The Death of Christian Britain

Chapter four
Angels: Women in
Discourse and Narrative
1800–1950
THE FEMINISATION OF PIETY
One of the great mythic transformations of the early nineteenth century
was the feminisation of angels. Until the 1790s, British art and prose
portrayed the angel as masculine or, at most, bisexual – characteristically
muscular, strong and even displaying male genitalia, and a free divine spirit
inhabiting the chasms of sky and space. But by the early Victorian period
angels were virtuously feminine in form and increasingly shown in domestic
confinement, no longer free to fly. 1 Woman had become divine, but an
angel now confined to the house.
This transformation was an important transition in the representation of
female piety. In the Middle Ages and much of the early modern period,
female piety had been conceived in terms of the woman ‘becoming male’.
Icons of female piety, such as martyrs and ascetics, had been represented
as ‘masculine’, whilst femininity, menstruation and childbirth were regarded
as dangerous and polluting to piety. 2 Though the early-modern woman was
able to use religiosity more freely under Protestantism to express her identity,
her freedom to do so was severely restricted within formal religion.
Between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, the Protestant churches
in England (and without a doubt in Scotland also) made abandonment of
many traditional ‘popish’ rituals a test of faith. The most critical of these
customs (such as those surrounding childbirth and churching) were
women’s domain, and their suppression drove their observance into secrecy
and female piety into the closet. 3 Continued recourse to folk religion or
‘superstition’ aroused intense discursive and institutional condemnation
most visible in the witch-hunt. 4 Until 1800, masculinity lay at the core of
representations of piety, whilst femininity lacked exemplars and was
constructed as a religious problematic. 5
But around 1800, these polarities were dramatically reversed. This was
a gender shift in the centre of religiosity which laid the cornerstone for the
discursive power of Christian religion in Britain (as well as in Western
Europe and North America) for 150 years. 6 The feminisation of piety in
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