SOURCE: Swaim, Kathleen M. “Mercy and the Feminine Heroic in the Second Part of Pilgrim's Progress.” Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 30, No. 3 (Summer 1990): 387-409.

[In the following essay, Swaim examines Bunyan's handling of his male and female characters in Parts I and II of Pilgrim's Progress, arguing that, despite their differences, the two texts represent two parts of a unified whole.]

In 1684 John Bunyan published the second part of Pilgrim's Progress, a sequel in which the wife and children of Christian, the hero of Part I (1678), undertake their successful imitation of the pilgrimage of their husband and father. The sequel is at base a feminine analogue of the masculinist first part, and it operates out of a value system which prioritizes nurturance, compassion, benevolence, generation, and regeneration over ego, power, struggle, and transcendence. Sir Walter Scott draws the contrast in terms which reflect both woman's “weakness” and also what he calls her “inspired heroism”:

Christian … a man, and a bold one, is represented as enduring his fatigues, trials, and combats, by his own stout courage, under the blessing of heaven: but to express that species of inspired heroism by which women are supported in the path of duty, notwithstanding the natural feebleness and timidity of their nature, Christiana and Mercy obtain from the interpreter their guide, called Great-Heart, by whose strength and valour their lack of both is supplied, and the dangers and distresses of the way repelled and overcome.¹

Thus where Christian found that “The way of Transgressors is hard,” Christiana's journey is generally “lightsome and joyous.” As Christian is said to “play the Man,” so Christiana is advised against so “unwomanly” an action as journeying.²

Pilgrim's Progress Part I enjoyed enormous popularity from its own day well into the twentieth century, running to eleven editions and some 100,000 copies in Bunyan's lifetime alone, providing along with the Bible “the staple diet of all literate Englishmen” for the two centuries following, and contributing, for example, in the nineteenth century to the structure and content of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868-1869) and in the twentieth to the characterization of the heroine of Margaret Drabble's The Needle's Eye (1972).³ Even Huckleberry Finn read and formed an opinion on it. Readers have not accorded the second part the welcome of the first, and, indeed, Bunyan criticism often so much equates Pilgrim's Progress with Christian's journey as virtually to disregard the fact that Part II exists. It is time to examine the second part with more thoughtful attention, assured that it too will repay the highly developed reading skills Bunyan knew to be the identifying characteristic of a post-Reformation audience. In brief, Part II literalizes what Sagacity calls “second thoughts” (p. 177). As Part I variously deals with the Self as heroic, spiritual, and narrating event, so the sequel dramatizes Greatheart's proposition, “Relations are our second self” (p. 292), but Self is now extended into new dimensions of gender, time, place, belief, and ecclesiology.

The present argument centers upon ways in which certain characters in the second part of Pilgrim's Progress transcend the simple gender boundaries made obvious in the full title: The Pilgrims Progress from this World to That which is to come The Second Part. Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream Wherein is set forth The manner of the setting out of Christian's Wife and Children, their Dangerous Journey and Safe Arrival at the Desired Country. In particular, I am interested in Mercy, the secondary female protagonist of Part II, who not only fulfills the expected feminine role, but also echoes, subsumes, and elevates elements of Christian's heroism from Part I on the way to becoming a full realization or embodiment of the practice and the principle of Christian Charity inscribed in her name. I am arguing too that, despite their sometimes different purposes, the two parts of Pilgrim's Progress are unified in ways not previously recognized. Before these arguments can be mounted, it will be necessary to establish at least briefly some basic understandings of the usual male and female roles both in seventeenth-century and modern theory and also in Bunyan's thinking and practice.

I

According to the popularizing definitions of gender principles in Marilyn French's Shakespeare's Division of Experience, males are characteristically concerned “with prowess and ownership, with physical courage, assertiveness, authority, independence, and the right, rights, and legitimacy,” with power and defined hierarchical structures. “The masculine principle is linear, temporal, and transcendent, for it aims to construct something in the world and within time that will enable the individual to transcend nature (which is cyclic), time, and mortality.”⁴ For Linda Bamber, the masculine principle exalts the unique individual Self. In Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare, she describes the masculine hero as one who “explains and justifies himself, he finds fault with himself, he insists on himself, he struggles to be true to himself.” The male Self for her is essentially defined by its self-consciousness, self-discovery, self-judgment, and capacity for change and thus for developing self-definition.⁵

Bunyan's Christian fits this pattern. He is notable for his courage and endurance; he struggles to tame and to fulfill himself within a progressive, legalistic, linear structure; his goal is to trade participation in nature, time, and mortality for transcendence. His is a problematic selfhood, and his history is radically based in self-consciousness, self-discovery, self-judgment, and self-definition and redefinition. Christian is warned against “Wearisomness, Painfulness, Hunger, Perils, Nakedness, Sword, Lions, Dragons, Darkness; and in a word, death, and what not” (p. 18), and his arduous and hazardous journey as described from Part II is full of “Molestations, Troubles, Wars, Captivities, Cries, Groans, Frights and Fears” (p. 175). He makes sometimes highly consequential mistakes from which he learns and progresses, he several times steps off the Way, he describes himself as “an undeserving Rebel” (p. 25), and he literalizes “trespasses” by walking upon Despair's lands. The Interpreter places his and masculine journeys generally in perspective in observing that “the more healthy the lusty man is, the more prone he is unto Evil” (p. 203). On the positive side, Christian escapes enemies, kills at least one fiend or monster (p. 56), and perseveres victoriously against large, subtle, varied, and frequent challenges. In important ways he fulfills the paradigm of heroic departure, initiation, and return which Joseph Campbell outlines in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

As a specifically religious and Puritan hero, Christian achieves notable skill and mastery of the Bible and successfully negotiates the sequential stages of what Edmund S. Morgan has dubbed the “morphology of conversion,” a sequence moving through such stages of election as Effectual Calling, Justification, Sanctification, and Glorification. Morgan details the stages thus:

first comes a feeble and false awakening to God's commands and a pride in keeping them pretty well, but also much backsliding. Disappointments and disasters lead to other fitful hearkenings to the word. Sooner or later true legal fear or conviction enables the individual to see his hopeless and helpless condition and to know that his own righteousness cannot save him, that Christ is his only hope. Thereafter comes the infusion of saving grace, sometimes but not always so precisely felt that the believer can state exactly when and where it came to him. A struggle between faith and doubt ensues, with the candidate careful to indicate that his assurance has never been complete and that his sanctification has been much hampered by his own sinful heart.

