of femininity points to the constraints consequent on the historical aligning of femininity with emotion, where an embrace of the latter brought with it some of the liabilities of the former. Rather than representing the consolidation of discourses of femininity it reveals the points of tension inherent in them. Ultimately Maynard found a tenuous holding ground for her faith in an empiricism that derived from both Evangelicalism and Puritanism. Turning back to what Bebbington describes as the Enlightenment legacy of the eighteenth-century revivals, Maynard foregrounded an epistemology based on experience of the divine. In April 1875, while still at Girton, she had had Connie Herschel and Mary Kingsland to tea and afterwards wrote, ―we sat in the dusk for a long talk on the ‗Rational basis of Faith‘: We came to the conclusion that as in every case Intuition or 154 ‗direct Presentation‘ is the only certain knowledge (serving as a basis for demonstration), so in Christianity there is no proof but the immediate trying it, like sight & hearing.‖ 221 Maynard‘s perception that religious experience was the best evidence of faith was to foster a shift in her religious subjectivity. At the start of the 1880s she turned again to the holiness movement, and more particularly to the Salvation Army. A different iteration of desire, structured by the holiness movement, was to come to the fore in the next phase of Maynard‘s religious history. What is most remarkable about Maynard‘s erotic relationships of the 1870s, perhaps, is the relative insignificance of gender to sexual desire. Leila Rupp, in her history of same-sex sexuality, writes that ―there are various ways that sexual acts involving two genitally alike bodies may in fact not be best conceptualized as ‗same-sex.‘ In some cases, what is more important than the fact of genital similarity is the fact of some kind of difference: age difference, class difference, gender difference . . . are far more important to the people involved and to the societies in which they lived than the mere fact of touching similar bodies.‖ 222 Maynard‘s relationships with Campbell and Lumsden suggest a corollary to Rupp‘s assertion; for her, differently sexed bodies may have been less a factor in precipitating desire than religious difference was. She believed that Campbell‘s liberal theology had ultimately been injurious to her faith; Lumsden‘s near-agnosticism offered her the opportunity to remediate that injury and it was this, rather than Lumsden‘s physical sex, that incited Maynard‘s desire and structured her relationship with the other woman. 221 Greenbook, April 25 1875, 88-89. 222 Leila Rupp, ―Toward a Global History of Same-Sex Sexuality,‖ Journal of the History of Sexuality, 10 (2001): 287-288, quoted in Vicinus, Intimate Friendships, xxi-xxii. 155 Chapter 3: Familiar Desires: Evangelicalism, Familial Discourse, and Homosexual Subjectivity When in 1882 Maynard was offered the position of principal or ―Mistress‖ of Westfield College, the college for women whose founding she had championed, she compared accepting it to entering a religious order (―I heard the harsh grating of the convent gate closing behind me‖ 1 ) and delineated the similarities between herself and the seventeenth-century Jansenist abbess of the Port Royal convent, Jacqueline-Marie-Angélique Arnauld or La Mère Angélique (―I thought of . . . her white woollen dress & scarlet cross, & looking down on my own black dress I thought, ‗. . . it is the same dress . . . it is done from the same motive‘‖ 2 ). Religious orders were of great interest to Victorians. The Oxford Movement of the 1830s had sparked their restoration; the first Anglo-Catholic convent had been established in 1845 and by the end of the century, around 1,300 Anglo-Catholics had affiliated with religious orders. 3 Maynard‘s recourse to Catholic discourse is nevertheless surprising; Catholicism (both Anglo- and Roman), with its notion of priests as intermediaries to God, the practice of aural confession, the ornate ritual that characterized church services, and the elevation of celibacy, was anathema to most Evangelicals. Maynard established the college in response to a religious calling to women‘s higher education and in a period in which, for middle-class women, the pursuit of a career was deemed to be incompatible with marriage. In the early 1880s the metaphor of entering a religious sisterhood thus seemed to Maynard to best describe her acceptance of the position of principal of 1 Effie Notebooks, 27 October 1888, 172. 2 Effie Notebooks, Retrospect of 1888, 27 October 1888, 96-97. 3 Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 18. 156 Westfield. 4 Despite Maynard‘s history of homoerotic relationships, she viewed the renunciation of marriage with regret. At St. Leonards she had been courted by a distinguished Scottish clergyman, Dr. James Robertson of Wittinghame; she had repelled his advances but had nevertheless observed that she could ―hardly bear steadily to look on such a blessing within arm‘s length & yet be firm & reasonable.‖ 5 The founding of Westfield College was Maynard‘s most significant achievement and the college was an important milestone in the women‘s movement for higher education. 6 It was the first residential college for women in London and the first British college to award women graduates degrees (the college was affiliated with the University of London which granted women degrees from 1878, far predating Oxford and Cambridge). 7 Maynard served as its 4 The use of the metaphor of religious orders to describe women‘s colleges was not unusual. In an essay on the position of women in history, the near-agnostic Louisa Lumsden argued that the convents had been the last productive sites of women‘s learning, and that Protestants, by bringing about their closure after the Reformation, had thwarted women‘s intellectual development. She suggested that by offering women intellectual training the colleges comprised a form of modern-day sisterhood. Louisa Lumsden, ―The Position of Woman in History,‖ in The Position of Woman: Actual and Ideal (London: Nisbet, 1911), 29-66. 5 Greenbook, 28 July 1877, 211. 6 For the history of Westfield College and its role in the movement for women‘s higher education, see Janet Sondheimer, Castle Adamant in Hampstead. A History of Westfield College 1882-1982 (London: Westfield College, University of London, 1983); Eleanor Carus-Wilson, Westfield College, University of London, 1882-1932 (London: The Favil Press, [1932]); Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850- 1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Martha Vicinus, ―‗One Life to Stand Beside Me‘: Emotional Conflicts in First-Generation College Women in England,‖ Feminist Studies 3 (Fall 1982): 603-28; and Elizabeth Edwards, ―Homoerotic Friendships and College Principals, 1880-1960,‖ Women's History Review 4, no. 2 (1995): 149-163. The first journal to publish an article on the college was Girls Own Paper. Mary L. G. Petrie, ―The Dream of Princess Ida,‖ Girls Own Paper [15 December 1883]: 171. The writings of former faculty and staff are also important sources for the history of Westfield. Two unpublished works by Maynard and Anne Richardson were written in about 1927: ―The Inception of Westfield College‖ by Maynard and ―Notes on the History of Westfield College up to 1913, and on Some of its Foreign Connections Since‖ by Richardson. Maynard‘s ―Some Thoughts on the Cultivation of the Intellect: A Paper Read at the Annual Meeting for the Christian Women‘s Union, Held at Liverpool, October 1881‖ (London: Westfield College, 1888) became the prospectus for the new college. Richardson also wrote an article on Maynard in Wings, the journal of the Women‘s Total Abstinence Union. Publications by other former staff and students include: Dr. Marian Delft‘s ―Reminiscences of Westfield College mainly 1906-194‖ and ―Botany at Westfield 1906-48‖; E. C. Lodge‘s Terms and Vacations (1938); and M . D. Stocks, My Commonplace Book (1970) and Still More Commonplaces (1973). 7 Oxford granted degrees to women in 1921 and Cambridge only in 1948, although women were allowed to take the exams. Women had graduated from the University of London, in small numbers, from 1880. (In 1882, the year Westfield opened, Maynard counted eleven women amongst two hundred men at the University of London graduation ceremony.) Bedford College, founded in 1849, prepared students for London degrees, and University 157 principal from 1882 to 1913, when she retired. Westfield faculty and students went on to hold prestigious positions in education. 8 While feminist scholars have been quick to note the significance of Westfield College for women‘s higher education, they have neglected the role of Maynard‘s religious belief in the founding and structuring of the college. One feminist historian of education, Janet Howarth, nevertheless notes that women‘s schools and colleges, ―as a recognized female domain with influential male patrons,‖ offered ―interesting parallels with the contemporary Anglican sisterhood and deaconess movements‖ and observes that ―many headmistresses of the period took their religious vocation just as seriously and saw their work literally as ‗ministry.‘‖ 9 While feminist scholars have for the most part overlooked the religious framing of Westfield, and Maynard‘s persistent use of the Anglo-Catholic sisterhood metaphor in particular, scholars of Victorian homosexuality have studied religious orders as important sites at which homoerotic/homosexual desire was enacted. 10 They have, in recent years, turned to queer theory as a theoretical framework for this enquiry. Queer theory emerged in the early 1990s as a response to the identity politics of gay and lesbian theory (and activism). Queer theorists Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, indebted to the work of Foucault, argued that the subjugation of sexual dissidents was a product College admitted women to most of its faculties after 1878, when the University of London opened its degrees to women, but these colleges were not residential. 8 By 1913, when Maynard retired, about a dozen former students had been appointed headmistresses of the new girls‘ high schools, and half the new graduates of each year had gone into teaching (Sondheimer, Castle Adamant, 68). Katherine Tristram, Westfield‘s first tutor, became Principal of Osaka Girls‘ High School in Japan. Frances Ralph Gray, an early Classics lecturer, was appointed Head of St. Katherine‘s School for Girls (1894-1903) in St. Andrews and then High Mistress of the prestigious St. Paul‘s School for Girls in London (1903-1927). 9 Janet Howarth, ―The Church of England and Women‘s Higher Education, c.1840-1914,‖ in Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain: Essays in Memory of Colin Matthew, ed. Peter Ghosh and Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 169-70. 10 See David Hilliard, ―UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,‖ Victorian Studies 25 (1982): 181-210; Philip Healy, ―Man Apart: Priesthood and Homosexuality at the End of the Nineteenth Century,‖ in Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, ed. Andrew Bradstock (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 100-115; and Frederick Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 158 not so much of the hierarchical structuring of sexual categories (the privileging of heterosexuality over homosexuality) as of the construction and perpetuation of the categories themselves. Drawing on post-structuralist theory, and deconstruction in particular, they argued that the notion of sexual identity could not adequately encapsulate the diverse, contradictory, and dynamic discourses that structured the individual‘s sexual subjectivity. 11 The terms ―heterosexual‖ and ―homosexual,‖ rather than antithetical, had been implicated in one another‘s making, evinced continuities, and thus did not actually exist in an oppositional relation to each other. 12 Questions regarding the politics of queer theory emerged as a result of the latter analysis. Queer theory had originated as part of separatist movements with the gay and lesbian movement and some strands within it bore its imprint in positioning queer as inherently transgressive of heterosexuality. A more nuanced approach to the politics of the term ―queer‖ has emerged in scholarly work in recent years; it has expanded the category in order to account for a wider array of political possibilities for queerness (understood as a critique or refusal of identity rather than an identity). The question that has now emerged is how the relationship between transgression or subversion and the term ―queer‖ might best be understood. 13 11 David Halperin describes the term ―queer‖ in this way: ―Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily refers. It is an identity without an essence. ‗Queer‘ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative.‖ David Halperin, Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 62. 12 Thus, in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) Sedgwick challenged the heterosexual/homosexual binary by pointing to the same-sex desire evident in relationships between heterosexual men. Halperin, in historicizing homosexuality, sought to ―denaturalize heterosexuality, to deprive it of its claims to be considered a ‗traditional value,‘ and ultimately to destroy the self-evidence of the entire system on which the homophobic opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality depended.‖ David, M. Halperin, How to do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 10. 13 Frank Mort thus notes that ―one strand of queer theory has been organised around a surprisingly fixed and quasi- essentialist version of homosexual selfhood; with queer pitched against ‗straight‘ and perversion pitted against normality in a stark series of oppositions‖ (Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 [New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987], xviii). He argues that ―sexual theory is littered with reductionisms, they have proved simplistic because they fail to grasp the plurality of sexual systems and force disabling choices around polarised oppositions‖ (xx). 159 In the study of religion and homosexuality the influence of queer theory has been evident in the work of Frederick Roden, amongst others. In her text Tendencies (1993) Sedgwick suggested that the term ―queer,‖ rather than denoting the refusal of sexual identity only, might refer to practices, discourses, or identities that challenged or transgressed dominant cultural norms of any kind. Roden takes up Sedgwick‘s capacious definition of the term ―queer‖ to develop a theoretical framework through which to investigate the relationship between Victorian Catholic (and Anglo-Catholic) orders and same-sex desire. Positing a two-fold definition of the term ―queer,‖ he suggests that the newly revived orders constituted culturally queer or non- heteronormative spaces within Victorian society that facilitated the articulation of sexually queer desire. 14 By defining non-heteronormative spaces as those in which marriage and the family are eschewed, and by positing non-heteronormative sites as those from which same-sex desire emerged in the Victorian era, Roden situates homoeroticism and homosexuality beyond the parameters of the heterosexual family. In her study of female same-sex relationships, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2006), Sharon Marcus takes issue with approaches such as Roden‘s. 15 Drawing on Sedgwick‘s queer epistemology, as advanced in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), she argues that queer and feminist scholars, by positioning homosexuality outside heterosexuality and as an inevitable challenge to it, perpetuate the subjugation inherent in the mobilizing of heterosexuality and homosexuality as categories. Marcus‘s work is a direct challenge to Martha Vicinus‘s Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved 14 Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 1. His understanding of cultural queerness is also indebted to Theodora Jankowski, who used the concept of ―queer virginity‖ in her study of early modern English drama to argue that ―any early modern virgin who chose willingly to prolong her virginity – or especially to adopt it as a permanent condition‖ occupied a ―dissident and highly resistant‖ position in the gender/sex system. Theodora Jankowski, Pure Resistance: Queer Virginity in Early Modern English Drama (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 113, quoted in Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 6. 15 Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 160 Women, 1778-1928 (2004). Marcus argued that Vicinus, in arguing that Victorian women who pursued same-sex relationships posed an inevitable challenge to the patriarchal family, had utilized a lesbian feminist theoretical framework of the kind promulgated by Adrienne Rich; she had thus perpetuated the minoritizing discourse of homosexuality that Sedgwick had criticized. 16 Marcus claimed instead that Victorian women‘s friendships, homoeroticism, and homosexuality were integral to the making of femininity, heterosexual sexuality, marriage, and the heterosexual family. 17 Homoerotic and even homosexual relationships between women were acknowledged, accepted and encouraged by Victorians who saw them as preparation for, and a supplement to, marriage. In this chapter I explore Maynard‘s founding of Westfield College and the homoerotic relationships she pursued in the light of these debates on the relationship of ―queer‖ articulations of desire to heterosexuality. I argue that Roden‘s two-fold definition of the queerness of the discourse on Anglo-Catholic religious orders illuminates some important aspects of the relationship between Maynard‘s Evangelical holiness piety, her founding of Westfield College, and her homoeroticism. However, I am more centrally concerned with the relationship of Westfield College to the heterosexual family. I argue that as a culturally queer religious space that has some similarity to the sisterhoods Roden describes; it was not distinct from the family but actually a product of it. Expressions of homoerotic desire that took place within its walls were not the result of an ―escape‖ from the Victorian family, but were in fact co-produced with it. This chapter is thus indebted, to a degree, to Marcus‘s theoretical framework as it derives 16 Marcus argues that ―lesbian historians have inserted their subjects into the historical record by representing them as an outlawed minority defined by their exceptional sexual desire for women, their transgressive identification with masculinity, and their exclusion from the institutions of marriage and family.‖ They ―share the assumption that the opposition between men and women governs relationships between women, which take shape only as reactions against, retreats from, or appropriations of masculinity.‖ Marcus, Between Women, 11. 17 Marcus argues that ―in lieu of marginal and subversive identities, this book offers an alternative concept . . . the social relationship, which is not reducible to sex, power, or difference.‖ Marcus, Between Women,14. 161 from Sedgwick, but it also draws centrally on Vicinus‘s work on familial metaphors and female homoeroticism/homosexuality. Marcus‘s reading of Vicinus‘s text was not an inaccurate one. Not only was Vicinus‘s approach at odds with Rich‘s lesbian feminism but Vicinus also took up familial metaphors as the organizing principle of her text. 18 She argued that in an era that predated the dissemination of sexological discourse, Victorian women took up mother-daughter and husband-wife metaphors to denote same-sex relationships. 19 Vicinus‘s investigation of the use of familial metaphors by sexually dissident women suggests that she understood the relationship between Victorian same-sex sexuality and the heterosexual family to be more complex than Marcus had indicated. In this chapter I argue that the mutual constitution of Evangelical discourses of literal marriage, motherhood, and the family on the one hand, and their spiritual counterparts on the other, fostered culturally and sexually queer spaces in Evangelical discourse on the Victorian family. Maynard‘s homoerotic relationships of the 1880s emerged within these spaces; her accounts of them constitute an Evangelical genealogy of same-sex desire. More than this, culturally and sexually queer spaces within Maynard‘s Evangelicalism structured what may be deemed a specifically Evangelical homosexual subjectivity on Maynard‘s part in the mid-1880s. This subjectivity is distinguishable from her homoerotic subjectivity of earlier years, and parallels in some ways the subjectivity that was a product of the sexological discourse on ―female inversion‖ in subsequent generations, although it lacks its identitarian formulation. In 18 Vicinus‘s use of the term ―lesbian‖ did not in fact coincide with Rich‘s political lesbianism; her intention in using the term was actually to foreground the sexual in Victorian women‘s same-sex relationships. By exploring female masculinity Vicinus rejected lesbian feminists‘ eschewal of butch lesbians or transgendered women. 19 Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xxv. 162 the 1880s Evangelical discourse enabled Maynard to understand her desire as sexual and to argue that it had a significance comparable to that of heterosexual desire. If Maynard‘s same-sex relationships of the 1880s show the Evangelical family and female homoeroticism to be co-produced, they do not demonstrate, as Marcus asserts, the wholesale subsuming of female homoeroticism, female homosexuality, and female marriage to the ideological imperatives of the heterosexual family. This chapter charts a range of relationships of female same-sex desire to the heterosexual family in Maynard‘s adoption of mother-daughter and husband-wife metaphors, including ones that resist and disturb heterosexual familial discourse. The disruptive potential of women‘s homoerotic or homosexual relationships emerged not through institutions located outside the family, but as part of its production. Similarly, disruptions to Evangelical discourses of sexuality emerged not outside of Evangelicalism but as part of its making. Maynard‘s homoerotic relationships of the 1880s suggest that same-sex desire was integral to Evangelicalism rather than (simply) a transgression of it and that culturally and sexually queer spaces were intrinsic to the Evangelical family. In 1880 Maynard, having resigned her post at St. Leonards in Scotland, moved to London. She took up lodgings with her brother George at 66, Upper Berkeley St, and enrolled as a part-time student at the Slade School of Art located in University College, Gower Street. She had had an interest in art as a child, had shown some promise, and had been allowed to take drawing lessons in London at the ―Life School‖ at Newman St. Art School. At the Slade she studied under the French painter and etcher Alphonse Legros (1837-1911), a friend of the British painter James Whistler. 20 Initial success at the Slade – she was admitted by Legros into the Life School only ten days after the commencement of her studies, when most students required a term 20 For a more detailed discussion of Maynard‘s time at the Slade, see Catherine Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, Mistress of Westfield College: A Family Portrait (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1949), 170-72. 163 or even a year – led to a subsequent recognition of her limitations. Maynard also had reservations about the wholehearted pursuit of art by Christians. Turning instead to her ―inner life,‖ she sought a solution to her prolonged faith crisis and found a partial answer in the holiness movement. The holiness movement was part of what Alex Owen, disputing singular trajectories of secularization, describes as the fin-de-siècle mystical revival. Later nineteenth-century Victorians, disillusioned with both scientific materialism and orthodox religion, turned to mystical iterations of religion including ―medieval and Renaissance Christian mysticism, heterodox inspirational neo-Christianity, and Eastern religions.‖ 21 Maynard recognized a shift in broader Victorian culture towards religious revivalism. In characteristically Evangelical fashion she differentiated between manifestations of God on the one side and the devil on the other. ―After an age of deadness on both sides,‖ she observed, in 1874, ―spiritualism is reviving, & with it fresh & more open life in the church, __ I mean teaching like R. P. S. [Robert Pearsall Smith] [,] power like Moody & Sankey, gifts of healing like D. Trudel.‖ 22 Of holiness piety Maynard noted in later years, ―the whole inner circle of the Church of Christ was feeling after closer relations with Him, and while some called it ‗a clean heart,‘ and some ‗a life of complete devotion,‘ and others ‗the baptism of the Spirit,‘ they were all every one of them out after the same thing.‖ 23 Maynard had first encountered the holiness movement in the late 1860s; she had experienced the second conversion, or entire consecration, in 1869. The movement had gained 21 Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 21. 22 Greenbook, Christmas Day 1874, 172-73. 23 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 4, 1865-1866, 1-2. 164 momentum in the 1870s and 1880s. 24 Maynard attended the Brighton holiness conference in 1875 and in London in the 1880s she was a member of the Portman Chapel whose minister, Rev. E. W. Moore, was a leading exponent of holiness Evangelicalism. 25 By 1880, however, her religious subjectivity had shifted. She had experienced a faith crisis during the 1870s and observed in later years that ―it remained impossible to shut one‘s eyes and go back into the old position . . . since for me that position was a false one.‖ 26 By turning to holiness piety in the 1880s, she sought a different engagement with the movement than that of the late 1860s. During her faith crisis Maynard had come to believe that reason could no longer be primary in the legitimation of her faith. 27 She was drawn to the ―mysticism‖ of holiness advocates because it offered an alternative means to validate faith (―it is almost as though they would say, ‗Let there be no rational basis for faith; it yet produces these results in the soul, therefore it is true‖ 28 ). The religious experience of individual Christians, both past and present, gained heightened significance for Maynard. She wrote in retrospect that ―to me the thought of the Church Universal, so well learned in younger days, became as true an inspiration as the thought of Christ Himself, and one more tangible, more open to be seen, handled and verified.‖ 29 She turned to Christian history for accounts of the Church Universal. ―The long procession moved before the eye of my soul,‖ she noted, ―– martyrs, missionaries, sufferers; the recluses of 24 David W. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1989), 161. 25 Moore was a friend of the renowned Keswick holiness advocate Evan Hopkins. 26 Constance Maynard, ―An Individual Retrospect of the Religious Thought of the Nineteenth Century,‖ pt. 2, Expositor (September 1901): 253. 27 Of this era of her life she later noted, ―reason . . . stands aside as though she would say . . . ‗I have led you as far as I can, and you have been obedient. It is not irrational that you should now go further.‘‖ Maynard, Individual Retrospect, 259. 28 Ibid., 254. 29 Ibid. 165 Port Royal, the persecuted Huguenots and Covenanters, the Moravians working in Labrador or among the Lepers.‖ 30 Contemporary Evangelicals, like their historical counterparts, might, through their recounting of spiritual experience, also offer evidence for the validity of Christianity (―the great tent at Keswick, and Moody‘s crowded meetings, and hot mission rooms in London, and gatherings in lonely cottages, where a few Methodists met kneeling on the brick floor‖ 31 ). In the early 1880s, in an effort to reinvigorate her foundering faith, Maynard turned to the Salvation Army, a nondenominational holiness organization, and sought within its auspices a more collective piety through which evidence of Christianity might be found. Her engagement with holiness piety in the early 1880s thus differed from her more individualistic approach in the late 1860s. The Salvation Army was a primarily working-class holiness organization founded in 1878 by William and Catherine Booth. Religious experience was central to Salvationism. Army meetings were characterized by the sharing of stories of conversion and of triumph through spiritual struggle. Maynard attended her first meeting of the Salvation Army in December 1880. ―It was a ‗Testimony Meeting,‘‖ she wrote, ―and . . . in nearly everyone the ring of the true metal was loud and clear, and it did my heart good.‖ 32 Smaller ―experience meetings‖ derived from the Methodist ―class meetings‖ which were characterized by ―intimate discussion and mutual confession.‖ 33 Access to believers‘ religious experience enabled the upper-middle-class and class conscious Maynard to overlook the working-class ethos of the Army. She observed that the ―jumping red jerseys, mistaken and flippant expressions in the ‗War Cry,‘ everything I had 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Autobiography, Part 6, Chapter 39, 1880, 37. 33 Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 135. 166 found repulsive vanished before the glorious reality of living transforming power.‖ 34 During the 1880s, Maynard endeavored ―to learn from those whose spiritual life had in it any element of victory‖ and to ―help those still further astray or still more despairing.‖ 35 The holiness movement‘s emphasis on religious experience rather than on scholarly expertise gave Victorian women a rare institutional discourse of spiritual authority. 36 Following the New Testament Pentecost story, the leaders of the movement taught that the baptism of the Holy Spirit was available to women and men and equipped them equally for Christian ministry. 37 Catherine Booth thus asked fellow Salvationists, ―Who shall dare thrust women out of the Church‘s operation or presume to put my candle which God has lighted under a bushel?‖ 38 Under Booth‘s influence, the Army became one of the most egalitarian religious movements for Victorian women; women were eligible for all ranks, were appointed on equal terms with men, and were given equal authority: they preached, administered communion, and oversaw Army corps or mission stations. In the early 1880s Maynard witnessed the leadership of women in the Salvation Army; she heard Catherine Booth speak at weekly Army meetings at St. Andrew‘s Hall, and in 1881 she met the twenty-two year old Kate Booth, the Booth‘s oldest daughter, who was leaving for France to establish a branch of the Salvation Army there. At the age of twelve Maynard had received a prophetic calling. Soon after gaining admission to Girton College, Cambridge, in 1872 she had come to understand women‘s higher education to be the arena within which her prophetic calling was to be exercised. ―Whether God 34 Autobiography, Part 6, Chapter 39, 1880, 37. 35 Maynard, Individual Retrospect, 258. 36 Nancy Hardesty, Women Called to Witness: Evangelical Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville, Tenn: Abingdon Press, 1984), 49-50. 37 Ibid. 38 Catherine Booth to William Booth, 9 April 1855, Catherine Mumford Booth Papers, British Library, Add. Mss. 64802, f. 68, quoted in Pamela Walker, Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 20. 167 spoke to me, or my heart cried to God, I do not know,‖ she wrote in later years, ― I only know that a definite thrill went through me, ‗Oh, how I want a College, just like this in its high standard of work, its liberty, & everything! & yet not like this . . . but where the name of Christ is loved & honoured.‘‖ 39 The Salvation Army‘s legitimation of women‘s religious leadership, its belief in the egalitarian empowering of Christians by the Holy Spirit, prompted her to take up a prophetic calling to women‘s higher education. As Pauline Phipps notes, for Maynard ―ambition, passion, and faith‖ were interconnected and ―propelled [her] toward an independent career.‖ 40 By 1880 Maynard had worked for seven years in contexts inimical to her faith. She had come to a different understanding of the world from that of her Puritan parents. ―I now see that the world being the great educating influence in which we are placed,‖ she observed in 1878, ―it is not what is intended to stand aside entirely & look on it as on a vain shew.‖ 41 Nevertheless, separation from the world remained compelling; an ―excess‖ of separation was far better than ―the blunting, dulling wretched compromise so often carried on.‖ 42 She longed to immerse 39 Autobiography, Part 3 Chapter 11, 1872, 355-56. It was not unusual for Victorian women, and indeed Evangelicals, to see themselves as prophets. In her campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s and 1870s the Evangelical Josephine Butler identified herself with John the Baptist (and his antecedent, the prophet Isaiah) or a ―voice crying in the wilderness‖ (Isa. 43:10). Helen Mathers, ―‗‘Tis Dishonour Done to Me‘: Self- Representation in the Writings of Josephine Butler‖ in Sex, Gender, and Religion: Josephine Butler Revisited ed. Jenny Daggers and Diana Neal (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 37-53. (See also Lucretia A. Flamming, ―‗And Your Sons and Daughters Will Prophesy‘: The Voice and Vision of Josephine Butler,‖ in Women’s Theology in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Transfiguring the Faith of Their Fathers, ed. Julie Melnyk [New York: Garland, 1998], 151-64). Florence Nightingale, an Anglican, had received a prophetic call in 1837, when she was sixteen; see Christiana De Groot, ―Florence Nightingale: Mother to Many,‖ in Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible, ed. Christiana De Groot and Marion Ann Taylor (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007), 118. The High Church Anglican Christina Rosssetti assumed a prophetic role by ―aligning her words with those of the Old Testament prophets Jeremiah, Amos, and Isaiah,‖ in her ―stinging political and cultural critique‖ of Victorian society. Amanda W. Benckhuysen, ―The Prophetic Voice of Christina Rossetti,‖ in De Groot and Taylor, Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters, 174. 40 Pauline Phipps, ―Faith, Desire, and Sexual Identity: Constance Maynard‘s Atonement for Passion,‖ Journal of the History of Sexuality 18, no. 2 (May 2009): 271. 41 Greenbook, 14 July 1878, 98. 42 Ibid. 168 herself in communities that shared her beliefs. Her founding of Westfield College may be understood in part as a response to the holiness movement‘s reinvigoration of her Puritan desire for purity and separation from the world. While in the 1880s Maynard sought separation from the world, and while this entailed the eschewal of marriage and motherhood, neither her founding nor her structuring of Westfield College, can be deemed a straightforward rejection of the Evangelical family. The culturally and sexually queer desire that informed Maynard‘s venture was in fact the product of Evangelical familial discourse rather than an exception to it; insofar as the Evangelical family was a central Victorian institution Maynard‘s same-sex desire was an integral part of, rather than marginal to, Victorian society. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall argue, in their study of the rise of the English middle class, that the elevation of the family by middle-class Evangelicals was a historically specific effect of early industrial Britain. Families were central to middle-class entrepreneurship: marriages were the means by which business alliances were forged, male entrepreneurs depended on their wives‘ fortunes to found or expand businesses, the procuring of credit depended upon a solid, reputable family life, and businesses were often family owned. 43 An emerging middle class, predominantly Evangelical in belief, sought and found validation for the family in biblical texts. By turning to spiritual metaphors of marriage, motherhood, and the family, they validated and valorized the earthly family and by making recourse to the earthly family to describe spiritual truths they elucidated and legitimated the ―spiritual family.‖ Evangelicals deployed the biblical marriage metaphor to depict God‘s relationship to the Church, while simultaneously elevating literal marriage. The marriage metaphor also structured relationships between husbands and wives by requiring wives‘ submission to their husbands (―Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. . . . Husbands, love your 43 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780- 1850, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 1987), 193-315. 169 wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it‖ [Ephesians 5:22, 25]). Metaphors of motherhood represented God‘s blessing of Israel while simultaneously valorizing the role of literal mothers who brought salvation to their families. The pious earthly home was represented as a model of the Heavenly Home and simultaneously as evidence of it. 44 Literal and spiritual versions of marriage, motherhood, and the family were co-produced in Evangelical discourse. The evangelical Victorian family is often understood as a rigid and unchanging structure. However, the co-production of the literal and spiritual family led to instabilities in evangelical discourses about the literal family. The meanings of marriage, family, and motherhood vacillated unsteadily between incommensurable referents and generated resistances at the heart of the family. Spiritual marriage to Christ, for example, might prove more compelling than literal marriage. The ―family of God,‖ to which those who converted belonged, might undermine the cultural significance of the earthly family. In a chapter of We Women: A Golden Hope (1924) entitled ―Sister, Mother, Bride,‖ Maynard demonstrated the instability within Evangelical discourse on the family, contingent upon the co-production of its spiritual and literal versions, and the resistance offered by a spiritual discourse of the family to the literal family. Christ had both mobilized and valorized the notion of the spiritual family or ―family of God.‖ He had said, ―For whosoever shall do the will of my Father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and sister, and mother‖ (Matthew 12:50). 45 He had given precedence to the spiritual family, suggesting that whoever ―left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands‖ for his sake and the gospel‘s would ―receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands‖ (Mark 10: 29, 44 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 109. 45 Constance Maynard, We Women: A Golden Hope (London: Morgan & Scott, 1924), 111. 170 30). 46 ―In His anxiety to establish a perfect relation with the whole human race,‖ Maynard noted, ―[he] tended to crush down the natural relation.‖ 47 Texts such as Maynard‘s suggest that the rigidity of evangelical representations of the earthly family was in fact a response to the instability of evangelical familial discourse. The ostensibly inflexible middle-class discourse of marriage, motherhood, and family was actually the unstable result of competing discourses of the family, earthly and heavenly. Evangelical discourses of earthly and spiritual motherhood were central to Victorian notions of femininity. The association of mothers with Christ elevated motherhood while mothers illustrated Christ‘s love. In a book-length narrative poem entitled A True Mother (1916) Maynard demonstrated the mutual constitution of literal and spiritual motherhood. Mothers were the incarnation of Christ for their children, just as Christ was the incarnation of God: ―The Word made flesh.‖ God found no other way Whereby to speak to hearts of men of old; . . . ―As He is, so are we.‖ Made flesh again. ‘Tis I, unworthy, have to take this place . . . They catch my tone, they look me in my face; This is the only transcript they can read. 48 At the same time, Victorians, including Maynard, represented Christ and God as mother-figures. Boyd Hilton argues that the years 1850 to 1870 witnessed a transition in Christian theology from an emphasis on atonement to incarnation. He suggests that with the turn to incarnational theology – a focus on the life of Christ rather than his death – men and women began to worship 46 Maynard, We Women, 111. 47 Ibid. 48 Constance Maynard, A True Mother (London: Marshall Bros., 1916), 36-37. 171 a Christ of ―almost feminine tenderness and humanity.‖ 49 In her 1893 study of the Decalogue, the High Church Anglican Elizabeth Wordsworth, principal of Lady Margaret Hall, contended that Christ, by sacrificing himself for humanity, had elevated the role of mothers (―by giving us an example of self-sacrifice, by laying down His life for us, He has given a new beauty to that most mysterious and affecting relation between mother and child‖) and that mothers in turn had become a type for Christ ―as no other human type can do.‖ 50 Some female exegetes moved from notions of Christ as a mother to an exploration of the maternal elements of God. Rossetti wrote of the Victorian mother, ―And well may she glory, inasmuch as one of the tenderest of divine promises takes (so to say) the divine form: ‗As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you‘ (Is. lxvi.13).‘‖ 51 Samuel Taylor Coleridge‘s ―To An Infant,‖ transcribed by Maynard in her Greenbooks in 1876, demonstrates the broader cultural adoption of notions of God‘s motherhood and the blurring of spiritual and earthly motherhood consequent on the proximity of representations of a maternal God and godly mothers: O thou that rearest with celestial aim The future Seraph in my mortal frame, Thrice holy Faith! whatever thorns I meet As I totter with unpractised feet Still let me stretch my arms & cling to thee Meek nurse of souls through their long infancy! 52 49 Boyd Hilton, Age of Atonement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 333, quoted in Helen Mathers, ―The Evangelical Spirituality of a Victorian Feminist: Josephine Butler 1828-1906,‖ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 52, no. 2 (April 2001): 304. The quotation is originally from J. Seeley's Ecce Homo (1866). 50 Elizabeth Wordsworth, The Decalogue (London: Longmans, Green,1893), 143 quoted in Rebecca G. S. Idestrom, ―Elizabeth Wordsworth: Nineteenth-Century Oxford Principal and Bible Interpreter,‖ in De Groot and Taylor, Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters, 190-91. 51 Christina G. Rossetti, Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies of the Bedicite (New York: Pott, Young, & Co., n.d.), 30-31, quoted in Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 38. 52 Greenbook, 16 July 1876, 61. 172 Maynard was in later years to develop a feminist theology in which biblical references to God as mother featured prominently (see chapter four). Although motherhood was an important trope in the biblical narrative, Evangelicals‘ appropriation of it was not inevitable; theirs was not a straightforward re-enacting of the familial practices delineated in the Bible (which varied vastly) but a historically specific phenomenon. The privileging of the motherly aspects of the divine in the face of the paucity of such a discourse in the New Testament, and very few references to it in the Hebrew Bible, attests to the role of the cultural context – the socio-economic importance of the family in industrial Britain – in the structuring of Victorian theology. In addition to this, the alignment of women with piety in evangelical discourse had rendered women newly responsible for the religious education of children. 53 Historians of feminism have often observed the prominence of the metaphor of motherhood in the rhetoric of Victorian feminists. Taking up the discourse of motherhood, Victorian women argued for the entry of women into the professions on the grounds that, as nurses, teachers, and social workers, they were extending the beneficial influence of mothers into the public arena. The evangelical discourse of the family was an important precedent to the emergence of the feminist use of the metaphor of motherhood to extend women‘s sphere of influence. The prioritizing of the spiritual function of mothers in Evangelical discourse allowed for the splitting off of notions of spiritual from literal motherhood and the eschewal of literal mothering altogether. Florence Nightingale exemplifies this process; she represented herself as a mother to the British nation in pursuing a religious calling to preserve life by instituting health 53 Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 84-87, quoted in Christiana De Groot and Marion Ann Taylor, ―Recovering Women‘s Voices in the History of Biblical Interpretation,‖ in De Groot and Taylor, Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters, 5. 173 reforms and teaching sanitation. 54 Culturally queer discursive spaces emerged with the Evangelical co-production of spiritual and literal motherhood as women pursued spiritual motherhood instead of, rather than alongside, literal motherhood. Familial metaphors predominated in Maynard‘s representation and administration of Westfield College. She constituted a new family ―within the walls of her college,‖ positioned herself as mother to her students and staff, and ran the college like a family. 55 She was not alone amongst college principals in making the family the model for women‘s colleges. 56 Vicinus argues that principals modeled colleges after the family to alleviate the tension they felt between ―the old social expectations of marriage and children, and the new opportunities for independence and personal fulfillment.‖ 57 She suggests that Maynard negotiated the cultural dissonance of her position as principal of Westfield by exercising her authority ―in a classic wifely fashion, by influencing the girls through her love and example.‖ 58 There is much that is insightful in Vicinus‘s explanation of Maynard‘s recourse to familial metaphors in founding and administering Westfield, however a more extensive analysis of Maynard‘s Evangelical piety is required to fully understand her recourse to familial metaphors, the indebtedness of Victorian feminist metaphors of motherhood to Evangelicalism, and the relationship between metaphors of motherhood and female homoeroticism. 54 Christiana De Groot, ―Florence Nightingale: Mother to Many,‖ in De Groot and Taylor, Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters, 121. 55 Vicinus, ―One Life,‖ 609, 614-15. 56 Elizabeth Edwards explores the ways that the principals of the women‘s colleges used the familial metaphor to structure those institutions. For example, Elizabeth Wordsworth, the principal of Lady Margaret Hall, situated herself as mother of her students and the college strove to provide its students with ―a common life with the ways and tone of a Christian family.‖ Elizabeth Edwards, ―Educational Institutions or Extended Families? The Reconstruction of Gender in Women‘s Colleges in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,‖ Gender and Education 2, no. 1 (1990): 65. 57 Vicinus, ―One Life,‖ 603. 58 Ibid., 612. 174 Prior to founding Westfield, Maynard read Isaiah 54 and 60 and believed God to be speaking to her through these texts. Both used marriage and motherhood as metaphors to describe God‘s renewed covenant with a wayward Israel: ―Fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed: neither be thou confounded . . . for thou shalt forget the shame of thy youth, and shalt not remember the reproach of thy widowhood any more. For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is his name‖ [Isaiah 54: 4-6, 7, 17]). 59 After years of doubt and an acute sense of spiritual failure, Maynard believed God to be renewing His relationship with her. More than this, she believed that God, by promising her not only spiritual marriage but spiritual motherhood, was reinstating her prophetic calling to women‘s higher education (―Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing, and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child: for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the LORD‖ [Isaiah 54: 1-3]). Maynard‘s founding of Westfield College was the result of a culturally queer refusal of earthly marriage and motherhood in favor of spiritual marriage to Christ and spiritual motherhood. Her establishing of Westfield cannot, however, simply be characterized as a rejection of Evangelical marriage, motherhood, and the family; it was the product of the interdependent and unstable relationship between Evangelical discourses of the spiritual and earthly family. If Maynard‘s founding of Westfield was a culturally queer product of Evangelical familial discourse, it was also informed by the latent feminism of holiness Evangelicalism. 60 By 59 Greenbook, 6 May 1883, 84. 60 The term ―feminism‖ was first used to describe an ideology or movement in the 1890s; the first recorded usage, according to the Oxford English Dictionary was in an article in the Day News of 12 October 1894 (De Groot and Taylor, ―Recovering Women‘s Voices,‖ 5fn17). As Helen Mathers notes, its ―application to the Victorian context has been legitimized by recent women‘s historians‘ use of the term. Jane Rendall, for example, uses ―feminism‖ to denote ―the way in which women came . . . to associate together . . . to reorganize and to assert their common interests as women.‖ Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France, and the United States 1780-1860 (Basingstoke, 1985), 1, quoted in Mathers, ―Josephine Butler,‖ 283-84. See also, Barbara Caine, Victorian Feminists (New York : Oxford University Press, 1992), 4-7. 175 founding Westfield, Maynard sought both to promote women‘s education amongst Evangelicals and to provide women with a university education based on Christian principles. In her book- length feminist treatise, We Women: A Golden Hope (1924), written in her later years, Maynard described the relationship between spiritual and literal motherhood in ways that rendered the feminist potential of her Evangelicalism apparent: when I use the term ―mother,‖ it is not to be restricted to the physical mother only. All honour be paid to her; but the formation of the mind, the characters, and the aims of life is a longer, slower, more complex, more perilous matter by far than the formation of the body, and in this work unmarried women have no insignificant share . . . those of us who are without such exacting ties who take charge of those older, we who teach and train and nurse . . . we also are mothers of the soul. 61 In later years, Maynard charted, in a characteristically Evangelical feminist manner, the changes in girls‘ upbringing that women‘s higher education had brought about. The potential of the ―thousands of girls‖ growing up in ―our pleasant country homes‖ 62 had in earlier years been thwarted by their cosseting. ―The clash of life was denied,‖ she contended, ―the exertion of the judgment was of no use as opinions were offered by Society ready made, strong enthusiasms were considered a little unseemly, and (if the parents could contrive it) the daughters were saved from even touching the hard corners of the world or thinking of its cruel realities.‖ 63 Evil was ―not to be conquered or remedied, but simply to be thrust out of sight.‖ 64 She noted that ―one redeeming light . . . shone steadily through this poverty of twilight . . . here was an outlet beyond the fireside, scope for the exertion of heroic forces, a path of limitless patience.‖ 65 A religious 61 Maynard, We Women, 22-23. 62 Constance Maynard, ―From Early Victorian Schoolroom to University: Some Personal Experiences,‖ Nineteenth- Century 76 (1914): 1067. 63 Ibid., 1068. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 1069. 176 calling had enabled women to renounce a stultifying home life and had encouraged Christian girls to pursue higher education. 66 In a 1914 article she called for the ―immense expansion‖ of ―the idea of motherhood,‖ and noted the diverse arenas to which single middle-class women had been called (education, medicine, the colonies, social reform, literature, art, and music). 67 In 1880 Maynard made contact with Miss Caroline Cavendish, an advocate of the higher education of Christian women and founder and honorary secretary of the Christian Women‘s Education Union (CWEU), to explore the possibility of founding a college for women informed by Evangelical Anglican principles. 68 Under the auspices of the CWEU Maynard began to disseminate her vision for a woman‘s college. In 1882 she met the wealthy Evangelical heiress, Miss Anne Dudin Brown, through a mutual friend, Colonel Martin Pietrie (whose daughter, Mary, was amongst the first cohort of women students at University College), and was invited by Dudin Brown to be part of a small committee she had appointed to consider her project. Dudin Brown made a £10,000 donation towards the venture and the committee worked quickly; two adjoining terrace houses were purchased on Maresfield Gardens, off the Finchley Road in Hampstead. 66 Responses to Westfield, both within Evangelical circles and beyond, were predictably mixed. Evangelicals tended to see missionary training as more practical and important than women‘s higher education. It was on this basis that Lord Shaftesbury opposed the college in an early meeting of prominent Evangelicals to discuss its founding. Mr. T. A. Denny who ―represented the wealth of the Church‖ and was a generous benefactor of evangelical organizations, told Maynard that ―nothing short of conversion interests me‖ (Autobiography, Part 6, Chapter 43, 1882, 120). The well-known Evangelical writer Mrs. Rundle Charles, a friend of Maynard‘s, distanced herself from the College on entirely different grounds, those espoused by many non-Evangelicals in academic circles: ―there is a danger of especially religious foundations becoming cliquish and narrow, and a hot-house as to religious temperature‖ (Autobiography Part 5, Chapter 36, 1880, 431). Lady Stanley of Alderley (the aunt of Dean Stanley, the dean of Westminster, a prominent liberal theologian and friend of Benjamin Jowett), who sat on the Girton Council with Maynard, advanced a similar criticism, scathingly: ―You must be so very, very Evangelical! . . . there you can sit & all be pious together‖ (Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 44, 1882, 10). Emily Davies was supportive however: ―she said that though it might seem to be a rival to Girton, she ‗grudged no success whatever to our common cause,‘ & most especially because she was convinced that the new College was ‗founded on sound principles & in trustworthy hands,‘ & herewith she enclosed ₤5 ‗as a token of goodwill.‖ (Autobiography Part 6, Chapter 43, 1882, 123). 67 Maynard, ―From Early Victorian Schoolroom,‖ 1061. 68 For an account of the founding of Westfield and its earliest years see Sondheimer, Castle Adamant, 10-47 and Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, 157-210. 177 Maynard was appointed Mistress of Westfield (after the Girton nomenclature) from the start. Katherine Tristram (1858-1948) served as the first tutor and Frances Ralph Gray (1863- 1935), a Newnham graduate, was appointed Classics Lecturer a year later. Anne Richardson (1858-1942), daughter of the Anglo-Irish Quaker industrialist, John Grubb Richardson, was to be Maynard‘s primary source of professional support during her thirty-one-year tenure at Westfield (1882-1913). A Newnham student like Gray, Richardson transferred to Westfield in 1884 after meeting Maynard and discovering that they shared a vision for an overtly Christian women‘s college. She was appointed Classics Lecturer in 1887, Vice-Principal in 1915, and worked at Westfield until her retirement in 1925. The College opened its doors in October 1882. The size of the student body remained small during Maynard‘s years, never exceeding sixty students. Westfield College may be considered a culturally queer physical space within later Victorian Evangelicalism. The college was not unlike the Catholic sisterhoods in being based on religious principles and requiring particular religious practices of its members. Many of its students were daughters of clergymen (Nonconformist and Anglican), and the college‘s motto was ―Behold the handmaid of the Lord.‖ Every morning Maynard convened mandatory prayers before breakfast in the dining hall and after breakfast optional hymn singing took place in the Common Room. Every Tuesday evening ―Bible Class‖ was conducted and was compulsory. Church attendance on Sundays was also mandatory, though students could choose which church to attend. On Sunday evenings ―Function‖ was held; students were expected to assemble in Maynard‘s room for the reading of religious literature, the singing of hymns, and the reciting of religious poetry. On week-day evenings small groups of students met with Maynard for Bible study. Religiously motivated philanthropic work was also instituted. Westfield was a non- heteronormative religious space. It enabled Evangelical women to eschew or defer marriage on religious grounds; it equipped them to pursue a career in higher education or another profession. 178 The historian of Westfield, Janet Sondheimer, notes that ―well under half of those who entered the College between 1882 and 1913 eventually married‖ and that ―few students rushed into matrimony straight from College.‖ 69 If Westfield was a culturally queer religious space, it was nevertheless one that had been established as a product of the evangelical co-production of the literal and spiritual family. Just as the unstable relationship between discourses of earthly and spiritual marriage, motherhood, and family produced culturally queer discursive spaces in Evangelicalism (queer spaces in language, practices, and institutions), so they produced expressions of sexually queer desire. Like its cultural counterpart, sexual queerness was a part of the making of earthly marriage, motherhood, and family rather than a transgression of it. In the 1880s, within the broader context of her association with the Salvation Army, including its collective piety and the elevation of religious experience, Maynard took up the role of spiritual mother at Westfield. Within the holiness movement Maynard‘s dissident sexual subjectivity shifted and she pursued a different iteration of homoerotic relationships from her relationship with Lumsden which was structured by the crisis of faith. In Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 Vicinus explores Victorian women‘s varied use of mother-daughter metaphors to denote friendships between older and younger women. She examines the use of the mother-daughter metaphor in religious contexts in her study of the erotic history of the Evangelical Anglican Mary Benson (1842-1918), the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward Benson. Benson, believing that it was through the love of spiritual friends that God‘s love was apprehended, pursued a series of homoerotic relationships within the framework of spiritual mother-daughter friendships. 70 69 Sondheimer, Castle Adamant, 68. 