SOURCE: “‘Matters That a Woman Rules’: Marginalized Maternity in Jean Ingelow's A Story of Doom,” in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 33, No. 1, 1995, pp. 75-88.

[In the following essay, Johnson studies Ingelow's portrayal of feminine spirituality and the role of the woman within the patriarchal world of Christianity in her poem A Story of Doom.]

And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons' wives with him, into the ark, because of the waters of the flood.

Genesis 7.7

He looks back to the past
grieves not over what is distant.
I mourn the wrack, the rock under the
blue sea, our old wound, the
dismantling storm and cannot
thank you.

Fay Zwicky, “Mrs. Noah Speaks” in “Ark Voices”¹

Narrative poetry on biblical themes frequently has attempted, in Milton's terms, to “justify the ways of God to men” while justifying little more for woman than her marginalization within patriarchal Christianity, with motherhood offering her only opportunity for power or redemption. Victorian women poets' responses to this tradition, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 1844 poem A Drama of Exile, often underscore the religious importance of maternity while doing little to interrogate the problematic intersection of motherhood and spirituality. Barrett Browning may complicate traditional biblical (and Miltonic) definitions of the feminine, especially if, like Dorothy Mermin, we find in her Christ “a sort of high mingling of gender roles” that ennobles stereotypically feminine and maternal traits through their presence in Christ.² Yet the fact that the promise of motherhood is advanced as women's route to atonement—indeed, serves as their only justification for continued existence—points to A Drama of Exile as a celebration of women's maternal roles that embraces, rather than eschews, what Alice Falk has termed apparent “self-annihilation.”³ Maternity becomes the sole valorized conduit to women's full participation in spirituality. Further, this contingent relation to Christianity can only be sustained by Eve's acceptance of the inevitable masculine “pressures of an alien tyranny / With its dynastic reasons of larger bones / And stronger sinews” (ll. 1865-67) and the “permitted pain” (l. 1902) of motherhood that will develop her powers of endurance and make her worthy of divine love.⁴

In her 1867 poem A Story of Doom, however, Jean Ingelow exposes the precariousness of the authority that motherhood confers upon women and suggests that it can become an empty palliative rather than a source of spiritual and social strength. Ingelow's ten-book Victorian epic relates the tale of Noah and his wife, unnamed in the Genesis account of the flood but given a name and a voice by Ingelow. Noah's conflict with disbelieving humanity parallels but is subordinated to conflict with Niloiya,⁵ his wife, who opposes a mission that to her remains forever mysterious and quixotic. Recasting the gendered antagonisms associated with the Fall onto the less ideologically fraught account of the flood, Ingelow clearly positions Niloiya as an Eve-like figure who presents a potential impediment to her husband's sacred and life-saving task.

In the process of dramatizing Niloiya's gradual submission to her husband's will, which is equivalent to God's will, Ingelow nevertheless indicates that the divinely decreed hierarchies making a woman subservient not only to her husband but also to her male children may reduce the woman's role to little more than childbearing. Further, Niloiya's reinterpretation of the Fall and its sequel, centering on an empowered and exonerated Eve, allows Ingelow to proffer the possibility of an alternative form of female spirituality, even though this tantalizing theorization is then devalued through oblique associations with Satan. While such a theorization allows her to naturalize the necessity for female submission, Ingelow also suggests that unrestricted male control of women can ultimately extend to denying women the opportunity for participation in Christian faith. The spiritual and familial compensations that redeemed existence in a fallen world for Barrett Browning's Eve are largely denied Niloiya. Ingelow's poem presents a dramatically different and profoundly bleaker estimation of women's position within a patriarchal Christian universe, and, in this way, serves as a corrective response to other Victorian women poets' efforts, like those of Barrett Browning in A Drama of Exile, to recoup maternity as a source of spiritual potency.

