The Little Professor

The Jewess, A Tale of Our Own Time

Although Jewish conversion narratives are an ancient form indeed, and Jewish conversion-to-Catholicism novels appeared on the Continent, all of the well-known (er, to people like me) Anglo-American Jewish conversion novels are overwhelmingly Protestant.  This makes The Jewess, A Tale of Our Own Time (1867) something of a curiosity.  It went through what appears to have been a grand total of one printing with the Catholic publisher P. O'Shea, then vanished from the planet.   In part, the novel appears to have been intended as advertising copy for the then-new Sisters of Our Lady of Sion (Notre Dame de Sion), located in Ein Karem. 

Unlike one of the better-known (less unknown?) English-language Catholic examples of the Jewish conversion narrative, "A Brief History of Weglij Hockwer, A Jewess of Constantinople,"¹ The Jewess does not involve visionary dreams, abusive parents (a standard in Protestant texts as well), or, indeed, any dramatic personal trauma.  However, it does offer a conventional supersessionist reading of the relationship between Judaism and Catholicism, figured in part by the transition from the wealthy Jewish patriarch to his converted daughter.  As in many other conversion novels, the wealthy father/child convert dynamic deliberately echoes The Merchant of Venice, although here the father is not otherwise Shylockian, and the relationship never becomes cruel.  Gonzalez of Evora, the father, is a "living receptacle of all the Hebraic traditions; keyless symbols, aimless ceremonies, phantoms of the past, which are not yet scattered by the full light of day" (6).  The "problem" of Judaism, as the novel understand it, rests in part with its reduction to pure, non-signifying form--the usual Protestant critique of Catholicism, as it happens--and in part with its status as weird Gothic revenant, haunting the Christian present.   Where Gonzalez seamlessly embodies Judaism's pure formalism, however, his daughter Ada suffers from an uneasy self-consciousness that her religion consists of "mechanical prayers" (9) that bring her no nearer to God.   Ada, in other words, senses--although she cannot quite articulate it yet (10)--that her religion constitutes a hollowed-out anachronism; she realizes the possibility of a spiritual difference, but does not yet understand the historical or theological implications of that difference.

As in many Catholic conversion narratives, Ada's route to belief proceeds through a series of well-defined steps: encountering an exemplary lay believer; becoming initially convinced through study and conversation; and finally receiving tutelage and baptism from a priest.  Unlike a Protestant narrative, in which Bible-reading would be emphasized, Ada's change of heart derives primarily from her charitable dealings with the impoverished, dying Cornelia Joonckere and her son, Floris.  As we will eventually discover, one of Ada's family's ancestors had been rewarded for services rendered with the Joonckere family property, even though accepting this payment contradicted the Decalogue (31); Ada's providential encounter with the Joonckeres, then, atones for a sin at the heart of her own family's prosperity, restores Floris to material comforts, and finally results in her own salvation.  In contrast to the Gonzalez family's formalist rites and props, the Joonckere household's religious statues, devotional books, and rosaries all appear pregnant with meaning--a meaning that Ada slowly decodes during the months that she spends caring for Cornelia.  (Indeed, her interaction with Cornelia itself is a change from her father's tribalist charitable practices.)   Cornelia's love for Christ teaches Ada to reread the Bible typologically and prophetically (26), so that her conversion derives not from a close reading of the New Testament, but a newly sympathetic understanding of Christian hermeneutics.  (The emphasis on sentiment in this arrangement is part and parcel of the novel's gendered account of religious change, with the paternal rule of Law giving way to the maternal rule of Love.) 

