The Little Professor

OW

And here we have the sort of book review that sets every academic's heart a-tremble (after they finish giggling, of course).   Kind of makes you want to employ a dozen fact-checkers before sending your baby out to the publisher.  (Spotted via Terry Teachout.) 

Various and sundry midsemester reflections

• This afternoon, I flirted with the idea of teaching George Eliot's Romola in one of my classes next semester.  The flirtation ceased after about five seconds, as it seemed likely to result in my immediate execution by the students.
• British Gothic seems to be progressing reasonably well; the students performed excellently on their midterms (prompting sudden visions on my part of being accused of rampant grade inflation, despite being one of the department's most notoriously evil graders...) and did nicely with their first set of papers.  I usually like to teach genre by getting the students to extrapolate conventions from the texts, as opposed to outlining conventions up front, and this group responds quickly to that approach.
• Of course, I never know how a course is actually going until I see the evaluations.  At that point, needless to say, it's too late...
• Next up: The Monk.  
• The "you know, if something in Walpole or Beckford strikes you as hilarious/ridiculous, that's because it is" lecture appears to have done its work.  A colleague and I were discussing the difficulties involved in teaching anything funny, because students tend to default to "oh, if we're studying this in class, it must be Very Serious."  I teach Sherlock Holmes (very) occasionally, and the students are equally puzzled: it's enjoyable! Can this be OK?  In my colleague's case, things went a little haywire when the students insisted on treating Alice in Wonderland with a completely straight face (although, to be honest, I suspect that a lot of Carroll's jokes no longer work without an explanation; how many students will pick up on the parodies, or even the mad tea party "etiquette"?)
• Still working away fiendishly to finish up all the revisions to Book Two and the annotated religion & lit bibliography (although, honestly, I'm going to have to ask for an extension on that one), after which I may be able to get back into more regular blogging.  That is, between bouts of annotating Robert Elsmere.   

Perhaps at some point...

At the risk of beating a dead triple-decker novel, is there any hope that the British Library, which is now doing this, will ever get around to supplying the Kindle versions of its 19th-c. digital materials that it promised a couple of years ago?  (My enthusiasm for purchasing an iPad just to get the relevant app is, I fear, low.  Even I have limits.) 

 

The Adventures of a Martyr's Bible

Much of what I write about involves popular religious fiction playing around with tropes and genres borrowed from high(er) literary culture, so it was genuinely interesting to uncover George Firth's The Adventures of a Martyr's Bible (1898)--an episodic Decadent novel that reworks the Bible it-narrative to explore problems in late-Victorian sexuality as well as religious doubt.  Contemporary reviews were mixed but intrigued; the novelist, however, appears to have done nothing else in this line.  Although the plot construction (or lack thereof) makes the novel a bit of a farrago, it is held together by its attempt to answer one of the questions plaguing nineteenth-century British Christians: after violent, state-sponsored religious persecution (as opposed to ongoing prejudice and/or discrimination) disappears in the UK, what can martyrdom possibly mean for modern Christians?  Certainly, it was possible to think about martyrdom in the imperial context--there was a decent-sized audience for narratives of missionary martyrs--but what about at home or on the Continent?  The novel's attempt to work through this problem, though, features a series of astonishingly Unfortunate Events involving murder (attempted, real), thwarted sexual desire (very explicit--no coding here), suicide, collusion, and overt misogyny.   Imagine Oscar Wilde writing for the Religious Tract Society, and you've got the general idea. 

