SOURCE: Corbett, Mary J. “Feminine Authorship and Spiritual Authority in Victorian Women Writers' Autobiographies.” Women's Studies 18 (1990): 13-29.

[In the following essay, Corbett studies the influence of Tonna's evangelical Protestant views on her writing.]

In a recent book on women's autobiography, Sidonie Smith has argued that “the woman who writes autobiography is doubly estranged when she enters the autobiographical contract,” with her estrangement founded on woman's historical subordination to male discourse and on her problematic relation to a reading audience always already configured as male. By usurping the male power of speech and writing, the female self-representing subject “unmasks her transgressive desire for cultural and literary authority” when she takes up the pen to author herself.¹ Feminist Victorianists will find this scenario familiar, for in its basic elements, it replicates the argument elaborated by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and extends it to the genre of self-representation, positing a “repressed desire” for literary—and thus masculine—authority as the subtext of every woman's life. In making this case, however, Smith's work also invites us to reconsider this interpretive model in relation to autobiography and to feminine authorship, and, as I will demonstrate below, to modify its totalizing claims about women's writing.

Smith locates “the repressed desire of a life like a man's” as the motivating principle in the Victorian text she examines, Harriet Martineau's Autobiography (1877). Reading Martineau's text as a paradigmatic example of how the feminine subject who “transgresses” the gendered boundary between the public and private spheres inscribes and is inscribed by the splits that structure gender itself, Smith exposes the contradictions that inhere in being a “public woman” in the Victorian period and thus in a woman's representing herself publicly as well. But her analysis is skewed because her basic and, until recently, quite orthodox feminist assumption—that only men possess authority and that women can only rebel against it—does not adequately account for the ways in which Victorian women were invested with authority, literary and otherwise.

I would adduce a very different reading of woman's role in relation to literary authority and cultural production from Martineau's history, the contours of which I can only suggest here, a reading I base on my understanding of Martineau as occupying a privileged position within Victorian culture. As the popularizer of a major hegemonic discourse, Martineau reproduced the lessons of high male theory for myriad private readers, male and female alike; her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832-34) were the fictional works primarily responsible for disseminating Utilitarian doctrine among the newly literate classes. Only when what she advocated—Malthusian principles of population control, for example—was perceived as inappropriate to “feminine” discourse did contemporary conservatives launch their scurrilous attacks against her; more sympathetic readers hailed her as a valuable spokesperson and propagandist for the new political economy, which legitimated the oppression of women and the working class.² Martineau thus textually participates in perpetuating patriarchal discourse even though her life as a public woman challenges some of its assumptions about women's “proper sphere”; she is, then, not marginal but central to her culture, for her literary work supports the capitalist values on which that culture depends. And her Autobiography reenacts her ideological positioning as a woman empowered to speak and to represent herself publicly so long as her speech and writing do not threaten the basic socioeconomic principles that structure the culture, including the separation of the domestic world from the public one. To constitute Martineau as “transgressive,” then, in the way that Smith does, is to downplay the ways in which her work upholds the categories her life is presumed to undercut.

In short, Smith's paradigm contains three assumptions contested by recent socialist-feminist analyses of Victorian women's writing: first, that all writing women have a marginal relation to structures of “cultural and literary authority”; second, that women have played little or no part in reproducing the ideological and material conditions that underwrite their own oppression; and third, that for women to represent the self under patriarchy is always an act of transgression.³ Without denying the heuristic power of her model, I would like to offer an alternative to it, for I believe that scripting a scenario in which women are always at the margins, and indeed are shown to derive their power from that outsider's perspective, occludes the ways in which certain women, primarily middle-class ones, have been empowered under patriarchy—and in its interests—by being positioned at the center, as cultural producers and reproducers of bourgeois values.

I would agree that in authoring their lives under patriarchal ideology, Victorian women writers confront the difficulty of representing female literary identity within a culture that, by and large, denies them the authority to do so in the public, secular realm; to say that, however, is not to say that women's different relation to that realm necessarily bars them from representing the self according to cultural criteria for femininity. Autobiography is, of course, one of the literary forms that most clearly displays its indebtedness to social conventions for representing personal identity, however that elusive concept is defined at any given historical moment; canonical nineteenth-century British autobiographies by male writers, for example, generally legitimate the individualist liberal values of capitalist culture by narrating the development of the self as a vocational history. Martineau's adaptation of this “masculine” form is, as Smith points out, clearly atypical in its time, for not until the end of the century do most middle-class women have access to the liberal rights and opportunities that allow them to map their self-representations onto a developmental model. Yet even though gender difference always continues to be constitutive of other differences, women's autobiographies throughout the century often wind up reinscribing—not challenging—cultural fictions such as fixed norms of gender and class.

