The Little Professor

"The Ritualists"

I don't usually acquire works of one page in length, but I made an exception for this curiosity: Mary Frances Tupper's poem "The Ritualists.  'Beware! They are Fooling Thee."  Here's what it looks like:

Although you can't tell from the front, the page appears to have been once glued into a scrapbook along one edge. 

What is this, you ask? Tupper was a very minor poet whose most significant production was a volume of poetry published with her sisters; she does not appear to have committed many other public crimes against verse that I can easily discover on short notice.  She inherited her poetic tendencies from her father, a rather notorious minor poet named Martin Farquhar Tupper. Somehow, probably via Tupper pater, Mary Frances' effusion came to the attention of the even more notorious bibliomaniac Sir Thomas Phillipps, whose book- and manuscript-collecting habits make me look positively parsimonious.  And Phillipps maintained his own press, called the Middle Hill Press, which he generally used for publications related to his own massive collection.  However, Phillipps also had a loathing for all things smacking of Catholicism, and was not averse to printing anti-Catholic (of both the Roman and Anglo varieties) diatribes by other people, whether in verse or prose. 

Clunkiness aside, the poem is primarily remarkable for compressing a number of anti-Catholic and anti-Anglo-Catholic stereotypes into a very small space.  As is often the case in such texts, Jesuits enter in even when there is no particular reason for them to do so.  Tupper attacks the more "tolerant" reader's trust in Anglo-Catholic surfaces, repeatedly insisting on the real, concealed conspiratorial agenda: the "stamp of Rome" (the mark of the Beast?) is interior, "on the heart"; liturgical novelties conceal a Biblical "snake" in their faux Eden; everything is merely outward performance.  The ventriloquized Ritualist, sneaking into the poem in stanza three, endangers England's Protestant fabric by normalizing Catholic behaviors (much as his language, which is not marked off by quotation marks, initially appears to belong to the poet herself).  And Tupper concludes with one of the most common rallying cries against all things Catholic--the memory of the Reformation martyrs.  To oppose Catholicism means emulating the souls who died in the sixteenth century; by extension, of course, tolerating Catholicism in any form also means running the gothic risk of resuscitating "bloody Mary."  There's a bit of rhetorical sleight-of-hand going on: the anti-Ritualist casts modern English Protestants in the spirit of the Reformation martyrs, except that anti-Ritualism is a preemptive protest intended to prevent such martyrdoms from recurring.  Ideally, that is, the English anti-Ritualist shows good Protestant spirit and keeps her head at the same time.   

The Case of Richard Meynell: Three Thoughts

1.  Mrs. Humphry Ward's The Case of Richard Meynell (1911) is a direct sequel (as opposed to the Spiritual Successor of The History of David Grieve) to Robert Elsmere, and most readers consider it a comparative (drastic) failure.  Richard himself is part of the problem: the novel is effectively Modernist hagiography, with Richard's flaws amounting to a dark night of the soul instead of three-dimensional characterization.  Moreover, at a technical level, the plotting is pretty terrible--William S. Peterson accurately describes its melodramatic aspects, including illegitimacy and bigamy, as a "stagey, lurid backdrop" to the novel's more serious theological concerns--and runs the risk of leaving readers with intellectual whiplash.¹  However, given my interests, what strikes me about the novel is that it's a far more conventional controversial novel than is Robert Elsmere.  There's more speechifying masquerading as dialogue (Victorian controversial fiction usually aims for monologism), more characters embodying specific theological positions, more heavily-weighted symbolic historical change.   That being said, its attempt to articulate a post-Protestant Reformation, waged purely in language instead of physical violence, suggests the extent to which the novel engages with its ardent predecessors.²   (To that end, the novel features some symbolically decayed architecture, in which busts of William and Mary guard a defunct Abbey--hinting, that is, that both Catholic and Protestant establishments have now collapsed.)

2.  To a contemporary reader, the most striking thing about the novel is its case against bringing "personalities" into the discussion of theological or political issues.  For a good chunk of the plot, one of Richard's opponents, Henry Barron, is trying to undo Richard's influence by forwarding a semi-accurate story about the illegitimacy of Richard's ward, Hester Fox-Wilton.  HB accuses RM of being Hester's father (it's actually one of RM's relatives), and circulates his charges in order to invalidate the Modernist position--clearly, HB argues, "'your infidel teaching has led to its natural results'" (451)--on the grounds of hypocrisy.  Progressive theology implies fatally flawed moral character; individual hypocrisy invalidates an entire social movement.  HB is Not a Good Guy.  Instead, the novel argues, theological debate needs to remain in the realm of ideas, divorced from the personal character of such-and-such a position's adherents.  Its authentically righteous conservative figures (of whom there are quite a few) are all disgusted by such scandal-mongering.  And yet, The Case of Richard Meynell wants to have its cake and eat it: the only way to secure this split between private character and public discourse is by making RB's criminal son responsible for circulating the bulk of the accusations.  Bad speech turns out to be produced by a bad speaker.  (This goes back to the melodrama I mentioned earlier.)

3.  However, the episode with HB highlights one connection with Robert Elsmere, which is Mrs. Ward's interest in storytelling's relationship to belief.   HB temporarily gains traction because his story is, for the moment, so very powerful.  Robert spends a good chunk of his novel retelling classic (and relatively contemporary) novels or historical narratives, inviting his listeners to develop morally and spiritually through emotional identification with an unfolding story's characters.  His practice sanctifies fiction without demanding that fiction be dogmatic.  Both the act of storytelling and the narrative process turn out to be integral to Robert's understanding of a fully humane religion: his new religious faith is important inasmuch as it offers a new plot, a new way of thinking about Christ in story.  RM thinks about Modernism in a similar way: the new Biblical criticism releases a Christ "'stripped of Jewish legend, and Greek speculation, and medieval scholasticism; moving simply and divinely among the ways of His Jewish world, a man among men'" (621-22).  (Unlike Robert, however, RM wants to stay within the CofE.)  Modernism produces the Christ of realist fiction, as it were. 

