The Coronation of the Virgin: Alice Meynell’s Typological Critique of Modern Bodies
Tracking one possible mode of survival for a fin-de-siècle “female Aesthete,” Talia Schaffer has drawn our attention to one very prominent editor, critic, and poet—Alice Meynell. Even as Meynell wrote avant-garde cultural criticism, she allowed and encouraged textual figurations of herself as a chas...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
2011-11-01
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| Series: | Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/cve/1048 |
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| Summary: | Tracking one possible mode of survival for a fin-de-siècle “female Aesthete,” Talia Schaffer has drawn our attention to one very prominent editor, critic, and poet—Alice Meynell. Even as Meynell wrote avant-garde cultural criticism, she allowed and encouraged textual figurations of herself as a chaste paragon, in works by such high-profile friends as Coventry Patmore, Francis Thompson, and George Meredith. In Meynell’s day, Schaffer says, this strategy provided “cover” for an unconventional career, but backfired in the twentieth century as Modernists mistook the rhetoric for the truth, seeing the pious persona for the person, and dismissing Meynell as out-of-date. Schaffer insists, though, that, on the contrary, this fictionalized, “angel in the house” ideal of Meynell was only a necessary evil, and must not be allowed to cloud our understanding of the career that it helped enable.Meynell is surely as important as Schaffer says she is, but what if her “piety” is more complex? Scholars like Francis O’Gorman have shown in recent years that late nineteenth-century cultural criticism, like that of John Ruskin and others, used religious rhetoric strategically to critique the increasing authority of normative, positivistic narratives of human development. What if Meynell’s pious rhetoric—and even the figurations of herself which she cultivated in the works of others—were part of a similar enterprise? Drawing on Meynell’s unpublished letters at Boston College’s Burns Library, her little-known late works, and Merry England, one of the publications which Meynell co-edited with her husband, I show that her use and defense of religious rhetoric was part of a strategic response to the emerging empiricist narratives of human being. Censured in print by education experts, Meynell models for us a distinctive cultural criticism which engages religious thought and the humanities to show up the limits of empiricism. |
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| ISSN: | 0220-5610 2271-6149 |