In order to demonstrate how some women's autobiographical texts are produced not by transgressing but by conforming to bourgeois norms, I will look here at how one nineteenth-century discourse of the self, a religious discourse that extends interpretive authority to all believing Christians, enables and encourages writing women to represent themselves; within certain patriarchal constraints on what she can represent, the Evangelical emphasis on individual authority enables the woman writer to invoke a system of values that sanctifies her work as useful and important and designates her self-representation as exemplary.⁴ Acting in conjunction with the economic logic that assigns women to the private realm, Christian discourse gives the autobiographer authority over that domestic space, which is redefined as the new locus for cultural and even literary authority. Far from being marginal, then, the woman who writes herself in relation to God and the home is at the center of the private sphere, newly invested with the power of producing and reproducing the ideologies that structure Victorian culture.

I

Today, neither the names of these women autobiographers—Mary Martha Sherwood (1775-1851), Charlotte Tonna (1790-1846), and Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck (1778-1856)—nor their works are familiar, while in their own day, the first two at least were amazingly prolific and popular writers.⁵ Sherwood's The Fairchild Family (1817) and Henry Milner tales were among the most popular children's stories of the period, while Tonna's tracts and novels of the thirties and forties, of the strictest Evangelical tenor, were also widely read. By the time the two came to write their autobiographies, they were well known as “authors,” even if they lacked the public profile of their more illustrious male and female contemporaries. And in their autobiographies, the literary space in which we might expect them to represent themselves as authors, they do not establish claims to authorial status, but rather delineate the boundaries within which feminine authorship can be constituted.

Their different rationales for working in this genre, as they explain them, do not overtly involve a wish to capitalize on their popularity: publicity, as we ordinarily think of it, is the last thing the spiritual woman writer would seek. Moreover, their explicit intention in representing themselves is to control the way in which their readers, contemporary and future, will read them. In her Personal Recollections (1842), Tonna attempts to seal off what she has constituted as her private self from public view; asserting the sanctity of “private domestic history” and “the sacredness of home.” (15), and defending the absence of any remarks on that aspect of her life, she yet acknowledges “that when it has pleased God to bring any one before the public in the capacity of an author, that person becomes in some sense public property; having abandoned the privacy from which no one ought to be forced” (1). Writing about ten years later, and commenting on “the propensity of the age for writing and recording the lives of every individual who has had the smallest claim to celebrity,” Sherwood presents The Life of Mrs. Sherwood (1857) as a necessary defense against what others might write if she were to leave it unwritten: “Could I be quite sure, that when I am gone, nobody would say anything about me, I should, I think, spare myself the trouble which I am now about to take” (1). She, too, assumes that the text of her life is vulnerable to all sorts of appropriation, and makes her move to autobiography a defense against that possibility of being appropriated.

Both choose to represent the self out of a desire not to be misinterpreted and misused by others; since as “public” figures they cannot count on the silence Sherwood seems to find preferable to speech, they assert a control over how they will be represented by putting their own versions of themselves into discourse. And in explaining their motives, they also signal a particular conception of the relation between the private and the public spheres not as separate realms, but as concentric circles, a conception that allows them to represent themselves without disturbing the line that demarcates their sphere from the public world. While Tonna suggests, for example, that her rhetorical representation of her “person” will become “public property,” she posits some familial, interpersonal experience as prior to and privileged over public discourse; the “sacredness” of the private realm, its integrity as a space theoretically sealed off from the public world, must be preserved inviolate for, as we will see, it is precisely the sanctity of the interior that enables the spiritual woman who writes to represent herself publicly. What remains innermost and goes unrepresented—the intricacy of family life—is condensed in the figure of the woman herself.

Tonna's anxiety about making the familial public is linked to women's cultural positioning on the inside, at the center of the domestic circle, which is itself circumscribed by the larger circle of the public world. Because nineteenth-century middle-class women derived their primary social and cultural self-definition from their identification with the private realm, for the writer to maintain her placement in that realm even as she symbolically moves outside it through writing is a difficult, though not impossible, task. A woman's “public” work in representation threatens to undercut her gendered, class-based identity by figuratively connecting her act of self-exposure with acts performed by other public women, who sell not just an ordinary commodity, but their very bodies, in a male-dominated market-place: as Catherine Gallagher asserts, Victorian writing and Victorian prostitution are metaphorically “linked … through their joint habitation of the realm of exchange.”⁶ But by enabling her to represent her work and her life as part of her ordinary course of duties, the discourse of Christian piety invests the middle-class Christian woman with authority even as it minimizes the risks of her engagement in autobiographical discourse; she negotiates the crossing from the inner circle to the outer one by always representing herself through the signifiers of domesticity and by refusing to locate herself permanently in the public realm of exchange.

