England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Philip Hoare

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ evoke her own memory of abuse. ‘When I felt my eyes closing with sleep, I used to pull them open with my fingers, and say within myself, I had better open my eyes here, than open them in hell.’ Where witches had been walked to make them summon their familiars, Ann forestalled her hellish visions by remaining conscious. She starved her body so that her soul ‘might hunger for nothing but God’; tears ‘cleaved off’ her cheeks, blood ‘gushed from under her nails’, and when she lay down at night, the bed shook so that her husband was glad to leave it. Denying herself every gratification, her ‘earthly tabernacle’ was so reduced that she had to rely on others to feed her.

      ‘My flesh consumed upon my bones, bloody sweat pressed through the pores of my skin, and I became as helpless as an infant.’ As she fasted, ‘a kind of down came upon my skin’ – a symptom of malnutrition, elsewhere responsible for the animal appearance of feral children. In her personal wilderness, Ann ‘labored, in strong cries and groans to God, day and night, till my flesh wasted away, and I became like a skeleton’. It seemed she was about to make of her marriage bed a sepulchre. Reduced to a living memento mori, Ann was now granted an ‘astonishing vision of the Fall, in which Christ appeared to her in all his glory’. She was shown a ‘full and clear view of the mystery of iniquity … and of the very act of transgression committed by the first man and woman in the garden of Eden’. The impact of this sacred, sexual vision was to set Ann on a new and extraordinary course, one which would take her across the world. But others saw it differently, and in 1770 Ann was admitted to the asylum of the same hospital in which she worked.

      Thus confined, as if with child, Ann faced her final confrontation. There, in the Lunatick Ward of the Manchester Infirmary, God revealed that she was the woman whose appearance was foretold in Revelations, ‘clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars’, crying out ‘in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery’. At this Ann ‘felt unspeakable joy in God, and my flesh came upon me, like the flesh of an infant’. Released from the infirmary and out of madness, she was born again, just as two centuries later psychotics would be reborn through insulin coma or electrical therapies which themselves resembled the Shakers’ trembling rituals. In this rite of her own body, she had become a different being: the Bride of the Lamb, or simply Ann the Word; and as she emerged from her confinement, like a butterfly from its chrysalis, she asserted her power over her mentors, the Wardleys.

      It was a religious coup in which Ann installed her own followers, among them her brother William, a former cavalry officer, a tall, powerfully-built young man who would act as Ann’s protector and yet who would also acknowledge her as his mother. As the new figurehead of the Shakers, Ann pursued their principles, taken from the Pentecostal or Primitive church: communal property, celibacy, pacifism, self government and power over disease. As with her familial conflicts, these claims enraged the mob, threatened by the promise that they might be saved if they too rejected sex. One of Ann’s own brothers took a broomstick to his sister: ‘He then beat me over my face and nose, with his staff, till one end of it was much splintered. But I sensibly felt and saw bright rays of the glory of God, pass between my face and his staff, which shielded off the blows, so that he had to stop and call for drink.’ Having refreshed himself, he resumed his assault, and yet a spiritual souffle infused Ann: ‘While he continued striking, I felt my breath, like healing balsam, streaming from my mouth and nose, which healed me, so that I felt no harm from his stroke, but he was out of breath, like one which had been running a race.’ His breath was merely human; Ann’s, divine.

      Like the Camisards, the Shakers moved by night to safe houses, chanting as they went, their leader miraculously preserved as though enveloped in some sacred bubble; when being stoned by the mob, Ann was ‘surrounded by the presence of God to such an effect that she felt joy and comfort while her unprotected enemies were utterly confused and distressed’. On another occasion, after ‘wilfully and contemptuously’ haranguing a Manchester congregation, Ann was interrogated by the church authorities who, she claimed, threatened to brand her cheeks and bore her blasphemous tongue with a hot iron – an attack which echoed the punishment meted out to James Nayler and portended Mary Ann’s paralysed lips, as if the word of God were as much an affliction as a blessing. And like Mary Ann, Ann Lee too had her would-be assassin: one Elizabeth Bishop, who declared she wished to shoot Ann with a silver bullet – only to fall under her influence and become a Shaker herself. It was as if Mary Ann’s trials had all been run before her, incarnate in Ann Lee.

      One Sunday morning the local constabulary broke in upon the Shakers’ worship and dragged Ann downstairs by her ankles, an act of humiliation in which her skirts rode up about her waist. In Manchester’s House of Correction, she was confined in a cell so small that she was unable to straighten herself. ‘She had nothing to eat or drink, except some wine and milk mixed, put into the bowl of a tobacco-pipe, and conveyed to her by inserting the stem through the key-hole once every 24 hours. This was done by James Whittaker, when a boy, whom Mother Ann brought up.’ It was a modern version of the medieval torture of ‘little ease’, in which, as Linder Sterling observes, the victim became an involuntary anchoress. Or perhaps this was a political imprisonment, an augury of hunger-striking suffragettes who used consumption and its denial as an offensive weapon, only to be punished by force-feeding with mechanical contraptions and rubber tubes.

      Freed once more, Ann declared, ‘It is not I that speak, it is Christ who dwells in me. I converse with Christ.’ She was the Elder Sister to Jesus’s Elder Brother: mortal beings to be followed, not worshipped; yet in her ‘the Christ, NOT Jesus… should make a Second Appearance’. The Shakers would reject physical resurrection as ‘utterly repugnant to both science, reason, and Scripture’. With their foundation, the Day of Judgement had occurred; they were now living ‘in the Resurrection Order, surrounded by, and in communion with, the spirits of the dead’ – a communion in which they looked to the new world for salvation.

      Over the wild Atlantic, America seemed to reflect its absence of history in its very vastness, as if the unending forests, prairies and lakes were waiting for its story to be written by the clouds scudding across its gigantic skies. This terra nullis evoked Eden before the Fall; a place in which to be reborn, as the Puritans believed, out of a state of fallen grace and back into perfection. Unseen and sublime over the horizon, this brave new world was itself a religious experiment, implicit with redemption. Even the passage there was a test of faith, just as The Tempest was inspired by a shipload of Irish rebels, gypsies, dissenters and criminals who had set off for Virginia, ‘Earth’s only Paradise’, only to founder on Bermuda, Prospero’s Island.

      Since their foundation by the Puritans, the colonies had been home to many such refugees. The Quaker William Penn had established Pennsylvania – a place of sylvan woods named after his father – with its biblical capital, Philadelphia. Mennonite and Amish communities would follow, as would a young Rosicrucian, Kelpius, who exchanged ‘millennial convictions’ with Mrs Leade in London, before taking his followers on a voyage during which the storm was calmed as Christ had done on Galilee. Led to their ‘new forest-homes beyond the mighty sea’, they set up their wooden tabernacle near Germantown in Pennsylvania, there to await the Second Coming, living communally and identifying with the woman clothed with the sun from whom they took СКАЧАТЬ