The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— Women in Discourse and Narrative 1800–1950 —<br />
Gideon overpowered and whipped her unconscious with his riding crop,<br />
and she fell seriously ill. Meanwhile Oliver, broken-hearted, had buried<br />
himself in colonial service, but he heard <strong>of</strong> Catherine’s illness and rushed<br />
to Jamaica just as she died. He rescued the baby daughter and her black<br />
nurse, bringing them back to London where he raised the girl, only to<br />
discover the full story in the diary many years later.<br />
Catherine Ballard is a novel <strong>of</strong> considerable social as well as spiritual<br />
seriousness. It makes horror <strong>of</strong> parental selfishness, black slavery and male<br />
brutality, gelling these issues <strong>of</strong> human dignity in a single <strong>Christian</strong> perspective.<br />
Most powerfully, it presents women as the victim <strong>of</strong> male exploitation<br />
– <strong>of</strong> fathers who corrupt their daughters and destroy their lives for commercial<br />
gain, and <strong>of</strong> husbands drunk on power and an insecure masculinity<br />
expressed in racist denigration and extreme domestic violence. It is also<br />
about women’s secret sacrifices, which may be hidden from good men, and<br />
known only to God and the personal diaries <strong>of</strong> ‘His dealings with me’. In<br />
tackling these themes, it varies the nature <strong>of</strong> the evangelical narrative,<br />
bringing in the spectre <strong>of</strong> the unreformable man, premature death, and the<br />
ruined domestic partnership <strong>of</strong> a godly couple. It is a tale which provides<br />
negotiation between a woman’s duty and a woman’s <strong>Christian</strong> rights. She<br />
is not a piece <strong>of</strong> property to be bought and sold, even by her parents. Her<br />
duties should not force her to lie before God (as in the marriage ceremony),<br />
and should not force her to forsake a godly union with another pr<strong>of</strong>essing<br />
<strong>Christian</strong>. <strong>The</strong> pr<strong>of</strong>essing <strong>Christian</strong> woman must pr<strong>of</strong>ess in matters <strong>of</strong> love<br />
as well as in matters <strong>of</strong> religion.<br />
Though the female evangelical narrative structure might vary in these<br />
ways, there were uniform characteristics. First, women’s conversions were<br />
usually taken for granted; the issue was their ability to choose a godly<br />
husband or to reform an ungodly one. Second, women’s spiritual destiny<br />
was virtually never portrayed as a battle with temptation or real sin; fallen<br />
women did not appear as central characters, and none <strong>of</strong> the usual temptations<br />
like drink or gambling ever seemed to be an issue with them. <strong>The</strong><br />
problem is the man, sometimes the father, but more commonly the<br />
boyfriend, fiancé or husband, who is a drinker, gambler, keeps the ‘bad<br />
company’ <strong>of</strong> ‘rough lads’, and is commonly also a womaniser. <strong>The</strong> man is<br />
the agency <strong>of</strong> the virtuous woman’s downfall; he does not make her bad,<br />
but does make her suffer and poor. She is not always portrayed as having<br />
undergone a major conversion experience, but to have emerged from childhood<br />
into a disciplined and natural ‘goodness’. Those virtues are ordinarily<br />
unalterable, only open to mild subjugation through the influence <strong>of</strong> men<br />
or frivolity. In ‘Saved from Drifting’ <strong>of</strong> 1922, a twenty-two-year-old wellto-do<br />
orphan with time on her hands dabbles with spiritualism to contact<br />
her parents. An aunt exhorts: ‘Like too many today, Lucia you are, I fear,<br />
drifting and clutching at any fragment <strong>of</strong> new thought.’ 82 Here the temptation<br />
is drawn from natural grief in bereavement; the temptation is a fad<br />
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