70 Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 85-108. 179 The transposition of discourses of literal to spiritual motherhood had been evident from the earliest days of evangelicalism. Mack argues that women‘s influence on evangelicalism was evident in the prominence of the mother-child metaphor in the language of conversion and sanctification. Methodist women participating in the labor of the repentant sinner to accept Christ were derisively referred to by outsiders as ―obstetrical saints.‖ 71 Mary Bosanquet (later Fletcher) saw herself as the daughter of her spiritual confidante Sarah Ryan and Ryan, in turn, saw herself as the mother of her band in London. ―My dear children,‖ she wrote to them, ―I travail in birth till Christ be formed in your heart.‖ 72 Mack argues of women‘s spiritual friendships that we can ―speak of an erotics of friendship, a valorization of romantic gestures and emotions that were consciously cultivated as an aid to spiritual progress.‖ 73 Maynard had taken up the role of ―spiritual mother‖ while a student at Girton College. 74 In the summer of 1874 she had renewed her friendship with Mamie Umphelby, the principal of Belstead School. Umphelby understood herself to be the spiritual mother of her students and their salvation to be her primary maternal responsibility (―Then she began to speak of her children; ‗I love them all, dear lambs. . . . And I hope & pray & agonize to meet them all again, with not one missing, & as far as I know not one has yet died out of Christ‖ 75 ). At Girton, in the midst of a deepening faith crisis, Maynard took up the salvific function of Evangelical motherhood, hoping that by presenting God with new souls, God might overlook her doubts and her inability to draw close to Him. She instituted a Bible study group in November 1873, in 71 G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 270, quoted in Mack, Heart Religion, 129. 72 Mack, Heart Religion, 160. 73 Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), 119-43, quoted in Mack, Heart Religion, 154. 74 Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 276. 75 Greenbook, 22 August 1874, 47-48. 180 November 1874 founded the Girton Prayer Meeting, which attracted a newer generation of Girton students, and was instrumental in the conversion of a number of Girton students, including, in November 1874, the social reformer Mary Kingsland (later Higgs), who was her first convert. The conversion of the Girton student Amy Mantle in May 1875 demonstrates the importance of the motherhood metaphor to Maynard‘s understanding of conversion and spiritual mentoring and the interchangeability of literal and spiritual motherhood in Evangelical discourse. In the months prior to Mantle‘s conversion Maynard prayed and read the Bible with her. When Mantle converted, Maynard‘s represented herself as Mantle‘s spiritual mother: ―Amy so long lost is found & my heart sings within . . . my child, my darling, first & best His for ever, & secondly mine for ever.‖ 76 Mantle took up the mother-daughter metaphor upon her conversion (―stretching out her arms [she] whispered, ‗Mother!‘‖ 77 ). Mantle‘s mother had died when she was a child and the polyvalent and unstable evangelical discourse of motherhood allowed her to institute Maynard both as a spiritual mother and as a literal mother-substitute. All Maynard‘s converts at Girton assumed the role of Maynard‘s spiritual children. Their relationships with her were characterized by physical expressions of affection. The Girton converts would sit on Maynard‘s knee when they came to confide in her. 78 The sharing of problems often led to sharing a bed at night; when Lizzie Burgess seemed to be struggling with her newfound faith, ―Maynard went to her room ―[lay] beside her . . . read Ps. 117 . . . put out the light & folded her in my arms.‖ 79 Physical intimacy could be quite robust; on this occasion Burgess, ―with a shudder of pain . . . flung herself on to me harder than ever as if to get rid of her 76 Greenbook, 3 May 1875, 92. 77 Ibid., 99. 78 Greenbook, 1 October 1875, 110-11. 79 Ibid., 117. 181 life in mine.‖ ―It was not a time for human words,‖ Maynard observed. 80 When in 1874 Mantle confided in Maynard that she felt neglected by her family, Maynard believed her ―too excited for me to speak of the Master,‖ but ―tried to soothe her with a little natural love.‖ 81 Kissing after devotional meetings was also common: ―we had a kiss all round.‖ 82 Maynard spoke of herself as sometimes ―devoured with kisses‖ from her spiritual children. 83 Like ideal Victorian daughters, the Girton Christians ―seem[ed] not to know how to spend enough love‖ on her. 84 Vicinus suggests that ―as a paradigm of intimacy, nothing could surpass the mother-child relationship,‖ 85 and notes ―a regression to a childlike dependency and erotic satisfaction‖ in some metaphorical mother-daughter relationships. 86 Maynard and Mantle‘s spiritual mother- daughter relationship had strong erotic resonances. 87 ―Often when she has ‗come to be loved,‘‖ Maynard wrote in 1875, ―I have called her ‗Baby.‘‖ 88 When in the months following her conversion Mantle feared doubt had destroyed her faith, she wrote to Maynard: ―See what your baby was like, but she is gone too now __ you have no baby. . . . I can‘t write more, but you cannot think how much she who was your baby loves you.‖ 89 Maynard replied, ―My darling, my 80 Ibid., 118-19. 81 Greenbook, 31 May 1874, 257. 82 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 16, 1874, 581. 83 Ibid., 593. 84 Greenbook, 24 October 1875, 129. 85 Vicinus, Intimate Friends, xxv, xxix, 113. 86 Ibid., xxvii, 235. 87 Phipps notes that the motherly role adopted by Maynard at Girton and Westfield was a ―passionate‖ one. Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 272. 88 Greenbook, 3 May 1875, 99. 89 Greenbook, 21 August 1875, 86. 182 baby, you shall have hard work indeed to make me give you up.‖ 90 She confessed to Maynard, ―I know it is wrong; I am giving you almost the Saviour‘s place, & I must try to turn my heart fr. you __ But oh! I do love you so __ you don‘t the least know.‖ 91 In later years the sexual resonances of the evangelical metaphor of motherhood were evident as Maynard‘s lover, Frances Ralph Gray, attempted unsuccessfully to renew a relationship with Maynard that she had earlier terminated: [Ralph] was not well, and I went up to see that she was rightly attended to. As I left she said with gentle hesitation, ―You never bite my fingers now, as you used to do.‖ ―Oh no, never,‖ I replied lightly. . . . The sweet low voice went on, ―And you never rock me in your arms and call me your baby.‖ ―No,‖ I said in the same even tone. 92 The discourse of spiritual motherhood that was given precedence in Evangelical women‘s spiritual mentoring practices allowed for the re-enactment of the erotic elements inherent in literal mother-daughter relationships. Because Victorian women were aligned with piety, and mothers were represented as Christ-figures, Victorians‘ religious desire was intertwined in complicated ways with mother-figures. The erotic in mother-child relationships was, in the case of Evangelical families, informed by, and inseparable from, religious desire. Maynard saw love, even love ―in its form of passion,‖ 93 as an acceptable antecedent to Christian conversion and a valid accompaniment to spiritual mothering. 94 In her final years at St. Leonards in the late 1870s, when her relationship with Louisa Lumsden was in decline, she 90 Ibid., 88. 91 Greenbook, 17 October 1875, 127. 92 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 54, 1890, 286-87. 93 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 49, 1885, 139. 94 Phipps, drawing on Vicinus‘s work on Benson, notes that for Maynard ―same-sex passion was . . . a permissible part of women‘s friendship, but it was morally superior if directed toward Christ.‖ Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 271. 183 had become enamored of two students, the seventeen-year-old Kate Milligan, and the precocious, fourteen-year-old Mary Tait. 95 Maynard believed that her ―falling in love‖ with Milligan, as she put it, indicated God‘s intention for her to draw Milligan closer to Him. In her Greenbook she observed that if Milligan was not a Christian, ―she must be very nearly so, & I long to get a little nearer her.‖ 96 When Tait became infatuated with Maynard, Maynard saw her infatuation as pointing to the role she was to play in Tait‘s conversion. ―Is it the first drop of the shower? the first seed of the harvest?‖ she wrote in her Greenbook, ― Oh, I feel glad, so glad, yet with a solemn sense of responsibility . . . It is but little though yet __ it is this. Mary Tait, a strange taciturn girl of 14 . . . seemed to feel a sort of attraction for me.‖ 97 The intertwining of religious aspiration and sexual desire in the early stages of Evangelical discipleship rendered it difficult for Evangelical women to distinguish clearly between the two. 98 When, despite Maynard‘s protestations, Lumsden expelled Tait from St. Leonards for increasingly disruptive behavior, the interdependence of the erotic and Evangelical religious desire was apparent as 95 ―Amid the 87 girls that have passed through our hand from the first these two stand to me with a complete difference of feeling. Many girls I care for truly, but these two I love with that touch of excitement that makes me know intuitively whether or not they are in the room, and feel honoured by their appeal to me in any little trouble.‖ Greenbook, December 31 1878, 176-77. 96 Greenbook, 7 July 1878, 97. ―For more than a month now I have been in love with Katherine Milligan. I can call it nothing else, for my eye seeks her out instinctively in the Schoolroom or Playground & is satisfied with the sweet quick flash of recognition‖ (ibid.). 97 Greenbook, 10 November 1878, 147. 98 In this respect Victorian women differed from men for whom distinct registers of sexual desire – either permissible or illicit – were available. Thus, for example, Charles John Vaughan, the headmaster of Harrow from 1844 to 1859, was forced to resign from his position when John Addington Symonds, a sixth-form pupil at the time, discovered that his headmaster and one of his friends had exchanged love letters and, after entering Oxford, reported this to his father on the advice of an Oxford tutor. David Amigoni, ―Translating the Self: Sexuality, Religion, and Sanctuary in John Addington Symond‘s Cellini and other Acts of Life Writing,‖ Biography 32, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 13. Amigoni notes that although Symonds ―sympathised with Vaughan‘s homosexuality, he condemned the man‘s hypocrisy and misuse of power.‖ Clinton Machann, ―The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds and Victorian Auto/biography,‖ A/B: Autobiography Studies 9, no. 2 (1994), 202-11, quoted in Amigoni, ―Victorian Life Writing,‖ 13. 184 Maynard lamented, ―Oh my child, my child, are you lost to me indeed? And I was the link which you were dimly feeling after a higher life – are you then lost to that too?‖ 99 A few weeks after Tait‘s expulsion, Maynard came to a partial recognition of her culpability in her erotically inflected relationship with Tait; she had forgotten her ―public office, which is truly the Lord‘s work as well as the School‘s . . . been led into private affection and . . . done it an injury.‖ 100 She acknowledged that ―among the girls even-handed justice is the first essential, and . . . any individual preference must in its expression be jealously guarded, and in public entirely repressed.‖ 101 She nevertheless affirmed the central place of ―love‖ (including love ―in its form of passion,‖ 102 ) in evangelism and in spiritual mothering. God did not mean her ―to take all this in an exaggerated form, but to remember that a Christian is allowed to love truly and heartily, that when we see any one not far from the Kingdom of God, we are permitted looking upon them to love them above the crowd that stands around.‖ 103 Maynard‘s theology of spiritual friendships was not idiosyncratic or anomalous to evangelicalism; rather, eroticism was an identified and valued part of evangelical conversion and also of sanctification. Wesley had argued that individuals‘ attraction to one another elucidated God‘s love for humankind. 104 He went on to suggest that ―in human relations, spiritual knowledge can best be conveyed and absorbed when teacher and pupil gaze at each other ‗with a lover‘s eye.‘‖ 105 Insofar as the production of erotically inflected desire was integral to 99 Greenbook, 12 April 1879, 59-60. 100 Greenbook, 20 July 1879, 115. 101 Ibid. 102 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 49, 1885, 139. 103 Ibid., 115-16. 104 Mack, Heart Religion, 135. 105 Ibid., 142. 185 conversion and to spiritual mentoring, and insofar as women played an important role in one another‘s evangelism and spiritual mentoring, female homoeroticism can be seen to be integral to the production and perpetuation of Evangelical piety rather than a transgression of it. In the early 1880s Maynard took up the role of spiritual mother to the five young women who formed the first cohort of Westfield students. Her spiritual mothering took place within the context of the holiness movement; she took the students to Salvation Army meetings and they initiated small, informal evening meetings with her at which they requested guidance on spiritual questions. After one Army meeting at which the women heard William Booth speak, one of Maynard‘s students, the nineteen-year-old Margaret Brooke, invited Maynard to her room and asked her to pray with her for ―entire consecration.‖ ―I want to know definitely what it means to be quite given up, so will you ask that it may be true?‖ she asked Maynard. 106 In the context of heady discussions of the high ideals of holiness piety and the exchanging of motherly physical intimacies, Maynard fell in love with Brooke (―on [Monday] evening last, suddenly without an hour‘s warning I fell in love with Margaret Brooke‖ 107 ). A characteristic holiness discussion on the eschewal of the world framed the women‘s nascent desire: That [Sunday] night . . . speaking again of the world she [Brooke] said fervently, ―One cannot have the best of both, and we must have the best of heavenly things!‖ – and then leaning hard on me in the dark, ―but oh, with love, I shall never never want such things. I have been longing for this my whole life. You fit right down into every corner till no part is empty and hungry – oh, how I have wanted you.‖ 108 For Brooke holiness piety did not preclude expressions of homoerotic desire; indeed the two went together. The higher religious aspirations of holiness piety were birthed in the love 106 Greenbook, 3 December 1882, 18. 107 Greenbook, 5 November 1882, 4-5. 108 Greenbook, 12 November 1882, 8. 186 between women. Brooke‘s ―wanting‖ Maynard, the sense she had of Maynard fitting into the corners of her life that were ―empty and hungry,‖ was a characteristic and appropriate prelude to the experience of God‘s love. For Brooke Maynard‘s love was an integral part of her pursuit of ―the best of heavenly things.‖ Maynard‘s relationship with Brooke was framed in the discourse of motherhood. Maynard observed of her awakening desire for Brooke that ―I shall have no love but these my children, and if one springs thus far beyond the usual mark bringing that touch of excited joy that is not to be commanded, must I ignore it, must I resolutely cast it away . . . ?‖ 109 Brooke also understood her desire within the framework of a mother-daughter relationship. She asked Maynard in ensuing months, ―Is it nice to feel that one little child is just all, all your own, first and only and for ever?‖ 110 The Victorian Evangelical discourse of spiritual mothering, which was co-produced with the discourse of literal motherhood, invited and legitimated homoerotic desire. As Vicinus notes in her study of Mary Benson, it was through an erotically inflected spiritual mothering that Evangelical women came to understand God‘s love. 111 Both Mary Benson and Maynard developed theologies of God as mother. 112 What has yet to be investigated 109 Greenbook, 22 March 1883, 71. 110 Greenbook, 2 March 1883, 63. 111 Martha Vicinus, ―‗The Gift of Love‘: Nineteenth-century Religion and Lesbian Passion,‖ Nineteenth-Century Contexts 23, no. 2 (2001): 242. 112 Ibid., 257. Interestingly, in 1906 the fifty-seven year old Maynard visited Lambeth Palace and met with Archbishop Benson, Mary Benson, Lucy Tait (Benson‘s lover at the time), a Mrs. Davidson and Mother Emma of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (S. P. G). Maynard writes of Mary Benson, who was sixty-five at the time: The amusing one was Mrs. Benson, for she did not seem able to say anything without attracting attention. Seating herself on the sofa beside Mother Emma with her quiet face & her nun‘s dress, she called me to her other side, & taking a hand of each of us, she joined them over her knee, saying ‗There, I am the uniter of the Church! Her is the unconquerable old-fashioned Evangelical (& she gave my hand a squeeze) & here is the solid unchanging High Church woman, & both are one in me.‖ Autobiography, 1906, 556. Both women played prominent roles in the Evangelical Anglican Church, both understood that role as the exercise of spiritual motherhood, and both had pursued a series of homoerotic relationships. 187 is whether their representations of God bear the erotic imprint of spiritual mother-daughter relationships from which they emerged. In addition to this, the erotics of spiritual mothering, and the Evangelical origins of motherhood as a prominent trope in Victorian feminism, suggest the possibility of a maternalist eroticism in Victorian feminism itself, which is often portrayed simply as moralistic, asexual, and/or prudish. It may be that historians, in making the latter determination about middle-class women and their sexual desire, have simply been looking in the wrong places. Holiness piety structured Maynard‘s homoerotic relationships in the 1880s and thereafter. Evangelical piety in general was premised on God‘s revelation of God‘s self to the believer and the believer‘s disclosure of the ―inner self‖ to God. Victorian Evangelicalism, while in many ways different from mysticism, shared with it an ideal of the dissolution of the self‘s boundaries before the divine as a defining feature of spiritual practice. Holiness Evangelicals sought to be wholly known by God, to give all of the self to God, and to ultimately be one with God. Maynard beseeched God intermittently to ―search‖ her heart and know her (―Thou seest the whole, I hide nothing. I want Thine eyes everywhere‖ 113 ). She saw her evening devotion as a time to ―[stand] awhile in the pure light of His searching presence.‖ 114 She cited Psalm 139 in this regard: 1. O lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. 2. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. 3. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways. 4. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether. 113 Greenbook, 25 July 1902, 145. 114 Greenbook, 25 June 1871, 192. 188 In spiritual iterations of mother-daughter relationships the requirement for self-disclosure was heightened by the explicitly devotional framework within which these relationships were forged. This element of the structuring of Maynard‘s homoeroticism by holiness piety was most apparent in her final relationship, with the young Anglo-Irish student of Westfield and her subsequent secretary, Marion Wakefield, in the early 1900s. Wakefield, as Maynard‘s spiritual daughter, strove to ―confess‖ herself fully to Maynard. ―My Mistress,‖ she entreated Maynard, ―do not mistake me. You have been a Mother to me, & my whole heart has been opened to you without reserve.‖ 115 Maynard, in turn, reveled in Wakefield‘s self-revelation. ―Here was an answer indeed,‖ she wrote. ―There is no doubt, no reserve . . . but that exquisite abandonment, that unstudied freedom & self-revelation that is unspeakably precious to my heart.‖ 116 The holiness concept of sanctification as the ―emptying‖ of self in order to experience the indwelling of Christ, and the notion of holiness Evangelicals that spiritual friendships were an important means to attaining that union, also informed the eroticism of Maynard‘s mother- daughter relationships. These constructs derived from the revivals of the eighteenth century. Hester Ann Rogers, a contemporary of John Wesley, explained the union with God inherent in the doctrine of ―entire sanctification‖: ―I come empty to be filled; deny me not. . . . I take hold of thee as my fullness! Everything that I want, Thou art. . . . I am conquered and subdued by love . . . I am now one with God.‖ 117 The notion that spiritual friendships played a primary role in the believer‘s attainment of union with the divine resulted in an unusual intimacy amongst spiritual friends. In a sonnet entitled ―Prayer,‖ part of the ―A Six Weeks Sleep‖ sonnet series Maynard wrote about Wakefield, she described the dissolution of boundaries between one another that 115 Greenbook, 10 September 1903, 216. 116 Greenbook, 31 December 1903, 288. 117 ―The Experience and Spiritual Letters of Mrs. Hester Ann Rogers‖ (London, 1841), quoted in Mack, Heart Religion, 130. 189 accompanied the dissolution of the boundaries of the self before the divine. She described a ―sacramental union‖ in which her soul and Wakefield‘s escaped the body, transcended the narrowness of time and space, and merged with one another and the divine: As darkness gathers, burns a fire divine, And bonds that tie to earth a while are riven. As two flames melt in one and upward soar, I clasp her hands, I clasp her soul in mine, And one prayer enters at the gates of heaven. (―Prayer,‖ lines 10-14). 118 Benson had exhorted her lover Charlotte Mary Bassett to a similar spiritual union: ―[Not] one whit less than all you will I have, in that mysterious, sacramental union where one can have all, and yet wrong no other love.‖ 119 Feminist historians have only recently begun to explore Victorian women‘s recourse to religious discourse to describe sexual desire. Sue Morgan thus notes that social purity reformer and High Church Anglican Ellice Hopkins described conjugal intimacy as ―an anticipation of the delights of heaven, where ‗the soul surrender[ed] herself . . . to the eternal Loveliness, as a bride surrenders herself in unutterable love to her husband.‘‖ 120 Maynard‘s erotic relationships suggest that such articulations had their origins in the homosocial spiritual friendships Evangelicals sanctioned. In devotional relationships the surrender of the self to God, and the rendering of the self permeable to the Spirit, took place alongside a spiritual friend‘s simultaneous surrendering of the self to God and rendering of the self transparent. The joint pursuit of intimacy with God by spiritual friends facilitated intimacy with one another. It is 118 Constance Maynard, Original Poems, vol. 1, 78. Constance Maynard Papers, Queen Mary College, London. 119 Mary Benson to Charlotte Bassett, 17 February [1879], Mary Benson Diaries and Letters, Deposit Benson, Bodleian Library, Oxford University, 3/28, quoted in Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 94. Emphasis in the original. 120 Ellis Hopkins, Christ the Consoler. A Book of Comfort for the Sick (London, 1879), 120 quoted in Sue Morgan, ―‗The Word Made Flesh‘: Women, Religion and Sexual Cultures,‖ in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, ed. Jacqueline deVries and Susan Morgan (London: Routledge, 2010),162. 190 unsurprising therefore that this intimacy had an erotic inflection and that the language of religious desire was taken up to describe sexual desire. Discourses of Evangelical religious devotion provided Maynard with a heady language for sexual desire. She and Wakefield took up the scripturally based, holiness inflected, libidinal adoration of the divine in articulating human eros. Wakefield gave herself to Maynard wholeheartedly: ―I love you with my whole heart & mind & being; all that is in me flows out to you in love. I am all yours & for always, & I lie down wrapped round in your love, – content . . . & that is enough,‖ 121 Wakefield wrote, echoing Psalm 139:3 (―thou compassest my path and my lying down‖). Her love for Maynard, like her love of God, was unceasing and eternal: ―My heart is full of a great love for thee . . . such as it is, it is thine now & always without intermission or end, beyond the Now into the Hereafter, all thine, beloved.‖ 122 The co-production of spiritual and literal mothering, and the sexually queer space it produced, was evident as Wakefield declared to Maynard: ―I give to you as one gives to God, without reserve and yet without fear.‖ 123 If evangelical holiness piety invited, indeed depended on, erotically inflected relationships between women, it also mandated the subordination of homoerotic desire to religious desire. Women‘s regulation of desire was as important to the perpetuation of Evangelicalism as the inciting of desire. At the Slade in 1880 Maynard had started a small Bible study group and through this group she was instrumental in the conversion of a fellow Slade student, Mabel Prideaux. Her spiritual mothering of Prideaux had awakened Prideaux‘s desire (she ―fell in love [with Maynard] . . . all at once, with no warning, but quite irretrievably‖ 124 ). While accepting Prideaux‘s attentions, Maynard nevertheless enjoined her to make God the 121 Greenbook, 10 September 1903, 216-17. 122 Greenbook, 31 December 1903, 287. 123 Greenbook, 25 April 1908, 226. 124 Greenbook, 19 December 1881, 16. 191 object of her desire. 125 Prideaux agreed with Maynard that the commutation of human love to divine was the goal towards which to work. According to Maynard, she observed: ―I am calling sentiment religion, I am following her like a shadow. My religion must be my very own‖ 126 ). In the following months Maynard believed Prideaux to have made the switch in the object of her desire. ―I do believe,‖ she wrote, ―that the Saviour takes His right place with her, for she tests everything in His presence alone, & speaks & acts with a complete independence of my judgement.‖ 127 Evangelical women‘s regulation of desire had its origins in Puritan theology. As Catherine Brekus notes of the New England Puritans of the eighteenth century, ―the most painful struggles involved ‗weaning‘ themselves from their attachments to loved ones‖ 128 and ―in anguished diary entries, both ministers and lay people expressed fears of loving their spouses, children, or friends more than God.‖ 129 Victorian evangelicals were similarly aware of the possibility of earthly love of all kinds usurping love of the divine. In 1838 Hannah Allen wrote of her pending marriage, ―I am fearful at times, lest I should allow my affections to cleave too closely, to the hindrance of my spiritual growth. Oh! that I may make no idol in my heart . . . may we both be ready and willing to yield up our all to thee.‖ 130 In a sonnet inspired by 125 In her autobiography Maynard added an explanatory sentence to her cautionary response to Prideaux‘s desire which both exemplifies the role of love (including erotic desire) in spiritual mentoring and the necessity of subordinating human love to religious desire: ―This isn‘t religion, this is the reflection of religion from human love.‖ Autobiography, Part 6, Chapter 41, 1881, 93. 126 Greenbook, December 19 1881, 16. 127 Ibid., 17. 128 Catherine A. Brekus, ―Writing as a Protestant Practice: Devotional Diaries in New England,‖ in Practicing Protestants: Histories of Christian Life in America, 1630-1965, ed. Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, Leigh E. Schmidt, and Mark Valeri (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 24. 129 Ibid., 24-25. 130 [Jane Budge], A Beloved Mother: Life of Hannah S. Allen, By Her Daughter (London: Harris & Co., 1883), 33, quoted in Marcus, Between Women, 65. As Vicinus notes, Charlotte Brontë‘s Jane Eyre (1847) contains one of the most well-known articulations of the idolizing of human love; Jane acknowledges that she has allowed Rochester to 192 Wakefield, Maynard described the process of subordinating human affections to the love of God: ―To spread before Thee (even while we fear) / Treasures most deeply hidden & most dear, / And pray Thee take them in Thy hands & reign. . . . And ever Love shall take the lower place / And hold her peace to watch the coming light.‖ 131 The pursuit of homoerotic desire was acceptable as long as it was subordinated to the love of the divine. Unlike sexology, the Evangelical regulation of women‘s affections did not distinguish between homosexuality and heterosexuality or between platonic affection and sexual desire. The regulation of platonic affections is evident in Maynard‘s book-length poem on motherhood; her protagonist prays, ―Oh Father, forgive! Am I straying from Thee? / Are Thy gifts too sweet, too much? From my children I backward flee.‖ 132 Cautions against female homoeroticism emerged from a broader evangelical regulation that applied to a range of human relationships. This was because female homoeroticism was a part of the production of the Evangelical family; it was an effect of the spiritual discourses of motherhood that were inextricably intertwined with, and shored up, middle-class notions of motherhood. The co-production of the literal and spiritual family rendered both the site of diverse affections. The unstable discursive structuring of each iteration of the family generated an array of desires, platonic and sexual. All of these required careful monitoring if the middle-class family formation was to remain cohesive. Although evangelical prohibitions of female homoeroticism differed from sexological discourse in not distinguishing between homosexuality and heterosexuality, they did share with sexology a narrative of spiritual danger and this narrative may have informed later sexological stand ―between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun.‖ Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 87. 131 ―Conclusion,‖ Maynard, Original Poems, vol. 1, 89. Phipps draws attention to Maynard‘s belief that women needed to ―control their passion through prayer in order to keep their ‗hearts forever sheltered in His hand‘ (Autobiography, 1899, 450).‖ Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 271. 132 Maynard, A True Mother, 26. 193 discourses on female same-sex desire. A note of danger, rather than simple caution, was evident in the early 1880s as Maynard described Prideaux‘s infatuation with her: ―I tried to stop this, but her heart seemed burning. Oh my darling, take care, we are scarcely meant for this.‖ 133 Much later, in an autobiographical account of a holiday taken in the Alps in 1874 (written in 1915), Maynard articulates a sexual danger very similar to that evoked by sexological discourse. She had encountered a woman who, she felt, set human (homoerotic) desire above the love of God: The Gräfien was very affectionate, putting her arm round me & kissing me many times. I was carried away by pure beauty [of the Alps]. . . yet some obscure hint in her tone seemed to say, ―I prefer human affection,‖ & a strange sort of chill ran over me, as though my heart was warned away from hers & ran up & up & pierced into the deep blue sky overhead & called out, ―Jesus is[t] schöner, Jesus ist reiner!‖ [―Jesus is more beautiful, Jesus is purer!‖] At such a moment I feel by a sort of quick instinct that everything is dark without the Saviour‘s presence, that, come life come death, I am His own child, & have a bond with Him, secret but strong for eternity. 134 While many of Maynard‘s converts achieved the subordination of sexual eros to religious desire, there were those who found it impossible to subordinate homoerotic desire to the love of God. Katherine Tristram, the first tutor at Westfield College, was unable to negotiate the dual demands of religious and human desire attendant on conversion; she told Maynard that the physical side of love had become ―a horrible snare to her‖ and in 1884 she left Westfield for Japan to serve as a missionary with the Christian Missionary Society. 135 At Girton in 1875, Amy Mantle had also been unable to transfer her desire from Maynard to the divine. Maynard lamented her role in the latter eventuality; as a spiritual mother she had accepted and encouraged a desire that was rightly God‘s (―the sad part to me is the thought that I have stolen some of the love that ought to be my Lord‘s. . . .When God says to me, ‗Take this child & nurse it for me,‘ 133 Greenbook, December 19 1881, 17. 134 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 17, 1874, 636. 135 Greenbook, 20 April 1884, 202. 194 shd I steal its heart?‖ 136 ). In 1902, Prideaux was still in thrall to Maynard. Maynard‘s Quaker colleague, Anne Richardson, who held a theology of desire similar to Maynard‘s, drew attention to the fault line in the notion of human love as necessary to understanding divine love: ―There is something so satisfying in feeling oneself loved, that I fear lest it shd stop effort half-way. I mean all that love & aspiration that shd climb up to the love of Christ alone, [has] a tendency to lie down satisfied on true human love, as they wd on no other thing in the whole world.‖ 137 When, in 1882, Maynard fell in love with Brooke and Brooke returned her feelings, she viewed the purpose of the erotically inflected relationship as spiritual – the erotic signaled God‘s intention for her to mentor or mother Brooke spiritually – but she also expressed anxiety about the possibility of human love eclipsing religious aspirations. In her Greenbook she admitted that the relationship was ―hardly safe, even thus far.‖ 138 Remembering the Tait incident, when the favoring of one student had had disruptive effects on the others, Maynard had what she deemed the first ―straight out‖ talk about ―love‖ with a beloved. Taking up the Puritan discourse of her childhood and the self-control inherent in the discourse of the ―rave,‖ she ―told her how the capacity for loving meant always the capacity for suffering, and how I must expect the utmost self-control from her . . . for I belonged to the object not the individual, and all students must be alike to me.‖ 139 She informed Brooke that she would ―never forgive myself if when she was sad she only came to me for help instead of going there beside her little white bed [to pray].‖ 140 Doggedly Maynard attempted to subordinate her own human eros to religious desire: ―A Love 136 Greenbook, 17 October 1875, 127-28. 137 Greenbook, 13 March 1884, 184. 138 Greenbook, 12 November 1882, 12. 139 Ibid., 9-10. 140 Ibid. 195 that some people say is absolutely satisfying, & affords the most overwhelming joy that the heart is capable of‖ was to be replaced by ―Thou art my portion.‖ 141 In his groundbreaking account of Victorian sexuality Foucault refuted the ―repressive hypothesis‖ that characterized historians‘ work on this era, suggesting that it was based on a fundamental misconception about the nature of power. Distinguishing between sexual regulation and sexual repression, he argued that sexual regulation, as the means through which power was exercised, was productive rather than repressive in its effects. By mandating the close monitoring of sexual desire, sexual regulation incited desire. It thus extended the reach of power into the inner recesses of subject‘s psyche and, within the broader social context, generated an ever-growing domain of influence and permeated that domain increasingly thoroughly. The proliferation of discourses of sexuality in the Victorian era – sexology, psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, demography – attested to the productive nature of power; these discourses ―put sex into discourse‖ in a growing number of arenas. Foucault was primarily concerned with scientific discourses of sexuality, or scientia sexualis, however he believed that the Catholic confession had structured the regulatory discourses of modern social science. Sexual desire and sexual subjectivity were constituted in the confession as the religious subject examined his/her conscience, charted ―thoughts, desire, voluptuous imaginings, delectations, combined movements of the body and soul,‖ and spoke the truth of his/her desire. 142 Victorian social scientists adopted the epistemology of the confession; they understood the truth of the self to be produced through the confession of sexual desire, derived knowledge about sexuality from the confessional accounts of their subjects, and developed categories of sexual identity predicated on the latter. 141 Greenbook, 23 December 1883, 151. 142 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1., An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 19. 196 As a number of scholars have noted, Foucault‘s account of Victorian sexuality did not take gender sufficiently into account. By focusing on science in the later nineteenth century he overlooked the alignment of women with religion, the subsequent persistence of religious discourse in the Victorian era, Victorian women‘s religiously informed involvement in the regulation of sexuality, and the effects of the latter on women‘s sexual subjectivity. Feminist scholars have drawn attention to the role of middle-class women in the regulation of sexuality of working-class women in the metropole (in the earlier nineteenth-century prostitute rescue mission and the later nineteenth-century social purity movement, for example) and of working- class and native women in the colonies (in campaigns against sexual permissiveness and miscegenation). They have also argued that, paradoxically, women‘s leadership in public campaigns for sexual reform – such as the movement to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1860s 143 – enabled middle-class women to speak about sex publicly for the first time; by ―putting sex into discourse,‖ these women began to develop their own discourse of sexual knowledge. What has yet to be investigated is the effects of Victorian women‘s regulation of sexuality on their own sexual subjectivity. Foucault argued that the regulation of sexual desire proliferates sexual desire in regulatory authorities and in their subjects. Is his contention borne out in the case of middle-class women, as they involved themselves in the regulation of sexuality? Scholars have also yet to explore the extent to which middle-class women regulated their own desire or the relationship between the private and public regulation of desire. The regulation by Evangelical middle-class women of the homoerotic desire inherent in their relationships provides a useful starting point for the investigation of their involvement in the public regulation of sexuality. 143 The Acts allowed for the medical examination of women suspected of prostitution in garrison towns and ports and the incarceration in ―lock hospitals‖ of those found to have contracted sexually transmitted diseases until they were deemed healthy. They were seen by those who sought their repeal to sanction the sexual double standard as well as prostitution. 197 Maynard‘s effort to ―regulate‖ Brooke‘s desire in early 1883 ―put sex into discourse‖ and demonstrates the paradoxical effects Foucault delineates – but as a product of religious rather than scientific discourse. 144 From Maynard‘s cautionary admonitions the two women went on to reflect on the awakening of their desire for one another. Brooke recounted to Maynard ―how one day (some three weeks ago) I [Maynard] laid my hand an instant on her shoulder . . . [and] she longed to kiss it.‖ 145 Maynard had seen Brooke‘s ―bright blushes‖; putting her arm round Brooke she had ―told her I know what that alteration of colour meant, and asked if I could help her.‖ 146 Brooke confided to Maynard that after this comment ―the tide of love rose with a bound . . . she could scarcely control herself.‖ 147 Maynard ―held her close, close,‖ as Brooke continued: ―All my heart is yours . . . it is not mine any more. It is yours, and I can never take it back.‖ 148 Maynard observed of her effort to constrain Brooke‘s desire, ―Thus I spoke, but oh how my heart went out to hers that lay against mine in the darkness.‖ 149 Maynard‘s ―straight out‖ talk with Brooke demonstrates, in the realm of religion, the paradoxically productive effects of the regulation of sexual desire. The Evangelical regulation of desire, by ―putting sex into discourse,‖ incited and proliferated it. Evangelical women‘s regulation of their own and one another‘s homoerotic desire also produced a discourse of knowledge about female same-sex desire in a period that predated the dissemination of sexological discourses of female inversion. In April 1883, months after her talk with Brooke, Maynard heard Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the first British woman doctor and co- 144 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 12. 145 Greenbook, 12 November 1882, 10. 146 Ibid. 147 Ibid. 148 Ibid., 11. 149 Ibid., 9-10. 198 founder of the London School of Medicine for Women, address the issue of sexual education at a meeting called by the Society of Friends to call for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. Blackwell, who had in 1880 published The Human Element in Sex, argued that the sexual desire of men and women was equally strong. ―In all this dangerous subject,‖ she advised her listeners, ―remember the senses are equal, but the man leans to the physical side and the woman to the mental.‖ 150 In suggesting how parents should respond to their children‘s awakening sexuality, Blackwell rejected the notion that the body and sexual desire were intrinsically sinful. ―If God made our souls and the devil our bodies, keep the whole thing down with a strong hand,‖ she noted, ―but if it is really His work that the future of the race is lodged in this duality, let us bow before it as something to be treasured and honoured.‖ 151 Blackwell did not contest the body/soul dichotomy of traditional Christian theology, but she refused to align it with the evil/good dichtomy. She anticipated and affirmed sexual desire and its corporeal outworking and advised the management of sexual desire rather than its repression. After hearing Blackwell speak, Maynard, taking on the role of a parent to Brooke, suggested that this was a difficult line to walk, both in her own life and in her capacity as Brooke‘s spiritual mother. ―I know how hard this is,‖ she wrote, ―and when I see an ardent Keltic nature like that which has crept so close to my heart, one that at nine fell heartily in love with a tall silent lad, and has had ‗a perfect trail of them ever since,‘ I begin to see how hard is the task I have undertaken. . . . Oh to deal wisely now.‖ 152 Maynard did not distinguish between Brooke‘s childhood heterosexual infatuation and her attraction to Maynard herself. 150 Greenbook, 1 April 1883, 74-75. 151 Ibid., 75. 152 Ibid., 76. Although Maynard agreed with Blackwell, she felt ambivalent about her; she was ―one of these people who see no sense in an individual conversion, and yet whose whole life and aim are unsparingly given to the Christianising of a nation‖ and believed Josephine Butler to be ―the angel of light in this cause‖ (ibid., 74). Blackwell had been raised a Congregationalist, had become a Christian Socialist in 1882, and then in 1891 199 Maynard‘s aligning of Brooke‘s heterosexual and same-sex desire suggests that Evangelical women may have been more self-consciously aware of the sexual nature of the desire they regulated, as spiritual mentors, than has been previously thought. The nineteenth- century alignment of middle-class femininity with piety, modesty, and chastity had led to a reluctance amongst Victorians to provide sexual education to middle-class girls and women. While the New Women of the 1880s and 1890s waged a battle for sex education – resisting the conflation of purity with sexual ignorance – most Victorians viewed sex education as a threat to middle-class women‘s inherent modesty. Maynard‘s comments suggest that middle-class Victorian women may have seen spiritual mothering as a form of sexual mentoring, in which the inciting of human eros and its subordination to religious imperatives provided a prototype for heterosexual marriage. Evangelical women‘s spiritual mentoring may even be viewed as an iteration of what Foucalt calls ―ars erotica.‖ Foucault suggests that ―in the Christian confession, but especially in the direction and examination of the conscience, in the search for spiritual union and the love of God, there was a whole series of methods that had much in common with an erotic art.‖ 153 These included: ―guidance by a master along a path of initiation, the intensification of experiences extending down to their physical components, the optimization of effects by the discourse that accompanied them.‖ 154 The inciting, monitoring, and managing of desire intrinsic to Evangelicalism rendered a discourse of desire, knowledge of it, and a type of ―sex education‖ necessary. In subsequent months Maynard and Brooke reached an uneasy resolution to their desire; Brooke adopted two different modes of relating to Maynard, one for embraced the Christo-Theosophical Society (Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914 [London: Penguin, 1995], 68). 153 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 70. 154 Ibid. 200 public and one for private (―‗You are two people,‘ she says, ‗and I love my Mistress dearly, but I love my own Love better‘‖ 155 ). The imbrication of Evangelical discourses of marriage and Maynard and Brooke‘s homoerotic relationship was certainly evident in 1883 when the two women took up the language and rituals of heterosexual marriage to define their relationship. 156 Maynard initiated this discourse. As she wrote in her Greenbook, ―she [Brooke] had not one thought beyond being my friend, just one among a dozen . . . till some words of mine one night late as I stood by her door, saying, ‗Suppose I had been a man, could you have married me, Margaret?‘‖ 157 Maynard‘s words had been, ―like a match to a mine,‖ for Brooke; they had ―fired a whole train of dormant thought & feeling, & nothing in the world wd do for her but she must be first & alone.‖ 158 Brooke took up the discourse of marriage readily; she ―called herself my little wife, and told me she had the dearest, strongest, most reverenced husband in the whole world, and that never a single thought could again go astray – never.‖ 159 Maynard subsequently drew back from the marriage metaphor for fear it would deter Brooke from marrying, but in private she asserted that it was appropriate. Her understanding of her homoerotic desire shifted. Initially she had seen it as indicative of God‘s intention for her to participate in the salvation or spiritual mentoring of the beloved; she now saw Brooke, in her new role of wife, as a gift from God. ―I did not ask for thee, God gave thee,‖ she noted, ―and now I claim the right to love and protect and cherish thee to my very life‘s end.‖ 160 155 Greenbook, 3 May 1883, 83. 156 Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 277. 157 Greenbook, 9 September 1884, 256-57. 158 Ibid. 159 Greenbook, 22 March 1883, 70. 160 Ibid., 71. 201 Historians of sexuality note that female marriages were not unusual in the nineteenth century. Women in same-sex relationships called one another ―husband‖ and ―wife‖; they sometimes also lived together and/or owned property together, took marriage vows and validated these vows legally (through the changing of wills, for example), and consummated these relationships sexually. 161 Vicinus points to the fluidity of women‘s use of familial metaphors to describe their homoerotic or homosexual relationships with one another.‖ 162 Relationships that began as mother-daughter relationships might become husband-wife ones, but the two discourses might also be simultaneously mobilized. 163 Phipps notes that Maynard vacillated between the roles of mother and husband in conceptualizing her homoerotic desire. 164 Maynard‘s adoption of heterosexual marital discourse to describe her relationship with Brooke reveals an Evangelical genealogy of Victorian women‘s recourse to the marriage metaphor. It was the product of the co-production of earthly and spiritual marriage in Evangelical discourse, of the instabilities consequent on each serving as a referent for the other, and of the challenge the discourse of spiritual marriage (marriage to Christ) offered literal marriage. The instability of Evangelical familial discourse was an important antecedent to what Vicinus rightly describes as the multiple, fluid, and ambiguous appropriation of familial discourse by Victorian women to represent same-sex relationships. Evangelical notions of literal 161 Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 22. Anne Lister‘s (1791-1840) ―marriages‖ provide the most well-known examples. She exchanged rings with one of her early lovers, Mariana Belcombe, and deemed the sexual relationships she pursued while ―married‖ to Belcombe, adulterous. Lister‘s subsequent ―marriage‖ to the wealthy heiress Anne Walker entailed taking vows on the Bible, exchanging rings, and remaking their wills; upon consummating their relationship, Lister invited Walker to take the sacrament with her to formalize the marriage (26). 162 Ibid., xxix. 163 Ibid., 50. The American sculptor, Harriet Hosmer (1830-1908), a member of a community of women artists in Rome, wooed Lady Ashburton (1827-1903) ―with the promise, ‗when you are here I shall be a model wife (or husband whichever you like)‖ while at times referring to Ashburton as ―the dear mother,‖ for example. Harriet Hosmer to Lady Ashburton, Sat. Oct. [1872?], Ashburton Accession, Ashburton Collection, National Library of Scotland, 11488/81, quoted in Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 50. 164 Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 272. 202 and spiritual motherhood, and literal and spiritual marriage, were co-produced, interdependent, and unstable. The status of the literal mother was the product of her spiritual functions and Evangelical spiritual mothering (outside of literal motherhood) shored up literal motherhood, but might also undermine it by providing women with an alternative to literal motherhood. The notion of spiritual marriage, or marriage to Christ, similarly consolidated and contested literal marriage. Evangelicalism, and the holiness movement in particular, also facilitated slippages between spiritual mothering and spiritual marriage. Evangelicalism provided no image of a female divine and women may thus have turned to one another for images of a divine feminine to supplement the Father-Son dyad of the New Testament. Spiritual mothers sought to represent Christ to their ―daughters‖ and were seen by younger women as Christ-like. In addition to this, Evangelicals held up spiritual friendships as models for marriage. Husbands and wives, like spiritual friends, were to engage in the cultivation of their spiritual lives, pursue union with Christ, and undertake shared religious service. The possibility that spiritual friendships might, as a corollary, supplant ―marriages‖ gained some acceptance. Marcus observes of the Victorian era that ―for those who took seriously the doctrine ‗We are all one in Christ,‘ the concrete differences between spouses and friends became less significant.‖ 165 Finally, the preponderance of cross-age courting and marriage in heterosexual Victorian relationships allowed for the appropriation of the marriage metaphor by women in mother-daughter spiritual friendships. Slippages between spiritual mothering and same-sex marriage were evident in Maynard‘s relationship with Brooke, as she represented Brooke‘s love as divine compensation for the marriage she had renounced upon founding Westfield. 166 This slippage had been evident in the late 1870s when, upon leaving St. Leonards and Lumsden, she had sought a woman with whom 165 Marcus, Between Women, 67. 166 Greenbook, 5 November 5 1882, 4-5. 203 to share her religious calling. ―My true love is yet to seek, & I do not know where to look for her,‖ she had prayed. ―Find my life, my love, my work, for me!‖ 167 The influence of the cross- generational aspect of Victorian heterosexual marriage was evident in Maynard‘s description of Brooke: ―On [Sunday] night, heartily tired as I had been, I did not sleep for a minute after 1 o‘clock, but lay there absorbed in the mere fact that she was asleep in my arms peaceful as a little child, yet an incarnation of intensity, sweetness and purity such as a man of profound insight need never desire to stray beyond.‖ 168 In early 1883 Westfield student Emily F. Maunder demonstrated the destabilizing of literal marriage consequent on Evangelicals‘ appropriation of a spiritual framework for marriage and the sexually queer spaces that emerged as a result. Maunder formed what Maynard described as an ―unhealthy attachment‖ to Maynard. ―For two or three nights she crept stealthily about the house like a cat,‖ Maynard wrote, ―ending by coming into my room shivering and miserable, & when in my bed clinging to me desperately.‖ 169 In a fit of ―hysterical mania,‖ possibly prompted by jealousy of Maynard‘s relationship with Brooke, she accompanied these enactments of desire with a fervent attempt to name same-sex desire: ―What do you call this?‖ she said once, clinging to me harder than ever. Afraid of crossing her I replied, ―The beginning of friendship, is it?‖ & in tones more of grief than in scorn she said, ―Friendship, did you say?‖ & then sinking her voice in a profoundly solemn note she added slowly, ―I call it Love & Marriage. We are two no longer, I am part of you & you are part of me. I know all your thoughts by instinct. We can never be separated. Two souls one for ever.‖ 170 167 Autobiography, Part 6, Chapter 41, 1881, 80. Her desire in later years for ―one life to stand beside me‖ (Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 50, 172), a life that could unite with hers in Christ and in His Service as she oversaw Westfield, illustrates the proximity of Evangelical friendship and same-sex marriage. 168 Greenbook, 22 March 1883, 70. 169 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 45, 1883, 23. 170 Ibid., 24. 204 Maunder‘s sentiments point to the role of religious discourse in defining heterosexual marriage (―two souls one for ever‖), to the readiness with which a discourse of ―love & marriage‖ could, through the spiritual framing of heterosexual desire, be applied to homosexual desire and to the sexually dissident corporeal effects of the construal of marriage in spiritual terms. In subsequent years Maynard was to encapsulate the queer effects of the Evangelical spiritualizing of marriage in a sonnet to her lover Marion Wakefield, titled ―Separation‖: ―our souls are caught / Together in the mesh of Heaven one aim, / One love, one hope, will guide us to the end.‖ 171 Maynard had first encountered the use of heterosexual marriage as a metaphor for homoerotic relationships in 1876 when Louisa Lumsden described Maynard‘s joining her at Cheltenham in these terms (―many different times did she express her joy at the thought of having me there for her ‗wife‘‖ 172 ). That Maynard understood marriage in an Evangelical frame is evident as, in the process of seeking Lumsden‘s conversion, she turned to biblical injunctions on marriage and specifically to St. Peter‘s instructions to wives of unbelieving husbands for guidance (―I lay out before myself to follow carefully the directions given in 1. Pet. 3. 1-4, as explained by J. Scott, & each time in play she calls me her ‗wife‘ I think of it‖ 173 ). In May 1883 Maynard and Brooke took up the ritual of marriage in addition to its language. 174 One night that month – ―O night I cannot forget,‖ Maynard wrote – Brooke ―lay in my arms in a sort of heaven of rapture. ‗Say once more I am truly your wife,‘ she said, and then 171 ―Separation,‖ Maynard, Original Poems, vol 1, 81. 172 Greenbook, 30 July 1876, 70. 173 Greenbook, 22 October 1876, 113. The writer of 1 Peter 3 advised wives that if husbands ―obey not the word, they also may without the word be won by the conversation of the wives‖ (1. Pet. 3. 1). 174 She had also turned to literary narratives of heterosexuality and spoke of Brooke as ―die herrliche Last‖ (―the glorious burden‖) (Greenbook, 12 November 1882, 9-10). This was a phrase taken from Goethe‘s 1798 epic poem Hermann and Dorothea in which the eponymous male hero carries a young and injured Dorothea out of a revolutionary France to safety. Brooke referred to Maynard as ―my Godgifu‖ (Old English for ―Godiva‖ ), the eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon noblewoman who, according to legend, rode naked through the streets of Coventry to convince her husband, Leofric, earl of Mercia, to lower the excessive taxes he had imposed on his tenants. 205 ‗No one in the whole world has a heart like my husband, and I give myself to him now and for ever.‘‖ 175 Taking up the words of the marriage ceremony, Brooke intoned ―in her clear steady voice . . . solemnly and slowly, ‗For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part, I take thee; by my own free choice I take thee for ever till death come though it cannot part us.‘‖ 176 Brooke entreated Maynard to say her part, but Maynard could not. ―I dared not bind that noble heart by words she might feel a fetter one day in years to come,‖ she wrote. 177 In the privacy of Greenbook, however, Maynard observed, ―I doubt if ever man cd. be found to love her with deeper honour & more intense tenderness. Mine, mine, oh Margaret, surely I have a sort of right now to live for you & die for you. 178 From August 1883, Maynard ―let her again & again call me her ‗husband,‘ and hiding her whole self in my breast, say, This is my home, my shelter, my all . . . I have all the beautiful parts of love & marriage & home & none of the troublesome parts.‖ 179 Feminist scholars have debated whether Victorian women‘s application of a spiritual discourse to sexual desire de-corporealized or de-eroticized sex. Lucy Bland argues that Victorian women‘s use of a spiritual language for desire might heighten the erotic while simultaneously refusing the corporeal. Religious discourse allowed Victorian women to ―explore the potential for other states of being – states of pleasure – which were not invariably rooted in physical sensation.‖ 180 She suggests that ―for a woman to feel able to value the physical side of sexuality; and to claim the right to be sexual in all its physicality as well as its 175 Greenbook, 3 May 1883, 84. 176 Ibid. 177 Ibid. 178 Greenbook, 21 August 1883, 117. 179 Ibid., 116. 180 Bland, Banishing the Beast, 276. 206 sublimity, many of the younger generation of feminists turned to the new sexology.