Spiritual Despair and Femininity: The Absence of Redemptive Agency in Graham Greene’s Women

This paper explores the intersection of spiritual despair and femininity in Graham Greene’s fiction, specifically focusing on the marginalization and lack of redemptive agency among female characters. Drawing upon Greene’s major works, including The Heart of the Matter, Brighton Rock, and The End of the Affair, the study demonstrates how women’s spiritual suffering is frequently rendered subordinate to male narrative arcs, often reduced to symbolic elements of sacrifice, temptation, or victimhood. Through close textual analysis and engagement with feminist and theological criticism, the paper uncovers how Greene’s portrayal of women aligns with broader patriarchal frameworks found in mid-twentieth-century English literature, wherein feminine spiritual experience is depicted as passive, voiceless, and rarely afforded the complexity of moral transformation or autonomy. Philosophers such as Simone de Beauvoir and theologians like Elizabeth Johnson provide critical tools for examining how literary and religious traditions have constructed gendered hierarchies of suffering and salvation. By examining the absence of redemptive agency in Greene’s female characters, this paper underscores the need for feminist revisions of the literary canon and spiritual narratives. The research argues that Greene’s fiction, while renowned for its psychological realism and moral ambiguity, ultimately perpetuates the absence of female spiritual redemption, prompting a call for more inclusive and transformative models of feminine agency in literature.