Following quickly after Ingelow's popular success in her 1863 collection of poems, A Story of Doom was widely reviewed in both Britain and America. Just as quickly, it became singled out by critics past and present as her most ambitious and, by many accounts, most disappointing poem.⁶ In the most recent reference to A Story of Doom in an academic journal, however, Gladys Singers-Bigger in 1940 dubbed the poem “a noble effort of the imagination” and inquired “why a poem such as this should be so little known and how a jewel of language that is at once tender and sincere should be hidden under slighter and more commonly appreciated works.”⁷ Even though a recent article on Ingelow's Gladys and Her Island interrupted the fifty-year critical silence that has obscured her large and influential niche in Victorian poetry,⁸ Jean Ingelow is one among the numerous figures who compel us to question the politics and practices of canon-formation. Further, Ingelow serves as an exemplary poet in indicating the wealth of material still remaining to Victorian and feminist scholars alike as they attempt to map the full trajectory of covert dissonant strains to dominant ideological constructs, even among those writers traditionally branded as conformists, as Ingelow frequently has been characterized.⁹

This essay focuses on representative moments within A Story of Doom through which disruptions emerge in an unproblematic link between motherhood and Christianity. As women's domination of the domestic arena becomes a hindrance to Noah's Christian and life-sustaining activities, plot and imagery alike consolidate maternal and paternal capacities in the figure of Noah. Niloiya's motherhood is gradually reduced from an ongoing, powerful role to a function that ceases with her child's maturity, as the child shifts his allegiance from the mother to the father—and, through him, to the divine Father—while the woman is denied access to a similar relationship with the deity. The mother's prerogatives are progressively wrested from her while male figures disavow their agency in subverting her will. This exclusion culminates in Niloiya's final engulfment within the patriarchally dictated and created sphere of the ark, a male womb serving as the source of all future human generation.

The seeds of Noah's later efforts to seize control of the domestic domain appear in the poem's first book, an extended dialogue in which Noah and Niloiya quarrel over Noah's singleminded dedication to completing the ark, interpreted by Niloiya as an activity akin to desertion. The most salient aspect of this book, however, is the alternate construction of the Fall and its aftermath provided by Niloiya. She asks to be informed of Noah's motivations:

“Else shall I be despised as Adam was,
Who compassed not the learning of his sons,
But, grave and silent, oft would lower his head
And ponder, following of great Isha's feet,
When she would walk with her fair brow upraised,
Scorning the children that she bare to him.”

(p. 104)¹⁰

This epilogue to the biblical story of Adam and Eve, here identified as Isha, presents Adam as inferior in knowledge to his sons, excessively melancholy following the loss of Eden, and alienated from his children. Although its syntactical confusion makes this quotation difficult to decipher, context indicates that the participle “scorning” is attributed to Adam. Niloiya thus reveals her perception of a postlapsarian hierarchy in which Eve gains power and a relationship with her children that excludes the “scorning” and self-absorbed Adam. Denigration of Adam continues with Niloiya's view that “sure he was foolisher … / Than any that came after. Furthermore, / He had not heart nor courage for to rule: / He let the mastery fall from his slack hand” (pp. 104-105). This emasculated Adam is inferior not only to his children but also to Eve, the “glorious mother” who, Niloiya later indicates, provided the emotional sustenance necessary to prevent Adam from sinking into complete abjection as “the slave of slaves” (p. 105).

