Hope and despair in modern British women’s religious poetry. Steve Smith’s representations of the divine and the human: ‘A God is a Man’s Doll”

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the connection between female writing and spirituality in the poetry of twentieth-century poet-novelist Stevie Smith (1902-1971). In her work, she not only discusses the place of spirituality in female experience but also questions the position of religious institutions and religious authorities: the male spiritual system that was the oppressive agent of patriarchy. For Smith, as for Sylvia Plath, the glorification of a male spiritual leader like Christ or the Pope resembled that of Hitler, presenting a danger of authoritative power that contributed to the records of death and destruction. Therefore, her Shelleyan appeal to “The Necessity of Non Believing”. Nevertheless, Smith’s verse assumes a very ambivalent or ambiguous relationship with orthodox Christianity, reflecting the tension between the poet’s unconscious desire to believe in the Christian God and her consciousness of the fundamental contradictions and irrevocable flaws of Christianity. The importance that she attributes to the figure of God and the intensity with which her language explores the main Christian tenets in the poems are rather unusual in the multicultural and secular society of today’s Britain. But one must bear in mind that much of Smith’s inspiration came from theology itself – books that often sparked off the quirky poems of an avowed agnostic, who believed in the centrality of the Human and that God was a childish construct. Smith is deeply sceptical of the divinity of Christ, feeling that to be human and to be divine is a contradiction in terms. The woman poet’s existential stance manifests itself through paradoxical and nonsensical statement about Mankind and God’s (un)concern for his creatures – an extended dialogue in which there is no pretence that a comfortable response is possible. This, thus, reflects the essential paradox of human life, in both male and female existence, expressed by Smith in one of her most poignant poems: “The questing conscious flame / That is my glory and my bitter bane”.