Guiney's Essay: Religion And The Martial Ideal

Most of the limited scholarship published on obscure 19th century American writer, Louise Imogen Guiney, has attempted to do one of two things: either explain her love of paganism and nature without sacrificing the integrity her self-professed Catholic faith, or connect the prevalence of militaristic themes in her works to the antimodernist movement. Intriguingly, though the martial ideal and paganism are two of the most prominent elements throughout Guiney’s catalogue of work, no scholar has yet attempted to reconcile both of these elements in the space of the same study, a missed opportunity that serves only to diminish, rather than illuminate, the impact of Guiney’s works. In examining both religion and the martial ideal in Guiney’s essay,
“An Open Letter to the Moon,” (1885) I aim to at least partially explain Guiney’s pagan predilections by examining them as antimodern elements, as well as critique other scholars’ published research on Guiney’s use of the martial ideal and antimodernism. Furthermore, given that in the western world, both Catholicism/Christianity and the military are historically masculine institutions, I will also demonstrate how I believe Guiney uses antimodernism to subvert Victorian gender roles. However, before examining these essential, gendered antimodern influences, I wish to closely read “An Open Letter,” giving special attention to its textual treatment of authority, gender norms, and the juxtaposition of the past and present.
Perhaps, given the recognition that there is very little scholarship written on Guiney in any context, it is unsurprising that there has not yet been any criticism published on “An Open Letter.” This is a shame.
Part cultural critique, part love letter to the moon, “An Open Letter,” follows the rise and fall of the feminine moon, a great and cosmic force that once guided her female subjects with omnipresent grace and could most likely command the glittering mass of stars around her feet with a sigh. Once, she was intelligent, beautiful, and powerful; however, when civilization arose, women lost their worshipful reverence for the moon (Guiney 29). Instead, men took on the mantle of her power (32), and so the moon retreated from greatness into a mere shadow of her former
self.
In her essay, Guiney implicitly aligns historical greatness with femininity. For, though the moon is explicitly female and inhabits explicitly female roles—resembling wife (30), mother (29), and queen (31)—those roles are always authoritative and powerful. Moreover, the moon always pushes—or crosses—those roles’ Victorian conventions. As a wife, the moon not only “slyly steal[s] the garb” of her husband’s splendor (30), but also veils herself immodestly (31). As a mother, the moon is almost entirely omnipresent, exceeding the scope of the mortal mother’s eye by watching not only her female followers, but also knowing their ancestral line all the way back to the biblical Adam (28). As a queen, the moon usurps the authority of the kingly sun by reveling without him in the night (29) and flaunts her lavish power over the lower classes (31). Though these actions are vices rather than virtues, they are the very things that make the moon so powerful, admirable, and great. Whereas Victorian portrayals of the moon show her as chaste, passive, and idealized (“Moon, n.1.d.”), Guiney’s moon is wild, desirable, audacious, and possessive. Her subversive femininity is her greatest source of power.
Intriguingly, just as Guiney aligns the primitive past with femininity, so does she explicitly align civilization with masculinity. As mentioned above, it is only when women enter civilized society and they lose their “ancient respect” for the moon that she becomes less powerful (Guiney 30). In her reduced state, she is saddled by the Man in the Moon—a usurper that appropriates the love of the moon’s followers for himself—and who brings her into modernity (32). Where she was once “fed…upon the homage of mortal lips” (36) now the Man in the Moon intercepts those supplications and “appropriate[s] kisses that were blown to [the moon] personally” (32) for his pleasure. Where the moon could once see all of time and humanity (28), now the Man in the Moon dares to “peereth where [the moon] only, by privilege, ha[s] permission to enter” (32). Essentially, because she did not adhere to modern Victorian gender strictures, the Man in the Moon becomes a necessary handler that keeps the mother moon in line, and “saves” her from her own reputation as an inconstant gossip, braggart, and harlot (30-32).
Guiney begs her fellow women to once again make the moon great—to offer her their lost ancient respect—and by imbuing her with the divinity of their sacred reverences, recover the moon’s ancient glory.
Though she offers apologies and justifications for womankind’s unfaithful behavior (38)—and even extends a halfhearted olive branch to the Man in the Moon (38)—Guiney strongly implies that women are capable of, and willing to, rise with the moon to overthrow both the Man in the Moon and the masculinized civilization of whom he is representative. For, when the moon is in her full power, “The primeval heathen has stirred within us. We have been under the witchery of Isis. We aspire to be a Moonshee, rather than any potentate of this universe” (37). In reaching back to their ancient ways, women can overthrow the modern Man in the Moon and restore the feminine moon to her past wildness and power. And as Moonshees who also throw off the cloak of modernity for the empowering shroud of the ancient past, Guiney and the moon’s other female supplicants can also tap into that uniquely gendered
power.
Guiney’s repeated call to regress in order to regain something lost is the essence of the antimodernist movement as a whole. Antimodernism, according to T. J. Jackson Lears, swept 19th century America like a well-meant intellectual plague. It is, by definition, a reaction against overcivilization and a “sign of broader transatlantic dissatisfaction with modern culture in all its dimensions: its ethic of self control and autonomous achievement, its cult of science and rationality, its worship of material progress” (Lears 4). Likewise, in his essay on antimodernism, Arthur Versluis argues that the movement is born of a society that “has at its core the awareness of decline” (Versluis 97). To combat such crippling moral complacency, interested members of the Victorian ruling class peeled back the rhetoric and comforts of modernity in an effort to revive more “pure” virtues of the past and provoke emotive and intense feelings in such a way that still, “remained within the bounds of Victorian propriety” (Lears 120-24). One would assume these bounds included gender roles. Two such longed for antimodern virtues include respect for nature/nature-based religion (Versluis 97) and the admiration of a warrior’s virtue/the chivalric honors of battle (Lears 141)—both of which occur because of, and within, distinctly and conventionally masculine institutions.
Versluis notes that, at least in part, the antimodernist movement rose in response to the belief that modernism brought “the destruction of nature, the fragmentation, the cultural dissolution, [and] the recognition that even in religion, [the] center cannot hold’” (Versluis 98) (emphasis added). Blatantly subverting the moral exclusivity of Christianity, “An Open Letter” is perhaps Guiney’s most pagan work, and perhaps, consequently, is one of her most antimodern ones as well. Interestingly, while as noted no scholarship has yet been published on “An Open Letter,” there has been a relatively large amount of scholarship published concerning Guiney’s affinity for pagan/nature-based spiritual themes throughout the catalogue of her work.