Joan Webber concisely describes the Puritan view of conversion as “the painful day-to-day experience of learning to conform to the will of a mysterious God, and then attempting to find out whether grace has been granted.”⁶ To fulfill such “Progress,” as Bunyan's Christian does, is to establish oneself as a hero, or what a Puritan liked to call himself, “a Visible Saint.”

Analogous gender and spiritual principles likewise illuminate some important narrative bases of the feminine in Pilgrim's Progress Part II. In contemporary terms, the English and American poet Anne Bradstreet (1612?-1672) presents an idealizing summary of the female role in “An Epitaph On my Dear and ever honoured Mother Mrs. Dorothy Dudley, who deceased Decemb. 27.1643. and of her age, 61”:

                                                                                          Here lyes,
A worthy Matron of unspotted life,
A loving Mother and obedient wife,
A friendly Neighbor, pitiful to poor,
Whom oft she fed, and clothed with her store;
To Servants wisely aweful, but yet kind,
And as they did, so they reward did find:
A true Instructer of her Family,
The which she ordered with dexterity.
The publick meetings ever did frequent,
And in her Closet constant hours she spent;
Religious in all her words and wayes,
Preparing still for death, till end of dayes:
Of all her Children, Children, liv'd to see,
Then dying, left a blessed memory.(7)

Cast in ideal rather than historical terms, the epitaph captures those qualities most looked for in the woman of the times: the worthy matron was chaste, loving, obedient, friendly, generous, wise, kind, just to servants, edifying to children, domestically dextrous, and variously and always religious. Except for Christiana's failure in Part I to accompany her pilgrim husband, the verses well capture the contemporary understanding of the female role precisely as Bunyan's heroine fulfills it.

Christiana's status, like her husband's, is securely founded upon scriptural texts. It is authorized by Pauline injunctions to be chaste, silent, and obedient (1 Timothy 2:11, Titus 2:5) and operates within the assumptions that underlie the defining phrase “the weaker vessel” (1 Peter 3:7). As Bunyan outlines it in his conduct book Christian Behaviour, a wife's duty is to be respectful of and obedient to her husband (1 Corinthians 11:3, 1 Peter 3:1, Colossians 3:18, Ephesians 5:22), but she is his “yoak-fellow,” not his slave. In general, “Let them be discreet, chaste, Keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands; And why? because otherwise the Word of God will be blasphemed, Tit. 2.5” (3:33). The containing assuptions are that “a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband”; “she stretcheth out her hand to the poor; yea, she reacheth forth her hands to the needy”; “she looketh well to the ways of her household, and eateth not the bread of idleness” (Proverbs 12:4, 31:20, 27). Gaius, an innkeeper in Pilgrim's Progress Part II (and Romans 16:23 and 3 John), supplements the Old Testament view by affirming the more positive features and precedents of women against a biblical, especially a New Testament background:

I will now speak on the behalf of Women, to take away their Reproach. For as Death and the Curse came into the World by a Woman, so also did Life and Health; God sent forth his Son, made of a Woman. Yea, to shew how much those that came after did abhor the Act of their Mother, this Sex, in the old Testament, coveted Children if happily this or that Woman might be the Mother of the Saviour of the World. I will say again, that when the Saviour was come, Women rejoyced in him, before either Man or Angel. I read not that ever any man did give unto Christ so much as one Groat, but the Women followed him, and ministred to him of their Substance. 'Twas a Woman that washed his Feet with Tears, and a Woman that anointed his Body to the Burial. They were Women that wept when he was going to the cross; And Women that followed him from the Cross, and that sat by his Sepulcher when he was buried. They were Women that was first with him at his Resurrection morn, and Women that brought Tidings first to his Disciples that he was risen from the Dead. Women therefore are highly favoured, and show by these things that they are sharers with us in the Grace of Life.

(p. 261)

The final phrase here derives from 1 Peter 3:7, the same verse that speaks of woman as “the weaker vessel.” For modern readers, at least female ones, Gaius's introductory assumption of reproach and his concluding masculinist condescension undermine the alleged praise. While such prejudices capture contradictory biblical attitudes toward women, they also reflect the troubling tensions of the changing world of the seventeenth century—“a world turned upside down” as so many contemporaries agreed.⁸

Companionship among the weak and intercession by the strong are the terms of the society. Despite various capabilities of a domestic sort, as travellers women are defined as weak, fearful, and in need of protection. Early in the story when travelling on their own, Christiana and Mercy are endangered by dogs and assault, and when he comes to their rescue the Reliever admonishes them thus: “I marvelled much when you was entertained at the Gate above, being ye knew that ye were but weak Women, that you petitioned not the Lord there for a Conductor: Then might you have avoided these Troubles, and Dangers: For he would have granted you one” (p. 196). From Interpreter's House on, they are led and protected by Greatheart who, on several occasions, accompanied by the other men and boys, forays against and beheads local giants.

