Women’s Nature and the Neo-Pagan Movement

Abstract

Paganism’s ubiquity among late Victorian and Edwardian women is apparent from three passing references that appeared in The Yellow Book (1894–1897) in relatively close succession. In an essay published in January 1896, Julie Nørregaard (whose name appears in the periodical as Norregard; 1863–1942) depicts the Danish author Georg Brandes as arguing for a harmony of pagan and feminist values. Brandes ‘means the two sexes to have equal rights and equal freedom’, she writes, ‘But he has no sympathy with the woman who, because she works and fights her own battles, must throw to the winds all grace and beauty. […] As a true pagan, he loves to be surrounded by youth and loveliness.’ According to Nørregaard, Brandes sees the fight for gender equality as justified but only if women retain their supposedly innate, natural qualities. The noun ‘pagan’ here is used principally as a euphemism for the male aesthete, the emphasis being placed on the man’s vigorous sensuality. Women who do not appeal to Brandes’ tastes, however, have somehow replaced their inherent beauty with the artifice that comes with battling for equal rights. In ‘Suggestion’—published nine months earlier, in April 1895—Ada Leverson (1862–1933) makes the gender inequity more apparent. Her story describes the studio of a male aesthete as giving ‘the complex impression of being at once the calm retreat of a medieval saint and the luxurious abode of a modern Pagan. One feels that everything could be done there, everything from praying to flirting’. Like Nørregaard, Leverson associates the ‘pagan’ with the male aesthete, but the emphasis now is placed not on women’s politicized gender performance but on the erotic exploits of men. The fashionable pagan-about-town captured by Nørregaard and Leverson had, by the 1890s, become a male characterized primarily by a sexual liberalism (or libertinism) that did not readily translate to women’s rights and freedoms of self-fashioning.