event, Eve gives birth to Cain: ‘the pains of child-birth had seized her while she was employed in her ordinary labours near the brook’.10 It is quite impossible that a sensitive child who loved animals as did the young Caroline, and who knew herself to be destined to become a woman (and as she no doubt assumed, a wife and mother) should have read this narrative without being deeply impressed by both events. In this context the bloodlessness of her own altar in the poem seems double-edged: not just a denial of animal sacrifice but also, perhaps, a subconscious denial of menstruation, the precondition for motherhood:

doi:10.4324/9780429459375-68

Chapter

event, Eve gives birth to Cain: ‘the pains of child-birth had seized her while she was employed in her ordinary labours near the brook’.10 It is quite impossible that a sensitive child who loved animals as did the young Caroline, and who knew herself to be destined to become a woman (and as she no doubt assumed, a wife and mother) should have read this narrative without being deeply impressed by both events. In this context the bloodlessness of her own altar in the poem seems double-edged: not just a denial of animal sacrifice but also, perhaps, a subconscious denial of menstruation, the precondition for motherhood:

Chapter

event, Eve gives birth to Cain: ‘the pains of child-birth had seized her while she was employed in her ordinary labours near the brook’.10 It is quite impossible that a sensitive child who loved animals as did the young Caroline, and who knew herself to be destined to become a woman (and as she no doubt assumed, a wife and mother) should have read this narrative without being deeply impressed by both events. In this context the bloodlessness of her own altar in the poem seems double-edged: not just a denial of animal sacrifice but also, perhaps, a subconscious denial of menstruation, the precondition for motherhood:

ABSTRACT

I referred earlier to a certain level of conflicted feeling, or constraint, about religion. The question of how to read such an apparently trans parent narrative never arose in contemporary criticism. Yet if we re main attentive we can pick up from this apparently simple narrative a complex web of competing discourses. The most striking perhaps, is the mingling of belief and unbelief, of piety and paganism. The vivid depic tion of the figure of Priscilla, as Wise Woman or witch, the wonderful passage about Queen Mab, give further strong evidence of the disrup tive potential of paganism bursting through the orthodox surface of the poem. In illustration of the effort with which these elements were held in check in the narrative (her pen appears to run way away with her), the speaking subject protests at one point:

And, in a spirit not mine own, I cry, ‘Perish all knowledge but what leads to Thee!’