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John Maynard's original and provocative study looks at sexuality and religion as alike creations of language, regularly connected in discourses that give them a single origin and mingled significance. In the elaborate and varied systems of sexual-religious interrelation in the Western Jewish/Christian tradition, Victorian writers found a central vocabulary for debate over sexual issues and for their individual refocussing of sexuality and religion. After a wide-ranging introduction (drawing on myth, anthropology, comparative religion, and the history of sexuality), Maynard goes on to articulate and interpret the strikingly complex and varied ways in which the earnest skeptic, Arthur Hugh Clough, the Protestant clergyman, Charles Kingsley, and the Catholic convert, Coventry Patmore, placed the relation of sexuality and religion at the center of their work In Clough, where inherited sexual and religious truths were tested and often burlesqued or overwritten by his skeptical intelligence, Maynard finds a foil to the simplicities of his age - and of our century's attempts to reduce Victorian sexual thinking to one thing, whether medical myth or a leaden prudishness. Kingsley by contrast attempts to unify and construct one new view, a variation on Christian marriage that places very unascetic espousal embraces at the center of the universe. Patmore, unknown in his experimental early poems and almost as ignored in his great odes, moves from Kingsleyan celebration of married love to a profound exploration of desire's failure and the creative absence that replaces it with human sexual relation to God. A final chapter on Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure returns to the universal questions of the Introduction by showing one Victorian literally disintegrating into (body) parts the constructive visions of his predecessors This implosion of language and meaning illuminates - as fiction, myth, mere human discourse - the tradition it destroys: capable of being thus deconstructed but, in Hardy's successors in the modern age, also subject to renewal
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