| Summary: | This study argues that, in terms of their engagement with theological discourse,
the contribution of women writers to the rise of modernity has been presented,
incorrectly, as an element in the secularization paradigm of history, itself now seen by
many scholars as an overly simplistic account. Because most existing critical
approaches to reading women's theology and literature also fail to provide an adequate
historical analysis, my study presents a series of comparative readings that attempt to
rectify this situation. I argue that the texts of Dinah Mulock Craik and Margaret
Oliphant, two popular and influential nineteenth-century authors, while differing in
many ways, both function as agents of "religionization," engaged in a conscious and
crafted dialogue with secularity, and promoting a feminine non-sectarianism that
opposes a domestic maternal realm to the social and theological law and institutions of
the Fathers. I consider these texts to be involved in the development of a "somatic
textuality," that is, the embodiment of theology and the rise of the textualized religious
subject. This modern religious subject, like Nancy Armstrong's generic modern
individual outlined in Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel
(1987), is primarily female and exists, as do the texts themselves, in a complex
relationship to hegemony.
My readings trace the development of this somatic textuality from mid-century
to the fin de siècle. I find that both authors write the body as essential to the integrity
and realisation of the word, and that both explore the poetics of faith and the politics of
religious literacy. I conclude that Craik's and Oliphant's texts are involved in the
delineation and dissemination of a form of "diffusive Christianity," "diffusive" both in
the sociological/historical sense and in a discursive sense referring to the intertextual
transformation of theology—"theology as style."
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