¹ William S. Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976), 198. 

² Although, as Judith Wilt points out, it's still "violence" of a sort; see Behind Her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Arnold Ward (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 78.

Religious novel live-blogging: St. Dorothy's Home

Once more unto...the really quite terrible religious novel.  Granted, the horror is not quite as bad as what can be found lurking ominously in my sidebar, but still.

We'll see how long it takes before I go scrambling for some ballet.  Or maybe the new Morse episode; I haven't watched it yet.

8:39 PM: Uh-oh, a quotation from Revelation.  Our novelist is starting to go apocalyptic on us.

8:47 PM: Is a "smart mortuary chapel" anything like a smart classroom, I wonder?

8:47 PM: (Yes, I know what "smart" means here.  Just work with me on this, OK?)

8:56 PM: It wouldn't be a controversial novel without a lonnnnnng list of everything wrong with Roman Catholiciszzzzzzzzzz....

*jerks awake*

Where was I?

8:57 PM: *gulp* Another scary illustration.  Is this some sort of undead priest? Seriously, check out the eyes, staring into the poor maiden's soul:

9:01 PM: If only "perversion" meant something more interesting.

Excuse me while I pet this cat, who is trying to break into one of my desk drawers.

9:15 PM: National stereotypes ahoy!

9:17 PM: Apocalypsizing again.

I could do with some bad puns right about now.  As it stands, we've just got bad allegorical names ("Poundtext").

9:22 PM: It's the Dialect Chainsaw Massacre, Part XIII.

9:23 PM: Whoo-hoo! Fight! Fight! Fight! This is a bit more action than we generally get in these novels.

9:24 PM: Alas, our novelist is about to become Very Serious, which he carries off about as well as he does humor.  Time for a inset conversion narrative.

9:27 PM: Yet more fisticuffs.

9:29 PM: And now yet more national stereotypes, Irish edition.

9:29 PM: I was wishing for puns, wasn't I? Careful what you wish for, etc.

9:34 PM: I appear to have missed some integral plot point, possibly because I was thinking about chocolate.

9:35 PM: BRAIN FEVER! Because of lobster.  And Puseyites.

Let this be a lesson to you all: Puseyism and lobster are two tastes that do not go together.

9:39 PM: Ooooh, more clerical plagiarism.  Where's Turnitin when you need it?

9:40 PM: Oops, the curate was about to deliver the same sermon as his rector.  This reminds me of the time one of my colleagues had two students turn in the same paper.

I think I'm trying to "relate" to this novel.  Oh, dear.  Excuse me while I look for some convenient ballet.

10:03 PM: Twenty-three minutes of ballet later, I return.  I shall stick it out to the bitter end.

That is, if the thought of dark chocolate with sea salt doesn't distract me again. 

10:06 PM: James Bond meets anti-Catholic controversial fiction! It's a secret agent from Propaganda! (Agent 666?)

10:08 PM: Apparently, secret agents from Propaganda are quick-change artists, capable of transforming themselves into septuagenarians at a moment's notice.  This is the sort of useful information one really looks for from controversial fiction.

Time to pace around the room, pondering the dark and mysterious secrets of the universe.  Or, barring that, my academic vocation.

10:17 PM: Not content with dialectizing, the author now tries drunken dialectizing.  That is, the character is drunk, not the author.

I hope.

10:19 PM: There are so many hyphens in this paragraph that it looks like Emily Dickinson wrote it after chugging three Red Bulls.

10:23 PM: THE PUNS THE PUNS MAKE THEM STOP

I'd continue, but the cat has suddenly taken over my office chair.

10:40 PM: The cat is still on the office chair, but we shall make do.

Incidentally, if my readers are unclear on this novel's plot, they may rest assured that that's because it doesn't appear to actually have a plot, anything resembling a plot, a simulacrum of anything resembling a plot, or, indeed, the representation of a simulacrum of anything resembling a plot.

10:44 PM: There's a Mr. Doolittle here.  No relationship to the doctor of the same name, I'm sure.

10:45 PM: I SAID STOP WITH THE PUNS ALREADY

The author doesn't seem to be listening to me, despite the all-caps.

10:46 PM: "Nimrod Wildman"?!

10:50 PM: The Dissenters are spouting prooftexts again.

10:51 PM: Wow, the phrase "Popish plot" just appeared.

10:54 PM: I don't know about you, but I find that having an entire box of prooftexts dropped on my foot really hurts.

10:54 PM: But then again, no puns in the last few pages.  Perhaps the author has started paying attention to me?

10:56 PM: "So many other parochial incidents have been brought before us that 'St. Dorothy's Home' and its inmates have somewhat been lost sight of."  It's always so refreshing when an author owns up to his utter incompetence.  If only it happened more often.   

10:58 PM: I'm an English professor.  I don't do the numbers thing.  What is a word problem doing in my controversial novel? 

11:02 PM: Ah, the old "I'm dying, so I will now spout theology for several pages" routine.

11:06 PM: The main character...died? Just like that?

To be clear, it's not the main character who was spouting theology.

11:07 PM: And he's buried, with plenty of snark at Puseyites &c.  That's...that's it? This is the end? Pfffft.  This squib isn't just damp; it's been left to soak outside in a massive rainstorm.