Ada's final jump to conversion turns out to be channeled through another Jew--the Virgin Mary, "the Virgin of Israel, the mother 'mid thorns" (36).  Invoking Mary specifically in the context of converting Jews has centuries of precedent (and it also crops up in the Weglij Hockwer narrative).²   Mary's intercession in the chapel is apparently successful, for Ada immediately encounters the priest who will officially tutor her in Catholic doctrine.  Moreover, Mary symbolically replaces Ada's long-dead mother, just as the priest will now take over the spiritual authority originally associated with her father.  In any event, her turn to the "study of religion, habitual prayer, and above all the exercise of charity" (39)--a Protestant novelist, already grouchy about the Virgin Mary, would continue grousing here--makes her an exemplar to both Jews and Christians, and, along the way, obviously makes her conversion clear to her father.  Unlike many conversion novels, this one emphasizes the father's loving agreement with his daughter's decision; as the Jewish father willingly gives his daughter up to Christianity on his deathbed, the narrative implies, so too must Judaism resign itself to its own obsolescence.  The narrative enacts this shift in Ada's decision to join Our Lady of Sion, where she will join them in "pray[ing] for the conversion of the Jews, wherein they try to love God as much as possible, in order to repair the crimes of that unfaithful nation [...]" (44).  Ada finds the true end to Jewish "exile" in Christianity, and enters the "land of her forefathers" (45) in order to re-home the Jews, as it were. 

¹ Which may or may not be fiction; I don't think anybody knows. 

² E.g., Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 160.  Adrienne Boyarin's Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2010) discusses the significance of the Virgin's Jewishness in a more restricted context, but also argues for the importance of identifying Mary as a Jew. 

Short on Longsword

Once upon a time, I heard a rumor (in comments on this very blog, I do believe) that somebody was planning to do a scholarly edition of Thomas Leland's Longsword, Earl of Salisbury (1762).  Did this ever come to fruition, or did the project just lapse? 

The Frankenstein of the Next Century

Ever since the time I came across a late-Victorian book review that argued that Mrs. Humphry Ward would be remembered once George Eliot was rightly forgotten, I have been rather chary about predicting the canonical afterlife of any particular author.  As I've said before, after about a century or so, there's a sudden shaking-out of formerly well-regarded authors and texts (Anne Manning's Married and Maiden Life of Mary Powell, afterwards Mistress Milton, for example, described in one of its Everyman editions as a "minor classic," only to magically vanish into obscurity).  However, this never stopped anyone from playing the survival game. 

This Metafilter thread, though, reminded me that there's an entire subcategory of the canon that has everything to do with an exceptionally powerful idea, narrative drive, and/or character--a story so compelling, for whatever reason, that its technical and stylistic flaws, if any, sink into insignificance.    So, if you like playing the game:  what pop novels are going to survive--horror fiction, SF, mysteries, westerns, the works? What's going to be the next Frankenstein, or Dracula, or Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Who will be the next Arthur Conan Doyle or Mary Elizabeth Braddon?

I'll start by making off with the super-ultra-obvious example.  I think that over a century from now, we will still read at least some Stephen King: Carrie and the novellas comprising Different Seasons.  Or, at least, two of the novellas from Different Seasons--"Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" (filmed as The Shawshank Redemption) and "The Body" (filmed as Stand by Me, the subject of the Metafilter thread above).   Carrie, for example, evokes the adolescent persecution of anyone "different" in ways that resonate well beyond the novel's immediate small-town setting; I suspect that, like Dracula, which it also resembles structurally, Carrie will stand up to considerable twisting and appropriation. More to the point, it's effective horror that makes good use of its narrative form (the "memoirs," newspaper fragments, straightforward third-person omniscient narrative, and so forth). 

Your votes? Bonus points for anything that might not have a NYT bestseller list-type audience now, but you think nevertheless could have real staying power.  