Christiana never strays from a road made safer for her by her husband's precedence. But because so many of the dangers of the Way have been protectively identified, achievement as well as errors elude her. Her travel is essentially reactive rather than active. Christian had to fight Apollyon because of previous “slips,” but as Greatheart asserts in Part II, “here is nothing to hurt us, unless we procure it to our selves” (p. 236). For Christiana the Valley of Humiliation is a place of contemplation and a foretaste of the Land of Promise—“as fruitful a place, as any the Crow flies over” (p. 236)—but for her husband the battle here against Apollyon (Pride) was a searing crisis of selfhood, “the fruit,” as Greatheart explains, “of those slips that he got in his going down the Hill” (p. 236). As the Shepherds describe it, their site serves both as a warning for the unruly and a support of the weak (p. 285), and it is Christian who requires the former curbing as it is Christiana and her party who demonstrate the latter needs. Again, the two things Mr. Holyman says pilgrims need, Courage and an unspotted Life (p. 276), are separately manifest in the dominant values of Parts I and II. The differences are not merely within the characters represented but attach importantly to the described worlds and to differing kinds of reader involvement with the overall narratives.

Christiana's character is essentially defined by what is outside herself in contrast with the internal selfhood that is normal to Christian's and the male role more generally, or as Linda Bamber would phrase it, Christiana measures by Other rather than by Self. For Marilyn French, the idealized or “inlaw” feminine is fundamentally benevolent, nutritive, compassionate, merciful, regenerating, and supportive (p. 22). Her allegiance is chiefly to nature rather than supernature, to time rather than eternity, to continuity rather than transcendence, to quality of life rather than power, to the body rather than the mind or soul (p. 22). These are qualities which describe precisely Christiana's roles in Pilgrim's Progress Part II where her female “Self” is determined by the needs and ideals of the dominant Puritan male culture. For French too, the feminine principle is defined by an external rather than an internal standard:

It is impersonal, or suprapersonal, or altruistic, totally: it values above all the good of the whole, the community. It exalts the community above the individual, feeling over action, sensation over thought. It is not passive: it actively reaches for subordination for the good of the whole and finds its pleasure in that good rather than in assertion of self.

(p. 24, italics hers)

A fictional work which offers such a female as the principal character will necessarily run the risks, to which Pilgrim's Progress Part II is subject, of a heroine who by relinquishing what is bad, dangerous, or insistent about the Self will secure only limited interest or will distribute it into the larger community which her energies serve. Bunyan is more concerned with the implied receivers of the woman's actions than with Christiana as a distinct personality. The Interpreter's rather muted response to her is, “Thy beginning is good, thy latter end shall greatly increase” (p. 205, and see Offor, 2:493), and as the narrative advances, that increase attaches to Christiana's familial satellites rather than herself.

At its simplest in terms of character, Part I is dominated by a single individualistic heroic male self in a pattern that contrasts sharply with the incremental layered community that builds around the female protagonist of Part II. Linda Bamber describes as characteristic of Shakespearean comedy what we also find in Part II of Pilgrim's Progress, a feminine character who is interwoven with the dominant social group and with social surfaces, and who relates to the external world, even to the nature of external reality, by contrast with the male's interiority. Where the male hero's history is the organizing principle of his narrative, the woman serves rather as a centrifugal center of social power shaping not so much an individual life as an encompassing social design or society. The woman ministers, as Bamber puts it, “to our sense of community, to friendships and marriages, to whatever is voluntary and pleasurable in the bonds between its citizens” (p. 28). This contrast with masculine Self can mean that the female characters, even the principal one, will be incidental, inessential (Simone de Beauvoir's words), and referenced to or an echo of a male character or system.

In these terms Bamber's larger argument explicates the lowering of tension built into the characterization of Bunyan's Christiana:

The Self is unique, the Other is typical. In tragedy we value the hero for being unique, but in comedy we value those who are content to be ordinary. The comedies deal with our problems as if they were ordinary difficulties rather than issues of life and death. The Otherness of the heroine makes her difficulties seem ordinary even to herself. … It is the tragic male self who feels his difficulties to be unique, earth-shaking, and unbearable; the comic feminine Other refuses to find herself extraordinary.

(pp. 39-40)

Such active “self-denial” means for Marilyn French that because female characters are denied ethical judgment and autonomy, they will always be static by contrast with male characters who are mobile, dynamic, and judged according to their moral excellence and fallibility. Western literature she asserts allows only male characters to function as “the image of the human, the standard, in the moral, political, or philosophical dimension” and allows only such stories to be interesting and significant (pp. 26-27). Thus for French because masculine and feminine characters derive from such conceptually differing bases and inhabit such different realms, they cannot compellingly occupy the same story.

It has been usual to find that women's stories participate less than men's in such ethical or “human” categories, but as much evidence shows, women's stories are not quantitatively but qualitatively different, the human now redefined as communal, outward reaching, and adjusted to mortality rather than merely theoretical and self-referential. Christian must function within a doctrinally rigid and threatening Way, while Christiana operates under the dispensation Susan Snyder phrases as “benevolent natural law[,] the only one comedy holds sacred.”⁹ Christiana's line is horizontal and her motion expansive and inclusive, his vertical and exclusive. More socially structured, the woman's story forgives rather than punishes and operates within an atmosphere of comfort and diversity. It affirms diurnality over destiny, and acceptance and self-acceptance over transcendence.

II

In a recent commentary entitled “From Christiana to Stand-fast: Subsuming the Feminine in The Pilgrim's Progress,” Margaret Thickstun has called attention to one way in which the gender alignments of male with Part I and female with Part II are circumvented. Thickstun describes a layer of the story in which the female protagonist becomes absorbed into the more familiar male heroism of Mr. Standfast, a character first met just before the Enchanted Ground gives way to Beulah, who is kneeling in prayer in an emblem of the Christian of Part I and of the Christian believer more generally. Through prayer he has triumphed over the enticing purse and person of Madam Bubble, “the Mistriss of the World” (p. 301). In Beulah Land, Standfast is the last of eight pilgrims to be summoned to death, and as Thickstun describes it, Bunyan appropriates for his deathbed what had been a distinctly feminine language belonging previously to Christiana and thereby

completes the displacement of the female implicit in the controlling [that is, sexual] metaphor of the second part. … Bunyan's transfer of the role of the Bride of Christ to Stand-fast excludes Christiana and all other women from that role. Stand-fast, the male perfection of the idea of the feminine, usurps Christiana's role. The Type of a “higher chastity”—male chastity—Stand-fast can become the most perfect Bride of Christ.¹⁰

On her deathbed Christiana had willed him her ring (p. 305). “Standing fast” is, of course, the essential act heroically achieved in Milton's Paradise Regained IV, 561 and enjoined by the completed armature of Ephesians 6.