Niloiya's championing of Eve extends to an evaluation of women's access to spirituality within a reversal of gender hierarchies. Stating that “yet the mother sits / Higher than Adam” (p. 106), Niloiya promotes a theory of female knowledge and relationship to an alternative spirituality. She finds Eve's “knowledge of the many tribes / Of angels and their tongues; their playful ways / And greetings when they met” (pp. 106-107) superior to Adam's knowledge of animals and birds. Eve even, according to Niloiya, “knew much that she never told, / And had a voice that called to her as thou” (p. 107). Since the “voice” to which Niloiya refers is differentiated from the “Voice” emanating from God, Eve is allied with a different spiritual force that presumably undergirds the mystical, female-centered belief system related to natural cycles repeatedly associated with women such as Niloiya's mother.¹¹ Indeed, there are even suggestions that such a system, if wielded by Niloiya, might prove to have powers surpassing those conferred upon Noah by God. Having renounced her own spirituality in deference to Noah's wishes, Niloiya perceives that recourse to relinquished abilities could draw Noah to her and away from God, although she resists this temptation as she reproaches her absent mother: “Mother, ye did ill; / 'T is hard unlawful knowledge not to use” (p. 114).

Noah counters Niloiya's interpretation with a traditional appraisal of Adam as a near-divine flawless patriarch and of Eve as an uncontrollable creature, “somewhat that [Adam] could not rule,” a wayward temptress who “drew him after her” (p. 106). Indeed, Noah's virulently Miltonic viewpoint reverberates throughout the poem, as Ingelow subtextually validates his more conventional stance, implicitly anathematizing the provocative prospect of women's primary relationship to a potent spiritual force and of a vindicated Eve. The specter of Niloiya's mother who appears to her daughter in Book 1, “a snake with a red comb of fire / Twisted about its waist” (p. 103), is figuratively linked to the “serpent hiss” and “scaly splendor” of Ingelow's Satan (Book 3; pp. 131, 133). Satan even gains an almost maternal function in bringing forth life, albeit of a debased variety, in the two black angels he causes to emerge from “glowing balls” that crack “egg-like” before him in Book 3 (p. 135). Most surprisingly, Satan proves himself an unwitting advocate of women's unmediated full participation in Christianity, for he gleefully attributes to men rather than to women the heedlessness that will eventually lead to the flood, since “their wives, / Whom, suffering not to hear the doom, they keep / Joyous behind the curtains” (p. 145). This testimony to male guarding of women's knowledge parallels Noah's limited disclosure of his own motives and refusal to share his faith with Niloiya, amply evidenced in her aforementioned plea for information and her spurned attempt to accompany Noah to a mountain-top sacrifice (Book 1; p. 109).

Nonetheless, Satan is specifically depicted in Book 3 as avoiding women, calling them “abhorrèd of my soul” and ordering, “Let not a woman breathe where I shall pass, / Lest the curse falleth, and she bruise my head” (p. 144), in an extremely literal and immediate interpretation of the Genesis 3.15 declaration by God to Satan, “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.” Indeed, Satan's attestation that women can be complicit with him only inadvertently, through a lack of knowledge ultimately fostered by men, suggests a fundamental disjunction between the feminine and the demonic. Thus, although a neat analogy between women and Satan is never fully realized and is even sporadically combatted, A Story of Doom does indubitably suggest that an intersection occurs in these two factions' shared opposition, arising from differing motives, to patriarchal Christianity.

Such a viewpoint provides justification for Noah's alienation from his family, as this was the example set by Adam in turning from the “degenerate seed” born to Eve (p. 106). At this early point in the poem, Noah sees his family as an irritating obstruction to his Christian mission; he muses upon the unlikelihood that God will accept a plea that “I love the woman and her sons” (p. 101) as sufficient excuse for inattention to fulfilling God's demand. The threat posed by a feminine form of spirituality is eliminated almost as soon as it is suggested; however, Niloiya's valorization of Eve's role in creating a domestic bulwark provides hints of the alternate threat that Noah will later perceive in the family. The female control of familial space will become not an impediment but a power that he will acknowledge and appropriate.

