It takes talent to write an entirely incompetent novel, and whoever wrote The Tudor Sisters: A Tale of National Sacrilege (1846) undoubtedly had talent. There is absolutely nothing right about this novel. It defies close reading. (Indeed, at times it defies reading.) The plot frequently makes no sense and, on two notable occasions, requires important characters to behave like complete fools, in order that they may become dead. The characterization is innocent of even the remotest attempts at psychological verisimilitude, especially when it comes to Elizabeth I (here represented as such a violent "virago" that it's hard to see how she survived Mary I's reign, let alone her own). The prose style is Edward Bulwer-Lytton as reimagined by the annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, copiously dotted by random outbreaks of ellipses and, worse still, dubious explosions of Scots dialogue:
For pages on end, mind you.
One of the novel's more ill-advised decisions involves a new interpretation of Lady Jane Grey's fate in the Tower, which can be summarized thusly:
THE NOVEL: Our perfect and pure heroine will now convince Mary I that it would be a great idea to break Lady Jane out of prison.
READER: Um, that can't possibly--
THE NOVEL: Mary, who is practically a saint, will go along with this plan.
READER: I...I don't think...surely not?
THE NOVEL: Our perfect and pure heroine will interrupt the jail break with some controversial dialogue about Bible-reading and the right of private judgment.
READER: THIS IS NOT THE RIGHT TIME.
THE NOVEL: Hooray! We have now helped Lady Jane escape!
READER: [experiences moment of panic, worries that she has forgotten something important in the history books]
THE NOVEL: Lady Jane, who is extremely intelligent, will now fall for an obvious ploy to recapture her.
READER: [smacks head hard against the desk]
THE NOVEL: Once again, our perfect and pure heroine will try to convince Mary I to let Lady Jane go.
READER: AGAIN?!
THE NOVEL: Our perfect and pure heroine's exhortations bring Lady Jane to at least consider converting to Catholicism, just prior to her execution.
READER: ...No.
Despite this novel's total lack of redeeming virtues, it probably would have made it into Book Two, at least in passing, as an example of Catholic attempts to recuperate Mary I. Its attitude to Mary is recognizably derived from the revisionist work of John Lingard and, following Lingard, the Strickland sisters, in which anything bad that Mary did resulted from the pressures of bad political advisers and her Spanish husband. (Thus, the novel argues that Mary's poor decision-making doomed Catholicism in England for the next several centuries, but those decisions often had good excuses, whereas Elizabeth was just a horrible human being who, apparently, offed Catholics for the heck of it.) Moreover, its obvious cod Walter Scott qualities (granted, overcooked cod), like the presence of a Meg Merrilies-cum-saintlier-Madge-Wildfire knockoff, exemplify something else I've argued about nineteenth-century Catholic historical novels: in religious fiction, Scott's interest in historical relativism was far more appealing to Catholic novelists than Protestant ones, because it enabled Catholics to locate persecution in specific cultural and national contexts that would not repeat in nineteenth-century England. Protestant novelists, by contrast, argued that Catholicism was a danger whatever the context, and so the historical record paradoxically testified to the transhistorical nature of Catholic evil.
One thing about this novel that is slightly unusual is how it materializes Catholicism. Certainly, in emphasizing Catholicism as a totalizing world-view, one that structures all aspects of human life (festivals, eating, sleeping, worship, etc.), along with its physical presence in the landscape in the form of cathedrals and great manor houses, the novel is conventional enough. (Similarly, its historical narrative--from Catholic organic wholeness to Protestant fragmentation--is also standard for Catholic fiction.) But it also spends much more time than is common on clothes and jewelry as embodiments of Catholicism, along with handicrafts such as embroidery. When Mary appears as a "very meteor of regal splendour" (II: 74) and everyone else at the court dons their brilliant dresses, their spectacular displays of fashion and wealth perform what the novel represents as an explicitly Catholic aesthetic--a celebration of divinely-ordained prosperity in the form of unapologetic ornament. Similarly, our heroine sleeps in a luxurious bedroom whose beauties are inseparable from faith, whether in the paintings on the walls or the exquisite "coverlet," "bearing in its centre a Roman cross of threads of gold, embroidered by her own fair hand" (I:144). For the novelist, making, wearing, and using beautiful objects are all ways of participating in a kind of perpetual worship--but a kind only suitable for a world in which Catholicism reigns entirely. Once the surviving characters are forced into exile after Elizabeth's accession, they immediately abandon their hallowed enjoyments for extremely brief lives of asceticism and atonement, one as an almoner and another as a Poor Clare. Inasmuch as these shifts doom the novel's central family, they call a symbolic halt to Catholicism's English future on earth (not least because both die in exile) while affirming it in heaven. The novelist, I think, intends the reader to contrast the fragile qualities of Catholic jewels, paintings, statues, and textiles (easily put aside, destroyed by iconoclasts, etc.) with the more resilient nature of Catholic buildings: the former are ephemeral signs of Catholic success, the latter reminders of its permanence in the face of persecution.
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