The Little Professor

Some thoughts on the "unreadability" of Victorian religious fiction

My last post was about a novel that was well-nigh unreadable.  By which I mean that, while I certainly read it, it was with a constant aggravated awareness that this novel violated pretty much any principle of formal coherence, aesthetic judgment, or what-have-you that anyone might care to bring to it (and, as the sole reviewer certainly hinted, nobody at the time found it exactly pleasurable either).  It was not quite a "why didn't I become a sports announcer instead" novel, but certainly a "I wish I had a triple chocolate brownie right about now to dull the pain" novel.  But there's another kind of unreadability out there.  I've noted more than once that nineteenth-century religious fiction has a bad habit of thwarting many literary-critical approaches: although didactic genres in general do have some animating tension--most obviously between the goal of controlling the reader's response and the use of formal techniques (dialogue, suspense, etc.) that might open up alternate interpretations--most religious novels resist surface/depth modes of interpretation, and equally resist the kind of close reading you might perform on, say, George Eliot.  One doesn't "unpack" most Victorian religious novels;  with rare exceptions, they come already opened, or they don't do their job.  Instead, they become much more interesting when understood in groups, at which point one begins to see experiment and contestation along with norms and conventions.  The downside of that, of course, is that one has to read...rather a lot of them.   Not surprisingly, most literary critics interested in talking about religion-related matters in the nineteenth century prefer to work on George Eliot than they do on Emma Marshall, and would certainly much prefer to spend time with monographs about George Eliot than they would Emma Marshall (and, indeed, one of the problems I faced with Book Two was that I was interested in tracing a nineteenth-century obsession that canonical novelists wouldn't touch with a proverbial ten-foot pole--and yet, without a canonical novelist in the book, I wouldn't be able to place it).  This is the professional difficulty involved with working on any kind of "minor major genre," not just this one.¹

In his recent Good Form: The Ethical Experience of the Victorian Novel, Jesse Rosenthal in part sets out to analyze what comprises the "readable" (127) in a disciplinary sense.  He argues near the end that  "[i]n spite of the fact that we're talking about works from another century, and another country, most of the critical apparatus built around the field depend on the notion that, in talking about the nineteenth century, we are talking about ourselves" (192).  He points out that "we can say that Victorian novels are those novels that do not need to be mediated by historians or interpreters"--that is, even though "[t]hey might benefit from such mediation," the novels "do not seem like they need it" (126-27).  These novels are "readable," especially for our undergraduates, precisely because, in other words, they appear to require no further reading; the Victorian religious novel, by contrast, would qualify as "unreadable" because the reader cannot engage with either their form or their content without spending lots of time getting up the distinctions between the assorted varieties of pre- and post-millennialism, or the like.  But that's an interesting slippage between the students (not all of whom are excited by such things) and the faculty (who surely don't quite have the same excuse).  Significantly, his list of the "twenty-six" writers who inform our "expectations of shared reference" (192) is primarily composed of authors whose writing is often extracted from its theological context (e.g., Austen, the Brontes), can be treated as though the religious references are extraneous (e.g., Stoker) or are mildly to extremely skeptical (e.g., Eliot, Gissing, Hardy, Thackeray).  One can put pressure on Rosenthal's "we" and "ourselves"--the discipline envisioned here seems not to include anyone from Great Britain, to begin with--but the perhaps unconscious underlying point is that "we," the academics, don't see "ourselves" in novels that bear a label saying "Hi, I'm religious," or even, much more expansively, "Hi, I think this is relevant for understanding how my own historical moment works,"  without having any personal identification with a religious tradition, or even religious belief at all.  

But what would it mean to make such a claim? After all,  it's important to remember that many Victorians didn't see themselves in religious fiction--including a considerable number of evangelicals (who suspected that religious fiction was just as corrupting to the moral sense as any other fiction), readers whose religious beliefs ranged from unenthusiastic to non-existent, and a legion of book reviewers (the Saturday Review being an especially good resource for scarifying responses).  Most or all of those readers, given access to a time machine that downloaded twenty-first century syllabi and scholarship, might well think that, really, keeping Victorian religious fiction out of the frame of "shared reference" was no great loss.  Although the anti-novel evangelicals would no doubt have a lot to say about teaching Victorian fiction, period.  And just as the Romantic "big six" would be horrified to find that they've been lumped in with each other, so too would many religious novelists be equally appalled to discover that in the act of recovering them, we've thrown them into the same pile...  Indeed, Rosenthal's point about readability and mediation could be projected back to the period itself: were any novels marked off as "unreadable," and by and for whom? Contrariwise, which religious novels became eminently readable, and again, by and for whom? 

¹ It's major, because...really, have you seen just how much nineteenth-century religious fiction exists? But it's minor, because a) we've lost how it intersects with the now-canonical tradition, b) it was always marginal in some respects (the Athenaeum, for example, often refused to review it) and  problematically "serious," for some definition of serious, and c) only a handful of scholars are interested in contemporary religious fiction as part of its own literary tradition. 

The Irish Priest; Or, What for Ireland?

There are some novels so poorly written and constructed that the critic winds up trying to argue that, surely, the failure must be intentional in some fashion.  Take, for example, The Irish Priest; Or, What for Ireland? (1847), a rare example of polemically ecumenical fiction.  Despite the "Preamble," which references the Famine and "falsifications" about the Irish, the novel neither takes current events as its subject nor spends much time on the physical sufferings of Ireland's poorest people (although they are certainly discussed more than once).  Instead, the novel provides a fragmentary and highly-fraught narrative devoted to Father Michael, a conscientious Catholic priest who, nevertheless, has no "vocation," but instead became a priest because "it was all that lay open to me" (51).  Appearing in the otherwise irrelevant Doctor's introduction as a "haggard and meagre" man clearly beset by "disappointment" (6), among other similarly gloomy emotions, Father Michael immediately dies--but not before convincing the Doctor that he is a "'good and pious man'" (10).  Of course, Father Michael leaves behind him a narrative of his life, to which the reader is duly subjected.  The reader who seeks a plot in this narrative is doomed to as much disappointment as Father Michael: it jumps about from topic to topic, from main narrative to inexplicably long inset narrative, and (most notably) from sudden death to sudden death.  This is not one of those books where characters make it to comfortable old age. Father Michael dies in his forties; his beloved childhood friend Marion dies suddenly of some mysterious disease (although not without speechifying at considerable length); his later friend Cornelia is saved from an awful marriage when her evil aristocratic suitor is killed in a duel; a mysterious "Charles," a former priest, sends letters to his beloved before dying of something or other; and Cornelia's saintly brother Cornelius ("C" names are at a premium in this novel--there's also a Conrad and a Cecilia) dies when he is mistaken for another landlord and murdered by a Ribbonman.  All of these characters undertake their adventures in uniformly high-flown prose, whether nostalgically reminiscing about the "turfy green" (98) or enthusing about the "multitudinous firmaments that make up the star-stream" (52), sometimes with disastrous results.  Strictly speaking, as one of its lone (and somewhat sardonic) Victorian reviewers suggests, the endlessly gushy (and mushy) prose, along with the fractured structure, suggest that the novelist was probably trying to imitate eighteenth-century sentimental fiction of the Man of Feeling variety.¹  If only it had been published in the eighteenth century, and not in 1847.