Noah's visit in Book 2 to a recalcitrant Methusaleh, who rails against God for perceived injustices and refuses an alliance with Noah, provides an additional presage of Noah's later usurping of both parental roles. In a prophetic trance that predicts the flood's devastation, Methusaleh first compares Noah to “a fruitful field / When all the lands are waste” and then adds, “Behold the hope o' the world, what time / She lieth under. Hear him; he shall save / A seed alive, and sow the earth with man” (p. 125). Methusaleh's reference to the earth's “time” creates an image of a feminized earth in labor, a recurrent trope in Ingelow's poem and one that extends the traditional identification of nature with the feminine. However, the comparison of Noah to “a fruitful field” is actually a conventional figuration of female fertility and passivity, while Noah's capacity to “save a seed” and “sow the earth” evokes an active, life-giving, and specifically male procreative capacity. Thus, Noah is not only the field but also the seed; he is both elements in the reproductive cycle, thereby excluding women from any substantive role, even in the activity most often used to define their purpose. It is precisely this consolidation of both masculine and feminine in the figure of Noah that comes to characterize his activities in later portions of the poem, beginning with Book 4.

Until this point, Niloiya has been developed as the primary parental figure to the couple's three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japhet. She worries about them when they are away from home, stating to Noah in Book 1, “I have been sorry, thinking oft / I would my sons were home” (p. 116), and she desires Noah to remain at home until the sons arrive, which is only partly a ploy to delay Noah's departure. In Book 4, the full extent of Noah's alienation from his sons becomes evident when he meets them on the road home from his visit to Methusaleh and does not recognize them. Clearly, the sons' allegiance is to their mother, for one of the sons responds to Noah's question, “Fair sirs, whose are ye?”, with the reply, “The beautiful woman, sir, our mother dear, / Niloiya, bear us to great Lamech's son [Noah].” Noah, imagining he will surprise and delight these men by revealing that he is their father, is unprepared for their indifferent rejoinder: “We know it, sir. We have remembered you / Through many seasons. Pray you let us not; / We fain would greet our mother” (p. 147).

Since only two of his sons were in the group that passed, Noah, “sick with their cold, quiet scorn” (p. 148), asks a servant for the whereabouts of the third and youngest son, Japhet, and is told that he remained behind sleeping. The scene of recognition and reconciliation between the father and son institutes Noah as the principal parent in his son's life, again by positioning Noah as a self-sufficient melding of both mother and father—and, in effect, ousting Niloiya from her earlier prominence in Japhet's life. Watching his son while he sleeps, Noah remarks, “How beautiful / Are children to their fathers!” (p. 150), and Japhet's awakening is a second birth in which Noah establishes himself as the central figure, asking his son to say Noah's name as one of his first words (p. 151).

As a result of this new alliance, Japhet resolves to accompany Noah and share his work, and he specifically moves away from the sphere of maternal power and into the patriarchal realm of his father and God when Noah informs him,

                                        “Know thou, most dear
To this thy father, that the drenchèd world,
When risen clean washed from water, shall receive
From thee her lordliest governors, from thee
Daughters of noblest soul.”

(p. 152)

To prepare for this role, Japhet and Noah both acknowledge the importance of finding a wife for Japhet immediately. This decision further invests Japhet with a portion of his father's masculine authority, since in Book 5, he asks Niloiya to find him a wife in the following terms: “Now, therefore, let a wife be found for me, / Fair as the day, and gentle to my will / As thou art to my father's” (p. 154).

