Meets Land

the lacking middle term

Nevertheless his injunction 'that a lady ought to keep the knowledge she might have most secret than the Calvinist his creed in Catholic countries' will dominate the battle to come between her piety and her activity, linking as it does the secret suppression of a woman's access to knowledge, which is otherwise public and shared, part of the social world, with her access to God, to the invisible and supernatural, which is at first erotic and friendly but subsequently converted to a deeper pathos of sin, suffering and salvation. The 'confession' concerns the lacking middle term - the various actual existences' tempted, tried and turned away; so that the confessor matures - she is a 'beautiful soul' - but her body falls away 'as an outward object' Such resolution is not aesthetic or ethical but, as it were, religiousness 'A', resignation with a border on despair, which would 'pine away in consumption' were it not granted the future in the form of four children, left by a dead sister, but shortly removed from the 'dangerous' education of their aunt.

Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle