Abstract
This chapter looks at the role of spirituality as a means of expressing same-sex desire in Hope Mirrlees’ Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists (1919) and Christopher St John’s Hungerheart: the Story of a Soul (1915). It considers how instances of religious ecstasy function within the texts as moments in which a queer transcendence of sexual norms takes place. Because of the spiritual dimension of the protagonists’ emotive gestures, the queer impulse in these novels is an imagined projection into a future that has a utopian quality to it. Ultimately, spiritual desire comes to stand in for same-sex desire, the realization of which is beginning to be imagined as a possibility.
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Ricketts, E. (2016). The Queer Movements of Ecstasy and Asceticism in Hungerheart: The Story of a Soul and Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists . In: Anderson, E., Radford, A., Walton, H. (eds) Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53036-3_10
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