<1>In How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon (2022), Iwan Rhys Morus identifies no women with which to credit scientific explorations of the Moon. He points out that there is no escaping the overwhelming predominance of men in the world of Victorian science and that, as far as men of science had been concerned, those like astronomer Mary Somerville and popular science writer Arabella Buckley could participate in discourses merely as conduits, to relay the knowledge of men (13-14). However, the Moon played a complex role in the literature of nineteenth-century women as a symbol for imagination, escape, hope, and desertion. This paper will survey creative and scientific representations of the Moon in women’s Romantic literature and romances with a focus on Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886) and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Dreams (1890). While the two authors held polar positions on the rise of the New Woman, both react against scientific realism and Eurocentrism and wield allegorical uses of the Moon to explore the condition of Victorian women in ways prescient of the decentering and interactionist modes of late twentieth-century feminist science studies. Their Moon not only aims to transcend material realities but to cast into sharper relief the multidimensionality of women’s experiences.
<2>The Moon as a symbol of the nineteenth-century imagination, especially in the context of romances, may appear to be an already well-studied image. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Custom-House” introduction to The Scarlet Letter (1850) famously conjoins moonlight and romance writing:
Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly,—making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,—is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests […to present] a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet. (32-33)
Critics have read this seminal definition of the romance as reliant upon a limbic state, where narration is hypnagogic, suspended between states of wakefulness and sleep, or otherwise dialectical and navigating the tensions between other polar states, including those of history and fiction, duty and desire, or a colonial past and ideal future. The idea that moonlight lends greater visibility or insight than sunlight contends with the dominant use of the sun in Enlightenment literature as a symbol for reason. Notably, Hawthorne’s Moon also remains ungendered, as an “it” (33).
<3>Imaginations of the moon allowed nineteenth-century women to transcend their material realities. Florence Nightingale is one renowned woman of science who uses a fleeting Moon metaphor to vent against the profound ideological and material restrictions on women’s education and professional opportunities observed by Morus. She captures the waste and frustration of those women who sought to live in the “sharp radiance of intellect’s moonlight,” in her feminist treatise, Cassandra (1854) (36). Women labored in silence and solitude, trapped between ideal fictions and social realities, for a dream that at times could only be glimpsed, so to speak, through the shutters. Nightingale’s Moon metaphor indicts romances that mislead young women and disable them from engaging with the demands of social reality, but Corelli and Schreiner embraced the genre as one with transcendent potential to emancipate female subjectivity through flights of the imagination, to places of elsewhere and elsewhen. Their Moon serves as an allegorical body not only articulating the ways a Victorian woman was often overshadowed and marginalized but also positioning characters to explore the heights and depths of life that otherwise felt beyond reach and vision. This paper proceeds with a feminist science studies lens that seeks to make visible the women voices interacting with lunar imagery and to rethink the scientific and literary epistemologies revolving around nineteenth-century representations of the Moon.
Representations and Realities of the Nineteenth-Century Moon
<4>Corelli and Schreiner inherit the tradition of transcendent Moon imagery from eighteenth-century women writers, like Anne Finch and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, who reified the moon as a feminine guide for intellectual and fanciful journeys and subverted the primacy of the patriarchally-coded Enlightenment sun. William McCarthy analyzes Finch’s “A Nocturnal Reverie” (1713) and Barbauld’s “A Summer Evening’s Meditation” (1773) as epitomizing a greater tradition of “female freedom” (130). Unlike Hawthorne, both Finch and Barbauld use gendered Moon imagery to signal female progress, community, and activity in moments outside male influence; that is, at night. That both poems preceded the advent of street lighting, which helped to increase feelings of security, belies the women’s need to claim time away from patriarchal rule and public scrutiny. Under the gentler reflected light of the Moon, Finch’s women are tellingly “uninterrupted” and “unmolested” by the “rage,” “clamor,” and “toil” of “tyrant man” (22; 34; 44; 49; 38). Barbauld inherits this revolutionary language and describes the sun as likewise, “The sultry tyrant of the south” (1). Undisturbed and untaxed, Finch’s women contemplate “Something, too high for syllables to speak,” implying not only the philosophic power of women but the value of “silent musings” over the materially seen and heard (41-42). Where men claim power in material domains, Finch looks to the immaterial for satisfaction. Barbauld likewise upsets the gendering of epistemology and exclaims as the poem begins “‘Tis past! […] his short-lived rage,” echoing Finch’s argument that patriarchal rule and reason represent a particular historical moment as opposed to an ahistorical objectivity (1-2).
<5>Astronomy generally assists with departing from privileged perspectives that claim to represent the whole. One may ‘look up’ from opposing hemispheres and see unique parts of the cosmos. Likewise, one system’s sun may be another’s star. For centuries, the Moon had already been enmired in philosophic and scientific discourses that confirmed a perpetual state of ignorance in the human pursuit for knowledge. After the invention of the telescope, Galileo Galilei’s Sidereus Nuncius (1610) upset the Aristotelian assumption that the Moon must be smooth, revealing its many pits and craters instead. Then, a few decades before Corelli and Schreiner published their first novels, Moon photography became popular, changing the way Victorians negotiated the boundaries between reality and representation.
<6>In 1851, John Adams Whipple, a prominent Boston photographer, and William Cranch Bond, first director of the Harvard College Observatory, brought one of their glass daguerreotypes of the Moon to the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London. This was a pivotal event. While others had been photographing the Moon since the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, Whipple’s and Bond’s image stood out. Their use of Harvard’s Great Refractor telescope allowed them to capture a lunar image that the official Great Exhibition catalogue described as ushering in “a new era in astronomical representation” (Reports 277). Jennifer Green-Lewis explains that this technology appeared “superhuman” (322). The photograph enabled the human gaze to travel to the Moon and back. Not only did it close this distance as other photographs of the Moon already had, but it was also clear, revealing unprecedented detail.
<7>As many critics have noted, visual culture dominated the Victorian period. Nicholas Mirzoeff reminds readers that the study of “visuality,” i.e. of the social conditions as opposed to merely physiological conditions of sight and experience, goes back to Thomas Carlyle who coined the term and its sister verb, “visualizing,” in the 1830s (55). As Kate Flint explains, an influx of optical inventions (like the kaleidoscope, stereoscope, pseudoscope, and zoetrope) alongside developments in printing that facilitated the rise of visual media led to increased exposure to and engagement with visual information, and these dramatic changes in visual and print culture spurred questions that revolved around “problems of interpretat[ion],” or questions around the reliability of the human eye and the perception of things within and without one’s body, nation, and culture (1). By the mid-century, Victorians began associating great detail with faithful representations of reality and a burgeoning sense of objectivity, or as Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison define it, a “blind sight, seeing without inference, interpretation, or intelligence” that “embraces accidents and asymmetries” (17). This is in contrast to the idealization associated with Romantic writing; that is, the universalization of ideas and forms, to smooth eccentricities and irregularities of material life, as seen in Corelli’s and Schreiner’s work. Still, objectivity is not just about authorial distance and detailed empirical realism. It is also unsettlingly about control. Jonathan Potter asserts that the emergence of nineteenth-century visual culture was driven by an “underlying need to understand the interface between self and the world” (11). Reviewing Michel Foucault’s influential study of the power of the gaze in Victorian social formations, Flint reiterates, “to make something visible is to gain not just understanding of it, but control over it” (7). Whipple’s and Bond’s photograph of the Moon reifies a power to retain sight of the subject regardless of distance and time as well as a power to protect viewers from the truth that it is only a representation and not reality that viewers possess.
<8>The Moon provides a framework for speaking on issues of direction and relationality that reframe discussions of epistemology. When Finch and Barbauld imagined the Moon as providing women with intellectual agency, they paved the way for those like Agnes Giberne who then rethought the Moon’s position in the solar system. Agnes Giberne was an amateur astronomer who published Sun, Moon, and Stars as an introduction to astronomy in 1879. She stresses an understanding of the Moon, Sun, and star systems as relational as opposed to hierarchical, noting how orientation and perspective shapes one’s comprehension. She repeats throughout her book: “There are two ways of thinking about the moon. One way is to consider her as merely the earth’s attendant satellite. The other way is to consider her as our sister-planet, traveling with us round the central sun. The first is the more common view; but the second is just as true as the first” (157). Giberne sent a copy for review to British astronomer Charles Pritchard who responded positively and, without prompting, added his own introduction to the text. Success led her to revise and republish in 1898 and then again in 1903.