Nevertheless, as always, there are a couple of points of interest.  The first, as I said, is the novel's polemical ecumenicism.  On the one hand, the book is not exactly in favor of the priesthood as currently constituted: it repeatedly attacks clerical celibacy, suggests that Maynooth provides almost nothing useful for priests, and represents confession as an often hypocritical undertaking that is more emotionally traumatic for the beleaguered priest than anything else.  Father Michael, who is a priest solely because it's a job, is obviously "disappointed" in part because he can't marry.  On the other, there's no religious controversy and, indeed, nothing in the way of conversion experiences.  The Doctor's house in the beginning is represented as an open space of universal hospitality, a "home house" (5) that admits both the "Presbyterian minister and the priest" (5) alike.  Free of sectarian conflict, the Doctor's house, with its almost magical comings-and-goings of food and wine, is a kind of miniature utopia, one that anticipates Cornelius' much grander ideal estate in the end, with its happily co-existing and subsidized clergy: "Cornelius paid the rector his tithes, the priest his dues, the presbyterian minister his stipend, the methodist preacher his salary; for each was satisfied to receive his conventional hire, without driving the unwilling or coercing the destitute" (161).  In the novel's dream of clerical collaboration, denominational differences give way before the power of divine love, as celebrated as Father Michael's overlong sermon.  Enabled by the ideal landlord, rather than the state, the clergy abandon both conflict and competition in the service of a universalized (if diversified) faith, devoting their time to their congregations instead of their theological differences.  The Doctor's house, with its free inflow and outflow of gifts in the service of total hospitality (his friends are entitled to partake even when he's absent), thus turns out to model an ideal Irish polity, in which differences among (and between) Catholics and Protestants give way to sociable collaboration--but a collaboration which requires that the funding model be strictly impartial, privileging neither Established churches nor Dissenters.  Everybody can "eat," but nobody can demand to eat exclusively.  

Cornelius' utopian estate certainly requires a lot of outlay  As the reviewer rather dryly pointed out, Cornelius' death is "greatly to be regretted, as it deprives us of the opportunity of learning how the very beneficent plans of Cornelius would work."  (Or, more to the point, how they would be funded.)  His project, which involves subsidizing an advanced education, medical care, housing, optional relocation to deluxe colonial outposts, and, of course, religious instruction for all of his tenants, also includes giving the tenants "a direct interest in the fruits of their toil" (155).  The ultimate goal is social harmony, eliminating the bones of contention between landlords and tenants while simultaneously eliminating political agitators.  But Cornelius has something more grand in mind: one day, "the producer and the consumer, the creator of enjoyments and he who revels in them, shall be one and indivisible once more" (158).  Once again, the Doctor's house, in which all are entitled to comfort, returns in Cornelius' utopian (and milennialist) world, where contemporary class divisions give way before a new order of universal luxury--luxuries, however, for which everybody also works.  At the same time, by making the landlord the prime mover in social change, the novel suggests that transformation occurs only in the context of decentralized, face-to-face local relationships; it is key, that is, that utopian hospitality come from somebody.  This position is, in fact, part of the novel's sentimentalism: the landlord must learn to feel for his people.  Social change is paternalist in form (it comes from the top down), but only with the goal of eliminating paternalism altogether in favor of complete social unification.  As Cornelius' murder indicates, however, a bad landlord will produce tenants who feel badly (and, therefore, do bad things); Cornelius' utopia, however, is an estate of entirely good feeling.    In theory, given that the novel itself was supposed to raise money for Irish charities, the whole point of the narrative's elevated emotional temperature was to produce, at a remove, similar effects on its (English?) readership.

¹ "Literary Notice," Northern Whig, March 27, 1847: 4.

Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues

Rowland Hill's enormously popular (and enormously long) Village Dialogues (1801; republished frequently thereafter) is notable, as Adrian J. Wallbank argues, for its "eclectic assortment of residual literary techniques and strategies of the type associated with eighteenth-century didacticism, catechetical guidance, parables, and 'stories-within['] while also drawing heavily upon sentimental aesthetics, pathos, and more contemporaneous, if not 'new' strategies such as narrative realism, characterization, and satirical invective."¹ Unlike Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts, the Village Dialogues function as a coherent novel, albeit with some loose ends not tied up.  In terms of genre, though, the Village Dialogues are also the kitchen sink of Romantic-era evangelical fiction: there are multiple death-bed narratives (good and bad), an abolitionist narrative, multiple conversion narratives, and various diatribes against Catholicism (not good) and Unitarianism (also not good), interspersed with outbreaks into epistolarity and inset lyric verse.  (I did wonder, incidentally, if Jane Eyre's response to her unexpected inheritance, which involves subdividing it amongst her newfound relatives, was a reaction to Hill's Mr. Lovely, who gives away much of his inheritance to his family and others [although the inheritance was expected] and receives some criticism for it from the evangelical clergyman Mr. Lovegood.)  The Village Dialogues² are at their most novelistic, though, in their treatment of the adulterous and stereotypically emotional Mrs. Chipman, whose fate is notably different than it would have been some decades later.

Mrs. Chipman's passionate affair with the evil and atheistic Sir Charles Dash does not come to a good end, as one would expect from this type of narrative.  Dash is a classic rake, a type Hill tackles three times, insisting that the only means of reforming a rake (an implicit critique of Pamela) is his own conversion.  Hill represents not the affair but its aftermath, in which Mrs. Chipman, overcome by remorse after hearing Lovegood preach on Hebrews 13:4, comes to him and Mr. Worthy in search of assistance.  What interests me about Hill's approach to the situation is that his critique of Mrs. Chipman is at the level of narrative form, far more than it is in terms of the text's content.  Messrs. Lovegood and Worthy, although obviously disapproving, nevertheless spend most of their time trying to restrain Mrs. Chipman from blaming herself too much: Mr. Worthy points out that Dash was obviously a designing seducer who took advantage of her while her husband is gone, an "accidental circumstance" that "must be considered an alleviation of your crime" (XVIII); similarly, Lovegood immediately agrees to intercede with her father in hopes of returning her to her home, on the grounds that she has become a truly "humble penitent" (XIX).  Mrs. Chipman, however, is a problematic narrator of her own plot and characterization, as it were.  When first invited to tell her story, she immediately collapses into "strong hysterics" (XVIII) and castigates herself, leading Lovegood to finally interject "[b]e calm" (XVIII)--but, instead of beginning her narrative, she again berates "the pride and wickedness of my own heart" (XVIII), which prompts a perhaps understandably exasperated Lovegood to point out that they cannot really get anywhere with this subject unless she is "not somewhat more particular in relating your calamities" (XVIII).  The novel in fact sets up Mrs. Chipman's self-loathing as moral excess, incompatible with faith in Christ's ability to save sinners.  Her fragmented narrative is not only punctuated by such stage directions as "too much overcome" to keep going (XVIII), but also by inappropriate attempts to manipulate her audience into a negative reaction; when she cries "[a]fter hearing no more than this, surely you will say that I am the most abominable wretch that ever lived upon the earth" (XVIII), Mr. Worthy simply notes that they really don't have sufficient information to judge her story yet.  Hill treats her hyperbolic and, in some ways, narcissistic interpretation of her own behavior, which the men clearly don't think is all that unusual (i.e., adultery is sinful, but not some shocking novelty), as itself the ongoing manifestation of the emotional flaw that allowed her to give in to Dash's blandishments in the first place.  "Again her grief is excessive" (XVIII), as another stage direction observes. A letter from her father again reduces her to "strong hysterics" (XIX); after praying, she is the "picture of misery and frantic grief" (XIX); thinking of her child, she gives way once more to "excessive grief of mind" (XIX).  Far from being fully converted, the novel suggests, Mrs. Chipman's passionate and self-imploding narrative strategies actually entrap her at the stage of being convicted of sin, in such a manner as to prevent her from contemplating the possibility of transformation or forgiveness.  As tract narration goes, this is the "wrong" approach, one that frustrates and upsets its auditors.   In fact, when other characters spot her later on, one of them inquires if she is suffering from "melancholy derangement" (XXII)--which proves to be foreshadowing.  Upon hearing of her husband's death, she collapses into "total derangement" from her agony (XXVI), and experiences, among other things, Gothic visions of her husband's "murdered emaciated apparition" (XXVI).  But this (temporary) situation, which momentarily reduces her to the status of Gothic victim, is itself an aberrant mode of narration--the most extreme section of the text, even worse than the "bad" death of Mr. Lovely's uncle Mr. Greedy.  Mrs. Chipman is consistently incapable of developing an autobiographical character for herself that does not involve some form of eternal emotional self-punishment, maintained at fever pitch. 