If she is thus retroactively to establish her claim to the authority that enabled her to begin writing, and also to legitimate the act of self-representation she engages in at the time of writing, the spiritual autobiographer must not upset the distinction between the norms that constitute appropriate feminine behavior and the eccentricities displayed by those who exceed the prescribed bounds of middle-class femininity. Asserting her own claim to be considered representative of the norm, Sherwood expresses her desire not to be thought exceptional—and thus unwomanly—mainly in terms of her distaste for the stereotypical literary woman, the bluestocking who, forfeiting femininity in her quest for publicity, comes to represent the extraordinary and unnatural woman rather than the conventional and unexceptionable one. Recalling her father's repeated claim that she “was to grow up a genius,” Sherwood recollects that back then, as at the time of writing, to be “a celebrated authoress” was not her wish: “even then I felt, if it were necessary to be very singular, I would rather not be a genius” (51-2); while “it was a matter of course to me that I was to write, and also a matter of instinct … I had a horror of being thought a literary lady; for it was, I fancied, ungraceful” (118). When “forced into public” (her father suggested that she should help an impoverished family friend by publishing her first work and donating the proceeds to him), “my heart sunk at the proposition”: “to be set down so soon in that character which I had always dreaded,” to feel “the mortification which I felt at being thus dragged into public” made her wish “that I had never known the use of a pen” (119). Her choice of the term “mortification,” a word Burney and Austen also use to describe what Evelina and Elizabeth Bennet experience when publicly exposed, either physically or psychologically, suggests that for the woman writer to enter the public world, even through the impersonal medium of print, is to incur the risk of social or moral death; Sherwood constructs the passage from the home to the world as symbolically representing the loss of the feminine self.

At this border, where the public and the private meet in self-representation, we see how competing tensions—the woman writer's need to remain situated within the domestic realm and her simultaneous engagement in the public process of writing, in which her name (if not her body) circulates at large within public discourse merely by the fact of publication—produce an anxiety about literature and literary production itself, about how texts function in the world and how their circulation affects their producers. As Mary Poovey notes, while an “objective text” like a novel “serves as a more general mediator between self and public,” the avowedly “subjective” text the autobiographer composes, which formally and thematically negotiates the line between private feminine experience and the public masculine world, presents itself as neither mediated nor mediating, as a window that opens directly onto the soul.⁷ For some women writers, opening that window onto the private is so fraught with danger that only fiction, or a masculine pseudonym, can provide them with the curtain necessary to shield them from public view. But by invoking a higher power than the self as the legitimating Author of their lives and their texts, by writing from the position of the Christian subject, whose life and work are always oriented toward an eternal goal, the outer circle which circumscribes all human life, women writers find a viable way of representing female experience. The combination of religious and domestic authority sanctions female authorship.

Although most feminists have, with good reason, tended to see religion as enforcing the patriarchal values that consign women to silence, recent revisionist work has begun to establish the counterpoint to the monolithic view that casts all religious discourse as inherently oppressive: as Gail Malmgreen puts it, “it is surely neither possible nor necessary to weigh up, once and for all, the gains and losses for women of religious commitment … the dealings of organised religion with women have been richly laced with ironies and contradictions.”⁸ If religion helped produce the ideology that assigned women to the domestic sphere, it also enabled them, within that realm, to write and act in ways that women who sought access to literary authority on purely secular grounds could not.

As Elizabeth Jay writes in her study of Evangelicalism and the Victorian novel, “the religion of the heart” invested its believers with “the onus of interpreting God's Word”: “no appeal to any authoritative body of dogmatic pronouncements” could relieve the individual of her responsibility to establish her relation to the Bible and to God, for the eternal welfare of her soul ultimately depended on that relationship.⁹ And gender, here as everywhere else in the nineteenth century, plays its role as a determining factor in prescribing the possible limits and acceptable range of feminine discourse. For example, the cultural prohibition against women engaging in public activity, in conjunction with the spiritual imperative to meekness and humility, while dictating style and content does not absolutely prevent writing. Adhering to those unwritten laws, in fact, keeps the writing woman from the spiritual and moral death Sherwood fears, as in Tonna's invocation of the religious bent of her works as a safeguard against the ever-present temptation of taking too much satisfaction in her own literary abilities:

… the literary labour that I pursued for my own sustenance was perfect luxury, so long as my humble productions were made available for the spiritual good of the people so dear to me. My little books and tracts became popular; because, after some struggle against a plan so humbling to literary pride, I was able to adopt the suggestion of a wise Christian brother, and form a style of such homely simplicity that if, on reading a manuscript to a child of five years old, I found there was a single or word above his comprehension, it was instantly corrected to suit that lowly standard.

(145)

In a move that oddly recalls Wordsworth's transvaluation of work in the opening lines of The Prelude, Tonna's “labour” becomes “luxury”; “literary pride” is transformed into the “homely simplicity” of her style and her very self once she orients her writing toward a spiritual end. The “wise Christian brother,” figure of patriarchal authority, is to Tonna not an oppressor but a benefactor, for it is his warning that keeps her on the appropriate path for the righteous Christian woman.

In these terms, the religious woman's writing entails not public “mortification,” but the private mortification of the self before God, which leads to eternal life, for the writer herself and for her readers as well, to whom Tonna can relate through a shared system of values and beliefs. By erasing all traces of art and artfulness, she shows herself willing and able to mortify her “literary pride” before those readers in order to establish a reading community of comprehending converts. While writing demands that she present herself to an unfamiliar audience, the religious woman writer reduces the risk of entering discourse by appealing to values, specifically religious ones, that require her self-effacement even as they invest her with a voice to which other Evangelical Christians will listen.

II

For a reader of other nineteenth-century autobiographies, the lack of information provided in these women's texts about the actual activity of writing can be quite maddening, or, at the very least, startling: when juxtaposed with Mill's Autobiography (1877), that classic case of the life that, without Harriet Taylor, would have almost solely consisted of readings and writings, or with Trollope's Autobiography (1883), with its detailed description of all aspects of his literary work, including the ledger that sums up the total of his emoluments, these texts hardly seem to be by writers at all, so thoroughly do they repress the signs of literary production. But this silence, too, supports the exemplary status of the author-autobiographer: the publicity that writing entails, even the most minimal engagement with publishers, editors, and printers, is banished, thus enabling the writer to root her identity in the private sphere, where the middle-class woman neither calls attention to whatever undomestic talents and ambitions she may possess nor trespasses on male territory by commenting directly on political events. Keeping both her discourse and her body within the limits of the feminine sphere insures that the religious woman writer will not be subjected to the kind of criticism the autobiographer Mary Sewell leveled at a mid-Victorian woman evangelist who delivered her message directly to a public audience: a public proselytizer, unlike a private didact, is cut off from the legitimating power and protection of the family, for “‘a lone woman who speaks in public,’” Sewell intones, “‘is a very lone creature indeed.’”¹⁰

Remaining private empowers the religious woman writer; keeping silent on certain subjects is a definite necessity for maintaining that power, and politics is thus a topic these texts do not speak of. Tonna, for instance, does not refer at all to her political beliefs, even though they deeply informed the rhetoric of her industrial novels; while she claims that she has been “often charged with the offence of being too political in my writings” (20), her autobiography reveals nothing to substantiate that charge.¹¹ While Schimmelpenninck was an adolescent at the time of the French Revolution, contemporary politics never enter her self-representation: she writes not of “public events, with which I have nothing to do,” but promises to trace “the effects which they produced on the domestic sphere with which I had experience” (I.217), a promise she does not fulfill. The possibility of writing an account that would draw on the happenings of the public world is held out and then withheld; the actuality of public history is invoked only to be dismissed according to the implicit dictum that confines the woman autobiographer to writing solely about what is proper to her sphere. She cannot construct herself as “author,” nor will she textually engage with public events.

What the female Christian autobiographer, like her counterpart, the female novelist at mid-century, is presumed to know best and encouraged to confine her attention to is, of course, character, and, specifically, female character. And everyone's character appears to best advantage in the private sphere, for it is “in the private lives of the children of God,” as Sherwood puts it, “that we are enabled best to discern the wonderful beauty of the Divine influence … in the most private intercourse with the humblest and feeblest persons … we find the best and most lovely exhibitions of the Christian graces” (427). Like Sarah Ellis, who conceived the influence of a woman's “individual character” as “operating upon those more immediately around her, but by no means ceasing there; for each of her domestics, each of her relatives, and each of her familiar friends, will in their turn become the centre of another circle,” Sherwood sees developing and shaping individual character as woman's special province.¹²

Her school for doing so is the home, the realm of affective ties which is counterposed to the heartless world; the Christian household, in Nancy Armstrong's words, “[detaches] itself from the political world and [provides] the complement and antidote to it,” as the place where private virtue arms the family against public vice.¹³ Ideologically endowed with the responsibility for molding moral character, and particularly in relation to girls, the private-sphere writer must protect herself from “the danger of celebrity” (Sherwood, 509) and avoid all traffic with the public world; her sphere is located on the inside, in the home and the heart, and her place is at the center. By eliminating everything external to the domestic, everything in the public world, from her texts, she both accedes to and reinforces the limits on the range of possible discourse, and so maintains her right to instruct her audience within her own realm, in the formation of everyday private-sphere virtues.