‖ 181 Morgan, on the other hand, notes the validation of corporeal pleasure evident in Marie Stopes‘s recourse to religion to describe mutual orgasm (―the apex of rapture‖ 182 ) in her best-selling Married Love (1918) and argues that Stopes‘s approach had its antecedents in the discourse of religious Victorians such as the social purity activist Ellice Hopkins and the physician Elizabeth Blackwell who took up religious language to legitimate bodily sexual pleasure. In the 1894 edition of the The Human Element in Sex, Blackwell argued that ―the physical pleasure which attends the caresses of love is a rich endowment of humanity, granted by a beneficent Creative Power. . . . The sex act itself, rightly understood in its compound character [is] . . . divinely created‖ 183 The turn to religious discourse to describe sexual desire enabled women to rehabilitate understandings of sex in an era in which sexual ignorance, sexual coercion in marriage, and extensive and sometimes life-threatening childbearing, often rendered sexual intercourse a negative experience. In Sex and Sanctity (1914) Lucy Re-Bartlett thus suggested that ―in the past, women‘s way of preserving her ideality has often lain in abstracting herself partially, that is to say with her mind and heart, from all that part of the sexual relation which she has found unlovely. . . . The woman of to-day who can understand no such splitting off of ideality – whose faith is high enough to let her both feel and passionately affirm that there is no part of life which cannot and should not be beautiful . . . ‗opens gates.‘‖ 184 For Bartlett ―while 181 Ibid., 277. 182 Sue Morgan, ―The Word Made Flesh: Women, Religion and Sexual Cultures,‖ in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, ed. Jacqueline deVries and Susan Morgan (London: Routledge, 2010), 162. 183 Elizabeth Blackwell, The Human Element in Sex, Being a Medical Inquiry into the Relation of Sexual Physiology to Christian Morality (London: J. &A. Churchill, 1894), 14, quoted in Lesley Hall, ed. Outspoken Women: An Anthology of Women’s Writing on Sex, 1870-1969 (New York, NY : Routledge, 2005), 18. 184 Lucy Re-Bartlett, Sex and Sanctity (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1914), 63, quoted in Hall, Outspoken Women, 42-43. 207 sensuality is of the body only, passion is also of the mind and soul.‖ 185 The appropriation of a heterosexual discourse of desire facilitated by the application of a spiritual discourse to heterosexuality allowed Maynard and Brooke to represent the corporeal component of their relationship more directly and to begin to acknowledge its sexual nature. Maynard had sought consistently to legitimate same-sex desire in her discourse on love. In this she differed from her Victorian counterparts who were more aware of pejorative discourses of female same-sex sexuality and sought to downplay or conceal their desire. 186 While attempting not to allow same-sex relationships to eclipse her relationship with the divine, Maynard had nevertheless mobilized the terms: ―[love] in its form of passion,‖ 187 ―passionate affection,‖ 188 ―strong personal love,‖ 189 ―and ―raptures,‖ 190 to distinguish erotic desire from platonic. Maynard‘s appropriation of the metaphor of heterosexual courtship and marriage constituted part of her ongoing effort to foreground and to validate homoerotic desire in the absence of an overt public discourse for it. At night when she gathered Brooke to herself ―all so yielding and unconscious‖ she asked, ―Is not the love of the man stronger fiercer than that of the women? – so I feel to thee, my own, my love, my heart‘s darling.‖ 191 In March 1883 she wrote of Brooke, ―Last night she came after I had put out the lights and in an instant more I had my 185 Bland, Banishing the Beast, 276. 186 Thus, when Charlotte Cushman commenced an affair with the young Emma Crow, she advised Crow, ―Yes darling, there are people in the world who could understand our love for each other. Therefore it is necessary that we should keep all expression of it to ourselves – & not demonstrate too clearly our great devotion to each other: we only excite observation & envy & jealousy & this is best avoided.‖ Charlotte Cushman to Emma Crow, 3 May, 1860, Charlotte Cushman Papers, vol. 1, Cushman Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, quoted in Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 42-43. 187 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 49, 1885, 139. 188 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 46, 1885, 58. 189 Greenbook, 28 June 1907, 173. 190 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 46, 1883, 59. 191 Greenbook, 22 March 1883, 70. 208 arms around her, my love, my darling. . . . Her presence brings a strong fascination that is partly physical and draws out my love with a force almost painful. ‖192 She noted that ―only L. had the same physical power over me greater perhaps, certainly seeming so, because so painfully exercised. . . . This one, though so strong, is all gentleness and peace.‖ 193 Brooke‘s informal marriage ceremony enhanced the women‘s sexual intimacy. In August 1883 Maynard wrote, ―there never now seemed the slightest check against our deepening, broadening love & at night we lay folded close, ah so close, & felt as if we knew what satisfaction meant at last to both heart & body, & as if nothing could ever part us now.‖ 194 In November 1883 she spoke of the ―thrills of strong excitement that came on me by surprise, & that I tried to put down for they seemed almost as much physical as mental,‖ and then notes, ―but this week over, I gave way.‖ 195 Maynard continued to see Brooke as a gift from God: ―Who am I that all this should be given to me?‖ 196 While historians of sexuality have agreed that female same-sex marriages were not unusual, they have disagreed on the extent to which they were accepted by Victorians, 197 and on whether or not they posed a challenge to heterosexual marriage. Vicinus argues that female marriages were derided by Victorians and posed a threat to heterosexual marriage. 198 Marcus 192 Ibid. 193 Ibid., 72. 194 Greenbook, 21 August 1883, 116. 195 Greenbook, 4 November 1883, 138. 196 Ibid. 197 Vicinus notes that as early as 1852 Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), after meeting American actress Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876) and Matilda Hays (1820-1897) in Paris, wrote to her sister, ―it is a female marriage.‖ She had told her companion at the time, ―Well, I never heard of such a thing before,‖ and had been informed in turn that ―it is by no means uncommon.‖ Julia Markus, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995), 256, quoted in Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 9-10. 198 She deems the economic threat most prominent (Vicinus, ―One Life,‖ 604-5). Those women who were able to live together often held professional positions and their entry into the public sphere, appropriation of jobs, and 209 asserts that female marriages were accepted by Victorians and integral to the perpetuation of heterosexual marriage. 199 In this chapter I have argued that Maynard‘s same-sex desire was the product of Evangelical familial discourse; it emerged from culturally and sexually queer spaces that were the effect of the Evangelical co-production of literal and spiritual marriage, motherhood, and the family. Maynard‘s Evangelical ―marriages‖ nevertheless offered a substantial critique of heterosexual marriage. Her ―marriage‖ to Louisa Lumsden demonstrates the disruptive effect of female marriages on heterosexual marriage. As Vicinus notes, Lumsden and Maynard‘s ―marriage‖ posed a challenge to heterosexual marriage by providing Maynard with an important means to evaluate the marriage proposal of a suitor, a distinguished Scottish clergyman from Wittinghame, Dr. James Robertson, who courted Maynard while she was at St. Leonards. 200 Maynard contrasted Lumsden‘s depth of feeling for her with Dr. Robertson‘s less convincing approach: ―As I put on my cloak and went off to School I used to hug myself and think, ‗Now I know what love is!‘‖ she wrote. Anything Robertson offered was ―timid and colourless in comparison.‖ 201 An Evangelical discourse of feeling played an important role here. Evangelicalism had equipped Maynard with a register for assumption of the male role of breadwinner were seen to threaten men‘s economic privilege. For Vicinus, the increasingly unstable institution of heterosexual marriage played a role as well: ―the naturalness and the moral superiority of normative heterosexuality‖ was being called into question by ―controversial agitation both for and against prostitution, raising the age of consent, divorce, birth control, male friendship, and other issues.‖ Vicinus, Intimate Friends, xvi. 199 Marcus contends that female marriages were inherently sexual and were widely accepted as such by Victorians (Marcus, Between Women, 203). She answers ―no‖ to two key questions posed to her in the course of her research: ―Weren‘t Victorians too invested in female sexual purity to admit that lesbians existed?‖ (12) and ―Didn‘t most people think of women who had sex with other women as deviants, almost a third sex, who had little in common with women who became wives and mothers?‖ (13). 200 Vicinus, ―One Life,‖ 613. 201 Autobiography, Part 4, Chapter 31, 1877, 223. In addition to this, as Vicinus notes, Robertson had little interest in Maynard‘s educational work: ―if he mentioned me, it was with reference to himself. There was not one word about giving me a fine, full, rounded life.‖ Autobiography, Part 4, Chapter 33, 1878, 298. Maynard made a similar comparison between Marion Wakefield, her last significant homoerotic relationship, and her good friend the South African missionary Dudley Kidd: ―I do not deny that I loved him, but there was no excitement about it. I loved Marion far more.‖ Autobiography, 1897, 419. 210 emotions and had compelled her to examine her emotions. ―From my heart I respect & honour you,‖ she wrote to Robertson in April 1877, ―but these feelings however strongly admitted will not stand in the place of love & I cannot with truth say that I return the affection in the way you desire‖ 202 In 1879, when Robertson resumed his courtship, Maynard wrote in her Greenbook that ―there is a certain amount of subjective feeling I must have.‖ 203 She believed her absence of feelings of desire for Robertson to indicate God‘s disapproval of the relationship. 204 She had ―truly laid myself in the hands of Him who can touch every string of my being into tune or discord,‖ 205 and God had not responded. She asked herself, ―What other test or criterion could I have?‖ 206 The implication of the Evangelical elevation and analyzing of feeling for women‘s privileging of erotic feeling was evident when in later years Maynard asserted more confidently that ―the thought of giving myself body and soul for ever seemed a simple impossibility, for the man held for me not one spark of personal attraction.‖ 207 The significance of religious desire or of feeling to faith led Maynard to consider sexual desire a significant indicator in ascertaining the merits of a heterosexual marriage proposal. Women‘s same-sex ―marriages,‖ even if co- 202 Greenbook, 23 April 1877, 179-80. 203 Greenbook, 11 April 1879, 54. 204 Greenbook, 24 March 1878, 66-67. 205 Ibid. 206 Greenbook, 11 April 1879, 54. When Maynard‘s sister Josephine (―Tissy‖) attempted to reinstitute the rational approach to decision-making promulgated by their mother, Maynard rejected it: ―she thinks I have been unwise, & reminds me strongly how Mother always laid the stress on what was, not on what was felt . . . but once more a single thread of feeling holds me back, a thread I cd easily snap, but I do not like to, fearing it may be the guiding clue in the Lord‘s hand, wh. if I break I shall lose my way‖ (Greenbook, 13 April 1879, 61). Dora, Constance‘s sister, articulated a similar notion that God used feeling to direct the believer in affairs of the heart. She had refused a marriage proposal from the son of a friend, Frank Moilliet. Jebb, their mother‘s servant, who had assured her, ―Well, dear Miss . . . I suppose it is right so, for if the Lord had meant it otherwise, He wd have given you a heart to love him‖ (Greenbook, 13 October 1878, 143). Later, when Dora prompted in part by a passionate attachment to Frank‘s mother, acquiesced to the proposal, she wrote to Constance, ―You know the old Jebb said that ‗if it had been right, the Lord wd have given me a heart to love him,‘ so now I hope that is what He has done‖ (Greenbook, 17 November 1878, 151-52). 207 Autobiography, Part 5, Chapter 35, 1879, 354. 211 produced with heterosexual marriage and considered secondary and a stepping stone to it, nevertheless proved disruptive of a masculinist economy of desire by providing women with particular criteria for marriage. Female ―marriages‖ could also alter the expectations of female onlookers regarding heterosexual marriage. While pursuing relationships with Brooke and Gray at Westfield, Maynard had also been attracted to her fellow teacher and eventual vice-principal, Anne Richardson. One of Richardson‘s Quaker contemporaries, Evelyn Sturge, approached Maynard ―full of eager delight‖ and informed her: ―Oh I've heard such a lovely thing! A lady said to me that you and Miss Richardson together gave her a new idea of married life! – You are naturally so different; and yet you are so essentially one, and have such perfect confidence in one another, – she said it was the finest thing of the kind she had ever seen.‖ 208 Maynard noted, ―there is some truth in it. . . . We are almost painfully unlike, so strong is she in intellect, so all but hard, so alarmingly masculine in force of both mind and will . . . and I can truly say ―There is none like her, none.‖ 209 Maynard‘s relationship with Richardson, like her earlier relationship with Lumsden, was informed by Evangelical notions of gender complementarity. Maynard‘s role in her homoerotic relationships varied – she represented herself as Brooke‘s husband, for example – but, for Maynard, the notion persisted that marriage was defined by the uniting of two different genders. This demonstrates the Evangelical discourse from which Maynard‘s discourses of same-sex desire emerged. Same-sex marriage bore the imprint of both literal and spiritual marriage; it was an effect of the co-production of the two. Maynard‘s subsequent and short-lived relationship with the Westfield Classics Lecturer Frances Ralph Gray illustrates the emergence of a specifically homosexual subjectivity 208 Autobiography, 1901, 473. 209 Ibid. 212 consequent on Maynard‘s recourse to religious narratives of heterosexual desire to describe her homoerotic relationships. Maynard turned to these narratives in an effort to renounce homoerotic desire. Her renunciation of same-sex desire required a prior legitimation of it as the equivalent of heterosexual desire. In the process of repudiating homoerotic desire she thus developed a homosexual subjectivity that was distinct from her earlier homoerotic subjectivity; in the manner of women who had access to sexological discourse in later years, she insisted upon the specifically sexual nature of her ―love‖ for women. In May 1884 Maynard began to woo Gray. ―I admired Ralph Gray with my whole heart,‖ she wrote in later years, ―& by this time love in its form of passion had been well awaked.‖ 210 Her relationship with Brooke had waned. ―I love her dearly still,‖ she observed, ―but all the halo of nameless charm has fallen fr. her. . . . As a student she is almost perfect, as the choice of my life, I draw back.‖ 211 She recognised a certain ―unfaithfulness‖ to Brooke in pursuing her attraction to Gray, but believed love could be neither gainsaid nor concealed (―love is too restless to be hidden‖ 212 ). Brooke, recognizing Maynard‘s infatuation with Gray, sought to annul her ―marriage‖ to Maynard. Just as Evangelical holiness piety had precipitated her desire, and had provided her with contexts of intimacy, so it equipped Brooke with a discourse of separation from Maynard. With a dignity that far exceeded her years she informed Maynard that ―we had not after all the claim on each other man & wife had.‖ 213 She took up the holiness discourse of renunciation to achieve the transfer of her desire from Maynard to God. ―Laying her treasure down [,] [she] stands away fr. it, quite away, clasping her hands behind her back lest she shd be tempted to 210 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 49, 1886, 139. 211 Greenbook, 9 September 1884, 255. 212 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 49, 1886, 131. 213 Greenbook, 9 September 1884, 257-58. 213 touch it,‖ 214 Maynard wrote. Brooke freed Maynard from any obligations to her: ―And now I release you quite perfectly, darling, & we will love each other just as much as ever & be true friends.‖ 215 Maynard agreed to the ―divorce‖ and was repentant at the role she had played in initiating the ―marriage‖: ―I could only say ‗Yes, Margaret, I wd like it,‘ & stay there long before her struck through & through with remorse . . . [and] humiliation . . . thus to be found so poor so wrong in one of the strongest points of my being.‖ 216 The pursuit of holiness was primary in each women‘s life – each sought to subordinate human love to religious desire – and their relationship had been initiated, conducted, and terminated within the discourses of holiness piety. Initially Brooke expressed joy at the ―sacrifice‖: ―I have gained, nothing but gained, & I didn‘t expect it & I don‘t deserve it! . . . My life is just overflowing with happiness.‖ 217 In subsequent months Brooke spoke more soberly of the ―marriage‖: ―‗I was intoxicated with love,‘ she said sadly, ‗I saw nothing right.‘‖ 218 In May 1884 Maynard wrote Gray a passionate poem commemorating Gray‘s one-year anniversary at Westfield, and Gray responded ardently. ―[She] followed me to my room, Maynard wrote. ―I half turned, & her arms were round my neck in a moment & she caught her breath with a sort of sob as her head fell on my shoulder, & her lashes were wet as I kissed her eyes.‖ 219 At the end of that year Maynard sought a declaration of love from Gray: Sitting in the firelight by her low couch . . . Putting my cheek down on her I said, – 214 Greenbook, 19 October 1884, 273. 215 Greenbook, 9 September 1884, 257. 216 Ibid. 217 Greenbook, 19 October 1884, 273-74. 218 Greenbook, 8 November 1885, 88-89. 219 Greenbook, 18 May 1884, 210. 214 . . . half in play, – ―You must love me just a very little, just sometimes, Ralph, do you see?‖ She threw her arms round me, & said, ―Miss Maynard!‖ – It was a cry like the beginning of an entreaty yet she stopped. ―Well?‖ I asked, & quite shivering with the effort she said, ―I do.‖ My heart was full, & stayed in the close embrace. . . . I said, ―Oh Ralph, it seems almost too good. I have been loving you for sometime now, darling.‖ Then we parted for the time, but a happy, happy feeling went with me & will not leave me. . . . Oh Ralph, mine, I can hardly yet believe it. 220 Long years of taking the initiative in matters of faith enabled Maynard to act proactively in affairs of the heart, to exercise a form of sexual agency. Indeed the spiritual and sexual agency were indistinguishable as Maynard believed her attraction to women to denote God‘s salvific intention for them and her wooing of them to serve this end. In April 1884 Anne Richardson, still a student at the time but a friend of Gray‘s, warned Maynard that the attention she was giving Gray would have a detrimental effect on Gray‘s character. 221 At around the same time Westfield‘s first lecturer, Katherine Tristram, confessed that her desire for Maynard was insurmountable. It seemed to Maynard that she was surrounded by examples of ―love‖ gone awry (―it [love] has wrought evil to my Katie . . . it has brought weakness to me through my Margaret . . . it has dimmed my position altogether with Ralph‖ 222 ). Maynard‘s understanding of, and attitude towards, her love of women shifted again. 223 In the early 1880s she had seen Brooke as a gift from God and had perceived the primary liability of 220 Greenbook, 10 December 1884, 290-91. 221 Richardson and Gray were both Classicists. Ancient Greek and Rome had provided a significant discourse of same-sex desire for male Victorians and for some women, such as the aunt-niece couple Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 99). It is possible that Richardson and Gray had some knowledge of Juvenal‘s satirical discourse on female same-sex desire. In 1891 Dr Barlow, a member of Council, visited Westfield to observe the workings of the College and pronounced ―the Classical teaching of Miss Gray and Miss Richardson . . . ‗accurate and delicately shaded and above the ordinary Oxford lecture in refinement and taste.‘‖ The historian of Westfield Janet Sondheimer notes that ―since the author being expounded by Miss Richardson was Juvenal this was a tribute indeed‖ (Sondheimer, Castle Adamant, Chapter 3). However, although both Richardson and Gray suggested to Maynard that there was ―something wrong‖ with her relationships with women, neither cited Roman or Greek sources directly. 222 Greenbook, 20 April 1884, 202. 223 Phipps perceives a change in Maynard‘s approach to same-sex desire; she suggests that by the end of 1884 Maynard was ―writing more candidly about same-sex love.‖ Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 277. I see the transition happening more gradually, over a longer period of time. 215 homoerotic desire to be its weakening effect. In 1872 Lewis Campbell had taught her that love was ―in some degree a weakness – ‗a letting one‘s whole being out on one side.‘‖ 224 ―Leaning‖ thus became a prominent trope in Maynard‘s representation of the problem with human love in the early 1880s. At the end of 1883 she wrote of ―natural passion,‖ ―I have looked for it & leaned on it & craved for more, & weakness has come into my life.‖ 225 She took up the metaphor of a plant to describe her life; she strove to lean neither to the left or right but rather to grow straight towards the Sun that was the divine. From late 1883 when her relationship with Brooke became more sexual, Maynard began to view homoerotic desire more sternly. ―As the days go on,‖ she wrote at the end of 1883, I feel more & more ashamed of the latter half of this last term. The physical got the better of the mental, moral, & spiritual at once . . . & though vague, it is a wrong one cannot repair again.‖ 226 She nevertheless still understood her love for women in fairly innocuous terms. Love ―is to me so very very precious, & my natural passion for it has carried me away,‖ she suggested. 227 In April 1884 Maynard made ―the resolution . . . that throughout this May term I will have nothing to do with this softening side of love, so help me God,‖ 228 but had nevertheless commenced a relationship with Gray. In the ensuing months she entreated God to help her subordinate human love to religious desire (―drive it [the lesson] in, spare me none of the pain, none of the 224 Greenbook, 21 April 1872, 125-26. 225 Greenbook, 23 December 1883, 150. 226 Ibid., 149-150. 227 Greenbook, 23 December 1883, 150. Revisiting this journal entry while writing her autobiography in 1926, Maynard replaced the word ―physical‖ with ―physical instincts‖ and replaced ―natural passion‖ with ―human love on its passionate side‖ evidencing a more definite sense of the sexual in her relationship with Brooke. She noted that ―the physical instincts got the better of the mental, moral & spiritual all at once, & that power of endurance which, with all my faults, has ever stood by me, now all but failed me‖ ( Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 46, 1883, 63). 228 Greenbook, 20 April 1884, 202. 216 humiliation, only only [sic] don‘t let me forget it all my life long‖ 229 ). In early 1885 she identified the pursuit of human love more severely as a ―temptation‖: ―Talk about the temptations of Satan, there is no need for him ever to try a second one on me, when the one is invariably successful.‖ 230 Until this time, Evangelicalism had provided the framework within which Maynard‘s sexual desire was incited and her relationships pursued; her ―love‖ of women had been a prelude to evangelism and an accompaniment to spiritual mentoring. Now, however, Maynard took up a different Evangelical framework within which to interpret her desire, that of temptation and sin. In her attempt to repudiate her attraction to Gray, and to turn to God instead, Maynard made recourse to a number of religious narratives of heterosexual courtship and marriage, seeking to name and give content to the love she found so compelling. In September 1885 she turned to Sir Edwin Arnold‘s ―Indian Song of Songs‖ (1875). Arnold‘s The Light of Asia, Being the Life and Teachings of Guatama, Prince of India and Founder of Buddhism (1879) was the most popular British iteration of Buddhism in the 1880s. 231 ―Indian Song of Songs‖ was his rewriting of a Sanskrit pastoral drama, the Gîta Govinda, composed by the twelfth-century poet Jayadeva, one of the best-loved Sanskrit poets. Maynard believed that the ―Indian Song of Songs‖ ―shewed the position better‖ than its biblical counterpart when it came to the relation of human eros to religious desire. 232 The biblical Song of Songs, when read allegorically by Christians, represents the Church as a female lover courting and courted by a male Christ. Arnold‘s poem depicted the human soul (in the guise of Krishna) as a male betrothed to the Love 229 Greenbook, 9 September 1884, 260. 230 Greenbook, 5 April 1885, 39. 231 Joy Dixon, ―Modernity, Heterodoxy, and the Transformation of Religious Cultures,‖ in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, ed. Jacqueline deVries and Sue Morgan (London: Routledge, 2010), 220-21. 232 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 49, 1885-1886, 131. 217 of God, a feminine entity (represented in the poem by Radha, the spirit of intellectual and moral beauty). The male human soul is courted by women lovers (in the form of shepherdesses who make an appeal to Krishna‘s love of sensual pleasure). In her journal Maynard observed of the human soul in ―Indian Song of Songs,‖ that ―he is weak & is led away again & again by her [divine love‘s] rival, passionate human Love.‖ 233 She took the subject position of the male human soul of the poem to represent her temptation by a feminine ―passionate human Love.‖ In her journal she thus glossed the lament of the feminine Love of God for the loss of the (male) human soul to its female temptresses in the following way: Earth will of earth! I mourn more than I blame. . . The temptress was too near, the heaven too far . . . Make then the most of that whereto thou‘rt given Feign her thy Paradise, the Love of loves Say that her eyes are stars, her face the heaven, – It shall be vain, Nor wilt thou so believe thine own blind wooing, Nor slake thine heart‘s thirst even at the cup Which at the last she brings for thee, – Because still vain Is love that feeds on shadows . . . 234 Maynard‘s recourse to Arnold‘s narrative exposes the sexually queer possibilities concomitant on the co-construction of literal and spiritual marriage in the Christian tradition and in Victorian re-workings of Hinduism informed by Christianity. She was able to insert herself into heterosexual narratives of courtship and marriage and thus to legitimate the sexual nature of female same-sex desire because the use of biblical metaphors for God‘s relationship with Israel and with the Church de-naturalized literal courtship (and marriage). It required believers to situate themselves in a marriage-like relationship with Christ. Arnold‘s ―Indian Song of Songs‖ 233 Ibid. 234 Ibid. Maynard‘s gloss followed the text of Arnold‘s poem quite closely, but she omitted more overt references to sexual intercourse such as ―Her bosoms the two worlds, with sandal-groves / Full-scented, and the kiss-marks‖ and ―undoing / her girdle of carved gold, and yielding up, / Love's uttermost.‖ Edwin Arnold, The Indian Song of Songs, from the Sanskrit of the Gita Govinda of Jayadeva, with Other Oriental Poems (London: Trübner, 1875), 69-72. 218 effected a similar transposition of courtship discourse from the earthly to the spiritual realm. Maynard‘s turn to a religious narrative to simultaneously validate and renounce same-sex desire reveals the mechanism through which religious discourse facilitated a self-aware homosexual subjectivity. By appropriating the Hindu poem to describe homoerotic desire, and by assuming the male subject position, she drew attention to the sexual nature of her love for women; while renouncing homoerotic desire she sought simultaneously to insist on its sexual nature. As she observed in later years, ―the conviction remained with me that the one great temptation & weakness of my soul was expressed in these noble words. . . . ‗The temptress was too near & Heaven too far.‘‖ 235 Maynard‘s casting of herself as a sort of Krishna figure also represents what Joy Dixon describes as the ―colonial syncretic‖ that characterized British appropriations of Hinduism and Buddhism. 236 (In chapter five I explore the relationship between Maynard‘s Evangelicalism, her homoeroticism, and imperialist discourse.) Maynard also turned to the biblical discourse of the spiritual family of God in the course of insisting on the sexual nature of her love of women and renouncing the latter. She suggested that she was called to forego her relationship with Gray because those who worked for God, while promised brothers, sisters, and children to replace the loss of biological family members, were not promised husbands or wives: Never shall we find the exclusive bond of the husband and wife. There is a ―whole family in heaven and earth,‖ there is ―a household of faith‖ but if we try to step beyond this open and recognisable relation which can easily admit a dozen more, and which finds new brothers and sisters, and mothers and children, all the world over – then we are going astray. ―For they Maker is thine husband, the Lord of Hosts is His name, and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel‖ (Isa. LIV. 5). 237 235 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 49, 1885-1886, 131. 236 Joy Dixon, Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 11. 237 Maynard, We Women, 113. 219 The ties of husband and wife were ―too close too sweet too exacting for purely spiritual work.‖ 238 By taking up a biblical discourse of heterosexuality to renounce her desire, and by deeming her relationship with Gray the equivalent of a marital one, Maynard insisted on its sexual nature and evinced a homosexual subjectivity. Her analysis illustrates the proximity of literal and spiritual discourses of the family and of marriage as well as the permeability of the two. The pursuit of a religious calling brought the believers parents and siblings ―in Christ‖ who were comparable to literal parents and siblings. It could not, she averred, bring the believer a spouse. Her very insistence on this betrays the possibility of the latter consequent on the unstable relationship between literal and spiritual families. By October 1885, Gray had grown uncomfortable with Maynard‘s attentions. She moved out of Westfield and into the apartment her sister, Sarah, and her father shared. Maynard believed God had removed Gray from her because her relationship with her had eclipsed her relationship with God. ―Oh, my Ralph,‖ she wrote, ― [because] I have loved you too well, or rather in too earthly a fashion, you are taken fr. me.‖ 239 In April 1886, Gray rejected Maynard decisively. Maynard had expressed dissatisfaction at Gray‘s increasing emotional distance (―I have wanted you so badly this term. I don‘t get over missing you . . . & you refuse all my invitations, & you are making me afraid of you‖), and Gray had responded angrily, ―I‘m glad you are a little afraid of me, for perhaps it will make you treat me with more respect.‖ 240 Maynard was profoundly shocked at Gray‘s rejection; she later deemed it the moment that ―broke her life in two,‖ and the catalyst of her subsequent eleven-year depression. Her understanding of homoerotic ―love‖ shifted once again. When in early April 1886 Margaret 238 Greenbook, 5 April 1885, 40. 239 Greenbook, 20 December 1885, 94. 240 Greenbook, 11 April 1886, 128-29. 220 Brooke left Westfield for good, a more severe approach to desire was evident as Maynard reflected on their relationship of earlier years: love of this kind, love fed on grace & innocence & sweetness, love so secure that it flings the reins on the neck of passion & delights in being carried beyond the ordinary looks & tones of human intercourse, love that circles round & round itself rejoicing over its nest & needing no further outlook, – that love such as this is to me a snare & a poison. 241 After Gray‘s rejection later that month she took up an Evangelical theology of circumstance to argue that the rejection represented God‘s wrath towards her. ―It has been the source of all my (external) troubles at the College without exception,‖ she wrote. ―It is not a mistake any more, I think, it is a sin. . . . It must all be given up, not in its effects only but in its innermost principle.‖ 242 What is remarkable about Maynard‘s changing attitude towards her same-sex desire was the role played by circumstances. In a pre-sexological era, Maynard, who seems to have had no knowledge of other pejorative discourses of female same-sex desire, believed God to be revealing His mind to her through the responses to her of the women she courted. As these responses fluctuated, her attitude to her dissident desire changed. Gray‘s rejection of Maynard precipitated a shift in Maynard‘s religio-erotic subjectivity; it brought to the fore the Puritanism of her childhood, which was embedded in her holiness piety. In the mid-1880s Maynard took up the severe Puritan discourse of idolatry to characterize the sin of ―human love.‖ As a young adult she had understood the Christian journey as one in which the believer was frequently beset by enemies and lured by idols of a foreign land. The consequences of succumbing to spiritual enemies and idolatry were severe: ―Ye have seen all the evil that I 241 Greenbook, 4 April 1886, 126. 242 Greenbook, 17 April 17 1886, 130-31. Maynard was not alone in her reading of a lover‘s rejection as evidence of divine anger. When Harriet Hosmer rejected Margaret Coutts Trotter for Lady Louisa Ashburton, Trotter ―was convinced that God had punished her for loving Ashburton more than Him.‖ She believed God had ―broken the will of which he [sic] saw that there was good reason to be jealous – for God is a jealous God and will be first.‖ Margaret Coutts Trotter to Lady Louisa Ashburton, (?1867), Ashburton Accession, Ashburton Collection, National Library of Scotland, 11388/98, quoted in Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 87. 221 brought upon Jerusalem . . . [because] they went to burn incense & to serve other gods . . . Wherefore my fury & mine anger was poured forth.‖ 243 After Gray‘s rejection, Maynard took up the Biblical prophets‘ representation of a wayward ancient Israel as a whore to denote her idolatry. This metaphor derived from the discourse of spiritual marriage elucidated in the Hebrew Bible to describe God‘s relationship with Israel. It referred to Israel‘s turning to foreign gods and the range of behaviors that went with it, including illicit sexuality. Maynard deemed herself, like ancient Israel, to have broken her covenant with God in her pursuit of a now explicitly conceived sexual desire. The sexual queerness possible within the mobile biblical discourses of courtship and marriage, and slippages between literal and metaphorical notions of courtship and marriage were evident as, turning to the writings of the prophet Hosea, Maynard imagined a wronged and vengeful God punishing her, His unfaithful wife, for her idolatrous sexual relationship with a woman: And now will I discover her folly in the sight of her lovers, . . . And I will visit upon her the days when she decked herself with jewels & went after her lovers, & forgot me, for she must pay for the wretched past as well as for the present. . . . Therefore I will allure her & bring her into the wilderness, for I see it is the only way left me; stripped of all, in utter desolation I can begin to speak, & I will speak to her heart, for then at least her heart will lie open. 244 If the co-production of spiritual and literal marriage in biblical discourse enabled Maynard to take up discourses of heterosexual courtship and marriage to describe her homoerotic relationships, the spiritual metaphor of sexual unfaithfulness enabled her to articulate a 243 Greenbook, 5 September 1869, 112-13. 244 Greenbook, 30 April 1886, 142. The actual text of Hosea 2 reads: 10. And now will I discover her lewdness in the sight of her lovers . . . 13. And I will visit upon her the days of Baalim, wherein she burned incense to them, and she decked herself with her earrings and her jewels, and she went after her lovers, and forgat me, saith the LORD. 14. Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak comfortably to her. 222 homosexual subjectivity even while condemning her pursuit of (homosexual) human love over religious desire. Pursuing Hosea‘s image of an unfaithful Israel consigned by God to the desert, Maynard represented her renunciation of desire as entry into a desert. She had earlier portrayed her sexual desire as a ―hunger for love.‖ 245 After Gray‘s rejection in April 1886, she drew on the biblical story of the exodus, which combined the tropes of the desert and hunger, and represented the desert, or her renunciation of all desire, as the product of her illicit satisfying of that hunger. An underlying resistance to God‘s ostensible requirement that she forfeit same-sex desire was nevertheless evident as she noted that ―I have been very hungry, & have said as it were, ‗Well I did not know there wd. be actually nothing to eat in the desert except manna.‖ 246 In later years she compared herself to Christ in the desert tempted with bread by Satan: ―The suggestion used to come to me, ‗Command these stones that they become bread,‘ but I always replied, ‗No. I belong to God now.‘‖ 247 The pursuit of same-sex desire which had initially been part of her piety, inherent in her evangelism and spiritual mothering, was now positioned in stark opposition to it. Paradoxically, however, her use of the metaphor of hunger for same-sex desire and bread for its sating, suggested that same-sex desire was more fundamental to Maynard‘s life than her dispensing with it indicated. 248 Maynard also took up a biblical discourse of physical infirmity to describe her homosexual desire. After rejecting her advances, Gray explained to Maynard that she ―saw there were two sides to me – one independent, practical, hard-working, wholly devoted to the College, 245 Greenbook, 1 February 1896, quoted in Autobiography, 1896, 372. 246 Greenbook, 30 April 1886, 143. 247 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 50, 1887, 184. 248 Phipps notes that she ―admitted that her ‗hunger for love‘ was something ‗deeply rooted in [her] and difficult to give up.‘‖ Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 277. 223 & this she loved, the other ‗something wrong.‘‖ This was the side Gray felt ―doomed nearly always to be in contact with.‖ 249 Maynard had come to a similar decision, ―It is as if one part of me were so soft it is scarcely fitted to live in the world at all, while the rest is independent enough for anything. I used to be independent all round; something has got very wrong.‖ 250 She turned to the story of Christ‘s healing of the invalid at the Pool of Bethesda (―to-day Jesus sees me lie here & says, ‗Wilt thou be made whole?‘‖ 251 ). The invalid had lain at the pool for thirty- eight years hoping to be cured by its waters before Christ healed him. Maynard was thirty-seven in 1886 and believed that she, like the invalid, was not beyond Christ‘s healing. 252 Her appropriation of a biblical discourse of pathology to explain her homoerotic desire suggests a possible convergence between religious and sexological discourses of female inversion in later years. The eleven years following Maynard‘s renunciation of homosexual desire, from 1886 to 1897, were marked by a prolonged depression. Having repudiated human love, she set about ―waiting on God‖ for an experience of divine love, but with little success. 253 For Maynard the repudiation of ―human love‖ put the divine beyond reach. Homoerotic love was an important site of her encounter with the divine; without ―human love,‖ her faith foundered. The prophet Hosea was not to have the final word on her homoerotic desire, however. In 1897 she fell in love with Marion Wakefield, the young Anglo-Irish cousin of Anne Richardson. Reading 249 Greenbook, 30 April 1886, 139-40. 250 Greenbook, 17 April 1886, 30-31. 251 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 49, 1886, 161-62. 252 Ibid., 162. 253 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 50, 1887, 179. 224 circumstances as the expression of God‘s will again, but in a more propitious context, she understood Wakefield to be a ―gift from God.‖ 254 At the beginning of this chapter I suggested that Maynard‘s recourse to the Anglo- and Roman Catholic sisterhoods to represent her acceptance of the position of principal of Westfield was somewhat surprising in the light of Evangelical hostility towards Anglo-Catholics and Catholics. In recent years historians of Victorian religion have pointed to the gender and sexual anxieties underlying this hostility. Evangelicals deemed the rituals of Anglo-Catholicism overly sensual, viewed the confessional as a site of lasciviousness and/or seduction, and represented monasteries as institutions of homosexual license and convents as sites of (hetero)sexual violence. Blurring religious and sexual discourse they depicted conversion to Catholicism as a process of seduction. 255 Gender anxieties informed notions of sexual degeneracy; the Anglo- Catholic clergy with their long vestments and ostensibly excessive refinement were deemed effeminate; the Catholic Church was represented as a ―perverted and vampiric mother,‖ or the sexually degenerate ―whore of Babylon.‖ 256 Underlying both sexual and gender panic was a sense that Catholicism constituted a threat to the family. For example, of the Anglo-Catholic manual on confession, The Priest in Absolution (1866), Archbishop Tait alleged, ―I cannot imagine that any right minded man could wish to have such questions addressed to any member of his family.‖ 257 Maynard‘s founding of Westfield College and her pursuit of a series of homoerotic relationships within its walls suggest that Evangelical anxieties concerning Catholicism may have been exacerbated by developments within Evangelicalism itself. The co-production of 254 Phipps notes that ―even in her seventies‖ Maynard argued of Wakefield, ―that God had blessed her with love for someone who had loved her passionately in return.‖ Phipps, ―Faith,‖ 277. 255 Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997). 256 Ibid., 264. 257 Ibid., 283. 225 literal and spiritual marriage, motherhood, and family in evangelical discourse – the use of each as a metaphor for the other – rendered earthly marriage, motherhood, and the family unstable. Culturally queer spaces emerged within the very making of the evangelical family as meaning vacillated between spiritual and earthly discourses of the family. The disruption of the evangelical alignment of women with literal marriage and motherhood effected by this co- production heightened evangelical anxiety regarding women‘s role and norms of femininity. Maynard rejected earthly marriage and motherhood in favor of their spiritual counterparts in founding Westfield College. If the co-production of literal and spiritual marriage led to culturally queer spaces within evangelicalism, it also produced sexually queer spaces in this tradition. The notion that Christians were the family of God resulted in the construal of mentoring relationships between women as mother-daughter relationships. Metaphors of motherhood were animated by powerful but volatile expressions of religious eros. This was particularly true of holiness piety, a revivalist movement within evangelicalism that was characterized by heightened expressions of religious desire. The proximity between spiritual friendships and marriage, consequent on the framing of marriage by spiritual language, led to slippages between the pursuit of divine love with a spiritual friend and of human love with a spouse. It may well have been gender and sexual anxieties within holiness evangelicalism that exacerbated evangelical antipathy for Anglo- and Roman Catholicism. Evangelical gender and sexual panic with regard to Catholic practices of celibacy, same-sex religious orders, priests‘ disruption of dominant discourses of masculinity, and sensuality in religious devotion, was a response to, and may have served as a regulatory mechanism for, perceived excesses within holiness evangelicalism itself. An Evangelical concern over human love – or idolatrous relationships – usurping love for the divine may have informed Evangelicals‘ turn to sexual 226 discourse and the recapitulation of Reformation notions of the Catholic Church as the ―whore of Babylon.‖ Evangelical disquiet with the prominence of women in the holiness movement, and also perhaps with erotically inflected mother-daughter relationships, may account for representations of the Catholic Church as a sexually voracious and/or vampiric ―mother.‖ Evangelical women‘s refusal of marriage for a religious vocation, and their pursuit of such vocations in close friendships (even ―marriages‖) with other women, may also have fueled evangelical criticism of Catholic celibacy as a perversion of marriage. The blurring of the lines between Evangelicalism and Catholicism, and between sexual anxieties within and outside Evangelicalism, was evident in Maynard‘s life when, in a moment of remorse, she observed of her time at Westfield, ―If only I could have given that love, that preoccupation of the heart, to Christ alone! I had entered the Cloister voluntarily, and I had perpetually transgressed its first rule.‖ 258 258 Greenbook, 8 February 1935, 255. 227 Chapter 4: Motherhood: A Class Act? Class, Race, and Empire in the Evangelical Middle-Class Family When on October 19, 1888, Constance Maynard met six-year-old Stephanë Fazulo, the Italian child she was to adopt, her impressions were not favorable. Fazulo, who had been living in a Parisian orphanage, wore a ― a shabby red frock, scarlet stockings that did not match, darned to the last point all over the knees with still a third red, a black jacket, a rough white knitted handkerchief, & a blue serge cap much the worse for wear.‖ 1 It was Fazulo‘s poor sight that was decisive for Maynard. ―[As] I looked at her sitting there,‖ she wrote later that day, ―a quiet reasonable thought passed through my mind, ‗Of course she won‘t do.‘ It was no sort of repulsion, but a kind of calculation, founded on her spectacles & the squint they were intended to correct, for which I had not been prepared.‖ 2 After some deliberation, Maynard nevertheless went ahead with the adoption. She believed herself guided by God. 3 In her incisive account of this adoption story, the historian Pamela Walker notes Maynard‘s belief that Effie Anthon, as Maynard renamed Stephanë Fazulo, would ―cross class and cultural lines and eventually share Maynard‘s education and social life.‖ 4 Her decision was informed by a reformist Evangelical belief that God‘s grace would not only accomplish Anthon‘s spiritual regeneration but also elevate her socially. Twenty years later, however, Maynard had given up all hope for Anthon. Part of the title for this chapter is taken from Bonnie Fox‘s essay, ―Motherhood as a Class Act: The Many Ways in which ‗Intensive Mothering‘ is Entangled with Social Class,‖ in Social Reproduction: Feminist Political Economy Challenges Neo-liberalism ed. Meg Luxton and Kate Bezanson (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006). 1 Effie Notebooks, 19 October, 1888, 159, Constance Maynard Papers, Queen Mary College, London. The notebooks are also available on microfilm: Constance Maynard, The Diaries of Constance Maynard, The Origins of Modern Feminism, pt. 1. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Microform, 1987. While some of the entries in these notebooks list the day, month, and year, most list only the month and year. I have followed Maynard‘s scheme. 2 Ibid. 3 Effie Notebooks, 4 November 1888, 208. 4 Pamela J. Walker, ―Adoption and Victorian Culture,‖ History of the Family 11, no. 4 (2006): 212. 228 Taking up eugenic discourse she argued that she was ―a wreck, a ruin, diseased, unclean, untrue‖ 5 and ―wondered why I had gone on so long with this being who to me appeared dirty all through in a fashion irremediable.‖ 6 Anthon‘s long struggle with masturbation prompted Maynard‘s recourse to eugenic discourse. Anthon was the illegitimate child of an Italian mother who had been seduced by an Italian Protestant clergyman; Maynard argued that her ―illicit‖ sexuality was hereditary. The role of eugenics in the making of race was evident as Maynard associated Anthon and her parents‘ ostensible sexual immodesty with a purportedly degenerate Italian sexual laxness. 7 This chapter examines Maynard‘s relationship with Anthon as a site at which to chart the final shift in Maynard‘s religious subjectivity and explores the effects of her changing religious beliefs on her sexual discourse. From 1900 she began to engage with theological modernism. With Westfield College firmly established, she pursued as her primary objective the ―modernizing‖ of Evangelicalism. Holiness piety had provided her with a temporary respite to her crisis of faith, but had not provided answers to the questions that informed that crisis. ―There was no admixture of the new insight with the old faith,‖ she wrote in a 1901 article for The Nineteenth Century, ―and therefore [holiness piety] could not deal with the central grief, written deep within.‖ 8 A long-held frustration with Evangelicals‘ intellectual timidity, and particularly that of the holiness Evangelicals, prompted Maynard‘s turn to modernism. Of the 1906 Keswick 5 Effie Notebooks, January 1909, 224. 6 Effie Notebooks, February 1909, 243. 7 Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 220. 8 Constance Maynard, ―An Individual Retrospect of the Religious Thought of the Nineteenth Century, Part II,‖ Expositor (September 1901): 253. 229 Conference she noted, ―the intellectual interest seemed to me to be extraordinarily low; for the most part it was stereotyped poor & limited.‖ 9 As in earlier years, broader cultural discourses, science in particular, played an important role in Maynard‘s shifting religious beliefs. She turned to the Darwinism that had so challenged her faith in the 1870s and sought to reconcile it with Evangelicalism; her ―synthesizing‖ of the two at the turn of the century comprised her primary effort to modernize Evangelicalism. Maynard‘s modernizing project was also crucially informed by the high imperialism of the turn of the century, which saw both the expansion of the British Empire and anxieties about its viability. Her turn to Darwin to modernize Evangelicalism was influenced by her imperialist sentiments and her reworked theology bore their imprint. From her synthesis of Darwinism and Evangelicalism, Maynard developed a new, scientific and imperially inflected feminism; this too was part of her project to modernize Evangelicalism. Maynard‘s ―modern‖ Evangelicalism represents the reconfiguring of faith in response to ―modern thought‖ of the kind that scholars of gender and religion have pointed to in refuting singular trajectories of secularization. It demonstrates one process through which scientific discourse gained ascendance in turn-of-the-century Evangelicalism. The eugenics discourse that emerged with Maynard‘s attempt to synthesize Evangelicalism and Darwinism illuminates the often overlooked role of scientifically inflected re-workings of religion in the ascendance of the eugenics movement, including feminist iterations of it. Maynard‘s forging of an Evangelical discourse of modernity also points up the historically specific constitution of discourses of modernity. It points to the inadequacies of contemporary categories of ―modernity‖ that, by assuming religion to be antithetical to science, exclude religion from consideration and/or, by re- inscribing a metropole/colony dichotomy, ignore the indebtedness of British modernity to imperialism. Indeed, I argue that the scientifically inflected religious discourse of empire of the 9 Autobiography, 1906, 562. 230 turn of the century provides one of the most persuasive reasons for questioning dominant notions of ―the concept of a rational secularized culture . . . [as] a key signifier of modernity.‖ 10 As in earlier years, Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity and her sexual discourse were structured by shifts in her religious beliefs. The former thus constitute particularly productive sites for investigating those beliefs and, in this case, for examining the relationship between religion, science, and empire in the making of modernity. The next chapter explores Maynard‘s homoerotic relationships as a site at which Maynard‘s modern imperially inflected synthesis of Darwinism and Evangelicalism found articulation. This chapter examines her relationship with Anthon, with a particular focus on Maynard‘s sexual discourse, in order to chart the making of Maynard‘s imperialism and her scientific discourse at the turn of the century and to plot the ways in which these intersected with her making of a modern Evangelicalism and Evangelical feminism. In recent years scholars of British imperialism have undertaken a thorough critique of Enlightenment-indebted definitions of ―modernity,‖ arguing that by aligning modernity with the triumph of reason, the ascent of science, and human progress, the indebtedness of British modernity to imperialism has been elided. The innovations of the industrial revolution, upon which Western notions of modernity are based, were predicated on the enslaving or subjugation of indigenous peoples, the occupation of their land, and the appropriation of their resources. Postcolonial scholars see the failure of British historians to recognize the imperialist making of British modernity as a product of the division of national and imperial history that has long characterized British historiography. Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper have called for a theoretical framework that integrates ―metropole‖ and ―colony.‖ While much postcolonial scholarship in British studies focuses on the colonies, some scholars have begun to explore the 10 Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 10. 231 making of imperialist discourse in the British ―metropole‖ as one means of challenging the metropole/colony divide. Feminist historians of gender and empire, for example, have begun to chart the complicity of metropolitan British women and British feminism in the making and sustaining of imperialist discourse. 11 The autonomy of middle-class British women and their quest for education, access to the professions, and citizenship, has been shown to depend upon their positioning themselves as the guardians of indigenous women. 12 Scholars of religion, gender, and empire have charted the implication of the religious subjectivity and religious work of metropolitan British women in imperialism and have begun to position discourses of modernity in relation to this enquiry. However, feminist historians of Christianity have yet to explore the engagement of metropolitan Christian women with the overlapping discourses of modernity, science, and empire. This chapter utilizes scholarship on the family, drawing attention to the sexual discourse of the middle-class family, as a framework for investigating the relationship of religion, science, and empire in Maynard‘s making of modern Evangelicalism. With the efforts of some British historians to integrate national and imperial historiographies, scholarship on the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century family has been transformed. Feminist historians have noted that the nuclear family that was the acme of middle- class culture, and indebted to evangelicalism, was posited as the telos of the ―civilizing‖ mission 11 For key texts in the field of European women and empire see Gayatri Spivak, ―Three Women‘s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,‖ Critical Enquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 243-61; Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1886-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995); Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and Catherine Hall, ―Of Gender and Empire: Reflections on the Nineteenth Century,‖ in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46-76. 12 Thus, for example, Antoinette Burton notes how the Evangelical feminist Josephine Butler‘s positioned British women as the guardians of ostensibly helpless ―native‖ women in her campaign against the Indian Contagious Diseases Acts in the late 1880s (Burton, Burdens of History, 127-170). See Spivak‘s ―Three Women‘s Texts‖ for the initial formulation of this concept. 232 in imperialist discourse. 13 Catherine Hall thus argues that ―civilizing‖ indigenous peoples most often meant ―turn[ing] sinners into new Christian subjects, living industrious, domesticated, and familial lives‖ 14 – lives defined by a ―set of ‗proper‘ relations between men and women‖ 15 and companionate marriage. A related body of literature inaugurated by Stoler and Cooper explores the intimate domains of sex, sentiment, and domestic arrangement as key micropolitical sites at which the macropolitics of empire were constituted and contested. 16 Within the colonial home Europeans aligned middle-class competencies, sensibilities, and moral values with ―whiteness‖ in forging difference between themselves and their children on the one hand, and ―native‖ women and children on the other. The sexual production of race accompanied its cultural production. Situating Foucault‘s work on sexuality within an imperial frame, Stoler examines the making, unmaking, and remaking of racial categories in changing colonial policies on miscegenation, prostitution, and concubinage as they were enacted or resisted in intimate relationships of empire. 17 Studies of imperial intimacy have tended to focus on colonial contexts. Among the few studies of the metropolitan family that do exist, the British home is represented as a material product of imperialism and a showcase for it. 18 Anne McClintock‘s work is a notable exception. 13 Hall, ―Of Gender and Empire‖; McClintock, Imperial Leather; Philippa Levine, ―Sexuality, Gender, and Empire,‖ in Levine, Gender and Empire, 134-155; Rosemary Marangoly George, ―Homes in the Empire, Empires in the Home,‖ in Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary Marangoly George (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 47-74. 14 Hall, ―Of Gender,‖ 59. 15 James Mill, The History of British India, 2 vols. (1818; New York, 1968), 309-10, quoted in Hall, ―Of Gender,‖ 51. 16 Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler, ―Between Metropole and Colony. Rethinking a Research Agenda,‖ in Tensions of Empire. Colonial Cultures in the Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 1-56; Stoler, Education of Desire; Stoler, Carnal Knowledge. 17 Stoler, Education of Desire and Carnal Knowledge. 