But this is not, in fact, the destiny that the novel intends for her: far from sending her to Australia (as happens to another female character married to a rake) or, as Mrs. Gaskell would later do, immuring her in an isolated valley or killing her off, Hill sends her back to her home town to help run her deceased husband's business and raise her child.  Although her plot is never fully resolved, Hill pointedly insists that she needs to be fully reintegrated with her family and community in order to thrive, physically and spiritually.  Forgiveness, in the world of this novel, is precisely that.   Yet in leaving the conclusion of her plot open-ended, Hill also rejects the mode of evangelical narrative that insists on clearly elucidating all of the this-worldly consequences for behavior.  When she returns home, Mrs. Chipman is still in emotional overdrive; Lovegood is finally reduced to speaking "rather sharply to her" (XXXVI) in order to get her to knock it off.  In a sense, Lovegood becomes the good version of Dash, this time seeking to redirect her emotions to religious rather than erotic purposes.  And like Dash, Lovegood leaves--not because he is disgusted, but because conversion can only be between Mrs. Chipman and God.  While Lovegood offers the community the parable of the Prodigal Son as a means of developing their own narrative about her return, he cannot intervene beyond a certain point in how she chooses to tell her story--and it is at that point that the novel brings her plot to an end, with Hill leaving her to her own narrative devices, as it were, just as Lovegood does. 

¹ Adrian J. Wallbank, Dialogue, Didacticism and the Genres of Dispute (2012; Routledge, 2016), 70. 

² Dialogue numbering varies between editions; I'm citing from the 1825 printing.   

 

Earl Nugent's Daughter; Or the Last Days of the Penal Laws: A True Story

I celebrated handing in my final grades by reading a Victorian religious novel, as, ah, one does.  Agnes M. Stewart's Earl Nugent's Daughter (1883) is a historical novel about Mary Elizabeth Grenville, Marchioness of Buckingham, who was, as the title advertises, the daughter of Robert Nugent, 1st Earl Nugent.  The novel is rooted in a memoir by Mary's daughter, Lady Mary Arundell of Wardour, and perhaps for that reason suffers from biofic-itis--that is, the tendency to confuse plot with chronological order.  Although the title advertises penal laws, the novel only sporadically remembers to address them; although it also advertises Nugent, he's a relatively minor character (Mary's husband, George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, is far more important); and the novel decides about midway through to spend lots of time on the French Revolution, which is not entirely lacking in sense (Mary helped settle French refugees), but, story-wise, is also not entirely sensible.  Nevertheless, as a Catholic novel it has some interesting features, not least of which is its progressivist vision of English national history when it comes to the Catholic population.

At one level, the novel is a narrative of apparently individual moral mistakes that, in actuality, emerge from political forces beyond anyone's control.  Nugent converts to Protestantism in order to secure his upward political trajectory, early on realizing that "those whose faith he professed were small in number amongst an overwhelming majority"; ranking earthly power above his heavenly salvation, he joins the ranks of "the oppressors" (13) and, indeed, becomes violently anti-Catholic.  His career addresses the paradox articulated by other nineteenth-century Catholic novelists, like Edmund Randolph: under Protestant rule, how is it possible to shape a gentlemanly public identity and retain one's faith? Nugent's fall into Protestantism, which manifests itself in a host of other private failings--not least of which is his authoritarian rule over his daughter--mistakes the sordid negotiations of political life for the true community afforded by the corporate body of the Roman Catholic Church.  Only on his deathbed is he at least partly reconciled with his daughter, as he admits that he has returned to Catholicism (as did the real Robert Nugent) and "beg[s] God to have mercy on you and me" (128).  But this deathbed reunion is subverted by the conditions of Mary's own interfaith marriage to the Protestant Grenville, which forbid her from admitting that, far from remaining Protestant as she had been raised, she too is a Catholic (128).  Yet all this, the novel admits, is not just a matter of Nugent's personal failings and Mary's excessive scrupulousness:

As to the Marquis of Buckingham, his conduct to his wife--in the highest degree a talented and accomplished woman; as a wife, circumspect, faithful, and affectionate--betrays too truly the odious and fearful spirit of the times; that he, an English nobleman of exalted rank, a statesman, highly educated, esteemed and beloved, could yet so fearfully coerce his own wife, shows up in all their horror the fearful penal laws, and the effect they produced.  They made to that unhappy lady, for many years, amidst all her wealth, tyrants of both husband and father, and caused the latter to die, not daring to proclaim himself as one returned to the old faith, because the barbarous laws would take from his own child her rightful inheritance.  (130-31)

The novel is not so much invested in the specifics of the penal laws, then, as it is in how they deform private life.  Mary's life with her husband is blighted not because he is naturally inclined to dominion, but because his own anti-Catholic education and the laws of the time make it essential that he repress her beliefs in order to maintain his position; her relationship with her father is equally blighted for the same reason.  Catholic domestic life under the penal laws is effectively Gothic, with overbearing patriarchs, an "odious and fearful spirit," and a general air of "horror."  At the same time, note how the novel's two primary male characters naturalize unequal relationships under the penal laws: Nugent simply opts for the role of "oppressor" in order to gain power, rather than the far more difficult option of resistance, while the cultured Grenville is unable (for most of the novel, at least) to question his own belief that Catholicism is not something for a "sensible or well-educated person" to "believe" (48).  As the thwarted moment of truth with her father suggests, Mary exists in an in-between space, trapped between the rock of her husband's Protestantism and the hard place of her own Catholicism; her inability to resist her father and, for most of the novel, her husband suggests the limits to her Catholic heroism.  Unlike other Catholic novels, which emphasize characters experiencing Catholicism in community (hearing Mass, for example), Earl Nugent's Daughter represents the tragedy of Catholic life under the penal laws in Mary's forced isolation: until her husband slowly relents in the wake of his experiences with French clergymen, she spends most of the novel communicating alone, at one point hearing Mass only by eavesdropping.  The penal laws forcibly dismember the Catholic body.