Incidentally, the only novel advertised at the end of the book is this novel, which seems terribly redundant, somehow. 

Religious novel live-blogging: St. Dorothy's Home: A Tale for the Times

7:47 PM: The title page reads "English Protestant Printing & Publishing Society."  It's always helpful when the publisher's name tells you exactly what you need to know about the novel to follow.  Reduces the agony of suspense, and all that.

7:49 PM: A quick Googling suggests that despite the publisher's grandiose title, St. Dorothy's Home may have been its sole production (at least, under this name).  Bode well, this does not.

7:51 PM: And, to make matters even worse, the novel got a good review from the Bulwark.  The Bulwark was about as good a judge of literary talent as I am of the latest advances in astrophysics. 

Note that I have yet to make it past the title page.

7:53: The table of contents rhymes.  Rhymes, I say:

A Weary Pilgrimage, to Visit Dead Men’s Shrines, has much Merit in it, say Puseyite Divines-—Cardinal Jollity—Priestly Morality—Wesleyan Malignity—Prayers for the Dead most Desirable, if Anglicans would prove Reliable—Curates Negative Deflection from Rectorial Direction

I don't know if I should salute, take a stiff drink, or undergo a conversion experience to canonical literature.

8:00 PM: I could be wrong, but it seems to me that quoting Macbeth to describe an town full of innocently dozing villagers is...overblown. 

Still, I've finally made it to the first page, after being stunned senseless by the rhyming TOC.

Oh look, a convenient interruption in the form of a phone call.  My brains are safe for at least the next few minutes.

8:13 PM: Phone call over.  I guess this means I need to get beyond the first page.

Or I could frantically search for ballet videos to watch on YouTube.

8:19 PM: I slowly drag myself back to St. Dorothy's Home, only to find the author misquoting Edward Young.  Still on the first page, incidentally.

8:20 PM: I arrive on page two, only to find myself battered by a terrible pun ("besides holding sundry livings, the soul charge of which he delegated to hungry curates").  Italicizing the pun is such a nice touch; we might miss it otherwise.

8:22 PM: Snoreham Cathedral?! 

8:24 PM: I'm defeated by the doggerel verse on p. 3, which doesn't appear to be an actual quotation from anything.  If it is, it's been mangled, masticated, and manipulated beyond hope of reconstruction.

8:26 PM: Not another pun.

8:27 PM: Death by Tractarian sermon, eh? That's...um...different.

8:29 PM: YEEEEAAAAARRRRGH! This illustration of John Henry Newman is going to haunt my nightmares for the next seven years, at least.  Why does he look like a human-fish-parrot mutation? Is he some bizarre offshoot of Cthulhu?

8:32 PM: We've moved from Snoreham to Boreham, thereby cementing my estimate of the author's originality on the satirical names front.

8:33 PM: Dubbing a church "Nothingmore" (i.e., Littlemore) is a trifle obvious, don't you think?

8:36 PM: Apparently, there was a coffin controversy in the 1860s.  I can now rest easy, knowing that I've learned something useful from this experience.

8:38 PM: I see we're going to be banging on about the dangers of confession.

8:39 PM: Annnnnd the local medievalist sculptor is named...Chizzel.

8:40 PM: Which goes along with a Protestant preacher named Esau Bones.

8:41 PM: Whose curate bears the moniker of Narcissus Smiles. 

8:43 PM: Lord Byron seems awfully inappropriate in a novel of this type.  Then again, perhaps the novelist was under the mistaken impression that he was writing a Protestant Don Juan.

I feel a desperate urge for food, no doubt brought on by the draining effect of exposure to lousy puns.

8:47 PM: Now that I've been fed, I can once again face my punishment.

Uh-oh--it's contagious.

8:49 PM: This rebellious sister (as in Anglican sisterhood, not sibling) makes her case by endlessly spouting Shakespeare, which is one way of doing it, I suppose.

8:51 PM: Two pages have gone mysteriously missing from this Google scan.  Presumably, whoever was operating the scanner understood how dangerous this book would be to my psychological well-being, and therefore reduced the length of the torment.

8:56 PM: Is it absolutely necessary for the narrator to burst out into quotations every five seconds? I feel like I'm reading a Wikipedia article overdosed on "citation needed."

8:59 PM: On one page, we collect "Dryasdust," "Gabriel Drones," "Benedict Cowls," and "Catchemall."  

9:02 PM: The author is attempting to do dialects.  This is going about as well as it does in, say, lower-end fanfic.

9:04 PM: I am beset by the growing suspicion that our novelist is a Dissenter.  Quite possibly because this Dissenting character has been spouting perfectly reasonable theology for the past several paragraphs, unlike everyone else we've met so far. 

9:05 PM: Methodist, to be precise.

Another quick trawl through YouTube in search of anything to distract myself from the agony. 

9:10 PM: OMG OMG OMG! There are Anglican sisters who have "bare legs"! I hope you're all trembling at the enormity of this revelation.

Done trembling? We'll move on.

9:12 PM: Yet another utterly inappropriate quotation from Shakespeare.

9:15 PM: More Shakespeare?! Look, I'm as down with the Bard as anyone, but can't we let the poor fellow rest peacefully in his grave? Does he have to march zombiefied through this novel?

9:17 PM: Glug.  Another horrific pun.  I recant! Bring back the inappropriate Shakespeare!

9:17 PM: I spoke too soon--two terrible puns in the space of a single paragraph.  This is not elevating my estimate of the Bulwark's literary taste.