<9>It may seem silly to consider the Moon as anything but a satellite, but the traditional model exhibits what Evelyn Fox Keller may call a rhetoric of Western science that projects “a specifically male consciousness” of “power and control” onto theoretical descriptions (598). Keller points to examples of hierarchical descriptions of cellular organization to illustrate her point. In the past, primacy has been given to the nucleus and DNA to determine the properties and characteristics of a whole cell and organism, whereas a single component of the cell wields master control over the entire system. In these examples, Keller extends Daston and Galison’s notion of objectivity as “blind sight,” or knowledge that denies the multiple intrusions of a privileged speaking self. She frames objectivity as a “masculinist” impulse that seeks to dominate nature and, further, projects an ideology of mastery onto conceptions of nature itself as hierarchical (602). In contrast, interactionist theories rethink these assumptions and propose different theoretical orientations that stress conversant pluralism (Keller 601). Demonstrating this interactionist approach, Giberne imagines the Moon-Earth relationship not as geocentric but interdependent and mutual. In her chapters on the Moon, Giberne goes on to caution readers to be generally mindful of jumping to conclusions. She clarifies that although the Moon may appear at first to be, “a globe silent, voiceless, changeless, [and] lifeless, […] it does not do to speak too confidently,” and she cheerily reminds that we have much to learn about the Moon’s far side (148; 66).
<10>The Moon has a history of setting the scene for scientific hoaxes or otherwise manifesting in literature, as Giberne says, as a “globe silent, voiceless, changeless, [and] lifeless.” The Great Moon Hoax and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” (1835) tested the gullibility of audiences first becoming acquainted with the fabulous possibilities of science. Meanwhile, in science fiction from George Tucker’s A Voyage to the Moon (1827) to H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901), the Moon became the backdrop to social satires. In The Evolution of Worlds (1909), Percival Lowell exerts his great scientific imagination and describes the satellites of all planets, including Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, and Jupiter, as “practically dead,” while “Our own Moon carries its decrepitude on its face” (233). Dismissed so frequently and unflatteringly, the Moon lends itself as an allegorical body for Victorian women who felt similarly silenced, voiceless, inert, stationary, and unseen.
Schreiner and Corelli on the Moon
<11>In 1886, Corelli published her first novel, A Romance of Two Worlds. Derided by critics but lauded by fans, this novel launched Corelli into a meteoric career. Her level of popularity was unmatched. She was translated into over a dozen languages ranging from French and German to Japanese and Persian, and her novels outstripped combined sales of her competitors, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, and H. G. Wells (MacLeod 9-10). Corelli was also a favorite across classes. Queen Victoria requested that all of Corelli’s books be sent to her private residence, and the Prince of Wales invited Corelli to dine, professing to her, “You are the only woman writer of genius we have” (qtd. in Federico 1).
<12>Bookending Corelli’s Romance are Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm and Dreams. Published in 1883, African Farm became an immediate success, resulting in fifteen additional editions in Schreiner’s lifetime, transforming Schreiner into a celebrity, and winning her introductions in London’s circle of intellectuals, including sexologist Havelock Ellis and the philosopher and mathematician Karl Pearson. In an 1894 review, British journalist W. T. Stead named Schreiner, “The Modern Woman par excellence, the founder and high priestess of the school,” making her novel “the forerunner of all the novels of the Modern Woman” (64). Published in 1890, Dreams went through twenty-five editions in the next forty years and also won noteworthy praise. In her prison diary, Lady Constance Lytton describes the deep impact of Dreams on her and her fellow suffragettes: “‘Dream’ seemed scarcely an allegory. The words hit out a bare literal description of the pilgrimage of women. It fell on our ears more like an A B C railway guide to our journey than a figurative parable” (157).
<13>Most critics agree that Schreiner and Corelli tended towards romance and allegory as means of transcending structural sexism and racism, but neither author is able to fully demonstrate this escape. In her Prologue, while addressing the apparent contradiction between her main title (“A Romance”) and subtitle (“A Novel”), Corelli defends the validity of her romance: “I do not expect to be believed, as I can only relate what I myself have experienced,” that is, not only the “unseen” and “unknown” but “felt” (6). While spurning the realism that critics sought in novels, Corelli’s Romance asserts popular romances written by, for, and about women as a kind of faithful representation of reality, especially a reality beyond material signs. She concludes her Prologue by staking a claim to the realm of “facts,” declaring, “let facts speak for themselves” (7). She suggests that individual experience is a part of factual reality and anticipates the feminist science concepts of situated and partial knowledges propounded by later critics like Donna Haraway. Speaking toward such twentieth-century theories, Corelli critiques the tendency of realists and positivists to treat the visible as the totality of knowledge, calling her skeptics “faithless” and “perverse” while importantly eschewing the cover of any known religion or philosophy (7).