This Week's Acquisitions

• Eaton Stannard Barrett, The Heroine; Or, Adventures of a Fair Romance Reader (Valancourt, 2011).  One of a number of novels--including The Female Quixote, Northanger Abbey, and Romance Readers and Romance Writers--satirizing women who interpret reality through the lens of romantic or Gothic fiction.   Originally published in 1813.   More about the extremely short-lived Barrett here. (Amazon)
• Hilary Mantel, An Experiment in Love: A Novel (Picador, 2007).  Catholic girl matures, or tries to, in 60s England.  (Lift Bridge)
• Lynn S. Neal, Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction (North Carolina, 2006).  Study of how evangelical women readers actually interpret Christian romances; a religiously-inflected sequel of sorts to Janice Radway's famous Reading the Romance.  (Review copy)
• Laura Mooneyham White, Jane Austen's Anglicanism (Ashgate, 2011).  What it says: a study of Austen's work through the lens of Anglican doctrine and ritual.  (Review copy)
• Anthony Paul Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350-1500 (Cambridge, 2010).  Different manifestations of anti-Jewish sentiment and their intersections in medieval culture.  (Review copy)
• Raymond D. Tumbleson, Catholicism in the English Protestant Imagination: Nationalism, Religion, and Literature, 1660-1745 (Cambridge, 2009).  Anti-Catholicism in literature, politics (e.g., the Popish Plot) and theology.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Virginia Raguin, ed., Catholic Collecting, Catholic Reflection 1538-1850 (Catholic University of America, 2006).  Art-historical approach to Catholic self-narration, focusing on the role of sacred objects and texts.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Chiara de Capoa, Old Testament Figures in Art (Getty, 2004).  Part of the J. Paul Getty Museum's handy series on how to recognize and interpret religious iconography.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Why is Casaubon in favor of Catholic Emancipation?

Here's a question I put to my graduate seminar earlier this week. 

While joshing Mr. Brooke about his friendly relations with Casaubon, Mrs. Cadwallader snarks that

"I see you have had our Lowick Cicero here [...] I suspect you and he are brewing some bad politics, else you would not be seeing so much of the lively man. I shall inform against you: remember you are both suspicious characters since you took Peel's side about the Catholic Bill. I shall tell everybody that you are going to put up for Middlemarch on the Whig side when old Pinkerton resigns, and that Casaubon is going to help you in an underhand manner: going to bribe the voters with pamphlets, and throw open the public-houses to distribute them. Come, confess!" (Middlemarch I.i.6)

Peel's ultimate support for Emancipation was, of course, one of the great political flip-flops of the Victorian period.  Now, Mr. Brooke's decision to follow Peel (and, we're told, to let the local Roman Catholics erect a chapel on his land) emerges from no great philosophical devotion to reform, modernization, or anything else.    As he explains at the fateful dinner with Casaubon, "the Reformation either meant something or it did not, that he himself was a Protestant to the core, but that Catholicism was a fact; and as to refusing an acre of your ground for a Romanist chapel, all men needed the bridle of religion, which, properly speaking, was the dread of a Hereafter" (I.i.2).  This typically vague and self-contradictory chain of reasoning (what "something" does the Reformation mean? what precisely is the relationship between "fact" and toleration for a purportedly committed Protestant in 1829?) finally issues in a purely utilitarian view of religion as a means of social control, with Protestantism and Roman Catholicism having identical effects.  (So much for the Reformation, one takes it.)  Unlike Dorothea, Lydgate, Will, and, indeed, Casaubon, Brooke rarely registers the deep historical discomfort that permeates the narrative; here, he seems not to understand the cultural and religious seismic shift of which he has made himself a part.  (It's no accident that Eliot begins the novel shortly after the bill passes--this is a book about the coming of Victorianism, so to speak.) 

But why does Casaubon support Emancipation? Mr. Cadwallader comments that Casaubon's position was "unexpected" (I.i.8), which certainly doesn't help matters; it does, however, link him (and probably Brooke as well) to Peel.  There's nothing in Casaubon's behavior elsewhere in the novel to indicate that he finds politics particularly interesting, and there's less than nothing that would lead us to suspect him of hidden liberal or pro-reform leanings.  The most obvious temptation, then, is to read Casaubon's startling pro-Emancipation stance in the light of his problematic relationship to both historical thinking and modernity (and, possibly, to what is clearly a failed vocation as an Anglican clergyman).    Casaubon's lack of interest in Emancipation's political ramifications, for that matter, looks like another symptom of his notoriously "dead" historical narrative, which remains shattered in permanently disconnected fragments.   In a way, he might be the flip side of Mr. Brooke: Brooke begins by alluding to history (the Reformation), then jettisons it for pragmatic reasons; Casaubon, who "live[s] too much with the dead" and suffers, like Dorothea, from symbolic bad vision (I.i.2), appropriates the topic for yet another one of his endless tract productions. 