Perhaps I'll watch some dubstep dancing as a change of pace. 

9:26 PM: Ah, the dangers of preaching while there are owls in the belfry.  I'm sure we've all been there.

9:28 PM: It's another zombie Shakespeare quotation, lurching through the narrative in search of brains!

I think I need to go watch some more ballet.

9:37 PM: Whew! Back now.

9:40 PM: No wonder I couldn't find this quotation.  What on earth has Alexander Pope done that he should be botched so?

A cat has just wandered in front of the computer, reminding me of the really important things in life.

9:52 PM: Back to walloping confession again, thanks to Mr. Faithful.  You know, after Bunyan has done allegorical names once, you probably shouldn't do them again.

9:55 PM: It looks like our novelist has resurrected a poem on confession that was circulating amongst Protestants in the mid-to-late 1850s, but has passed it off without any acknowledgement of its origins.

9:57 PM: I am temporarily distracted from the thundering cavalcade of theological cliches by this error in subject-verb agreement.

10:01 PM: What does the novelist have against vertically-challenged clergymen?

10:02 PM: OK, I'll grant points for originality to "turned up his eyes like a dying duck."

10:04 PM: However, the novelist promptly loses all said points for making one Rev. Mr. Hogg read Charles Lamb's "Essay on Roast Pig."  Things do not improve elsewhere on the page.

10:09 PM: Dialecting again.

Excuse me while I pace around randomly for several minutes, bemoaning my self-inflicted lot.

10:26 PM: I return, only to be suddenly buried under an avalanche of prooftexts.  Has anyone seen my shovel?

10:29 PM: Gawwwwd, not another blasted pun.

10:31 PM: The author has the temerity to snark at a clergyman who makes up his sermons out of quotations.  The pot hasn't just met the kettle; it's actively romancing it. 

On that note, we've made it halfway through the novel.  Tune in tomorrow...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strictly Kosher Reading

Yoel Finkelman's Strictly Kosher Reading: Popular Literature and the Condition of Contemporary Orthodoxy (Academic Studies Press, 2011) is, to say the least, well off my usual beaten path: contemporary Haredi literature (which here comprises self-help and other manuals, pop theology, fiction, biography, and the like) in both Israel and the USA is not exactly my primary area of expertise.   Strictly speaking, this study veers more toward the sociological than the literary, with little in the way of close reading.  For those of us who primarily study Christian fiction, Finkelman's approach most closely resembles Callum Brown's in The Death of Christian Britain: both emphasize the importance of narrative in everyday life, and analyze popular texts (fictional and non- ) in order to discover how groups shape communal identities through storytelling. Although Finkelman's particular topic is probably foreign to many readers of his blog, his points are still worth looking at for those of us who study religion & literature. I'll highlight a few.

1) Strategies for negotiating boundaries, and the permeability of same.  Finkelman repeatedly points out that Haredi literature, despite its apparent rejection of all non-Haredi culture, is actually permeated with a number of very modern concepts--"coalescence," a term he borrows from Sylvia Barack Fishman--which it often authorizes with more traditional rhetoric and authors.  For example, contemporary beliefs about nutrition can be undergirded with references to Maimonides and kabbala (45-48), and equally contemporary arguments about child-rearing (especially the dangers of physical punishment and the need for affection between parents and children) can be justified by careful interpretations of apparently contradictory verses from the Torah (74-77).   Innovation can thus be folded back into tradition.  At the same time, as Finkelman reminds us, "[a]t the end of the day, market forces may be more important in the Haredi book market than ideology, whether to publishers, authors, or readers" (97).  (As we have seen very recently, attempts to quash heterodox or heretical texts may have the opposite of the desired effect, especially thanks to the internet.)   Most of the book is devoted to how Haredi authors import and transform apparently secular genres or theories, whether fictional or scientific, and then justify the practice (sometimes by refusing to acknowledge what's going on, sometimes through careful framing). 

2) Gender and appropriation.  The book advances an interesting argument: Haredi women are not only more likely to advance internal self-critique, but also to utilize arguments drawn from secular sources, given that they "for the most part do not receive the same degree of education as men in the most sacred and authoritative texts of tradition" and are much more likely to "have received a less restricted secular education" than their male counterparts (79).  Thus, a woman writing about problems with the Haredi education system unapologetically deploys her "expertise in special education" (84) in a way that a male author rarely does.  Although at one level this is a very culturally-specific difference, it also raises interesting questions about secular dynamics in women's religious writing from other traditions, whether non-Haredi Judaism or Roman Catholicism. 

3) In-group vs. out-group texts, or not.  As one might expect, texts produced for outreach rather than for the home community's consumption often have different trajectories, contents, and so forth.  But as Finkelman observes, "much of the outreach-oriented literature is in fact read, and meant to be read, by insiders as well" (39).  Trying to identify how an audience might respond to a given text is tricky for precisely this reason: it's not at all clear, for example, that Jewish conversion novels have a Jewish audience in mind, while Jewish and Catholic novelists like Grace Aguilar, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, and Julia Kavanagh had a wide-ranging ecumenical readership.  (What would it mean to "get" one's understanding of Catholicism from Lady Georgiana?) Here, though, is where the question of media distribution networks arises--a nineteenth-century Catholic novel aimed primarily at a Catholic audience and sold almost entirely at Catholic bookstores would not have the internet to enhance its mobility, whereas the combination of online bookstores and search engines now makes it difficult to keep in-group literature "in" (sometimes to everyone's chagrin). 