Our narrator, Heathcote, who is somewhat ambiguously reliable, is a dilettantish philosopher in his mid-20s whose ancestor was burnt at the stake during the Reformation.  The ancestor in question, John Adam Heathcote, passed on his Bible shortly before his death, with a somewhat gnomic injunction: "'Let him take it in his hands'" (1).   This act, John Adam's descendants believe, invested the Bible with a mystical "influence" (2) that exerts its force on those who touch it: as Heathcote tells his friend the local clergyman, "'We believe that whoever touches it cannot do anything but right, according to his own best conscience, however else he may be tempted to act at the time'" (127).  The Bible is an enchanted object--even, perhaps, the repository of John Adam's essence, that which motivated him to martyrdom.  But even though John Adam died for the stereotypical Protestant reasons (private judgment, sola scriptura, etc.), his Bible's mystical power resides in its materiality.   Heathcote quite cheerfully admits to the charge that this is a form of "idolatry" (3, 174).   Virtually no-one reads this Bible; it exerts its power through physical contact, a kind of laying-on of hands.  Thus, even though the Bible circulates through the novel in much the same way as it would in a traditional Bible it-narrative, handed from one person to the next, its influence has nothing to do with its textuality, and it does not directly generate any recognizably Christian conversions.  A Bible it-narrative normally emphasizes the irresistible force of reading, of encountering God's Word and being abruptly awakened to a conviction of sin.   Reading the Bible ultimately integrates the sinner and convert into the body of the Church.  Here, though, the magic Bible does something far more violent, and even, in some ways, strangely sinister: it renders the user's actions perfectly congruent with his or her conscience, and in prompting absolutely righteous action, it often wrecks and blasts everything around it. 

And this is the problem of modern martyrdom.   In cleaving perfectly and absolutely to their consciences, the Bible's holders risk not official persecution, but social, psychic, and even physical destruction of the most shattering sort.  In the first section, our narrator and his brother Harold both fall in flaming lust with their gorgeous cousin Juliet, who literally brings death to the household in the form of an infected shawl that kills their mother and, as a result, their father.  During a late-night confrontation with Juliet, who sits ensconced in a symbolic halo of "knives and swords and daggers,"  Heathcote finds himself unable to "look straight or long at her," lest he "should have done some mad thing not of my own will" (43).   Both the intensity and the sexual terror of this moment will repeat itself through the stories that follow; characters exist on the brink of an uncontrollable desire nearly always figured in fire-and-brimstone terms.  Their only hope lies in the touch of the Bible, which forces their conscience to regroup itself against the pull of lust.  In this case, the Bible moves Heathcote to think that although her beauty might move men to sacrifice themselves "like martyrs" (46), in reality, the sheer glory of her embodiment would "turn all men to do evil to her" (45); the chaotic force of male sexual desire will rebound brutally against the object of its passion.  This insight does not save Heathcote from his passion for Juliet, but it does lead him to try for her salvation--in a discussion that, once again, involves martyrdom.  "But is anything certain enough to be a martyr about now?" Juliet wonders (47), soon revealing that she has been attracted to Roman Catholicism (thanks to a priest who, predictably, was in love/lust with her).   But while the novel is basically Protestant in orientation, and  is not especially kind to Catholicism, doctrine is not its primary focus.

Instead, Heathcote diverts our attention from theology to something else, an absolute devotion to a felt truth:

"No one is wrong who is burned. If we all sprang from dust that came alive, as the world cooled and made mistakes as it came alive, even then, since that dust in us has been divine enough to die for its mistakes, it is enough God for me. I worship it. But if that is not the whole story, there was spirit, and I worship that. It comes to the same in the end. You see, don't you? The main thing is to get burned somehow or other, or at least to believe in it."  (52)

Heathcote's solution to the problem of modern martyrdom is effectively post-sectarian.  Rejecting questions of doctrinal correctness and pseudo-martyrdom (debates over the latter of which were still going strong in the Victorian period), he instead advocates the passion for martyrdom per se, the willingness to utterly abandon the self and its petty desires in the face of the call of righteousness.  This total immolation of the self, whether literal or figurative, constitutes true moral greatness.  In this context, the technical "rightness" of "wrongness" of a martyr's acts, when considered from an institutional point of view, no longer signify.  At the same time, the rhetoric  of "burning" itself reminds us that to risk martyrdom is to risk unspeakable suffering and, of course, the limit point of all suffering: death itself.  If the  modern martyr may not die literally, s/he may do so figuratively.  And the fires may not always be easily contained.

