The Death of Christian Britain

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