The argument for such “subsumption” can have only limited force in that Standfast does not even enter the story until a dozen pages from the end, and his language evidence is minimal. But there are at least two other heroic males in Part II who can be said to subsume the feminine, if by subsume we mean displace by inclusion. Mr. Valiant-for-Truth also supplants Christiana and also emblematizes Christian. He enters the Way just at the point where Littlefaith figured in Part I, and by succeeding where Littlefaith had been overwhelmed, he effects the empowerment his name signals. Littlefaith was the only sympathetic figure in Part I to share weaknesses of body or spirit with the late recruits to the entourage of Part II. Mr. Valiant-for-Truth is chiefly characterized by the military trappings and actions in which he is first encountered, especially by his “right Jerusalem blade” (p. 290) and by his fighting “till my Sword did cleave to my Hand” (p. 291). At first sight he too presents an echoing emblem of Christian from Part I and of Christian's role model from the tableau of the Valiant Man at the Interpreter's House (p. 33). Valiant-for-Truth's salvation history was inspired by and recapitulates Christian's. On her deathbed Christiana asks him to watch over and comfort her children. In the first of these roles, his displacement of Littlefaith, Valiant-for-Truth transmutes weakness into strength, and in the second, by echoing Christian and Part I so fully within the family framework of Part II, he takes on the paternal role and draws both parts of the book to full resolution. What is of chief importance to the present argument, he does so by encompassing the feminine and family mode within his masculine heroism. The entourage is complete when Valiant-for-Truth, the “guard” travelling in the rear, complements Greatheart, the “guide” in the lead (p. 296).

The third of these strong or “subsuming” figures is Greatheart. As the experienced conductor of parties of pilgrims, he joins Christiana and her family at Interpreter's House, and for the remainder of the journey he fulfills pastoral and patriarchal roles in the extended family of pilgrims, as knowledgeable guide, wise counsellor, and militant protector of his “congregation” (grex = flock). As is often remarked, Greatheart embodies Bunyan's projection of his biographical history as Bedford minister (1672—) as Christian had allegorized Bunyan's own conversion struggles and terrors recorded in Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. Besides regularly leading pilgrims from Interpreter's House to Beulah Land, sites which signal ministerial functions relating to Bible-instruction, salvation, and death, Greatheart absorbs the family duties Christian had abandoned in the City of Destruction. Thus even more than Standfast or Valiant-for-Truth, Greatheart “subsumes” the feminine. These several compoundings of the heroic Christian male accumulate as the story unfolds into a fully resolved, variously inclusive, invitational or inspirational lesson by the end of the paired parts.

Besides at least these three strong male figures, Christian's four sons also grow from childhood to full maturity over the course of the story, joining in battles against a series of giants and also marrying “fruitful” wives before they reach the Delectable Mountains. They thereby, like their father, variously multiply the faith. What is less obvious, and thus more interesting, is that an additional series of males in Part II are subject to the bodily and spiritual weaknesses usually associated with females. The closer Christiana, her four sons, and Mercy draw toward their journey's goal the larger the party becomes. After the Valley of the Shadow of Death they are progressively joined by “the old, the infirm, those plagued by scruples and haunted by despondency, timidity, and fear,”¹¹ besides the small children and later grandchildren of the pilgrim family itself. Feeblemind speaks for these recruits—Honest, Ready-to-Halt, Despondency, Much-Afraid—and captures many of the dominant values when he avers, “I am a man of no strength at all, of Body, nor yet of Mind, but would, if I could, tho I can but craul, spend my Life in the Pilgrims Way” (p. 267).

The aged and infirm males crossing over the usual boundaries between strong male and weak female roles give full evidence that Bunyan does not handle gender roles simplistically. Complementarily, and more surprisingly, Christiana's companion Mercy goes well beyond what is usually defined as the female role. By embodying a modified version of Christian's spiritual history, she provides crossovers not just between male and female roles but also between Parts I and II. To anticipate the stages of the remaining argument, through the threshold or initiation phase of Interpreter's House, she echoes and broadens the conversion morphology from Part I and thus recapitulates the earlier narrative, shifting emphasis away from doubt and despair and toward acceptance, assurance, and final glorification. In the overall narrative, she epitomizes and translates into spiritual terms the principles of nurturance that dominate Part II. By the end she has also translated the theoretical theology of Part I into a full program of works and thereby subsumed the mode of masculine achievement within a fully realized, empowered, comprehensive, and multiplying feminine heroism. Mercy is notably a “doer,” and as we were told in Part I, “The Soul of Religion is the practick part” (p. 79). To understand her role fully, it will be necessary to consider some of Bunyan's miscellaneous works along with the more familiar evidence of the allegories.

