Literary Sophias: The Esoteric Female in Romanticism

Abstract

This thesis explores the Romantic representation of femininity in relation to elements of the Western esoteric tradition. In particular, it discusses the presence of Gnostic themes and gender imagery and the ways in which Romantic writers incorporated these concepts into their works as a means of articulating discourses that could challenge mainstream trends. I propose that Romantic writers engaged with an image of the feminine that elevated the female within the epistemological hierarchies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and whose precedents lie in the traditions of Gnosticism and other esoteric schools of thought. This feminine image resurfaced within dissenting movements like the Moravians, Behmenists and Swedenborgians, who emphasised the feminine aspects of God and creation. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these movements, and the ideas they espoused, became intertwined with apocalyptic concepts which entailed the spiritual renewal and the betterment of humanity, and in which the feminine was a central component and catalyst. These concepts acquired greater socio-political significance during and post-Revolution and, within this socio-political climate, Romantic writers challenged the binary constructions of gender and epistemological hierarchies. This thesis demonstrates the ways in which Romantic writers—S.T. Coleridge, William Blake, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the transitional figure, Elizabeth Barrett Browning— incorporated alternative religious representations of gender into their writings in ways that subverted established discourse, depicting the feminine as a source of spiritual wisdom and creative transcendence, a mode of representation that mirrors such figures as the Gnostic Sophia.