That writing itself, rightly conceived, does not conflict with women's prescribed role but, on the contrary, amplifies and extends it, proves to be a point to which all three autobiographies attest in their affirmation of the writing religious woman. Womanhood is itself valorized in these texts, in part for its disinterestedness: “‘Remember, it is a privilege to be a woman instead of a man,’” writes Schimmelpenninck, recording her mother's words; “‘men, heroes, and others, do things partly to do good and partly to gain a great name; but a woman's self-denial and generosity may be as great, and often greater, while it is unknown to others, and fully manifest only to her own conscience and to God: to work for this, and for this alone, is the highest of all callings’” (I.204). But invoking the language and concept of calling to define and deify womanhood, as conservative writers on femininity from Hannah More to Sarah Ellis repeatedly do in their writings, does not strictly predicate the ways in which that vocation may be practiced; it rules out only the love of fame as an end while presenting as the paramount object the necessity of making one's conscience fit for God's sight.

The way to keep that conscience clear is, paradoxically, to make its workings readable, not only to God, but to other readers: the Christian woman's self-examination, conducted through and throughout her life, externally expresses what would otherwise remain hidden from all eyes but God's, the subject's heart and mind. While the interpersonal and the political fall outside the circumscribed area of what the religious woman writer can represent, the most personal experience—the writer's relation to God—must be made legible in her text: reversing the logic of inside and outside, private and public, spiritual autobiography makes what is ostensibly most private, the inner self, the substance of the public representation.

As Carol Edkins' work on eighteenth-century American women's spiritual autobiographies establishes, the religious woman can publicly represent this individual (but not unique) experience because her readers understand the conventions of religious discourse: the shared values held by autobiographer and reader “[create] a symbolic bonding with the group” such that her exemplary spiritual progress can be read and imitated by others.¹⁴ Spiritual autobiography, then, not only permits but demands of its writers an excruciatingly thorough self-inquisition, and particularly on the issue of writing itself, for those who produce literature and self-representations are responsible not only to God, but to other Christian readers as well, as a crisis of authorship reported in Tonna's text illustrates. Caught between the need to make a living and the demands of her husband, who apparently tried to annex her earnings as his own even after they separated, Tonna must decide between continuing to write her religious works under her own name, thereby forfeiting the income garnered by her pen, and beginning to write secular fiction under a pseudonym, which would disguise her identity and protect her income. She submits her case not to a court of law, as Caroline Norton did when entrapped in a similar situation, but to God's will:

The idea of hiring myself out to another master—to engage in the service of that world the friendship of which is enmity with God—to cause the Holy One of Israel to cease from before those whom by the pen I addressed—to refrain from setting forth Jesus Christ and Him crucified to a perishing world, and give the reins to an imagination ever prone to wander after folly and romance, but now subdued to a better rule—all this was so contrary to my views of Christian principle that, after much earnest prayer to God, I decided rather to work gratuitously in the good cause, trusting to him who knew all my necessity, than to entangle myself with things on which I could not ask a blessing.

(190)

To serve “another master”—the world or Mammon—is an option she will not choose, since it is only her dissemination of God's word that authorizes her writing in the first place; by prayerful, conscientious self-examination, she arrives at the correct spiritual and moral decision. Moreover, to write for the secular world would entail a personal fall as well: by losing the audience of converts and believers already constituted for her, by “[giving] the reins to an imagination ever prone to wander after folly and romance,” and thus undoing the labor to submit all human desires “to a better rule” which the autobiography records in painstaking detail, she would feed her body while starving her soul and the souls of others who live and labor in “a perishing world.”

Again we see that writing must come under God's rule, but we see as well the way in which Tonna conceptualizes her self, God-given but marred by “indwelling sin” (29), as a battleground between opposing forces of good and evil. Her duty, then, is to overrule the depravity of the self, including the innate tendency of the imagination to focus on vain and worldly things, by opening it to the intense scrutiny of God's light, and her readers' eyes, and by keeping careful watch over herself; in Schimmelpenninck's metaphor, which nicely illustrates the spatial relation between inside and outside and the permeable barrier that separates them, the self is a tabernacle and “an efficient company of porters and doorkeepers should guard every gate of access into the temple” (I.65). Only a constant self-surveillance can insure that one's soul and one's writing will not be invaded by God's enemies, but that policing of the temple only restricts access; it does not prevent the autobiographer from representing the inner sanctuary.

For middle-class women, invested as they are with the responsibility for the moral life of children and, to a great extent, of adult men, interrogating the self is particularly crucial; for the woman writer, however, it is even more so. By writing and publishing, and thereby extending her influence to include not only like-minded middle-class Christians, but often the working class as well, she could as easily become a force for evil as for good, particularly since her position makes her so much more susceptible to the “temptations” and “mortification” of the public sphere. In order to mold the character of others, her own character must be scrutinized, continually searched for signs of moral and doctrinal failure. Thus the imperative to examine the self in writing throughout one's life, through letters and journals, and as one's earthly life draws to its close, in autobiography, is necessary for maintaining the fiction of authority that enables her to begin writing in the first place. God's sanction allows her to write, and to write the self is to test and re-test the validity of that sanction.