4) The practice of in-group criticism.  Finkelman highlights two different trends in Haredi self-criticism: "one that reinforces the beliefs of the community" and "a more subversive, dangerous comparison, one in which a Haredi spokesman cautiously and implicitly accepts various aspects of the secular critique of Haredi Judaism" (163).  The former insists that all failures indict not the community's values, but rather its refusal to practice same; the latter suggests that the community's self-construction obscures important flaws visible only to those outside of it.  Thus, one critic of internet use warns that many blogs are dangerous because "they lack the filters and limits on criticism that Torah considers central" (166), whereas the prominent commentator Yonoson (Jonathan) Rosenblum extensively quotes from a secular author's perspective in order to authorize his own agenda, and thus "translates the outsider critique into the language of insiders" (172).  Although Finkelman doesn't discuss the issue at any length, the problems posed by #3 above have considerable resonance for in-group critique: what happens if the out-group reads it?   This is much less of a problem if one is writing in Yiddish or Hebrew, obviously, but it remains an issue; one thinks, for example, of the minefields involved when moving from Catholic anti-clericalism to anti-Catholic anti-clericalism, or from Jewish critiques of materialistic Jews to the anti-Semitic version of same.  (The reception history of Amy Levy is one of the most [in]famous cases in point--how are we supposed to read her contempt for Jewish bourgeois self-satisfaction?)

The Hebrew's Daughter

We haven't had any religious poetry in a while, so let's turn to W. Henry Ludlow's The Hebrew's Daughter, A Fragment of a Jewish Tradition, in Five Cantos (comp. 1852; pub. 1854).  This appears to have been Ludlow's only foray into the world of any sort of verse--that he was willing to put before the public, at least.  As the poem's title suggests, it participates in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tradition of "fragment" verse, poems whose purportedly mangled forms echoed the contemporary fascination with ruins; certainly, ruin, in both its figurative and literal sense, turns out to be the poem's order of the day.  Ludlow tries some cautious experiments with rhyme and meter, writing primarily in iambic tetrameter couplets but sometimes veering from trimeter to pentameter (especially in the big storm scene) or breaking out into triplets, quatrains, and envelope rhymes.  Not surprisingly, the poem's formal technique is not thrilling.  But for those interested in Jewish subjects in Victorian poetry, this poem is interesting for two reasons: its reworking of the Shylock mythos and its subversion of the by-then conventional Jewish conversion narrative. 

First, the plot.  Elam has a daughter, Zillah, for whom he seeks a possible guardian after the death of her mother.  The mother in question was a secret Christian convert who tutored Zillah in the basics, and so, Zillah "was led more faith to place,/On Christian oaths, than do her race" (10).  This turns out to be a problem when Elam temporarily decamps.  Alas, Elam had refused a loan to a supposed Christian, Hun; in revenge, Hun seduces Zillah (words only, no action), then locks her up in prison until one of his followers finally decides that this is really not quite the thing.  Elam, who returns to find himself sans child, threatens Hun with a scary magic spell, then takes off for the Holy Land.  Zillah also takes off for the Holy Land.  And so does Hun, who is, dare we say, not feeling so great about himself.  Due to divine intervention beyond our control, Zillah and Hun are shipwrecked; Hun, continuing to not feel so great, rescues Zillah (who, understandably, runs away very fast once she sees his face).  After much stereotypical wandering and lamenting, Zillah finds her father on the brink of death, obtains his forgiveness, and--after he repents of cursing Hun--watches him die in peace.  Then...she goes insane, leaving us with Hun sadly watching over her, hoping "to see once more arise/The light of reason in her eyes!" (59)

As this plot outline suggests, Ludlow begins by using Shylock to structure his plot: Elam, who embodies the Law, is the money-lending father; Zillah, who embodies Love, is his Christian-tending daughter; Hun is the Christian in need of cash.  The legalistic Jewish father and the emotional Jewish daughter are par for the course in fictions about the Jews.  Most often, the former symbolically gives way to the latter, with the tyrannically masculine Law superseded by the rule of feminized Love.  In that sense, the Shylock plot and the conversion plot are always bound up in each other.  Ludlow further emphasizes that link with another familiar figure from conversion narratives, the secret Christian convert: the deceased mother (in the Shylock plot, she generally is) had "taught her, ere she died/The creed of Jesus crucified," with the proviso "not to let her Father see/Her to the Saviour bend the knee" (10).  Zillah thus exists in an ambiguous space, Jewish in public but Christian in private; further ambiguity arises from that allusion to "her Father," which immediately refers to Elam but, more problematically, also suggests God the Father, whose Son she does not openly avow.   As a result, the symbolic transition from Judaism to Christianity, from paternal Law to maternal Love, stumbles badly.    This deliberate narrative botch gets only worse once we consider Hun, about whom "nothing certain was there known" (9), and who enacts the Shylockian conversion romance only to lock Zillah up in a Gothic tower. Neither secretly-Christian mother nor nominally-Christian lover can conduct Zillah to Christian community.

