God Between Their Lips

Connecting the cultural domains of religion, sex, and work, this book encompasses aspects of feminist theory, post-structuralist materialisms, Victorian thought, and two prominent 19th-century women's novels (Charlotte Bronte's Villette and George Eliot's Middlemarch)-to understand desire between women as a form of "spiritual materialism." This book explores desire between women as a form of "spiritual materialism" in writings by Luce Irigaray, Charlotte Brontë, and George Eliot. To begin with the study's underlying paradox, "spiritual materialism": the author wishes to understand why the act of grasping materialities—a sob in the body or the body itself—has so often required a spiritual discourse; why materialism, as a way of naming matter-on-its-own-terms, and material relations that still lie submerged, hidden from view, evoke the shadowy forms we call "spiritual."