<14>While Corelli defined the romance as “the art of idealizing,” Schreiner viewed the allegory as “the very essence of art,” and both grounded their literature in political discourses (qtd. in Radford xvii; qtd. in Black et al. 20). Like Corelli and her pushback against literary realism, Schreiner distrusted the sciences and refused to place wholesale faith in the theories of those like Pearson and Ellis as solutions for all social problems (Black et al. 35). Thus, as Cherry Clayton explains, Schreiner remodeled the Christian literary tradition to carry secular critiques of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism, making the allegory “key” to her “reformist vision” (74). Barbara Black et al. claims that Schreiner’s use of the allegorical form is particularly apt:
From the Greek “allos” for “other,” “agoria” for “speaking,” and “agora” for “the marketplace,” allegory features the writer speaking differently in public by way, furthermore, of having one thing stand in for another—or “an other.” One can readily see how allegory as a preferred formal choice would serve well both Schreiner’s race and gender politics […] speaking to her lived experience of and in Africa. (35)
It is important to note that the romance and allegorical form are prone to totalizing depictions of their subjects, although the totalizing effect need not necessarily refer to Western significance, and Black et al. points to possible African influences in Schreiner’s interest in the allegory (21). But Schreiner makes a deliberate choice to universalize, explaining that, “It is this abiding consciousness of an end to be attained [… that] binds with the common bond of an impersonal enthusiasm into one solid body the women of whatsoever race, class, and nation who are struggling after the readjustment of woman to life” (Woman 128). Schreiner demarcates a late-century feminist position that aims for ideal equality and universal suffrage.
<15>Corelli still found occasions for attacking Schreiner’s brand of romance and allegory. Adamantly opposed to suffrage and Schreiner’s vision of a New Woman, Corelli expressed great satisfaction in publicly criticizing her. In her biting satire, Silver Domino (1892), Corelli ridicules Schreiner for “marvel[ing]” at “Afric’s zone” and propounding a philosophy of “Universal Nothing” (344). Some years later, in Cameos (1896), Corelli confessed to a hoax that she or a friend, Bertha Vyver, had played on Schreiner and the Pall Mall Budget, which had previously lambasted Corelli’s The Soul of Lilith (1892) and which had been recently lauding New Women writers. The two friends had submitted a story Corelli had hastily written, “God’s Light on the Mountains,” with a note suggesting Schreiner as the author, and when the magazine readily published the story, Corelli claimed the occasion as proof of the magazine’s bias: “but the discovery that I was the author of the story, and not Madame Schreiner, of course put a stop to the Pall Mall’s approval and enthusiasm!” (qtd. in Waller 810).
<16>What the two authors have in common is an allegorical reliance on gendered Moon imagery that reproduces the relational and interactionist modes practiced by their literary foremothers. Both authors spotlight their lead women in lunar scenes. Schreiner’s African Farm begins with the homestead bathed in the light of the “full African moon” (47). At first casting “a kind of dreamy beauty” over the plain, the narration proceeds to tighten its frame onto the moonlit face of a child, Lyndall, the novel’s prototype for the New Woman (47-48). Under the moonlight, Lyndall’s defects are hidden; illuminated instead is her “elfin-like beauty” (48). The novel quickly moves on into the next scene recasting Lyndall in the daylight with more realism as a “grave” orphan with “wrinkled forehead” upon which the “sunlight had no mercy” (50). The contrast between the Romantic and realistic lenses anticipate Lyndall’s diatribe against sexism which she delivers halfway through the narrative to an unsuspecting, idolizing Waldo: “Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don’t see it—but there is” (195). Echoing Giberne, Lyndall introduces the notion that the moon represents not just an elsewhen—or nighttime when, as Finch said, men are asleep—but an elsewhere, reifying the potential in women to unveil natures that are complex, perhaps well-rounded, likely flawed, and always multifaceted.
