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COPYRIGHT 2007 ELT Press
IT HAS BEEN SAID that the cultural move toward transgressiveness pervades the literature of the fin de siecle: "in the poetry of the late 1880s and 1890s, the desire to resist conventional boundaries--whether of poetic form, sexual identity, or social mores--appears everywhere." (1) Most critics have fitted the treatment of Christian religion in the literature of the period into this trajectory of transgression; generally, critical attention has tended to focus on the ways the language and symbolism of the church were taken over for unconventional or sacrilegious purposes. (2) Catholicism's appeal to the Decadent poets has been variously documented--but devout adherents of the church, too, were writing poetry. While the Roman Catholic faith in late-Victorian England was indubitably politically and socially conservative, it helped produce refigurings of the role of woman that are both original and provocative.
Within the whirl of the areligious hedonism that in most accounts characterizes the fin de siecle, the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth in fact saw a gathering of considerable social and creative force amongst Roman Catholic writers in London. Calvert Alexander writes: "While the Catholic Revival was not, in its origin, a manifestation of the 90's, it is quite true to say that its life was quickened, its influence augmented, either simultaneously with or as a result of the many enthusiasms let loose by the last two decades of the nineteenth century." (3) Problematically, the majority of literary critics have tended to concentrate on those other enthusiasms and (very occasionally) on the ways Catholicism was refracted by those movements, rather than hypothesizing that "influence" might have gone both ways, or turning the focus on how these movements may have been refracted by Catholicism. These fin-de-siecle years saw an impressive centralization of some of the most critically and financially successful writers of the day: the old guard of Aubrey de Vere and Coventry Patmore; the once-destitute and ever-shaky Francis Thompson; the sprightly young Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, and Alfred Noyes; and, floating about, the delicate, Decadent Lionel Johnson. The Catholic Literary Revival, a movement that defies description as either mainstream or "radical," centered in literal and symbolic ways on womanhood. For at the center of this group, in different but no less significant ways, were two highly successful and highly regarded women writers: Alice Meynell and Katharine Tynan; at the outskirts, leaving and rejoining the circle as she crossed and recrossed the Atlantic, was the beautiful and aloof American Agnes Tobin. The relationships and interconnected works of these artists focus attention on important questions about the literary, religious, and romantic influence that Catholic women writers had on each other, on their cultural moment, and on constructions of female identity, community, spirituality, sexuality, and leadership. (4)
The influence of Christian religion on the fin de siecle's contested categories of gender deserves reassessment, and the contribution of Catholicism in particular should be more closely examined. Focusing on the work of three women poets linked by religion, self-defined literary roles, and intimate friendship, this article will explore how the feminine and artistic ideals were written and rewritten in ways quite distinct from contemporaneous "transgressive" versions. The discussion will focus primarily on the poetry the women wrote in the combative fin-de-siecle years between 1890 and 1914, years that also saw the period of greatest intimacy between the friends, and I will argue that the close friendships characterizing this coterie of coreligionist writers significantly shaped their rewritings of ideal womanhood. Examining the ways this group of Catholic women poets constructed themselves and each other by means of a Catholic-inflected womanly ideal, and analyzing the poetic, political, and psychological complexities attending these constructions, will offer further illumination of a complex cultural moment.
Katharine Tynan could be described as the heart of the Catholic literary circle, as in fact she might of every circle she moved in--of which there were many. Sociable, voluble, and passionately affectionate, the Dublin native played a significant role in the early days of the Irish Literary Revival, alongside her friends Douglas Hyde and William Butler Yeats. (5) She is today remembered more for her close association with the young Willie Yeats than for her own quite prodigious literary out put: by the end of her life she had penned some twenty collections of verse and over one hundred novels. Born in Ireland in 1861, she moved to England in young adulthood and lived there until 1912, becoming a close friend of the Meynells following her early contributions to their periodical Merry England, and staying at their home before her wedding in 1893. The success of Tynan's literary and social ambitions testifies to her gift of pleasing: the shortsighted redhead wrote sunny verses about her love for Ireland, nature, children, and her God; she met everyone, and flattered everyone. Her gossipy, charming memoirs record an astonishingly energetic social round, and her friendship provided the common denominator for established figures like Christina Rossetti (who commented drily that the young Tynan was "deferential enough to puff me up like puff paste" (6)), exciting new voices like Charlotte Mew, leaders and lesser lights of the emerging Irish Literary Revival--and of course the Catholic circle that centered around Alice Meynell.
Meynell can be seen as the head of the Catholic Literary Revival in several important ways: socially, spiritually, and imaginatively. (7) Born in 1846, she was in middle age during the fin-de-siecle years, a literary figure so respected that she was suggested for poet laureate after Tennyson's death (and again after Austin's). A tremendously popular essayist, critically acclaimed poet, and somewhat harassed mother of seven, she straddled worldly acclaim and feminine irreproachability in powerful, paradoxical fashion. From the 1880s on into the early years of the twentieth century she headed Catholic literary society in quite practical terms as a hostess: she brought together the older and the younger artists in sparkling literary evenings at her Palace Court home. Richard Le Gallienne called her, with some flourish, "a veritable Egeria in the London literary world, the center of a salon that recalled the salons of pre-Revolutionary France." (8) Another writer recalled, "All literary London came and went, and one heard the best talk of the day, without the loss of a word, across a board as narrow as a dining table of the Middle Ages. The Meynells were in touch with pretty well all literary England in the later Victorian and Edwardian days." (9) Meynell also provided less tangible forms of leadership: she gave spiritual encouragement to Roman Catholics who, as Hilaire Belloc described in The Path to Rome, often felt daunted by their cultural isolation in England; Alfred Noyes called her "a tower of intellectual and spiritual strength." (10) Meynell also provided in herself (and, as Schaffer has argued, at some cost to herself (11)) creative inspiration to the very different Patmore, Thompson, and Meredith, reappearing in their poetry as angel, mother, Madonna, and celestially named flower, Alicia Cerulea. (12) But she was much more than muse: herself a forceful literary critic as well as writer, Meynell was not merely "written"; she insisted on dictating and evaluating the terms of writing, including the writing of herself. Significantly and provocatively, she was repeatedly refigured in the works of her female intimates, for whom she served as a combination of mother figure, literary mentor, spiritual guide, and romantically charged figure of adoration.
Agnes Tobin, a minor figure in this literary group, was one of Meynell's most passionate devotees. Born in San Francisco in 1864, she met Alice Meynell at a London party in 1895, and for the next few years was as often as possible in her company. Cultured, well traveled, fluent in several languages and friend of European luminaries like Andre Gide, Ada Negri, and Joseph Conrad (who dedicated Under Western Eyes to her), she was herself a sometime poet and gifted translator. Her 1902 translation of Petrarch, Love's Crucifix, was highly regarded by literary figures including Thompson and Yeats. Yeats wrote to her in 1904: "now I can give myself the deep pleasure of telling you how I delight in your Petrarch. I have read it over and over. It is full of wise delight--a thing of tears and...
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