At the same time, the novel celebrates an emerging English tolerance for its Catholic community--symbolized in Grenville's slowly-increasing willingness to give his wife religious liberty, until eventually her beliefs are no secret at all--and here, I think, is where both the Gordon Riots and the French Revolution come in.  In a sense, the novel goes double Dickens, reworking (not very subtly or gracefully) both Barnaby Rudge and A Tale of Two Cities.  Like Dickens, Stewart stews about mobs.  But in counterpointing the Gordon mobs and the Revolutionary mobs, Stewart arrives at what seems like a paradoxical conclusion: Protestant England ultimately does a much better job of containing violence against its Catholic community than does Catholic France.  For that matter, Protestant England turns out to be a welcoming save haven for the French Catholic community, complete with monetary support that was "honourable to the charity of the English nation" (216).  Earl Nugent's Daughter shows surprisingly little interest in converting Protestants--notably, Grenville remains Protestant throughout (as per the historical record), something unusual in Catholic fiction.  Instead, it cheers for a more capacious understanding of Englishness, one in which, contra Dickens, it is possible to speak of one's Catholicism and fully participate in civic life.  In a key flash-forward, the novel conjures up the "attentive and well-conducted Protestants" (78) who calmly listen to Cardinal Wiseman speak in St. George's Cathedral, near one of the sites where Lord George Gordon urged the rioters on (78).  But despite the Papal Aggression controversy, we are informed that "John Bull has become more sensible" (79), and so there is no retread of the Gordon Riots.  The Protestants show no sign of converting en masse, but they have nevertheless learned to be "sensible"--a sensibility that enables them to enter a Catholic church as honorable guests, not rioters.  This "sensible" Englishness does not make Protestantism and Catholicism interchangeable, but it does enable a kind of mutual hospitality, in which Protestants are welcomed into Catholic churches in much the same way that French Catholics had been welcomed into England.  Everyone is at home, and everyone is a guest.  

Crane Pond: A Novel of Salem

At the end of Richard Francis' Crane Pond, its protagonist, Samuel Sewall, takes a walk with his oldest daughter, Hannah, and shows her, far off in the distance, the eponymous pond.  As they look at it, she sees some cows, and muses, "I love cows" (347)--which is news to Sewall, who remembers her earlier loathing of said animal.  But, he thinks, "she didn't mislead him then, and she isn't telling untruths now.  As the past makes its pilgrimage to the future it must transform itself or there would be no heaven to look forward to" (347).  Although Crane Pond is a novel about the Salem Witch Trials, told from the point of view of the one judge who later confessed that he had wrongly convicted innocents, it is also a meditation on the junction of truth, history, and community--or, to use another word important to the novel, "fellowship."  The conclusion, in which Sewall envisions the possibility of a new America in a world perhaps less self-confident than that of the previous generation, is optimistic, even though the narrative that has led up to it is far more guarded.  In part, that may be because of the literary-historical past of the Trials, from Hawthorne forward.  Certainly, for many twenty-first century Americans, at least, the Trials come mediated to us via Arthur Miller's The Crucible, and in some respects, Crane Pond dissects that play--indeed, one of the first characters to see through the girls' behavior, Mr. Brattle, does so because he has actually gone to the theater, and recognizes that "[w]atching them at their tricks is exactly like watching a play in Covent Garden" (176).  Sewall, as it happens, is nowhere to be found in The Crucible, but his journey to self-accusation parallels that of Miller's John Proctor, who finds redemption ("a shred of goodness") in the act of refusing to confess.  This is a journey, however, from the point of view of the persecutor, not the persecuted.

Mr. Brattle's insight about the girls' behavior highlights the role that cultural frames play in interpreting events.  Significantly, Sewall did not go to the theatre in England, and early on, he dissuades a local tavernkeeper from building a little theater for a magician (53).  Sewall's disinterest in to dislike of theatricality turns out to be his Achilles heel, as he cannot imagine that the girls' contortions and expressions of pain are anything but authentic testimony to spiritual suffering.  Although the novel puts a number of other characters in the dock for cruelty, Sewall is represented throughout as a believer in childhood innocence and an optimist about election; his actions during the trials reflect compassion for the girls, whose witness he believes to the point of disavowing his own senses.  When the girls accuse John Proctor of somehow projecting himself up to the roof, Sewall both sees him there and doesn't (120).  Sewall lives in a world inhabited by spirits and divine portents, where empirical evidence seems simply inadequate.  Unlike The Crucible, Crane Pond is not interested in the accusers' motivations; instead, it turns them into embodiments of contemporary terror, colonial fears (mysterious animal attacks, raids by local Native American tribes, etc.) made manifest.  (When Betty Parris, one of the original accusers, is separated from the others, she simply returns to "normal.") The adults see what their beliefs prime them to see, even though in some cases it's obvious that a girl is being manipulated (physically, in one instance) by someone else.  Mr. Brattle sees through the girls not because he is a religious skeptic, but because of his greater cultural competency; Sewall, by contrast, is proud to say that when he went to England, he not only left his "wits" in America, but his "heart" and "soul" along with it (178).  Brattle's very mild cosmopolitanism primes him to detect ambiguities where Sewall can only see truth/lies, yes/no--a belief in binaries and absolutes that does not stand up against the complex forces at work in the trials. 

Sewall himself is a character of mixed motives, as he occasionally admits.  He is a devout man who excitedly interprets events in the light of Biblical prophecy, but he also temporizes and waffles when decision is called for.  He is merciful (not, in other words, the fanatical Puritan famous from centuries of stereotyping), but his refusal to stand up during the trials is also compensation for what he perceives as his own wishy-washiness during a piracy case some years earlier.  He disavows the worldly pleasures of theater, but loves to eat--in fact, he spends a good chunk of the novel eating, thinking about eating, or buying things to eat.  (In a particularly creepy moment, his first thought after condemning a woman to death is to get to his dinner as quickly as possible.)  Although the eating is comical,  it also carries more substantive force: when he feels himself being tweaked by Mr. Brattle over eating habits, Sewall thinks to himself, "[s]o many discussions and meetings take place over a good meal; so much business can be transacted; so many friendships cemented.  Dinner is at the heart of family life, just as the Lord's Supper is at the heart of congregational worship" (291).  For Sewall, eating represents one of the primary forms of community-building, domestic and divine.  Eating together is an act of fellowship, defined by mutuality and exchange, a moment of hospitality and openness.  Significantly, after Sewall's confession, the most influential of his former colleagues on the bench snubs him by not inviting him to a dinner, an act that echoes his minister's decision to exclude him from the congregation after Sewall insists on burying his stillborn child in the family vault.  

