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1 results

  • Chapter 23 - Femininity and Martyrdom

  • from Part V - Gender, Sexuality, and the Body
  • Edited by Martin Dubois, University of Durham
  • Book:
    Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context
    Published online:
    16 January 2025
    Print publication:
    16 January 2025, pp 202-209

  • Summary

    This chapter argues that Gerard Manley Hopkins’s preoccupation with agony and martyrdom is best understood in the broader context of Victorian figurations of religious suffering as inherently feminine. The chapter outlines the multiple factors shaping Victorian interest in female martyrs, from new theories of sexology to anxieties over Roman Catholicism. It then examines texts by writers such as Sarah Stickney Ellis, John Mason Neale, and Charles Kingsley that contain representations of suffering as a Christian virtue to which women are innately disposed. Such texts ostensibly frame women’s martyrdom as a paradoxical means of power through self-disavowal while often containing voyeuristic descriptions of suffering female flesh. Next, the work of Christina Rossetti is introduced as a counterpoint that avoids lurid depictions of sexualized violence in favour of reflections on female subjectivity and salvation. The chapter ends by finding in Hopkins’s martyr texts a complex and nonreductive engagement in this wider discourse.