III

Writing for the marketplace is not, of course, the most decorous way for the middle-class woman to carry out her civilizing function, nor can the writer ever fulfill the true womanly ideal as it is configured by patriarchy: as George Henry Lewes comments sardonically in 1850, “My idea of a perfect woman is of one who can write but won't; who knows all the authors know and a great deal more; who can appreciate my genius and not spoil my market.”¹⁵ Sarah Ellis's far less ironic view, as quoted above, which imagines the exemplary domestic woman's influence as inspiring others to create perfect circles of their own, is shared, surprisingly, by Mary Russell Mitford, who portrays her ideal woman in much the same terms:

the very happiest position that a woman of great talent can occupy in our high civilisation, is that of living a beloved and distinguished member of the best literary society … repaying all that she receives by a keen and willing sympathy; cultivating to perfection the social faculty; but abstaining from the wider field of authorship, even while she throws out here and there such choice and chosen bits as prove that nothing but disinclination to enter the arena debars her from winning the prize.¹⁶

The ideal woman Lewes and Mitford construct is the amateur par excellence; like Ellis's woman, she rests at the still center of the domestic sphere, defined not so much by what she produces as by what she reproduces, the cultured, leisured middle-class existence that approximates an earlier, but still operative, aristocratic ideal of unproductive gentility. As a later formulation of this model suggests, the true work of women, “a mission quite as grand as literary authorship,” is not to write, but to “[keep] alive for men certain ideas, and ideals too, which would soon pass out of the world in the rush and hurry of material existence if they were not fed and replenished by those who are able to stand aloof from the worry and vexations of active life.”¹⁷ Women's role in literary production, then, should be to protect and transmit culture, virtue, and private values; “feeding” and “replenishing,” reproducing the material conditions of existence as well as the spiritual “ideas, and ideals” that have no home in the “arena” of the public world, domestic women also insure that art will continue to be produced.

The secular model for professional authorship suggests that male artistry requires female subordination; the ideal woman is confined to the home, where she carries out the unpaid labor of biological and cultural reproduction. Yet the religious woman who writes, whether or not she does so, as Mitford did, from financial necessity, makes up for what she might appear to lack in perfect womanhood by using literature itself as her medium for reproducing and exchanging domestic values. She sends her book out into the world only so that it will enter homes other than her own, where its influence will operate on other readers.

The autobiographers considered here definitely see literature's role in forming and disseminating the private-sphere virtues as central: that “the spiritual good of the people” of which Tonna speaks is actively advanced by their writing is not an assumption she and Sherwood ever question, and each also assumes that secular literature, which Schimmelpenninck calls “pestilential” and of “evil influence” (I. 124), does the devil's work in the world. These women can thus construct their writing as one of their womanly duties, a Christian duty to push back the powers of darkness by spreading the light of truth and salvation, a duty which the middle-class woman may carry out in print along the same lines as she does in her home and in her personal relations with others. Putting the values of the domestic into a public form for public circulation, the spiritual woman writer projects what she represents (which is equivalent to who she is) into a book, a tract, or a self-representing text, which passes through the public world en route to other middle-class homes; there it will be consumed in the service of the continuing reproduction of the values her life and her text embody.

In Ellis's terms, the exemplary woman's text spawns other domestic circles, other moral centers; that task, however, is not accomplished by women's “[entering] the arena,” or “the wider field of authorship,” but rather through reconstituting literature, and the scene of reading, as a private-sphere activity—women do not go outside, but literature comes in. Redefined as a private agent of private values, the religious woman's work exemplifies the powerful moralizing force of private femininity, a force which in its textual form actively combats the influence of secular novels, those “gin-palaces of the mind,” in Schimmelpennick's words, and “all that stimulates unproductive sensibilities” (I.131).

Schimmelpenninck argues, in appropriately circular fashion, that women have both acted upon and been acted upon by literature, and that the mutual interchange has altered both in the process. Casting the history of literature from her youth at the time of writing as the history of its feminization, she asserts an identity between women's role and literature's purpose:

The great increase of literary taste amongst women has wrought a wonderful change, not only in collections of books, but in their composition. Books were then written only for men; now they are written so that women can participate in them: and no man would think of forming a library in his house, without a thought that its volumes must be the companions of his wife and daughters in many a lonely hour, when their influence must sink into the heart, and tend to modify the taste and character. Thus, in literature, as in other things, and especially in domestic life, has the mercy of God bestowed on women the especial and distinguishing blessing of upholding the moral and religious influence, that spirit of truth and love by which man can alone be redeemed from the fall she brought upon him.