One cause for Sewall's increasing anxiety during the trials (even though he mostly remains silent) rests on a different form of disfellowship: the clergymen who refuse to pray with the condemned prisoners. Brattle angrily describes to Sewall how all the ministers in attendance at one of the final executions refused the prisoners' requests for final prayers (244), something that one of the clergymen, Mr. Noyes, had earlier twice refused to do.  When Sewall asks Noyes to pray for Rebecca Nurse, Noyes instead sneers that "I am not her man of God [...] Not now, nor ever was" (212).  Their attitudes are discomfiting to him in part, it is implied, because they simply reenact his own belief in binaries and firmly-delineated truths: one is or is not saved, one is or is not of the church, one is or is not telling the truth, and so on.   But refusing to pray with someone, like refusing to eat with them, is more about the self than the other.  Noyes and the other ministers prioritize their own purported holiness over the needs of another soul; they desire an essentially selfish form of being-with-others (I do not render myself vulnerable; I only share another's pain only when I believe it safe to do so), instead of the commonality that Sewall associates with eating and prayer.  (Sewall's understanding of community is itself limited, inasmuch as he cannot even begin to conceptualize "fellowship" with non-Christians--he believes in the possibility of full fellowship with Native Americans, for example, but only insofar as he also thinks that they are descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel and potential future converts.) Yet the yearning for fellowship can be just as dangerous, Sewall comes to realize, as the refusal to extend it: as he eventually admits to himself, he has been desperately salving his conscience by taking "a collective view of the whole tragedy, concentrating on the notion of fellowship, a fellowship that disappeared when the community divided against itself, then formed again" (325).  Calls for fellowship may be about mutuality, openness, and sharing--but, as Sewall realizes, they can also be a form of sleight-of-hand in which the community is forced to bear a burden that rightly belongs to the individual soul.  If everyone was responsible, then nobody was.

Sewall's decision to confess in front of his congregation, taking full responsibility for his sins during the trial, is rendered deliberately anti-triumphal.  It is here that the novel most obviously inverts The Crucible, which ends with John Proctor heroically affirming his "goodness" and heading off to martyrdom, accompanied by his wife's praise and the frantic breakdowns of the Revs. Hale and Parris.  In Sewall's case, the moment turns into theater, the theater that Sewall has resisted all the way along.  First, Sewall finds himself wondering if his confession was just "an act of sinful vainglory" (337), given how many others were involved--is he assuming too much guilt in the act of confessing his own? And then, in order to somehow exit the confessional scene, he winds up bowing to the congregation, "a hypocritical action, as you would expect of the theater, since it pretends humility while claiming credit" (337).  The confession, intended to reveal the sinner's self, turns out to be both scripted and easily appropriated for unintended purposes; having spent the novel worrying about community, Sewall finds that he cannot escape the demands imposed by his own.  The self he believes he creates for himself in the act of confession rapidly escapes him.  Sewall's unexpectedly theatrical confession turns out to be cathartic for the congregation, as they now think there's nothing more to be done, but that is not, to say the least, a desirable outcome. Indeed,  Sewall's unease in the wake of his confession registers the non-heroism of his act: to accept and publically proclaim one's guilt in the death of innocents is moral, but hardly reverses the fact of the crime.  As Sewall quietly thinks to himself, ruminating on the men and women who refused to lie to save themselves, "[t]hose were the brave acts, not this one" (339).  Ultimately, Sewall's confession turns him into a kind of scapegoat, leaving him "half in, half out" (340) of his church and, symbolically, both badly-fed at an inn and denied a dinner invitation.  Having finally told the truth in a novel that is all about people denying truths right in front of their eyes, it makes sense, as even Sewall himself admits, that his fate is "ostracism" (342).

When misattributions attack! A cautionary tale

I've been spending my illness-related downtime (achoo, cough, etc.) doing some revisions to an article, which means pulling out volumes from my various material and electronic collections.  Now, I was giving some (numerically bizarre) examples of one Victorian anti-Catholic talking point--namely, totting up all the people murdered by the Catholic Church, salacious details optional--when I noticed that the same passage kept appearing over and over:

 

This footnote is from John Scott's sermon Samson's Fatal Sleep (1854), but examples recur right down to the twenty-first century.  It is always this quotation specifically, which set off my academic Spidey-sense: when authors over a period spanning well more than a century (!) always somehow manage to cite the same quotation from a three-volume work, the work in question being John Scott's (not this John Scott's) The History of the Church of Christ (1826-1832), then it is highly likely that somebody somewhere has not actually done the reading, but is instead lifting the quotation from elsewhere.  (Tsk, tsk.)  In any event, this discovery called for further investigation, so I called up Scott's History and started searching for it.

Er, one problem.  It's not in John Scott's History.

It is, however, in Thomas Scott's enormously popular The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments (a.k.a. Commentary on the Whole Bible). Hey, Scott vs. Scott...it's easy to confuse them.  Right? So when did they get confused?

It looks like the culprit may well be Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.  There are earlier references to Scott in the 1820s that refer to him as "T. Scott" without any mention of the title--presumably because the name would have been sufficient to indicate the source.  Alas, the Blackwood's author was apparently not up on their Bible commentaries, because in an 1838 article on "The Progress of Popery," they referenced Edward Bickersteth's Testimony of the Reformers (1836), which cites Scott without further identifying the Scott in question.  However, Blackwood's thought Bickersteth meant the other Scott.  Hence the problem.  Later authors all appear to have lifted their references from a combination of a) Blackwood's and b) each other, with the result that the quotation has been misattributed for a good 185 years or so now. 

Julia Ormond

The last article I finished primarily involved high-quality religious fiction (with the occasional poem thrown in), so it's been a while since I've been able to sit down with the kind of novel I normally discuss on this blog.  But it's time to get back in the swing of things, so here we go!  Julia Ormond; Or the New Settlement (Dolman, 1850) is a pre-Papal Aggression Catholic controversial novel, set not in England, but instead in a German Lutheran settlement in Missouri, founded by a kindly first-generation American, Jeremiah Dtwiller.  The tiny and close-knit community experiences an upset when the Catholic Ormond family arrives, eager to escape "the contaminations of the city" (36) in order to raise morally and spiritually pure children.  (Despite the country/city divide, the novel doesn't do anything with the natural surroundings.)  The beautiful Julia is especially popular, thanks to being a perfect example of charity, piety, kindness, learning, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseam.  Although the family is soon on good terms with most of the other residents, thanks to a policy of keeping their religious faith strictly private (and scruples on part of the Dtwillers to confront them), matters soon become unpleasant when a particularly anti-Catholic Methodist preacher, Mr. Gearhart, a man with a "dictatorial and overbearing manner of speaking" (52), preaches a hellfire-and-damnation sermon condemning the wiles of Satan in the community's midst.  Although most of the community is unimpressed, and the Ormonds themselves mildly amused--"The truth is, we are so accustomed to such things, that we are become pretty callous to them" (81)--there are repercussions: the Dtwiller's eldest son, Abel, a Lutheran minister, has begun by engaging in controversy with the beautiful (etc. etc. etc.) Julia and ended by falling in love with her--after, that is, largely coming around to her religious POV.   Alas, Julia has vowed herself to perpetual virginity (albeit without joining a sisterhood), and so poor Abel, determined to make himself her equal, takes off for further study.  Thanks to a lost letter, his disappearance mystifies everyone, and between that and the obnoxious gossip Mrs. Litherbarrow, an iconoclastic mob threatens to burn the Ormonds out of their home.  Fortunately, the beautiful (etc. etc. etc.) Julia heads them off, and the mystery is revealed in the nick of time.  Cue several years passing, and everybody has converted to Catholicism, thanks to the beautiful (etc. etc. etc.) Julia's influence; at the very end, the new priest arrives to preach in the equally new church, and it turns out to be--er, really, there aren't any prizes for guessing the answer to that one.