In Psyche as Hero: Female Heroism and Fictional Form, Lee R. Edwards distinguishes between the terms “heroine” and “female hero.” Bunyan's Christiana fully instances the former. She loves, nurtures, comforts, solaces, and endeavors to please; she is innately selfless, weak, and passive. She is by nature a submitter to, not a subverter of, the structures of her patriarchal politico-religious society. Hers is a private and domestic, not a public sphere of action. As Edwards puts it, “the heroine obeys, falls into line, takes second place,” and although the male hero functions as a subject, she is always an adjunct. For Edwards, by contrast, the “female hero” finds ways to redeem the “human” so as to include women: “Permitted, like others of her sex, to love and nurture, to comfort, to solace, and to please, the heroic woman specifies these impulses as human not just female, and endows them with a value that counters their usual debasement.” Like Joseph Campbell's paradigmatic male hero, Edwards's female hero reenacts a mythic role, in this case the myth of Psyche who achieves extraordinary action and awareness, defying and robbing the gods, facing their love and enmity, suffering isolation and even a trip to the underworld, achieving impossible tasks, and finally triumphing.¹²

Bunyan's Mercy does not extend female heroism to such mythic proportions, and she is not the principal female character in Part II. But in this younger figure accompanying Christiana as companion and helper, we find represented Bunyan's version of the female hero, an approximation in miniature of the convert's role as enacted throughout Part I by Christian. Like Christian, and unlike Christiana, Mercy makes some real progress in the course of the narrative, developing as John R. Knott describes it, “from fearfulness to joy, and from illustrating the comprehensiveness of divine mercy to exemplifying mercy herself.”¹³ Mercy's spiritual adventures are not just more developmental but also more exciting and reader-engaging than Christiana's, and because of these changes, a number of commentators allow to Mercy a narrative and character interest not attached to Christiana at any point in her story.¹⁴ Matthew 10:39 is one of a number of New Testament texts enjoining the Christian to lose himself in order to find himself (similarly Matthew 16:25, Mark 8:35-36, Luke 9:24-25, 17:33, and John 12:25). Bunyan's hero Christian fulfills that injunction, but Mercy enacts the disappearance of self differently and more entirely. Where Christ may be seen in Christian or the visible Puritan saint, Christ is seen through Mercy—and not merely seen but energized and multiplied.

In keeping with the communal values of Part II, Mercy is sparked to pilgrimage by her friendship for Christiana, and their godly fellowship blossoms as they progress. Mercy is a hired companion, and Christiana promises “Yet we will have all things in common betwixt thee and me” (p. 185). Such status, as not precisely a servant so much as a friend and family member, rests upon contemporary Puritan thinking that distinctions between masters and servants were fundamentally unchristian.¹⁵ Mercy is the young active virgin, “always busying her self in doing” (pp. 226-27), making and bestowing needments, a combination of New Testament virgin and Old Testament handmaiden (Thickstun, p. 92). Although her suitor, the worldly Mr. Brisk, commends her as “a good Huswife” who is “never idle” (p. 227), he rejects her because he cannot “like her conditions,” that is her ineradicable generosity to the poor. Through marriage to the eldest son Matthew, Mercy becomes a full member of the “Christian” family.

In general, Mercy requires the kind of theological interpretation that dominates Part I as Christiana does not. Especially in its early stages, Mercy's pilgrimage echoes the expected Puritan conversion struggle. Like Christian, she experiences a low level of self-worth and a high level of anxiety. Although she has “fall[en] in love with her own Salvation” (p. 186), she anticipates failure and danger; indeed, her pilgrimage toward salvation is stimulated by such energies. Unlike Christiana she travels without an invitation or proof of promise. When Christiana and the boys gain easy entry at the Wicket Gate, Mercy is left outside, “much dejected in her mind, for that she comes, as she thinks, without sending for” (p. 189). Impatiently, Mercy like Christian knocks vigorously on her own behalf, and the gloss reads: “The delays make the hungring Soul the ferventer” (p. 189). Entry for her, as it was for Christian, is felt as the difference between life and death. Mercy voices this absolute as “I also thought that I must either knock again or dye” (p. 191), and the gloss calls attention to the parallel with Christian's history (pp. 24-25). Knocking at the gate is equal in Puritan parlance to fervent prayer.¹⁶

Although this threshold experience reminds us of Christian's, there are some important shifts of emphasis. Mercy is included within a general or communal calling to salvation rather than made the object of a special call. Thus she represents, as does Part II more largely, not so much the individual believer as the church or conventicle as a whole. The gate-keeper is no longer Good Will (as in Part I) but now Christ himself, and the effort of entry has shifted from Self-centered conversion morphology to Christ-centered justification by imputed righteousness. She is so conscious of her weakness and doubtful of her welcome at the Wicket Gate that she faints and is led over the threshold, not pushed from behind. Despite the evidence of conversional trial and anxiety in the figure of Mercy, as U. Milo Kaufmann summarizes, “Bunyan indeed seems to present with most dextrous equivocation God's merciful acceptance of one who, by all the signs the human eye can judge, was not of the elect” (p. 96). Thus Mercy is here the occasion for manifesting salvational inclusiveness and Divine Mercy, rather than showing herself to be actively merciful. Similarly when Christiana intercedes on her friend's behalf, it is Christiana who manifests the quality in question. Such double valence and such Self-consumption attach systematically to Mercy's name and nature, as we shall see more fully in a moment.

The most interesting and telling links between Mercy and Christian emerge in their relations to biblical texts. Mercy is motivated to pilgrimage because her heart burns within her and, like Christian, she leaves her father, her mother, and the land of her nativity (p. 206, as enjoined by Luke 14:26 and 33). Like Christian too she has come to see the City of Destruction as no longer habitable. The Interpreter translates these motives into typological heroism by analogy with Ruth's relation to Naomi (pp. 206-207). Like Christian, Mercy repeatedly interprets her experience through the medium of apt verses from Matthew (twice), Psalms (thrice), the Song of Songs, and Hosea (191, 216, 218, 239). Expansively she describes her service to the poor in the words of 1 Timothy 6:17-19 (p. 227). Christiana's relations to the biblical Word are in a very different mode. Where Christian and Mercy enfold their beings and circumstances within the scriptural locus, Christiana merely applies passive biblical tags or labels.