(I.125).

Women's education in the principles of “literary taste” makes for a change in how the domestic library, the physical locus for reading, is structured as well as in how each individual constituent part, each book, is composed: the fact that more women read requires the production of books that invite and allow “feminine participation” in them as readers. While the patriarch still determines the shape of the collection, he must choose more judiciously now than he did at some earlier point in time when books were “written only for men,” for books are, anthropomorphically, “companions” for women, capable, as women in particular are, of molding human lives: “their influence must sink into the heart,” the innermost center of the reading subject, “and tend to modify the taste and character.”

Books become, in short, like women: they are moral agents whose influence shapes the interior life of their readers, and in doing so, they also prepare women to become writers who will send back into the world the lessons they have learned from reading the primers of the heart. Schimmelpenninck projects feminine moral force into a material object that can save all readers—and the woman writer herself—from the consequences of the first woman's sin, the desire for knowledge, for if the world fell through Eve's weakness, then it can only be “redeemed” through her stronger daughters' labor as readers and writers: Adam's curse is women's “especial and distinguishing blessing.” And literature shapes the character of its readers within the confines of the gentleman's private library (rather than the eighteenth-century public coffeehouse, accessible only to men) as women themselves do in their private roles as wives and mothers; it acts as an agent of that private “moral and religious influence” which, implicitly because of their role as public beings, few men can supply.¹⁸ Thus the religious woman writer need never even leave the home to do her work, which is spatially, spiritually, and socially centered in her father's house.

In the moral economy of the Christian Victorian household, domestic women produce and reproduce the spiritual food necessary for the whole family's consumption: in its self-sufficiency and autonomy from what lies outside it, woman's sphere appears to constitute itself as the realm that saves the fallen public world from its own sins. What we see in looking at these autobiographies is that within a conservative ideological framework, writing need not be constructed as a threat to the feminine self, for writing itself is privatized and feminized by women's influence, transposed from the public world to the private one. Nor does their writing threaten to undermine the naturalness of the public-private split, for the confluence of the norms of femininity and those of Christianity produces a powerful ideology of the private sphere that simultaneously legitimates women's writing and puts it in the service of the continuing reproduction of bourgeois hegemony, since the goal of the exemplary self-representing text is to elide the differences between lives and texts, realities and representations. In the religious woman writer's self-representation, then, writing one's life as an exemplary text testifies to the ideological importance of the woman writer's leading an exemplary life.

Notes

1. Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of Woman's Autobiography: Marginality and the Fictions of Self-Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 49, 50. The first third of the book is devoted to developing a critical feminist theory of autobiography and puncturing the androcentric assumptions of masculinist theorists; in the remainder, Smith does readings of women autobiographers who have, by virtue of the extensive feminist critical attention their texts have received, been elevated into a feminist canon of our own—Margery Kempe, Margaret Cavendish, Charlotte Charke, Martineau, and Maxine Hong Kingston. One objection to Smith's methodology, which I do not have space to pursue here but would like to raise, is that her canon of autobiography is problematic because it does not interrogate the principle of canonicity itself: the strategy of arguing against the exclusivity of the masculinist literary standard while proceeding to inscribe another standard, one that makes certain texts “representative,” unintentionally reaffirms the patriarchal logic that has relegated women's experience and women's texts to the margins.

2. For a recent reading of Martineau's life and work with which I find myself in substantial agreement, see Deirdre David, Intellectual Women and Victorian Patriarchy (London: Macmillan Press, 1987).

3. I'm thinking in particular of Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984) and Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).

4. My use of the term “spiritual autobiography” throughout this essay is quite different from Linda Peterson's recent definition of it in Victorian Autobiography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). Peterson asserts that “the spiritual autobiography demands an introspective and retrospective view of personal experience and a consistent hermeneutic system with which to interpret that experience” (125), and posits that, for cultural and generic reasons, women were unable to adopt it as a mode of interpretive self-representation since “women possessed neither experience nor authority” (130). While I do not contest Peterson's use of the hermeneutic model as a cultural standard for masculine self-representation, what I propose here is a concept of women's spiritual autobiography as an exemplary mode designed to inspire imitation, not self-analysis, in female readers, a mode in which the range and the limits of women's experience and their cultural authority could be both expressed and reinscribed.

5. I here include the bibliographical information for the autobiographies to be considered: Mary Martha Sherwood, The Life of Mrs. Sherwood, ed. Sophia Kelly (London, 1857); Charlotte Elizabeth [Tonna], Personal Recollections (New York, 1842); Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, Life of Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, 2 vols., ed. Christiana C. Hankin (London, 1858). All page references will be included in the text.