<17>In Corelli’s Romance, the unnamed narrator and Zara, the novel’s model of feminine perfection, are both likened to the Moon. Zara, whose name suggests Zora, the Slavic goddess of the dawn, possesses “large, luminous” eyes that are “dark as night” (68). Her figure is “rounded and proportioned” and her skin is “transparently” white (68). Most notably, she is never seen without her electric stone necklace, which glows with “opaline radiance” and changes color with her mood (67). The stone, found in a king’s coffin then passed down the generations in her family, is reminiscent of the coveted diamond of Wilkie Collins’s Moonstone, which like the Moon, symbolizes the union of “permanence with change, and objectivity with subjectivity” (R. P. Laidlaw qtd. in Hennelly 29).(1) Corelli’s unnamed narrator is likened to Diana, the Roman goddess of the Moon, and is consistently adorned in ivory-tinted fabrics of Eastern and Middle Eastern origin, once again signaling an expected orientalist return to an ‘enlightened’ elsewhere and a way of knowing that, by nature of its mysterious ancientness, subverts the more factual and hard light of modern Western reason symbolized by the sun.
<18>Demonstrative of these gendered and imperial privileges, the men in Schreiner’s African Farm and Corelli’s Romance are driven to madness by the light of the Moon. In the same scene that introduces the “elfin” child-Lyndall, Schreiner’s narrator describes Waldo as a boy, listening in the darkness where “Nothing was visible” to the ticking of his father’s “great silver hunting watch” (48). The silver watch is an earthly analog to the celestial Moon, but instead of signaling eternal change and hope in futurity, the silver watch counts, “One, two, three, four! […] every time it ticked a man died!” (49). Ticking without change or alteration, the watch drives little Waldo into despair, and he grovels: “The child wept, and crept closer to the ground” (50). Seeing only the material world—or time meted out by a manmade pocket watch—Waldo is crushed by his infant need to see through the darkness.
<19>In Corelli’s Romance, Raffaello Cellini, the humble painter who first introduces the narrator to the Electric Creed, nearly commits suicide under the Moon’s imagined scythe (45). Likewise, under the “cold slanting rays” of the Moon, Prince Ivan Petroffsky, a misguided materialist, manically pursues the inviolable Zara, who safely repulses him with an electric shock. In Corelli’s work, when the men lose their sense of emotional and moral direction, it is the women who guide them. In these vulnerable moments, the men seem to lose all agency. After saving Casimir Heliobas from committing murder, Azùl, Heliobas’s angel lover, commands him to follow her. Heliobas readily obeys, merely asking, “Wilt thou lead me? Whither? Nay – no matter whither – I come!” (192). Echoing these lines in the next scene, the narrator beckons Ivan to the chapel to repent, and Ivan repeats, “Where would you take me?” ultimately also obeying her lead (194). These lines recur once more in the conclusion where the narrator reinjects considerations of orientation and directionality. She asks readers pointedly, “Whither is our ‘Progress’ tending – Forward or Backward – Upward or Downward? Which way?” (216). Her question has less to do with what is at the end of ‘up’ and what is at the end of ‘down’ and more to do with movement itself. As the narrator quips in one of her defenses of her eccentric Electric Creed, “E pur si muove” (and yet it moves), echoing the words of Galilei in defense of his heliocentric theories (207). The effects of the Moon on the men along with the women’s responsive aid decenters the men and replaces each figure in an interconnected and moving system.
<20>By contemplating Lyndall’s death, Waldo is able to transcend the bars of his reality, although his progress, shaped by Lyndall’s absence, is more philosophic. Little Waldo had initially failed to transcend because he merely possessed the hunter’s watch, but he did not behave as a true Hunter, i.e. an ideal hunter. The eponymous character of “The Hunter,” one of Schreiner’s Dreams which she embedded in African Farm, ultimately embraces a metaphysical pursuit to know himself. As the hunter climbs the eternal mountains in pursuit of the white bird named Truth, he surrenders desires and creeds that had previously delimited the outline of his imagination. With each sacrifice and each year, he climbs and takes on aspects that metamorphose him into the reflection of the white bird he pursues. Eventually, his hair grows white, his fingers become stiff and bent (like a bird’s talons), and he dies holding one white feather, gasping, “Where I lie down worn out, other men will stand, young and fresh. By the steps that I have cut they will climb […] no man liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself” (“Hunter” 73). By struggling with his grief over Lyndall, Waldo obtains this same realization, muttering to himself before he dies, “It is but the individual that perishes, the whole remains. […] For the soul which knows itself no more as a unit, but as a part of the Universal Unity of which the Beloved also is a part; which feels within itself the throb of the Universal Life; for that soul there is no death” (274-75). In the absence of his ideal beloved, Waldo comes to recognize the difference between an earthly hunter in pursuit of discrete and finite needs and a metaphysical Hunter whose hunt never ends, displacing himself as a sole subject and finding satisfaction in his interconnectivity. In the end, he dies enlightened as the sun sets, hallowed by the ending light.