Heathcote's willingness to martyr himself--in this case, by giving Juliet to his brother--brings no tangible reward.  Instead, Juliet tries to murder him, and his brother helps.   This sets the pattern for the rest of the narrative, in which there is no this-worldly reward for righteousness.  But it also establishes one of the novel's less pleasant strategies, which is to link female sexuality (and desire more generally) with death, chaos, and all-around general mayhem.  In the narratives that follow, we have an older woman healing Heathcote after the murder attempt, only to be rejected by him once she makes her desire clear; a prostitute blackmailing a saintly (but loathed) clergyman, then dying after he figuratively martyrs himself by offering her marriage; an increasingly insane elderly woman, also in love with (and rejected by) the clergyman; and a fashion plate married to a drunkard who commits suicide when her stepson tricks her into thinking that her husband has drowned (as a righteous act, this does seem rather counterproductive).   This is entirely woman as the temptress, potential agent of man's damnation--or, as Heathcote's brother Harold later says of Juliet, "'she was Eve, and apple, and snake all in one'" (355).  Pointedly, the only fully positive representation of a woman in the novel is Gwendolen, or "Bouncey," the prepubescent sister of one of Heathcote's friends (who is still treated as a sex object in the making, in a manner guaranteed to induce squick).  Juliet, who strings the novel together (albeit mostly offstage), never manages to grasp the concept of "burning," but eventually abandons Harold for first another man (there's a quite matter-of-fact divorce) who locks her up in his castle (!) and, ultimately, for a convent, racing away from death instead of toward it. By contrast, Mrs. Emslie, the woman whom Heathcote rejects, marries Juliet's paramour, but is motivated by the Bible to liberate Juliet from her Gothic imprisonment.    Her "burning," that is, lies in her willingness to put aside any potential sexual jealousy in order to save her husband's mistress from his brutal ministrations; it appears that the only way for a woman to catch a break in this narrative is to immolate herself in the fires of the danger she herself poses.

 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Jill Rappoport, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (OUP, 2011).  Philanthropy and other modes of giving by women in the nineteenth century, ranging from gifts to religious salvation.  I'm reviewing this for Nineteenth-Century Contexts.  (Review copy)
• K. D. M. Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity, and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700-1950 (CUP, 2009).  Studies the parish as the organizational unit of local culture, tracing its decline, fall, and replacement by other forms of belonging.  (Amazon [secondhand])
• Michael Brown et al., eds., Converts and Conversion in Ireland, 1650-1850 (Four Courts, 2005).  Essay collection analyzing conversion narratives, case studies of individual conversions, conversions to Protestantism/Catholicism, etc.  (Amazon [secondhand])

Paranoia fuel

I'm not too decline-and-fallish about the state of copyediting in academic press books; after all, I own a book from the 1950s with the most...unique use of apostrophes I've ever seen.  (We're talking errors that even my undergraduates don't make.)  But now that I've almost entirely had to abandon reading fiction in favor of literary criticism (think: deadlines; White Rabbit, quotations from), my glums have increased exponentially.  Misspelled names! Misplaced modifiers! Missing punctuation! I've always thought of the copyeditors as one of the last lines of defense against myself, but as more and more publishers outsource copyediting (or just don't really do it), it's hard not to feel a little unprotected.  And, to be blunt, copyediting has usually been one of the gatekeeping methods used to separate professional publishing from its less-respectable siblings; it's hard to keep up that position if the copyediting is being done ineptly, no? 

Temptation

While wandering through Wegmans, I noted that they had their mini greenhouses for sale again.  I was particularly tempted by the thought of buying a little greenhouse of carnivorous plants for my department office.  (Pitcher plants! Venus flytraps!)

However, I'm not entirely sure what message that would send to my students. 