Mercy's dream at Interpreter's House securely attaches her journey to the conversion morphology scheme, but also and soon moves beyond it to what is of greater importance for Part II:

I was a Dreamed that I sat all alone in a Solitary place, and was bemoaning of the hardness of my Heart. Now I had not sat there long, but methought many were gathered about me to see me, and to hear what it was that I said. So they harkened, and I went on bemoaning the hardness of my Heart. At this, some of them laughed at me, some called me Fool, and some began to thrust me about. With that, methought I looked up, and saw one coming with Wings towards me. So he came directly to me, and said Mercy, what aileth thee? Now when he had heard me make my complaint; he said, Peace be to thee: he also wiped mine Eyes with his Handkerchief, and clad me in Silver and Gold; he put a chain about my Neck, and Ear-rings in mine Ears, and a beautiful Crown upon my Head. Then he took me by my Hand, and said, Mercy, come after me. So he went up, and I followed, till we came at a Golden Gate. Then he knocked, and when they within had opened, the man went in, and I followed him up to a Throne, upon which one sat, and he said to me, welcome Daughter. The place looked bright, and twinkling like the Stars, or rather like the Sun, and I thought that I saw your Husband there, so I awoke from my Dream.

(pp. 222-23)

Solitariness and hardness of the heart here give way to the brief recital of the sort of personal narrative required for membership in a gathered church. This in turn gives way to a welcoming, personalized, all-powerful, non-judgmental savior and celestial welcome as Mercy's anxiety transmutes fully to assurance.

Mercy's name points in several directions, and as Bunyan reminds us in An Exposition on the First Ten Chapters of Genesis, “names of old were ofttimes given according to the nature and destiny of the persons concerned” (Offor, 2:495). That the God governing Part II is “one that delighteth in Mercie” (p. 185 and Micah 7:18) provides the context for her several ranges of action and meaning. The text partly signals her meaning by the fact that she has a sister named Bountiful, also remarkable for showing kindness to the poor (p. 228), and by the names of her sisters-in-law Grace, Phebe (shining), and Martha (see especially John 11:27). Mr. Honest amplifies the relation between her name and her nature thus: “Mercie, is thy Name? By Mercie shalt thou be sustained, and carried through all those Difficulties that shall assault thee in thy way; till thou come thither where thou shalt look the Fountain of Mercie in the Face with Comfort” (p. 248). It is tempting to apply to Mercy the explication of Honest's own name: “Not Honesty in the Abstract, but Honest is my Name” (p. 247), along with Kaufmann's comment: “Honest bears the name of a virtue he hopes to attain—a virtue which is not his very substance but a goal in pursuit of which he is exemplary.”¹⁷ But “Mercy is a substantive not an adjectival designation. She is in pursuit not of the quality but of occasions within which that quality can be made operative. She is thus like her mirror, to which we shall return in a moment, for the quality reflects back not her self but her Christic service. Matthew 25:40 provides an authorizing text: “Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me,” and James 2:13 adds, “Mercy rejoiceth against judgment.”

Both Mercy's name and her relation to Christ are illuminated with some fullness in Bunyan's Israel's Hope Encouraged, written on the text of Psalm 130:7: “For with the Lord there is mercy.” This treatise helpfully distinguishes Mercy from the sometimes synonymous terms Grace and Love: Grace “show[s] that what he doth is of his princely will, his royal bounty, and sovereign pleasure”; Love “show[s] that his affection was and is in what he doth, and that he doth what he doth for us, with complacency and delight”; but Mercy “bespeaks us to be in a state both wretched and miserable, and that his bowels and compassions yearn over us in this our fearful plight.” Mercy is thus defined as “that goodness that is in God's heart towards us” and that “rejoiceth against judgment,” and it shifts the emphasis to the desperateness of human need and to God's compassion and pity (Offor, 1:594, 599). Bunyan's Saints' Priviledge and Profit also aligns and distinguishes Mercy and Grace: “Mercy signifies pitifulness, or a running over of infinite bowels to objects in a miserable and helpless condition. But grace signifies that God still acts in this as a free agent, not being wrought upon by the misery of the creature, as a procuring cause; but of his own princely mind” (Offor, 1:644, and see 1:679 and James 2:13). In Good News Bunyan similarly asserts, “Mercy ariseth from Bowels and Compassion, from Pity, and from a feeling of the Condition of those in misery” (11:25). The full title of this work registers the point: Good News for the Vilest of Men, Or, A Help for Despairing Souls. … Shewing That Jesus Christ would have Mercy in the First Place offered to the Biggest Sinners (1689). Elsewhere this work speaks of “Mercy, and the revelation thereof [as] the only Antidote against Sin. 'Tis a Thawing nature: 'twill loose the Heart that is frozen up in sin: yea, 'twill make the Unwilling willing to come to Jesus Christ for Life” (11:34).

The Saints' Priviledge and Profit avers that by Mercy “we have through Christ the continuation and multiplication of forgiveness, without which there is no salvation” (Offor, 1:679). Mercy divides, however, between “eternal Mercy” and “present Mercy” (Reprobation Asserted, Offor, 2:357-58). Mercy is thus remarkable as enormous and unfailing sympathy, and also as inexhaustible abundance. Israel's Hope Encouraged contextualizes the term by identifying kinds of biblically mentioned mercy under the headings of tender, great, rich, manifold, abounding, compassing us round about, following us, doing every good turn, and everlasting (Offor, 1:593-604). Another set of parameters is similarly copious:

There is converting mercy, there is preserving mercy, there is glorifying mercy; and how many mercies are folded up in every one of these mercies, none but God can tell. A Multitude! … A multitude of common mercies; of every day's mercies, of every night's mercies, of mercies in relations, of mercies in food and raiment, and of mercies in want of these things there is; and who can number them?

(1:597)

The treatise distinguishes also between mercies that diminish and mercies that multiply by the using (1:597), a point reinforced in Pilgrim's Progress Part II by the emblematic man on Mount Charity whose “Roll of Cloth was never the less” for all his clothing of the poor (p. 286). In The Resurrection of the Dead (3:236-37) Bunyan appropriates the Parable of the Talents—“Well done thou good and faithful servant … enter thou into the joy of thy lord” (Matthew 25:21 and 23)—to commend the good works through which mercy shows itself. But Bunyan, like Puritanism generally, is insistent that good works be products of faith, not substitutes for it. In this treatise he objects to mere “meritmonger[ing]” for “faith is it that justifies all its works” and “the work is only good because it floweth from faith (for faith purifieth the heart)” (Offor, 1:326).