<21>When examining the scientific contexts of African Farm and Romance, most critics have looked into the histories of evolution as well as telecommunications, spiritualism, and magnetism (particularly for the latter title). Thus far, this paper has suggested the ways an astral setting liberates characters from the oppressions of their material reality. Rounding this argument for both authors requires geometry. Corelli’s Electric Creed is based on the belief that the universe is a circle, made of infinite circles concentrically nested, highly suggestive of Dante’s progressive structure of the cosmos in the Divine Comedy. Heliobas identifies these circles in the movement of planets, the shape of the human eye, the cup of a flower, and droplets of dew (76). Waldo likewise finds fractal beauty in the iteration of shapes in nature, especially the curl which recurs from the wisps of clouds and flight of insects to the pistils and stamens of flowers, blossoming leaves and blossoming men, or embryos, his own hair, his woodchips, Lyndall’s seashell, and more (282). As Waldo’s Stranger explains, in these reiterations, “the little [is] made large and the large small” (168).
<22>Both works base these analogical ascensions on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transcendentalism. Corelli’s Heliobas approvingly refers to Emerson as the “American imitator” of Plato, while Emerson serves as the namesake for Schreiner’s Waldo (72). Transcendentalism has roots more ancient in classical Greek scientists. Pythagoras of Samos in the sixth century taught that the celestial bodies are attached to spheres that enable rotations and revolutions. This was followed by Plato’s argument in Timaeus that the material cosmos is a copy of a truer universe, suggesting that higher dimensionalities of truth may be obtained by investigating self-similarity, the sphere being that shape upon which all other shapes may be inscribed and thus the most self-similar (Baryshev and Teerikorpi 11). Self-similarity and ladders of analogy amounting to intellectual and spiritual progress abound in Romance and African Farm. Schreiner’s narrator discusses a spectrum of creativity that ranges from sham artists and copyists to true creativity embodied by the Circle at the Center of the Universe. Religions in Romance are likewise discussed as types of a single whole, and characters mark distinct levels of progress. For instance, Leo, the dog, is Heliobas’s namesake and lower animal form, while both are lower forms of the Sun. In Schreiner’s novel, pools of water, mirages, mirrors, and dreams reflect varying degrees of each other while the chickens which chase the white moths and sit on Waldo’s head after he has passed away are analogous to Waldo and the metaphysical Hunter in their lateral pursuits for truth. And as mentioned, in both works, the women are analogized to the Moon.
<23>In some ways, these platonic ladders retain the semblance of unsettling hierarchical structures. In Romance, Heliobas is repeatedly emphasized as the sage one whose instruction cannot fail to guide all seeking his counsel. His name, gesturing towards a ‘lower’ or more base (Gr. βάς) form of the sun, is a transparent moniker signaling his role as a platonic guide. Still, at his most obtuse, he advises the narrator, “You are a woman – your desire is […] to love and be beloved – to wear pretty toilettes and to be admired” (57). While the narrator retorts with a feminist riposte, Heliobas maintains the baseline of his philosophy and again advises the narrator at the end of the romance that the virtues of women are “obedience, purity, meekness, patience, long-suffering, modesty, self-denial, and endurance” (163). Meanwhile, in the most selenocentric allegory of Schreiner’s Dreams, “In a Far-Off World,” a woman makes a moonlit sacrifice of blood that also appears to leave her in a double-bind. By sacrificing her own blood, she is allowed a wish, and she prays not for herself but for her beloved: “[for] I know not, but that which is most good for him” (77). To her dismay, her prayer results in the man sailing away: “the face the moonlight did not show, but the figure she knew” (78). When the woman beseeches the invisible spirit to bring the man back, the soft-spoken spirit whispers, “Your prayer was answered. [… The best of all gifts] is that he might leave you,” once again subjugating her implicit desire to his needs (78). Evident in both narratives appear to be ideals that reinforce patriarchal tradition and the secondary position, objectification, and self-abnegation of women.
