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PDF eBook, 307 pages Published 1894 Read May 2017 |
"The whole scheme [of Christian religion] is very fine," she said one day; "it is a perfect idyll in its way, and divine from the mere exaltation and grandeur of it; but where any proof of a personal God comes in I can't see, any more than in any of the other creeds. They all seem to be chips off the same block. The ideal God seems universally human—this Jewish one with the rest. He is feeble and tyrannical, and He, in the old Testament, is so inconsistent; and in the New—well, after all, that is only rather a more modern reflection of the Old. As for Christ, we know so little of Him,—and then when all's said, His loveliest and best thoughts were also thought in the Vedas by the Brahmins. It is wonderful beyond comprehension to me how so many have lived and died for such myths. The greatest and divinest quality of God seem to me to be His inexorableness, and even that failed Him more than once at a pinch." (74-5)This was a strange book, an 1890s romance novel by the then-prolific author Kathleen Mannington Caffyn, under her pen name of "Iota." The basic premise is that a married pair of amateur scientists, the Warings (Mrs. Waring being the earliest woman of science I know of in fiction except for Maria Gallilee in Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science), try to raise their children without religion, but lots of natural science, and then they'll be given the Bible when they're teens so that the parents can see what what objective decision they reach. The plan fails for a variety of reasons, but their daughter Gwen is still without religion, and with a scientific level of detachment, as you can in the passage above, despite years of tutoring by the local rector and his wife.
The book starts with the parents, but around the one-quarter mark clearly becomes Gwen's book. Gwen is beautiful, kind, and intelligent-- but unable to love thanks to her scientific upbringing. Men fall in love with her by the score, but she never with them. Finally one talks to her as an equal (opening up about his premarital sexual relationships, not a thing I expected to see happen in an 1894 novel), one Sir Humphrey Strange, a world traveler who reminded me of Sir Richard Burton. She agrees to marry him even though she does not love him, as an experiment.
As you might guess, A Yellow Aster is about the slow process by which Gwen's heart is opened to love and to Christianity. It's utterly fascinating, and it doesn't adhere to traditional morality as much as one might expect: for example, Gwen concludes it's better to have a child born of love outside of marriage than within an unloving marriage. Gwen herself and her wacky parents (who view children as a distraction from the writing of their geological magnum opus; Mrs. Waring refers to herself a "tortured woman" when her nursemaid asks her a question about disciplining the children (6), for example) are the real points of interest in the novel, sometimes comic, sometimes tragic, in the way they're detached from everyday concerns. Gwen is a great precocious child, and becomes a reasonably precocious adult. Caffyn is, as far as I know, a largely forgotten writer now except within certain critical circles (I came across a reference to A Yellow Aster in a monograph about "New Women" novels by Patricia Murphy), and not good enough to really warrant recuperation outside of them, but if you're interested in Victorian concepts of gender, science, and education, it's a fascinating read.
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