Honest's description of Mercy's destiny as “look[ing] the Fountain of Mercie in the Face with Comfort” anticipates the mirror that becomes her emblem. At the Delectable Mountains a pregnant Mercy thinks she will miscarry if she cannot have the looking glass from the Shepherds' dining room. Christiana again intercedes and attains it for her as a gift saying, “It is no Shame, but a Virtue; to long for such a thing as that” (p. 287). In Part I the Shepherds shared an analogous visual machine with Christian and Hopeful in the form of a “Perspective Glass” on Hill Clear through which the gates of the Celestial City, their goal, can be glimpsed by skilled pilgrims (pp. 122-23). Mercy's differing allegorical nature requires a target, a reflection, in order to fulfill itself. As the S(word) of Ephesians may be taken as the dominant biblical emblem of Part I, so Mercy's mirror carries to its furthest reach the analogous text and reading skills of Part II:

Now the Glass was one of a thousand. It would present a man, one way, with his own Feature exactly, and turn it but an other way, and it would shew one the very Face and Similitude of the Prince of Pilgrims himself. … Yea such an excellency is there in that Glass, that it will shew him to one where they have a mind to see him; whether living or dead, whether in Earth or Heaven, whether in a State of Humiliation, or in his Exaltation, whether coming to Suffer, or coming to Reign.

(p. 287)

Marginal glosses identify the mirror as “the Word of God” and point to the Epistle of James which blesses those “doer[s] of the work” who, looking into a mirror, see not their natural faces but rather “the perfect law of liberty” (James 1:25); to 1 Corinthians which distinguishes between seeing through a glass darkly and seeing (and being seen) face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12); and especially to 2 Corinthians 3:18. The unstrained quality of Mercy is a capacity to see the variously layered spiritual potentiality behind the data of homely experience, in the words of St. Paul, to take away the veil: “But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory even by the Spirit of the Lord” (2 Corinthians 3:16, 18).

In his study of Puritanism and the Self, Sacvan Bercovitch distinguishes a characteristic Puritan understanding of the mirror that exactly captures the point of Mercy's mirror. Renaissance humanists understood a mirror as reflecting the unique Self of modern individualism, whereas the Puritan sought not his or her own reflection but the divine image:

They sought Christ, “the mirror of election,” and “Prospective-Glass for Saints”—or rather mirror, prospective glass, and image all in one: Communion meant “a putting on of Christ,” transforming oneself completely into his Image. … The Puritans felt that the less one saw of oneself in that mirror, the better; and best of all was to cast no reflection at all, to disappear.¹⁸

In Bunyan's depiction of Mercy, Self-reflection does fully disappear in favor of the continuous, copious, and sympathetic action of ministering to the basic human needs of others. In the context of Part II, Christ is depicted as a nurturing and domestic presence (pp. 190, 234) rather than as the absent referent, governor (p. 14), or warrior (p. 52) of Part I. At the opening gate to greet the party, he “fed them, and washed their feet, and set them in the way of his Steps” (p. 193). Mercy's characteristic activity of clothing the naked, of “making of Hose and Garments for others, and bestow[ing] them upon them that had need” (p. 227), becomes enfolded into service to Christ (Matthew 25:36, 38) and ultimately into the saviorial role itself.

Mercy multiplies in yet another way as well. Christiana is regularly subsumed within her familial roles and within the strengths of other members of her party. Mercy emerges from that “family” compound to define and bear feminine redemptive energies. In line with the dominant emphases of Part I, Mercy's history importantly participates in both development and the question of identity. Although at the outset Mercy echoes Christian's Self-absorption—which is also an overriding concern for achieving salvation—after she has crossed the threshold into assurance Mercy can advance into full Self-lessness. The Shepherds' gift of the mirror to a pregnant Mercy fully seals her achieved identity as now “a young, and a breeding Woman” (p. 287), and Mercy comes to multiply generation as well as regeneration. As the story advances, Mercy becomes a mother—and can say with Christiana, “Now I am risen a Mother in Israel” (p. 219, Judges 5:6-7)—and her family and new generation provide continuity beyond the serial deaths of the aged and infirm with which Pilgrim's Progress Part II concludes. Thus, as the preceding arguments have shown, in addition to her role as multiplier of works, Mercy serves as the agency for carrying forward into the future the combination and integration of both Christian's and Christiana's modes of achievement.

Notes

1. Scott's review of Southey's edition of Pilgrim's Progress, anthologized in Bunyan: The Pilgrim's Progress: A Casebook, ed. Roger Sharrock (London: Macmillan Press, 1976), p. 61.

2. Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress from this World to That which is to Come, ed. James B. Wharey, 2nd edn. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 215, 212, 240, 181, cited hereafter by page numbers in parentheses.

3. The quotation is from Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (New York: abridged edn. Harper Torchbooks, 1979), p. 160. Charles F. McCombs, in “The Pilgrim's Progress: John Bunyan, His Life and Times, 1628-1928,” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 32 (1928), speaks of overall some 800 editions of Pilgrim's Progress in forty languages (pp. 786-809).

4. Marilyn French, Shakespeare's Division of Experience (New York: Summit Books, 1981), pp. 21, 22. In The English Family 1450-1700 (London: Longman, 1984), Ralph A. Houlbrooke synthesizes the inherited secular view of the female role in these terms:

   Men were stronger and wiser than women. The male was active and formative, the female material and passive. Less fully developed than man, woman was rendered by her predominantly cool and moist humours, softer and weaker in body, less able to control her emotions, and therefore naturally unfitted either for heavy work or for public life. In law, as in theology and scientific theory, the woman's position was in many ways inferior. The husband enjoyed legal supremacy over his wife within marriage. He controlled her property, and for many purposes the common law regarded husband and wife as one person.