18 McClintock, Imperial Leather; Antoinette Burton, ―Women and ‗Domestic‘ Imperial Culture: The Case of Victorian Britain,‖ in Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 174-84. 233 Turning to the sexual within the domestic, and drawing on the earlier work of Leonore Davidoff, she examines the imperial framing of the sadomasochistic relationship between the Victorian barrister Arthur Munby and the maid-of-all-work Hannah Cullwick; Cullwick‘s ―dirtying up‖ as a servant for Munby demonstrates slippages between discourses of class (servanthood) and race (African slavery) in the middle-class home. Walker‘s study of Maynard‘s adoption of Stephanë Fazulo demonstrates another way in which imperialist discourse informed the making of the metropolitan middle-class family. She notes that, at a time when middle-class women‘s femininity was predicated on successful motherhood, Maynard turned to an imperially inflected eugenics as a means to excuse her failed ―mothering‖ of Anthon. 19 She rightly notes that Maynard‘s recourse to eugenics provides ―one close view of . . . [the] shift‖ towards ―more biological explanations for human behavior in the later nineteenth century.‖ 20 Walker identifies important similarities between eugenics and Evangelical holiness piety that facilitated the assimilation of eugenic discourse into Evangelicalism: both systems of thought shared ―a belief that the body expressed truths about the individuals‘ character and inheritance.‖ 21 However she relinquishes this line of enquiry for the assertion of the co-existence of the two discourses (Maynard drew on ―a combination of racial, medical and religious explanations‖ 22 ). While drawing attention to the role of Maynard‘s middle-class status in her adoption of Anthon, and pointing to intersections in class and racial discourse in Maynard‘s turn to eugenics, Walker also neglects the role of Evangelicalism in the making of class and overlooks the role of class discourse in the incorporation of eugenic discourse into Maynard‘s Evangelicalism. As a result, 19 Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 213. 20 Ibid., 212. 21 Ibid., 220. 22 Ibid., 214. Walker also argues that ―determined to deter Effie from marriage, Constance put aside the language of evangelicalism and turned to scientific reasoning‖ (218). 234 the relation of class to racial discourse in Evangelicalism is underexplored as is the role of class- based metropolitan Evangelical eugenic discourse in the making of colonial discourses of race. In this chapter I argue that rather than simply demonstrating the co-existence of two discourses, 23 Evangelicalism and eugenics, Maynard‘s relationship with her adopted daughter illustrates a shift from a traditional Evangelicalism to a more scientific iteration of it. Maynard‘s turn to eugenics was the consequence not only of a need to account for her maternal inadequacies but also of a far larger ―modernizing‖ project that was precipitated with her synthesizing of Evangelicalism and Darwinism in the early 1900s. I argue, contra Walker, that holiness piety and eugenics, while sharing some similarities, were actually in substantial opposition to one another. Maynard‘s account of her adoption of Anthon offers a rare record of a working-class woman refusing a middle-class woman‘s eugenic effort to police her sexuality. It is all the rarer for Anthon‘s recourse to holiness piety in this endeavor. Maynard, with the self- assurance of many women of her class, left a candid record of Anthon‘s refusal of her eugenic Evangelicalism. 24 Anthon‘s challenge to Maynard‘s eugenic discourse of sexuality elucidates the contest through which eugenic versions of evangelicalism triumphed in early twentieth- century Britain. It illustrates how Evangelical notions of grace came to be set aside for theories of heredity, how a new Evangelicalism that deemed the body all-significant came to triumph over an older, traditional Evangelicalism in which the wellbeing of the spirit was largely dissociated from that of the body, and how the fluid discourse of the evangelical family – in which spiritual understandings of the family of God vied with literal understandings of the family – came to be supplanted by a more rigid eugenic discourse in which the literal family and the law of heredity predominated. Maynard‘s account of her adoption of Anthon also illustrates 23 Walker suggests that ―although divine authority and medical authority might seem to contradict each other, Maynard struggled to balance the two in her effort to explain and reform Effie.‖ Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 212. 24 Walker notes that although ―Constance‘s perspective predominates in this story . . . it is possible to glimpse Effie‘s point of view in her letters and in conversations Constance recorded‖ (Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 213). 235 the role of class in the metropolitan Evangelical making of imperialist discourse and the role of imperialism in the making of an Evangelical discourse of modernity. The first part of this chapter explores Stoler‘s notion that racial discourse was culturally produced within the colonial family through the alignment of ―whiteness‖ – or in this case a white Englishness – with middle-class competencies, sensibilities, and values. It extends Stoler‘s analysis by examining the role of the latter in the making of race in the metropolitan family. Maynard‘s attempt to make a middle-class British child of Anthon, her failure to achieve this, and her subsequent re-making of Anthon‘s working-class status reveals the artificiality, fluidity, and instability of class difference. It suggests a similar artifice and instability in the metropolitan construction of racial difference. The second section examines Maynard‘s attempt to modernize Evangelicalism by synthesizing it with Darwinism at the turn of the century. High imperialism played an important role in this endeavor and the ―modern‖ Evangelical feminism that was an effect of it. Maynard‘s eugenic response to Anthon‘s supposedly illicit sexuality demonstrates the emergence of eugenic discourse within Maynard‘s modern Evangelicalism. The tenuous nature of Maynard‘s making of Anthon‘s class and racial difference, and the contradictions and resistances within her understanding of Anthon, led Maynard to embrace eugenic discourse, which fixed class and racial difference as ―natural‖ or ―biological.‖ Maynard‘s sexual discourse therefore constitutes a crucial site for understanding the relationship between religion, science, and empire in Maynard‘s making of a modern Evangelicalism. Stephanë Rosabianca Fazulo was the ―illegitimate‖ daughter of an unmarried Italian woman, Rosabianca Fazulo (1862-1930), 25 and a married Italian Protestant clergyman, Oscar Concordia. She had been conceived one night in 1881 when Concordia, a friend of the Fazulo 25 Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 213. 236 family, had offered to sit with the ill Rosabianca. Rosabianca, on being found to be pregnant, had been banished from her family, and abandoned by Concordia. She had gone to stay with relatives in Naples and it was here that Stephanë was born in 1882. Two years later Rosabianca was found by Salvation Army officers (in Tuscany or in the south of France, the facts are not clear), homeless, begging, and ―nearly out of her mind with anxiety & shame & despair.‖ 26 The English feminist Josephine Butler learned of her plight and took her into her home in Winchester for three months, ―calmed & restored her, taught her both French & English,‖ and returned her to the Salvation Army in France. 27 By 1886 she was working as a Salvation Army cadet in the Army‘s orphanage in Paris. 28 Stephanë‘s history during these years is less clear; it is likely that she was cared for in France while her mother was in England. In March 1886, when she was four years old, she was placed in the Salvation Army‘s Paris orphanage. She was not told that Rosabianca was her mother; she knew her only as one of the Army cadets. She had been told her mother and father were dead. 29 In 1888, the Salvation Army, short of funding, closed its Paris orphanage. Stephanë, six years old at the time, was placed in the care of Ellen Pash, an officer with the Salvation Army and a Girton graduate with whom Maynard was acquainted. Pash took Stephanë to England in the hopes of finding a home for her. 30 Rosabianca, probably in an effort to remain near her daughter, also moved to England; she was working in a London hospital and living with a grocer 26 Effie Notebooks, 19 October 1888, 163. 27 Effie Notebooks, Retrospect of 1888, 19 October 1888, 85. 28 Effie Notebooks, 19 October, 1888, 163. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. It was unusual for the Salvation Army to pursue adoption when a child‘s mother was still alive. Walker notes, quoting J. Fairbank‘s Booth’s Boots (1983), that evangelicals who administered rescue homes believed ―the child would help ensure the mother‘s redemption and many insisted that no sinner should escape the consequences of sin‖ (Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 211-13). Like evangelical rescue homes, the Army preferred children to remain with their mothers; we cannot be sure why, in this case, Pash sought adoption for Anthon. 237 and his wife in Bishopsgate Within when, in October 1888, Pash took Anthon to see Maynard. Pash had written to Maynard about the child, asking her to look out for adoptive parents for her, and Maynard had asked to meet her. Maynard chronicled the adoption and her subsequent relationship with Anthon in seven volumes of notebooks. In the 1880s adoption procedures had not yet been formalized in Britain (adoption was only legalized in 1926). 31 While, as Walker notes, the adoption of working-class children by working-class families was not uncommon (it allowed working-class children to remain close to their families and friends), adoption amongst the middle class was rare. 32 The adoption of children by unmarried middle-class women was a contravention of norms of middle-class femininity. Ellen Pash thus wrote to Maynard: ―of course the world would object, but . . . Christ demanded sacrifices.‖ 33 The multivalence of evangelical discourses of the family – and the contestation between literal and spiritual meanings of family in particular – was evident as, in the following weeks, Maynard turned to the Bible in an attempt to ascertain God‘s will. She could not be sure whether God was calling her only to spiritual motherhood (in her role as Mistress of Westfield College) or to literal motherhood also. ―All night long the alternatives keep coming before my mind,‖ she wrote, ―‗Whoso receiveth one such little child in my name, receiveth me,‘ & then again, ‗Whoso forsaketh not father or mother or child for my sake, cannot be my disciple.‘ Which was true of these solemn voices?‘‖ 34 Through a series of external events Maynard came to believe that God was directing her to adopt the child. Her decision to adopt 31 See Leonore Davidoff‘s ―Kinship as a Categorical Concept,‖ Journal of Social History (2005): 411-28, quoted in Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 214. 32 Walker, Adoption,‖ 212. 33 Effie Notebooks, 26 October 1888, 169. 34 Effie Notebooks, 30 October 1888, 190. 238 Anthon illustrates the role of evangelical discourse in producing dissident configurations of the family. Evangelical discourses of the family were nevertheless deeply implicated in the constitution and maintenance of class difference. In the late eighteenth century, the family had become a crucial cultural institution for an emerging middle class intent on distinguishing itself from the aristocracy and working class. 35 It was a site at which the boundaries of the working and middle class were entrenched. Maynard was from an upper-middle-class Evangelical Anglican family. The importance of the middle-class family in the consolidating of class difference was most evident in Maynard‘s early life in her years at Girton College. She entered Girton (then ―Hitchin‖) in 1872, at a time of heightened class consciousness in Britain. The Reform Act of 1867 had extended the franchise to the majority of working-class men; the democratization of education followed, with the passage of the 1870 Education Act mandating the education of all children up to the age of twelve and allowing women to serve on School Boards. The founding of Girton College in 1869 was part of this movement, but in its earliest years women‘s higher education comprised a site at which class difference was entrenched rather than contested. Soon after entering Girton, Maynard noted with satisfaction the ―perfect standard of refinement‖ established by Louisa Lumsden, the leading student. Although not an aristocrat, Lumsden was from an ancient Scottish family; her mother ―been a Forbes of Forbes Castle‖ and the other Girton students came from similarly auspicious homes. 36 When, from its third year, Girton began admitting students of the lower sections of the middle class – daughters of less affluent Nonconformist clergy, and after some discussion, the daughter of a London shopkeeper – Maynard viewed the incoming students with dismay. ―They were the first drops of 35 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780- 1850, rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2002). 36 Greenbook, 30 July 1876, 66-67. 239 that shower that brought to so low a level the refinement of our Women‘s Colleges,‖ she wrote in later years. 37 Her attitude to class was not significantly different ten years later when she founded Westfield College. When the college opened in 1882 she noted that ―it is hard, very hard to gather in real gentlewomen, for the classes below come pressing upward, ever upward, & they must be accepted.‖ 38 At Girton in the early 1870s, Maynard turned to the family to consolidate class difference. The families of the newer students were, she argued, ―absolutely intolerable in their want of good taste & good breeding.‖ 39 They were ―people we should not think of ‗knowing‘ at home, people whom to ‗know‘ & to welcome to your home, meant the exclusion of your equals.‖ 40 Sexual discourses of the evangelical family played an important role in inscribing class difference too. Maynard‘s discovery that the daughter of the London shopkeeper, Amy Mantle, had been born out of wedlock, constituted an almost insurmountable barrier to their friendship. ―Now indeed I was under a blow,‖ she averred in her autobiography. ―A girl who ought never to have been born, a girl stained through & through with disgrace, a girl without a name to sign, with no real relatives, __ my mind seemed to fly about over the shocking history.‖ 41 By 1873, however, Maynard was compelled to engage with the newer group of lower middle-class Girton students. Her efforts to befriend and to convert the first generation of Girton students had failed, and believing it necessary to disseminate the gospel, she turned with reluctance to the newer incoming students. ―Hitherto I had sought the society of my superiors,‖ 37 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 11, 1872, 341. 38 Autobiography, 1911, 636-37. 39 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 22, 1875, 546-47. 40 Ibid. 41 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 16, 1874, 575. 240 she wrote in later years, ―now I turned round & tried to give out my treasures to those who were not only young & ignorant, but recognised as inferiors.‖ 42 She won converts amongst these students and the potentially egalitarian nature of the spiritual ―family of God‖ came into conflict with the class-based Evangelical discourse of the literal family. Maynard turned to the latter to negotiate the demands of the spiritual mother-daughter relationship. When her converts talked to Maynard about their families, a means of instituting intimacy amongst young middle-class women, Maynard entrenched class difference by refusing to reciprocate (―One of them . . . said, ‗Here I‘ve told you the characters of all my family, & we‘ve consulted about them all, & I haven‘t one idea how many brothers & sisters you have!‖ 43 ). More significantly, she took up spiritual discourse and ―de-corporealized‖ her converts in order to assume the role of their spiritual mother. ―[They] were hopeless,‖ she wrote in later years, ―until I divested them of both body & mind & looked at them as immortal souls, & then I loved them dearly, both collectively & separately.‖ 44 Maynard understood the body to be an important designator of class but, paradoxically, the body/spirit dualism of traditional Evangelical discourse enabled her to overcome it; while perpetuating class divides, the body/spirit dualism nevertheless allowed for some interchange across them. In 1888 a belief in the superiority of the middle-class family informed Maynard‘s class subjectivity and enabled her to override the claims of Rosabianca Fazulo, a working-class mother, on Fazulo‘s daughter. 45 In November 1888 she met with the Salvation Army solicitor, Dr. Ranger. He informed her that under English law parents could not be irrevocably separated 42 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 14, 1873, 496. 43 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 22, 1875, 547. 44 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 25, 1875, 756. Paradoxically the divesting of the lower middle-class Girton students of their corporeality did not preclude the expression of physical intimacies intrinsic to spiritual mother- daughter relationships. 45 Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 214. 241 from their children. If Rosabianca became economically independent through marriage or through her work, she might take Anthon back into her custody. 46 With Maynard‘s consent, Ranger, over-awed by Maynard‘s upper-middle-class status, drew up a contract that would make it as difficult as possible for Fazulo to ascertain, let alone to assert, her parental rights (―The use of this document is chiefly to . . . make her think this transfer much more irrevocable than really it is‖ 47 ). Walker suggests that Maynard may have further prevented Fazulo from making a claim on Anthon by orchestrating her removal to South Africa as a nurse for the Cape General Mission in 1892. 48 The paradoxical role of the discourse of the spiritual family in entrenching class difference was evident when later in November 1888, Maynard took Anthon to Dr. Ranger‘s office to effect the adoption. Ellen Pash and Mr. and Mrs. Lampard, the couple with whom Fazulo lodged, were present and, Maynard writes, a ―fourth [person] sat still and stony & I knew it was the mother.‖ 49 Fazulo ―had on the neat hospital dress, & looked lady-like, tall & imposing,‖ 50 but as the meeting progressed she became increasingly distraught. As ―poor Rosabianca‘s sobs [rose] in intensity,‖ 51 Maynard wrote, she went up to her and ―said quite low in her ear, ‗I will care for your child. I will love her. . . . I will do all that I can that she shall 46 Effie Notebooks, 8 November 1888, 212-213. Walker, quoting G. Belmer‘s Friends of the Family (1998), confirms that ―in 1888, no parent could relinquish rights and responsibilities for a child nor could another adult assume them.‖ Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 212. 47 Effie Notebooks, 8 November 1888, 214. 48 Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 214, quoting, Memorandum, 1892; Council Minutes 13 June 1891, 18 April 1892, South African Pioneer, January 1893. Although she made occasional trips to Britain, Fazulo lived in South Africa until her death in 1930. In1894 she married fellow missionary Samuel Holt and, after working in Cape Town, they settled at a mission station at Mount Packard, near Umtata, in Tembuland (217). 49 Effie Notebooks, 16 November 1888, 222. 50 Ibid., 223. 51 Ibid., 226. 242 grow up a Christian, & you will live with her in heaven.‘‖ 52 Making recourse to the spiritual family, Maynard restructured Anthon‘s literal family. She later prayed that Anthon ―might be His child fr. the [very] first, & that He wd. raise her up to do great good for His kingdom, so that many & many might thank God for the work of that day.‖ 53 She prayed also that she and Anthon might ―prove the beauty of an ideal relation of Mother & daughter, loving each other unreservedly, [because] we loved our Lord still more.‖ 54 In this instance an evangelical bifurcation of the body and spirit enabled the upper-middle-class Maynard to devalue the physical working-class family. The radical potential of the spiritual discourse of the family was defused as spiritual discourse served to consolidate the formation of this middle-class family. Scholars of British imperialism have explored the efforts of colonial authorities to re- structure indigenous families along the lines of the middle-class British family as part of the ―civilizing mission,‖ and the role of Christian missionaries in that endeavor. Missionaries in the Caribbean and Africa sought to bring African families into conformity with middle-class British ones; in India they attempted to achieve the disbanding of women‘s quarters in Muslim and Hindu households and endeavored to restructure matrilineal extended Nair households, for example. 55 Such efforts co-existed, paradoxically, with the tragic wrenching of children from Aboriginal families in Australia and Canada as part of the ―civilizing‖ mission. Maynard‘s evangelical unmaking of the family of the working-class Fazulo provides a metropolitan counterpart to the colonial re-structuring of indigenous families. It suggests that the dehumanizing process through which colonial authorities were able to reconfigure the families of indigenous people had its counterpart in middle-class attitudes towards the working class in the 52 Ibid., 228. 53 Ibid., 229. 54 Effie Notebooks, 4 November 1888, 208. 55 Hall, ―Of Gender‖; Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (The New York: Routledge, 1998), 168. 243 metropole. It brings to the fore the role of Evangelicalism in that process of dehumanization. The Evangelical discourses of the spiritual and literal family worked in tandem in this project; the Evangelical discourse of the literal family elevated the middle-class family, while the discourse of the spiritual family eroded indigenous and working-class family formations. Maynard‘s subsequent efforts to ―reform‖ the foreign and ostensibly working-class Anthon‘s behavior demonstrates the role of metropolitan class relations, and middle-class approaches to working-class families in particular, in the making of race in the colonies. In a recent study Seth Koven argues that some middle-class Londoners‘ practice of ―slumming‖ (visiting or living amongst the poor in the East End neighborhoods) shaped Victorian philanthropy and social welfare: the ―private lives of individuals intersected with the public histories of benevolence.‖ 56 Maynard‘s relationship with Anthon demonstrates an intermediate step in this process, the dissemination of the attitudes of middle-class ―slummers‖ throughout the middle class. Indeed, Maynard‘s and Anthon‘s relationship can be understood within the framework of social reform represented by some forms of slumming, even though it was mostly removed from the poor neighborhoods of London. Unlike Koven‘s middle-class subjects, Maynard‘s attitude to Anthon was not, as far as we can see, sexually inflected. It nevertheless entailed a discourse of sexual regulation and demonstrates a similar combination of curiosity and repulsion, the amelioration of class difference with its consolidation, that marked the efforts of reformist ―slummers.‖ Maynard‘s and Anthon‘s relationship suggests that slumming was not only a spatially located practice pursued by a small minority of middle-class Londoners, but might better be understood as one mode through which middle-class Britons related to the working class in a range of locations, including the middle-class home. 56 Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2004). 244 Maynard‘s early relationship with Anthon was marked by the curiosity and the earnestness, the self-interest and the altruism, that characterized social reform efforts. Anthon had been placed in an orphanage in Kilburn upon arriving in London. Upon collecting her after the adoption proceedings, Maynard noted with interest, but also distaste, the condition of the orphanage girls: two ―rather workhouse looking girls with cropped heads & long straight coarse pinafores opened the door.‖ 57 There followed a great effort on Maynard‘s part to reform Anthon‘s appearance. The two proceeded to Garrould‘s department store on Edgeware Road and ―we went round to various counters buying navy blue stocking[s] & gloves, navy blue ribbon for hat & hair, a little lace . . . then went to other shops for a straw hat, & shoes, &c.‖ 58 Later, at a friend‘s home, Anthon set about brushing her hair, and Maynard ―slipped the new [dress] over her head . . . tied her hair back with the navy blue ribbon,‖ and, she notes, ―there was our little maid tidy & complete.‖ 59 Anthon‘s physical transformation altered Maynard‘s attitude towards her: ―For the first time it came to me that it was a dear little face; the spectacles were off, the cast in the eye did not shew much, & the little cheeks though usually rather pale looked very soft, & the mouth was frank & pleasant with its line of baby-teeth still quite perfect.‖ 60 Koven notes the role of cross-class dressing in slumming; middle-class reformers assumed the clothing of the poor in order to ascertain first-hand the living conditions of the work houses and low-incoming lodging. He notes that clothing ―was both a metaphor and a marker‖ of class identity, but the ability of the wealthy to ―cross-dress‖ indicated the instability of this 57 Effie Notebooks, 29 October, 1888, 170. 58 Ibid., 182-83. 59 Ibid. 60 Ibid., 185. 245 indicator of class and of class itself. 61 Maynard‘s sought the reverse effect with Anthon; by re- clothing her she believed she had made the first step in rendering her a middle-class child. This was not to be the case, however. Anthon‘s resistance to Maynard‘s reformist project paradoxically facilitated the perpetuation of the ―slumming‖ framework within which this relationship took place. In her work on imperial intimacy, Stoler explores the cultural production of race within the intimate domain of the family; European women aligned whiteness with middle-class European competencies, sensibilities, and moral values in forging difference between themselves and their children on the one hand and their ―native‖ servants and their children on the other. Maynard‘s difficulties in rendering Anthon an ideal middle-class child demonstrate the role of particular competencies, sensibilities, and moral values in the making of class in the British metropole, and the role of these in the making of the racial categories of empire. Little is known about the two-and-a-half years after Anthon‘s adoption – the period is largely unchronicled by Maynard 62 – but by 1891, when Anthon was nine years old, Maynard believed her adopted daughter had failed to attain the character of a middle-class child. Anthon had a ―forward & managing disposition,‖ demonstrated an exaggerated sense of her achievements, was insufficiently contrite when found out in her transgressions, exuded an unshakeable sense of self- satisfaction, and lacked a ―sense of honour.‖ 63 Anthon seemed unaware of class distinctions; she spoke to Maynard and her family in patronizing ways, was rude to Maynard‘s students, and failed to demonstrate the requisite noblesse oblige to the servants. 64 Her behavior also 61 Koven, Slumming, 19. 62 The period is not covered in Maynard in the Effie Notebooks, and Anthon is mentioned only intermittently in the autobiography; the Greenbooks for these years have been destroyed. 63 Effie Notebooks, January 1896, 162. 64 Effie Notebooks, August 1891, 3. 246 contravened the gendered making of middle-class character. ―Of grace, reticence, pretty stand- back manner or nobleness of bearing, she has not one vestige,‖ Maynard wrote in 1892. 65 Anthon‘s most pronounced deficit lay in the area of sentiment; she lacked the ability of the ideal middle-class daughter to feel ―correctly‖ and to love ―properly.‖ Feelings were central to the Victorian middle class‘s construction of class difference. The middle class differentiated itself from the working class on the basis of a refinement of feelings, particularly the wider range of feelings they believed they experienced and the appropriateness of their emotions. In her study of eighteenth-century Methodism, Phyllis Mack delineates an Evangelical genealogy for the middle class‘s association of the ability to feel ―properly‖ with morality. Contrary to common perception, the awakening of emotion in the revivals was not as important to evangelicals as its subsequent analysis and education. 66 The Christian journey required ―a radical and painful self-fashioning‖ including ―master[ing] ‗bad‘ feelings like anger or envy while nurturing ‗good‘ feelings like compassion or tenderness.‖ 67 Early evangelicals endured a ―lifelong struggle to achieve higher and higher levels of self-analysis, moral improvement, and appropriate feelings.‖ 68 Feeling, and the ability to analyze feeling, were integral to Evangelical spirituality and thus gained a moral and a rational valence that facilitated the making of class and racial distinctions. Boundaries between classes were animated by affect; the repugnance felt by some of the middle class for the working class was one such boundary-marking emotion. The family was the site at which feeling was cultivated. For girls, the education of feelings was undertaken and evidenced in the mother-daughter relationship. Despite Maynard‘s 65 Effie Notebooks, May 1892, 96. 66 Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 67 Ibid., 15. 68 Ibid., 18. 247 best efforts, however, by 1891 Anthon failed to evince the feelings of a middle-class daughter. She did not demonstrate the effusive love of the ideal Victorian daughter for her mother; when Maynard visited her at the small family school, Selwood, at which she boarded, ―though pleased to see us, [she] was not in the least rapturous.‖ 69 At other times Anthon loved too quickly and enthusiastically. ―A few hours of kindness,‖ Maynard wrote, ―is quite enough to make her transfer the most loving terms, wh. is a kind of ignorance of the heart rather than the head, wh. is rather trying.‖ 70 Her affection demonstrated other moral shortcomings; she loved only ―as long as loving is pleasant, & becomes heartless when it brings with it any effort or trouble.‖ 71 Maynard derided the ―miserable narrowness & poverty of [Anthon‘s] views of affection & fidelity.‖ 72 For Anthon, however, middle-class feelings and their moral content were a luxury. The uncertainty of sources of affection concomitant on orphanage life led her to seek affection wherever it could be found and the working-class culture of the Salvation Army orphanage supported wider affective networks than the nuclear family. Maynard‘s disappointment in Anthon reveals an underlying assumption about the malleability of class and particularly of the role of Christianity in the construction of class difference. Maynard had believed that a Christian education would achieve the transformation of Anthon‘s character (through conversion) and would simultaneously equip her with the sensibilities, values, and competencies of a middle-class child. Evangelicalism, the middle-class family, and the making of class difference were inextricably intertwined. Eventually Maynard argued that the ten-year old Anthon‘s failure to love her as the ideal middle-class daughter loved and admired her mother, to identify the requisite shades of feeling in a range of relationships, 69 Effie Notebooks, November 1891, 35. 70 Effie Notebooks, May 1892, 99. 71 Effie Notebooks, August 1891, 27. 72 Effie Notebooks, May 1902, 6. 248 and to prioritize individual expressions of feeling over corporate ones, rendered her a ―moral idiot.‖ The moral framework within which feeling was understood was evident at the end of 1892 when Maynard suggested that ―the last strands of my respect for her character & trust in her affection or stability gave way & we went on morally parted & mechanistically united.‖ 73 Her response to Anthon‘s transgression of the sensibilities of the English middle class also had an affective element; she felt a ―real sense of repulsion & degradation‖ towards her. 74 Maynard‘s subsequent relationship with Anthon illustrates the artificiality of class difference, the effort required to sustain it, and the anxieties that surrounded class status. Although Anthon had resembled a working-class child when Maynard first met her, her class standing was actually ambiguous. Her mother‘s family held ―a very good bourgeois position in Rome‖ 75 and her father, a Protestant clergyman, ―was also of [a] respected middle-class Roman family.‖ 76 Despite having lived in an orphanage for two years, she spoke a ―pretty, distinct, fine French.‖ 77 At the time of her adoption, a working-class home had been deemed unsuitable by those who knew her (―all agreed she seemed eminently unsuited to the humblest ranks‖ 78 ). Anthon‘s misbehavior had become a source of class-based anxiety to Maynard; she feared that her adopted daughter‘s behavior might undermine her own social status. When Maynard failed to transform Anthon into a middle-class British child, she resorted to extreme measures, which nevertheless still demonstrated the artificiality of class. After one spate of misbehavior on Anthon‘s part, Maynard arranged for her to work as a servant for two weeks for a dressmaker, 73 Effie Notebooks, December 1892, 202. 74 Effie Notebooks, September 1891, 31. 75 Effie Notebooks, Retrospect of 1888, 19 October 1888, 83. 76 Ibid., 84. 77 Effie Notebooks, 29 October 1888, 181. 78 Effie Notebooks, 28 October 1888, 177. 249 Mrs. Kent, a friend of the head servant at Westfield, Goldsmith. 79 At Mrs. Kent‘s, Anthon would ―help make beds, dust, wash up, & join in everything . . . she should have her hair plaited up, & be treated as one to help, not to be waited on.‖ 80 The two weeks of service demonstrated in the starkest terms what Anthon‘s fate would be should she fail to assimilate the sensibilities, values, and competencies of the middle class. It was a punishment not only for Anthon‘s misbehavior but also for her insensitivity to class distinctions and her failure to appreciate Maynard‘s efforts to elevate her socially. Maynard‘s relegating of Anthon to Mrs. Kent also took place within the social reform framework; like many of the efforts of middle-class reformers it represented both an attempt, albeit a paradoxical one, to better Effie socially, while at the same time entrenching class difference. The home of a working-class woman became the site at which Maynard, as a middle-class woman, sought to consolidate the boundaries of class. At the conclusion of the two weeks Maynard was dismayed to find that Anthon, who had adapted very quickly to her environment, had appropriated the speech, behaviors, and sentiments of the working-class Mrs. Kent. It was Anthon‘s disregard of the elevated role of the middle- class family, her blithe contravention of its boundaries as an ostensibly middle-class child, and her irreverent eschewal of the feelings that sustained it, that Maynard found most disturbing. During her stay at the Kents, Anthon had begun to call Mrs. Kent‘s son-in-law, Mr. Rowland, ―Dad-dad!‖ 81 She treated Mrs. Kent as her grandmother. ―Mrs. Coryton has been ‗Grannie‘ for long, & now I find Mrs. Kent is Grannie, & I do not like that,‖ Maynard observed. 82 She remarked of Anthon‘s ready forging of familial relations that ―the poor little thing brought on herself another lecture‖; ―[I tried] to instil [sic] into that unsensitive [sic] little mind a little of the 79 Walker notes that Maynard sought to ―use service as a punishment and a threat.‖ Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 215. 80 Effie Notebooks, March 1892, 81. 81 Effie Notebooks, May 1892, 98. 82 Ibid. 250 deep meaning & the beauty of Father & Mother, & how we cd. not have two.‖ 83 Anthon‘s behavior was in accord with working-class modes of family and of feeling. In later years the mother of a friend of Anthon‘s, Mrs. Bennett, explained to Maynard why she allowed Anthon to call her ―mother‖: ―by her calling me Mother I take it on myself to talk to her sometimes as a Mother should to a wayward child [.] I have several Girls of my own & wile [sic] away from home I do Pray that they may find someone that will do them good & not evil.‖ 84 The necessity of young working-class girls and boys leaving home early in search of employment rendered more porous understandings of the family – the validating of surrogate parents – both necessary and valuable. Anthon, an illegitimate child separated from her mother, had an even more urgent need for understanding the familial network as diffuse, varied, and extensive. While Maynard‘s reformist efforts had demonstrated the artificiality of class, Anthon‘s ready acclimation to the Kents illustrates the substantial effects of class discourse. Class difference was no less material in its effects for being artificial. The artificiality of class difference nevertheless led to anxieties amongst the middle class. These were evident as, after Anthon‘s stay at Mrs. Kent‘s, Maynard, concerned at her daughter being deemed working class, strove again to re-make Anthon‘s social status. Here again the broader discourse of social reform was evident in the private life of a middle-class woman, in the sphere of the middle-class home, and not only in the impoverished neighborhoods of London. On their way back to Westfield, Maynard urged Anthon to relinquish the cockney accent she had taken up at the Kents‘ (she ―made her speak very slowly & particularly, saying it was only the very best speaking that cd. come to Westfield!‖) and forbade her from speaking of her 83 Effie Notebooks, May 1892, 99. 84 Effie Notebooks, May 1908, 170. 251 experience as a servant (―she was not to talk to the students of where she had been‖ 85 ). The significance of dress to the signification of class status was evident when, upon arriving, the two ―crept into the house, & [Maynard] let down her [Anthon‘s] hair, put on the loose brown velveteen frock & absolutely new shoes & brought her out into society.‖ Maynard‘s making, unmaking, and remaking of Anthon‘s class demonstrates, within the realm of the middle-class home, the class anxieties that informed the broader social reform endeavors of the middle class. In mid-1892 Maynard, exasperated with Anthon‘s failure to assimilate the sensibilities of the middle class, attempted to terminate ties with her entirely. Dr. Ranger had informed her that the adoption deed stated that if ―unforeseen circumstances‖ arose before Anthon reached the age of seventeen, she had only to write to Anthon‘s mother explaining the situation and after six months she would be free of all responsibility for Anthon; she could ―send her to the Workhouse, if [she would].‖ 86 Maynard wrote to Fazulo in South Africa informing her that she was ―very reluctantly . . . going to give her [Anthon] up‖ and asking her what she ―wd. wish done with her?‖ 87 With very little hesitation Maynard thus sought to re-make Fazulo‘s working- class family. When Fazulo failed to reply, Maynard arranged a place for Anthon in a London orphanage, Miss Sharman‘s Orphanage, located in West Square, Southwark, home to 220 children. Although she visited Anthon at Miss Sharman‘s a few weeks after she entered the orphanage, it was almost six months before she saw her again and five months thereafter that she visited her for the third time. Anthon was told of her pending removal to Miss Sharman‘s by Lily Coryton, her Selwood teacher, the night before her departure. 85 Effie Notebooks, May 1892, 99-100. 86 Effie Notebooks, 4 June 1892, 112. 87 Ibid., 118, 119. 252 Anthon‘s placement at Miss Sharman‘s resulted in a more permanent and more precipitous social descent than her two-week sojourn at Mrs. Kent‘s. The fascination for the slums and their residents which informed middle-class ―slumming‖ was evident in Maynard‘s approach to Anthon when, upon visiting her at the orphanage in January 1893, she noted ―how changed she was.‖ ―Really,‖ she wrote in her notebook, ― I now & then had to stop & take a look at her, to make sure it was the same child, so altered was she in every point at once!‖ 88 Once again dress proved a significant marker of class difference: ―Let me describe her. Terra- cotta dress hanging limply down as far as the tops of her very thick boots, comfortable brown ulster with thick cape to it, & a black sailor hat, & woolen gloves.‖ 89 It was a discourse of dirt that most preoccupied Maynard and which enabled her to delineate class difference. In his text on slumming, Seth Koven draws attention to middle-class women reformer‘s fascination with dirt. 90 He argues that, as a result, dirt had came to do important ideological work; it had ―implications for the social politics and policies [reformers] advocated.‖ 91 Maynard‘s relationship with Anthon demonstrates a preoccupation with dirt in the form of a discourse of hygiene. She noted that at the orphanage baths were used by many in series, that Anthon had no toothbrush, and that she was as a result, grubby. Anthon‘s ―terribly grey pocket handkerchief‖ 92 epitomized the orphanage‘s poor standards of cleanliness. The girls were given one handkerchief a week, Anthon explained, because ―there are 400 girls, & it would make a good bit more washing if they had two.‖ 93 Of an excursion with Anthon soon thereafter, 88 Effie Notebooks, January 1893, 6-7. 89 Ibid. 90 Koven, Slumming, 21. 91 Ibid., 184. 92 Effie Notebooks, May 1893, 30. 93 Effie Notebooks, January 1893, 14. 253 Maynard noted, ―I put the wretched rag into the Automatic Machine, & scented it with ‗Sacred Lotos.‘‖ 94 She observed that ―even in so trifling a thing as this, to think my poor child has come so low! She, whom I kept so clean & fresh & tried to make so dainty in her tastes & ways.‖ 95 Most vexing of all was Anthon‘s lack of awareness of dirt; when Anthon dirtied her hands while on a boat trip on the Thames in 1893, Maynard observed, ―there was not a trace of disgust at having them so dirty.‖ 96 Maynard and Anthon‘s differing perceptions of dirt demonstrate different values attributed to it and the relatively arbitrary elevation of dirt and cleanliness as markers of class difference. When, in August 1893, Maynard was allowed to take Anthon away from the orphanage for a few days, she attempted to address her grubbiness. ―First we went to a barber's & had the poor little rough ill-kept head nicely cropped & then shampooed,‖ she wrote. Anthon took up Maynard‘s discourse of cleanliness. She informed her that she wished she ―had a cold bath every morning as I used to have with you,‖ 97 bathed frequently, and brushed her teeth diligently. She spoke with distaste of the shared baths at the orphanage (―I call those koind of ways, ‗filfthy [sic]‖). Maynard spoke with satisfaction of Anthon‘s turnaround: ―it was touching to see her suddenly thus awake to a kind of repulsion I know she had not felt before.‖ 98 Anthon‘s cleanliness was an enduring focus for Maynard. Years later, when Anthon was admitted to a Salvation Army rescue home, Maynard gave her a ―heavy parcel‖ with ―everyday things that make for cleanliness‖: ―(1) Sponge of mine (2) Buttermilk Soap (3) Large bottle of ‗Scrubb‘ (4) 94 Ibid., 14-15. 95 Ibid. 96 Effie Notebooks, May 1893, 30. 97 Effie Notebooks, August 1893, 37-38. 98 Ibid., 38 254 New hair-brush with lovely ‗box-wood‘ back. (5) New white india-rubber comb, that all dirt might be detected at once. (6) Toothbrush (7) Rose tooth powder.‖ 99 Maynard‘s preoccupation with Anthon‘s cleanliness exemplifies in the realm of a private relationship Koven‘s notion that well-to-do women found in the discourses of cleanliness a means to expand their social authority over the poor. 100 Maynard, who had been involved in the making and the re-making of Anthon‘s class through the practices of dressing and personal hygiene, ultimately turned to the body to fix class difference; in the end Anthon‘s body attested to her ―natural‖ affiliation with the working class. When, in 1894, Anthon had been dismissed from the orphanage and placed into domestic service, Maynard observed, ―strong & stout indeed she looked, her body many inches wider that it was from the Home, & her face with the peculiar shiny red that servant maids often shew.‖ 101 Anthon was now ―on a quite different level,‖ Maynard concluded. 102 She had come to accept that her efforts to transform Anthon had failed, to doubt the malleability of class status, and to make recourse to the body as a means of naturalizing class difference. She contrived ―another relation‖ with her, the possibility of her one day ―being my real servant.‖ 103 Anthon‘s affective orientation, or her associational preferences, also played a key role in Maynard‘s re-classing of her and in her naturalization of Anthon‘s working-class status. At the orphanage Maynard found Anthon still unappreciative of the significance of the middle-class family, as Maynard perceived it, and the feelings that informed the structure of that family 99 Effie Notebooks, December 1897, 82. 100 Koven, Slumming, 183. 101 Effie Notebooks, May 1894, 111. 102 Effie Notebooks, January 1893, 20. 103 Effie Notebooks, November 1893, 69. Walker notes, ―Maynard‘s approach to Effie increasingly suggested that she was a dependent social inferior.‖ Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 217-18. 255 formation. When, quite contrary to Maynard‘s expectations, Anthon initially spoke ―happily of everyone‖ at Miss Sharman‘s, Maynard asked herself, ―after all the love & petting & talking to in bed that E. has had, it is a strangely easy accommodation to this new, bare, unindividual phase of life. Does E. really not value these things? & does the swarming crowd in the playground make up for everything?‖ 104 When in 1894 Anthon entered domestic service and Maynard visited her in Brighton, she again remarked on the promiscuous distribution of Anthon‘s affection and contrasted it with her own more individualistic approach: ―To me the crowds on the beach with their talk & their finery & their endless children; or the passers in the streets with their bargains & business, present no more possibilities of companionship than do the stones in the houses,‖ she observed, ―but to E. all are . . . interesting.‖ 105 Anthon was unable to gauge and to give weight to class difference; she would ―point to a small shop & say ‗That‘s where Miss Edwards lives, my Sunday School teacher, oh, such a nice young lady she is.‘ She will deftly thread her way through a crowd of loitering fellows with their canes & cigars, & speak of them respectfully as ‗those gentleman.‘‖ 106 For Maynard, Anthon‘s inability to recognize class difference and to behave according to middle-class precepts – both ostensibly acquired characteristics – precluded Anthon from becoming a member of the middle class. Now, however, Maynard saw these traits as ―natural‖; Anthon‘s failure to recognize class difference and act accordingly rendered her representative of the working class. ―I have been trying to analyse the feeling I have while with her,‖ she wrote in 1894, ―& find that she is a link with the class below such as I have never had before. That is the new thing to me, & it is distinctly interesting theoretically & most wearisome 104 Effie Notebooks, July 1892, 175. 105 Effie Notebooks, July 1894, 121-22. 106 Ibid., 123. 256 practically . . . she herself is one of the people.‖ 107 Anthon‘s putatively innate inability to recognize and behave according to the mores of the middle class made her working-class in a way that both naturalized class difference and made crossing class divides impossible. Maynard‘s representation of Anthon as inherently and inevitably of the working class was belied by the effort she exerted to entrench and to sustain Anthon‘s class difference. After reconfiguring her relationship with Anthon as one of a mistress to a servant, she sought Anthon‘s class-based deference. This she achieved when, in November 1895, she placed the thirteen-year- old Anthon in the care of former Oakfield servants, Lizzie Rickwood and her mother Jeb, who had started an ―all-sorts shop‖ in Hastings. Rickwood sought to convey to Anthon her lowly ―station in Life.‖ She believed that inculcating Anthon‘s class-based deference towards Maynard was necessary if she was to understand her place in society: ―we must make her give you due respect as a Lady, or we shall not be able to make her do it with others.‖ 108 She noticed that Anthon continued to call Maynard ―Auntie‖ and assured her, ―I have stopped her doing that . . . we always call you Miss Maynard to her, & she does to us.‖ 109 In a letter to Maynard, Anthon wrote: ―‗Mrs. Rickwood says it is a great thing for a poor girl like me to have a lady like you to look after her.‖ 110 Maynard commented approvingly in her notebook that this was ―an altogether new point of view for the poor child.‖ 111 When in January 1896 Maynard visited Anthon, Rickwood compelled Anthon to wait on Maynard: ―E. came in carrying a lamp & a load of housemaid‘s things . . . & proceeded to rake out the ashes & ‗do the grate‘ in a masterly way.‖ 112 107 Ibid., 124. 108 Effie Notebooks, January 1896, 147. 109 Ibid., 148. 110 Effie Notebooks, December 1895, 139. 111 Ibid. 112 Effie Notebooks, January 1896, 154-55. 257 Anthon felt torn between the role of servant and daughter. ―The next morning,‖ Maynard wrote, ―the same scene of lighting the fire was repeated, only the manners seemed to break down rather more, for she came suddenly peeping over the bed & kissed me.‖ 113 The process through which Maynard re-made her relationship with Anthon demonstrates the artificiality of class difference even in the face of its naturalization. When in 1892 Maynard surrendered Anthon to Miss Sharman‘s, she sought to adopt another Italian child, the ten-year-old Margaret Calabrese 114 (or ―Margaret Addelen‖ as she was known). Addelen was installed at Selwood School – in Anthon‘s clothes, bed, and room – on the same day Anthon was moved to Miss Sharman‘s orphanage, as part of an experiment to ascertain whether Addelen would make a more suitable daughter than Anthon. Maynard‘s deliberations over Addelen expose the national and racial assumptions to which her classing of Anthon had led. As Maynard pondered adopting Addelen, she noted ―my sisters seem only wise when they say, ‗Not an Italian, this time.‘‖ 115 She concurred: ―she is Italian, & that is enough. Not the false, vain, untrustworthy Italian that shews in poor E. but the emotional, feeble, shew-off Italian, un-robust & un-sturdy in nature.‖ 116 Maynard deemed Anthon‘s dissembling, her bravado, her lack of honour, ―Italian.‖ As Walker notes, ―race in Victorian England is most often understood to operate on a metropole-empire axis . . . [b]ut in this case, the troubled vision of southern Italy was critical.‖ 117 Slippages between race and class demonstrate the proximity of these discourses for the middle-class Maynard. Anthon‘s ―Italianness‖ had not deterred 113 Ibid., 161. 114 Effie Notebooks, December 1892, 199. 115 Effie Notebooks, July 1892, 183. 116 Effie Notebooks, August 1892, 193. 117 Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 220. 258 Maynard from viewing Anthon as representative of the British working class, and as a member of the working class Anthon subsequently fell more easily into the category ―foreign.‖ In later years Maynard was to turn increasingly to a scientific discourse of race to describe Anthon; this was the consequence of her synthesizing of Evangelicalism and Darwinism at the turn of the century. From the late 1890s on, Maynard began to engage with theological modernism, and her effort to synthesize Evangelicalism and Darwinism emerged as a product of that engagement. Theological modernism was a later nineteenth century effort across a number of Christian denominations to bring Christian doctrine into dialogue with contemporary science, biblical criticism, philosophy, history, and ethics. 118 Most modernists subscribed to the ideals of free enquiry, sought to integrate the modern sciences with Christian belief, espoused the findings of biblical criticism, and upheld the notion that theology was dynamic. 119 With the 1889 Anglo- Catholic publication of Lux Mundi, edited by Charles Gore, modernist Catholicism, or what Gore called ―Liberal Catholicism,‖ came to the fore. 120 In 1898 the Churchmen‘s Union for the Advancement of Religious Thought, later renamed the Modern Churchmen‘s Union, brought together an array of Anglican modernists including Broad Church Anglicans. While Anglican Evangelicals remained largely suspicious of modern thought, in 1905 the Group Brotherhood emerged, promulgating a more conservative iteration of modernism than the Churchmen‘s Union; it was renamed the Anglican Evangelical Group Movement (AEGM) in 1923 and promulgated ―Liberal Evangelicalism.‖ 118 Martin Wellings, Evangelicals Embattled: Responses of Evangelicals in the Church of England to Ritualism, Darwinism and Theological Liberalism, 1890-1930 (Carlisle, UK : Paternoster Press, 2003), 227. 119 Kenneth Hylson-Smith, Evangelicals in the Church of England, 1734-1984 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1989), 248. 120 Wellings, Evangelicals Embattled, 192. 259 A willingness to entertain Darwinian theory was an important strand of Anglican modernism from the outset. In the text that was the most significant precursor to Anglican modernism, Essays and Reviews (1860), Baden Powell had described On the Origin of Species as a ―masterly volume‖ that ―must soon bring about an entire revolution in opinion in favour of the grand principle of the self-evolving powers of nature.‖ 121 In the Anglo-Catholic Lux Mundi (1889) Aubrey Moore and J. R. Illingworth enthusiastically embraced evolutionary theory. In 1900 a small group of Evangelicals were beginning to express anxiety over the failure of their peers to engage with modern thought. Canon G. S. Streatfield, vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead, published a two-part article entitled ―Questions that Must Be Faced; or, Evangelicalism and Modern Thought,‖ in an Evangelical Anglican periodical, the Record. 122 He urged his readers to consider evolution, as advocated by Illingworth and Moore and also by High Churchman Charles Gore and by the Scottish Evangelical Henry Drummond. Maynard shared Streatfield‘s concerns, but felt he had not gone far enough; his approach was ―timid.‖ 123 She was nevertheless reassured to find that she was ―not quite alone‖ in her thinking. 124 Maynard effected her first synthesis of Evangelicalism and Darwinian theory in the 1901/1902 academic year as part of a course for the Westfield Divinity program. A long-held Evangelically indebted interest in science led her to turn to Darwinism in the early 1900s. ―I chose Evolution,‖ she wrote later of her attempt to ―modernize‖ Evangelicalism, ―[because] we had been brought up on Science, rather than on Philosophy or Literature, & the language was 121 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (London: Michael Joseph, 1991), 100. 122 G. S. Streatfield, ――Questions that Must Be Faced; or, Evangelicalism and Modern Thought,‖ pt. 1 and pt. 2, The Record, 7 June and 14 June, 1901, 588-9 and 610, quoted in Wellings, Evangelicals Embattled, 195. 123 Autobiography, 1901, 469. 124 Ibid. 260 familiar to me.‖ 125 In a 1905 pamphlet, ―The Moral Equivalent of War,‖ written for the Church Missionary Society, Maynard engaged with evolutionary theory in a publication for the first time. A chapter of Between College Terms (1910) entitled ―The Creation of Eve: A Study in the Ethics of Love‖ provided the framework for her full-length study, Progressive Creation (1927); two later papers Maynard presented at the Victoria Institute, ―The Influence of Christianity on the Position of Women‖ (1919) and ―The Bible in the Twentieth Century‖ (1922), 126 further developed that framework. Maynard defined evolution as the notion that ―creation is not sudden but very gradual, and that life begins in its lowest forms and works upwards‖ and embraced the long trajectory of time required by Darwin for evolution. 127 With regard to the stickiest problem of Darwinian evolution, the origins of humankind, Maynard acceded to Darwin‘s explanation (―the body of man is made in the same fashion as those of the animals, and a branch is chosen representing a creature of arboreal habits‖ 128 ) with one qualification: ―the repulsive anthropoid apes are in no sense our ancestors, but are a degraded collateral branch.‖ 129 Maynard agreed with Darwin‘s assertion that humankind was far older than a literal reading of the Bible allowed and adopted a minority Evangelical pre-Adamite view in which human-like creatures were seen to pre-exist Adam, but it was only with Adam that humans gained spiritual faculties and began to bear God‘s 125 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 19, 1874, 754. 126 Autobiography, 1909, 609. 127 Constance Maynard, ―The Bible in the Twentieth Century,‖ Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 54 (1922): 37. In the 1860s she had read the Scottish geologist Hugh Miller‘s refutation of traditional biblical chronology and by the mid-1870s contemporary geological notions of time were a source of cheer rather than consternation. Autobiography, Part 5 Chapter 36, 1880, 413. 128 Constance Maynard, Progressive Creation (London: SPCK, 1927), 40. 129 Ibid. 261 image. 130 Prior to the fall, conscience was absent from the human race; the story of the fall provided an account of ―the birth of conscience in the soul of primitive man.‖ 131 She thus advocated a metaphorical reading of the Genesis account of the creation of Adam and Eve and of the Fall. The story symbolized the long development of humankind at geographically disparate sites: Let Adam and Eve be multiplied into the tribes and nations of the earth; let the Garden of Eden be in every place where the earth is sufficiently matured to produce the lovely vegetation of the Tertiary Period; let the time of the Temptation and the apprehension of the meaning of Sin and disgrace be lengthened from one day to several thousand years, and we have conceded all that Science requires. 132 Maynard nevertheless insisted on special creation at three junctures of ―evolution‖: in the emergence of matter, animal life, and the soul. 133 In addition to this, her synthesis had a religious telos. The telos of the gradual ascent of the individual and of the race was Christian salvation. God was a spirit, and ―His supreme and final object is to create spirits who shall be in sympathy with Him.‖ 134 130 David N. Livingstone, ―Preadamites: The History of an Idea from Heresy to Orthodoxy,‖ Scottish Journal of Theology, 40 (1987): 41, quoted in Wellings, Evangelicals Embattled, 215. J. A. Fleming had thus made a distinction between ―rational‖ and ―spiritual‖ humans; the former comprised the generations that existed before Adam and the latter the one after him. A. Rendle Short also espoused pre-Adamite theory in his The Bible and Modern Research (1931) (ibid.). 