Noah's decree that a wife be found for Japhet robs Niloiya of her last maternal and feminine prerogative and brings about her complete submission to Noah. The poem stresses that choosing a son's wife is a female office in the antediluvian world, as Japhet recognizes when he goes to his mother and asks that a wife be chosen immediately, just as Niloiya chose wives for Japhet's brothers and as other women chose Niloiya's daughters for their sons (p. 154). Noah also recognizes that this choice is part of the female domain when he says to Japhet, “'T is not the manner of our kin to speak / Concerning matters that a woman rules” (p. 163). Niloiya's privilege of free action in this matter is undermined, however, when her concern that Japhet is too young to marry is answered by Japhet's invocation of his father's will: “This, my father, saith” (p. 154). Forced to search for a wife in response to this order, Niloiya is even unjustly chastised by Noah when public disfavor of him causes the women she approaches to “scorn” her (p. 155). Niloiya goes so far as to offer her own possessions, “all her jewels,—all she held / Of costly or of rich” (p. 156), to these women in an attempt to please Noah and to avoid his censure. When an appropriate wife cannot be found, Niloiya is given an additional order from Noah, to choose a slave from her retinue for Japhet to wed. Although Niloiya initially resists this order “right scornfully” (p. 155), she does choose one of the few slaves remaining, since the others have run off in fear of Noah's prediction of doom. As she tells this slave, Amarant, “the Master willeth it: a wife” (p. 157), the capital “M” in “Master” conflates her husband with God, establishing Niloiya's lack of agency except as a surrogate for earthly and divine patriarchal authority.

The difference in social rank plays no part in Niloiya's objection to her son's marriage with a female slave; rather, she reveals apprehension that Japhet will find this difference objectionable and will blame her for her selection. “He will scorn / His mother and reproach me” (p. 157), she says—and she is right. Even though the order to choose from among her slaves originated with Noah, Japhet does reproach his mother for this decision. When he is told that a wife has been selected and he enters the room where Amarant awaits, he reacts to the sight of the chosen bride by blaming his mother:

                                        O! cruel seemed his fate,—
So cruel her that told it, so unkind.
His breast was full of wounded love and wrath
Wrestling together; and his eyes flashed out
Indignant lights, as all amazed he took
The insult home that she had offered him,
Who should have held his honor dear.

(p. 158)

This sentiment ascribes a certain vindictive agency to Niloiya, an estimation reiterated when Japhet explains his rebuff of Amarant by saying to the slave, “I am not wroth / With thee, but wretched for my mother's deed, / Because she shamed me” (p. 160). Japhet's efforts to evade this marriage by offering to find Amarant another husband reintroduce the possibilities for female community that have been suggested at several points in the poem, only to be thwarted and coded as potentially hostile to both masculinity and Christianity.¹² Amarant, her face “red with shame and anger” (p. 161), rejects Japhet's offer because she wishes not to be parted from Niloiya by marriage. Indeed, she welcomes the unmarried and childless state Japhet describes as her grim lot; to his ominous suggestions that she would “die unmatched” and “dwell alone” should she resist this one chance for marriage before the world's destruction, she appends, “Ay, … / And serve my mistress” (p. 162).

This desire to maintain a close female relationship, even though it is founded on slavery, poses a subtle danger, since it leads Amarant to propose, and Japhet and Niloiya to collude in, a lie to Noah. Noah agrees to a delay supposedly needed to make the bride's betrothal robe; assuming that with the choice of a bride, the marriage is as good as accomplished, Noah is once again content to divorce himself from “matters that a woman rules” (p. 163). Japhet and Amarant imagine that the postponement will allow Niloiya time to find a more suitable wife. With this stratagem, however, Japhet and Amarant enter with Niloiya into an act that subverts the will of the father. Ultimately, then, family solidarity that excludes the male, the desire for female community, and attempts to maintain a hitherto maternal privilege bear potential evil to the future of the human race.

Failure to achieve a speedy marriage for Japhet prevents him from fully entering into the masculine role of husband, patriarch, and future regenerator of the earth. Nevertheless, this threat to the father's authority does not prevent Japhet from entrance into the masculine spiritual world, as he leaves the family enclave to accompany an increasingly weakened Noah on his further journey to enlist the support of other groups, with the same lack of success he earlier achieved with Methusaleh. Japhet's return home in Book 8 signals his marriage, which also leads to reconciliation with his mother. Now that another and more high-born bride has been found, Niloiya is able to disclose to Japhet that “it was not I / That wrought to have it so” (p. 187) in the original choice of Amarant as his bride. Noah's original plan is ultimately enacted, however, when the newly chosen bride, repelled by the “right evil things / [Noah] prophesied” to her kinsman (p. 189), sends her servant to halt the marriage plans. As a result, Japhet asks Amarant to be his wife, comparing this action to an earlier but suppressed male tradition of choosing one's own wife: “Like as my fathers in the older days / Led home the daughters whom they chose, do I” (p. 191).