Instead, Zillah's chunk of the plot takes her back to the father's Law.  Meeting him once again, she confesses her sins at his request, and is forgiven for her "disobedience" (52).  Yet here the abortive conversion plot rears its head again, for Zillah finds no rest in this paternal forgiveness.  Although Elam is allowed a "good death" once he retracts his curse against Hun, Zillah's agony over her sin leads to fantasize that all of nature condemns her as his "murderess" (55), and all that is left of her is "reason's wreck" (55).  What are we to make of this? Zillah's mental collapse resonates tellingly with the state of Judaism in the rest of the poem, and it is here that we see how the poem's fragmentary form embodies its attitude to post-Christian Jews.  Like so many others, Ludlow relies heavily on the complaint as the dominant mode of Jewish utterance: Elam, for example, sadly asks why Jerusalem's "children roam/In foreign lands as if they hated home?/Why did our God forsake our chosen land,/And let his temple fall by heathen band?" (48)  Similarly, the insane Zillah bursts out into a hymn that, even as it promises that the Jews shall one day be restored, nevertheless sobs along with "Judah's daughter's ever weeping" (58).  Even before the tragedy plays out, Zillah and Elam are already part of the band of Jews who "wander far,/Nor have they now a guiding star" (5), and this vision of eternal exile and dislocation recurs in Ludlow's repeated descriptions of both Zillah and Elam as physically and/or mentally "wandering."  As wanderers without guidance or goal, both Zillah and Elam seem eternally condemned to life without a fully-developed narrative arc.  Zillah's strange in-between state as disobedient Jew but not-quite Christian further underlines the incompleteness in which these characters live; it is no accident that their apparently cyclical return to the Holy Land is merely yet another reminder that they have been displaced, with no right to enter Jerusalem.  In that sense, Zillah's return to her father and the Law he represents is equally fragmented: she can neither re-enter her first spiritual "home" nor transition to the Christian community putatively associated with her mother.  Well before 1890s psychological theory, Ludlow makes "madness" the understandable outcome of such a shattered, "wandering" existence [1].

Despite the poem's title, Zillah winds up exiled from the conversion plot.  It is Hun, the villain, who dedicates his life to protecting the mad Zillah as what appears to be self-imposed penance.  And it is Hun who is on the receiving end of the poem's finger-wagging moral: "I pity all whose mental strife/Was such as gall'd Hun's later life;/Remorse of those who late repent,/Is heaviest of punishment" (59).  Yes, says the reader, but isn't he rather better off than Zillah? Elam, the staunch Jew who finally repents, is saved from pain at the last moment; Hun, the professed Christian turned real Christian, repents and spends the remainder of his life undergoing what we are to assume is divinely-ordained agony; Zillah, who abandoned her faith and tried to return, is left to a suffering she cannot possibly interpret.  The Christian may get the poem's last word, but "bad" Christians who abuse their faith also, by extension, bear the weight of the poem's moral condemnation. 

[1] On which see Carol Margaret Davison, Anti-Semitism and British Gothic Literature (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 145-46.

 

The History of a Bible

The History of a Bible is a tract with an odd provenance.  Like most American Tract Society publications, it appeared anonymously.  However, the ATS itself appeared to be under the impression that it was written by J. W. Cunningham, well-known in England for another religious it-narrative, The Velvet Cushion.(Incidentally, somebody ought to do a joint edition of that and the response to it.) While the tract is sometimes cataloged with Cunningham as author, there doesn't seem to be any actual proof for this ascription; given that the tract appears to have been pretty successful, it appears decidedly odd that nobody on the other side of the pond mentions it as part of Cunningham's oeuvre.  So, hmm.  To make matters more complicated, the tract also exists in multiple versions.  In this 1820 printing, for example, the narrative ends after the Bible's dissolute second owner, George, departs this earth in a state of proper repentance; my own copy, part of an omnibus reprinting that dates from approximately 1848, sees the Bible continuing to live out its life in the kind of domesticity it lacked with its first two bachelor owners. 

Unlike the Bible it-narratives I've discussed here before, the Bible narrates The History of a Bible.  The Bible thus speaks as an organic "I," a unified "self" guaranteed by the authority of divine inspiration; there are no Biblical books here, just a Book.   And this Book appropriates a number of roles to itself: "close prisoner" in the bookshop and, later, William's library (3), would-be "companion" (3), and, most importantly, evangelist.   It is the ultimate text in the library, preceded in William's textual pilgrim's progress by Oriental tales, Don Quixote, The Man of Feeling, and historians--the latter of whom speak not as their titles, but as their authors (Hume, Robertson, Rollins).  The implied progress of William's reading suggests the possibility that fiction might be a gateway drug to more serious texts, but that once the reader finally encounters the Bible, no other text is worthy of attention.   In a way, the Bible is the object of William's and, later, George's romantic yearnings, desired yet regarded with shame, famous yet treated as a dangerous secret.  The two men repeatedly hide and ignore the poor thing, only to always return.  But although Leah Price argues that "it-narratives anthropomorphize the book at its moments of greatest vulnerability," this Bible undergoes little in the way of figurative mutilation or torment, aside from its occasional imprisonments.¹ Instead, it becomes most powerfully "human" at the moment of reading--so powerful, in fact, that it swamps the human subject altogether.  "My first salutation struck William" (5), the Bible informs us, swapping its own verbal address for William's act of reading (and implying near-physical shock into the bargain).  Their encounter is a "conversation" (5), and yet it is one in which the balance of power is being constantly negotiated.  The Bible may repeatedly "speak," erasing William's own role as the reader, but it is William who can quite literally "clos[e] my mouth" (5-6) or "allo[w] me to talk" (6).  The figurative violence of the Bible's "salutation" returns upon itself in the reader's domineering response, finally climaxing in a fight of sorts over the Law: William rejects it, the Bible warns him of damnation, and the result is a "sick and feverish" fit (7).  This is a classic moment in conversion narratives, the moment of terror in which the not-yet-believer finds himself convicted of sin, but yet without hope of salvation.  But it is also represented in terms of a conversation in which William actively participates, talking back to the Bible instead of merely being lectured.   In Price's turn of phrase, "the virtuous" recognize the Book's "subjectivity" (125), yet such recognition occurs in the context of rejection as well as assent.   George, too, will have a similar moment on his deathbed, when he finally opens himself up to the Bible's charges.   Debates over free will thus emerge in these moments of decision-making: do I read or not? Do I listen or not? Do I resist or not?