131 Constance Maynard, The Religious Training of Immaturity (London: The National Sunday School Union, 1923), 42. 132 Maynard, Progressive Creation, 51. 133 Autobiography, 1924, 24-25; Maynard, ―Bible in the Twentieth Century,‖ 39; and Maynard, Progressive Creation, 54. 134 Maynard, Progressive Creation, 28. The Scottish geologist Hugh Miller had also posited a spiritual telos for creation. Maynard noted in 1871 that ―he then adverts to the regular advance of Creation, from the first semblance of life in ‗the egg-like mollusc‘, to man, then redeemed man, & then to its union with God in the person of our everlasting Saviour.‖ Greenbook, 4 July 1871, 198. 262 Some of Maynard‘s non-Evangelical peers recognized the shortcomings of her synthesis. 135 However, Evangelical Anglicans had been slow to engage with Darwinism; within an Evangelical context Maynard‘s synthesis was innovative. In 1909 she sent three chapters of a book on evolution that she had commenced in 1903, Studies in Creation, to the Evangelical Eugene Stock, ―an example of the best & most enlightened of his type of faith.‖ 136 He responded that this teaching was exactly what was needed; that the leaders to whom we looked for help were persistently silent; that men like the Dean of Westminster & the Bishop of Durham must really know all about Evolution & must to some extent accept it, yet, amid reiterated complaints of the books already written, why did they never give us one single constructive word? why did they dwell on negative only, & never tell us what to believe. Such a book was imperatively needed. 137 By rendering Darwinism palatable to Evangelicals within a discourse of modernity, Maynard‘s synthesis of Darwinism and Evangelicalism may be said to constitute a ―modern‖ iteration of Evangelicalism. The aspect of Darwinian evolution that most influenced Maynard‘s approach to the young Anthon in the very early years of the twentieth century was his theory of morality. Darwin‘s evolutionary theory had had a marked moral emphasis. In Descent he argued of humans‘ moral development that ―the moral sense of conscience . . . is the most noble of all the 135 For example, according to Maynard, Eleanor McDougall, Classics Lecturer at Westfield between 1902 and 1914, asserted of Maynard‘s 1909 text that ―in all ancient documents, you should get back to the writer‘s point of view, & not read into it your own further knowledge.‖ Autobiography, 1909, 604. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid., 605. The book was never published. It was withdrawn by Maynard from the publisher when the tide seemed to be turning against Darwinian evolution (―I placed it with Hodder & Stoughton, & all seemed to be going well, when in June came the ‗Darwin Centenary.‘ Amid much praise of the great pioneer it was distinctly said that his fundamental law of ‗The struggle for Existence & survival of the Fittest,‘ was proved to be not true, & we must look elsewhere for a solution. . . . I imagined my book could no longer be a help, I recalled it from the publishers.‖ Autobiography, 1909, 605. 263 attributes of man.‖ 138 He represented morality as a characteristic of the ―civilized‖ races; a ―moral being‖ was one who ―[a]fter some temporary desire or passion has mastered his social instincts, he reflects and compares . . . and . . . resolves to act differently for the future – and this is conscience.‖ 139 For Maynard the Bible, with its sometimes questionable morality, attested to the evolutionary nature of the conscience. She believed that not all nations had come to possess a conscience; the remnants of pre-lapsarian and pre-ethical nations persisted in the ―primitive‖ nations of her era. In a 1905 booklet written for the Christian Missionary Society, The Moral Equivalent of War, she developed an evolutionary reading of both religion and race in which she posited a spiritual hierarchy that placed the British at the apex, followed by the Japanese, Chinese, Hindus, and Africans. Africans, she asserted, lacked a valid religion and even the moral foundation required for Christian conversion was absent: ―there is a possible affection and obedience . . . but no initiative, no responsibility, and we shrink from them as shells, as impositions, as hopelessly inferior, as lacking in the bare, moral groundwork, that bed-rock of the knowledge of good and evil, that we take for granted as existing in every man.‖ 140 In two later publications, The Religious Training of Immaturity (1923) and The Birth of Conscience (1928), she linked ontogeny (development of the individual) with phylogeny (that of the species or race) to argue that the child‘s gradual attainment of a conscience echoed that of the race. 141 Slippages between a discourse of child development and a racist theory of moral development were evident in Maynard‘s discourse when, in 1896 when Anthon was ten, 138 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: John Murray, 1871), 148, 934, quoted in Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914 (London: Penguin, 1995), 88. 139 Bland, Banishing the Beast, 86-87. 140 Constance Maynard, The Moral Equivalent of War (London: Church Missionary Society, 1905), 6. 141 She had come to see ―for the first time that Creation in the past exactly resembles Creation in the present, from the speck of protoplasm to the living babe, & from the foolish ignorant babe to the grand, honourable, effective man.‖ Autobiography, 1901, 470. 264 Maynard visited South Africa. In an account written for The South African Pioneer, the periodical of the South African General Mission, she described the Pondo, an African ethnic group living in the Eastern Cape, as a ―nation of children.‖ While the ―outward form may be well-knit and powerful . . . the character within is always that of a child following its own untaught devices.‖ It was difficult, she asserted, ―for a mature mind to know how to deal with them.‖ 142 Similarly, Anthon‘s inability to act morally and to feel ―properly‖ was seen as the product of a primitive ―racial‖ heritage. In a 1905 letter Maynard wrote that Anthon was a ―real Moral Idiot . . . Intellectually & Volitionally strong rather than above average, there is an absolute gap or vacuity where the instinctive Moral sense ought to be.‖ 143 For Anthon, ―nothing . . . works within, but all has to come to her from without.‖ 144 Maynard‘s engagement with Darwinian theory led her to represent Anthon‘s ―moral idiocy‖ as the product of an inferior racial heritage. In a complex dynamic that elevated Anthon‘s spirituality while simultaneously deriding her lack of conscience, and which was characteristic of missionaries‘ approaches to their subjects, Maynard nevertheless argued that while ―Effie‘s moral sense [was] sadly low, religious instinct [was] very strong.‖ 145 Even after Anthon had converted in 1896 she would, as the result of the permeation of Maynard‘s Evangelicalism by evolutionary discourse, remain a member of a different class and race. Anthon was ―either walking with God from hour to hour like a real saint‖ or, as the result of an absent moral sense, was ―right down in the mire & mud where no respectable self-respecting souls go.‖ 146 The fluidity of discourses of class and race 142 Constance Maynard, ―A Nation of Children or Impressions of a Fortnight in Pondoland,‖ The South African Pioneer 10 (1897): 154. 143 Effie Notebooks, September 1905, 109. 144 Effie Notebooks, March 1905, 69. 145 Effie Notebooks, March 1892, 72. 146 Effie Notebooks, March 1905, 69. 265 evident at the outset of Maynard‘s relationship with Anthon had, as a result of her taking up of Darwinian evolution, been stabilized. Maynard‘s relationship with Anthon between 1888, when Anthon was six, and 1894, when she was twelve, demonstrates the cultural production of an imperial Englishness within the intimate space of the metropolitan family, and the central role of class in that process. It illustrates the sensibilities, competencies, and moral values that informed the middle-class making of race, the importance of the family as a site at which class difference was constituted, and the role of family-based emotions and of the body in the maintenance of class difference. Maynard‘s making and unmaking of Anthon‘s middle-class status shows class difference to be artificial, requiring constant consolidation, and anxiety-laden. In the next section I take up Stoler‘s work on the sexual production of racial difference to examine Maynard‘s regulation of Anthon‘s sexuality in the years between 1894 and 1915, focusing on her engagement with eugenics. Maynard‘s response to Anthon‘s masturbation and to her desire to marry illustrates the ascendance of a scientific discourse within her Evangelicalism, consequent on her synthesizing of Darwinism and Evangelicalism. Her turn to Darwin enabled Maynard to fix an otherwise precarious class difference by attributing to it a biological discourse; that discourse fostered slippages between class and race. The competition between Maynard‘s eugenic Evangelicalism and Anthon‘s more traditional Salvationist version shows sexual discourse to be an important site for charting the relationship between religion and science in Evangelical discourse. In January 1894, when Anthon was twelve, she was expelled from Miss Sharman‘s orphanage after being accused of having taught some of her peers to masturbate. She had, Miss Sharman alleged, ―got into the beds of the other children at night, & taught them ‗disgusting & 266 filthy tricks.‘‖ 147 Sharman evoked a medical metaphor to describe masturbation; she told Maynard that ―nothing is so catching,‖ that such behavior was ―a terrible thing to get among children,‖ and that ―only twice before in these 27 years I have been here, have I had it, & never so clear a case, so bad as this.‖ 148 She nevertheless put medical discourse at the service of religious imperatives; she could not be sure how Anthon had learnt to masturbate, but asserted that in ―one girl in a thousand or so, real wickedness, real degradation seems to come out of their hearts without any example, any putting in first.‖ 149 Anthon ―had been isolated since the very hour the evil was discovered‖ and she was determined ―at all costs . . . [to] have the Home pure & good.‖ 150 She suggested that ―for 4 or 5 years to come at least, E. wd. be like poison to other children‖ 151 and that she should be kept separate from them. With Maynard‘s consent she removed Anthon from the orphanage and placed her with an elderly couple in Brighton where she would work as a servant and attend board school. 152 The expulsion of two girls to whom Anthon had taught her ―shameful ways‖ was also necessary as what Anthon had taught them might ―at some other time . . . come to mind again.‖ 153 When in 1894 Miss Sharman informed Maynard about Anthon‘s ―dirty tricks,‖ Maynard was not sure what they entailed (―I cannot now understand what she has done‖ 154 ). It was not unusual for a pious, upper-middle-class woman such as Maynard to be ignorant of the discourse 147 Effie Notebooks, January 1894, 73. 148 Ibid., 74. 149 Ibid. 150 Ibid., 75. 151 Ibid. 152 Effie Notebooks, January 1894, 75. 153 Ibid., 74. 154 Ibid., 73-74. 267 of masturbation. The nineteenth-century alignment of middle-class femininity with piety, modesty, and chastity had led to a reluctance amongst Victorians to provide sexual education to middle-class girls and women. Ignorance of discourses of ―masturbation‖ did not, of course, preclude its practice. In her advice manual The Secret Book, Containing Private Information and Instruction for Women and Young Girls (1888), Priscilla Barker noted that ―only a few weeks ago a married woman told me she had carried on the practice for years, not knowing that the thing was sinful.‖ 155 Miss Sharman herself claimed only to know about masturbation through her contact with ―the Matrons at Dr. Bernado‘s [sic] Homes.‖ 156 Maynard nevertheless understood the sexual valence of Anthon‘s behavior; her ignorance of the discourse of masturbation did not prevent her from attempting to reform Anthon‘s sexuality. Maynard had encountered public discussion of sexuality as a supporter of Josephine Butler‘s campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1870s and 1880s, and in the social purity movement that emerged from that campaign. Although not an active participant in either movement, she had supported them. In 1883 she had attended a meeting convened by the Society of Friends to address the Contagious Diseases Acts or the ―state regulation of vice‖: I have seen and heard this awful subject touched on before, but here, where we were all of one mind we were all so safe, and those who spoke, spoke bravely … one after another the speakers took up the warfare on definitely Christian grounds that did one‘s very heart good. Best of all was the long-tried warrior and leader, Josephine Butler, pleading for right and justice in perfect self-abnegation. 157 155 Priscilla Barker, The Secret Book: Containing Private Information and Instruction for Women and Young Girls (Brighton: P. Barker, [1888]), quoted in Pat Jalland and John Hooper, Women from Birth to Death: The Female Life Cycle in Britain, 1830-1914 (Atlantic Highlands, N.J. : Humanities Press International, 1986), 242. Elizabeth Blackwell described ―an agonized letter received from an intelligent and pious lady, dying from the effects of this inveterate habit . . . begun in childhood in ignorance of any moral or physical wrong which might result to her nature.‖ Elizabeth Blackwell, Essays in Medical Sociology, 1902, vol. 1, 36-37, 42-43, quoted in Jalland and Hooper, Birth to Death, 244. 156 Effie Notebooks, January 1894, 73. 157 Greenbook, 28 January 1883, 52. 268 Feminist scholars have argued convincingly that feminist opposition to the CD Acts – including that of its Evangelical leader Josephine Butler – was not as much about sexual repression as it was about opposing the sexual double standard. For Maynard, Butler‘s ―pleading for right and justice‖ encapsulates both a rejection of the double standard and a concern for sexual purity. At the same time Maynard harbored a characteristically middle-class fear of sexual ―sin.‖ In 1881 she accompanied Susan Bernard, the sister of Girton Mistress Lettice Bernard, to a tea and meeting for ―poor lost girls‖ and observed, ―for three weeks beforehand I dreaded it, for I have never even touched the fringes of this awful subject.‖ An Evangelical social purity alignment of piety, sexual purity, and physical wellbeing is evident as Maynard describes Bernard as ―a strong clean angel.‖ Maynard could not bridge the social chasm represented by the sexual sin of the ―lost girls‖: ―I knew I was entirely helpless and I never went near these things again.‖ 158 Maynard‘s nascent social purity feminism had come to the fore in 1885 when the well- known journalist W. T. Stead, the Salvation Army officer Bramwell Booth, and Rebecca Jarrett, a working-class woman, undertook to expose child prostitution and sexual trafficking. Stead, who effected the ―purchase‖ of the young Eliza Armstrong, wrote of it in his widely-read and sensationalist article, ―The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.‖ 159 Maynard supported Stead, Booth, and Jarrett unequivocally. She attended a Salvation Army meeting at Clapton Training Houses in November 1885 where ―we were asked to send our sympathy to Mr. Stead & Mr. Bramwell Booth at that moment in the dock of the Old Bailey, & the 6 or 7,000 rose to their feet like one man & the ‗Amen‘ was like a cannon-shot.‖ 160 On November 15 1885, Maynard noted with disapproval that Stead, Booth, and Jarrett had been found guilty: 158 Autobiography, Part 6, Chapter 40, 1881, 58. 159 Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 81-134. 160 Greenbook, 8 November 1885, 85. 269 Thousands of real crimes of the most awful nature are going unpunished, & this one ―mock crime‖ is heavily visited. Poor Jarrett, she said, ―I have done many, many bad things in my life, & only one good one, & for that I am sent to prison.‖ Stead is a hero, & I think a little prayer is now going up fr. thousands of us, that God wd be with him this first [Sunday] in prison. 161 For Maynard the trial of Stead, Jarrett, and Booth brought the ―horrors of lust‖ to light. The issue of sexual conduct was, furthermore, a national one. In Stead, Jarrett, and Booth, ―England is proved true at heart after all, something in it is pure & sound & clear as a crystal, amid all the masses of surrounding corruption. Hope, hope, for our country!‖ 162 Maynard‘s aligning of sexual purity with the wellbeing of the nation was a characteristically social purity stance; it paved the way for her engagement with eugenics. In 1894 Anthon failed to show contrition at her expulsion from Miss Sharman‘s and Maynard threatened to break ties with her completely. Anthon wrote remorsefully: ―My dear Auntie, I am very very sorry, & promise you I will never do it again if you will only forgive me . . . please answer as quickly as you can, & send forgiveness for me.‖ 163 When Maynard visited Anthon in Brighton and discovered she had been moved to a new family, the Taylors, and was sharing a bed with their eleven-year-old daughter, Maria, she ―forced [herself] to tell [Mrs Taylor] how bad E. had been, & to beg her not to let the two sleep together.‖ 164 She told Anthon the ―Taylors could not keep her if she said anything bad to little Maria . . . went over & over this point.‖ 165 Anthon ―faithfully promised she would not, that she knew it was wrong, & would 161 Greenbook, 15 November 1885, 86-87. 162 Greenbook, 31 December 1885, 97. 163 Effie Notebooks, January 1894, 80. 164 Effie Notebooks, February 1894, 93. 165 Ibid., 97. 270 indeed put it behind her for ever.‖ 166 Maynard prayed with Anthon that ―God would indeed forgive her & enable her to keep her promise, & to begin a new life.‖ 167 Anthon was subsequently rejected by the Taylors and placed with a Mrs. Coomber, a widow with no children. Maynard wrote to Coomber asking her ―to employ E. usefully in her spare time, & be sure not let her run about with other children.‖ 168 Maynard, who had withdrawn from Anthon, took up her ―motherhood‖ more actively during these years to prevent the perpetuation of the effects of Anthon‘s sexual ―sin.‖ In the years between 1894 and 1896, when Anthon was boarding with working-class families and attending board school, her behavior became increasingly disruptive and she was sent away from a number of work places. In 1896, Maynard took her to see Dr. Barnardo with the hope that he might be able to give her advice regarding Anthon‘s ―secret vice‖ and the disruptive behavior with which Maynard believed it was associated. Maynard hoped that Barnardo might take her into one of his homes. Like Sharman, Barnardo used the metaphor of disease to describe masturbation and refused to accommodate Anthon (―A child that cannot be classed with other children, is not a child for him, & he wd. no more take her than if she were in the midst of the small-pox‖ 169 ). He contended that ―the grace of God has been known to triumph, __ but very rarely. The unclean secret thoughts & acts destroy the very foundations of character, & such unhappy creatures seldom reach 30, & often die idiots.‖ 170 In 1896 Maynard 166 Ibid. 167 Ibid. 168 Ibid., 101. 169 Effie Notebooks, September 1896, 181. 170 Effie Notebooks, December 1915, 60. Barnardo had been embroiled in a sexual scandal of sorts a number of years earlier, in 1877. He had been accused not only of staging the before-and-after photographs of street children (through which he sought to procure funding for his homes), but of representing the children in a sexually provocative manner. While the latter charges were never proven, they circulated widely and may well have resulted in a more rigid approach to children‘s sexuality on Barnardo‘s part. Koven, Slumming, 88-139. 271 turned to the Salvation Army as a last resort; she approached one of the Army‘s prostitute rescue homes, the Clock House at Walthamstow, and asked them to admit the fourteen-year-old Anthon. She believed that for Army rescue home workers, ―nothing was a surprise . . . they knew all the forms her wickedness was likely to take, & had experience of them every one.‖ 171 Anthon was accepted into the Clock House upon the approval of Mrs. Bramwell Booth. Soon after arriving at the Clock House, Anthon was converted. My dear Godmother,‖ she wrote Maynard, ―I am very glad you sent me here for something lovely has happened, I have done what you have prayed for eight years at least, I have given myself to God.‖ 172 In recent years scholars of religion and class have disputed singular notions of working- class irreligion and the secularization theories they substantiate by drawing attention to forms of working-class piety that took place outside of weekly attendance at church and chapel. 173 The Salvation Army, which drew on working-class culture and offered devotional opportunities beyond those of a Sunday morning, straddled the divide between the informal religious practices of the working class and the church or chapel. Scholars of religion and class have also refuted notions that working-class religion was an imposition of the middle class on the working class to procure compliance to the economic and political inequities of industrial capitalism. 174 Walker thus asserts that ―the Salvation Army was as authentic, complicated, and mediated expression of working-class belief and desire as any other movement of working-class people.‖ 175 She 171 Effie Notebooks, October 1896, 11. 172 Ibid., 12. 173 Sarah C. Williams, Religious Belief and Popular Culture in Southwark, c.1880-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 174 E. P. Thompson, for example, had argued in The Making of the English Working Class that Methodism was the ―‗chiliasm of despair‘ taken up by workers defeated by the onslaught of industrial capitalism.‖ Pamela Walker, Pulling the Devil's Kingdom Down: The Salvation Army in Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 4. 175 Walker, Pulling, 66. 272 suggests that to dismiss Salvationists as ―deluded or duped denies the creativity of those men and women as well as the particularity of their vision.‖ 176 Anthon‘s conversion therefore should not be seen as a capitulation to Maynard‘s piety. She had resisted conversion for eight years and her turn to Christ in 1896 was a response to the spiritual mothering of a Salvation Army staff member, Ensign Martin, rather than a capitulation to Maynard‘s belief system. Her volition was nevertheless constrained by the very difficult circumstances of her life. She had experienced not only Maynard‘s unstable mothering but also chronic geographical mobility and a precipitous social downfall; she had neither friends nor family beyond Maynard and the Salvation Army. These circumstances contributed to her turn to Christian faith; she came to an understanding of Christ as unchanging. ―I am just going to write you out [Ensign Martin‘s] favourite chorus,‖ the sixteen-year-old Anthon wrote to Maynard, ―I love it because she does & because it is so true: Yesterday, to-day for ever / Jesus is the same, / We may change but Jesus never / Glory to his name. 177 For Anthon, Christ‘s love was unconditional and unwavering. Anthon‘s evangelicalism had much in common with Maynard‘s. She demonstrated a profound sense of sin, identified masturbation as a sin, and was no more able than Maynard to reflect on the very difficult circumstances (including those precipitated by Maynard) that had prompted her actual wrongs. She expressed deep contrition for her conduct of earlier years and sought Maynard‘s forgiveness (―Oh write & tell me that I have in some measure atoned for the years of trouble & anxiety I caused you‖ 178 ). At the same time, evangelicalism offered Anthon a chance to resist Maynard‘s class-inflected ―mothering‖ of her. She took up the notion of Christ‘s 176 Ibid. 177 Effie Notebooks, December 1896, 26. 178 Effie Notebooks, March 1903, 18. 273 faithfulness to criticize, in an oblique way that did not jeopardize her tenuous tie with Maynard, Maynard‘s inconsistency and volatility and to establish a new standard of mothering for Maynard. When she lost her temper and was rude, played truant from school, and/or took money from the Home, she wrote Maynard, ―I feel sure that you will forgive me . . . ‗Jesus Christ, the same yesterday & today & for EVER‘‖ 179 or ―Dear Godmother do forgive me . . . ‗Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.‘‖ 180 Evangelicalism provided Anthon with a discourse through which she was able to challenge the exclusions inherent in the middle-class making of the family. Evangelicalism was not entirely implicated in constructions of the middle-class family; it allowed for the contestation of class status as well as its consolidation. This contestation of class was apparent in Maynard‘s life as early as the 1870s when, through her evangelism, she constituted a ―spiritual family‖ from amongst the Girton students of the lower ranks of the middle class. The social reformer Mary Kingsland, the daughter of a Dissenting minister in Bradford, was Maynard‘s first convert and one of Maynard‘s spiritual children. Kingsland was also the victim of Maynard‘s consolidation of class difference through her spiritual mothering. When Kingsland was appointed Mathematics and Natural Science tutor at Girton in 1874, Maynard‘s class-based sensibilities came to the fore and she resisted the appointment (―oddly enough, now that poor little Mary was one with me in the spiritual life (& a more earnest, eager, intelligent disciple no one could desire) the more did her accent, manner, hand-writing, & a dozen other trifles grate upon me‖ 181 ). Kingsland‘s evangelical piety posed a challenge to Maynard‘s classism, however. She asked herself, ―Yet, was I not a traitor to our one Great 179 Effie Notebooks, March 1897, 53. 180 Effie Notebooks, September 1898, 110. 181 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 19, 1874, 148-51. 274 Cause? Here she was, glowing with the new life & an ardent Evangelist . . . & who was I to withstand an appointment that might bring the Kingdom of Heaven near to at least a third of the Students?‖ 182 When in 1875 Kingsland experienced the ―baptism of the Spirit‖ advocated by the Pearsall Smiths and the holiness movement, and long-sought by Maynard, Maynard‘s class prejudice was further challenged: It was a kind of shock to me that this girl whom I had tended to despise as so dreadfully uncultivated, a girl who did not know one Italian painter from another, nor even the Greek philosophers apart, that she should soar up to Heaven & leave me behind. It was humbling indeed, it was even humiliating, for I had several times talked to them about the Baptism of the Spirit as the culmination of the Christian life . . . & yet here was I without it. 183 Maynard‘s alignment of spiritual progress with refinement of character and social elevation was disrupted. Her spiritual relationship with Kingsland shifted. She envisaged herself now as Kingsland‘s spiritual equal rather than her spiritual mother: ―It is no longer direct teaching, it is ‗sharing the spoil.‘‖ 184 When Kingsland visited Oakfield, Maynard‘s home for two weeks in the summer of 1876, a further shift in the relationship was effected as Kingsland took up the role of spiritual mother to Maynard. Maynard had, after leaving Girton, immersed herself in theological study to the detriment of both evangelism and ―the practical work among the poor.‖ Kingsland spoke severely to her about this: ―Study will not do alone, but practice must accompany every step as verification.‖ 185 She added, ―just [because] you are so good, I do so want you to be better, for you just escape being so beautiful.‖ 186 Maynard took up the role of spiritual daughter; she accepted Kingsland‘s reprimands. If the Evangelical discourse of the 182 Ibid. 183 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 22, 1875, 563-64. 184 Greenbook, 10 June 1876, 43-44. 185 Ibid. 186 Greenbook, 3 September 1876, 95. 275 earthly family was deeply implicated in the forging of class difference, and if Maynard had taken up spiritual discourse to further this difference (by ―de-corporealizing‖ her converts), Kingsland demonstrated how Evangelical discourse might also be taken up to redraw the parameters of the spiritual family. Religion offered middle-class women a discourse of cultural authority, which they sometime exercised by assuming a dominant role in relation to women of the lower classes (including the lower middle class), but it also afforded the latter the possibility to contest that domination by asserting their own spiritual authority. The potentially disruptive effects of Evangelical discourse in the physical realm – in relation to the earthly middle-class family – were evident in the late 1890s when Anthon made recourse to Evangelicalism to challenge Maynard‘s ―mothering‖ of her. Evangelical discourse also enabled Anthon to resist Maynard‘s entrenching of her working-class status. In 1899 Maynard had temporarily installed her as a servant at Westfield for a number of days, unbeknown to the teaching staff and students, to ascertain whether this might be Anthon‘s future vocation. Anthon, however, believed that God had called her to the Salvation Army, and to its Cadet Training Program specifically, rather than to domestic service. Major Bennett of the Salvation Army supported Anthon‘s aspirations, observing pointedly to Maynard that ―‗you make her under-housemaid, don't you?‘ __ with an amused smile, __ ‗well, I think you will find she is above that now & wouldn't care to come. Why, she is nearly ready for Office work, & might earn her own living.‘‖ 187 While Maynard had drawn on Evangelical discourse to situate Anthon as a member of the working class, lacking middle-class sensibilities, values, and competencies, Anthon drew on Evangelical discourse in an effort to better herself socially. In 1903 Anthon was accepted into the Salvation Army‘s Cadet‘s Training Home in Clapton with a view to being made ―Lieutenant for the Social Work.‖ Soon thereafter, however, 187 Effie Notebooks, November 1899, 121-22. 276 she was discovered to have succumbed to her ―secret vice‖ and Mrs. Booth, upon learning of this, deemed commissioning impossible. In the years prior to her conversion Anthon‘s attitude to masturbation had been in stark contrast to those of the authority figures in her life. At Miss Sharman‘s orphanage she had ―not seem[ed] to be in the least sorry or penitent‖ for teaching her peers to masturbate. 188 In 1896 Dr. Barnardo had noted that ―she had no sense of shame.‖ 189 After her conversion in 1896 she waged a harrowing battle against it. In 1897 Bennett informed Maynard that Anthon had ―actually said that she wished we would bind her hands when she goes to bed at night, & this is done every night.‖ 190 At the end of 1897 Bennett reported, ―the Sergeant who sleeps in her room tells me she has seen her many times get out of bed & walk about the room & then kneel down & cry & pray before she has the victory.‖ 191 In 1903 Anthon was given a probationary appointment under Bennett‘s supervision at the Clock House. Here Anthon continued to wage a battle with her ―secret vice‖; in April 1905 Bennett informed Maynard that she ―had again given way to her old sins & they had decided to send her away as a ward-maid in an Infirmary or Hospital.‖ 192 Maynard‘s response to Anthon‘s ―secret habit‖ in the early 1900s was an effect of her synthesis of Evangelicalism and Darwinism around this time. For Maynard the latter paved the way to embracing eugenics. Her disagreement with Anthon over Anthon‘s ―vice‖ illustrates the contest between a more modern, scientific iteration of Evangelicalism and earlier, more traditional versions. By the end of the nineteenth century the medical profession had made a compelling bid to establish sexuality as its rightful domain. Masturbation was deemed by many 188 Effie Notebooks, January 1894, 77. 189 Effie Notebooks, September 1896, 181. 190 Effie Notebooks, March 1897, 48. 191 Effie Notebooks, November 1897, 67. 192 Effie Notebooks, March 1905, 70. 277 to be a medical problem. In 1897 Major Bennett had informed Maynard that ill health was a significant outcome of masturbation; Maynard wrote that in the opinion of the Salvation Army, ―everything, spiritual & moral progress, courtesy, intellect, physical health, even her very eyesight, depend on one secret habit.‖ 193 Bennett‘s explanation seems to have been indebted to the hydraulic theory of sexuality propounded by William Acton in The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs in Youth, in Adult Age and in Advanced Life (1857) in which masturbation was believed to drain the limited energy of the body, resulting in nervous exhaustion, fatigue, illness, and/or a premature death. In February 1904 Anthon was diagnosed with tuberculosis, which was incurable at that time. It was prevalent amongst the poor who lived in crowded urban areas and as a result it spread quickly. 194 Many doctors believed it was hereditary and some believed sexual promiscuity to be a precipitating factor. 195 When in 1907 an ill Anthon ―somehow conveyed a sort of satisfaction in being my ‗poor worn-out old Eff,‘‖ the convergence of scientific discourse with Evangelicalism was evident in Maynard‘s vituperative response: I reminded her how the S.A. Authorities had told me . . . that all her weakness & illness was due to her own wickedness, & that, had they not stopped her by strong measures, she might be by this time either a hopeless invalid or a sort of idiot. That to give way as she did for years had brought her now a long & sore punishment . . . & to think of her so early in life as ―worn-out‖ was to me repulsive because it was connected with sin. 196 From 1905 until her death ten years later, Anthon moved from one service position to another, living in locations that spanned the south of England. She experienced further 193 Effie Notebooks, December 1897, 69. 194 As Walker notes, tuberculosis was the most common factor in the deaths of people under the age of thirty. Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 218. 195 Ibid. 196 Effie Notebooks, April 1907, 148. 278 downward social mobility. A short temper prevented her from working in households with large staffs; she worked primarily as the sole servant, a ―general,‖ of less affluent families where social improvement was impossible. 197 She turned to marriage as a possible source of consolation and companionship. Maynard took up eugenic discourse in response. The racial discourse that had informed Maynard‘s making of Anthon‘s working-class status in earlier years was rendered explicit. Anthon‘s marital aspirations were also the occasion of clearer resistance on Anthon‘s part to Maynard‘s medically inflected Evangelicalism and Maynard‘s making of her class and ―race‖ in earlier years. It was Maynard‘s response to Anthon‘s desire to marry, a desire she entertained from the time of her dismissal from the Clock House in 1905, which best demonstrates the effects of Maynard‘s modernizing of Evangelicalism, and specifically her synthesis of Evangelicalism and Darwinism. When, in 1905, the twenty-seven year old Anthon began to consider marriage, she received the support of Major Bennett of the Salvation Army. Bennett perceived marriage to be a solution to Anthon‘s ―secret habit‖ (―to put it in plain language she is a girl that needs to be married. . . . I have known of many who have married & have settled down happily. I am of course speaking of this particular class of girl . . . it may be God's way out of our difficulties‖ 198 ). The Salvation Army had, despite Major Bennet‘s delineating of the physiological consequences of Anthon‘s ―secret vice,‖ never viewed Anthon‘s masturbation as harshly as Maynard had. Although Booth refused to commission Anthon in 1903 and Bennett dismissed her from the Clock House in 1905, the officers of the Salvation Army attempted to downplay and even to overlook Anthon‘s ―vice.‖ In 1903, when Booth deferred her commissioning, the Clapton Home‘s officers informed Maynard, ―it would discourage [Anthon] too sorely to tell her this,‖ 197 Effie Notebooks, January 1909, 229. 198 Effie Notebooks, August 1908, 204. 279 and that she would ―be given a sort of temporary commission‖ instead; Anthon would be told that her poor health was the primary reason for the postponement of her commissioning. 199 Bennett, stricken by Maynard‘s accusations that she had failed to deal adequately with Anthon‘s transgressions, had subsequently compelled Anthon to ―confess her evil deeds before the assembled officers of the Clock House‖ and to ask them ―whether she should be dismissed from their special work.‖ 200 The Clock House officers ―forgave her, & most kindly gave her another chance.‖ 201 Salvationist theology offered a less severe iteration of Evangelicalism in which a discourse of grace predominated. Unlike Bennett, Maynard was opposed to Anthon marrying. ―That extraordinary nature should not be perpetuated,‖ 202 she wrote in May 1906, and two years later, ―Marriage, indeed! _ with her diseased body & yet more diseased mind.‖ 203 Maynard‘s endorsement of Darwinian evolution had facilitated her engagement with eugenic discourse. Eugenics was a system of selective breeding developed by Francis Galton, a scientist and geographer, and a cousin of Charles Darwin, in the 1880s. Galton coined the term ―eugenics‖ in 1883 from a Greek word meaning ―good in birth‖ and defined eugenics as ―the science of improving stock.‖ 204 As early as 1865, in an essay entitled ―Hereditary Talent and Character,‖ Galton assumed a direct transmission of all traits from parents to their offspring. The physical and mental feebleness of the poor, and particularly of the casual poor or ―residuum,‖ was not the product of overcrowded and unsanitary living conditions, but the result of a heredity degeneracy. 199 Effie Notebooks, October 1903, 33. 200 Effie Notebooks, February 1905, 63. 201 Ibid., 64. 202 Effie Notebooks, May 1906, 125. 203 Effie Notebooks, August 1908, 197. 204 Bland, Banishing the Beast, 222. 280 Sexual discourse was central to eugenics. For many eugenists, sexual promiscuity was hereditary, as were the sexually transmitted diseases that often accompanied it; the latter resulted in irrevocable physical demise. 205 Single working-class mothers or children born out of wedlock were the problematic result of a hereditary feeble-mindedness. Eugenists sought to prevent ―unfit‖ women from procreating. Galton‘s eugenics was indebted to his cousin Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution. In a conversation with Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin had noted with concern the failure of the mechanism of natural selection to function in Victorian society, partly as a result of measures instituted to facilitate the survival of the poor which meant that the population was ―more largely renewed in each generation from the lower than from the middle and upper classes.‖ 206 He argued that it was possible that the Anglo-Saxon race would regress; ―the nation will retrograde as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule.‖ 207 Many feminists embraced eugenics. They argued that women‘s superior sexual self-control, their role in sexual selection (delineated by Darwin), and their role as mothers qualified them to serve as guardians of the Anglo-Saxon stock. 208 They positioned motherhood as central to the wellbeing of the nation. 209 Maynard‘s interest in eugenics was evident as early as 1885 when she visited the anthropometric laboratory Galton set up as part of the London International Health Exhibition and wrote approvingly of it. 210 205 Ibid., 240. 206 Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions (London: Chapman and Hall, 1905), 509, quoted in Diane B. Paul, ―Darwin, Social Darwinism and Eugenics,‖ in The Cambridge Companion to Darwin, 2nd ed., ed. Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 225. 207 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, vol. 1(London: John Murray, 1871), 77. 208 Bland, Banishing the Beast, 88. 209 Ibid., 230. 210 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 48, 1884-1885, 106. 281 In 1909 when a twenty-seven-year-old Anthon expressed a desire to marry, the influence of eugenics on Maynard‘s Evangelicalism was evident: ―I was always frightened about it long ago, because the tendency to vice is strongly inherited. You got yours doubtless from your poor wicked mother, & I trembled to think of children being brought into the world with this black stamp upon them.‖ 211 She argued that Anthon‘s having learnt to masturbate untaught by others indicated the hereditary nature of sexual vice (―when a person is the originator of a disease or evil thing, it is sure to be inherited‖ 212 ). Maynard believed the physical effects of sexual degeneracy to be indisputable. ―Doctors say it is simply wicked to marry when this disease has even once laid hold of you,‖ she informed Anthon, ―& yours is three times. Rickets, hip-disease, consumption, __ all these things come out in poor innocent children.‖ 213 Paradoxically Maynard‘s Darwinism and her eugenics, the product of her ―modernizing‖ Evangelicalism, demonstrate the long-term influence of evangelical values on science. For the revivalist Jonathan Edwards, and later for Thomas Chalmers, nature was a system defined by uniform and regular laws; it was the product of a faithful God. Edwards thus noted in a paper on atomism that the ―laws of nature‖ were ―the stated methods of God‘s acting with respect to bodies, and the stated conditions of the alteration of the manner of his acting.‖ 214 Convergences between commerce, religion, and science were evident as the entrepreneurial middle class took up the analogy of an economic system to describe nature, and economically inflected values such 211 Effie Notebooks, November 1909, 33. 212 Effie Notebooks, December 1909, 44. Maynard was far from alone in coming to this conclusion. In 1909 Dr. Howard A. Kelly had argued that masturbation arose from ―parents who are intemperate, whether through weakness of will or excess of passion.‖ Jalland and Hooper, 246, quoting Howard A. Kelly, Medical Gynecology, 1909, 72, 291-98. 213 Effie Notebooks, November 1909, 34. 214 Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Vol. 6, Scientific and Philosophical Writings, ed. Wallace E. Anderson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 216, quoted in John Hedley Brooke, ―The History of Science and Religion: Some Evangelical Dimensions,‖ in Livingstone, Hart, and Noll, Evangelicals and Science, 23. 282 as thrift, efficiency, and regularity were inscribed in both evangelicalism and science. Atonement had been described in terms of the laws of debt and ransom; a similarly causal explanation was evident in the related notion that sin required punishment. As John Hedley Brooke notes in his reading of Boyd Hilton, this ―temporal sequence‖ could be ―inscribed in nature itself.‖ 215 Linear notions of time and progress ensued, and paradoxically these paved the way for evolutionary theory and for its acceptance amongst evangelicals. Maynard‘s Puritanically inflected holiness piety emphasized sin and its effects. ―The complete ‗Forgive & Forget‘ of the atmosphere of the S.A. is not quite the whole of the education given us by our Divine Ruler here below,‖ she wrote in another context, ―& the ‗Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap‘ of Ethics, ought now & then to be emphasised.‖ 216 Medical notions of time – and more specifically long aetiologies for disease – informed her evangelicalism and produced a reading of Anthon‘s past in which linearity and causation featured prominently. However, Evangelicalism did not necessarily produce linear notions of time and the endorsing of evolution or eugenics. Notions of redemption, such as those of the Salvation Army which emphasized grace, transformation at conversion, and lifelong forgiveness of sin, disrupted a cause-and-effect logic, but Maynard eschewed this theology. Until around 1905 Anthon‘s ―secret vice‖ had, as far as Maynard was concerned, been indicative of more severe spiritual sins and had also been ameliorable. While increasingly assimilating medical discourse, she had hoped along more traditional Evangelical lines that, with the ―second conversion‖ or ―entire consecration‖ of holiness piety, Anthon‘s mind, will, and body would be infused by the Holy Spirit and that she would be healed of her ―secret vice‖ and the tuberculosis that she believed was a consequence of it (if Anthon ―persevered in right for 215 Boyd Hilton, Age of Atonement, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 25, quoted in Brooke, ―Science and Religion,‖ 25. 216 Effie Notebooks, January 1907, 141. 283 some 2 or 3 years more . . . I should see her fresh & strong & bright as she ought to be‖ 217 ). She understood Anthon‘s ―secret vice‖ to be the symptom of the more serious sins of ―falsehood & conceit‖ 218 and ―pride & independent spirit.‖ 219 With the mobilizing of eugenic discourse, however, Maynard begun to identify Anthon with her sexual ―sins.‖ In attempting to deter Anthon from marriage she compiled an outline of Anthon‘s life that took sexual sin as its primary focus: (1) At ten Miss Coryton asked me to take you away from School, because you talked such shocking horrid things to the other girls. (2) At 12 you were dismissed in the utmost disgrace from the Orphanage, because you got into children‘s beds at night, & taught them to do things too horrible to speak of. I cannot soil my pen by writing them down. (3) At 14 you fell . . . 220 (4) At 15 I took you to Dr. Bernado [sic] with his immense experience. He said . . . ―Only one girl in 2,000 invents vice. . . . I would as soon have a girl with the Plague in my Village Homes, as have that girl.‖ (5) At 16 began the battle, long & dreadful, with this horrid vice. 221 Walker contends that Maynard turned to eugenics in later years to clear herself from the stain of failed motherhood. Anthon‘s ―secret vice‖ was a bodily weakness ―that neither prayer nor religious instruction could vanquish.‖ 222 While Walker‘s point is certainly valid, there was more at play here. Maynard‘s sense of failure as a mother had racial and national resonances and these in turn derived from her feminism. 217 Effie Notebooks, April 1907, 148. 218 Effie Notebooks, May 1905, 75. 219 Effie Notebooks, December 1909, 115. 220 Maynard believed, incorrectly according to Anthon, that Anthon had had sexual relations with a young man who shared her Brighton lodgings. 221 Effie Notebooks, December 1909, 40-41. 222 Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 219. 284 Maynard‘s reconciliation of Darwinism and Evangelicalism had not only resulted in a ―modern‖ Evangelicalism, but had produced a modern Evangelical feminism. In The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) Darwin had supplemented his theory of natural selection with the theory of sexual selection to account for differences between the sexes. He argued that competition for females led to ―the man attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman – whether requiring deep thought, reason or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.‖ 223 He had associated women with the ostensible tenderness and selflessness of the maternal role, asserting that ―woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in her greater tenderness and less selfishness . . . owing to her maternal instincts.‖ 224 Darwin‘s theory of gender was imbricated in imperialist discourse. He argued that in the ―higher races‖ sexual difference was more marked. At the same time he asserted that women shared with the ―lower races‖ a ―lack of willpower, emotionality, dependence, imitativeness, and little capacity for abstract thought.‖ 225 Darwin thus represented women as the ―lower race‖ of gender, and the ―lower races‖ as the female type of the human species. 226 The philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) had re-worked Darwinian theory, drawing on Darwin‘s interest in morality, to argue that the antagonism intrinsic to early human societies was, in humankind‘s more advanced phases, replaced by altruism and the pursuit of the common good. In The Ascent of Man (1894) the Scottish evangelical Henry Drummond took up Spencer‘s theory of altruism to situate human evolution in a larger spiritual framework and to argue that motherhood was the means by which altruism was fostered. 223 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st ed (London: John Murray, 1871), 327. 224 Darwin, Descent, 326. 225 Harry Campbell, Differences in the Nervous Organism of Man and Woman, 612, quoted in Bland, Banishing the Beast, 74. 226 Nancy Stepan, ―Race and Gender: the Role of Analogy in Science‖ in The Anatomy of Racism, ed. D. Goldberg (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1990), 40, quoted in Bland, Banishing the Beast, 74. 285 Maynard followed Drummond in her reading of femininity. Like him, she argued that maternal love was the font of all that was good: ―Of what is Maternity the mother? Of children? No, not of them only . . . Of love itself . . . of love as the pure and undefiled fountain of all that is eternal in this world.‖ 227 She subverted Darwin‘s gender hierarchy by reading the biblical story of the creation of the sexes in an evolutionary frame. In her 1924 text We Women: A Golden Hope she suggested that Adam, whom she understood to represent men, had been created first, and this correlated with the emergence an early and more primitive ―Man-spirit,‖ while Eve, created after Adam, represented the later emergence of the more advanced ―Woman-spirit.‖ Her feminist reworking of Darwinism was accompanied by the re-inscribing of the primitive/civilized dichotomy that sustained Darwin‘s racial discourse. Refusing Darwin‘s notion of the proximity of women and ―primitive‖ races, in We Women she suggested that in most races of the world the manly qualities were well developed; they had been in use for long spans of time. The womanly virtues were ―a far later product,‖ 228 less common amongst ―primitive‖ societies, and never ―foremost in [the minds] . . . of savages.‖ 229 British motherhood was thus more advanced than that of ―primitive‖ peoples. Maynard‘s re-reading of Darwin allowed her to situate mothering within a national and imperial frame. At the 1908 Church Congress held in Manchester, she addressed a meeting of girls on the topic of ―Women and the National Character.‖ 230 Britain had a special national character defined by its honesty, industry, public spirit, and simplicity. She suggested that these characteristics, all of which Christianity had helped foster, uniquely qualified England for 227 Constance Maynard, We Women: A Golden Hope (London: Morgan & Scott, 1924), 28. 228 Constance Maynard, ―The Creation of Eve,‖ in Between College Terms (London: James Nisbet, 1910), 69. 229 Maynard, ―Creation of Eve,‖ 69. 230 Constance Maynard, ―Women and Our National Character,‖ in Between College Terms (London: James Nisbet, 1910), 257-71. 286 imperial rule: ―To England, in the good providence of God, is entrusted so large a share in the rule of the world. . . . We may be sure that neither choice was arbitrary, but founded on character.‖ 231 Maynard understood the family to play a key role in relation to the nation. In a 1910 essay, ―The Creation of Eve,‖ she suggested that from the family sprang ―the main rules of ethics and the right functions of the State‖; the family trained future citizens in steadiness, forbearance, and justice. 232 British women were the repositories of British morality; they were the guardians of the nation: ―we also are mothers of the soul, the mothers of the nation.‖ 233 Children too were situated in a national frame. In her 1919 article ―The Influence of Christianity on the Position of Women,‖ she argued that children, women‘s supreme responsibility, ―first belong[ed] to the family, but as they grow on they become the Children of the Nation, the priceless heritage of the country at large.‖ 234 With the emergence of eugenics, middle-class British women were again represented as ―mothers of the race.‖ Women evinced the capacity to regenerate the British physically through their choice of healthy and fit spouses (sexual selection), through the careful raising of children, and as overseers of the morality of the society. The efficiency of the nation and the viability of the empire lay in their hands. Maynard believed that by attempting to dissuade Anthon from marriage and motherhood, she was performing not only her maternal duty but also her duty as a mother of the British nation. Believing the family to be significant in shaping the nation, she sought to deter Anthon from creating a family that would weaken the nation through its perpetuation of hereditary sexual vice and the physical disability that accompanied it. The 231 Maynard, ―Women and Our National Character,‖ 259. 232 Maynard, ―Creation of Eve,‖ 76. 233 Maynard, We Women, 23. 234 Constance Maynard, ―The Influence of Christianity on the Position of Women,‖ Journal of the Transactions of the Victoria Institute 51 (1919): 43. 287 imperialist framing of her eugenic discourse was evident as she asserted, ―the good doctor‘s [sic] lament sadly, because our beautiful sound healthy English stock is getting spoiled by miserable diseased people having children.‖ 235 Although once her adopted daughter, Anthon was now a foreigner whose intemperate passions threatened to corrupt Anglo-Saxon stock. Nevertheless, Maynard attempted to assume a motherly role towards Anthon in order to fulfill her obligations as a metaphorical mother of the nation. When Maynard took up eugenic discourse, it was not in opposition to Evangelicalism, but as part of it. She thus informed Anthon that ―there are cases when God (not man) says ‗No.‘‖ 236 Because of ―wickedness & disease‖ Anthon had been called to celibacy, and while God could not ameliorate the physical effects of masturbating, ―even your poor, broken, crippled sort of life may be offered as a sacrifice to God, & used by Him for beautiful results.‖ 237 Her transition to a eugenic Evangelicalism had been gradual. It was anticipated in 1894 when she accepted Miss Sharman‘s use of the disease metaphor for masturbation, in 1896 when she took up Dr. Barnardo‘s use of the same metaphor, and in 1897 when she accepted Major Bennett‘s description of the physical effects of masturbation. By 1909 eugenics predominated, as Maynard asserted that masturbation was a hereditary disease for which there was no religious antidote. Maynard‘s renunciation of marriage to pursue a religious calling, and her struggle with homoerotic desire, also played a role in her ready recourse to eugenics. She too had been called to celibacy, she informed Anthon, but, in contrast to Anthon, her eschewal of ―the joys of marriage‖ was ―because of honour & love & self-sacrifice.‖ 238 The instability of elements of eugenics and traditional Evangelicalism in Maynard‘s 235 Effie Notebooks, December 1909, 42. 236 Effie Notebooks, November 1909, 32-33. 237 Ibid., 35. 238 Ibid., 33-34. 288 belief system was evident as, at times, she set aside eugenics altogether for Evangelical notions of personal responsibility. In 1909 she turned her argument around to suggest that Anthon‘s vice was not hereditary; Anthon had been its originator. She informed her that ―in my compassion for you I tried to shelter you behind your poor Mother & said perhaps some of the blame of your bad life was due to her.‖ 239 She now told her, ―you are the one in whom the vice originates, & it is not taken from another. You cannot shelter behind your mother, __ she has no disease, & your constitution is good. At 10 you were an ‗iron-strong‘ child, sound all through, & it is your own choice has made the poor which you are.‖ 240 The interdependence of religious and medical discourse was evident when Maynard wrote later that her ―object in the whole matter was to detach her [Anthon] from man, & to attach her to God; to shew her that her history taken as a whole, hereditary & originated, mental moral & physical, rendered her unfit for marriage.‖ 241 Racial discourse was intrinsic to eugenics in general and, as Walker notes, to Maynard‘s eugenics in particular. 242 Her turn to eugenics went hand-in-hand with her foregrounding of Anthon‘s Italian heritage. Maynard was to see Anthon as enduringly Italian and to associate her sexual excess with that identity. When in 1912 she sent Anthon to Italy in a final effort to restore Anthon‘s health, she suggested that ―the sense of being among her very own people‖ would exercise a salubrious effect on Anthon‘s health; she asked herself, ―why oh why have I left this poor exotic sitting so many months on the beach at Margate?‖ 243 When Maynard first met Rosabianca Fazulo in 1888 she observed that Fazulo‘s beauty was ―of an unintellectual & 239 Effie Notebooks, December 1909, 53. 240 Ibid., 40-43. 241 Ibid., 63-64. 242 Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 219-20. 243 Effie Notebooks, March 1912, 134. 289 animal type.‖ 244 As eugenic discourse dominated Maynard‘s thinking, she asserted of Anthon that ―even quite as a child, she had no natural modesty, no shame.‖ 245 Sexual concerns had also been at the fore when she had decided against adopting a second Italian child, Margaret Addelen, in 1894. Addelen‘s nature was ―far more awake with regard to the young men than it ought to be at 10 ½ . . . there was the emotional flutter, the desire to please, the answers in turns too shy & too pert, the care how she looked, & all the 100 minute signs that shew the difference between man & woman is felt without stopping.‖ 246 Maynard‘s transition from construing Anthon as a working-class Briton to perceiving her as an Italian demonstrates the proximity of class and racial discourse; Effie‘s sexual laxity rendered her more ―foreign‖ than even the working class for Maynard, it was akin to that of the ―primitive‖ people of the British Empire. Maynard‘s opposition to Anthon‘s marrying precipitated Anthon‘s rejection of eugenic Evangelicalism and demonstrates the contestation between it and a more traditional Evangelicalism. In 1905 Anthon was in substantial agreement with Maynard‘s medically inflected and Puritanical approach to her ―secret vice.‖ She wrote to Maynard that masturbation had ―cursed my life, ruined my prospects & dragged me down.‖ 247 From the end of 1905, however, a fissure emerged between the two women‘s approaches to masturbation. Without disputing Evangelical censure, Anthon began to give precedence to an Evangelical theology of grace and to the possibility that the present was not a singular effect of her past. ―Still ‗forgetting those things that are behind, I press forward to the mark,‘ __ that is what I have to do now, isn't it?‖ she asked Maynard. ―The past can never be recalled,‖ she continued, ―but the present can be 244 Effie Notebooks, 16 November 1888, 223. 245 Effie Notebooks, March 1897, 54. 246 Effie Notebooks, September 1892, 194. 247 Effie Notebooks, May 1905, 72. Quotations from Anthon here and below derive from letters written to Maynard by Anthon and transcribed by Maynard in her notebooks. 