“CONVENT THOUGHTS”: AUGUSTA WEBSTER AND THE BODY POLITICS OF THE VICTORIAN CLOISTER

Extract

IN AN ESSAY SHE ORIGINALLY published in the Examiner and later reissued in the collection A Housewife's Opinions, the Victorian feminist poet Augusta Webster imaginatively fuses two female figures: the medieval cloistered saint and the saintly, cloistered wife of her own age. Her “Saint Opportune” is a parody, the life of a most “unobtrusive saint,” whose name (taken from a street in Poitiers) is “the epitome of her virtues, her charter of beatification” (“Opportune” 203). “In all things always acceptable,” Saint Opportune “was, of course, not a martyr,” because “in her day anybody could have been that, and her grace was an exceptional one” (203–04). Rather, she led “an existence of honourable safety” (204), being a child so trouble-free that her clothes always fitted just right, and “she neither lagged behind her teachers' hopes nor prematurely outshot their skill” (206), “a girl about whom it was remarkable that she never was remarked” (208), eventually becoming medieval version of the Victorian domestic saint: St. Opportune's career as a wife was the perfect accomplishment of the highest auguries of her youth. No matter at what moment of unpunctuality her husband came in bent upon his dinner, whether a quarter of an hour before time or three-quarters of an hour behind, the soup was steaming ready in the tureen, the boiled fish firm and flaky or the fried fish at the evanescent perfect phase of crispness, the joint done to a turn as he liked it, the entrees at their harmonious prime, nothing soddened, nothing hurried, all ready and right with no too much and no too little, according to the variable standard of the tastes of the master of the house. (210) Capping her career of “inspired unobtrusiveness” (208), Saint Opportune withdraws to a convent when her first wrinkle appears (so her husband can be remarried to “a damsel of pleasing aspect who reminded him of her in her fairer days” [211]), only to die soon afterwards so as to oblige her order: She did not live long in the cloister. A neighbouring convent lost a nun of great sanctity, who on her burial began working miracles. St. Opportune's convent, till then the leading one in those parts, was much mortified but saw no remedy. St. Opportune at once died and instantly worked a miracle. What that miracle was this investigator has failed to discover; but it restored the convent to its former supremacy and proved to all after ages the right of St. Opportune to beatification. (212)