As always, let's look for the points of interest.  First, the plot structure is a good example of the Catholic interrupted courtship/marriage plot, which both critiques the marriage plot's dominance in nineteenth-century realist fiction, and reframes the concept of "family" to incorporate a different understanding of belonging.  Julia chooses to live as a "religious recluse" (159), instead of a Sister of Charity, the better to serve as a substitute mother to her siblings; yet, her decision is on a continuum with the Sisters who are "actuated by affectionate tenderness and a sense of duty to the common Father, whose children the sufferers are" (165).  The celibate, that is, abandons the worldly and bodily desires associated with reproduction, as well as with the demands of everyday middle- or upper-class life, to sacrifice herself entirely for the universal family headed by God.  In this context, Julia's accomplishments (the etc. etc. etc.) are no longer the traditional signs of useless femininity--the sort of education intended to advertise a woman's suitability for genteel marriage--but, instead, the practical studies necessary to teach her brothers and sisters, a project she later extends to the rest of the community.  (The novel thus adopts one of the Victorian justifications for certain kinds of women's professional work--namely, that it is at root an extension of maternal or caring labor.)  Similarly, when Abel makes his case for marriage by pleading that "you may be enabled to bring another stray sheep to the great fold!" (167), Julia's firm refusal rejects a much milder version of the classic marriage plot's "reformed rake" scenario.  Abel is no rake, but he is also still no Catholic, and his proposal invests his spiritual quest with definite overtones of worldly romance.  Their mutual destiny, then, is one in which they are united in perfect spiritual accord, each fully relinquishing the pull of bodily desire in pursuit of holy service.  

The novel also illustrates some of the gender trouble caused by the Catholic controversial novel's "flipping" of Protestant tropes.  One has to go quite some way into the nineteenth century before Catholic controversial fiction ceases to react to its Protestant forebears en route to consolidating its own formal properties.  In evangelical fiction, female controversialists (and child controversialists, for that matter) are extremely important: their ability to hold their own against hostile Catholic (or secular) interrogators, of whatever sort, manifests the power of sola scriptura.  Anyone who has properly read and interpreted the Bible (with the help of the Holy Spirit) can take on even the most erudite opposition.  For obvious reasons, this doesn't work in the Catholic context; at the same time, for polemical reasons, Catholic authors tried to hang on to the female controversialist figure.  What to do? Julia's various debating scenes exemplify a number of escape routes.  First, she takes apart sola scriptura and, indirectly, prooftexting as viable approaches to the Bible (e.g., pointing out that "search the Scriptures" has an immediate context that cannot refer to the N.T. [122-23]); next, she explains the limits of private reason, explaining that it extends to the point of recognizing the true Church and then obeying its "unerring judgment" (130).  The narrative thus authorizes Julia's discussions of Scripture and doctrine inasmuch as they are not original to Julia.  This becomes even clearer when Julia quotes from or recommends the reading of well-known modern Catholic authorities, such as Gother, Milner, and Wiseman; in so doing, she both demonstrates the breadth of her Catholic education and subordinates herself as an expositor.  Significantly, Julia cannot complete Abel's education, even once romance is completely off the table--he needs to undertake a formal Catholic course of study under the guidance of the clergy.  That, too, is standard in Catholic controversial fiction: a character starts by conversing with a well-read Catholic lay figure, progresses to serious reading, and finally turns to a priest.  Julia's power resides in her spiritual exemplarity, which distinguishes her from both the evil Mrs. Litherbarrow and the wishy-washy Mrs. Dtwiller on the novel's moral continuum.  But exemplarity inspires; it isn't sufficient.

Victorian Catholic Fiction as a "Minor" Literature?

I've been looking for a vocabulary to better describe how English Victorian Catholic fiction works.  It's true, as Brian Sudlow has noted, that there is a "divine entente cordiale" between late 19th-c.  French and English Catholic writers when it comes to the topic of secularism, but it's nevertheless still the case that in terms of its form, English Catholic fiction doesn't go down the same routes as its contemporary French counterparts.¹  This is in large part because French Catholic Revival writing emerges in a majority-Catholic context (although, from the 1880s onward, one where Catholicism's establishment character is under increasingly harsh pressure), and is thus positioned simultaneously against not-good Catholic writing (however "not good" is to be defined), anti-clerical writing, and secular realism.  Hence Malcolm Scott's point that the French Catholic Revival was at first self-consciously anti-realist, because realism (and, later, naturalism) were coded secular; when God appears in 19th-c. French realist fiction, Scott suggests, "we know that the novelist is displaying his conjuring tricks, enjoying his own ironic devices," not making a case for the operations of the divine in the everyday world.²  But English Catholic fiction appears in a literary field in which there is, as it were, no "outside": everything has already been staked out as Protestant territory.  Protestants have their own providential narrative forms, their own appropriations of Biblical tropes and language, their own protocols for describing how God works in the world; even when Protestants rule things out of realist bounds, as in the case of mystic visions and miracles, they let them in through the back door via psychologization (see, for example, the dream visions in Alton Locke and Tom Brown's Schooldays), or allow them to run free in the Gothic.  (One of the objections to both Scott's The Monastery and The Bride of Lammermoor was that they confused Gothic and realist modes.) 

What Victorian Catholic novelists tend to do, then, is unwrite genres: the novel appears to be one thing, then turns inside out and becomes an entirely different kind of text.  E. H. Dering, whom I have derided at some length, is nevertheless doing precisely that.  He takes the sensation novel and transforms its shocking events (child swapping! murder! bigamy! wills! etc.) into moments at which divine grace becomes momentarily visible when human beings attempt to thwart it.  Similarly, to use my favorite example, Laetitia Selwyn Oliver's Father Placid appears to be a Gothic, but when Catholics "read" it, it becomes a miracle tale.  After thinking about this for a while, it seemed to me that I needed to look again at Gilles Deleuze's and Felix Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, which defines the concept of "minor literature" thusly: "the deterritorialization of language, the connection of an individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation."³  That is, minor literature is a "minor practice of a major literature from within" (18), by authors who must write in the dominant language that is at the same time not theirs; is always political, not "individual" (17) in its concerns (or "universal," perhaps?); and not defined by a "literature of masters" (17), singular great authors, but by that "collective" of voices.  Now, Deleuze and Guattari phrase this definition in terms of language and style, whereas I'm talking specifically about genre.  The Catholic novelist is at ease in the language, but not in the form.  But I think that appropriating minor literature in this fashion (which is the sort of thing Deleuze and Guattari approved of, rather than otherwise) is one way into thinking about what makes Victorian Catholic fiction not-Protestant, but also not-French Catholic Revival. 