290 lived for Him.‖ 248 She challenged Maynard‘s eugenic belief that the body had a singular meaning – that it represented the state of the soul – and that both were fixed within a linear trajectory of time: ―if my poor suffering body always reminds you of a depraved heart, I feel as if I should never again want to tell you of my health.‖ 249 She argued that Maynard‘s forgiveness of her would disrupt the cause-and-effect dynamic of Maynard‘s Evangelicalism and by extension the linear notion of time it informed. ―If I can only feel that you forgive, & that you accept, & that you love me,‖ she wrote to Maynard, ―the fact ‗It is your own fault‘ will not seem quite so bitter.‖ 250 In 1909, when Maynard sought to deter Anthon from marrying, Anthon resisted Maynard. ―I do not feel reconciled to always remaining single like you were talking to [m]e about the last time I saw you,‖ she wrote to Maynard. ―I have always looked so forward to one day having a nice little home & a good man as my husband.‖ 251 Later that year she was more decisive: ―my will is not in any way subdued to what you seem to think is God's plan for me. I really cannot see it at all.‖ 252 Anthon drew on an evangelical discourse of love to oppose Maynard‘s eugenics. She had argued in earlier years that love would enable potential Christian husbands to overlook her ―illegitimacy‖ (―if a man was a Christian & loved me he wd. never once think of my parents‘ sin‖ 253 ). She now asked Maynard, ―what does a man really care for the past concerns of his wife if he really love the women for her own sake[?]‖ 254 248 Effie Notebooks, November 1908, 223. 249 Effie Notebooks, April 1907, 149. 250 Effie Notebooks, January 1909, 236. 251 Effie Notebooks, February 1909, 46. 252 Effie Notebooks, December 1909, 36. 253 Effie Notebooks, May 1906, 125. 254 Effie Notebooks, December 1909, 36-37. 291 Maynard responded to Anthon‘s early rebuttals by arguing that Anthon was ignorant of the laws of heredity. She contended that ―any man who were to begin to love you . . . might yet say, ‗Never mind. We love each other, & that is the one thing needed.‘ Would that shew that he was kind & good? No, it would only shew that he was as utterly ignorant of all the laws of God about life & health & inheritance, as you are. If he had not read one single book on these wonderful laws, his judgement wd. be as worthless as yours.‖ 255 The disagreement over Anthon‘s marrying was ultimately an epistemological one; it was about the relation of scientific know-ledge to religious knowledge, and about who within evangelicalism had the right to define it. Anthon refused Maynard‘s contention that she was ignorant of heredity: I think I have also got the brain to understand the meaning of Inheritance. If my Mother has no disease, there is somewhere in that family, or in my poor father's, the tendency to this fearful complaint or I should never have had it, & even if I was a strong child at 10, the germs were there & there is not getting away from the fact . . . all the evil tendencies in both their passionate natures have been brought out again in my life. 256 Nevertheless she challenged the epistemological grounds upon which Maynard‘s made her argument and claimed that her life experience constituted as creditable grounds as Maynard‘s reading of the literature on heredity in assessing the question of marriage. ―Though I may not have read the books you have read or hear the lectures you have heard & given,‖ she wrote to Maynard, ―yet I think I have seen more of the sin & the dark side of life & of the world than you have ever seen, I have not been in those homes for nothing, & have seen cases there that I would not like to have you witness.‖ 257 For Anthon knowledge was the result of a particular 255 Ibid., 43. 256 Ibid., 48-9. 257 Ibid., 48. 292 situatedness; Maynard might, as a middle-class woman, have access to book knowledge, but she lacked the knowledge of working-class life. Anthon knew of ―many many girls with far worse health [who] are married, & have nice little homes & sweet children around them.‖ 258 Anthon also drew attention to the sexual ignorance of middle-class women: ―I am keeping straight, but oh the struggles. I could not tell you neither would you understand, how could you?‖ 259 She exposed the strategic silence by which middle-class women foregrounded their modesty while regulating the sexuality of working-class women: ―you say you would not soil your pen to write of things in the past, I think you have already written enough to drive me right away from any thoughts of being good & straight.‖ 260 She noted the hypocrisy in a class-based discourse of sexuality, arguing that ―you say my mother fell, but she is not the only one of many hundreds who have done the same, but she does not happen to have been one of the lucky ones with plenty of money & able to hush it over & cloak it up like the Royalty & what is called the Society of today.‖ 261 Anthon also stringently rejected Maynard‘s singular focus on her sexuality and her identification of her with her sexual ―sin.‖ She took up Evangelical discourse to resist Maynard‘s eugenic Evangelicalism, asserting that ―you have drawn up a long list in your letter, __ My God, is the past never to be silent? . . . Ever since I knew anything about the religion of God, I have been taught to forget the past & live in the present, & not to dwell on past failures.‖ 262 Two years later, in 1911, she took a firm stand for evangelical notions of grace over eugenic notions of heredity, telling Maynard that ―I know I was wicked, but I think I have reaped 258 Ibid., 36. 259 Ibid., 61. 260 Ibid., 50. 261 Ibid., 51. 262 Ibid., 49. 293 enough for what I sowed, & I don‘t believe God means me to suffer all my life, & lose all my happiness.‖ 263 The influence of an evangelical veneration of love and feeling, not unlike that experienced by Maynard in earlier years, was evident as she averred, ―I am a woman with a woman's heart & power to love, & cannot help my inmost & sacred feelings. They come to all girls, & cannot easily be set aside.‖ 264 Anthon also rejected Maynard‘s class-based and cavalier evangelical making and unmaking of the family. The latter had been apparent again in the late 1890s when Anthon, who had forged a motherly relationship with the Salvationist Ensign Martin, began to think of her biological parents: ―I do not know what has come over me (but I suppose it is natural),‖ she wrote to Maynard, ―but I do worry now about my own father & mother, & lay [sic] awake sometimes hours wondering & worrying about them. I long to know what they were like both in feature & character, & I want to know all about myself & them before I was six.‖ 265 Maynard promised to tell Anthon the story of her parentage in 1903 when Anthon was twenty-one, and this she did. She explained that Rosabianca, who was living in the Cape, had married a fellow missionary, Samuel Holt, and had given birth to a son. Anthon expressed the desire to meet Rosabianca some day. Towards the end of 1903 Anthon learnt that her mother would visit England on furlough at the end of the year and wrote Maynard, ―I feel if she is coming I can‘t let her return without seeing her & that darling boy.‖ 266 Maynard wrote back laying exclusive claim to the maternal relation: I told her how we must first of all respect her feelings in trying to do right, & that if her husband & friends discovered she had a grown-up daughter, why the poor thing wd. be 263 Effie Notebooks, January 1911, 88. 264 Effie Notebooks, December 1909, 39. 265 Effie Notebooks, May 1898, 96. 266 Effie Notebooks, November 1903, 46. 294 covered with shame & disgrace & no one knows what she might do. I described the transfer in the lawyer‘s office, I quoted part of the deed, & told the child I was after all the only Mother she would ever know. 267 Maynard‘s refusal to allow Anthon to make contact with her mother, and to allow Rosabianca to decide on whether to pursue the relationship or not, demonstrates the persistence of Maynard‘s middle-class making and unmaking of working-class families. She privileged the middle-class family formation (and middle-class notions of sexual propriety associated with it) by giving priority to her own rather tenuous maternal relationship with Anthon over Anthon‘s efforts to reconstitute her working-class family. When in 1911 Maynard, driven by eugenic discourse, attempted to thwart Anthon‘s desire to establish a family of her own, Anthon drew attention to the class assumptions that informed their respective understandings of family. Maynard could afford to renounce marriage: You have all you wish for, comforts, money, people who study your comfort, your own dear brothers & sisters who love you & are loved by you, all these things help to make up to you for a single life, but mine is different. I have none of the things I mention, I have only you . . . [who] may soon be called away from earth to be with Him. Then indeed I shall be alone with no one to care for me, no protector. 268 Maynard had both the wealth and the immediate family that rendered it possible to embrace celibacy. Anthon, who understood the necessity of a broad and diffuse familial network characteristic of the working classes, had no-one. When Maynard suggested work in an orphanage as an alternative to marriage and motherhood, Anthon questioned, for the first time, Maynard‘s adoption and mothering of her; she drew attention to the middle-class‘s use of the family to establish boundaries between classes and intimated that her own marginalization by Maynard was a consequence of it: ―Speaking of other people‘s children, they are not like one‘s 267 Effie Notebooks, December 1903, 47. 268 Effie Notebooks, December 1909, 37. 295 own, are they? Have I been so to you?‖ 269 Anthon understood the middle-class discourse of the family to be intertwined with the making of class difference. Anthon‘s health deteriorated rapidly after 1912. A trip to Italy planned by Maynard as a final attempt to restore Anthon‘s health failed; the severity of Anthon‘s illness compelled her to return to England early. Ties between Maynard and Anthon became increasingly tenuous as Maynard felt disappointment in the failure of her plan, underestimated Anthon‘s illness, and neglected Anthon while making plans for her retirement from Westfield. In March 1914 two middle-class women, a Mrs. Tarbutt and a Miss Rose, arranged for the now bed-ridden Anthon to be admitted to the Home for Incurables at Ramsgate; Maynard covered most of the costs. In June 1915, however, Maynard, unwilling to support Anthon any further, arranged for her to be admitted to a workhouse infirmary. On September 10 th Anthon was moved temporarily to the Minster Infirmary near Ramsgate and established in the Women's Side Ward. 270 There she died in November 1915. Maynard was not present at Anthon‘s death. Upon learning of a sudden deterioration in Anthon‘s health earlier in November, she had gone to visit her, but Anthon was no longer conscious. The matron of the infirmary believed she might live for up to a fortnight, and Maynard took final leave of Anthon. In the process she engaged in one last re-making of Anthon‘s class status; she refused to cover the expenses of Anthon‘s funeral, thus consigning her to a pauper‘s burial. 271 On Tuesday, November 16th, Maynard received a telegram announcing Anthon‘s death: ―Stephanie Anthon 4.30 this morning.‖ 272 On Friday November 20 th she wrote 269 Ibid. 270 Thanet Union Infirmary, as Walker notes from Anthon‘s death certificate. Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 219. 271 Walker draws attention to the degradation inherent in the latter: ―even the poorest family would incur debt sooner than dishonour the deceased with a pauper burial.‖ E. Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 193, quoted in Walker, ―Adoption,‖ 219. 272 Effie Notebooks, November 1915, 47. 296 in her notebook: ―The funeral is at 2.30 today.‖ 273 She did not attend it. In her dealings with Anthon, Maynard had not been part of a network of accountability (―no one in the world knows how I go on with her. Home people have ceased to enquire, & Anne & Ralph very naturally treat her as if she had died long ago‖ 274 ). Nevertheless, Anthon had had at least two defenders in the course of her life. Both challenged Maynard‘s treatment of Anthon on Evangelical grounds. When in 1896 Maynard sought to annul the adoption, Ellen Pash was outraged. She informed Maynard that ―had she thought the bond wd. not be permanent she ‗would never have allowed it.‘‖ 275 When in 1912 Maynard wrote a dismissive note to Miss Ward, the woman with whom Anthon was lodging in Italy, in response to her concerns about Anthon‘s deteriorating health and her need to return to England early, Ward also took up Anthon‘s cause: ―I really believe that poor girl is friendless, think of how sad that must be! She needs a permanent home where she will be very kindly treated.‖ 276 Anthon was ―one of these little ones that believe on Christ.‖ 277 Maynard‘s turn to eugenics had, in fact, been informed by dark and complex feelings towards Anthon. She had felt profound anger at Anthon‘s failures and revulsion towards her ―sexual vice.‖ In 1909 she described how disgust had overwhelmed her just before a visit from Anthon: ―a surge of repulsion rose up in me, & I hardly knew how to go downstairs to meet her; a wreck, a ruin, diseased, tuberculous, unclean, untrue, __ all the most terrible thoughts & hates rose up within me, & would not be suppressed.‖ 278 She ―wondered why I had gone on so long 273 Ibid., 51. 274 Effie Notebooks, December 1909, 65. 275 Effie Notebooks, 11 June 1892, 132. 276 Effie Notebooks, November 1912, 185. 277 Effie Notebooks, January 1913, 199. 278 Effie Notebooks, January 1909, 224. 297 with this being who to me appeared dirty all through in a fashion irremediable. There was nothing to be done but to loathe such a compound of vices & evils as she was.‖ 279 A discourse of dirt and of illicit sexuality converged; Anthon‘s ―dirtiness‖ of earlier years had become associated with her sexual vice. The line between disgust and affection, and even admiration, was paradoxically a fine one, however. At moments of Anthon‘s ―deep disgrace,‖ such as her dismissal from the Clock House in 1905 for the pursuit of her ―secret vice,‖ Maynard ―felt drawn to her as never before since she was a little child.‖ 280 She met a spiritually broken, ―humbled,‖ and contrite Anthon with an excess of affection. Anthon was her ―crown of blossoms that has been dashed in the mud, my rose that has been snapped off & trampled underfoot‖ 281 ; she referred to her as ―my dear battered bruised Anthon.‖ 282 In her struggle with masturbation Anthon had ―tried so long & so hard‖ 283 and had never given up. ―My poor old Eff,‖ she wrote in her notebook, ―God measures us not by success but by the amount of effort put forth, & . . . compared with most of us, you are a bit of a hero.‖ 284 Maynard had vast reserves of hope for Anthon: ―She is going to be a hero, my Anthon, & I see the beginnings of it now in her sore humiliation.‖ 285 Both Maynard and Anthon shared a singular ―hunger for love.‖ 286 Both believed that 279 Effie Notebooks, February 1909, 243. 280 Effie Notebooks, May 1905, 77. 281 Effie Notebooks, January 1909, 231. 282 Effie Notebooks, September 1905, 110. 283 Effie Notebooks, May 1905, 77. 284 Effie Notebooks, December 1911, 121. 285 Effie Notebooks, May 1905, 77. 286 On Maynard‘s description of her own ―hunger for love,‖ see Greenbook, 1 February 1896, quoted in Autobiography, 1896, 372. 298 marriage and motherhood would satisfy that hunger. As Anthon began to insist on the right to marry, Maynard assured her that she knew how ―one longs for love, & for a little home of one's own? . . . Oh, how I should have loved to be a true, happy wife & mother! And I was devotedly loved.‖ 287 By 1888 when Maynard adopted Anthon she had renounced the homoerotic relationships that she initially deemed divine compensations for marriage and motherhood. Between the years 1886 and 1897 she waged a ―successful‖ battle with homoerotic desire. From 1897, however, she commenced a final homoerotic relationship with a young Anglo-Irish woman, Marion Wakefield, and began an unsuccessful struggle to subordinate human love to divine. She observed that ―to look back is to be deeply ashamed . . . & I am covered with confusion to think of the discrepancy between what I knew & what I did.‖ 288 The identification suggested in Maynard‘s fervent attachments to and detachments from Anthon is not unlike that of middle-class women towards the prostitutes of London‘s slums. In Maynard‘s case this identification derived from similarities to as well as differences from the working-class ―other.‖ This was rendered explicit as Maynard observed, ―poor, poor Effie, her faults after all are only my own ‗writ large.‘‖ 289 Anthon‘s refusal to forego marriage – her prioritizing of human love over what Maynard deemed divine imperatives – was comparable to her own pursuit of homoerotic desire. If Maynard sensed a certain similarity between Anthon‘s struggles and her own – their desire to marry, what Maynard saw as their calling to celibacy, their struggles to subordinate human love to divine – Maynard was nevertheless certain that Anthon‘s sins were far more egregious than her own. Anthon‘s sins may have been her own ―writ large‖ but they were ―so 287 Effie Notebooks, November 1909, 32. 288 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 44, 1882, 19. 289 Effie Notebooks, December 1909, 64. 299 very very large, so blatant, it is hard to tackle them.‖ 290 Love – or rather the misguided pursuit of love – became a site at which class and racial difference was consolidated. Maynard noted that unlike her, Anthon lacked ―the many veils of reticence, of love of approbation, of instinctive modesty, of sense of fitness or beauty, of a natural recognition that a thing or a person is higher or better than oneself, __ the scores of other feelings that come into life as checks to expression, as hiding our bareness, as softening or turning aside the unadorned crude edge of our greed for self.‖ 291 It was the recognition of their similarity that led Maynard to chart such a rigid line between her own sexuality and Anthon‘s, to turn to eugenic discourse and its more unyielding class and racial explanations of dissolute sexuality. Maynard‘s regulation of Anthon‘s sexuality suggests a far more complex dynamic in middle-class women‘s regulation of the sexuality of working-class and indigenous women than simply an evangelical prudishness. If, as I have argued in the preceding chapters, evangelical discourse produced desire as much as it restrained it (and produced it in the process of restraining it), then it is necessary to examine middle-class women‘s erotic subjectivity – and specifically the struggles of evangelical women to subordinate human love to the divine – in positing explanations for their regulation of the sexuality of working-class and indigenous women. Maynard‘s relationship with Anthon offers an explanation for the dual disgust/attraction dynamic that informed the approach of some middle-class ―slummers‖ to their working-class peers. The ―sins‖ of the latter may have epitomized, for middle-class Victorian women and men, their own sins ―writ large.‖ At the start of this chapter I suggested that the family was an important site for the 290 Ibid. Maynard may have been expressing similar sentiments when in 1897 she heard from Major Bennett that Anthon was a fallen woman: ―Yet it kept coming to me that wilful sins are perhaps much more alike in the sight of God than I was counting them, & that in no sense should the ordinary world's judgment be my judgment, after all the personal teaching I had had on such matters.‖ Effie Notebooks, May 1897, 56. 291 Effie Notebooks, December 1909, 64-65. 300 constitution and contestation of class difference, and I explored the role of middle-class sensibilities, values, and competencies in Maynard‘s making and unmaking of Anthon‘s middle- class status. Evangelical notions of grace, the body/spirit dualism, and the fluid discourse of the literal and metaphorical family provided some porosity to class boundaries. Maynard‘s constitution of Anthon‘s class and racial difference demonstrates the artificiality of class, the effort required for the sustaining of class difference, and anxieties inherent in it. Maynard‘s recourse to eugenics in the early 1900s entailed the fixing of Anthon‘s class difference. It illustrates the central role of class in the construction of racial difference. Maynard‘s turn to eugenics was occasioned by her synthesizing of Darwinism and Evangelicalism. Here heredity trumped grace, the literal body the body/spirit dualism of traditional Evangelicalism, and the literal family the spiritual one. An imperialist discourse of motherhood intrinsic to Maynard‘s Darwinian feminism found expression in Maynard‘s eugenic Evangelicalism, as she nevertheless construed herself as mother of the nation in overseeing Anthon‘s the body and her morality, in associating these with the efficiency of the nation, and in thus attempting to sustain Britain‘s imperial prominence. The effects of evangelical discourse were variable, however. The fluid evangelical discourse of the family that allowed Maynard to remove Anthon from her mother by prioritizing spiritual motherhood, also allowed Anthon to contest Maynard‘s motherhood. It allowed her to resist Maynard‘s eugenic prioritizing of the body and heredity, class, and race. The contest between these two iterations of evangelicalism demonstrates the process by which eugenic discourse gained ascendance in turn-of-the-century evangelicalism. It also illustrates the agency, albeit a limited one, of working-class evangelicals in their dealings with their middle-class co- religionists. 301 Chapter 5: Queer Intimacies: Evangelicalism, Homoeroticism, and Empire In 1899 Maynard wrote a series of thirty-seven sonnets, ―A Six Weeks [sic] Sleep,‖ which took as their subject the young Anglo-Irish woman, Marion Wakefield (b. 1876), with whom the fifty-year-old Maynard had fallen in love, and who was at the time being treated for neurasthenia. The sonnets were never published and, as Maynard later acknowledged, were of varying literary merit. Nevertheless, ―A Six Weeks Sleep‖ constitutes a significant new resource for the study of female same-sex desire in the Victorian era. 1 In the sonnets Maynard, adopting a range of poetic personae from which to reflect on the body of the recumbent Wakefield – Sleep, Death, Life, Health etc. – expressed ―a love so fervent‖ that she doubted Wakefield, the last of her loves, would ever have its equal offered to her. 2 Religious discourse, homoerotic desire, and imperial sentiments intertwine in the sonnets. Maynard represents Wakefield as a gift from God as her glance lingers sensually on her body (―But thou, Thyself has given me this rose / And added human comfort to divine‖). At the same time Maynard remembers the bodies of the British in the battle fields of the South African War, which had just erupted: Before my passive mind two visions rise, – The one from where the Transvaal comes the roar Of shots fired by the sullen Boer, And the war‘s dread crimson mounts before my eyes. And then, a room all hushed in twilight calm, Where she, my white rose, gently breathing lies, Her thoughts like petals folded inwardly. (―Visions,‖ lines 5-11). 3 1 Constance Maynard, Original Poems, vol. 1, 88, Constance Maynard Papers, Queen Mary College, London. In a commentary that accompanies ―A Six Weeks Sleep,‖ Maynard wrote that ―when the door was closed and bolted on Marion [visitors were prohibited during Wakefield‘s rest-cure] I attempted to write a sonnet about her, & then being cheered by finding I could do it, I went on writing one a day till the release. There they stand 37 of them, of unequal merit, but some are good‖ (ibid.). 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 75. 302 The visual juxtaposition of the ―war‘s dread crimson‖ and ―my white rose,‖ and the aural contrast of ―the roar‖ of the war and the ―hushed‖ room in which Wakefield lies, establishes a gendered public/private and imperial/domestic dichotomy. Masculinity, violence, and the colonial battle field are juxtaposed with femininity, purity, and the home. In the sonnet ―Marion Speaks a Second Time‖ imperial aspirations, illicit gender longings, and same-sex desire converge in ways that disrupt the gendering of the private and public, of domestic and imperial space. Maynard, relinquishing her vantage point as an observer, slips into the textual body of Wakefield, and effects the incorporation of Wakefield‘s body and psyche (and thus also her own) into the colonial landscape. A murmur from the Transvaal hoarse & long Sounds through four thousand miles of foaming deep, And visions haunt me that I cannot sleep, Of awful slaughter in the gathering throng, My blood from fighting fathers rises strong, To cheer the men who storm the rocky steep. And when my will loses its hold on life, And dreams hold sway in reckless brilliant show, They wildly plunge in battle‘s roar (―Marion Speaks A Second Time,‖ lines 3-11). 4 Maynard‘s erotic inhabiting of Wakefield‘s body refuses the alignment of middle-class women with the domestic, and of the divide between the wider domestic (the ―home‖ of the British nation) and empire (the ―away‖) upon which British imperialism was predicated. In Wakefield‘s body Maynard is, in fact, part of ―the battle‘s roar.‖ With the recent effort to integrate national and imperial historiography, historians have argued that the metropole/colony dichotomy, which has long characterized British historiography, derives from the colonial period and was in fact central to the maintenance of the 4 Ibid., 79. 303 British Empire. The injustices of imperialist expansion were made possible through the imagining of Britain as an ―island nation,‖ entirely distinct from the empire of which it was actually an integral part. The metropole/colony dichotomy has also informed some theories of secularization and dominant constructions of modernity. The representation of modernity as the triumph of Enlightenment science, human reason, and progress is predicated on distinguishing Britain from its colonies and rendering the latter peripheral to Britain. For the indigenous people of the empire, British modernity was not synonymous with progress. Neither was British imperialism, even in the later nineteenth century, a singularly secular process. Scholars in postcolonial studies have begun to explore the mechanisms through which the metropole/colony divide was sustained. With the cultural turn, scholars have moved from institutional and high political questions to a consideration of empire in the everyday lives of Victorians. 5 Feminist scholars have turned to the associated issue of how empire was understood by metropolitan Britons, how imperial power relations were normalized, and how the British came to feel ―at home with the empire.‖ 6 In this chapter I explore how the metropole/colony dichotomy was constituted and contested in the Maynard-Wakefield relationship. I examine how Maynard constructed Wakefield‘s ―Irishness‖ and her own ―Englishness,‖ and how in the process imperial categories of race, class, sexuality, and gender were made, unmade, and re-made. The Maynard-Wakefield relationship does not represent the conventional English/Irish, colonizer/colonized binaries; Wakefield was not an impoverished Irish Catholic peasant, but rather a middle-class Anglo-Irish Quaker who had been educated in England. Maynard‘s racializing of Wakefield is achieved across other axes of difference including class, region, age, and educational difference. The 5 See, for example, Catherine Hall and Rose, Sonya O., eds. At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 9. 6 Hall and Rose, At Home with the Empire, 5, 25. 304 Maynard-Wakefield relationship shows imperial grammars of difference to be relative rather than absolute, contingent on context and also variable. At different sites within the empire ―colonial discourses were made and remade rather than simply transferred or imposed.‖ 7 This chapter traces the role of religious discourse in consolidating the domestic and imperial grammars intrinsic to it. Maynard‘s and Wakefield‘s relationship also witnessed the disruption of the metropole/colony dichotomy and the exposure of power relations otherwise deemed natural; empire was rendered visible at the site of metropolitan same-sex desire. Evangelicalism provided Wakefield with a discourse of authority that challenged Maynard‘s imperial subjecthood and disrupted her imperial imaginings. It prompted Maynard‘s unmaking of Wakefield‘s Irishness. As Wakefield took up the erotically inflected role of spiritual ―mother‖ to a young Westfield student, Mary Armitage, and Maynard‘s relationship with her was threatened, Maynard returned to the metropole/colony dichotomy and her earlier discourse of race. The ―spiritual Wakefield‖ vied with the ―Irish Wakefield‖ in Maynard‘s imagination, and the imperial landscape upon which the relationship had been forged was exposed. Maynard‘s and Wakefield‘s erotic relationship thus provides a productive site at which to explore the making of the frontiers of empire. By illustrating the means by which a metropole/colony dichotomy was the creation of British imperialism, and the power relations of empire were normalized, this chapter offers a critique of both secularization theory and notions of modernity that perpetuate unthinkingly the divisions between private and public, domestic and imperial, ―home‖ and ―away.‖ It also challenges theories of religious transformation, posed in response to singular trajectories of secularization, which by associating the religious with the private at the turn of the century, exclude religion as a factor in making of high imperialism and exclude both religion and imperialism as factors in the making of British modernity. Maynard‘s dissident sexual relationships thus show sexuality to be an effective site at which to chart the 7 Hall and Rose, At Home with the Empire, 6. 305 making and unmaking of the metropole/colony dichotomy as it normalized empire, naturalized imperial power relations, and informs secularization theory. The study of sexuality has played a key role in the field of (post)colonial studies, where two broad approaches have been pursued. The first focuses on the erotic imagination and its role in imperial conquest, and is sometimes indebted to Freudian (and Lacanian) theory; it is evident in Frantz Fanon‘s study of male desire in the structuring of colonial power relations, Edward Said‘s construal of heterosexual male fantasy as central to Orientalist discourse, and Anne McClintock‘s analysis of the gendering and sexualizing of Africa and the Americas in discourses of imperial conquest. 8 A second approach focuses on imperial sexual regulation and sometimes draws on Foucauldian theory. Stoler‘s work has been key here; she argues that the racial categories upon which European imperial authority depended were constituted and contested in changing colonial policies on miscegenation, prostitution, and concubinage. 9 Few scholars, with the exception of McClintock in her study of the imperially inflected sadomasochism of Arthur 8 There is an extensive literature on the erotic imagination and empire. For an overview see Ania Loomba, ―Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Discourse,‖ Colonialism/ Postcolonialism (New York: Routledge, 1998), 151-83 and Stephen Garton, ―Dominance and Desire,‖ in Histories of Sexuality: Antiquity to Sexual Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2004), 124-47. For studies of the European male imagination and the harem and/or veiled woman see Meydu Yegenoglu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism, (New York : Cambridge University Press, 1998); Sarah Graham-Brown, ―The Seen, the Unseen and the Imagined: Private and Public Lives,‖ in Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader ed. Reina Lewis and Sara Mills (New York: Routledge, 2003), 502-19; Sara Mills, ―Gender and Colonial Space,‖ in Lewis and Mills, Feminist Postcolonial Theory, 692-719. For studies of the British heterosexual male erotic imagination generally see Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality. The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). For studies of the European male imagination and African or Native American women see Anne McClintock, ―The Lay of the Land: Genealogies of Imperialism,‖ in Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 21-74; Rey Chow, ―Where Have All the Natives Gone?‖ in Lewis and Mills, Feminist Postcolonial Theory, 324-49. For studies of the European homoerotic or homosexual imagination see Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Christopher Lane, The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (Durham: Duke University Press 1995); Mukulika Banerjee, The Pathan Unarmed: Opposition and Memory in the North West Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Philip Holden, Imperial Desire: Dissident Sexualities and Colonial Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and John Tosh, ―Manliness, Masculinities and the New Imperialism,‖ in Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire (New York: Longman, 2005). 9 Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) and ―Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontier: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial South East Asia,‖ in Tensions of Empire ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 198-237. 306 Munby and Hannah Cullwick, have followed Stoler‘s and Cooper‘s injunction to utilize a single analytical framework for the analysis of the relationship between metropole and colony. If scholarship on empire and the erotic imagination has furthered our understanding of the imperial motivations of European men primarily, scholarship on sexual regulation has opened the way for an enquiry into the role of sexual discourse in the complicity of middle-class European women in imperialism. Historians of gender draw attention to the participation of middle-class women in campaigns to regulate the sexuality of both working-class women in the British metropole (evidenced in the earlier nineteenth-century prostitute rescue mission and the later nineteenth-century social purity movement), and of working-class and native women in the colonies (in campaigns against sexual permissiveness and miscegenation). For these women the ―civilizing mission‖ entailed the re-making of putatively excessive or deviant indigenous sexuality; middle-class women sought unilaterally, and often with insufficient understanding of the effects of their interventions, to prohibit concubinage, outlaw polygamy, and raise the age of sexual consent, amongst other issues. 10 Scholars disagree on the extent to which middle-class British women can be blamed for the rigidifying of racial boundaries in the latter half of the nineteenth century. However, most agree that their leading role in sexual reform, social purity, and the eugenic movements dovetailed with the efforts of colonial authorities to consolidate the racial categories of empire in response to the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857, the uprising at Morant Bay in 1865, and the threats posed to imperial racial categories by growing mixed-race colonial populations. 11 For the most part, though, historians of empire have assumed that the 10 See, for example, Himani Bannerji, ―Age of Consent and Hegemonic Social Reform,‖ in Midgley, Gender and Imperialism, ed. Clare Midgley (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 21-44; Philippa Levine, ―Sexuality, Gender, and Empire‖; and Hall, ―Of Gender and Empire.‖ 11 In Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience, Ronald Hyam argued that middle-class British women held more puritanical attitudes to sex than their colonial male counterparts, and by opposing concubinage and prostitution were largely responsible for the transition to more segregated colonial societies. Feminist scholars, while not denying the complicity of middle-class British women in imperialist sexual discourse, have challenged the singular focus on middle-class women as the cause of rigidifying racial boundaries in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 307 involvement of middle-class women in sexual regulation was the product of their passionlessness and prudishness. These they attribute to the aligning of middle-class women with religion earlier in the century. 12 The possibility that religion and sexuality existed in a different relation to each other, and that personal passionlessness might not have been the corollary of public sexual regulation, is not considered. Scholars working in the area of religion and homoeroticism in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain have not, for the most part, taken up empire as a category of analysis. David Hilliard‘s 1982 essay ―Un-English and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homo- sexuality,‖ the founding study in this field, paved the way for just such an enquiry. Hilliard argued that the association of middle- and upper-class homosexual men with Catholicism and Anglo-Catholicism – religious traditions deemed un-English and effeminate – disrupted dominant British discourses of nation. Few scholars of religion have taken up Hilliard‘s national framing of dissident sexuality and explored the relationship of religion, homoeroticism, and imperialism. 13 Alex Owen‘s work is an important exception. In a recent study of the homosexual relationships of the influential occultist Aleister Crowley, Owen argues that Crowley‘s spiritual efforts to explore the outer reaches of consciousness through homosexual sex They contest the voluntarist notion of agency underpinning this thesis, noting the penalties imposed on middle-class British women who deviated from gendered sexual norms and drawing attention to the role of colonial authorities in securing the emigration of British women in order to consolidate a masculinist imperial authority. Feminist scholars of empire also point to British men‘s complicity in the imperial regulation of sexuality through their support of the missionary, social purity, and/or eugenics movements. See Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 32-34. For an approach that assumes greater agency on the part of colonial British women, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1886-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 12 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780- 1850, rev. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). 13 David Hilliard, ―UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,‖ Victorian Studies 25 (1982): 181-210. 308 magic entailed an enactment of bourgeois individualism and mastery that was informed by, and that informed, imperialist discourse. 14 It is Owen‘s earlier work on spiritualism that is more pertinent to this study, however. There she pointed briefly to the enactment of an imperial erotic amongst middle-class women in the materialization séance. Making recourse to Lacanian theory to situate the unconscious in history she observed how working-class mediums ―materialized‖ female figures of imperial conquest – ―Pocahontas,‖ the Orientalist ―Yolanda‖ and African children – and how middle- class sitters caressed and embraced them. 15 Like Maynard in the sonnets above, the illicit sexual desires of these middle-class women were entangled with unconscious imperial longings. Their articulation of desire entailed rendering domestic space an imperial landscape and taking up imaginary positions within it. In so doing they both rendered the domestic/imperial, home/away dichotomies visible and questioned their validity. Maynard‘s upbringing had been intricately intertwined with British imperialism; the prosperity of the Maynard family was itself the result of imperial trade. As a young man Henry Maynard had made his fortune in the Cape Colony. He and his brother, Charles, had been sent by their father to the Cape in 1819 to work as agents for the Cape Town firm of an uncle, Henry Nourse and Co. 16 Nourse, a socially and economically prominent British businessman, was a key proponent of the 1820 South African immigration scheme, one of the largest British settlements in Africa. In the 1820s Henry and Charles Maynard settled in Grahamstown on the Cape‘s eastern frontier, the focus of Nourse‘s immigration scheme, and established a trading company, Maynard Brothers. In 1823 they were trading gunpowder and arms with the Zulu 14 Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 15 Alex Owen, The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (London: Virago, 1989). 16 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 7, 1869, 150. 309 from Natal in exchange for ivory and other tropical products, but they made their fortune, like other frontier farmers, by introducing sheep to the area and engaging in the lucrative wool trade. 17 When, in 1837, Henry Maynard returned to England to marry Constance‘s mother, Louisa Hillyard, he continued to direct the trade with South Africa (then the Cape Colony and the two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) from the Pancras Lane offices of Maynard Brothers. In 1862 he was appointed a director of the Cape of Good Hope Telegraph Company and in 1863 a director (and later governor) of the South African Bank. 18 When diamonds were discovered in South Africa in 1867, Maynard Brothers was one of the first companies to trade them (―Harry brought us a rough diamond to see. It came from the Cape, & now is sold for ₤ 1,050‖ 19 ). Between 1861 and 1886 Henry and/or his sons Harry and George made eight trips to South Africa on behalf of Maynard Brothers. The convergence of the Maynard family‘s evangelical sentiments and their commercial interests was evident during these trips to the Cape. Twenty-three years earlier Louisa Maynard and her children greeted the return of Henry and Harry Maynard from the Cape with a banner bearing the words, ―This is the Lord‘s doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes.‖ 20 The bifurcation of national and imperial historiography has rendered the imperial indebtedness of the middle-class Maynard family largely invisible. Few studies of Maynard map the connections between the ―discreet opulence‖ of her Kent home, her father‘s years in South Africa, and his ongoing business interests there. The metropole/colony divide of the nineteenth-century that sustained the empire is thus 17 The Maynard brother‘s expansionist predispositions were evident during the 1835 British Frontier War with the Xhosa; they gave unequivocal support to the punitive British response to Xhosa military attempts to re-claim land appropriated by the British. When the British government appropriated further land from the Xhosa – the Province of Adelaide – Charles Maynard submitted no fewer than three requests for land in the area. 18 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 23, 1875, 640. 19 Greenbook, 26 June 1871, 85. 20 Catherine Beatrice Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, Mistress of Westfield College: A Family Portrait (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1949), 42. 310 perpetuated in contemporary scholarly work. It is also present in theories of secularization that exclude both empire and religion from consideration. Maynard‘s early writings make little mention of empire or of her father‘s colonial business interests; they illustrate the erasure of empire consequent on a metropole/colony divide. They also demonstrate the ―domestication‖ of empire, or its normalizing in the middle-class domestic setting. ―Our dog at this time was called Kaffir,‖ 21 Maynard notes in passing, and also mentions ―the comfortable old carriage & pair, with its footwarmer & its heavy fur rug made of a South African kaross.‖ 22 The Maynard family supported missionary organizations and regularly attended the Mildmay Conference, the annual gathering of one of the most influential missionary bodies in England (initially named the Barnet Conference and founded by Rev. William Pennefather in 1856), but missionary organizations are only intermittently mentioned in Maynard‘s pre-1880 writings. It is during the period identified by historians as ―high imperialism,‖ that Maynard‘s imperialist sentiments gain prominence in her writings. The period between 1880 and 1918 was one of intense colonization and anti-colonial resistance, in which the empire gained prominence in popular culture while its viability was at the same time increasingly questioned. The 1890s saw the ―scramble for Africa.‖ Anti-colonial challenges to empire within the colonies and concerns about the ethics of imperial rule in Britain, evident with the First Indian War of Independence (the ―Sepoy Rebellion‖) of 1857 and the Morant Bay Uprisings in Jamaica in 1865, came to a head with the South African War of 1899-1901. Unexpected and unprecedented losses for the British in its early years led to concerns about the viability of empire; these were exacerbated, although from a different constituency, by the treatment of Boer and African 21 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 6, 1868, 127. 22 Autobiography, Part 3 Chapter 11, 1873, 371. In 1876 Maynard Brothers faced bankruptcy after Harry had appointed an inept business manager to oversee a business venture in the Cape and the imperial context comes into view briefly, but with urgency, in Maynard‘s writings. 311 prisoners of war after Britain‘s fortunes changed. Ireland, recognised by these historians as the first of Britain‘s colonies, a prototype for Britain‘s subsequent colonies, and a test case for the resilience of empire, was also an important focus in these years as William Gladstone attempted unsuccessfully to pass Home Rule Bills in 1886, 1892, and 1912. Maynard had visited South Africa with her brother George in 1886 and again in 1896. The heightening of imperialist sentiments generally in this era was, for Maynard, augmented more specifically by these visits. Her involvement with the Salvation Army from the early 1880s was matched by an engagement with missionary organizations, and this had a similar effect. She attended meetings of the Christian Missionary Society, the Foreign Evangelisation Society, and the Colportage Society. She became interested in the work of Henry Grattan Guinness, nephew of the founder of the brewing empire and a well-known Irish Evangelical. In 1873 he founded the East London Missionary Training House with Dr. Thomas Barnardo, where missionaries representing over thirty different denominations were trained for work worldwide. 23 She was proud of the students who graduated from Westfield and became missionaries (about a quarter of the graduates by 1913). 24 Maynard pursued her relationship with Wakefield against the backdrop of heightened British imperialism and a more avid interest in the empire on Maynard‘s part. A substantial record of the Maynard-Wakefield relationship exists, but only in the well- preserved writings of the more prominent Maynard. 25 Although Wakefield‘s writings have not 23 In 1877 Guinness had founded the Livingstone Inland Mission and in 1888, the Congo-Baolo Mission (along with the Regions Beyond Missionary Union in 1898) and it was this aspect of Guinness‘s work to which she was drawn. 24 Thirty went to India, eight to China and eight to the Middle East, four each to Japan and African, one to Java, and another to South America. Others worked in the London headquarters of missionary organizations. Janet Sondheimer, Castle Adamant in Hampstead. A History of Westfield College 1882-1982 (London: Westfield College, University of London, 1983), 67. 25 Maynard chronicled her relationship with Wakefield in multiple sources: in the Greenbooks that were devoted to her ―inner life,‖ in the Diaries in which Maynard recorded the external events of her life, in her travel diaries, and in her unpublished autobiography, a synthesis of her life writing. The Greenbooks provide the most comprehensive record of the relationship, with the exception of the account of the heady first years (1897-1899), which has been 312 been preserved, her point of view is, to some extent, represented in Maynard‘s Greenbooks, in transcriptions of Wakefield‘s letters and in detailed accounts of Maynard‘s conversations with her. Information on Wakefield‘s immediate family can also be gleaned from the writings of her more prominent aunt, Jane Marion Wakefield Richardson. Marion Wakefield was the cousin of Maynard‘s Westfield confidante, the lecturer and later vice-principal of Westfield, Anne Wakefield Richardson. Anne was the daughter of the prominent Anglo-Irish Quaker linen manufacturer, John Grubb Richardson, best known in both Ireland and Britain for Bessbrook, the model village founded around spinning mills in Newry where Protestants and Catholics lived and worked together, their children were educated together, and temperance predominated. Wakefield, like Richardson, was the descendant of prominent Irish Quaker linen manufacturers. 26 During the great famine, however, her father had moved to London, where he had worked as a barrister. In the 1880s the family fell on hard times, returned to Ireland, and took up residence in diminished circumstances at Cloncore House in Portadown, County Armagh. Marion, the youngest of four children, was still a child at the time; she considered Cloncore House her childhood home. Maynard first learnt of Wakefield while planning a spiritual retreat for a small group of Westfield students. It was early 1897 and Maynard was forty-eight years old; she was in her fourteenth year as Mistress of Westfield. Anne Richardson had recommended her young cousin as a possible speaker for the retreat. Wakefield, Richardson informed Maynard, had ―had a removed along with the account of the preceding ten years in which she grappled with depression. Maynard‘s unpublished autobiography, written thirty years later, includes some excerpts from the missing sections from the Greenbooks. 26 The wider Wakefield family and its predecessors are well represented in Irish Quaker historiography. They were part of a small group of interlinked Quaker families – Christy, Sinton, Malcomson, Richardson, Greer amongst others – who had been instrumental in establishing the linen industry in Ulster in the seventeenth century. By the early nineteenth century the Christy-Wakefield linen bleaching and manufacturing business, located in Moyallon near Gilford, County Armagh close to the first Quaker settlement in Ireland at Lurgan, was prospering. Richard Vann and David Eversley, Friends in Life and Death: The British and Irish Quakers in Demographic Transition, 1650-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 62. 313 remarkable spiritual experience, leading her to speak with deeply convincing power in the cottage meetings around her home, which lies in the desolate bog-land beyond Portadown.‖ 27 Richardson did not elaborate on her cousin‘s spiritual experience, but she did describe Wakefield as a ―pleasant, hearty, country girl, something of a tom boy [sic] in times past, & still fond of cycling & shooting.‖ 28 Wakefield was twenty years old. Of Wakefield‘s response to Maynard‘s invitation, Maynard writes only that ―she was bewildered, but willing to come.‖ 29 In late March 1897 Maynard met Wakefield at Liverpool Station as she and a small group of students prepared to make their way to Germany. Wakefield, she wrote, was ―crude, abrupt, easy-going in manner, and I rather avoided her.‖ 30 A week later, however, Wakefield had changed: ―her Irish openness confronted with English reserve became a very pretty sort of deference as to those older & wiser than herself, & in this she never afterwards faltered.‖ 31 The role Maynard‘s disapproval played in the transforming of Wakefield‘s ―Irish openness‖ into ―a pretty sort of deference as to those older & wiser than herself‖ 32 demonstrates the making of imperial female English bourgeois subjectivity. In construing Wakefield‘s ―crude, abrupt, easy- going‖ manner as ―Irish,‖ Maynard was utilizing etiquette as a domestic discourse by which to entrench the racial discourse that supported a metropole/colony bifurcation. 33 Despite Wakefield‘s middle-class upbringing, her English schooling, and her evangelical Christianity, Maynard associated her with the rough, impulsive, and ill-mannered Irish. She was also 27 Autobiography, 1897, 407. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 408. 31 Autobiography, 1897, 407-408. 32 Ibid. 33 Autobiography, 1897, 408. 314 constituting her own Englishness by suggesting the English were reserved, refined, and aware of the social niceties concomitant on hierarchies of difference (age, education, social, and regional location, in this case). The use of etiquette entrenches a metropole/colony dichotomy while rendering empire commonplace. The awareness of difference, and the enactment of requisite forms of deference through which subjects of empire were deemed ―civilized,‖ required an acceptance of the political hierarchies in place. Conversely, the ability of the English to comply with the correct etiquette – to recognize social difference, and accord it the requisite deference – often simply entailed an acceptance of their own superior location within these hierarchies. The political nature of etiquette, a product of middle-class upbringings, entrenched and also concealed the metrople/colony dichotomy. In recent years some historians of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ireland have taken up postcolonial theory to describe relations between Britain and Ireland in the nineteenth century. Luke Gibbons argues that the inclusion of the Irish in the racial categories of empire demonstrates the flexibility and resilience of imperial difference-making; as ―white,‖ the Irish Catholic peasantry confounded the ―scopic drive‖ through which, as Homi Bhabha suggests, racial difference was consolidated. Nevertheless, imperial categories of race were re-made to include the Irish as the imperial subjects of the British. 34 Binary categories – the juxtaposition of putatively regressive Irish Catholic peasantry with the progressive Protestant industrialist of the English metropole – cannot adequately account for the complex making of racial discourse in Ireland, however. British imperial power in Ireland was exercised through complex and sometimes competing racial classifications. The Anglo-Irish, although sometimes embraced as 34 Luke Gibbons, ―Race Against Time: Racial Discourse and Irish History‖ in Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. Catherine Hall (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 208. 315 allies of the British, were more often maligned as backward in their agrarian ways, incompetent managers of their estates, and dissolute in their frivolous urban pursuits. Maynard‘s racializing of Wakefield exemplifies the relative and context-dependent terms in which imperial difference was constituted; it demonstrates the fact that fixed, binary categories cannot adequately describe ―the mapping of difference across nation and empire.‖ 35 Maynard was never to speak of her Anglo-Irish colleague Anne Richardson in racialized terms. The Richardsons were a wealthy and politically prominent Ulster family, however. 36 John Grubb Richardson had weaving factories in the Lisburn area, had founded the Inman line of steamers, and had set up mercantile houses in Belfast, Liverpool and New York. The Richardson family also had two members in parliament: John Nicholson Richardson, Anne‘s step-brother, and Frank Leverton Harris, her brother-in-law. Wakefield‘s widowed mother and her children lived in far less salubrious circumstances. Maynard‘s construal of Wakefield as ―almost the same but not quite‖ demonstrates that, as Catherine Hall and other scholars of European imperialism have noted: ―white skin in itself was not always enough to secure full belonging to the nation or the Empire.‖ 37 Maynard‘s making of a metropole/colony dichotomy was further evident in her visit to Wakefield‘s home, Cloncore House, in 1903. Homes were central to Maynard‘s grammar of class and racial difference. Her sense of the ―nobility‖ of her first love, Louisa Lumsden, had been confirmed in a visit to her childhood home in Arran, Scotland in 1876. Although 35 Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination, 1830-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 20. 36 Richard T. Vann and David Eversley, in their study of Quaker demography in Britain and Ireland note that the Richardsons ―were the only family [in Ulster?] that lived in a grander style‖ (Richard Vann and David Eversley, Friends in Life and Death: The British and Irish Quakers in Demographic Transition, 1650-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 54. 37 Hall, ―Of Gender and Empire,‖ 49. 316 Lumsden‘s home was not an entirely ―grand‖ place, Mrs. Lumsden, ―a Forbes of Forbes Castle,‖ had ―kept a stately place by instinct.‖ 38 Maynard‘s perceptions of Cloncore were very different: For years I had promised my M. that before I died I would come & see ―the hole‖ whence she came to me, & the surroundings that nourished her young life. . . . I had heard many descriptions of the house, yet even so I was not prepared for its utterly forlorn shape, a foundation of bald concrete hastily altered & patched up to form a dwelling, low & apparently roofless, one cannot decide whether it is a ruin or not. 39 A covert conflation of Wakefield‘s home with the homes of the Irish peasantry is evident in Maynard‘s description of Cloncore. In describing the house‘s ―flat outline & awkward chimneys,‖ 40 Maynard may have been thinking of the peasant dwellings built into hillsides, which seemed to emerge from the bog itself. She situated the ―ruin‖ of Concore house in ―anachronistic time‖; she would later refer to it as a place where ―no visitors & no change & no prosperity ever come.‖ 41 She thus utilized Wakefield‘s home to structure the metropole/colony binary and to render that difference commonplace or ―natural.‖ The poverty of the Irish, as a factor that distinguished them from the British, was not seen as the result of a historically specific British imperialism, but as natural as the bog itself. The diminished circumstances of Wakefield‘s family and its geographical location, in the ―desolate bog-land of Portadown,‖ contributed to Maynard‘s recourse to an imperial discourse of race to describe Wakefield. Laura Tabili, disputing readings of contemporary British racial discourse as homogenous and chronologically uniform, argues that the racializing of some communities living in Britain – 38 Autobiography, Part 4, Chapter 29, 1876, 116. 39 Greenbook, 8 August 1903, 209. In her travel diary written at the same time, Maynard noted that ―it is curious to leave [live] in such a solitary desolate place, & you cd. walk from my bedroom out onto the flat roof, & look over all the stretches of black bog-land & green meadows.‖ Travel Diaries, 1 July 1903- 24 September 1903, August 11- 19, 1903. 