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The Function of Religion in Selected Novels of George Gissing Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English Winter 1-7-2011 The Function of Religion in Selected Novels of George Gissing Lawton A. Brewer Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Brewer, Lawton A., "The Function of Religion in Selected Novels of George Gissing." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2011. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/60 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE FUNCTION OF RELIGION IN SELECTED NOVELS OF GEORGE GISSING by LAWTON A. BREWER Under the Direction of Paul Schmidt ABSTRACT George Gissing has experienced a fluctuating reputation among critics in the period of over one hundred years since his death in 1903. Curiously, during the last decade of his life, many critics put Gissing on a par with Thomas Hardy and George Meredith among writers living at that time. Early in his career, however, his reputation suffered from the notion that Gissing was simply a naturalist with a pessimistic, atheistic streak. To some extent, this appraisal has some merit. Gissing pronounced himself an unbeliever to family and to acquaintances such as Fredrick Harrison as early as 1880. Nonetheless, Gissing maintained an interest in religion throughout his life, a fact made plain by his use of religious material in his novels. Furthermore, he was far from merely dismissing religion, nor did he adopt a uniformly unsympathetic view of belief. My dissertation will demonstrate that, starting with his first published novel, Gissing made extensive use of religious subject matter in the form of imagery, symbolism, plot elements, and characterization. More significantly, he also examined the relationship between religion and capitalism. Often, one detects in Gissing‟s work a sense of what I will call economic Calvinism, an idea that has received extensive explication by Max Weber and others. I will show that Gissing‟s characters are often divided into class and economic lines, a fact not in itself particularly novel, but one which finds expression in Gissing in terms very evocative of the Christian division of humanity into categories of damned and saved. I will also reveal patterns in Gissing‟s work that depict the ongoing dialogue between religious issues and other social concerns such as feminism, philanthropy, poverty, church affiliation, philosophy, and marriage. The dissertation covers selected novels from roughly the first half of Gissing‟s career in an attempt to bring to light the pervasiveness of religious reference in a representative assortment of Gissing‟s work. My paper will show that more concentrated attention to the use of religion in Gissing will contribute to a greater understanding of him as an artist. It will also suggest that more study in this area needs to be done. INDEX WORDS: Gissing, Calvinism, Arminianism, Religion, Church, Philanthropy, Feminist space, Money, Economics, Christianity, Capitalism, Protestantism, Puritanism, Christ, Exploitation, Charity, Activism, Social Issues, “The New Woman,” Marriage, Class, Poverty, Max Weber, Damnation, Salvation, Determinism, Accommodation, Commodification, Gender, Bible, New Testament, Old Testament, Faith, Belief, Darwin, Universal salvation, Savior, Martyr, Comte, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Election, Workers in the Dawn, Isabel Clarendon, The Unclassed, Demos, Thryza, The Nether World, The Odd Women . THE FUNCTION OF RELIGION IN SELECTED NOVELS OF GEORGE GISSING by LAWTON A. BREWER A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2010 Copyright by Lawton A. Brewer 2010 THE FUNCTION OF RELIGION IN SELECTED NOVELS OF GEORGE GISSING by LAWTON A. BREWER Committee Chair: Paul Schmidt Committee: LeeAnne Richardson Michael Galchinsky Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University December 2010 iv DEDICATION To my children, Art and Abby. To Bettie Sellers, a marvelous poet and the most wonderful of teachers, the kind who really loved the books she taught and wrote. Primarily, I must thank Dr. Paul Schmidt for continuing to assure me that I would finally, despite my own doubts, finish my dissertation. From the beginning of my experience as a candidate for this degree, Dr. Schmidt has been instrumental in encouraging, advising, and guiding me through the process. He has quite literally promoted my work, once nominating a paper of mine for a departmental award. More crucially, he has made certain that I would not desert this endeavor. In my estimation, he has no peer as teacher, scholar, or friend. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In all sincerity, I would like to thank the members of my doctoral committee for their input and assistance. Even in questioning me about the direction of my work, their comments have always been helpful and only painful when necessary. Dr. Paul Schmidt, Dr. LeeAnne Richardson, and Dr. Michael Galchinsky disciplined and sharpened my thinking when it went astray. In addition, I must acknowledge the help of Patricia Chapman, who answered numerous questions and tried to calm me down when I invented yet another paranoid scenario. Ms. Chapman, whose interest in literature will soon result in great critical achievement and academic accomplishment, unfailingly gives of her time to struggling doctoral candidates like me. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v LIST OF TABLES viii CHAPTERS 1. Introduction 1 Gissing, Secularism, and Religion: An Initial Assessment 1 The Victorians and Religion 8 Money, Materialism, and Religion 11 Gissing, Carlyle, and the New God 14 Critical Commentary on Gissing and Religion 19 Money, Class, Feminist Identity 25 The Residuum of Calvinism 27 Zombie Protestantism 37 Money and the “Gospel of Success” 44 The Need For the Study 47 2. Chapter One: The Ur-Novel: Workers in the Dawn 49 Religion, Social Issues, and Money in Workers in the Dawn 49 Foundational Importance 53 The Critique of Philanthropy 54 Legends of the Fall 76 Arthur Golding and the Legions of the Damned 79 vii Apostles of a New Order 89 The Religious Crank and Feminine Space in Workers in the Dawn 97 3. Chapter Two: Early Novels of the Working Class 104 Class and its Demarcations 104 The Unclassed: Determinism Light? 105 The Redemptive Whore: Gissing’s Fantasy Fulfilled 107 Hell Embraced 117 The Religion of Death 122 Woodstock’s Capitalist Theology 130 Demos: A Story of English Socialism 133 Thryza 145 The Nether World: Gissing’s City of Dreadful Night 148 4. Chapter Three: The Damned Domain of Feminine and Religious Space 161 Hell is a Woman’s Realm but Man is the Devil: Isabel Clarendon 168 Thryza: Religion as Feminine Refuge 178 The Odd Women, Gender and Identity 182 5. Conclusion 192 6. Notes 199 Works Cited 251 Bibliography 269 viii LIST OF TABLES Table 1. Calvinism and Arminianism 249 Table 2. Religious Terminology 250 1 Introduction Gissing, Secularism, and Religion: An Initial Assessment George Gissing, considered by contemporary critics as one of the three most respected novelists of the 1890‟s along with Thomas Hardy and George Meredith, nonetheless elicited, as John Halperin notes in Gissing: A Life in Books, a very mixed critical reaction throughout his career (2). His novels have continued to experience an uneven response, with some readers claiming for Gissing a stature nearing greatness and others regarding him at best as a minor late Victorian novelist, to be remembered primarily for his treatment of the urban poor in earlier novels such as Workers in the Dawn, The Unclassed, The Nether World, Demos, and Thryza. Recently, however, appreciation of Gissing has acknowledged a wider range of interests in his works, even within these industrial novels. For instance, numerous feminist critics have discovered in Gissing a sophisticated treatment of issues involving women, although they sometimes find his position on these matters somewhat elusive. Overall, Gissing‟s reputation has grown steadily in the last fifty years, a trend that has accelerated significantly since the mid- 1990s. Biographies and essays continue to appear at a steady rate, and it appears that Gissing has achieved a level of respect that will prove increasingly less susceptible to fluctuation. Gissing‟s work, in my view, justifies this improvement in the novelist‟s reputation. His novels demonstrate an assortment of concerns that Gissing presents with skill and complexity. One of these concerns, not sufficiently recognized, has to do with his management of religious issues, either through Gissing‟s direct evaluation of religion or through the way Gissing employs religious subjects and imagery to underscore or illuminate other social issues, issues with which the author grappled extensively. Fredric Jameson, while analyzing Gissing in The Political Unconscious, observes that “great realistic novelists … are forced, by their own narrative and aesthetic vested interests, 2 into a repudiation of revolutionary change and an ultimate stake in the status quo” (193). Certainly, Gissing evidences “narrative and aesthetic” preoccupations
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