   For biographical information on Tonna and Sherwood and some discussion of their fiction, see Vineta Colby, Yesterday's Woman: Domestic Realism in the English Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), chapter 4.

6. Catherine Gallagher, “George Eliot and Daniel Deronda: The Prostitute and the Jewish Question,” in Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 41.

7. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (cited in n. 3), 41.

8. Gail Malmgreen, “Introduction,” Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760-1930, ed. Gail Malmgreen (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 7.

9. Elisabeth Jay, The Religion of the Heart: Anglican Evangelicalism and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 51.

   For an explication of “the concept of Original Sin” as the “linchpin of the Evangelical creed” that draws on mid-century literary texts, see Jay, 54-59.

   For a reading of the Puritan spiritual autobiography in relation to fictional models, see G. A. Starr, Defoe and Spiritual Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), and particularly 17-22 for the exemplarity of the spiritual autobiography for other like-minded readers.

   Tonna's autobiography does record a conversion, which I will not report in complete detail; what I find most interesting about it is the way in which it is mediated by the Biblical text. Living in rural Ireland, and thus outside an immediate community of Protestant believers, Tonna's seclusion leads her to undertake a thorough course of religious devotions; when she finds herself unable to pray, she turns to the Bible for guidance so as “to reform myself … and become obedient to the whole law” (102), which she carries out through reading and writing—making note of Biblical texts that she should take to heart and pasting them around her room, keeping a little book in which she records all her offences, and finally understanding the true meaning of the Scriptures by divine guidance. Her career as a writer begins almost immediately after this conversion to Evangelical ways. For a reading of the autobiography as a “failed” conversion narrative, see Elizabeth Kowaleski, “‘The Heroine of Some Strange Romance’: The Personal Recollections of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 1:2 (Fall 1982), 141-53. Also see Jay, 59-65 and 148-49 for her reading of the influence of Evangelical motifs on literary texts, particularly in George Eliot's novels, in which conversion is represented as “continuous warfare with sin” (67), part of an ongoing process of self-scrutiny rather than a sudden and dramatic break from sinfulness to salvation.

10. Mary Bayly, The Life and Letters of Mrs. Sewell, 5th ed. (London, 1890), vi, vii; further references will be included in the text.

    Sewell's disapproval notwithstanding, there was a tradition of women preaching publicly dating back at least to the eighteenth century. For late-eighteenth-century evidence documenting the historical record on women preachers in the Methodist revival, see D. Colin Dew, “Ann Carr and the Female Revivalists of Leeds,” in Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760-1930 (cited in n.9), 68-87; for Sewell's own period, see Olive Anderson. “Women Preachers in Mid-Victorian Britain: Some Reflexions on Feminism. Popular Religion and Social Change.” The Historical Journal 12:3 (1969), 467-84.

11. For introductions to and readings of Tonna's politicized industrial fiction, see Ivanka Kovačević and S. Barbara Kanner, “Blue Book Into Novel: The Forgotten Industrial Fiction of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25:2 (September 1970), 152-73; Joseph Kestner, “Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's The Wrongs of Woman: Female Industrial Protest,” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 2:2 (Fall 1983), 193-214; and Deborah Kaplan, “The Woman Worker in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna's Fiction,” Mosaic 18:2 (Spring 1985), 51-63.

12. Sarah Ellis, The Wives of England (London, 1843), 344-45.

13. Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (cited in n.3), 48. For another recent formulation of the relationship between nineteenth-century women's writing and woman's role as the creator of character which resonates with my analysis, see Margaret Homans, Bearing the Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), especially chapter seven.

14. Carol Edkins, “Quest for Community: Spiritual Autobiographies of Eighteenth-Century Quaker and Puritan Women in America,” in Women's Autobiographies: Essays in Criticism, ed. Estelle C. Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 41.

15. Vivian [George Henry Lewes], “A Gentle Hint to Writing-Women,” The Leader 1 (18 May 1850), 189.

16. Mary Russell Mitford, Recollections of a Literary Life, 3 vols. (London, 1852), I. 249.

17. “Literary Women,” The London Review 8 (26 March 1864), 329.

18. The middle-class woman's “natural” role as civilizer and moral agent was earlier argued for on the same grounds Schimmelpenninck puts forward: as Hannah More writes in Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), “the general state of civilized society depends, more than those are aware who are not accustomed to scrutinize into the springs of human action, on the prevailing sentiments and habits of women, and on the nature and degree of the estimation in which they are held. … I would call [women] to the best and most appropriate exertion of their power, to raise the depressed tone of public morals, and to awaken the drowsy spirit of religious principles” (In The Complete Works of Hannah More [New York, 1843], 313). Literature, as More's own career demonstrates, provide an obvious means for carrying out the feminine moral mission she recommends.