40 Greenbook 6 October 1903, 225. 41 Greenbook, 3 June 1902, 120. 317 Irish, Jewish, German, and Arabs – at particular points during the nineteenth century was the product of increasing tensions in associated regions of the British empire. 42 The Home Rule question had brought the Irish into particular prominence in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The Liberal Prime Minister, William Gladstone, responding to increasing pressure from the Irish Parliamentary Party, had introduced Home Rule Bills in 1886 and 1893, providing for a separate Irish parliament with authority over Irish affairs. The Bills met with consternation; the British population and Irish Protestants feared a Roman Catholic ascendancy in Ireland, the secession of Ireland from the United Kingdom, and ultimately the demise of the British Empire. Tensions over Home Rule contributed to Maynard‘s ready recourse to racial discourse in framing her early impressions of Wakefield. Her racializing of Wakefield and her home comprised an imaginary making of the English nation and the United Kingdom at a time when the parameters of both were being contested. Paradoxically, the cohesion of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, and of the English nation that dominated it, required the inclusion but subjection of the Irish, whose subordinate role was central to the maintenance of empire. There was a significant Anglo-Irish contingent among the Westfield students. During her cycling tour of Ireland in 1895, when Maynard had visited the Richardsons‘ home, Moyallon, she observed that at supper she ―cd. look at 10 Westfield students in a row.‖ 43 The prominence of the ―Irish question‖ was evident at Westfield. Anne Richardson represented the Unionist side, while Westfield‘s first Classics Lecturer, Frances Ralph Gray, represented the nationalist side. When the students began to take up the issue, Maynard intervened: ―On St. Patrick‘s day, I 42 Laura Tabili, ―A Homogeneous Society? Britain‘s Internal ‗Others‘, 1800-present‖ in At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World, ed. Catherine Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 53-76. 43 Travel Diaries, 1 July 1895-28 September 1895, 10 August 1895, 62. 318 found a wreath of potatoes round the clock in the hall, & a green flag, & mottoes like, ‗Repeal the Union‘ & ‗Down with Sassenach,‘‖ she wrote. ―This was only fun, but really to have Ralph a Tipperary nationalist & Anne strong ‗Ulster,‘ was serious, & I had to ask them never to mention Ireland at meals.‖ 44 Maynard does not address Home Rule at length in her journals or in accounts of her visits to Ireland. In typically Evangelical fashion she eschewed overt political engagement (while nevertheless holding Conservative views). It is evident, however, that Richardson‘s Unionist views influenced Maynard. Like most Anglo-Irish Quakers, Anne Richardson opposed Home Rule; she viewed her father‘s benevolent if somewhat paternalistic exercise of authority at Bessbrook as a prototype for national politics. Her step-brother, James Nicholson Richardson, had been elected Liberal MP for County Armagh in 1880, but had vacated his seat in the House of Commons in 1885 to campaign exclusively against Gladstone‘s Home Rule Bills. 45 In 1893 Richardson began campaigning publicly for the Unionist cause, working alongside him. 46 Maynard sympathized with Richardson‘s Unionist activism: Ireland was at this time in a bewildering crisis, & Anne was drawn away from the College, heart & soul. She served on Committees where she was the only woman, she attended great Ulster Demonstrations in the Albert Hall, she addressed hundreds & sometimes thousands at once, & did it admirably & well, & was truly effective in her wise & sober indignation. 47 44 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 55, 1892-1893, 304. 45 Anne Richardson‘s brother-in-law, Frederick Leverton Harris, the only Quaker to be elected a Conservative MP during Victoria‘s reign, also took up the Unionist cause around this time. 46 In a letter to The Times, written from the Albemarle Club on March 8, 1893, she elaborated on the reasons for Irish Liberal opposition to Home Rule: ―they know – and who has a better right to know? – that only in the impartial justice of an Imperial Parliament is there any hope for ‗free speech‘ and ‗equal law‘ in a country where the spirit of faction divides the people . . . they oppose it because, in John Bright‘s words, ‗it would set up in Ireland an ascendancy a hundred times more baneful, a hundred times more harmful than any ascendancy‘ he or they have fought against in the past.‖ Anne Richardson, ―Irish Opposition to Home Rule,‖ The Times (London, U.K.), March 17, 1893. 47 Autobiography, Part 7, Chapter 55, 1892-1893, 322. 319 Maynard‘s description of Gladstone, written at the time of his funeral in 1898 which Maynard attended, indicated (in a muted manner, for she admired his piety) her disapproval of his Home Rule initiatives: ―an unblemished Christian man, sometimes mistaken, but never hiding that he desired to be a humble & faithful follower of Christ.‖ 48 The metropole/colony dichotomy was more vehemently re-entrenched at a time of anti-colonial resistance and imperial grammars of difference more vigorously naturalized. Soon after arriving at Berka in Germany in 1897 Wakefield was able to achieve a shift in the macropolitics of empire as they played out in the micropolitics of her relationship with Maynard. Religion, and more specifically Wakefield‘s ―remarkable spiritual experience,‖ provided her with a discourse of authority that countered Maynard‘s making of race and nation. The spiritual became the terrain on which the unstable power relations between the two women played out and in which practices of empire were consolidated and contested. After her faith crisis of the 1870s Maynard had turned to religious experience – the experience of Christ in the life of the believer and the transformation that ensued – as the only incontrovertible evidence for Christianity‘s claims. Paradoxically, despite years of seeking a direct encounter with Christ, Maynard could claim no such experience. Maynard‘s faith was self-avowedly founded on the spiritual experiences of others, both those of her contemporaries and those of Christians of the past. 49 Maynard‘s and Wakefield‘s relationship developed within the context of Maynard‘s aspirations for a personal experience of the divine. Maynard told Wakefield of her spiritual struggles, of the long years of waiting futilely for direct experience of Christ, and of her sense of spiritual failure. ―I told her I was like one who is always striking 48 Autobiography, 1898, 429. 49 See chapter two for more on Maynard‘s crisis of faith and chapter three for a discussion of the holiness piety that emerged from it. 320 matches & yet never getting the fire alight,‖ she wrote, ―A crack, a spark, – there is real light, real fire. . . . There is the instant‘s flash of possibility, & then black night closes down . . . thus I make thousands of grasps of faith.‖ 50 Wakefield responded to Maynard‘s sorrow with Christ‘s assurance: ―Him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.‖ 51 She prayed for Maynard ―with the greatest simplicity & frankness.‖ 52 Maynard was later to write that ―it gives me a joy I cannot well describe to be dealing with one [Marion] who has a real first hand spiritual experience, one whose obedience is owed to some far higher & more subtle level than any earthly one.‖ 53 In a poem that is part of Maynard‘s 1899 sonnet series, ―A Six Weeks Sleep,‖ Maynard, addressing God, wrote, ―Thou livest for me within those [Marion‘s] cloudless eyes.‖ 54 Her words demonstrate the role Evangelical women played in embodying Christ for one another, which was particularly important in the light of the predominantly male personalities of the Christian trinity. Wakefield‘s ability to effect a turnaround in the way Maynard viewed her was a result of this potentially egalitarian strand inherent in evangelicalism. The piety so valued by Evangelicals was a gift that was accessible to all and the exercise of that gift had the capacity to destabilize, if not to entirely disrupt, the racial hierarchies of empire. The erotic valence within evangelical devotion further turned the tables on Maynard. Just as the metropole/colony dichotomy and the racial discourse that informed it had been constituted and naturalized in domestic discourse – through Maynard teaching Wakefield etiquette and her representation of Wakefield‘s home – so too was its disruption effected within domestic 50 Autobiography, 1897, 410. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid. 53 Greenbook, 16 September 1901, 59. 54 Maynard, Original Poems, vol. 1, 84. 321 discourse. This turning point in Maynard‘s and Wakefield‘s relationship took place in the kitchen of the cottage in the Thuringian forest. Marion and I stood on opposite sides of the tall white china stove, warming our hands. . . . I could tell now that Marion was praying, and that God was near. I could only see part of her serge dress, and her knee and her foot. Once her long fingers came around the angle of the stove and we held hands for half a minute and then parted again. There was a thrill, a strange momentary smiling of the heart, an actual physical sensation, and I knew that I loved her. I had thought that never again should I love in the sense of having my heart's life implicated, and here the deed was done, and could not be undone, and a sense of awe and even terror came over me as well as a wave of extraordinary sweetness. 55 Barbara Taylor, in her biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, draws attention to the role of the religious imagination in structuring an idealizing erotic imagination. An amatory identification with the divine led Wollstonecraft to idealize her male and female loves. Maynard‘s account of ―coming to love‖ Wakefield demonstrates in a related manner the role of religious discourse in the structuring of the erotic imagination. Maynard, making direct reference to Christ, subsequently asserted that Wakefield had been ―made to reflect the direct beams of the Sun of Righteouness,‖ 56 and was ―clothed with beauty and splendour.‖ 57 Her later observation that she ―had robed and crowned her,‖ points to the central role of religious longing in the pursuit of this relationship. Maynard‘s turn to religious discourse to describe her desire for Wakefield illustrates the imbrication of the spiritual and the erotic in Evangelical piety. Taking up a different metaphor for Wakefield, Maynard wrote of her in later years: 55 Autobiography, 1897, 411-12. 56 Ibid., 217. 57 Greenbook, 23 April 1908, 223. 322 The strong, swift, beautiful Marion who leaped in at the window, her face alight with the joy of Heaven and the fresh night-wind in her garments was still to me the ideal Marion, the one I loved with a high love, the one who was the angel sent to fill up and perfect my solitary life, the one I longed for with a longing unutterable. 58 Maynard was drawing on the Song of Solomon 2: 8-9, here: ―8. The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. 9. My beloved is like a roe or a young hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the windows, shewing himself through the lattice.‖ The passage continues: 11. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; 12. The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; 13. The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. Maynard thus represented Wakefield as the coming of the spring in her life. It was both a spiritual and an erotic re-awakening. As Maynard‘s erotically inflected evangelical intimacy with Wakefield deepened, she ceased framing Wakefield‘s actions in an imperial discourse of race. The Wakefield who represented the possibility of an encounter with the divine, indeed who represented Christ himself, superseded the ―Irish‖ Wakefield in Maynard‘s imagination. Just as in her sonnet ―Marion Speaks a Second Time,‖ Maynard had situated a Wakefield in the battlefields of South Africa, and just as spiritual mediums and their sitters had materialized figures of imperial fantasy in the sitting rooms of middle-class homes, so Maynard‘s coming to love Wakefield while praying in the cottage kitchen exposed the larger imperial landscape in which the metropolitan domestic was situated. However Maynard‘s relationship with Wakefield also demonstrates the disruption of imperial grammars of difference in middle-class domestic discourse. 58 Autobiography, Part 7, 411. 323 While Wakefield‘s evangelical Quakerism allowed her to challenge Maynard‘s racializing of her, that evangelicalism was also imbricated in imperialist discourse. The Quaker Historian Maurice J. Wigham notes that the quietist Quaker belief in the ―Light Within‖ militated against Quaker evangelical or missionary efforts. However, with the Wesleyan revivals of the eighteenth century an evangelical form of Quakerism emerged, led by Joseph John Gurney (1788-1847). A special conference to promote Home Mission was established by Quakers at the Dublin Yearly Meeting of 1884. Wakefield‘s evangelism was effected through the Cookstown Methodist church. From here she conducted ―cottage meetings‖ (small home- based devotional meetings), in all likelihood amongst the Catholic peasantry. Her evangelical work should thus be seen in conjunction with the broader efforts of the British government to secure the conversion of Irish Catholics to Protestantism as a strategy of imperial rule, a strategy which simultaneously instituted the metropole/colony dichotomy at the site of the domestic. When placed alongside Maynard‘s imperialist ―racializing‖ of Wakefield, it attests to the multiple levels upon which imperialist discourse was constructed and contested. If the religiously inflected erotic saw the unmaking of Wakefield‘s ―Irishness,‖ Maynard‘s evangelical re-imagining of Wakefield did not escape imperialist framing. No longer the impetuous, wild, somewhat rough and rural young Irish woman Maynard had initially met, Wakefield became, in Maynard‘s imagination, the young Protestant evangelist bringing the gospel to the Catholic peasantry. Torn between inviting Wakefield to Westfield College as a student and allowing her to continue her evangelical work in Ireland, Maynard writes: ―I wanted her to stay on just as she was amid her peasants, her bogs, & her cottage Bible readings, my white rose unsullied.‖ 59 Maynard‘s representation of Wakefield as part of a Protestant evangelicalism entailed a re-drawing of the metropole/colony dichotomy; Wakefield was now a 59 Autobiography, 1897, 411. 324 member of the metropolitan religious elite, bringing the gospel to the benighted Catholic peasantry. The instability and contingency of the metropole/colony dichotomy, the shape- shifting capacity that allowed for the re-entrenching of imperial rule in the face of contestations of categories of difference, is demonstrated here. Its illusory nature is also exposed and its effects shown to be no less powerful for being both imaginary and dynamic. Maynard was ultimately to overcome her reluctance to uproot Wakefield from the Irish countryside; not long after the Berka retreat she invited her to enroll at Westfield College as a student. Wakefield did not immediately take up Maynard‘s invitation, nor did she reciprocate Maynard‘s passion at the time. It was only a year later that she enrolled at Westfield, and only in 1899, two years after Berka, that she ―came to love‖ Maynard. From 1899 on, however, she reciprocated Maynard‘s desire with a passion Maynard had never before experienced. Wakefield‘s heart had ―caught fire,‖ Maynard observed. ―I had tried for years,‖ she wrote of other friends, ―& they had failed me, & at last here was one who responded eagerly.‖ 60 At Westfield, Wakefield ―in her long grey dressing gown, with her fair hair in a thick Marguerite plait . . . [she] would steal in [to Maynard‘s room] and seek shelter in my arms.‖ 61 In her autobiographical account of that year, she asks candidly, ―And what of me?‖ and answers, ―I was passionately in love with her.‖ 62 Writing about 1899 thirty years later, Maynard observed, ―one word is scribbled across it in letters of fire, & that word is Marion.‖ 63 During the Easter break of 1899 Maynard and Wakefield vacationed at Argelès in the Pyrenees; Maynard describes 60 Ibid., 448 and 438. 61 Ibid., 445. 62 Ibid. 63 Autobiography, 1899, 438. 325 Wakefield bathing in the Gave, ―a snow white Naiad in her native home,‖ while she kept watch above. 64 As with her other homoerotic relationships Maynard was concerned about the threat posed by homosexual desire to the women‘s love of God. In the relationship prior to this one, the ill-fated liaison with Ralph Gray that Maynard had pursued fifteen years earlier, Maynard had come to believe that same-sex desire was of the same order as heterosexual desire. Its unrestricted pursuit was comparable to the pursuit of illicit heterosexual desire. She therefore strove to contain her own and Wakefield‘s desire. Although such efforts were motivated by spiritual imperatives, spiritual discourse was inextricably intertwined with imperialist discourse. Imperial grammars of racial difference depended on the juxtaposition of the sexually chaste or continent middle-class woman with the putatively sexually excessive indigenous and working-class woman. 65 The sexual morality of the British middle class provided justification for the ―civilizing mission‖ of the British Empire. Maynard endorsed these views. She wrote that men in general might live on an animalistic or an ethical plane and that British men lived on the latter. She argued further that in ―these inner facts, typical of the English mind, lie the secret of our power and our justice, and hence comes our right to rule the savage and outcast nations that dwell in the dark places of the earth.‖ 66 British women exemplified a purity that was the result not of an ethical nature, but of a spiritual one; they were characterized by ―a faculty that loves beauty and purity and kindness for their own sakes, an instinct toward that which is white and undefiled, an innate reverence for the things of heaven . . . every task leads without 64 Ibid., 440. 65 Siobhan B. Sommerville, Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body,‖ in Sexology in Culture: Labelling Bodies and Desires, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 60-76. 66 Constance Maynard, ―The Creation of Eve,‖ in Between College Terms (London: James Nisbet, 1910), 80-81. 326 hesitation to that which is pure.‖ 67 Women demonstrated to men ―that the severity of virtue is radiantly lovely, and the laxity of vice is hideous, deformed, repulsive.‖ 68 It was ―the naturally upward-tending instincts of the woman that cause her to be the guardian of the moral order, as the man is that of the physical and mental order.‖ 69 Maynard‘s discourse of sexuality was indebted to Darwinian discourse, as this latter comment suggests. It was the product of her modernizing of Evangelicalism, her synthesis of Evangelicalism and Darwinism, in the early years of the twentieth century. She thus took up Darwin‘s evolutionary readings of sexuality – his notion that the lower races were characterized by sexual promiscuity, that a higher sexual morality characterized the ―higher‖ races, and that the family, and by extension women, were the repositories of that morality. Maynard‘s evolutionary reading of sexuality was evident in the article she wrote for The South African Pioneer on the trip she made to South Africa in 1896, ― A Nation of Children or Impressions of a Fortnight in Pondoland.‖ Here she attributes the Pondo‘s ―primitive‖ state to a lack of industry, ambition, and struggle on their part. ―When one thinks of the immense amount of reform needed in these dark and bewildered lives,‖ she observed, ―one feels as if one could never begin it. To deal with an inveterately idle race, a race so utterly destitute of ambition that to ‗get on‘ in any direction, even the most material, is no spur or no allurement, is a very hard thing.‖ 70 Sexual discourse was integral to Maynard‘s synthesizing of Evangelicalism and Darwinism and to her constituting of racial categories of difference. The Pondo, she suggested, were a sensual nation. In old age they exhibited ―in flesh and blood all the indulged appetites, 67 Ibid., 81-82. 68 Ibid., 89. 69 Ibid., 82. 70 Maynard, ―A Nation of Children,‖ 154. 327 the persistent aims and pleasures of a very lifetime.‖ 71 Young Pondo women were the most ―repugnant,‖ Maynard contended. ―When a girl gets to marriageable age,‖ she continued, ―when she ‗comes out,‘ there is a change for the worse . . . the expression in the face becomes sensual and sly and in every way dreadful.‖ 72 She suggested that ―the whole self-complacent expression was of a mind deep in the mud of a sensual life and too ignorant to be aware that anything else existed.‖ 73 She buttressed her description of excessive female sensuality with a discourse of dirt. As a girl approached marrying age, ―her skin is rubbed with oil and clay, and the terrible pent- house of strings of red clay [the styling of Pondo women‘s hair] is coaxed into existence. There is . . . no possibility of ever being clean again.‖ 74 Physical dirt, sexual impurity, and religion were in close proximity as Maynard asserted that these were not the conditions for a ―clean and Christian life.‖ 75 Maynard‘s sexual making of racial grammars of difference took place in the context of anxieties about the demise of the British empire, anxieties precipitated by Britain‘s failure to suppress the Boers effectively during the South African War, anxieties about the dissolution of empire prompted by the Home Rule question, and concerns of the eclipsing of British industry 71 Ibid., 153. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 171. Maynard was far from alone amongst religious women of the turn-of-the century in putting social purity discourse at the service of a religiously structured imperialism. In The Power of Womanhood (1899), Ellice Hopkins, a social purity feminist and founder of the White Cross Organization, represented male sexual purity as a pre-requisite for national progress. A sexually-based racism similar to that of Maynard‘s was evident as in her pamphlet The British Zulu (1891) in which she rendered the terms ―Zulu‖ and sexual depravity synonymous. ―‗Are you quite sure‘, she asked her readers, ‗that the average Englishman has got much beyond the level of the dirty savage?‘‖ Sue Morgan, ―The Word Made Flesh: Women, Religion and Sexual Cultures,‖ in Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain eds. Jacqueline deVries and Susan Morgan (London: Routledge, 2010), 170. In The Decalogue the High Church Anglican Elizabeth Wordsworth associated sexual purity with national virility, and positioned middle-class women as examples to poorer women of that ethic; she advised women that ―the well-being of a nation depends on the purity, delicacy, sweetness, and goodness of its women, especially perhaps among the more influential classes. The mere sight of a good, holy, and refined woman is a kind of gospel to the poor and illiterate‖ (Idestrom, 191, 28). 328 by the new industrial powers of Germany and America. She turned to the Darwinian racial discourse because it represented the new authority of science and thus an effective means for consolidating the racial discourses upon which an imperiled empire depended. Maynard‘s evolutionarily indebted diatribe against Pondo sensuality demonstrates the centrality of sexuality to scientific discourses of race in an Evangelical context during the early 1900s. Stoler draws attention to the unstable process by which colonial grammars of difference were constituted. ―Colonialism was not a secure bourgeois project,‖ she contends. ―It was not only about the importation of middle-class sensibilities to the colonies, but about the making of them.‖ 76 Her starting point is thus not ―the hegemony of imperial systems of control,‖ but ―their precarious vulnerabilities.‖ 77 Re-reading Foucault in an imperial frame, she argues that the colonial bourgeois self was constituted in an unstable space in the Victorian psyche, between the pursuit and repudiation of desires inculcated by racially based sexual regulation (―the management of European sexuality in the colonies . . . animated a range of longings as much as it was a consequence of them‖). 78 The repudiation of such desire ―reaffirmed that the ‗truth‘ of European identity was lodged in self-restraint, self-discipline, in a managed sexuality that was susceptible and not always under control.‖ 79 Like that of Stoler‘s colonial women and men, Maynard‘s bourgeois imperial subjecthood was founded on the repudiation of desire that sexual discourse incited. For Stoler, however, the discourse of race replaced that of the confession as the regulatory discourse that 76 Stoler, Education of Desire, 99. 77 Ibid., 97. 78 Ibid., 176. 79 Ibid., 177. 329 incited and produced desire and thus ultimately produced imperial bourgeois subjectivity. 80 For Maynard the two were inextricably intertwined; the Evangelical confession through which sexual desire was both regulated and precipitated was imbricated with a language of race. The production and renunciation of desire in Evangelical discourse informed her imperial subjectivity; the latter depended on a sexual purity that was spiritually defined. For Maynard the making of imperial subjectivity was thus a religio-racial project. As Stoler suggests, it was also a precarious one. Maynard‘s regulation of her own and Wakefield‘s desire demonstrates the instabilities inherent in the Evangelical making of an imperial grammar of racial difference in the metropole. Uncertainty underlay Maynard‘s perpetuation of characteristically imperialist discourses of sexual morality: she recognized the vulnerability of British women to sexual transgression. Her discourse of sexual (and social) purity derived from the Bible. In a 1910 essay she argued that women‘s sexual laxity was a long-established fact. ―From the beautiful narrative of the Dawn of Conscience,‖ she wrote, referring to the Genesis account of the fall, ―down to Herod‘s birthday and the fatal effects of excitement, the woman is fully as often represented as tempting as being tempted.‖ 81 Women were not to ―soil our own thoughts by reading novels based on the complexities of Sex‖ 82 and to avoid the ―turning of the subject over and over with morbid curiosity and interest.‖ 83 They were to ―keep the mind clean and sweet by filling it with noble thoughts and high ambitions.‖ 84 80 ―Was the obsessive search for the ‗truth about sex‘ in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries directly culled from earlier confessional models, as Foucault claims, or was this ‗truth about sex‘ recast around the invention of other truth claims, specifically those working through the language of race?‖ Stoler, Education of Desire, 6. 81 Constance Maynard, We Women: A Golden Hope (London: Morgan & Scott, 1924), 75. 82 Ibid., 76. 83 Ibid., 77. 84 Ibid. 330 The alignment of European women with sexual purity, cleanliness, and whiteness was integral to the making of the metropole/colony dichotomy. Believing herself to have precipitated Wakefield‘s erotic ardor, Maynard attempted to reverse its effects. She mobilized a spiritual discourse of household cleaning to exhort Wakefield to a similar end. ―She [Wakefield] told me I was laying my hand on the centre, the bull‘s-eye, the core of everything; where she had never thought human sympathy could reach,‖ she wrote, ― and I told her not to live in the cellar, but to go down, tidy up, scrub it out, lock the door, and come up and live in the sunshine.‖ 85 By monitoring her own and Wakefield‘s sexual desire she sought their conformity both to Evangelical precepts and to imperialist discourse. Undergirding this discourse of the domestic was the necessity of sustaining the metropolitan/colony dichotomy as it was constituted at the site of female sexuality. Just as Maynard had evoked the South African War at Wakefield‘s bedside in her 1899 ―Marion Speaks a Second Time,‖ and Owen‘s mediums and middle-class sitters had materialized figures of imperial conquest in the homes of their middle-class sitters, so empire was instantiated in this iteration of the erotic ―domestic.‖ In her essay on the nineteenth-century advertising of soap, McClintock describes the practices of washing and cleaning through which an emerging British middle class established a boundary between itself and the working class. In the inner sanctum of the bathroom, and with the aid of soap, the middle class recruited the body to the making not only of class but also of racial difference. Advertisements represented soap as magically erasing not only the dirt with which the middle class associated the working class, but the darker skin colour that was central to their construction of racial difference. McClintock does not address the question of how, beyond personal cleanliness, middle-class women, who were increasingly exempt from household cleaning, were implicated in the making of the boundaries of class and race. Seth 85 Ibid., 448. 331 Koven suggests that some middle-class women turned to the slums and undertook, on a far broader scale, the cleanliness activities of the household at the same time both consolidating and contesting the boundaries of class. 86 A discourse of morality intrinsic to the cleanliness of the home (a godly middle-class home was a clean one) was simultaneously transposed onto the impoverished inhabitants of London‘s slums. Discourses of personal hygiene, morality, and social hygiene converged as cleanliness and sexual morality were represented as pre-requisites for a healthy society. Koven notes, however, that a paradoxical fascination by and eroticization of dirt accompanied middle-class women‘s social ―housekeeping.‖ They were drawn to ―the titillating squalor of the slums.‖ 87 Fearful of polluting their own bodies – both physically and sexually – in their work there, they were nevertheless attracted to dirt and the dirty bodies of those amongst whom they lived. Maynard had been involved in establishing the Women‘s University Settlement at Southwark in 1887; Alice Gruner, a peer from her Girton days, had proposed the venture. She appears not to have spent time at the settlement house, however, or to have had prolonged involvement with it; she disagreed with the founding committee on key (but unnamed) issues. The operation of the erotic across class boundaries had nevertheless been evident in Maynard‘s life at Girton College. Her befriending of Amy Mantle, the daughter of a London shopkeeper, was itself a transgression of class boundaries (―she came direct out of ‗Stagg & Mantle‘s‘ shop in Leicester Square‖); Maynard subsequently discovered to her horror that Mantle had been born out of wedlock. 88 In later years Maynard also expressed fears of contamination concomitant on crossing sexually structured class divides – both on the occasion of attending an outreach 86 Koven, Slumming, 186. 87 Ibid., 5. 88 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 14, 1873, 496. 332 meeting for prostitutes at an Evangelical ―rescue mission‖ and in her dealings with the ―secret vice‖ and ostensible fallenness of her adopted daughter, Effie Anthon. With Mantle, Maynard articulated a similar disgust. ―I had felt repelled, shockingly repelled,‖ she wrote in later years, ―& had now & then looked on her as the thing too low to be touched.‖ 89 Mantle was ―a girl stained through & through with disgrace,‖ and, she added with consternation, ―I had touched her, had let her kiss me & cling to me!‖ 90 Maynard subsequently recorded a far more sympathetic, romantically lugubrious, response to Mantle‘s illegitimacy. She observed that ―the sort of repulsion I felt before is lost in tenderness, & the feeling that some day she must know this, & that she will feel herself unworthy to be touched, & perhaps break her heart in grief & shame, makes me long to give her good measure while I can. And so tonight I have let her kiss me & call me her friend.‖ 91 In later years she noted more candidly, ―she partly attracted me & partly repelled me.‖ 92 Maynard‘s relationship with Wakefield saw an eroticized discourse of dirt and cleaning transposed into the spiritual realm. It represents another avenue through which middle-class women, themselves exempt from domestic housework, participated in the project of making class and racial boundaries. Its effects, like other instances of Maynard‘s application of spiritual discourse to earthly phenomena, were no less material for being the product of spiritual discourse. Not long after meeting Wakefield, while still in Berka, Germany, Maynard reflected on the ―sinfulness‖ inherent in her same-sex desire. She examined the ―motives, desires, and 89 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 25, 1875, 726. 90 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 16, 1874, 575. 91 Greenbook, 17 May 1874, 250-1. 92 Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 16, 1874, 573. 333 affections‖ that eclipsed religious desire, her own woeful failure in this arena, and the forgiveness of God that enabled her to approach the problem anew. She turned to the metaphor of personal cleanliness – bathing – to describe the process: Next morning . . . as I poured out my bath I thought how often washing was mentioned in the Bible. . . . Motives, desires, affections, all can be made quite clean in the sight of the Lord. And the water that was crystal clear to begin with, becomes defiled. It bears our sins and takes them away. As I carefully poured away the india-rubber folding bath into the large enamel pail, I said with a sense of triumph, ―Done with! Gone! Never to be brought up against anymore! ‗I will remember them no more ever.‘ ‗The iniquity of Jacob shall be sought for & not found,‘ any more than that water could be hunted up when thrown away, & brought up as testimony against me. Sin can be gone, gone for ever. And it is. Surely it is!‖ 93 Religious discourse, by inciting desire as part of the conversion and spiritual mentoring process and by then requiring its repudiation, offered Maynard the means to engage in an eroticized dialectic of cleansing and dirtying that replicated that of middle-class men and women in the slums. Her use of the ―bathing‖ metaphor attests to the proximity of notions of cleanliness and sexual purity. As mentioned earlier, in the generation before Maynard‘s, middle-class barrister Arthur Munby and maid-of-all work Hannah Cullwick demonstrated a similar preoccupation with dirt and rituals of cleaning, but in a different context and to different ends. Their sex play entailed, amongst other things, Cullwick bathing Munby, Cullwick ―dirtying‖ up as a housemaid, and the two keeping a close tally of the numbers of shoes cleaned by Cullwick in the course of her work. Munby was drawn both to the dirt that was intrinsic to the home, the removal of which was Cullwick‘s responsibility, and to the working-class Cullwick whom he identified with that dirt. 94 Indeed, as Leonore Davidoff notes, the family home was a site at which the sexualized 93 Autobiography, 1897, 409. 94 Leonore Davidoff, ―Class and Gender in Victorian Britain: Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick,‖ Feminist Studies 5, no. 1 (1979): 87-141. 334 boundaries of class difference were instituted through a discourse of the body and related tropes of dirt and cleanliness. Middle-class women were associated with the heart or hearth of the home, men with the head or study, and servants with the basement and ―back passages‖ through which dirt was removed. McClintock draws attention to slippages between discourses of class and race in Munby and Cullwick‘s sadomasochism; Cullwick ―blacked up‖ as a slave, she wore a slave band and collar, and addressed Munby as ―Massa.‖ 95 The ―home‖ and ―away‖ binary of imperialist discourse was contested as Cullwick and Munby‘s sadomasochism, like Maynard‘s sonnet, ―Marion Speaks a Second Time,‖ re-created an imperial landscape within the space of the domestic. As Stoler suggests, bourgeois Europeans‘ sexually-based making of racial boundaries was precarious; the inciting and repudiating of desire through which they were constituted was unstable. If Maynard attempted to rally both herself and Wakefield to spiritual purity, in the privacy of her diary a battle raged between religious aspiration and human eros. In her sonnet series, ―A Six Week‘s Sleep,‖ commenced at this time, Maynard turned to the characteristically Victorian symbol of the rose to represent purity and passion, rendering explicit the evangelical association of sexual purity with cleanliness and whiteness. Of her desire for Wakefield she wrote: The rose, the rose, the brave & joyous rose! – From all the flowers that spring our lives to cheer, Chosen for ever as Love‘s emblem here, His sacred hidden home of sweet repose. What depth of passion can its heart disclose. . . . (―Red Roses,‖ lines 1-5) Christ, however, required the setting aside of the red rose of earthly passion: 95 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995). 335 But truth is hidden from the love-charmed eyes The blaze of passion hides Heaven‘s solemn light. And, knowing here what alien splendour lies, The pure severity of Christ the Lord Passes the red rose by without a word, But even on His breast He lays the white (―Red Roses,‖ lines 9-14) 96 Maynard noted that followers of Christ were to ―walk with Him in garments clean & bright.‖ 97 If love could be ―pure white,‖ however, it was not a love that always appealed to Maynard. She argued that through Wakefield, life had ―made an appeal to me like a glorious scale of colour, a language not of thought but of emotion, an unanalysed happiness.‖ 98 Her resentment of the Christian ethic of purity was evident as she wrote plaintively, ―all the while Christ stood beside me, offering me white, pure white. He never speaks of any colour. He has nothing but white.‖ 99 At night, with Wakefield ―clinging‖ to Maynard in ―passionate longing,‖ Maynard nevertheless spoke to her of the ―dangers of love‖: how it was opening the door of the heart so wide that easily possible wrong might steal in; how it was a movement so swift that the slightest swerve might land you at the opposite point; how it was a tower so high that a single inch of slant in the foundation meant destruction later on; and … [we] must pray [Maynard exhorted Wakefield] with all our strength that this overwhelming force might be kept right, absolutely right. 100 In putting into discourse the possibility of a desire that exceeded desire for the divine, Maynard proliferated her own and Wakefield‘s desires, and facilitated their enactment. Ultimately, 96 Maynard, Original Poems, vol.1, 72. 97 Ibid., 72. 98 Autobiography, 1897, 410. 99 Ibid. 100 Autobiography, 1899, 447. 336 Maynard was unable to stay the ―overwhelming force‖ of passion; in her autobiography she acknowledged that the ―red rose‖ of passion had supplanted the ―white rose‖ of divine love and sexual purity. What is most telling about Maynard‘s capitulation to desire is the similarity of the tropes she used for it and for illicit heterosexual desire. By pursuing pleasure rather than duty middle- class women had become the temptresses of men. Maynard compared them with prostitutes and the brothels where ―‗the best in the world,‘ Love, is parodied and twisted into the worst sins of which human nature is capable‖ 101 In We Women: A Golden Hope (1924) she exhorted middle-class women to sexual purity by suggesting that ―when the white roses fall they cannot be replaced,‖ continuing, ―I fear, that the petals are dropping, and that we are losing the lovely distinction that makes us fair to look upon.‖ 102 She had enjoined women to be ―passion pure in snowy bloom, through all the years of April blood‖ 103 and had gone so far as to take up the Holiness Code and 2 Corinthians 6:17-18 to implore contemporary Victorian women to desist from flirtatious behavior and the sexual immorality to which it led. She enjoined her readers to ―Come out from among them and be ye separate, and touch not the unclean thing.‖ 104 Her descriptions of a desire pursued too avidly in her relationship with Wakefield (and her earlier one with Gray) echo precisely these metaphors. ―Oh! let us pray for ―Passion pure in snowy bloom through all the years of April blood!‖ she wrote in her Greenbooks of her relationship with Wakefield. 105 She had envisaged her desire for Gray as the idolatrous touching of the unclean and her eschewal of it as entering a desert. Not 101 Maynard, We Women, 61. 102 Ibid., 77. 103 Ibid., 74. 104 Ibid., 66. 105 Autobiography, 1899, 450. 337 only do these metaphors indicate that Maynard understood same-sex desire as commensurate with heterosexual desire, they also suggest that she saw her own experience with same-sex desire as sufficiently authoritative to serve as a resource for advice on heterosexual morality. For Maynard, women‘s friendships anticipated marriage not only in equipping women with the correct attitudes and values, as scholars like Sharon Marcus have suggested, but also in serving a sexual purpose, albeit one that was to be carefully curtailed. A covert recognition of the sexual nature of her own desire is evident in We Women, as she refutes Coventry Patmore‘s contention that women struggle less with sexual desire than men (―Where she succeeds with cloudless brow, / In common or in holy course, / He fails in spite of prayer and vow, / And agonies of faith and force‖ 106 ). For some women the struggle with desire was a rigorous one: ―we are secretly conscious that this verse does not present the whole truth. Some of us have not a ‗cloudless brow,‘ but rather have to exert strong control over the mysterious claims of passion.‖ 107 Ania Loomba asserts, with regard to imperialist sexual discourse, that ―female volition, desire and agency are literally pushed to the margins of the civilized world in representations of indigenous women as sexually deviant.‖ 108 Maynard‘s and Wakefield‘s same-sex desire, while not demonstrating the ―female volition,‖ and ―agency‖ to which Loomba alludes, nevertheless demonstrates the emergence of that desire, the importance of the domestic as a site of its enactment – both domestic discourse and the domestic that is the nation – and the subsequent disruption of the distinction between ―home‖ and ―away,‖ or metropole and colony, in imperialist discourse. 106 Maynard, We Women, 74. 107 Ibid., 75. She nevertheless concluded that ―on the whole, I think the distinction given in these verses holds good and the region of purity which it is an effort in the man to attain has an easy and magnetic attraction for the normal woman‖ (ibid.). 108 Loomba, ―Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Discourse,‖ 154. 338 Maynard‘s and Wakefield‘s subsequent relationship was characterized by a vacillation between spiritual purity and sexual passion. Wakefield‘s purity was integral to Maynard‘s religious aspirations; Maynard was depending on Wakefield to lead her to Christ. The evangelical understanding that perpetual repentance was part of the Christian journey, and that God‘s forgiveness was unlimited, facilitated Wakefield‘s recuperation of spiritual purity. Towards the end of 1899 she wrote to Maynard, ―My Mistress, everything now is pure & clear as our streams which walk in the light, & from my heart I thank God for this last summer. It is ‗passion pure in snowy bloom.‘‖ 109 At this time Maynard re-imagined Wakefield as her ―white rose‖ (a ―treasure so stainlessly sweet & pure‖ 110 ) and spoke of her repeatedly as such (―seldom, very seldom, it is one gets in this life a thing quite unblemished, quite at the highest point, that one may well turn it over in profound content‖ 111 ). Wakefield‘s spiritual purity, and the promise she appeared to offer Maynard of a direct encounter with Christ, was also integral to Maynard‘s erotic imagination. Evangelicalism‘s dialectic of sin and salvation, the metaphors of dirt and cleanliness through which it was communicated, the believer‘s perpetual ―falling from the faith‖ and redemption, informed Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity and structured her relationships with Wakefield; her desire was predicated on the intermittent making and unmaking of Wakefield‘s purity. It was Maynard‘s and Wakefield‘s intention to live together at Westfield indefinitely; Maynard hoped that Wakefield would eventually succeed her as Mistress of Westfield. Soon after Wakefield‘s arrival there, however, this plan was thwarted. In 1899 Wakefield failed her Matriculation exam, and in addition to this she was required at home as a companion for her 109 Autobiography, 1899, 450. 110 Ibid. and Greenbook, 19 February 1902, 98. 111 Greenbook, 3 June 1902, 125. 339 mother; she returned to Ireland. In early 1901 Maynard contrived to have Wakefield return to Westfield to work as her secretary. An Evangelical theology of circumstances, and of feelings in particular, informed Maynard‘s request. ―I can hardly think that love such as that is meant to be laid aside,‖ she wrote in 1901, ―starved, turned off from its natural goal & fulfilment of our living thus together.‖ 112 In March 1901 the Westfield Council approved the position, and in September 1901 the way was cleared for Wakefield to return to Westfield. Wakefield reiterated Maynard‘s theology of circumstance. ―If this is not guidance,‖ she wrote exuberantly to Maynard, ―I do not understand what is.‖ 113 Maynard concurred; in her Greenbook she wrote, ―I can only open wide my arms in welcome, & thank Heaven even once more for this the sweetest of my many gifts.‖ 114 In a pre-sexological era, before a discourse of sexual inversion circulated broadly and before the church censured female same-sex sexuality, an Evangelical theology of feeling and of circumstances determined the acceptability of women‘s homoerotic relationships. They understood the relationship within the religious framework of joint service of God. ―We two will not look merely at each other,‖ Maynard wrote, ―that we will keep for a rest & refreshment between whiles, – but our main attitude shall be standing side by side giving all our united strength to help others, & to set their feet on level ground.‖ 115 The second section of this chapter explores the making and unmaking of Maynard‘s imperial subjectivity, as a part of the construction of the metropole/colony dichotomy, in the domestic discourse of motherhood. When, in 1901, Wakefield arrived at Westfield College to work as Maynard‘s secretary, Maynard took up the mother-daughter metaphor characteristic of 112 Greenbook, 1 January 1901, 4. 113 Greenbook, 11 September 1901, 56. 114 Ibid., 57. 115 Greenbook, 9 March, 1901, 16-17. 340 Evangelical spiritual friendships. ―Marion was given me,‖ she observed, ―and the child added to the mother's heart.‖ 116 Christianity provided a framework within which Wakefield could be both Maynard‘s daughter and her spiritual guide. Wakefield was as the ―little child that is eventually to lead me straight into the Kingdom of Heaven,‖ 117 Maynard suggested, drawing on Isaiah 11:6. Her construing of Wakefield as a child entailed a shift in the power relations of the relationship, an undermining and confining of Wakefield‘s spiritual authority. It allowed Maynard to take up the metaphorical role of spiritual mother and to lay claim to a spiritual authority that had, until then, been Wakefield‘s, and which had allowed Wakefield to resist Maynard‘s racializing of her. At the same time it enabled Maynard to institute within the discourse of the spiritual family the power relations of the empire. Within the scholarship on gender and empire a large literature has emerged on the making of bourgeois European women‘s subjectivity in relation to, and at the expense of, indigenous and working-class women. This scholarship was inaugurated in a 1985 essay by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in which she delineated the constitution of the western female individual (and individualist) through the marginalizing of ―native‖ women in women‘s literature and in feminist literary criticism. 118 Feminist postcolonial scholars have yet to examine middle-class women‘s sexual relationships as a site at which this subjectivity was constituted. It is Sharon Marcus‘s Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, a text which overlooks British imperialism, that best explores the ―will to power‖ in the sexual 116 Greenbook, 25 August, 1901, 46. 117 Greenbook, 19 February 1902, 98. 118 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ―Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,‖ Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 243-261. 341 making of the female bourgeois subject. Marcus argues that dominance, aggression, and competition often characterized relationships between Victorian mothers and their daughters. 119 Maynard, as Wakefield‘s spiritual mother, exemplifies the feminine ―will to power‖ delineated by Marcus. In her role as spiritual teacher to Wakefield, Maynard exercised a mastery which, like that of Aleister Crowley‘s spiritual mastery over his acolyte Victor Neuberg in the early 1900s, had an imperial subjectivity as its effect. While scholars of religion have examined the imperialist effects of missionary Evangelicalism, they have yet to consider the power dynamics within Evangelicalism, in metropolitan Evangelical organizations and between Evangelical women, that informed missionary imperialism. Maynard‘s spiritual motherhood demonstrates, within metropolitan Evangelicalism, a religious mastery that informed an imperial bourgeois subjecthood and a characteristically imperialist disregard for the religious beliefs of others. She precipitated a crisis in Wakefield‘s faith with the intention of rendering Wakefield‘s piety more relevant to her own ―modern‖ Anglican Evangelicalism. As much as Maynard was enamored of Wakefield‘s spirituality at the start of their relationship, she felt it was limited by its simplicity. ―Long ago, in the Thuringian forest I heard that note of certainty, & was profoundly impressed by it,‖ she observed in her Greenbook, ―& yet it was mingled with a sort of dogmatism that I felt sure could not stand the knocks & blows of modern thought, & the courage was three parts of it the courage of ignorance.‖ 120 In rural County Armagh, Wakefield had not encountered Darwinian theory, modern geology, biblical criticism, psychology and philosophy, with which Maynard had grappled at Girton College and which had informed her modernist reworking of Evangelicalism in the early 1900s. Maynard‘s 119 Marcus, Between Women, 27. 120 Greenbook, 13 December 1903, 271. 342 own crisis of faith had left her spiritually bereft. Although she had synthesized Evangelicalism and Darwinism, thus addressing a significant intellectual challenge, she remained spiritually untouched by the venture. She thought that by evoking a similar crisis of faith in Wakefield, she might find an answer to her unrequited spiritual longing. In her role as spiritual mother to Wakefield, she thus initiated Wakefield into the hazards of ―modern thought.‖ Maynard‘s ―educating‖ of Wakefield‘s religious desire evoked grief, loss, and confusion in Wakefield. As early as 1897 she wrote to a Westfield friend, Ellie Clarke, that she had ―been through fire & water‖ and that the ―utterly unreasonable happiness, the fullness of joy‖ she had experienced before the Berka retreat had left her. In later years, Wakefield told Maynard that ―the vision which had come to me at 19 [in 1895] & had altered all life to me . . . had been obscured & as I almost thought lost.‖ 121 Although Maynard does not describe Wakefield‘s faith crisis in detail, Wakefield later agreed that psychology had played a primary role: ―‘Psychology,‘ I suggested. ‗Psychology,‘ she replied, ‗that terrible book of Prof. James.‖ 122 At times Maynard regretted having initiated Wakefield into the uncertainties of modern thought. ―All the freedom & assurance of the old days are gone,‖ she noted in 1903, ―& she is not at home in the new world of thought but is timid & cannot find the right words. . . . This roused me more sharply than any other prick in the world could do. ‗That is your doing. You led her in. Now you must lead her out.‘‖ 123 She also, however, found the power it afforded her over Wakefield‘s spirituality erotically compelling, as is evident in the libidinal terms with which she described Wakefield‘s loss of faith. ―It was as though a young tree was felled,‖ she noted, ―or so cruelly lopped that it stood ever in my sight bare & appealing, all its sweet verdure 121 Greenbook, 16 October 1903, 238-39. 122 Greenbook, 28 June 1907, 172. 123 Greenbook, 18 January 1903, 185. 343 gone, no sight, no sound left, but what had been the home of beauty & life & fragrance, all despoiled & silent.‖ 124 Trees, like flowers, were a recurring trope in the language of women‘s homoeroticism in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Ethel Smyth, looking back on the failure of her friendship with Mary Benson, wrote that she and Benson were ―like two trees whose upper branches, occasionally mingling, gave the illusion of one tree, whereas their roots were far, far apart.‖ She compared her more successful relationship with Lady Ponsonby to ―the trees on that wild Mecklenburg coast,‖ where ―storms in the upper branches merely drive the roots deeper.‖ 125 When Wakefield‘s spirituality seemed to revive (―shoots were timidly rising again, & feeling their way into the light & air, & every day they strengthened‖ 126 ) Maynard reveled more overtly in her spiritual deflowering of Wakefield: ―And I have educated her & changed her, & led her through deep waters & out again.‖ 127 The erotic elements in Maynard‘s role as Wakefield‘s spiritual teacher were rendered overt in the realm of fantasy, in the ―A Six Weeks Sleep‖ sonnet cycle. Here Maynard, in the guise of a personified Sleep, imagined a more complete mastery of Wakefield: Mine, folded safe from care & pain, Mine the fair limbs, sweet lips, & veiled eyes Blind, dumb & helpless, in my power she lies, My captive, fettered by silken chain. No, none may vex or claim her, none may wake, I, Sleep, her servant, am her master too, 124 Greenbook, 1 October 1901, 67-68. Maynard had written of her own faith crisis many years earlier: ―Worse, far worse than this, I did not stand where I was before, but some real thing had happened to me that it is difficult to state without overstating. A storm had tossed about my sweet orchard blossoms, which, if it continued, might destroy the whole crop of fruit of my life . . . The particular thoughts on which I based the whole of my beliefs, hopes, duties, aspirations, & calls to action were evidently not the adamant I had supposed, but were assailable . . . The whole of religion was changing from ‗certainty,‘ to ‗a high degree of probability‘, & the effects of conduct I so infinitely valued might conceivably have other causes that the one to which I had attributed them all.‖ Autobiography, Part 3, Chapter 12, 1873, 447. 125 Ethel Smyth, As Time Went On, 15, 99-100, quoted in Vicinus, Intimate Friends, 133, 134. 126 Greenbook, 1 October 1901, 67-68. 127 Greenbook, 3 June 1902, 125. 344 I hold my orders from the Man Divine. She is to labour for his blessed sake, To love, to dare, to suffer and to do, – Till then I hold her captive. She is mine. (―Sleep Speaks,‖ lines 6-14) 128 Pauline Phipps describes Maynard‘s relationship with Wakefield as a sadomasochistic one, and indeed, the Evangelical origins of contemporary tropes in sadomasochism are evident in this poem. Such a characterization needs nevertheless to be dealt with quite carefully. Two misreadings are evident in Phipps discussion. These are best exemplified by examining further what Phipps deems ―sadomasochistic.‖ In early 1903 Maynard had taken up a discourse of self- denial in her relationship with Wakefield: ―[self-denial] is one of the very foundations of the Christian effort, & no house can be reared high without it. Nothing can take its place, & I am now so surrounded with pleasant duties & with the love of true hearts, that unless I pick it up intentionally, here & there, it does not come in the course of the day.‖ 129 She imposed a ―fast‖ on physical affection with Wakefield (―in public all will be exactly the same, but in private we will have no playing together, but will sit close together & talk, or kneel & pray‖ 130 ). Wakefield agreed with Maynard‘s theology of self-sacrifice; but struggled with it in practice. ―I just hate suffering . . . & real self-renunciation, the death of the self with its will & desires, – that is blankly impossible,‖ she proclaimed. 131 Maynard observed that ―she kept to it very strictly, & exactly as I had wished, & it was a real comfort to feel how excellently well she had herself in 128 Maynard, Original Poems, vol.1, 75. 129 Greenbook, 25 January 1903, 190. 130 Ibid. 131 Autobiography, 1899, 445. 345 hand, but the strain was considerably greater on her than on me . . . [and] on Sunday] I took it off again.‖ 132 For Phipps these practices represent ―sadism‖ and ―masochism‖ on Maynard‘s part. She believes Maynard‘s denial of sexual pleasure is masochistic and her denying of it to Wakefield, her young lover, is sadistic. The problem with Phipps‘s analysis is the conflation of the contemporary practice of sadomasochism, which is founded on the notion of the self-aware consent of participants, with more general discourses of ―sadism‖ and ―masochism‖ which might nevertheless pertain to sexual practice in the past or present. The contemporary definition of sadomasochism does not apply here: Wakefield‘s consent (if it can be deemed consent) to the denial of sexual pleasure is not directed at enhancing that pleasure, and neither is Maynard restricting Wakefield‘s pleasure at her express request. The problem with utilizing the more general discourses of ―sadism‖ and ―masochism‖ instead, is that they are reductive. Maynard took up a discourse of self-denial because she believed that self-denial was the means to intimacy with God; she feared that unimpeded pleasure would distract her from the pursuit of religious objectives. Her imposing of such self-denial on Wakefield is indeed problematic, especially in the light of Wakefield‘s discomfort with it, but it should be understood as part of the women‘s shared Evangelical piety. Maynard‘s practice of the renunciation of sexual pleasure, and even her imposition of it on Wakefield, did have sexual resonances for Maynard, and these explain the continuity of these tropes in contemporary sadomasochism. However, Maynard‘s primary objective was religious (and it is this religious context which gives these tropes their current purchase in contemporary sadomasochism). In order to understand the complex relationship between Evangelicalism and contemporary sadomasochism, it is thus necessary to distinguish contemporary sadomasochism from ―sadistic‖ or ―masochistic‖ practices and at the same time not to reduce religious practices too quickly to the latter. This 132 Greenbook, 12 February 1903, 190-91. 