Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase: Literary Criticism as Spiritual Autobiography

I’ve just finished rereading one of my favorite books, Karen Armstrong’s The Spiral Staircase. The book is Armstrong’s memoir about leaving her life as a Catholic nun and then struggling to re-enter the world. When I first read the book several years ago, I strongly identified with Armstrong’s story. Like Armstrong, I study religion and English literature, I spent time studying at Oxford, and I struggle to integrate myself into the world after being raised in the counter-cultural environment of Seventh-day Adventism.

The part of Armstrong’s story with which I most identified as I read her memoir this time, though, was her struggle to personalize her study of literature. She says that the the strict obedience and emotional restraint that she learned in the monastery made it impossible for her to form her own emotional and intellectual responses to literary works. The essays she wrote during and soon after her time as a nun did not represent her own thoughts about literature; instead, she describes them as “Gothic cathedrals” built of others’ ideas.

Recently, I too have had trouble personally connecting to the literature I study. And, what is more, I have wondered how I would appropriately express my personal responses to literature in the academic community, even if I wanted to. My graduate program–and I would imagine most graduate programs in literature–doesn’t exactly encourage students to talk about their personal responses to literature. Reader response theory began to broach this taboo topic, but it taught us to think more about others’ responses to literature than it did about our own responses.

And for good reason. I would be the first to agree that good literary scholarship should be grounded in an understanding of a work’s historical context and not only an anachronistic response in the present. I can see too that good literary criticism needs to thoroughly understand and respond to the remarks of other literary critics and not emerge solely from individual opinion. Moreover, I am not so idealistic as to believe that every work of literature should emotionally or spiritually resonate with every literary critic all of the time. Even given all these reasons why not to focus on personal responses, though, I still wonder if literary scholars are overlooking a potentially rich field of inquiry when they fail to acknowledge their own feelings about the works they study.

Part of the genius of The Spiral Staircase is that it in essence a work of literary criticism in the form of a spiritual autobiography. Armstrong acknowledges the need to personally connect with the literature she studies, noting that regaining the ability to emotionally connect with literature was her first step toward recovery. In one of the most moving passages in the book for me, Armstrong describes the first time she was able to hear a poem, T. S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, on more than a cerebral level:

In the Hilary term of 1973, I felt the first flicker of true recovery. I had gone to hear Dame Helen Gardner, the Merton Professor of English Literature, lecture on T. S. Eliot. She was known in the faculty as “the Dame.” It suited her grand manner and her way of waving students into an auditorium as if she were welcoming them to a garden party. That day she was lecturing on the sequence of poems which Eliot has called Ash-Wednesday….As I listened to the Dame reciting Eliot’s lines, I felt for the first time in years profoundly and spontaneously moved by the poetry. I no longer had to wait for her to interpret it, and my appreciation was no longer wholly cerebral. It was an essentially emotional, intuitive response that somehow involved my entire personality, reaching something deeply embedded within. I had thought I had lost this capacity forever, but now here it was again. There was a complete and satisfying fit between my inner and outer worlds. The poem, with its quiet, haunting accuracy, perfectly expressed my own state, and endorsed it, showing that I had not weakly abdicated from the struggle for life and health, but had somehow stumbled upon a truth about the human condition and the way men and women work. (139-140)

In the next few pages, Armstrong goes on to offer what I think is a perceptive and insightful reading of Ash-Wednesday by explaining it in terms of her own experience. In fact, the whole of Armstrong’s spiritual autobiography can be read as a critique of the poem. Armstrong uses the first section of Ash-Wednesday as a sort of epigraph to the book, and she continues to reference it throughout her memoir, even using key lines as chapter titles. By the end of the memoir, then, the reader arrives at a far deeper understanding of what could initially have been a very baffling poem, and her spiritual story becomes an illuminating reading of the poem.

I’m not sure that Armstrong’s approach is always the best approach to take in the academic setting. A graduate seminar structured around students’ spiritual stories is probably not the most effective way to teach literature. I do tend to think, though, that the most penetrating and “true” readings of literary texts are grounded in a private, emotional investment in and a personal, spiritual connection with them, and I wonder if critics would do better at least to acknowledge, if not to formally discuss, the emotional and spiritual power that literature can have for them.