<24>Ultimately both suggest that the reality of Victorian women and the Moon are synonymous; recalling Whipple’s and Bond’s photograph, the earthly and celestial feminine bodies each appear delimited to the level of portraiture. It is one of the strangest turns in Corelli’s Romance, a story already full of many surprises, when Heliobas, welcoming the narrator back from her astral journey, confesses, “The Moon does not exist. What we see is the reflection or the electrograph of what she was. Atmospherical electricity has imprinted this picture of a long-ago living world upon the heavens” (142). Understanding the logic of this image helps to contextualize those elements of each text that appear to retain troubling hierarchical structures. To review, Heliobas, who may already be understood as decentered to a degree by his relationships with Azùl, the narrator, and Corelli (as a product of her creativity), utters a dictum that women must self-deny. In this sense, women may create but are not self-creating. As Corelli’s narrator says in her major feminist speech, “We did not create ourselves” (58). She applies a constructivist theory explored by Finch, Barbauld, and Giberne, thereby inviting considerations of women’s social identities as products of social relations. In Corelli’s case, if the self is self-denying then the self is also desiring, and that self who is transcendentally self-similar to an Ideal suggests that the Ideal also desires. Thus, the effeminate Moon may not exist in this world because it is a picture of absence, or desire.
<25>Finally, the self who is self-similar to an Ideal that is likewise represented in all suggests selves (or a plural “we”) that are both self-denying and self-referential. Whereas Corelli’s Ideal desire may also be parsed as Love, “we” (the self-similar representations of Love) may be understood as creating Love inasmuch as Love creates her creations. “We” and Love are all self-denying and self-referential, making life and love an experience that is always in progress. In short, Corelli’s logic suggests that Heliobas’s Electric Creed and Law of Love is a structure that defends the women in Romance. In an analogous manner to the way Zara activates her body-electricity to fend off a violent Ivan, the Electric Creed is an ideology that protects the narrator from having to marry. Under the Electric Creed, any institution that seeks to discretely codify the apparent achievement of ‘love’ defies the Law of Love and observation of true Love as perpetually moving.
<26>In both romances, men suggest that marriage supplies the much-coveted freedom women seek. In Romance, Ivan, who confesses that he possesses no common interests with Zara but loved her as “the loveliest woman” he had ever seen, explains, “I thought, by making her my wife, to release her from such tyranny and give her rescue and refuge” (193-94). Likewise, in African Farm, Gregory, the father of their child, perceiving Lyndall as little more than a “queenly little figure” with “a transparent little face, refined by suffering into an almost angel-like beauty,” proposes to her: “you shall have perfect freedom Lyndall, grand little woman, for your own sake be my wife!” (264; 267). Whereas Heliobas’s Electric Creed liberates the women of Romance, empowering them by literally charging them like batteries then shooting them onto cosmic allegorical journeys of spiritual enlightenment, Lyndall’s despair speaks more plainly. She complains of her solitude and the isolation which demands that she must be inexhaustibly self-reliant: “I am so weary of myself! It is eating my soul to its core,—self, self, self! […] Will nothing free me from myself?” (232). In the selenocentric allegory of Dreams, “Far-off World,” where “the sun never shone,” the truth about the woman’s self that sets her free is simple; she is not what is best for the man (77). It is a truth that may strike one’s ego as much as their heart. The woman loses sight of the boat “beyond the moonlight sheen,” and the unseen spirit asks, “Art thou contented?” (78). The story concludes with the woman’s echo: “‘I am contented.’ At her feet the waves broke in long ripples softly on the shore” (78). Yet, this ocean, with its “silvery” waves and “glittering” shore, is no mere Shalott-esque mirror and the woman is no mere Ovidian Echo (77). Tidally-driven and belying the unseen strength of the Moon, the ocean’s waves break from the woman’s former conception of herself as—like the Moon’s light and the Moon’s image perpetuated by the Whipple and Bond photograph—merely reflective of man. Under this moonlight, the woman is finally free to help herself.