Japhet further allies himself with his father in adhering to Noah's original decree that his son wed a slave; it is not only Amarant's beauty that brings about Japhet's newfound admiration of her but also Niloiya's revelation that the choice of a slave was his father's will. Japhet discloses his decision to his mother with the words, “Sweet mother, I have wed the maid ye chose / And brought me first” (pp. 191-192), suggesting that he has acquired some of Noah's skill in professing to uphold maternal tradition while actually subverting it. Niloiya is presented with a fait accompli that she opposes, only to be told that this event was actually what she desired in the first place. The choice of marriage partner is further solidified as a newly male-identified perquisite with the exclusion of women from the marriage ceremony, as “they went apart, / [Japhet] and his father to the marriage feast” (p. 192), leaving behind both Niloiya and Amarant.

Appropriately, then, the final episode of the poem takes place inside the ark on the morning following the wedding marking Noah's successful arrogation of the previously feminine bastion of authority over the destinies of one's children. The poem's last line, in which Niloiya's son Shem delivers the news that “The door is shut” (p. 198), ostensibly conveys the news that the flood-bearing rains and attendant destruction have begun. In addition, this line, which Bruce A. Castner has aptly designated “a multiple-meaning line, perhaps one of Ingelow's best,”¹³ is particularly ominous in its indication that, for Niloiya, the male-dominated ark and not the maternal province she had earlier celebrated and defended is now invested with the hope of all future life. This enclosure behind shut doors serves as capstone to the gradual marginalization of Niloiya's role within a female sphere that has been constricted into nothingness.

It is tempting to read A Story of Doom as Ingelow's insightful questioning of patriarchal Christian doctrine and practices and of the actual glory afforded to women by the Victorian and Christian glorification of motherhood. For in Noah, Ingelow deftly exposes the sanction of male domination of women within traditional religion and the selfish guarding of access to spiritual wisdom, as well as the lip-service that is paid to the sanctity of maternity while the rights that supposedly accompany it are stealthily undermined. Yet the apparent questioning of conventional tenets in A Story of Doom must also be read in light of a sonnet appearing in the same volume with Ingelow's epic. This poem, titled “Remonstrance,” addresses to the “Daughters of Eve” the following judgment of relative guilt in causing the Fall: “he did not fall so low, / Nor fall so far, as that sweet woman fell” (p. 203). Moreover, in her recent essay on Gladys and Her Island, a long poem also appearing in the 1867 collection including A Story of Doom, Jennifer A. Wagner discerns that the central character's discovery of her imaginative abilities and the creative world within leaves her “still prey to the demand that she dutifully sacrifice herself for the good and care of others” (p. 236).

With such overt expressions of adherence to a doctrine of female inferiority and self-abnegation in both Ingelow's poetry and devout life, it becomes difficult to read A Story of Doom as participating in the sort of revisionist myth-making Alicia Ostriker has defined as a “figure or tale … appropriated for altered ends, the old vessel filled with new wine, initially satisfying the thirst of the individual poet but ultimately making cultural change possible.”¹⁴ Mermin has stated that Barrett Browning's “valorization of renunciation and pain” in her early poetry, such as A Drama of Exile, “turned out to be only a temporary accommodation” (p. 733). This, however, is not true of Ingelow, who accepted her constructed and constricted position as a woman within Victorian society and Evangelical faith and who, as late as 1892, several years before her death, rejected women's suffrage, cautioning, “We cannot have rights and privileges, and I prefer privileges. I have got on very well without so-called rights; besides, I think we have as many rights as we need, and we can do pretty well what we choose. We shall lose our privileges when we demand our rights by force.”¹⁵

