Guiney's Essay: Religion And The Martial Ideal

Most of the limited scholarship published on obscure 19th century American writer, Louise Imogen Guiney, has attempted to do one of two things: either explain her love of paganism and nature without sacrificing the integrity her self-professed Catholic faith, or connect the prevalence of militaristic themes in her works to the antimodernist movement. Intriguingly, though the martial ideal and paganism are two of the most prominent elements throughout Guiney’s catalogue of work, no scholar has yet attempted to reconcile both of these elements in the space of the same study, a missed opportunity that serves only to diminish, rather than illuminate, the impact of Guiney’s works. In examining both religion and the martial ideal in Guiney’s essay,
Part cultural critique, part love letter to the moon, “An Open Letter,” follows the rise and fall of the feminine moon, a great and cosmic force that once guided her female subjects with omnipresent grace and could most likely command the glittering mass of stars around her feet with a sigh. Once, she was intelligent, beautiful, and powerful; however, when civilization arose, women lost their worshipful reverence for the moon (Guiney 29). Instead, men took on the mantle of her power (32), and so the moon retreated from greatness into a mere shadow of her former
Though she offers apologies and justifications for womankind’s unfaithful behavior (38)—and even extends a halfhearted olive branch to the Man in the Moon (38)—Guiney strongly implies that women are capable of, and willing to, rise with the moon to overthrow both the Man in the Moon and the masculinized civilization of whom he is representative. For, when the moon is in her full power, “The primeval heathen has stirred within us. We have been under the witchery of Isis. We aspire to be a Moonshee, rather than any potentate of this universe” (37). In reaching back to their ancient ways, women can overthrow the modern Man in the Moon and restore the feminine moon to her past wildness and power. And as Moonshees who also throw off the cloak of modernity for the empowering shroud of the ancient past, Guiney and the moon’s other female supplicants can also tap into that uniquely gendered