346 does not, of course, prevent the criticism of certain religious practices. Nor does it preclude the recognition of sexual resonances within them and the exploration of continuities between past religious practice and contemporary sexual practices. Wakefield finally managed to negotiate her doubt. Maynard wrote that ―her feet stood in the Temple court, & her face was lifted to the opening heavens, & all doubt & hesitation & dumbness & reluctance were over & gone. . . . Tested, tried, knocked hither & thither by many trials, & abrupt new criticisms, & long stretches & strains, there it is, & it is all pure now & all permanent.‖ 133 Wakefield offered to share with Maynard her new-found spiritual certainties. ―She put her long arms round me,‖ Maynard wrote at the end of 1903, ―& said solemnly, ‗My Mistress, what I have, I have for both of us. That is the condition, as it were. It is God Himself who has woven our lives together.‘‖ 134 Maynard responded with alacrity: ―a treasure of loveliness & purity that cannot be surpassed, & that is mine, mine.‖ 135 Imbricated in Maynard‘s making of spiritual motherhood in relation to Wakefield was an imperial subjectivity that sought, by relegating Wakefield to the position of a spiritual child and by evoking a faith crisis in her, to meet her own spiritual needs. The metaphor of spiritual mothering ultimately constituted a fault line in Maynard‘s and Wakefield‘s religiously structured relationship. In 1903, when Wakefield was compelled to return to Ireland, Maynard recommended Jean Richardson, Anne Richardson‘s sister (and Wakefield‘s cousin), as a temporary spiritual mentor for Wakefield. Much to Maynard‘s distress, Wakefield took on the role of ―spiritual child,‖ reviving Richardson‘s piety just as she had done with Maynard‘s. Richardson had, in Maynard‘s estimation, however, always been 133 Greenbook, 13 December 1903, 271. 134 Ibid. 135 Greenbook, 31 December 1904, 364-65. 347 more spiritual than Maynard. ―Jean & she [Marion] have taken hands in a living clasp & have soared away, & they see things I cannot see, & love things I cannot love,‖ she wrote. 136 At this time Maynard seems to have recognized one of the limits of religiously structured homoerotic desire. ―Something was gone,‖ she wrote of Wakefield‘s defection, ―something that as long as we are human entities enclosed in separate minds & bodies, must be of exceeding worth to us.‖ 137 The practice of self-denial, and attempts to transmute sexual desire into religious desire, also contributed to the demise of Maynard‘s and Wakefield‘s relationship. While neither self- denial nor the commutation of erotic desire into religious desire are inherently anti-erotic, there was always the possibility that desire might dissipate altogether. In 1902 Wakefield wrote to Maynard that she had achieved the goal of transcending sexual desire: The thought of you is only restful now, & I do without you very contentedly, & am conscious of the treasure that is always & irrevocably mine. . . . It is very blessed to have got to this place of peace which is so deep & real, & to leave behind, – may it be forever, – that restless craving for the expression of love when absent, & the reckless abandonment of one‘s whole being to it when together. Both of these I have known at times, & the one is weakening & the other leads to harm, & upsets the balance of life. But there, my sweet Mistress, we wont [sic] even think of that side, but throw ourselves into our work & the needs of others. 138 In 1904 Maynard sought to consolidate her relationship with Wakefield. She presented Wakefield with a ring and the two conducted their own ―marriage ceremony.‖ In October 1904, however, Wakefield took up the role of spiritual mother to Mary Armitage, a Westfield student. Maynard‘s and Wakefield‘s marriage did not protect their relationship from the fluidity of the discourse of spiritual mothering. Nor did Wakefield hide her emerging relationship with 136 Greenbook, 23 December 1903, 273-74. 137 Greenbook, 31 December 1903, 289. 138 Greenbook, 29 December 1902, 175. 348 Armitage from Maynard. Instead, overlooking her recent ―marriage‖ with Maynard, she revived the mother-daughter model that had never fully receded from their relationship. She reassured Maynard of her daughterly love (―she told me I was her mother . . . & she was mine for ever.‖ 139 ) while at the same time confiding in Maynard her new found love: She put my books on the table hurriedly, snipped off the Electric light, & got into bed, clasping me strongly in her arms in the darkness, & being silent for a minute. Then came the confession, that [she] loved Mary Armitage, that the deep fountains of that wondrous heart had broken up suddenly, & that she loved her in a way that was a wholly new experience. . . . M. clung to me almost like one drowning, & said, ―I had to come to you straight off & tell you. I have hardly slept at all. Oh what a wonderful thing love is!‖ 140 In her Greenbook, Maynard wrote of Wakefield‘s reneging on their marriage vows: She did not understand the sacred bond exactly as I understood it. And how should she? I at 50 & over, gleaning up the last inestimably precious roses of love in the summer of life, & she at 23 with her heart brimful of first experiences, how could they be the same. . . . I see now the equilibrium was not stable & the position could not hold for ever [sic]. To me it stood alone, while to her it was the presage of a glorious region she was just entering. 141 If Wakefield‘s infatuation with Armitage revealed to Maynard some of the inequities in her own relationship with Wakefield, it also revealed to Wakefield the extent of Maynard‘s influence over her. ―Oh my mistress . . . I had no idea till this began how you had made me, heart & soul . . . when we talk about love. . . I have no thoughts but your thoughts. You have made me.‖ 142 This Wakefield understood as the product of Maynard‘s ―mothering‖: ―You are my Mother indeed . . . You took me up so empty & ignorant that you see I have no others.‖ 143 139 Autobiography, 1904, 529. 140 Greenbook, 27 November 1904, 351-52. 141 Greenbook, 29 September 1906, 122. 142 Greenbook, 27 November 1904, 353. 143 Greenbook, 26 December 1904, 361. 349 Wakefield saw Maynard‘s ―making‖ of her – her erotic and religious mentoring of her – as a form of ―civilizing‖: Maynard had ―made her from being a wild ignorant creature to what she was.‖ 144 Maynard‘s spiritual mothering of Wakefield, particularly the inciting and managing of her sexual desire, had been accomplished within an imperial frame. The purity that Maynard had both made and re-made was part of the making of the imperial bourgeois subject. Imperial categories of racial difference – both their consolidation and their contestation – informed Maynard‘s sexual discourse. The following months revealed to Maynard, in a very tangible way, her own overweening influence on Wakefield, as Wakefield took up in her relationship with Armitage the religious rituals, texts, and language that had defined Maynard‘s and Wakefield‘s relationship: when she . . . showered down [on Mary] all the treasures, every hymn & verse & thought & poem, that she & I had collected in 7 years of friendship, all in a few weeks; when I remembered the opal ring so solemnly given at the close of those 7 years, & then found that in one year they were wearing beautiful opal brooches which they had given one another; – well I felt I had trusted a ―child‖ in the sense of ignorance, as well as in the sense of receptive beauty. 145 Once again Maynard encountered a paradox inherent to religiously structured desire: ―I had expected this some day and I had encouraged it, telling her that she must have children and ‗really love‘ them and yet when the point comes there is an element in it that is hard.‖ 146 Although Wakefield‘s and Armitage‘s relationship had been structured by the religious rituals, texts, and language that had defined Maynard‘s relationship with Wakefield, the Wakefield- Armitage relationship was not entirely of Maynard‘s making. Wakefield had earlier attempted to 144 Autobiography, 1904, 529. 145 Greenbook, 29 September 1906, 121-22. 146 Greenbook, 27 November 1904, 352. 350 reframe her physical affection towards Maynard within a discourse of spiritual purity, insisting on the pure motives that informed it. ―Oh, my love, my darling, I am all yours, every inch of me,‖ she informed Maynard, ―& . . . it is all good & all pure love, untouched by the least thing else, & then came a whispered ‗May I?‘ & those fresh full young lips were laid on mine.‖ 147 Wakefield also took up a Platonic framework for desire in her relationship with Armitage which was contrary to Maynard‘s way of thinking. [Marion] held me in her arms [and] whispered, ―Mistress, do you ever learn about the love of Christ from the love you feel yourself?‖ ―I don‘t think I do,‖ I said, ―the two never seem really alike,‖ ―But they are,‖ she answered eagerly, ―they are.‖ ―What our hearts can feel for another, is a real reflection of what He goes on feeling for us.‖ 148 For Maynard a Platonic framework for desire was impracticable; human love too quickly subsumed religious desire. In understanding Wakefield to be her daughter, Maynard believed she had found ―some one who will pour their life into mine, & increase my effectiveness by the saving of my force.‖ 149 Even before Wakefield started at Westfield as Maynard‘s secretary, however, Maynard expressed concerns about her possible idleness. Maynard wrote, ―if she feels me idle & rebelling as I sometimes pass a day or two in being, she will catch it at once, & the mark I endue may be indelible in her more strong & rigid nature than it is in mine.‖ 150 Maynard took up a discourse of race to express her reservations about Wakefield‘s work ethic. ―I may become 147 Greenbook, 21 May 1902, 117. 148 Greenbook, 27 March 1905, 15. 149 Greenbook, 28 September 1902, 163. 150 Greenbook, 25 May 1901, 24. 351 irritated at her forgetfulness or untidiness or Irishness,‖ she wrote, ―& there would not be the same untouched unruffled confidence on her side any more.‖ 151 Barbara Taylor, in her study of the religious structuring of Mary Wollstonecraft‘s erotic imagination, notes that Wollstonecraft‘s religious desire led her to an expectation of perfection in those she loved. Like Wollstonecraft, Maynard cast her idealization of Wakefield in perfectibilist terms. For Maynard, however, notions of perfection were informed by an imperial, industrial capitalist social context. In this final section of the chapter I examine the demise of Maynard‘s relationship with Wakefield as the failure of an imperially informed ideal, chart Maynard‘s renewed recourse to discourses of race with regard to Wakefield, and trace the re- constituting of a metropole/colony dichotomy within the relationship, as a ―spiritual Wakefield‖ was once more supplanted by the ―Irish Wakefield‖ in Maynard‘s imagination. The characteristics of productivity, effectiveness, and thriftiness were central to the middle class and to industrial capitalism. Davidoff and Hall draw attention to Evangelicals‘ doctrine of personal responsibility or ―the right use of ‗talents,‘ of time and money, which was a moral imperative.‖ 152 McClintock, taking up an earlier essay by Davidoff, which is in turn indebted to the work of Max Weber, represents the middle-class home as the arena in which rationalization was implemented and practiced. 153 In her loosely autobiographical book-length narrative poem, A True Mother, Maynard drew attention to the importance of industry to her upbringing. The Mother in the poem avers: One of the secrets of their happiness (A secret for which I my Mother bless) Is, they shall find employment all day long . . . 151 Ibid. 152 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 86. 153 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 167-69. 352 No vacant dreary hours to drag along . . . The boys and girls alike must work their best. 154 In 1865, after Constance had returned from Belstead, she and Gabrielle and Dora ―started to be very industrious, we made time-tables of the hours for reading & learning & drawing, & at the end of each week counted how much had been done.‖ 155 Maynard had learned to account carefully for the minutes of her day. ―But the great point was the ‗Keeping a Bill,‘ i.e writing down not what you intended to do, but what you actually did do,‖ she wrote. ―A ‗good‘ Bill, accounted for 36 hours in the week, & I have known it to rise to 43, & a ‗bad‘ Bill was under 30.‖ 156 The careful accounting of time by Maynard and her sisters shows the domestic to be an integral part of its industrial capitalist context; it points to the role of domestic Evangelical discourse in promulgating notions of a thrifty, productive, and self-conscious use of time upon which the mechanization of industry depended. Maynard‘s childhood use of time also demonstrates the role of the home in the structuring of the metropole/colony dichotomy. At Westfield, Maynard rationalized her time in similar ways to those of her childhood: ―Wake between 5:30 & 6. Write till 7. Prayers & B‘fast 8. Sec.s letters 9-11. Run in the garden for 15 or 20 minutes. More writing til 1., a friendly chatter. Then a sleep, tidying up, Tea at 4 oc, & then 2 ½ valuable hours for study. Dinner at 7. Play ½ hour. Bible Class at 8 every evening except Sat. & Prayers at 9.45.‖ 157 She contrasted this to Wakefield and her upbringing. ―I not only know but see with my own eyes that the life she has lived is disadvantageous,‖ she wrote in 1902, ―it tends to slackness & indolence in 154 Maynard, A True Mother (London, 1916), 43-44. 155 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 4, 1865-1866, 55. 156 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 8, 1870-1871, 206. 157 Autobiography, 1900, 461. 353 everything she touches, & though she combats the results bravely, a stream of the tendency is forever pouring through her life.‖ 158 If Maynard was concerned about Wakefield‘s idleness, she was also alarmed by her constitutional weakness and her tendency to neurasthenia. Maynard wrote, ―I am baffled again & again by her want of vitality. . . a passivity that must be bad for any one at 25.‖ 159 For Maynard, Wakefield‘s lethargy had moral resonances. She situated Wakefield‘s constitutional weakness in an evolutionary frame, aligning productivity with human advancement. ―I only hope that . . . a higher level of life may be hers in the future,‖ 160 she wrote. Here too Maynard re-made the metropole/colony dichotomy. In opposition to her careful English budgeting of time and energy, Wakefield ―with Irish recklessness would tend to dissipate what little force she had gained the moment she felt it in her possession.‖ 161 Before her ―marriage‖ to Wakefield in 1904, Maynard saw both Wakefield‘s poorliness and her Irishness as remediable. ―Her health & her being Irish are to be my definite trials & I must bear with them for life,‖ she speculated. ―Both are a matter of degrees, & both may be greatly bettered & helped.‖ 162 In 1902 Maynard, taking up the discourse of race again, confronted Wakefield on her laxity; she ―shewed her how ‗Irish‘ she was still, i.e. slack, & forgetful & untidy & unfinished in her doings for me.‖ 163 Wakefield accepted Maynard‘s 158 Greenbook, 16 April 1902, 108-9. 159 Greenbook, 2 March 1902, 102. While Wakefield‘s neurasthenia seemed in part congenital (her sister Florence had suffered from prolonged ―nervous exhaustion‖ and her father had struggled with poor health) it seems likely that the stress of embarking on a relationship with Maynard, Mistress of Westfield College, while attempting to complete her matriculation exam, had precipitated its onset in 1899. Maynard observes as much: ―Yet the effect on her [of their relationship] was not good; she worked far too hard as the Matriculation drew near.‖ Autobiography, 1899, 444. 160 Greenbook, 23 April 1902, 111. 161 Greenbook, 31 December 1904, 364-65. 162 Ibid. 163 Greenbook, 29 December 1902, 175. 354 criticisms of her work and endeavoured to improve. Maynard also addressed Wakefield‘s uncertain health. She took Wakefield to her own doctor, Dr. Neatby, who pronounced Wakefield ―in a condition of ‗malnutrition‘ all over, a case of ‗thorough neurasthenia.‘‖ 164 The remedy was the same as in 1899: ―There was nothing for it but she must return to ‗the Cage‘ for another 6 weeks sleep & overfeeding.‖ 165 Wakefield reluctantly agreed. Although resistant to the second rest-cure, Wakefield‘s approach to her neurasthenia conformed to Maynard‘s. ―Mistress mine,‖ she wrote, ―I will do my best to get well. No one can feel more than I do how bad the sort of life I am compelled to lead is for me. . . . It is ruination to character.‖ 166 Neither Wakefield‘s efforts to improve her work ethic, however, nor her rest-cure achieved the kind of change Maynard sought. As Maynard‘s efforts to ―re-make‖ Wakefield proved futile, she effected a split in her image of Wakefield. As with her Girton students thirty years earlier, she separated Wakefield‘s spirit from her body: ―there was her forgetfulness & unhandiness, every bit of which I believe was physical, save the very small amount due to being Irish.‖ 167 Wakefield‘s ―innermost soul,‖ was, however, ―true, sweet & sincere . . . There is no break there, no jar, but all is sound.‖ 168 In this manner, Maynard was able to protect her idealized image of Wakefield, and to preserve the role Wakefield played in Maynard‘s spiritual aspirations. With Wakefield‘s infatuation with 164 Greenbook, 9 March 1902, 102. Maynard notes that is was ―a case moreover ‗not complicated by hysteria or hypochondriasis,‘ & though this absence makes the matter more serious I cannot help feeling glad that her diseases are true‖ (ibid.). 165 Autobiography, 1902, 484. Maynard notes here that Wakefield commenced her rest-cure ―with a pulse at 55 or even lower, a very poor circulation‖ and, tall as she was, weighing only 9 stone (126 pounds).‖ 166 Greenbook 16 April 1902, 108-9. Maynard wrote in her diary: ― She is better, and distinctly stouter, exactly eight pounds heavier than when she came. It was all right as long as she was in bed, but now it is enough. She must leave. Dinner was a pitiful sight with the consumption patients forcing themselves to eat large portions of meat. . . . The atmosphere of ―Cheer up! You‘re getting on famously!‖ is not for Marion at all.‖ Diary,7 May 1902, 89. 167 Greenbook, 29 September 1906, 120. 168 Ibid., 124. 355 Mary Armitage, however, Maynard‘s divided image of Wakefield was threatened. Distracted by Armitage, Wakefield‘s work deteriorated. ―But alas,‖ Maynard wrote, ―the rising of momentary disappointment & irritations against her thousand negligences has begun to invade inner territory.‖ 169 The distinction between the body and spirit collapsed as Maynard deemed Wakefield morally deficient: ―When the desires seem exerted to the utmost & there is still failure, one can only suppose the will is utterly weak & irresolute, & that the character is slack & unreliable. . . . there seemed to me a certain moral element in it.‖ 170 Maynard‘s discourse of morality was itself infused with the values of the industrial middle class, however. Of Wakefield‘s expenditure of her limited energies on Mary Armitage, Maynard concluded, ―that is the one thing about which she seems to have no conscience of real debtor & creditor.‖ 171 When Wakefield quickly passed on to Armitage the religious language, texts, and rituals that had defined her relationship with Maynard, Maynard evoked another value of the industrial middle- class: ―oh it was wasteful, wasteful!‖ 172 Within the intimate discourse of female homoeroticism industrial capitalist values were enacted and a metropole/colony dichotomy simultaneously constituted. Wakefield, like the Irish peasantry, lacked the foresight to plan and to budget, was unable to exercise thrift, and had no sense of the relationship between debtor and creditor. Paradoxically, Wakefield‘s body was to provide the final frontier of resistance to Maynard‘s idealizing and imperial impulses. Of Wakefield‘s neurasthenia Maynard wrote: ―Oh how determined I was to conquer it, & to bring her back to me what I call well!‖ 173 At the time of Wakefield‘s infatuation with Armitage, however, Maynard conceded defeat. Taking up 169 Greenbook, 28 May 1905, 34. 170 Greenbook, 8 October 1905, 65-66. 171 Greenbook, 31 December 1904, 364-65. 172 Greenbook, 29 September 1906, 122. 173 Ibid., 122-23. 356 eugenic discourse, she averred, ―But alas & alas, I was combating a dead weight of heredity that I could not move though the whole force of my life was laid fair & square against it.‖ 174 Fearing that a failure of respect would compromise both her love for Wakefield and the spiritual ideal she had attempted to protect, Maynard informed Wakefield in November 1904 that she was no longer suitable for the post of secretary. In her autobiographical account of the demise of her relationship with Wakefield, written thirty years later, Maynard noted more candidly: ―She [Wakefield] fell in love with a new Student, Mary Armitage. . . . She became slack & idle toward me, & I bitterly felt the strong force of another heart.‖ 175 If the Evangelically indebted erotic destabilized the metropole/colony dichotomy that it also constituted, then the failure of the erotic led to the re-stabilizing of that dichotomy in more rigid terms. Wakefield did not oppose her ―dismissal‖ from Westfield. 176 In a series of letters written to Maynard in October 1905, she acknowledged but also contested Maynard‘s sense that the relationship was threatened by Maynard‘s impending loss of respect for Wakefield. Wakefield was horrified by the notion that ―externals‖ such as the carelessness, negligence, and laxity could overshadow the internal life of the spirit: ever since thou didst tell me thou didst keep in thy mind a divided image of me, I have felt a fear – hardly expressed in thought even – yet I see now it was lest you should find the two images were in reality one. The shock with which I realised that a thing which seemed to have to do only with the mere externals of life, could touch the very centre & citadel, the sanctuary & holy place, which I thought was impossible of access to all the world & to all influences, – the shock realising that this could touch the precious bond between thee & me, has been great, but I believe it was necessary to wake me to my senses. 177 174 Greenbook, 29 September 1906, 123. 175 Autobiography, 1904, 529. 176 Wakefield‘s response exemplified for Maynard the spiritual qualities she had initially seen in Wakefield: ―The complete magnanimity of her acceptance of it, the entire confidence in me, the undivided homage to Truth & Duty.‖ Greenbook, 8 October 1905, 66. 177 Greenbook, 11 October 1905, 67. 357 Wakefield acknowledged that there had been on her part ―an unpardonable slackness & weakness of will in the past, which deserves your severest condemnation,‖ but added ―that it is not an integral part of my nature, that I need not be weak, that I can say No, that I have the power to break old life long habits & make new ones.‖ 178 Maynard‘s understanding of the relationship between the body and the soul had varied through the course of her life. During her upbringing her parents had espoused an incarnational theology that appeared to reconcile body and soul. On the one hand their theology of atonement emphasized the incarnation of Jesus, rather than just the crucifixion. On the other hand they argued that through his life Jesus had subordinated the flesh to the spirit, thus achieving divinity and demonstrating the process by which individuals were to be redeemed. During the course of Maynard‘s life a body/soul dualism was evident in the vying of literal and spiritual discourses of the family. It allowed Maynard to divorce her Girtonian converts from their bodily presentation of lower-middle-class traits. In her relationship with Anthon and with Wakefield, the influence of evolution and eugenics on Maynard‘s theology was evident as she relinquished the body/soul dualism for a notion of the body as the marker of the spiritual. Wakefield, like Anthon, held firmly to a body/soul dualism to resist Maynard‘s eugenics; not only was her spirit distinct from her sometimes indolent nature and her weakened body, but it was able to effect changes in both. In the years following Maynard‘s and Wakefield‘s separation, Maynard began to entertain the notion that she had idealized Wakefield: ―I viewed her with the rainbow eyes of love, wh. are full of hope, endless hope. She was beautiful already, that I always saw the ideal in her, & thought that with just one shove of all the force of Love, & we should reach it!‖ 179 178 Ibid., 67-68. 179 Greenbook, 29 September 1906, 120. 358 Maynard regretted her disenchantment or the passing of love‘s illusions, noting, ―Oh I cannot bear to think that the reign of triumphant Love is over, & that I look with merely reasonable eyes, appraising good & ill. But I do now.‖ 180 In September 1906 Maynard informed Wakefield that ―the plans of Hope had been chiefly my invention & my mistake.‖ 181 In September 1906 Wakefield wrote to Maynard acknowledging that their relationship had taken a different form. ―I could not help being sad when I was near thee,‖ she observed, ―it brought ‗all the might have been‘ of the last 10 years home to me. I can‘t get used to . . . feeling that of necessity our interests must be different, in detail at any rate.‖ 182 She acknowledged, however, that she could not sustain the life at Westfield: ―I am well now only because I live the half-life I do.‖ 183 If Wakefield‘s life was now a ―half-life,‖ she was nevertheless aware that it was her own life: It has been a painful process this drawing away of my life into a narrow little channel of its own; but it has got to be done, & we will not shrink from it. And I have been thinking lately that perhaps it has been necessary to my full development that I should have a life that was all my own, however small & bounded it was. 184 Wakefield‘s subsequent evaluation of the relationship was to be far harsher. Maynard, in an entry in her 1923 Greenbook, notes that Wakefield had accused her of ―stealing ten years of her life.‖ Wakefield averred that it was ―because of your own desperate need at the time that you 180 Ibid. 181 Greenbook, 30 September 1906, 127. 182 Ibid., 125. 183 Ibid. 184 Greenbook, 9 October 1906, 128. 359 did not see the harm you were doing me. When you overwhelmed me lavishly, and thought you were opening doors to my mind, you were actually repressing me.‖ 185 At the start of this chapter I observed how, within the domestic setting of a rest-cure home, Wakefield‘s body and psyche became metonymical, in Maynard‘s erotic imagination, for the contested landscapes of the British Empire. Maynard‘s erotically inflected imperial aspirations challenge the bifurcation of the public and private and their aligning with masculinity and femininity. Her imperial imaginings also contest the alignment of the private/public binary with the nation/empire one that took place with the aligning of the British nation with the middle-class family and the rendering of both distinct from their larger contexts. Maynard‘s imperial imaginings at the bed of Wakefield, evident in her sonnet ―Marion Speaks A Second Time,‖ show empire to be at the heart of the domestic. Her subsequent relationship with Wakefield demonstrates the imbrication of the homoerotic with the middle-class domestic context (with discourses and practices of the family), the role of religion in constituting the domestic as homoerotically inflected, and the significance of the homoerotic domestic in the making and unmaking of the metropole/colony dichotomy. The relationship between these two women also points up the role of religion in the constitution and contestation of the metropole/colony dichotomy as it was forged within and naturalized by domestic discourse. Maynard made Wakefield‘s ―Irishness‖ and her own ―Englishness‖ as she sought to reform Wakefield‘s manners as a mother might, in her characterization of Wakefield‘s home, and in her juxtaposition of their childhoods. Just as in 1899 she located the recumbent Wakefield in the battlefields of the South African War, so subsequently she imagined her in the imperial and racialized landscape of ―the desolate bog-land of Portadown.‖ 186 In so doing, Maynard situated Wakefield (and the Irish) as tangential to the English nation, ―almost the same but not quite,‖ 185 Greenbook, 30 December 1923, 260. 186 Autobiography, 1897, 407. 360 and simultaneously as indispensable to a cohesive United Kingdom whose coherence depended on the political dominance of the English. Wakefield‘s ―remarkable spiritual experience‖ provided a counter-discourse to Maynard‘s imperial making of Wakefield‘s ―Irishness‖; Maynard‘s infatuation with both Wakefield‘s piety and with Wakefield herself undermined Maynard‘s imperial longings By taking up the discourse of spiritual motherhood, however, she effected a shift in the balance of power between the two women and simultaneously consolidated an imperial subjectivity in relation to Wakefield. Maynard‘s efforts to regulate her own and Wakefield‘s desire had unpredictable effects, however; they resulted in the proliferation of the women‘s desire, the deconstructing of an imperial semiotics of ―whiteness‖ and ―cleanliness,‖ and the disruption of imperial discourses of sexuality that aligned middle-class British women with sexual chastity and upon which the metropole/colony dichotomy depended. It was Wakefield‘s erotic imagination that put paid to Maynard‘s consolidation of an imperial subjecthood through the practice of spiritual mothering. The fluid metaphorical discourse of the family that had structured the Maynard-Wakefield relationship paradoxically facilitated Wakefield‘s relationship with Mary Armitage. Wakefield‘s ―spiritual mothering‖ of Armitage revealed to both Maynard and Wakefield the extent of Maynard‘s ―making‖ of Wakefield – of her educating of Wakefield‘s erotic and religious desire. For Maynard, who had sustained a body/spirit dualism for much of her life, and for whom spiritual discourse had often contributed to the devaluing of the body, Wakefield‘s physical body provided stubborn resistance to the imperial imaginings that were intrinsic to Maynard‘s spiritual aspirations. In recent years, queer postcolonial feminists have argued that the western linkage of ―coming out‖ to leaving home perpetuates the ―homonormativity‖ or ethnocentricity of queer scholarship. They argue that the home/away dichotomy has been transposed in contemporary 361 accounts of coming out in a manner that reinforces the broader home/away or west/―the rest‖ dichotomy by rendering the ―away‖ of coming out a progressive form of homosexuality. As a result home is re-inscribed as inherently heterosexual. These scholars draw attention instead to the heterogeneity of desires that constitute the domestic, and to enactments of homoeroticism within the multiple relations of extended households. 187 In chapter three I argued that sexually queer discursive spaces were attendant upon and integral to the Evangelical making of the family. Maynard‘s relationship with Wakefield shows the domestic to be integral to the inciting and repudiating of same-sex desire. The latter process was also integral to the forging of Maynard‘s imperial subjecthood; it demonstrates the imbrication of the domestic and the imperial, of ―home‖ and ―away,‖ and thus attests to the importance also of moving beyond the bifurcation of the national and imperial in the writing of British histories. 187 Gayatri Gopinath Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) and ―Homo-Economics: Queer Sexualities in a Transnational Frame,‖ in Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, ed. Rosemary Marangoly George (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 102-24; Anne-Marie Fortier, ―Making Home: Queer Migrations and Motions of Attachment‖ in Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, ed. Sara Ahmed (2003), 115-135; and Geeta Patel, ―Home, Homo, Hybrid: Translating Gender,‖ in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 410-27. 362 Conclusion ―What remains to be better understood is the degree to which . . . religious constructions, which seem so foreign to us today, were experienced as explanatory and enabling in a period that defined itself by its newness.‖ 1 Thus notes Jo-Ann Wallace in an essay on Edith Ellis‘s sapphism. Wallace suggests that Ellis‘s belief in the transformative nature of passionate love, including same-sex desire, led to a modernist interest in new forms of relationship, new configurations of community, and a new society. 2 Drawing on the monistic theology of the homosexual utopian Edward Carpenter, she sought to reconcile the body and soul that, she believed, Christianity sundered. 3 Carpenter had situated sexual desire in a spiritual frame, arguing that the union of the body and soul in sexual intercourse accomplished the believer‘s union with the divine, who was both material and spiritual. Sex apprehended in a spiritual way had the ability to transform human relationships; it provided the starting point for social transformation. 4 Homosexuals, who through social censure had been disenfranchised from their bodies, were to lead the movement for social transformation; they understood the importance of 1 Jo-Ann Wallace, ―‗How Wonderful to Die for What You Love‘: Mrs. Havelock Ellis‘s Love-Acre (1914) as Spiritual Autobiography,‖ paper presented at the Religion and Sexuality in Britain 1870-1930 Workshop held at the University of British Columbia, 27-30 August 2009. 2 Jo Ann Wallace, ―Edith Ellis, Sapphic Idealism and The Lover‘s Calendar (1912)‖ in Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and English Culture, ed. Laura L. Doan and Jane Garrity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 185. ―Edward Carpenter is a prophet of the soul and of the body,‖ she wrote, ―he proclaims the emancipation of the soul through the completion of its relation to the body.‖ Mrs. Havelock Ellis, ―Edward Carpenter‘s Message to His Age,‖ in Three Modern Seers (London: Stanley Paul & Co., 1910), 225, quoted in Wallace, ―Edith Ellis,‖ 193. 3 For Edward Carpenter‘s sexual theology see Joy Dixon,―‗Out of Your Clinging Kisses . . . I Create a New World‘: Sexuality and Spirituality in the Work of Edward Carpenter, ‖ in The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth- Century Spiritualism and the Occult ed. Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Wilburn, Forthcoming ( London: Ashgate, 2011). 4 Wallace, ―Edith Ellis,‖ 185; Edward Carpenter, ―The Homogenic Attachment,‖ in The Intermediate Sex (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1912), 68-69, quoted in Wallace, ―Edith Ellis,‖ 195. 363 the body to the soul, of sexuality to spirituality, and vice versa. 5 Speaking as ―Miss H.,‖ case study 36 in her husband‘s study of homosexuality, Sexual Inversion (1897), Edith Ellis echoed Carpenter. She averred that ―the effect on her of loving women is distinctly good . . . both spiritually and physically‖‘; as a member of the Fellowship of the New Life she pursued the belief that progressive human relationships were the first step to social transformation. 6 Unlike Ellis, Constance Maynard was not a modernist; she espoused very different understandings of same-sex desire, the body and the soul, and the relationship between ―passionate love‖ and social transformation. She was aware of monistic theologies such as Ellis‘s and Carpenter‘s, and from the early 1900s associated her same-sex desire with ―attacks of pantheism,‖ or the appeal of an immanentist theology in which God was not only manifest through nature but was also synonymous with it. She nevertheless consistently refused such theologies in favor of a self-aware dualism, believing the distinction between good and evil to be fundamental to the Christian doctrine of atonement. Maynard did not automatically align the good/evil binary with the soul/body one; she viewed the body as intrinsically neutral, like the mind, but understood both to be subject to the corrupting influence of the heart or emotions. 7 Her recognition of the corporeality of desire – her homosexual subjectivity – emerged as a product of Evangelical discourse, but it was nonetheless in tension with her faith. Her struggle to repudiate the same-sex desire that threatened the primacy of her love of God led her to investigate that desire more carefully, and she came to the understanding that it was commensurate with heterosexual desire. Like most evangelicals, she believed social transformation to be contingent upon the spiritual regeneration of the believer; it was the effect 5 Edward Carpenter, ―The Place of the Uranian in Society,‖ in The Intermediate Sex, 114-15, quoted in Wallace, ―Edith Ellis,‖ 195. 6 Havelock Ellis, Sexual Inversion in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1, 3rd ed. (New York: Random House, 1942), 226, quoted in Wallace, ―Edith Ellis,‖ 189. 7 Autobiography, Part 2, Chapter 9, 1872, 243. 364 of the individual‘s recognition of sin, acceptance of the redeeming work of Christ, and dependence on sanctification by the Holy Spirit. Maynard‘s erotic history nevertheless demonstrates some continuity with Ellis‘s modernist sapphism and with that of Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943) in the next generation. Although Maynard did not self-consciously espouse a theology that reconciled ―sexual inversion‖ and religion – the physical consummation of same-sex desire found no explicit place in her theology – same-sex desire did feature prominently in her religious practice. Along with John Wesley, she believed the relationship of the would-be convert to the believer to have erotic overtones; these echoed the desire of God for the salvation of the non-believer. God‘s love of humans could, as expressed in the biblical metaphor of love, courtship, and marriage, evince erotic elements, as could the believer‘s in return. It was thus quite possible that God would indicate his salvific intentions for an individual through the believer‘s erotic desire for the unconverted, and that erotic desire should inform the spiritual mentoring that took place after conversion. While Maynard didn‘t perceive her work in social reform – her role in the movement for women‘s higher education – to be the direct effect of a divinely sanctioned same- sex desire, homosexual desire and same-sex relationships were nevertheless integral to her socially transformative religious calling. She believed a devotional intimacy with Christ to be crucial to the pursuit of that calling and perceived spiritual friendships to be the means by which that intimacy was attained. She looked to spiritually structured homoerotic relationships to find a companion with whom to share her calling. Maynard‘s erotic history brings to the fore both culturally and sexually queer discourses within evangelicalism. These were the product of the co-production of earthly and spiritual courtship, marriage, motherhood, and the family. Maynard‘s founding of Westfield College demonstrated an acceptable Evangelical refusal of literal marriage and motherhood for 365 ―marriage‖ to Christ and spiritual motherhood. The evangelical recourse to biblical metaphors of love, courtship, and marriage to describe the believer‘s relationship with Christ incited sexual desire, and the pursuit of spiritual mother-daughter friendships, with their religiously directed cultivation of the erotic, produced Maynard‘s sexually queer desire. The struggle to subordinate human eros (or ―inordinate affection‖) to religious desire that was the product of evangelicals‘ elevation of the erotic, paradoxically rendered same-sex desire central to Maynard‘s piety; it proliferated that desire and created the conditions for its articulation. Her same-sex desire and her homosexual subjectivity were thus not alien or incidental to evangelicalism, an unfortunate by-product of the need to experience human love in order to understand divine love, but intrinsic to it. Evangelicalism depended for its perpetuation on erotically inflected conversion and spiritual mentoring processes – the erotic was integral to religious desire – and insofar as women‘s homosocial devotion was central to the tradition, it depended on female homoerotic desire. Continuities between the religious making of Maynard‘s dissident sexual subjectivity and that of more recognizably queer figures like Ellis and Hall are evident in the persistence, albeit to different ends, of Christian tropes in the writings of Ellis and Hall. Crucifixion appears as a prominent metaphor in the work of both modernists. A protagonist of Ellis‘s novel Love Acre (1914), while speaking of heterosexual love, articulates Ellis‘s understanding of sexual inversion: ―These are the crucified loves who save others though they cannot save themselves . . . It is the sweetest of all miracles . . . To save through losing and to grow beautiful through sorrow.‖ 8 In The Well of Loneliness (1928) Radclyffe Hall represents Stephen Gordon as a Christ-figure calling for justice for sexual inverts: ―you Stephen, who drained our cup to the 8 Mrs. Havelock Ellis, Love-Acre: An Idyl in Two Worlds (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1914), 188, quoted in Wallace, ―How Wonderful to Die,‖ 16-17. 366 dregs – we have asked for bread; will you give us a stone.‖ 9 For both Ellis and Hall the crucifixion aptly denotes the anguish of homosexuals at their vilification. It evidences, as Richard Dellamora notes, the paradoxical use of religious terms by sexual dissidents in constructing an identity. 10 It is important however, as Dellamora asserts, to explore the reason for this turn to religious discourse. It would be a mistake to see these writers‘ use of religious language simply as the most effective way to challenge the Church‘s censure of homosexuality. Maynard‘s irate response upon coming to the decision that her same-sex desire was sinful sheds light on the use of Christian discourse by sexual dissidents. ―I have been very hungry, & have said as it were,‖ she wrote in 1886, ―‗Well I did not know there wd. be actually nothing to eat in the desert except manna.‘‖ 11 Maynard and Hall expected Christianity to satisfy their same-sex desire. The dissident erotics inherent in the Catholic worship of Christ and of the Virgin Mary 12 and the Catholic Church‘s elevation of same-sex spiritual friendships and their dependence on a homoerotic desire, had led to the expectation that same-sex desire was a ―hunger‖ that could be sated within Christianity. Indeed for Maynard and Hall the two were indistinguishable; homoerotic desire was contained within and informed the believer‘s desire for God. The metaphor of motherhood was, paradoxically, central to this expectation. Hall represents Stephen Gordon not only as a Christ figure but also as the Virgin Mary from whom a homosexual community seeks the spiritual birth denied them by the Catholic Church (―they possessed her. Her barren womb became fruitful – it ached with its fearful and sterile burden. It 9 Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Virago Press, 1994), 476, quoted in Richard Dellamora, ―The Well of Loneliness and the Catholic Rhetoric of Sexual Dissidence,‖ in Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, ed. Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden, and Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007), 125. 10 Dellamora, ―Well of Loneliness,‖ 115. 11 Greenbook, 30 April 1886, 143. 12 Dellamora, ―Well of Loneliness,‖ 114-128. 367 ached with the fierce yet helpless children who clamour in vain for their right to salvation‖). 13 By representing Stephen Gordon as the Virgin Mary who, with her ―barren womb,‖ seeks to give spiritual birth to sexual inverts, Hall shares with Maynard the appropriation of a culturally and sexually queer spiritual motherhood. The birth that the inverts in Hall‘s novel seek and the ―bread‖ that both they and Maynard sought, the divinely sanctioned satisfaction of same-sex desire, was understood by Hall, and in this instance also by Maynard, as their right. It is the product of the homoeroticism that had been incited by Catholicism and evangelicalism, which had been an acceptable part of the piety of each tradition, and upon which both traditions had depended. Hall and Maynard turned to religious discourse in order to describe their sexual dissidence because, they suggested, it was the tradition that gave both them, and their dissident desire, birth. They also used it in order to express the sense of betrayal consequent on the rigidification of attitudes towards same-sex desire in each tradition. In the mid-1880s Maynard had come to believe that her pursuit of same-sex desire was contrary to God‘s will. In light of the earlier centrality of same-sex desire to evangelism and spiritual mentoring, this constituted a painful reversal. Hall‘s religiously framed anguish suggests a similar sense of betrayal. Maynard‘s erotic history is in continuity not only with what we might characterize as modernist sapphism, but also with modern homosexuality more broadly. The fact that she came to a homosexual subjectivity through an engagement with religious discourse challenges the tendency of scholars to conflate ―modern‖ sexuality with both science and sexual liberation. At the same time it calls into question the identitarian framework within which histories of modern sexuality have often been understood. Maynard came to a sense of the sexual nature of her desire without espousing categories of sexual identity. The making of her dissident sexuality demonstrates the significance of sexual subjectivity as a site at which to explore and to contest a range of binaries that have underpinned singular trajectories of secularization – secular/sacred, 13 Dellamora, ―Well of Loneliness,‖ 125, quoting Hall, The Well, 476. 368 science/religion, sexual liberation/repression, masculine/feminine, and metropole/colony – and for charting the historically contingent, dynamic, and variable relationships between these ostensibly antithetical terms. Nowhere is the significance of sexuality to the investigation of modernity more evident than in iterations of sexuality forged during the crisis of faith, a period traditionally seen as the watershed moment in Britain‘s transition from a religious to a secular society. The alacrity with which Maynard, and many other Victorians, turned to ―love‖ in the face of faith crisis, demonstrates the proximity of religious and sexual desire in later Victorian Britain. During a period which, paradoxically, saw religious discourse increasingly mobilized to describe human love, courtship, and marriage (a counterpart to the mobilizing of these metaphors to describe religious experience), the sacred remained imbricated with the sexual. By representing ―love‖ as a replacement for faith, and by utilizing religious discourse in this process, those who relinquished religion formulated expressions of sexual desire that paradoxically contained the residues of faith. Such articulations of desire existed alongside those of religious adherents for whom an erotic engagement with non-believers had fostered a faith that incorporated doubt. Maynard‘s religious belief was dynamic. Transitions in religious belief were not unusual for Victorians but Maynard, as the head of a university college, was particularly well-positioned to discern and to engage with shifts in Victorian religious culture. In this study I have explored the Presbyterian-inflected Evangelical Anglicanism of Maynard‘s upbringing, her childhood and adolescent encounters with the Ulster revivals in the late 1850s and early 1860s, her encounters with theological liberalism and agnosticism at St. Andrews and Girton College in the 1870s and her crisis of faith, her renegotiation of her Evangelical faith through an involvement with the holiness movement in the 1880s, and her reconfiguration of her faith as a result of her engagement with theological modernism in the early years of the twentieth century. Shifts in 369 Victorian religious culture and in Maynard‘s own religious beliefs were effected as religious discourse interacted with other cultural discourses. Transitions in Maynard‘s religious subjectivity in turn effected changes in her sexual subjectivity. In this project I have been most interested in changing understandings of science and imperialism and their effects on Victorian religious belief and on Maynard‘s religious subjectivity. I have examined the ways in which the scientific discourses of natural theology, evolution, eugenics, and psychoanalysis, along with the high imperialism of the turn of the century, were constituted within, contested by, and/or qualified Maynard‘s religious beliefs. Maynard‘s sexual subjectivity thus becomes an important site for exploring not only her religious subjectivity but also the relationship between religion, science, and imperialism. Maynard‘s sexual desire and her sexual discourse show the relationship between science and religion in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century to have been a dynamic one. Her childhood sexual desire was structured by the natural theology that was central to her parents‘ Puritan Evangelicalism. The amateur study of astronomy, botany, zoology, and geology within a natural theology framework established the terms of her religious and also of her sexual desire. God was infinite, omniscient, and eternal, and yet worked intricately in nature. Erotic relationships broke with the mundane limits of earthly existence and offered an experience of a timeless eternity, while echoing the idea of the intimacy of the God with the creation which was evident in the argument from design. Maynard‘s sexual discourse in the early 1900s, and particularly in her relationship with her adopted daughter Effie Anthon, demonstrates a different and far less salutary conjunction of science and religion. The eugenic discourse evident in Maynard‘s Evangelical efforts to understand Anthon‘s ―secret vice‖ and to prevent her from marrying, illustrates the process by which scientific discourse came to inform some iterations of turn-of-the-century Evangelicalism. Maynard‘s eugenics was a product of her attempt to 370 modernize Evangelicalism by synthesizing it with Darwinian theory. This process shows religion to be a site at which discourses of modernity were constituted, while at the same time disrupting the science/religion binary that informs secularization theory. Maynard‘s effort to regulate Anthon‘s ―foreign‖ sexuality also demonstrates one way in which scientific discourses of class and race came to supplement an older missionary discourse in early twentieth-century Evangelicalism, as discourses of class became central to the making of the racial discourses of empire. Maynard‘s ―modern Evangelical feminism,‖ another outworking of Maynard‘s synthesis of Evangelicalism and Darwinism, illustrates one site at which Darwinism and eugenics came to permeate turn-of-the-century feminism. Finally, Maynard‘s autobiographical account of the sexual repression of her childhood reveals a dialogue between psychoanalysis and Evangelicalism in which some aspects of psychoanalytic discourse were assimilated into Maynard‘s modern Evangelicalism while others were resisted. Maynard‘s last homoerotic relationship, with the Anglo-Irish woman Marion Wakefield, demonstrates the indebtedness of Maynard‘s re-configured, ―modern‖ scientific Evangelicalism and her re-worked ―modern‖ feminism to her imperialist discourse. It suggests that modernity is a product of imperialism, both discursively and materially; it disrupts the metropole/colony binary that has enabled secularization theorists to present modern Britain as the product of Enlightenment reason, science, and progress. By taking the erotic subjectivity of sexually- dissident Victorian women seriously, this project suggests new ways of thinking about middle- class women‘s complicity in empire. It argues that studies of middle-class women‘s sexuality that have focused on their passionlessness and prudishness, and the discourses of sexual regulation believed to arise from the latter, may be the effect of an unthinking reiteration of imperialist Victorian discourses of gender. It opens up an enquiry into religiously produced same-sex and heterosexual female desire as a site at which empire was enacted and/or contested. 371 Evangelicalism rendered the boundaries between the ―races‖ a sexualized one – the pious and chaste middle-class Victorian women versus the promiscuous indigenous women – and it also rendered the transgression of those boundaries sexually compelling. Maynard‘s relationship with Wakefield demonstrates not so much the role of the erotic in the transgression of a ―racial‖ boundary – the English Maynard‘s attraction to a racialized Anglo-Irish Wakefield – as much as its role in exposing the artificiality, contingency, and malleability of the racial categories of empire. Finally, Maynard‘s erotic history has an important contribution to make to the emerging enquiry into the relationship between religion, dissident sexuality, and social transformation. Edith Ellis and Edward Carpenter‘s heterodox theology constitutes one turn-of-the-century site at which these discourses intersected. For Ellis and Carpenter, the reconciliation of the body and spirit effected in sexual union rendered sexuality a primary site for experiencing the divine and the starting point for social transformation. ―I conceive,‖ Carpenter wrote, ―a millennium on earth . . . when men and women all over the earth shall ascend and enter into relation with their bodies—shall attain freedom and joy.‖ 14 This kind of theology is not only historically significant, but it also offers an important and appealing alternative to many contemporary religious approaches to same-sex desire (and to sexual desire generally) which, by distinguishing between the body and soul, and privileging the latter over the former, compel religious adherents to make a choice between their sexuality and faith. At the same time, however, it is necessary to recognize that the scholarly investigation of heterodox religion and sexuality, as valuable as it is, is only one part of a necessarily more complex project. Maynard‘s negotiation of desire, her very failure to present a sustained positive approach to same-sex desire, reminds us of the complexity, diversity, and historically specific nature of the relationship between religion and sexual discourse. Equally specific (and possibly diverse) solutions are required to the problems 14 Edward Carpenter, Towards Democracy (London, 1949), 14-15, quoted in Dixon, ―Your Clinging Kisses.‖ 372 posed by contemporary Christian traditions that perpetuate the negative aspects of Maynard‘s approach. By investigating the greatest possible array of religious negotiations of the erotic, historians will be best placed to address the complexity of contemporary religious approaches to same-sex desire and to sexual desire generally, approaches which have often been damaging to religious adherents. The relationship between same-sex desire and social transformation also needs careful examination. By subsuming same-sex desire to social transformation scholars may elide the complexity of the relationship between them. Maynard, for example, did not perceive her work in social reform – her role in the movement for women‘s higher education – to be the direct effect of sexual desire. It was the product of a religious calling; her same-sex relationships emerged as part of that calling. Moreover, her social reform efforts existed in diverse relationships to social transformation. While Maynard was undoubtedly instrumental in forwarding the cause of women‘s higher education and of women‘s increased participation in the public sphere, including suffrage, she simultaneously drew upon and stabilized dominant discourses of gender, class, and race. Her work in the cause of women‘s higher education was undertaken while, and by, consolidating her class and racial superiority as an upper-middle-class English woman. The religious desire that motivated her reformism, and the same-sex desire that her piety produced, had disruptive potential. Her religious theology evidenced egalitarian strands, and her piety and her same-sex desire compelled her not only to cross but also to question class and racial divides. However, class and racial hierarchies were also entrenched within Maynard‘s articulation of religious and sexual desire. The notion of social transformation has thus itself to be historicized and its effects carefully calibrated. The goal should be to keep the theoretical nexus of possible connections between religion, sexuality, and social change as 373 broad as possible so as to facilitate the historical investigation of many different conjunctions (or lack thereof) between these three phenomena. 374 Bibliography Primary Sources Manuscript Collections Constance Maynard Papers. Queen Mary College, London. Works by Constance Maynard Maynard, Constance. An Alpine Meadow. 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Commences her undergraduate degree at Hitchin. 1875 Successfully sits the Moral Tripos examination. 1876 Takes up a part-time position at Cheltenham College as Louisa Lumsden‘s assistant. 1877 Co-founds St. Leonards School for girls in St. Andrews with Lumsden. 1878 Death of mother, Louisa Maynard 1880 Resigns from St. Leonards and moves to London. Commences art course at Slade Art School, University College, London. 1881 Presents ―Some Thoughts on the Cultivation of the Intellect‖ at the Annual Meeting for the Christian Women‘s Union in Liverpool. 1882 Founds Westfield College. 1888 Death of father, Henry Maynard; adoption of Stephanë Fazulo (―Effie Anthon‖) 1905 Publishes The Moral Equivalent of War 1910 Publishes Between College Terms 1913 Retires from Westfield; establishes a home (―Sundial‖) in Little Bookham, Surrey. 1914 Publishes Watching the War: Thoughts for the People. 1915 Death of Anthon. 1916 Publishes A True Mother. 1923 Moves to Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. 1924 Publishes We Women: A Golden Hope. 1926 Publishes Dora Greenwell: A Prophet for our Own Times on the Battleground of Our Faith. 1927 Publishes Progressive Creation. 1935 (26 March) Dies at home; buried at Gerrards Cross parish church on 29 March. 389 Appendix B: Dates of the Writing of the Autobiography Maynard wrote her autobiography between the years 1915 and 1925. She did not write it in chronological order, but instead started with her adolescence and progressed to 1880. It had initially been her intention to chronicle only her years at Girton and the events leading up to them. Then, in 1925, after five years, she wrote an account of her childhood, her years at Westfield College, and her retirement years. Known dates of writing for the particular sections of the autobiography are as follows: Autobiographical Account Date Written 1849-1864: Childhood 1925 1865-1876: Early adulthood, including Girton College 1915-1916 1876-1879: Cheltenham College and St. Leonards 1918-1919  1879 1917, 1919, 1924 1880-1913: Slade School, Westfield College, Retirement years 1924-1935  1880 1924  1881-1885 1926  1885-1891 1927  1903-1905 1930