In the Christian terms that inform Ingelow's poem, Niloiya becomes not so much an exemplar of what women might become as she is a representative of the desires women must repress if Christianity is to progress steadily toward humanity's redemption. Thus, Niloiya's spirit, hunger for knowledge, quest for partnership in marriage, and tenacity in guarding feminine and domestic prerogatives function much as the seductive energy and ambition of Milton's Satan provide a cautionary tale to the reader who identifies with him. Nevertheless, ambivalence toward A Story of Doom's endorsement of patriarchal spirituality creeps relentlessly through the poem's interstices, leaving the reader to echo, with modifications, William Blake's famous statement on Milton's Satan: “Jean Ingelow was of Niloiya's party, though she knew it not.”

Notes

1. The English Version of the Polyglott Bible (London, 1828); Fay Zwicky, “Ark Voices,” Kaddish and Other Poems (St. Lucia: Univ. of Queensland Press, 1982), p. 23.

2. Dorothy Mermin, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning through 1844: Becoming a Woman Poet,” SEL [Studies in English Literature] 26 (1986): 732.

3. Alice Falk, “Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Her Prometheuses: Self-Will and a Woman Poet,” TSWL [Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature] 7 (1988): 75.

4. Quotations from Barrett Browning's A Drama of Exile, identified by line number, are taken from The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Harriet Waters Preston (1900; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), pp. 67-98.

5. After an exhaustive search of Hebrew dictionaries and reference books, I am unable to determine a definite source or significance of this name. However, a discussion of Noah's name and its possible roots in Lloyd R. Bailey's Noah: The Person and the Story in History and Tradition (Columbia: Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 165-170, indicates that the name “Noah” may be related to the name of a Mesopotamian deity Nah from whose name is derived several personal names found in cuneiform texts, such as “Na-hi-lum” (Nah is the deity) and “Na-hi-li” (Nah is my deity) (p. 167). These names' similarity to Niloiya's may suggest that Ingelow heard or read discussions of the etymology of Noah's name and incorporated this knowledge into her poem. In any case, it would be entirely appropriate if Niloiya's name encoded her status as adjunct to Noah, as each of these Mesopotamian names indicates.

6. For example, an anonymous reviewer in Tinsley's Magazine (“Criticisms on Contemporaries: Lord Houghton and Miss Ingelow,” November 1868, pp. 385-397) scathingly assesses the poem as “a terribly tedious romance, in nine books of the driest blank-verse that it ever entered into the heart of man (or woman either) to conceive” (p. 396) and cites numerous “monstrously-grotesque improprieties” in characterization and dialogue, particularly those features that humanize the venerable biblical figures (p. 397). The poem fares still worse in an 1867 American review in The Nation, which parodies several passages and prophesies in A Story of Doom's publication “the swamping of Miss Ingelow's frail poetic bark.” The source of the poem's faults is alluded to only in a brief reference to unfortunate versification and “the want of a controlling sense of form and artistic proportion, which most of the poetry written by women displays” (“Jean Ingelow's New Volume,” August 22, 1867, p. 147).

   Still later, an 1899 retrospective of Ingelow's life and work in the Fortnightly Review (“Jean Ingelow,” March 1, 1899, pp. 486-499) concurs with the Nation's review, as Mabel C. Birchenough contends that the poem's blank verse “was not the medium suited to Miss Ingelow's temperament” (p. 494). Even Maureen Peters, Ingelow's biographer and generally quite uncritical in her assessments of Ingelow's work, finds the poem filled with obscure symbols and states that Ingelow “obviously had her private vision, but it remains private. In striving for effect, she lost the art of communicating in universal terms the emotions her characters are supposed to suffer” (Jean Ingelow: Victorian Poetess [Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1972], p. 71).

