with their literary precursors, Ann Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, to illuminate what is traditional and what is original or "re-visionary" in contemporary portrayals of women's experience.
This article explores Virginia Woolf's conflicted relationship with Christianity, namely, her avowed atheism and hostility to religious dogma, yet her openness to mystical experience and her use of the language of Christian mysticism in her writing. In particular, Woolf's critique of secularism in her novel Mrs. Dalloway remains open at some level to Christian beliefs and values. Woolf's stream-of-consciousness technique reveals the soul as a ''sacred'' space or ''sanctuary,'' and her allusions to Christ in the character of Septimus Smith, and less obviously Clarissa Dalloway, suggest yearning for answers to human suffering in a ''godless'' world. In the end, however, the modernist effort to ''sacralize'' human goodness does not resolve deeper theological issues at stake in the novel, which Christianity locates in the doctrine of the fall and God's redemptive work in Christ.
Modern literary criticism has long recognized Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847) as a pivotal text for feminists. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's ground-breaking study The Madwoman in the Attic locates the enduring appeal of this novel in its emancipatory narrative strategies whereby the author both conceals and reveals social and psychological truths about women's lives, for example, their anger at being treated as sexual objects in the marriage market, and, paradoxically, their overwhelming desire to love and be loved by men with whom they can never be equal. Gilbert and Gubar's thesis is that female authors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have written "palimpsestic" novels "whose surface designs conceal or obscure deeper, less accessible (and less socially acceptable) levels of meaning" (73). Like Bronte's "madwoman;' these inaccessible meanings are locked up, as it were, in the "attic" of the text. Other feminist critics who dominated Bronte studies in the 1970s and 1980s include Elaine Showalter, Ellen Moers, and Adrienne Rich. Rereading Jane Eyre in her twenties, thirties, and forties, Rich captures the lasting attraction of this Victorian classic for its mostly women readers: "I have never lost the sense that it contains, through and beyond the force of its creator's imagination, some nourishment I needed and still need today" (142). Still widely read by women in the twenty-first century, Jane Eyre has now gone global as postcolonial feminists challenge Bronte's apparent blindness to the ways her novels seem to sanction racism and aspects of western imperialism deemed oppressive for women. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" (1985) and Susan Meyer's "Colonialism and the Figurative Strategy in Jane Eyre" (1990) are well known for this approach. While much has been written about Bronte's treatment of women's issues and concerns in the novel, including women's education, the plight of the governess, and equality in marriage, what has been missing until recently is a feminist approach
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.