 

 

 

Syllabus-ing

As I just mentioned, I'm working on a Victorian poetry seminar for the fall semester.  This is a last-minute course correction, as it were--a colleague is going on leave, and so my own schedule got swapped around a bit.  We haven't had a dedicated graduate-level course in 19th-c. poetry in years (only mixed grad-undergrad sections), so I felt that offering one was something of a priority. 

Victorian poetry anthologies seem to be in an  odd state.  The Oxford and Penguin anthologies of Victorian poetry are great to have on the shelf, but not helpful if you want students to do in-depth work on any particular poet.  The big Collins & Rundle, which would work in a dedicated graduate seminar, has gone out of print, which leaves us with little Collins & Rundle--and that needs far too much supplementation for my purposes.  Ditto the Blackwell anthologies, where once again, the big ones are out of print (both the general Victorian poetry anthology & the women poets anthology),  and the small ones are primarily suited for undergraduate courses.  The recent Anthem anthologies look interesting, but they're priced way out of student reach.  (And faculty reach, for that matter.) 

Right now, my book order looks something like this:

• Robert Browning, James F. Loucks (ed.), Andrew Stauffer (ed.), Robert Browning's Poetry (Norton Critical Editions)
  
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Julia Bolton Holloway (ed.), John Bolton (ed)., Aurora Leigh and Other Poems (Penguin Classics) 
• Alfred Tennyson, Adam Roberts (ed.), The Major Works (Oxford)
• Alfred Tennyson, J. M. Gray (ed.), Idylls of the King (Penguin Classics)
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, Catherine Phillips (ed.), The Major Works (Oxford)
• Cecil Y. Lang, ed., The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Circle (Chicago)
• Lisa Rodensky, ed., Decadent Poetry (Penguin)

I will still have to break out some online sources (and/or old-fashioned handouts) for Arnold and the Brontes, but the Lang has everything I want to teach from the Rossettis & Co., and Rodensky has a nice selection of the 1890s poets.  As it stands, the class "tilts" a bit to the Brownings and Tennyson. Right now, though, the course is primarily a  survey; the order may change in the next few days if I decide to tighten up the focus (narrative poetry, for example).  Definitely no The Ring and the Book, though--that really needs to be its own course!

ETA: An intrepid commenter points out that even though Amazon is allergic to the full Collins & Rundle, Broadview actually still has it in stock.  That certainly simplifies matters! I can order C&R plus Aurora Leigh and Idylls. 

Exasperated observation for the day

There isn't a single scholarly edition of Matthew Arnold's poetry available? Not one?  Not even from Everyman?

ETA: Penguin has also let Emily Bronte's poetry go out of print, it seems. 

ETA P.S.: Trying to put together a graduate seminar on Victorian poetry here. 

This Last Two Weeks' Acquisitions (Victorian edition)

(There was a bit of a deluge chez LP's mailbox, thanks to the ongoing bibliographical essay.  These are just the Victorian-related works that appeared.)

• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Henry Dunbar, ed. Anne-Marie Beller (Victorian Secrets, 2010).  Reprint of Braddon's anti-death penalty novel, first published in 1864.  (Amazon)
• Andrew Maunder, ed., Varieties of Women's Sensation Fiction, 1855-1890 (Pickering & Chatto, 2004).  Scholarly edition of novels by Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, Mary Cecil Hay, Florence Marryat, Dora Russell, Felicia Skene, and Ellen Wood, plus a volume of critical responses.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-Century Literature and Religion: An Introduction (Oxford, 2007).  What it says on the tin: covers major religious disputes/topics & their ramifications for contemporary literature.  (Review copy)
• Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799-1917: Palestine and the Question of Orientalism (Oxford, 2005).  Analyzes popular travel narratives, fictions, and other representations of Jerusalem; revises Edward Said.  (Review copy)
• Lynda Palazzo, Christina Rossetti's Feminist Theology (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). Critiques some common assumptions about the sources of Rossetti's Anglo-Catholicism.  (Review copy)
• Dinah Roe, Christina Rossetti's Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).  Analyzes Rossetti's expressly religious works.  (Review copy)
• Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore, and Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).  Rereads all of Wilde's work in terms of its engagement with Roman and Anglo-Catholicism.  (Review copy)
• Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).  Focuses on Anglo-Catholic and Roman Catholic culture.  (Review copy)
• Carolyn Oulton, Literature and Religion in Mid-Victorian England: From Dickens to Eliot (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).  Survey of how major novelists responded to contemporary religious debates.  (Review copy)
• Karl Ashley Smith, Dickens and the Unreal City: Searching for Spiritual Significance in Nineteenth-Century London (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).  Dickens' theology as it relates specifically to urban life.  (Review copy)
• Elaine Lomax, The Writings of Hesba Stretton (Ashgate, 2009).  Analyzes the work of the exceptionally popular religious novelist.  (Review copy)
• Marlene Tromp, Altered States: Sex, Nation, Drugs, and Self-Transformation in Victorian Spiritualism (SUNY, 2007).  Emphasizes the discourses surrounding mediums.  (Review copy)
• Mary Elizabeth Hotz, Literary Remains: Representations of Death and Burial in Victorian England (SUNY, 2010).  The afterlife of corpses, so to speak.  (Review copy)

Also not dead (or, addenda to a post on doing research at a teaching institution)

I have a lighter load than Dr. Crazy (3/3 instead of 4/4), but what she says still applies.  To add:

1) Although I wouldn't quite say that "I seriously don’t care where I publish," it's true that the Fear and Loathing of Book Collections that appears to be prevalent in humanities departments at a number of research universities doesn't apply here.  I like book collections: I can come up with a proposal for an article (doing that right now, as it happens) targeted for a book with a very specific focus, and then work on something that I know will appear (er, eventually).  My college is happy that I'm publishing, and isn't particularly worried about publishing in PMLA vs. publishing in an edited collection.   

2) I suspect that I would have a very difficult time doing my type of work at a research-oriented institution.  I'm not theory-oriented and usually work on literary-historical topics that a) don't interface well with the canon and b) often require me to spend more time with the history of religion than with literary criticism.  (If I were a medievalist, this wouldn't be so much of a problem.  But I'm a Victorianist.)  Moreover, as I've said here before, Victorian religious fiction frequently resists theoretical approaches developed on canonical texts (narratology being a notable exception). 

3) Dad the Emeritus Historian of Graeco-Roman Egypt, whose CV runs over thirty pages long despite spending his career at Cal State Los Angeles, has more than once argued that scholars at teaching schools need to be more attentive to the process of developing a recognizable scholarly niche.  Now, granted that my niche is not precisely what he had in mind (come to think of it, when I started, it wasn't precisely what I had in mind), but it does compensate for some of the problems attendant on being at a teaching school (lack of prestige, less to no money, less impressive resources available, etc.).  

A reading recommendation

Professor Calvo-Goller might wish to contemplate Justine Larbalestier on the evergreen topic of poor reviews.

(Disclaimer: I have yet to be on the receiving end of this kind of dismissive review.    If one ever wanders across my path, I'm sure that I'll wind up wailing long-distance  to my parents, or something.  I also try not to write such reviews--but there are times when, in fact, some unpleasant things need to be said, like "this book will only be intelligible to those who have completed Advanced Xenolinguistics at the Vulcan Science Academy," or whatever.  OK, not said like that, but you know what I mean.  Pace Prof. Calvo-Goller, the author is not necessarily the best arbiter of whether or not a review is "fair.")