Scattered musings

• Sir Walter Scott has been completely dispatched (at least for a couple of weeks, at which point I'll go back and look at him again).  Final...er, more final...revisions to Book Two now in sight.
• I think my students in the Gothic course have become convinced that you can't have Gothic without people (usually women) swooning away.  Which reminds me that my mother once asked me to recommend Victorian novels without either marriages or swooning women.  This rather substantially reduced the available pool of novels.
• Midsemester break looms upon the horizon! And I'm doing...absolutely nothing besides writing-related endeavors, although I'll probably get back to shelving. 
• My mildly radioactive cat has returned.  Despite the impressive display of rage on her return trip from Ithaca (probably untranslatable by even the standards of Star Trek's Universal Translator device), she promptly went back to her old self once she entered the house.  Ironically, that's something of a problem: Vicki is very affectionate, but I have to limit physical contact for the next couple of weeks because, well, mildly radioactive cat.  I suspect my water bill is going to double, given all the hand-washing I have to do every time I pet her.
• I was a little startled to discover that googling for Lawrence Alma-Tadema turned up, among other things, Alma-Tadema fan fiction. 

This Week's Acquisitions

• Alexander Maksik, You Deserve Nothing (Europa, 2011).  Teacher at a tony private school in Paris goes astray.  (Lift Bridge)
• Esi Edugyan, Half Blood Blues (Picador, 2012).  During WWII, an Afro-German jazz musician disappears into the concentration camps; many years later, two fellow players at a reunion try to work out what really happened.  (Amazon)
• Thomas Mallon, Watergate: A Novel (Pantheon, 2012).   Historical novel about...guess what? (Lift Bridge)
• Lisa Kasmer, Novel Histories: British Women Writing History, 1760-1830 (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2012).  Study of women's historiography in multiple genres.  I'm reviewing this for the Journal of British Studies.  (Review copy)
• Eamon Duffy, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor (Yale, 2009).  Controversial, revisionist history of the Marian persecutions.  (eBay)
• Rowan Williams, Why Study the Past? The Quest for the Historical Church (Eerdmans, 2005).  Ecclesiastical history as a mode of theology, from the Archbishop of Canterbury.  (eBay)
• Claire Tomalin, Charles Dickens: A Life (Penguin, 2011).  New biography.  (BOMC)

Cyril Westward

I've been buried under Book Two, but allow me to surface to talk about the hitherto elusive Cyril Westward: A Story of a Grave Decision (1899).  This was the sole novelistic effort (which was probably all to the good) of Anglican clergyman Henry Patrick Russell, who converted to Catholicism in 1896 (followed thereafter by his wife).¹  The novel received reasonably good reviews, although critics did gently advert to the total lack of anything bearing even the slightest resemblance to a plot.  It made enough of a splash that it went through at least a second edition, and probably counts as the most successful late-Victorian Catholic controversial novel--bearing in mind that, by the late 1890s, straightforwardly controversial fiction was losing its mainstream market lustre; certainly, Cyril Westward had far less of an impact than mid-century novels like Geraldine and Loss and Gain, which arguably had said it all before.  

Cyril Westward represents what we could call the self-confident mode in Catholic controversial literature.  As a genre, the controversial novel (as opposed to controversial fictions more generally) started on the Protestant side of the equation, and Catholic responses from the 1820s to the 1840s were often rather beholden to Protestant strategies, especially Biblical prooftexting.  By contrast, like many later Catholic controversial novels, Cyril Westward features almost no quotations from the Bible at all, except for a rerun of St. Augustine's famous Tolle, lege.  Instead, it focuses on ecclesiastical history ("'With regard to the Third Canon of the Second General Council at Constantinople...'" [118]), nearly always to demonstrate that the Pope is, indeed, the Supreme Head of the Church.   In turning to history, Catholic controversialists insisted that the evidentiary record charted only the decline and fall of Anglicanism from its Catholic original.  History reveals Catholicism's sameness and Anglicanism's difference: "Do these champions for the historic continuity of the Church of England, he thought, really imagine that their religion very much resembles the religion that the endowments were given to perpetuate?" (20)   Protestants who obsess over the late "definition" of doctrines, as the Catholic priest Father Fairfield remarks, mistake clarification for novelty (85).   This question of continuity and papal authority had become newly topical, thanks to Leo XIII's Apostolicae Curae (1896), which concluded that Anglican orders were invalid; much of the novel in fact revolves around clerical angst about this.  In other words, Cyril Westward seizes  on the papal bull to force Anglicans to face the problem of a united visible church with a single head. 