One of the odder things about this tract, though, is the way in which it erases its own circulation.  "I was sent for" (12), the Bible says, when it moves from the deceased William to George; "I became the inmate of a respectable family" (16-17), it goes on, as it makes its transit from George to the unnamed married couple.  Scenes of sale and gifting are usually played up, not down, in Bible it-narratives.  Here, the Bible simply moves, or is moved.  The sole exception is when George "made a present of me to some poor native" (15), resulting in a problematic missionary moment: the native (a slave?) cannot read the language.  In this mockery of evangelization, the Word goes forth to someone who cannot hear it.  Other slaves are luckier in their grasp of English, and enjoy the kind of conversational relationship with the Book that William and, eventually, George will have.  But in effect, these encounters suggest that human evangelical efforts are less relevant than the direct encounter with the Bible's own "good news" (16).  Like the conversational relationship between the bachelor sinner and his Bible, this account of good works amongst slaves suggests that although language may be difficult, its content, paradoxically enough, is not--the self-interpreting Bible once again made manifest.  Nobody needs to analyze this Book; one merely listens and responds to its edifying conversation, and Christianity is sure to follow.  (One can hear nineteenth-century High Churchmen grumbling somewhere, far off in the distance.)  

The Bible's "reward," as it were, is its final migration to the unnamed nuclear family, where it finds itself installed in a position of new domestic authority.  In the family, the Bible simultaneously remains dependent (it is "permitted to speak," "brought out" [17]) and authoritative ("I addressed, "commanded," "told," "bade" [17-18]).  The family subjects itself, in a sense, to its most potent object.  Unlike the bachelor associations of William and George, where religion appears to spread rather hesitantly through random male companions and oppressed "natives," the family provides the Bible with an opportunity to develop a sort of program.  Moreover, the family turns out to be a miniaturized version of the colony as a whole, Christianizing the colony through force of example.  Within the family, the Bible turns out to have yet another role--that of surrogate parent.   Companion, evangelist, parent, yet potentially always a prisoner once again, the Bible turns out to be both spiritual magician, converting those who cross its path, and weak, passive object, awaiting the reader who will release its force. 

¹  Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2012), 128. 

Sister Agatha: Or, "The New Catholic Teaching"

Of the many, many controversial novels I've discussed at this blog, the vast majority have involved Protestants and Catholics squaring off against each other, with occasional voyages into Jews and [insert Christian here] doing likewise.  William Henry Pinnock's Sister Agatha: Or,  "The New Catholic Teaching" (1876) is an interesting variant on the usual theme.  Not because the novel itself is remarkably well-executed, or because it has something to say that might come as a shock to the average reader (of this blog, at least), but because the controversy involved is really two modes of High Churchmanship squaring off against each other.  Instead of the relatively wide gap between, say, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, we have here two different claims to Catholicity and apostolicity, launched by someone who clearly fears that it is impossible to tell the difference between High Churchmanship (old style), Anglo-Catholicism (new style), and, of course, Roman Catholicism. 

Even though the novel's conflicts are set within the Church of England, the story itself takes place in France after the Commune.  At first glance, it's an odd choice of setting, underlined by the total lack of "fit" between the English characters and their environment: even though Mr. Stanhope, who carries part of the brief for traditional High Church positions, is a longtime resident, much of the novel's actual dialogue about France consists of complaints about the bureaucracy, the manners, and, of course, the Catholicism.  But this unease actually underlines the novel's point about the Church of England, which is that is a national institution in need of protection against incursions by the Catholic Other.  Even the title character is convinced that post-Communard France is intellectually, morally, and culturally degenerate, reduced to "'selfish brusquerie'" in the wake of calls for egalitarianism (107).  The novel's English are an enclave of Anglican good sense in a sea of French Catholic bad culture, bad ritual, bad theology, and bad art.  Railways treat passengers like "'beeves in a cattle truck'" (106), while the churches sport--or used to sport--statues of the Virgin Mary "with hideous features in jaundiced wax" and "eyes affected by strabismus" (53).  Pinnock paints France as somehow irredeemably ugly, despite all its associations (good food, good wine, good clothes...); it is what England could turn into, were the Catholic Church to take over.

In order to ward off this unfortunate event, the novel quickly devolves into its real purpose, which is to act as a manual for countering both Anglo- and Roman Catholic claims.   On the one hand, the novel supports Anglican sisterhoods; Mr. Perilyan, the Anglican clergyman who spouts most of the theological monologues, even has "'two daughters in two distinct Sisterhoods'" (164).  On the other hand, the book turns somersaults to distinguish the good Sisterhoods from the dangerous ones, those under the sway of the "'wide eirenic principle of Catholic union, charity, and large-heartedness'" (198).  Pinnock diagnoses a kind of slippery-slope problem in post-Puseyite theology, in which the Eirenicon's anti-Marian arguments have apparently vanished under the rolling rock of "Romanizing" sympathies.  Mr. Perilyan and the Stanhopes repeatedly accuse the sisterhood that Agatha is joining of being "'nothing less than a nursery of Roman Catholicism, under the guise of a Church of England sisterhood'" (137), warning readers in no uncertain terms that the "Anglo-Catholic" position actually constitutes a deceptive performance within the borders of Anglicanism.  All of the novel's tub-thumping is thus devoted to charting the precise boundaries separating Catholicity from Roman Catholicism, with a strong emphasis on eucharistic and sacramental doctrine.  (Sister Agatha's own High Churchmanship comes out most strongly in its attack on the right of private judgment.) 

