THE CLOISTERED PEN: PENETRATION AND CONCEPTION IN ELIZA KEARY'S “CHRISTINE AND MARY: A CORRESPONDENCE”

Abstract

ELIZA KEARY (1828–1914) AND HER sister Annie (1825–1879) are two of many Victorian women writers whose works remain largely unexplored by scholars. Although Eliza Keary's poetry has been singled out as containing “unorthodox” rhyme and meter for the time period, a limited amount of criticism has taken Keary's work into consideration (Lustig).See Armstrong's comparison of Eliza Keary's “Christine and Mary” with Gerard Manley Hopkins's “The Wreck of the Deutschland” (26–28); Roden discusses the homoerotic and heteronormative aspects of “Christine and Mary.” He also locates Keary in a context of mysticism (“Religious Homoeroticism” 1–14). Her poetry's subject matter is also “unorthodox”: “Christine and Mary: A Correspondence,” the longest poem in Keary's first volume of poetry, Little Seal-Skin and Other Poems (1874), explores religious choices through sensual imagery which might not have had the sympathy, although probably did have the interest, of a mainstream Victorian readership.Analyses of religious and sexual spaces that intersect in Victorian literature have primarily centered on male writers such as Oscar Wilde, John Henry Newman, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture discusses these writers as well as Christina Rossetti and Eliza Keary in the context of mystic asceticism and sexuality. See Buckton for a discussion of Newman's autobiography as sexual self-confession; Saville deals with Hopkins's poetry in the context of his religion and his sexuality; Hanson's work addresses Oscar Wilde and the decadent movement within the contexts of Catholicism and homosexuality. An emphasis on the religious aspects of Victorian women's writings can be found in Krueger and Melnyk. See Roden's “‘Sisterhood Is Powerful’” and “The Kiss of the Soul” for more on Christina Rossetti. Keary's poem consists of a set of epistles between Mary, who has recently joined a Roman Catholic convent, and her female friend Christine, who remains outside of the cloister. While women in convents were typically depicted as repressed, unnatural, and unproductive since they chose not to seek marriage and motherhood, Keary's character Mary offers a version of the cloister in which women can express and fulfill their desires and are productive through creative enterprises. Keary's portrayal of the convent forces us to consider the ways in which conventual life during this time afforded some women a positive, creative, and fulfilling alternative to the more socially acceptable, although not necessarily socially- or self-empowering, roles of mother, wife, daughter, sister, or spinster.