Gerard Manley Hopkins

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• Veronica Alfano (bio)

Last year’s Hopkins scholarship provided a pleasing balance between close attention to the subtleties of the poet’s language and wide-ranging claims about his legacy.

Emma Mason’s article “Reading Christian Experience” (Modern Language Quarterly 83, no. 4 [2022]: 521–537) is provocative and powerfully written. She views the work of Hopkins and Christina Rossetti through the lens of kenosis—that is, the doctrine that Christ emptied himself of divinity in order to become fully human and submit to death. For both poets, says Mason, kenosis redefines Christianity through “inner stillness, deferential being, and humility” (p. 523). Furthermore, both writers gender this concept, with Rossetti using it to adumbrate a feminized version of spiritual authority and Hopkins enlisting it as a model of ideal gentlemanliness. As Mason demonstrates—via one of Hopkins’s biblical exegeses in an 1883 letter to Robert Bridges and via his 1883 poem “The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe”—this poet “offers a direct critique of muscular models of Christianity, promoting instead a vulnerable and uncertain ideal” as he implicitly compares Christ to “a Victorian gentleman who signifies and acts like a Victorian woman” (pp. 530–531). [End Page 382]

Here a bit more exploration of the ramifications of these gender-related claims would have been welcome. To what extent is Rossetti challenging the “pretense that humility and passivity are necessarily ‘female’” (p. 527), and to what extent is she implying that Christ’s patient humbleness makes him womanly? And in light of Hopkins’s tormented relationship to his own sexuality, what does it mean for him to feminize Christ?

All the same, throughout the article, Mason elegantly broadens the relevance of her theological analysis. Rossetti’s interest in the Tractarian principle of analogy is shown to rely on a kenotic “image of unity in diversity” (p. 530), as is Hopkins’s understanding of Mary as both fleshly and spiritual, as is the essential paradox of the Trinity itself. Mason’s closing arguments are her most ambitious: acknowledging that many modern readers will recoil from the focus on feminized self-abnegation she identifies in Hopkins, she counters that kenosis is in fact profoundly anti-fundamentalist. Because it is “predicated on a vulnerable model of power that directly rejects relationships structured by oppression or violence” (p. 534), it can motivate Christian models of social justice, ecological activism, and feminism (which she links to Hopkins’s praise of Mary in “The Blessed Virgin”). And because kenosis demands “a reading practice that perceives and understands relationships not as linear or binary but as coinherent, multiple, and interconnected” (p. 525), it is a potent tool for literary criticism as well. Ultimately, Mason employs Hopkins to make a compelling case that nineteenth-century scholars who engage with religious thought must account not only for the details of doctrine and the activities of worship but also for the emotional experience of faith.

Rossetti’s Anglo-Catholicism and Hopkins’s admiration for her—he writes that “the simple beauty of her work cannot be matched”—make these two a natural pairing (The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 8 vols., Lesley Higgins and Michael Suarez, eds. [Oxford Univ. Press, 2006–], 1: 216). Harriet Kramer Linkin, however, considers Hopkins alongside a female poet to whom he has rarely been compared: “Gerard Manley Hopkins in Dialogue with Felicia Hemans” (VP 60, no. 3 [Fall 2022]: 325–344) opens with the tantalizing observation that Hemans’s influence on Hopkins is both noteworthy and all but unexamined.

Linkin’s intertextual analysis of “The Wreck of the Deutschland” is especially keen-eyed, highlighting the ways in which Hopkins not only echoes but also revises his predecessor. In Hemans’s “Casabianca,” a poem that was soon to become the bane of many a Victorian schoolchild, a devoted boy perishes in a shipwreck as he calls out to an unresponsive father. Yet the tall nun who calls out to Christ in “The Wreck of the Deutschland” is able to [End Page 383] commune with Him, allowing Hopkins to transform what he may have seen as Hemans’s “rallying cry for patriarchal patriotism” into a “bid for spiritual patriotism” (p...