Asymptomatic

Dan Green's post on fiction as "window" (or not) prompted Scott Eric Kaufman to think about the historicist critic as "literary seismologist."  And, in turn, Scott's metaphor has spurred me to think about where such cultural upheavals are actually located...

Victorian religious fiction, for example, certainly registers a number of contemporary anxieties: lapses in religious faith, the return of Catholicism and the rise of Anglo-Catholicism, theological disputes of various sorts, Christianity and capitalism, religion and femininity (and masculinity, for that matter), and so on.  Many of these religious fictions aspire to being non-fiction, in the sense that they claim to document as well as represent contemporary religious crises.  (Hence the prefaces and footnotes that readers find in novelists like Catherine Sinclair and, in the US, Julia McNair Wright.)   That is, these aren't fictions; they're "factions."  Or so they claim. 

Now, publishers, since the dawn of time (OK, of commercial publishing), have generally had a stout regard for the bottom line.  And thus, if a Victorian religious novel appeared, it's safe to say that some publisher, somewhere, thought that book would find an audience--and that that audience's coin would find its way back into the publisher's pocket.  Nevertheless, it's hard to avoid noticing that most Victorian religious novels (like most novels in general, I'd add) simply disappeared without a trace.  There are the novels whose editions multiplied like proverbial rabbits--Mrs. O. F. Walton's A Peep Behind the Scenes and Christie's Old Organ, Hesba Stretton's Jessica's First Prayer, Elizabeth Prentiss' Stepping Heavenward, Mrs. Mary Martha Sherwood's The History of the Fairchild Family--and then there are all the others, which made a noise like a hoop and rolled away.  If a novel appears and nobody's interested in buying it, does it register on the critic's Richter scale?  Publishers, after all, have been known to wildly miscalculate the market for a particular theme or genre.  And didactic fiction was a business, which means that authors didn't necessarily write "from the heart": authors wrote for a perceived market, rewrote according to editorial prompts... [2]

Moreover, in the case of fiction intended for children or teenagers, it's not always clear that the adults (i.e., the people shelling out the aforementioned coins for the aforementioned novels) had more than a general sense of what might be in these books--aside, perhaps, from a general sense that the books would be wholesome, like 100% whole wheat bread.  (Buy from the Religious Tract Society! The books will be good for you! [1])  For example, it's still not clear to me why Grace Aguilar's Women of Israel became a popular Sunday School prizebook, since the book's argument--very explicitly stated in the preface!--is that one doesn't need to be Christian to be on God's good side.   Protestant book reviewers thought this was a pretty darned objectionable message--so why give the book to good little girls in Sunday School? Did it come with a surgeon general's warning label? What? It's not clear, in other words, if the book's success has more to do with the author's name recognition (Aguilar is one of the most famous Jews of the nineteenth century) than her text's relationship to contemporary ideological or theological faultlines.

Still, these are all examples of manifest content, and Scott is more interested in the subtler ways in which texts register the tremors of various intellectual, political, and cultural faults.  At times, though, I wonder if historicism doesn't obscure the extent to which even the most unabashedly popular of novels actively resist (or ignore) such tremors; it's the old problem of authorial ignorance, which I discussed several posts ago, but it may also be genre-specific.   Feminist critics have been complaining for ages that romance heroines may have new jobs, but they don't necessarily behave any differently than their more overtly "traditional" predecessors.  Along the same lines, Anne Boleyn novels "conventionally" include some sort of grumbling about female roles, disempowerment, etc., but such grumbling long predates feminism and doesn't really change once organized women's movements truly get under away.  All of the cultural tremors stay carefully on the margins--the appearance of happy gay couples in some of the most recent Anne Boleyn novels, for example.   And in my Victorian historical novels, there's some fairly sophisticated work going on with historiographical debates--but they're frequently historiographical debates of the previous century (or centuries).   (The theology tends to be rather more up-to-date.)   By contrast, detective fiction tends to be much more open to playing with whatever cultural conflicts are at hand, especially because such fiction requires the reader to believe that X is a crime, or not.  In at least some cases, the "tremor" is less in the text than in the reader's reception of the text--the ability of women to appropriate romance narratives in different ways, for example.  The latter, of course, is notoriously difficult to document.

[1] Actually, the RTS did not meet with the wholehearted approval of many Christians of the sterner sort: in some quarters, it was considered far too ecumenical.

[2] Speaking of business, and one of Ophelia Benson's recent queries, I'd note that we do have examples of authors either toning down or working up their religiosity--or irreligiosity--for the adult fiction market.  But it's true that the closest we have to an evangelical among the canonical nineteenth-century novelists is Charlotte Bronte, who in some ways is a pretty idiosyncratic Protestant; everybody else is a) a Christian of the most loosey-goosey sort (Dickens), b) politely or impolitely skeptical (Thackeray, Collins, Hardy, Gissing), c) deconverted (Eliot), d) anti-evangelical (Trollope), or e) Unitarian (Gaskell).  We no longer read the overtly religious Victorian bestsellers, like Charlotte Yonge (very High Church).   

Comments

[Sophie]

Just out of curiosity, how does Browning fit into your view of the literary landscape? I know you focus on prose, but Ring and the Book is a really fascinating portrayal of Catholicism, to my mind, and seems to fit, however awkwardly, with your interest in historical fiction.

[Ophelia Benson]

Yes - I meant to do a follow-up post mentioning that I was limiting myself to the canonicals, and saying Yonge would tell a different story. I've actually even read a Yonge novel...found it rather interesting...

[Marya]

I was actually curious how you're defining "religious novel," and wondered to what degree Yonge qualifies. (She's the novelist I know best from the genres you discuss.) And while I agree that Yonge isn't a bestseller anymore, have you typed her name into a Barnes and Noble or Amazon search lately? All kinds of quick-published editions of her most obscure novels (a lot of them, interestingly, in easy-eye type) are available. She hasn't *quite* gone away.

[Arnold]

I agree with Marya. When you say that 'we' no longer read Yonge, you mean 'we in the academy'. Yonge has always had a devoted following outside academia. (Here in the UK, there are currently two literary societies dedicated to her, the CMY Society and the CMY Fellowship.)

As to Ophelia's wider point .. surely religion is an absolutely central theme in nineteenth-century fiction? Of the novelists mentioned here, Eliot and Hardy (not to mention others, like Mrs Humphrey Ward) are fascinated by the crisis of faith; Eliot (though not an orthodox believer) is very sympathetic to Dissent, Trollope (though anti-evangelical) very sympathetic to Anglicanism, and Gaskell (though Unitarian) very sympathetic to Methodism. It is simply not true to say that you have to move outside the canon in order to find an author (like Yonge) for whom religion is a central theme.

Rather than saying that Christianity is not central to nineteenth-century fiction, it would be truer to say (as Miriam hints in her remarks above) that Evangelicalism is not central to nineteenth-century fiction. The reasons for this are complex and interesting, and discussed at length by Valentine Cunningham in Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel (where, incidentally, he singles out Eliot as the one novelist who really understood the Dissenting tradition).

Miriam, I'm also interested in your remark that most Victorian religious novels 'simply disappeared without a trace'. This may be true, but how can we know - how can we measure it? I don't think you can assume that a novel was a failure (whatever that means) just because it was never reprinted. One needs to go deeper into publishing history than that - and of course one must be wary of assuming that a novel sank without trace in (say) 1857 just because it happens to be invisible to us in 2007. (I know you know this, but I still think it's a point worth emphasizing.)