Carol Engelhardt Herringer, Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion
and Gender in England, 1830-85, Manchester University Press,
Manchester and New York, 2008. ISBN 978 0 7190 7753 1
(hardback), pp. ix + 221
Reviewed by Victoria F. Russell, Birkbeck College, University of
London, August 2008.
Carol Engelhardt Herringer’s interdisciplinary work, Victorians and the Virgin
Mary, represents an important contribution to church and gender-related
studies of the nineteenth century and will no doubt be of great value to
scholars and students alike. Her work on the Virgin Mary and Victorian
society is one of a growing number of increasingly influential studies to
address what has until recently been a significant oversight in historical
studies: the complex relationship between women and the church. Indeed
she argues that scholars have tended to neglect the ever ‘evolving and
competing’ representations of the Virgin Mary as crucial sources of
information on Victorian society.
Victorians and the Virgin Mary focuses upon the controversial Marian debates
regarding the renewed validity of the Virgin Mary’s role within established
church practice that spread across England from 1830 to 1885, and of the
impact such debates had both doctrinally and socially upon Victorians of the
period.
Dividing her study into five themed chapters, she addresses with perceptive
clarity the following issues: the renewed doctrinal impact of a Roman Catholic
Virgin Mary upon societal and gender norms; the conflict between opposing
Catholic and Protestant interpretations of the Virgin; the non-scripturallybased Marian dogma of the ‘Immaculate Conception’, helping illuminate
Victorian Christian attitudes towards sexual intercourse, sin and the body, and
finally the influence upon nineteenth century masculine identities, studying
the ways in which notions of the masculine were so often shaped in direct
response to those of the feminine.
In reaffirming the crucial impact of the Marian debates upon the religious
landscape of the time, Herringer succeeds in retrieving both Roman Catholic
and dissenting denominations from the ‘cultural margins’ of Victorian society.
She examines the ways in which the resurgence of Roman Catholicism and
increased reference to the Virgin Mary impacted upon Protestant English
society, and how such incursions into the established religious landscape
encouraged anti-Catholics to use the Virgin Mary to distinguish between what
they believed to be ‘a stalwart, rational, British Protestantism and a weak,
effeminate, continental Catholicism’ (p.4). Such distinctions were further
employed by the clergy in their endeavour not only to shape and control
patriarchal norms of behaviour and discourse but to determine distinct and
appropriate gender identities. Indeed, she argues that the Marian debates
peaked during the decades when ideas of the feminine ideal were at their
most dominant, concentrating as they did upon essential and traditional
female characteristics of virginity, maternity and moral superiority.
However, according to the Anglican church traditional patriarchal society was
under threat of being systematically eroded by increasingly open displays of
Catholic and dissenting devotion to the Virgin Mary, which, at times, appeared
to afford her greater importance than Christ himself. To Roman Catholics and
Tractarians, such as John Henry Newman and John Keble, the Catholic Virgin
Mary was accorded a heightened moral superiority and spiritual rigour in
comparison to that of the Protestant Mary. The belief in female moral
superiority was of course well established by the 1830s, however a dilemma
arose among traditionalists over the growing fear that a Catholic-described
Virgin Mary would encourage more and more women in the misguided belief
that their moral superiority could be used to equal effect outside the domestic
sphere. A public female voice was on the increase. Though Catholics and
other dissenting voices never intended for women to believe that they were
akin morally and spiritually to a spotless Virgin Mary, the connection was
nonetheless made and most notably by the Anglican clergy.
Though not traditionally representative of female autonomy, the Catholic
Virgin Mary represented to a Victorian paternalistic society, a subversive and
destabilising figure. She demonstrated that by describing women as ‘innately
good and maternal’, she could encourage them to move beyond a restrictive
domestic sphere. (pp. 64-65) The delicate issue of her eternal virginity
encouraged notions within the Anglican Church that the Catholic Mary was a
figure both independent of her husband Joseph and of society. Some Roman
Catholics went so far as to believe that her virginity was of a higher virtue
than her bearing of the saviour himself. (pp. 46-47). These controversial
issues all pointed to a female role model at odds with traditional notions of
patriarchal society and the very tenets of the Anglican faith. Indeed, such
fears of growing female independence were given credence by the rapid
increase across England during this period of female-controlled Anglican
sisterhoods.
No doubt of special interest to those studying gender relations, is Herringer’s
focus not only on the Virgin’s influence upon female identity, but upon male
identity as well. In fact, perhaps one of this book’s most thought-provoking
themes arises in the final chapter on Mary and Victorian Masculinities. In it,
Herringer describes the way in which opposition towards conflicting
descriptions of the Virgin Mary and the Victorian female ideal helped shape
both Protestant and Roman Catholic masculine identities. Whilst the
Protestant notion of a retiring and ordinary mother of Christ reaffirmed
masculine superiority, Roman Catholic masculinity was enhanced by believing
that Mary was a divinely blessed though complimentary and non-challenging
figure, thus identifying Mary as a safe and appropriate female role model
within a paternalistically, hierarchical society. In addition to this, Protestants
used an overly dominant Catholic Virgin Mary to assert the essential
effeminacy of Roman Catholicism and by association all those who followed
its tenets.
In expanding upon previous studies regarding Anglican responses to the
Virgin Mary by including Roman Catholic and dissenting representations,
Herringer offers a more ‘comprehensive and culturally situated analysis’ than
hitherto explored. (pg 3) However, she is careful to place her study within a
broader historiographical and disciplinary context, referring to historians such
as Susan Mumm (Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in
Victorian Britain), who have contributed immensely to our appreciation of the
roles of both ordinary women and women religious. She further
acknowledges the interdisciplinary benefits such studies bring to an already
significant body of work covering the nineteenth century resurgence of
Catholicism and the emergence of Tractarian and Ritualistic beliefs and
practices within the Victorian Anglican church.
Herringer does well to make this complicated subject both highly readable
and comprehensible. However, the continual rehearsing of key arguments
over the Virgin Mary’s role and nature during the nineteenth century, has
made it necessary for Herringer to structure her approach thematically rather
than chronologically, leading at times to a tendency to repeat information
already more than adequately expressed in earlier chapters and pages.
However, this is but a minor point in what is an extensively researched,
critical and thought-provoking study.