THE UNIVERSAL DIVINE PRINCIPLE, THE SPIRITUAL ANDROGYNE, AND THE NEW AGE IN SARAH GRAND'STHE HEAVENLY TWINS

Abstract

In February 1893 the feministjournalShaftspublished two articles by Mrs. A. Phillips the second of which provided an esoteric reading of the crucifixion in which Phillips, making recourse to Sanskrit, argued that Christ's death on the cross symbolized the “perfect marriage union of the male and female” (qtd. in Dixon,Divine Feminine163). Feminist theosophists such as Phillips believed Christianity's neglect of the Divine Feminine to have resulted in a masculinist ordering of religious authority and in the concomitant subordination of women. The editor ofShafts, Margaret Shurmer Sibthorpe, agreed; she added a note to Phillips's second article urging her readers to work towards the formulation of a gospel that would facilitate women's emancipation. In the same issue ofShafts, Sarah Grand'sThe Heavenly Twinswas reviewed. The reviewer cited at length a passage from the novel's Proem characterizing the divine as the union of the male and female principles and concluded with a discussion of the “heavenly twins” of the novel's title. TheShaftsreviewer, however, did not explore the significance of religious allusions inThe Heavenly Twins, nor did she examine the relation between the dual-sexed divine of the Proem and the story of the heavenly twins, Angelica and Diavolo Hamilton-Wells. Subsequent Grand scholars have not, for the most part, taken up these questions. The possibility that the novel might constitute an attempt to reconfigure dominant discourses of religion and gender, of the kind Sibthorpe had called for and Phillips undertaken, is largely unconsidered. The New Woman as a “modern maiden” is instead assumed to emerge from a predominantly secular cultural context.