   (p. 97)

   For a fuller consideration, see Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1980). Counters to the usual anti-Eve arguments are concisely offered, p. 91. In his Exposition on the First Ten Chapters of Genesis, Bunyan necessarily rehearses the usual views of Eve's weakness and folly, but commenting on Genesis 5:2, he presents the broader, New Testament view: “For the Holy Ghost … counteth not by male and female, but ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’ Ga. iii.28. Wherefore, women are not to be excluded out of the means of salvation; nay, they have, if they believe, a special right to all the promises of grace that God hath made to his saints in all ages.” The Works of John Bunyan, 3 vols., ed. George Offor (Glasgow: Blackie and Son, 1862), 2:455, hereafter cited as “Offor” with volume and page numbers. See also Offor, 2:428-29, 438, 439. Where they are available in the Clarendon Press edition I have cited The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, 13 vols. projected (Oxford 1972). These references occur within the text as volume and page numbers in parentheses.

5. Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 6, 8.

6. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 66, 91; and Joan Webber, The Eloquent “I”: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1968), p. 33. See also Richard Greaves, John Bunyan, Courtenay Studies in Reformation Theology (Appleford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1969), p. 50, and William Perkins, A Golden Chain, Or, the Description of Theology, in The Works of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward, Courtenay Library of Reformation Classics (Appleford: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), pp. 168-69.

7. The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., and Allan P. Robb (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1981), p. 167. Bunyan's The House of God assigns widows to teach younger women:

   What
   Is proper to their Sex and State, what not;
   To be discreet, keepers at Home, and chast;
   To love their Husbands, to be Good, shame-fac'd;
   Children to bear, to Love them, and to flye
   What to the Gospel would be Infamy.

   (6:291)

   According to David J. Latt, in “Praising Virtuous Ladies: The Literary Image and Historical Reality of Women in Seventeenth-Century England,” in What Manner of Woman: Essays on English and American Life and Literature, ed. Marlene Springer (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1977), seventeenth-century women “were praised for being upholders of what may be called the virtues of restraint. Rather than actively working in the political or theological worlds, women were expected to correct the world's immorality by being static exempla” (p. 43).

8. For The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (Harmondsworth: rpt. Penguin Books, 1975), Christopher Hill has collected an astonishing number of contemporary citations varying his title phrase, passim and especially chapter epigraphs.

9. Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare's Tragedy: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979), p. 48. In The Fiction of Truth: Structures of Meaning in Narrative and Dramatic Allegory (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), Carolynn Van Dyke praises Part II as “richer than its predecessor in what is usually called human interest” and sees its focus as “on the individual and the instinctual rather than on the universal and the abstract” (pp. 187, 188).

10. Margaret Olofson Thickstun, “From Christiana to Stand-fast: Subsuming the Feminine in The Pilgrim's Progress,” ch. 3 of Fictions of the Feminine: Puritan Doctrine and the Representation of Women (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988), p. 104, and similarly p. 35.

11. N. H. Keeble, “Christiana's Key: The Unity of The Pilgrim's Progress,” in The Pilgrim's Progress: Critical and Historical Views, ed. Vincent Newey (Totowa: Barnes and Noble, 1980), p. 14.

12. Lee R. Edwards, Psyche as Hero: Female Heroism and Fictional Form (Middletown: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 5-6. Carol Pearson and Katherine Pope register the political point even more forcefully in The Female Hero in American and British Literature (New York: R.R. Bowker Company, 1981): “In general, female independent selfhood was and still is defined by the traditional patriarchy as theologically evil, biologically unnatural, psychologically unhealthy, and socially in bad taste” (p. 6). For the male heroic paradigm of departure, initiation, and return, see Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: rpt. Meridian Books, 1958).

13. John R. Knott, Jr., “Bunyan and the Holy Community,” SP 80, 2 (Spring 1983):200-25, 213.

14. Knott, “Bunyan and the Holy Community,” pp. 212-14, and U. Milo Kaufmann, The Pilgrim's Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), pp. 95-97. In Fictions of the Feminine Margaret Thickstun denies Christiana the potential “to achieve a metaphoric transformation into the representative Christian believer” and labels her “a secondary participant in the convenant of grace … a variant of Christian that is essentially secondary, essentially different” (p. 25). She speaks of Part II as “humanizing” the fiction, but by this she means only making it carnal rather than spiritual (p. 24).

15. Levin L. Schucking, The Puritan Family: A Social Study from the Literary Sources, trans. Brian Battershaw (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 117. For Bunyan's recommendations on a master's duties to his servants and theirs to him, see Christian Behaviour, 3:30-32, 40-43.

16. Thus Bunyan can, for example, ask the readers of his Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded to “pray for me to our God, with much earnestness, fervency, and frequently, in all your knockings at our fathers door” (2:19). For a convert's knocking and fears about reception at the Door, see also Come, and Welcome to Jesus Christ (8:271, 340, 343-58, and 362).

17. Kaufmann, The Pilgrim's Progress and Traditions in Puritan Meditation, pp. 94-95. In The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974), Wolfgang Iser makes the nice observation that at least in Pilgrim's Progress Part I, “The numinous is allegorized by nouns when it is concerned with the human soul; the self is allegorized by adjectives when the only impulsion is a longing for the transcendental world beyond” (p. 17).

18. Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1975), p. 14, italics his. Bunyan uses the mirror in the more usual way in the Epistle to the Reader of The Doctrine of the Law and Grace Unfolded, 2:13-14. For other Bunyan mirrors see 2:157; 6:250 and 266; 11:47 and 204; Offor, 1:647 and lxxviii; Offor, 3:555. In “Mercy With Her Mirror,” PQ 42, 1 (January 1963), James F. Forrest traces the mirror as a reflector of material things to Plato; as a medieval metaphor for the spotless Virgin and thence transferred to Christ; as an icon of Veritas; and as a Puritan metaphor for the Word or Conscience (pp. 122-24).