As far as the novel is concerned, disunity is the name of the Protestant game.  The "wonderful comprehensiveness of the English Church" (48) turns out to be a sign of its endemic fragmentation; in encouraging, or at least tolerating, widely-varied opinions on matters of grave theological import (baptism, the Eucharist, eternal punishment), the CofE constantly bodies forth the absence that lies at its center.  "The only people who seem to know what authority and obedience mean," sighs Cyril's cousin (and would-be love interest) Amy, "seem to be the Roman Catholics" (77).  This causes all the more angst for Cyril because he is slated to take orders and succeed his uncle to the family living. The novel consists of Cyril and various other symbolically-named characters (Seking, Broadway, Bubbler, Gaudful...) discoursing at considerable length about theology, hermeneutics, and the like.  (Cyril's last name appears to derive from his arguments against the Eastern Church as a viable alternative to Catholicism; when he converts, he heads West, not East.)  Notably, although even the Broad Church Mr. Broadway points out that there must be a "present interpreter, teacher, guide" (46) for Biblical interpretation, disallowing both sola scriptura and attempts to harken back to a mythical "Primitve Church" (46), there's little in the way of such interpretation going on.  Nor is there very much in the way of Catholic dogma, liturgy, and the like; we hear little about transubstantiation (although respect for the Eucharist crops up repeatedly), the Virgin Mary, or the necessity of confession, although all of these topics wander through.  Instead, as the title indicates, the novel is about characters seeking to make a decision. They want to rest, as the novel repeatedly puts it, and they cannot rest anywhere except where there is a power at work that transcends the anarchism of local and individual desires.    

By focusing on the quest for reasons to convert, Cyril Westward offers one more hint at its debt to John Henry Newman, whose ghost hovers over the narrative, and whose letters are treated as almost sacred documents.  Besides citing Newman's theological work repeatedly, Cyril Westward borrows Loss and Gain's satirical take on what it represents as Anglo-Catholicism's rag-bag nature (Gaudful has "the Latin Missal bound up with part of our Book of Common Prayer" [61]) and religious antiquarianism in general, along with the onslaught of clegy with comical names.  (Newman, however, had a rather better sense of humor.  Make that a sense of humor.  Russell's is...dubious.)     Where the novel departs from Loss and Gain is in its more extensive discussion of religious aesthetics, something which Newman effectively brackets (his hero finds peace in a church that looks like a brick warehouse, basically).  Anglo-Catholic aesthetics come in for particular critique; studying an Anglican church got up to look like its Catholic counterpart, the characters fault their inability to feel "a sense of awe" (73).  Anglicans, in other words, have no sense of the true beauty of holiness; their churches are fundamentally bric-a-brac. 

Ultimately, however, reasons matter less than the gift of grace, a point the novel makes with the deathbed conversion of Cyril's scapegrace cousin Robert.  (Robert does find ample time to speechify before his death, despite being in agonizing pain.)  Robert admits to his sister that "I have taken so much of my time to come to a decision" (226), invoking the novel's main theme, but the narrator reminds us later that this was through the "Divine Compassion" (228).  Given that Robert has spent most of the novel snarking, therefore supplying what little entertainment the book deigns to provide, it's exasperating to find him killed off instead of Cyril.  But the point is clear: "'Who'd have thought of his outstripping us?'" says Cyril's friend and would-be fellow Catholic Probyn.  "'Happy Robert! Verily God's ways are wonderful!'" (231)  Even though the novel is loaded with angsty seeking after truth, it is Robert, who has spent the shortest amount of time seeking, who joyously gives up himself to God.  By contrast, Cyril and Mr. Seking, who feel weighted with temporal concerns--Seking, in particular, will lose his living and his livelihood, potentially shipwrecking his family--have, in a sense, used their ongoing theological debates as a means of evading grace.  After all, it turns out that the grave decision is precisely one that cannot be made by the self alone...

 

¹ See W. Gordon Gorman, Converts to Rome: A Biographical List of the More Notable Converts to the Roman Catholic Church in the United Kingdom during the Last Sixty Years (London: Sands and Co., 1910), 240-41.