The reason that nobody picks up on the distinctions, the novel argues, is lousy theological education.  In fact, our title character may qualify as one of the most inept fictional controversialists I've seen in some time.  No doubt the character's gender has something to do with it: she's unequipped with any of the languages she might need to study the relevant works.  But it gets worse, as they say.  Early on, she informs Mr. Stanhope that "'I must not venture upon argument: it is forbidden ground: and I dare not doubt the necessity of obedience to the injunctions of my spiritual superior'" (27), thereby wearisomely invoking every stereotype of intellectual self-abasement known to the reader of anti-Catholic polemic.  By no argument, of course, Agatha simply means no argument with her Mother Superior and confessor; she's perfectly happy to argue with Mr. Stanhope and Mr. Perilyan.  However, her contributions to the faux dialogues almost always fall into the forms of "But surely X did Y?" or "I heard somewhere that X."  Thus, on the question of whether or not Paul fasted before taking the Eucharist, she queries, "'But did not St. Paul in one of his journeys [...] adopt this very rule of fasting?'" (77)   One paragraph down, on the same topic, she does the same thing: "'But some ancient authority, I think, refers to this usage as prevailing immediately after the times of the Apostles'" (77).  And later, she tells Mr. Perilyan that she is "'almost certain'" that such fasting was practiced in the early Church (83).  Often relegated to one-sentence objections that are either heavily qualified or phrased as questions, Agatha consistently undermines both her voice and her authority to speak; she quite clearly has not mastered the "new Catholicity" (let alone the old one) that she wishes to preach to Stanhope and Co.  By the end of the novel, the new Catholicity has manifested itself as primarily an echoing theological void.

But the ending also does something unusual for a controversial novel: it declines to divert our heroine from her path.  When last we see her, she is off to "dissolve dear and loving family ties," preparatory to joining the convent she has been describing all along.  I've discussed paradoxically anti-controversialist controversial novels here before; this one too suggests the sheer uselessness of arguing theology with someone whose mind has already fixed on another position.   Despite the almost comically one-sided nature of the faux dialogues, Agatha's religious emptiness has not been filled by any solid Anglican knowledge.  It seems that force-feeding wandering Ritualists with a nourishing diet of old-fashioned High Churchmanship is not, after all, the way to go; those who have already proceeded well down the path to Roman Catholicism, the novel implies, probably cannot be reclaimed.   Only young women and men who have not yet fallen prey to stereotypically predatory priests in Anglican clothing can be saved from their fate...

Gothic repetition (so to speak)

My Gothic course is nearing the end of The Monk (sex! blasphemy! murder! in-- wait, we haven't quite figured that last out yet).  However, given that Book Two remains on my mind (and, with any luck, will soon get off it), I was struck by Lewis' references to the Bible in II.4.  The narrator begins by warning parents that the Bible, far from teaching virtue, "can only tend to excite ideas the worst calculated for a female breast"; in fact, it "but too frequently inculcates the first rudiments of vice," thanks to its erotic explicitness.  (Although the narrator is not explicit about the explicitness in question, it's possible that he has the Song of Songs in mind.)  Although Lewis appears to be going for gratuitous shock value here, there are some ironic conjunctions here--ironic, given the novel's roisterous anti-Catholicism--with anti-Protestant polemic, which sometimes represented women's Bible-reading in a similarly dangerous light.  (The Catholic novel Florence; Or, the Aspirant (1829), aka one of the nineteenth century's very worst novels, takes exactly this line.) 

In any event, good mama Elvira determines that "Antonia should not read it, till She was of an age to feel its beauties, and profit by its morality: The second, that it should be copied out with her own hand, and all improper passages either altered or omitted."  What strikes me here is not the Bible bowdlerization, although that's certainly of interest, but the way in which this moment dovetails with Walter Scott's The Monastery (1820): Lady Avenel originally intended that her daughter Mary Avenel would be "so far advanced in age" that she could understand the Bible before Lady Avenel would begin teaching her about it (as it happens, Lady Avenel dies before that can happen), and the Bible that Mary inherits from her mother is heavily annotated and interleaved with her comments.  Indeed, what really grabs Mary's attention is a Biblical commonplace book in her mother's writing, containing "those affecting texts to which the heart has recourse in affliction, and which assure us at once of the sympathy and protection afforded to the children of the promise" (III.5).  In Lewis, the Bible is a dangerous text, a trigger for the worst forms of sexual desire; innocent (virginal) youth must encounter it through the protective haze of the mother's virtue.  (Much as the married Dorothea Brooke can read Smollett, it appears that the married, and hence sexually enlightened, woman can read the Bible.)  Reading the Bible becomes, in a way, the act of reading the mother's mind. 

For Scott, however, what is at stake is not sexuality, but theology, and the mother excerpts instead of censors.  Scott's Bible troubles the intellect rather than inconvenient body parts.  By the same token, part of the charm of the commonplace book is that it "com[es] from a hand so dear," just as Elvira uses "her own hand."    But Scott dwells far more intensely on the materiality of that hand's work--the book overstuffed with notes, extra pages, and MSS--than Lewis does.  In both cases, the mother's authority trumps that of any other, but in Scott, Lady Avenel's interventions are intended to draw her daughter into a sense of Scriptural and theological tradition (after all, Mary still inherits a complete and unexpurgated Bible).  Lewis' mother, by contrast, actively "feminizes" the Bible.  Not, as it happens, that it will save her daughter from the Monk's machinations...

 

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.