Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women's Aesthetic Approach to Biblical Interpretation

• Published in: Bunyan Studies no. 21; pp. 138 - 140
• Main Author: Bygrave, Stephen
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2017
• Subjects: Aesthetics; Authorship; Baillie, Joanna; Bible; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Gender; Hemans, Felicia Dorothea Browne (1793-1835); Hymns; Literary influences; Literary translation; Poetry; Political activism; Politics; Priestley, Joseph (1733-1804); Readers; Religion; Religious music; Slavery; Theology; Wheatley, Phillis (1753-1784); Williams, Joanna; Women; Writers; Oregon; United Kingdom > UK; United States > US
• ISSN: 0954-0970

Sensibility could clearly have a political impact, as in poems of the anti-slavery movement by (among others) Helen Maria Williams, 'the most politically radical' of Duquette's subjects, who 'bridges Edmund Burke's false theological and aesthetic division between the punitive justice of God the Father as sublime and the compassionate suffering of Christ the Son as beautiful' (pp. 119, 117). The fact that Barbauld, Baillie and Schimmelpenninck were able to combine this biblical aesthetic with activism against the slave trade suggests an alternative to that account of male Romanticism of the first generation which sees its turn to religion as inevitably a turn away from political activism and into quietism or even reaction, though the chapter on Baillie is refreshing in seeing the poet and dramatist in terms of someone other than Wordsworth. There are surprising things throughout - the inclusion of Wheatley and the Anglican Hemans among these Dissenting women, an excursus on the Quaker poet Mary Knowles, or the unexpected speculation on the possible influence of Joanna Baillie's uncle, the surgeon William Hunter - specifically of his obstetrics - especially on her plays.