1 Brian Sudlow, "Catholic Realism: Common Ground between French and English Catholic Writings," Chesterton Review 35 3/4 (2009): 575.  Sudlow pursues this point at more length in Catholic Literature and Secularisation in France and England, 1880-1914 (Manchester, 2011).  

2 Malcolm Scott, The Struggle for the Soul of the French Novel: French Catholic and Realist Novelists, 1850-1970 (Macmillan, 1989), 29.   

3 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minnesota, 1986), 18. 

Brief note: Lovers' Saint Ruth's: And Three Other Tales

As a break from contemplating my participation on what are about to be five committees this semester--I seem to have missed the memo about full professors being able to say "no" to things--I decided to read some Catholic fiction.  Louise Imogen Guiney was primarily a poet, and the somewhat awkwardly-titled Lovers' Saint Ruth's: And Three Other Tales  (1895) was her only real try at prose fiction, published a few years before she relocated to England.  The collection might as well have been subtitled "Three Other Tales of Sacrifice," as all four short stories explicitly address self-sacrifice in its various forms, ranging from the innocent but utterly misguided ("The Provider") to expiatory substitution ("An Event on the River") to sanctified patriotism ("Our Lady of the Union") to well-meaning but problematic (the title story).

"Lovers' Saint Ruth's" and "The Provider" seem to have struck contemporary reviewers as Guiney's most successful attempts, perhaps because both of them imagine how self-sacrifice can run aground.  Whereas the tales in the middle see characters abandon themselves fully to a goal that they undertake with no hope of reward--the Union soldier who gives his life for a God-given cause; the wealthy man with a past who gladly pleads guilty to the crime his previously-unknown illegitimate son committed --the first and last tales feature characters who want to sacrifice themselves fully, but misjudge their efforts because they confuse the worldly with the sacred.   "Lovers' Saint Ruth's" is, as Alex Murray argues, a tale filled with "gaps and misunderstanding"* in terms of the present narration--an Anglo-Catholic priest, the descendant of the story's seventeenth-century characters, talking to his visiting American friend--but the plot itself is filled with things unspoken.  Lord Richard, "almost the only Langham with a conscience" (4), senses some sort of doom for his family; having secretly returned to his family's ancestral Catholic faith (they only have their possessions because a previous Langham apostasized), he woos the beautiful Eleanor, who out of love for him becomes a Catholic.  Symbolically, the lovers pledge themselves by the wreck of Saint Ruth's chapel, not by the new Protestant church, an "architectural hodge-podge" (5) whose physical ugliness embodies Protestant degeneracy as much as the ruined chapel embodies Catholicism's tenuous place in early modern England.  But before they manage to negotiate both sets of fathers, neither inclined to allow a marriage, Eleanor is abruptly assaulted and raped; the horrified Lord Richard immediately marries her in order to keep her from public shame--deriving less from the rape and more from his bringing her back to his own house, which makes the situation look like a deliberate assignation--and keeps her secret forever, although Eleanor's "reason was shaken" (12).  To make matters worse, Eleanor becomes pregnant as a result of the rape, meaning that Lord Richard can only maintain the facade by accepting the child as his own.   What follows from this is deeply ambiguous: Eleanor (quite understandably) loathes the child, and both she and Richard conclude that "a curse was upon them, and that they must endure it, and accept the torture of that alien child's presence for some purpose hidden from human eyes" (14).  The clerical narrator, though, argues that this position is "mistaken" (14), and the boy's development into a strong, exemplary adolescent is core to the story's great paradox: Ralph, the hated child of violence who dies at thirteen, would nevertheless have been worthier of inheriting the estate than the legitimate son Vivian, who turns out to be an irreligious wastrel.  In fact, both of Richard's and Eleanor's legitimate children turn out to be worse than useless, leading to the family's slow moral decay over several generations.   Far from becoming a locus of English Catholic authenticity and cultural authority, the Langhams subside into moral nothingness (it's no accident that the narrator's later conversion sees him becoming a monk, ending that line of the family altogether).     Ralph, who inherits neither his biological father's criminality nor Richard's no-conscience gene (as it were), can be transformed into a true Catholic gentleman, but cannot maintain the Langham family line; Richard's biological children, deprived early on of both father and mother, lose their faith altogether, but succeed in reproducing.   Richard's sacrifice for Eleanor fails, I think, because both he and Eleanor are responsible for transforming Ralph's innocence (announced on his tombstone, when it is too late) into the "curse"; Richard makes the lesser sacrifice (lying to preserve Eleanor's respectability) but neither he nor his wife can make what, on the terms of the collection's two successful sacrifice tales, would be the greater one (loving Ralph).  The cult of biological continuity wins the day over the more important promise of spiritual inheritance.

"The Provider," the other failed sacrifice tale, addresses the same cultural anxieties about child suicide as does Thomas Hardy's contemporaneous Jude the Obscure, and for the same reason.  Twelve-year-old Hughey is the oldest child in a deeply impoverished Irish family, already marked by multiple deaths; the family's move from pastoral poverty to its darker urban counterpart triggers Hughey's growing self-consciousness about money.  There is the "fine monument" to his father, the "enforced luxury" of a sister's funeral, the "costly" nature of his baby brother's chronic illness, and the ever-pressing demand for "rent" (95): domestic sufferings become all the more terrible because they carry a price tag, and each family member turns into potential negative value.  By voluntarily leaving school and going out to work, Hughey translates himself, in his own eyes, from the loss to the profit side of the accounting book.  But his obsession with money, which leads him to fall prey to a banking con, leads him to tell a "masterly lie" (105) about the amount of money he is making, the better to keep up his investments.   His unrepentant sin, no matter how charming it seems in context, signals that his act of sacrifice has gone off the rails.  Like Richard and Eleanor, his sacrifice tilts towards the worldly, insofar as his dreams are entirely (and understandably) about rescuing his mother from want; in fact, though, his fantasies about becoming his mother's "deliverer" (107)--an obvious trespass on Christ's territory--interfere with her health and comfort, insofar as he does his best to ensure that nobody else understands the true nature of their situation.   Self-sacrifice turns into innocent self-aggrandizement, even though, we are assured near the end, "he had never in his life hugged any thought whose interest centred in himself" (119).  His obsession with money-making climaxes in his critical evaluation of the children's value: "Oi've been a-thinkin' wan reason of ut is she has too many childher.  'Tis good little Rosy is with the saints. Childher all eats and wears clothes, and isn't much use" (113).  Reducing children's lives to a harsh calculus of consumption without profit, Hughey tips the story straight over into Little Father Time territory--although he ultimately elects to kill only himself, without taking one of his sisters along with him.  This sad child's parody of Christ's passion, which Hughey prefaces with "the sign of faith" (122), accomplishes nothing, and his mother dies within a few hours.  This makes the story's title all the more bleak, inasmuch as his remaining siblings are now orphaned without a provider.   In that sense, the story is on a continuum with "Lovers' Saint Ruth's," but at the opposite end: whereas Eleanor and Richard are psychologically constrained by aristocratic notions of honor, Hughey is equally in thrall to the cruel, all-or-nothing demands of urban poverty, which reduces human beings to sullied cash.

