Is the question mark in the title of Samara Anne Cahill’s book a clue, as it would be in a crossword puzzle? After finishing this thought-provoking survey of the role of Muslim stereotypes in shaping seventeenth- to nineteenth-century English writers’ arguments for and against the immortality of women’s souls, I read the punctuation mark as a joke or, better, an irony. Cahill is highlighting and deconstructing, as do the numerous works she analyzes, the misogynist twisting of a binary ontological system; that is, the soul is spiritual and immortal, the mind is intelligent and mortal, to create an oxymoron: an intelligent soul.
From the seventeenth century many English male theologians, philosophers, and litterateurs had argued that souls are differentially distributed so that only those that are intelligent—men’s souls—can achieve immortality. Cahill calls the claim that men’s souls are intelligent and thus immortal and women’s are not “misogynistic mortalism” (53). Feminists...
