Identity, Agency and Community: Intimations and Implications of Emerging Literacy for Women in The Pilgrim's Progress, The Second Part

• Published in: Bunyan studies no. 11; p. 74
• Main Author: Hancock, Maxine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Newcastle Upon Tyne Northumbria University, Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design and Social Sciences 01.01.2003
• Subjects: British & Irish literature; Bunyan, John (1628-1688); Bunyan, John (1628-88); English literature; Literacy
• ISSN: 0954-0970

In a footnote to her essay, 'The Pulpit Guarded' Ann Hughes comments: 'More work needs to be done on how unlearned people developed the skills and audacity to challenge learned clerics'.1 I would argue that 'the skills and audacity' by which 'unlearned people' - including women - challenged not only the learned clerics but also courts and judges (as Bunyan's wife does, for example, in intervening for his release from prison), were rooted in reading skills of a particular type. Because the vehicle of a deepening as well as a widening literacy was, firstly, the Bible in English, the readers, women as well as men, came to identify themselves as persons with identities which went far beyond their names and roles in local situation in which they had, most often, lived all their lives. [...]which has long been seen as distinctly feminine, Christiana gathers up a small but ever-growing company for her pilgrimage, beginning with her own sons and her much younger friend, Mercie. Women seem to have been able to reconcile this double message - as they were to do for centuries following - by internalizing the freedom with which they engaged the personal pilgrimage and by using informal structures of conversation and teaching where formal ones were denied. [...]although there is no immediate external emancipation of women's gifts for interpreting the Scriptures within the public meetings of the nonconformist churches (except in the case of such sectarians as the Quakers who saw gender roles as radically relativized by the gospel) there is an emancipatory trajectory established, and once women are readers, they will - finally - contribute the fruit of their interpretive stances to the discussions concerning the faith.33 IV We turn now to the last and also the most interesting site intimating women's developing literacy in The Pilgrim's Progress, The Second Part: Mercie's longing for the 'Looking-glass' in the dining-room of the Shepherds at the Delectable Mountains (pp. 287-88). Since throughout the story up to this point, Mercie seems to rely almost entirely on Christiana and others for the reading of the Scripture and for assuring her of her identity as one of the elect, it would seem that this represents her point of moving into the identity of a reader of the scriptures, thus crossing, as Christiana has before her, an invisible but very real threshold into a more fully developed sense of self.