* Alex Murray, "Recusant Poetics: Rereading Catholicism at the Fin-de-Siecle," English Literature in Transition 56.3 (2013): 362. 

John Ward, Preacher

A few chapters into Margaret Deland's John Ward, Preacher, I exclaimed, "Hey, this is a reverse Robert Elsmere."  Published the same year as Robert Elsmere, John Ward, Preacher similarly traces how the clash between heterodox and strictly orthodox beliefs affect a marriage--only here with the wife, Helen, the one skeptical of orthodox dogmas and, for that matter, Biblical inspiration.  By the end, though, I realized instead that JWP was much closer to Mrs. Humphry Ward's later novel Helbeck of Bannisdale, in which the Catholic Helbeck demands that the freethinking Laura Fountain abandon freethought for his own faith, ultimately leading her to commit suicide. The core of JWP Is that the ultra-Calvinist John Ward, who has married Helen Jeffrey despite her universalism, eventually concludes that their marriage cannot continue until she converts; he insists on a separation that lasts until his own death, neither one of them budging on their core principles. This paradoxically cruel devotion, which the novel emphatically praises, stands in contrast to the novel's other marriages and romance plots, including the tragicomic non-courtship of the lawyer Mr. Denner and two maiden aunts, the unhappily-married Dales, and the erratic competition between Gifford Woodhouse (good) and Dick Forsythe (bad) for the hand of Lois Howe. 

The novel unfolds in tiny villages and mill towns, far away from even the hint of urban sophistication; only the visiting Forsythe, a shallow cad with a faint aura of sexual danger, comes close to suggesting the allure of European mores.  As a result, the characters are both physically and figuratively imprisoned by their circumstances, with no interest in travel and about as much interest in books (which, when featured, are usually sparse or unpleasant).  Thus, the clash between Helen's shocking universalism and John's hellfire-and-damnation Presbyterianism is articulated on her part primarily in terms of affect, conscience, and inner urgings: "Oh, a theological argument seems to me sacrilege, and dogma can never be an antidote for doubt, John" (99).  The novel associates this non-dogmatic, instinctive theism with nurturing and charity; it is the spirit to Presbyterian's law.  Both John and Helen try to comfort the widow of a dissolute man who died heroically, but John cannot match Helen's assurances that the man is not damned for all eternity, leaving the woman in a state of profound spiritual despair.  (The clergyman whose pastoral duties run aground on his theological principles is a classic trope in controversial fiction.)  Presbyterianism's associations with the dreaded "theology," and thus texts, suggests that the absence of books from the narrative has a greater meaning: whereas Robert Elsmere's deconversion is bookish, a matter of the mind as well as the heart, Helen's universalism is figured as a kind of commonsense truth (although, by the end of the novel, she admits that she has virtually lost her faith altogether).  Equally, Helen's universalism is set against Presbyterian Bibliolatry.  This is a novel with remarkably few Biblical quotations, let alone references to the Bible; Helen herself tells John that while she understands his position, she does not share his foundational assumption that the Bible has been divinely "inspired," and therefore the two of them cannot "reason" with each other (308).  Helen's point here exemplifies how JWP deconstructs the controversial novel as a form.  Most controversial fictions represent theological arguments as entirely one-sided, in which the dice are always loaded in favor of the "right" position, and the person in the "wrong" simply blusters or concedes immediately, whereas Helen raises the possibility that neither side is capable of judging the other.  Despite Helen's lack of a wide-ranging education, John never manages to wave his magic wand and persuade her to convert, transforming the controversial novel into a drama of deadlock. 

At the same time, JWP offers up a kind of loaded relativism that really isn't one.   On the one hand, the henpecked Mr. Dale voices the novel's position on Helen's and John's standoff: "There is something very beautiful to me, Helen, speaking of truth, that you and your husband, from absolutely opposite and extreme points, have yet this force of truth in your souls.  You have both touched the principle of life,--he from one side, you from the other.  But you both feel the pulse of God in it!" (451)  On the other hand, despite Helen's understandable unhappiness towards the novel's end, the narrative accidentally self-deconstructs, as all of its sympathies are observably on Helen's side.  The Episcopalians, like Helen's clergyman uncle Dr. Howe and everyone else in her home village, are prissy and hypocritical, with little in the way of any capacity for self-reflection. (Mr. Dale's wife Adele, who bosses him unmercifully, believes that women should be silent and obedient...)  When Dr. Howe tries to offer Christian comfort to his old friend Mr. Denner, dying after being run over by a horse, he is entirely inadequate to the task. Meanwhile, when Helen goes off to her husband's mill town, she finds that the Presbyterians are gossipy, censorious prigs who are (once again) hypocrites, with an added dose of bigotry.  The fully godless characters, like Dick Forsythe, are of course louche.  Only Helen and her friend Gifford, both of whom profess a theism emphasizing kindness, honesty, and self-sacrifice, escape the novel's censure (Gifford's inability to understand Lois notwithstanding).  For modern readers, moreover, the novel's attempt to define the morality of an action solely by intention can be hard to take: Helen (and later Gifford) staunchly defends her husband's insistence on a marital separation because it's a sign of his "nobleness" (410), a position that finds about as many supporters in the text as John's argument early in the novel that the South seceded from "a mistaken idea of duty" (9) that, nevertheless, they could not avoid.  (Here, John and Helen arrive at the same conclusion from entirely different starting points, signaling their later conflict.)  To thine own principles be true, the novel argues, under all circumstances.   Yet in the case of John's and Helen's marriage, that principle itself results in tragedy: their mutual heroism destroys the earthly relationship, despite their devotion to one another, and Helen does not really believe that there will be a reward in the afterlife for their sufferings.  It's telling that the novel undercuts John's natural spiritual progression towards a "good" evangelical deathbed scene by eliminating that moment altogether--Helen goes upstairs and later comes back downstairs once John is dead, but the scene itself and the necessary language associated with it (witnessing, words of counsel, etc.) have been erased.  Unlike Mr. Denner, whose deathbed scene is quite prolonged, although not evangelical in nature, John is denied both hope and triumph.  Something about this purity of intention, for all that the novel praises it, proves incompatible with actual human thriving.  Tellingly, Gifford and Lois probably do not share this extreme form of passion, but their first moment of true romantic understanding "was only part of the morning, and the sunrise, and Nature herself" (470).  Such feeling may not be heroic, but its full harmony with the natural world suggests future possibilities denied to Helen and John.