   Along with several favorable assessments by modern critics, cited later in this paper, A Story of Doom did have its few champions among Ingelow's contemporaries. Perhaps the most positive response appears in the Athenaeum's praise of the poem's subtlety, characterization, and consistency (June 22, 1867, pp. 813-814). This accolade, in fact, led the Nation's reviewer, writing two months later, to mourn the demise of modern criticism.

7. Gladys Singers-Bigger, “Jean Ingelow,” English: The Magazine of the English Association 3 (1940): 81.

8. Jennifer A. Wagner, “In Her ‘Proper Place’: Ingelow's Fable of the Female Poet and Her Community in Gladys and Her Island,” VP [Victorian Poetry] 31 (1993): 227-239.

9. Wagner discusses several instances of efforts “to put Ingelow ‘in her place’” (p. 227) by linking both the woman and her poetry with a feminine ideal of domesticity that effectively brackets off women's writing from the production of male poets. Adding to Wagner's observations, I would mention several other particularly patronizing examples, including Ifor Evans' grouping of Ingelow among the mass of “popular women poets” whom Evans characterizes as “the writers of lyric, of facile movement, and of simple, sometimes mawkish sentiment” (English Poetry in the Later Nineteenth Century [London: Methuen, 1966], p. 352) and Edmund Clarence Stedman's faint praise tempered with the comment, “Her faults are those common to her sex” (Victorian Poets [Boston, 1893], p. 280). Even Alice Meynell, Ingelow's fellow-poet in the following generation of women poets, concludes her occasionally favorable essay on Ingelow with the statement that “what was least fine in Jean Ingelow's work set a fashion of doves, milking-pails, daisies, and ‘weather’ with its few rhymes, and the day of the fashion is gone” (“Jean Ingelow as a Poet,” The Wares of Autolycus: Selected Literary Essays of Alice Meynell [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965], p. 55). Nevertheless, like Wagner, Kathleen Hickok in Representations of Women: Nineteenth-Century British Women's Poetry (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984) has observed occasional moments of ambivalence toward a monolithic feminine and maternal ideal (see especially p. 26).

10. All quotations of the text are taken from A Story of Doom and Other Poems, in The Poetical Works of Jean Ingelow (Boston, 1878), pp. 100-198. Because no edition of Ingelow's poetry includes line numbers, citations will be identified using page numbers from this edition. I will also indicate contextually or parenthetically the book number of each specific reference, since the multitude of different editions of Ingelow's poems may make page numbers of limited use to many readers.

11. Also in Book 1, Niloiya tells Noah that her mother was impeded by his “holy smoke” of sacrifice and “could no more divine / Till the new moon” (p. 103).

12. For instance, in Book 1, Noah finds Niloiya's foremothers, who lived in an apparently matriarchal society, guilty of encroaching upon divine powers through their breeding of a pygmy race to serve as their slaves. This position is endorsed by “two … grave old angels that God made” who, Niloiya reports, once visited her ancestors to pronounce the following rebuke: “Ye do not well, you wives of men, / To match your wit against the Maker's will” (p. 111). The angels' terminology suggests that these women's activities have transgressed gender, as well as moral and religious, boundaries. The community of women described as Methusaleh's attendants in Book 2 is also coded as intrinsically wicked, since Noah is characterized as “pure among the vile,” and even emasculating, since “their majesty / And glorious beauty took away his words” (p. 123).

13. Bruce A. Castner, “Jean Ingelow,” Victorian Poets after 1850, Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 35, ed. William E. Fredeman and Ira B. Nadel (Detroit: Gale, 1985), p. 107.

14. Alicia Ostriker, “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking,” Signs 8 (1982): 72.

15. “Miss Ingelow and Her Work,” The Critic, February 27, 1892. Although I have been unable to obtain the original article, it is quoted in the entry on Jean Ingelow in Something About the Author, Vol. 33, ed. Anne Commire (Detroit: Gale, 1983), p. 114.