When a Woman Reads Pilgrim’s Progress

Emily loved The Pilgrim’s Progress. Many a time had she walked the straight and narrow path with Christian and Christiana — although she never liked Christiana’s adventures half as well as Christian’s. For one thing, there was always such a crowd with Christiana. She had not half the fascination of that solitary, intrepid figure who faced all alone the shadows of the Dark Valley and the encounter with Apollyon. Darkness and hobgoblins were nothing when you had plenty of company.

–from L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon

Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress has been a Christian devotional classic for several hundred years now. Christian’s allegorical adventures in getting to the Celestial City have caught the imagination of generations of Christians, offering spiritual insight and solace.

Bunyan wrote the first part of the book during his long imprisonment for violating religiously discriminatory laws. Nearly a decade after he published Part One, describing Christian’s pilgrimage, he wrote Part Two, where Christian’s wife, Christiana, retraces Christian’s journey. Part Two allows Bunyan to clarify and expand the allegory of Part One, addressing confusing matters and adding new ideas.

Like Emily of New Moon, I have never liked Christiana’s tale as much as Christian’s. Everywhere Christiana goes, she is accompanied by her children. The solitary struggle is absent. In one scene, she even stands aside and comforts her smaller children while her oldest son fights a monster for her.

This is troubling because Pilgrim’s Progress is an allegory, and the monsters usually represent sins or temptations or weapons of the devil. Allegorically speaking, portraying Christiana as standing aside while her son fights a battle for her is a deadly message, implying that a woman’s approach to spiritual struggle can be something like, “I don’t have to resist the temptation to lie; I can let my husband/son/father be honest instead of me.” I think Bunyan’s notions of femininity crippled his own allegory, resulting in symbols implying something he did not actually believe: that women do not stand before God on their own. Instead, a man stands between her and God.

I believe there is a common humanity to both sexes, and this common humanity is vastly more important than our differences. I believe this because of basic Christian doctrine: Jesus’ incarnation as human and his death and resurrection atoned for the sins of both men and women, not merely one sex alone. If our common humanity is not more important than differences of sex, then the incarnation and atonement cannot be efficacious for me. Christ in his humanity atoned for women in their humanity, a profound and unavoidable truth that should perhaps temper the fervor of some Christians’ passion for gender roles.

Despite Bunyan’s femininity flaw in the book, or maybe because of it, women for generations have found inspiration and wisdom in Pilgrim’s Progress, frequently seeing themselves more in the character of Christian than Christiana. When Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, she chose her chapter titles not from Part Two of Pilgrim’s Progress, but from Part One, and when the March girls play at scenes from the book, they choose the battles of Christian, not Christiana.

Women have always managed a kind of code-switching with literature. Women seem better able to see themselves in male characters than men can see themselves in female characters. It is probably the inevitable result of literary history. More writers were men, writing male characters, and if women were going to read, they had to be able to identify with a male character. Men have had less practice at this, simply because circumstances have not required it.

Things have changed, and it is easy to find women writers writing recognizable women characters, but I sometimes wonder if our new wealth in women literary models and gender-inclusive language means that we are losing some of our ability to code-switch. How jarring is it to read something like “All men are created equal”? Does it keep us from recognizing the truth it was meant to convey?

At the same time that gender-inclusive translations of the Bible are published, innumerable Bible studies for women have been written on the women of the Bible, with the implication that those women – who are usually minor characters – should be the examples Christian women look to, rather than the men who occupy the lion’s share of scripture. The gender-inclusive translations and the women’s study Bibles may be two sides of the same coin: a sign that we are less able to see ourselves in the other sex than women used to be.

Personally, I have decided to be completely retro about this. I will still read the adventures of Christian and find myself in it. I will still use sexist language and find myself in it. I will sing “Rise Up, Men of God” and “We Are the Sons of the Living God,” while my husband happily refers to himself as part of the “bride of Christ.” I even sometimes exhort myself with a “Stop whining and be a man.”

Even if my feminist brethren don’t understand.