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CATHOLIC CONVERSION and ENGLISH IDENTITY a Dissertation “I HAVE NOT A HOME:” CATHOLIC CONVERSION AND ENGLISH IDENTITY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Teresa Huffman Traver, B.A. Chris Vanden Bossche, Director Graduate Program in English Notre Dame, Indiana July 2007 © Copyright 2007 Teresa Huffman Traver “I HAVE NOT A HOME:” CATHOLIC CONVERSION AND ENGLISH IDENTITY Abstract By Teresa Huffman Traver Throughout the nineteenth century, religious identity, national identity, and domesticity converge in the depiction of broken homes, foreign invaders, and homeless converts which abound in anti-Catholic literature. This literature imagines conversion to Roman or Anglo-Catholicism as simultaneously threatening the English home and the English nation through the adoption of the anti-domestic practices of celibacy and monasticism. However, constructions of conversion as a rejection of domesticity and English identity were not limited to anti-Catholic propaganda: mainstream novelists made use of stock anti-Catholic tropes for rather more complicated purposes. In light of this convergence between religion, nation, and home, this dissertation explores novels by John Henry Newman, Margaret Oliphant, Charlotte Yonge, and Charlotte Brontë in the context of mid-century journal and newspaper articles, court cases, religious tracts and popular anti-Catholic fiction. I argue that in literature concerned with Catholic conversion and the Tractarian movement, the trope of finding a home became a tool for imagining new domestic, Teresa Huffman Traver religious, and national communities. Victorian constructions of English national identity and domesticity were always mutually constitutive, as domesticity was understood to be one of the identifying markers of “Englishness,” while the home served as a microcosm of the nation. At the same time, as recent critics have shown, religious identity was an essential part of English national identity, and anti-Catholic literature used Roman Catholicism as an Other against which to construct a Protestant and domestic English identity. Pro-Catholic or pro-Tractarian novels, on the other hand, often sought to reshape English national identity, incorporating alternative versions of domesticity and alternative conceptions of the role of the church. While religion and domesticity are both firmly connected to national identity, the literature of Roman Catholic or Tractarian conversion was also invested in constructing transnational identities. The concept of Catholicity offered mid-century novelists a means through which to explore the possibility of communities that transcended national and denominational boundaries. From Newman‟s Catholic cosmopolitanism to Yonge‟s view of the communion of saints, religious conceptions of the universal allowed mid-century authors a way to construct identities that, while remaining firmly grounded in English identity, also reached beyond it. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER 1: LOSING A FAMILY, GAINING A CHURCH: NEWMAN‟S CHALLENGE TO VICTORIAN DOMESTICITY ............................................. 19 1.1 Converts and Broken Homes: From Oxford to Rome and the Connelly Case 24 1.2 Newman‟s Critique of the Domestic Ideal...................................................... 50 1.3 Beyond Home and Homeland ......................................................................... 60 CHAPTER 2: CONVERSION, DUALITY, AND VOCATION: THE PERPETUAL CURATE ............................................................................................................... 70 2.1 Narrative, Conversion, and Betrayal in Kingsley‟s “Review of The History of England” ........................................................................................................ 74 2.2 The Convert as Dualist: The Case of Gerald Wentworth ............................... 79 2.3 Duplicity and Disguise: Jesuits in Carlingford? ............................................. 85 2.4 Sisterhoods, Surplices, and “The Great Work” .............................................. 92 2.5 Frank by Name and Nature ........................................................................... 100 CHAPTER 3: BUILDING CHURCHES, BUILDING EMPIRE: YONGE‟S TRACTARIAN DOMESTIC ............................................................................. 112 3.1 “The Holy Catholic Church” ........................................................................ 115 3.2 Constructing the Tractarian Domestic .......................................................... 122 3.3 “Home and Cocksmoor” ............................................................................... 131 3.4 “The Church Must Come to Them” .............................................................. 140 3.5 “I believe in the Communion of Saints” ....................................................... 149 CHAPTER 4: MAKING A HOME IN A FOREIGN LAND ........................................ 156 4.1 Trading Spaces, Brontë-Style ....................................................................... 160 4.2 Performing Cosmopolitanism ....................................................................... 167 4.3 At Home in Labassecour? ............................................................................. 173 4.4 “Land of Convents and Confessionals” ........................................................ 186 4.5 Villette as Novel of Intermarriage ................................................................. 201 ii CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 220 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 226 iii INTRODUCTION Surely this is the case on all sides of us; the outward world is found not to be enough for man, and he looks for some refuge near him, more intimate, more secret, more pure, more calm and stable. This is a main reason and a praiseworthy one, why a great number of the better sort of persons look forward to marriage as the great object of life. The mind finds nothing to satisfy it in the employments and amusements of life, in its excitements, struggles, anxieties, efforts, aims, and victories. Supposing a man to make money, to get on in life, to rise in society, to gain power, whether in the higher or the lower sphere, this does not suffice; he wants a home, he wants a centre on which to place his thoughts and affections, a secret dwelling-place which may soothe him after the troubles of the world, and which may be his hidden stay and support wherever he goes, and dwell in his heart . There is no rest for us, except in quietness, confidence, and affection; and hence all men . seek to make themselves a home, as the only need of their nature, or are unhappy if they be without one. (188-189) The paragraph above, with its emphasis on the home as the place of refuge from worldly ambitions and strife, seemingly might have been excerpted from the work of any number of nineteenth-century advocates of marriage and domesticity. The passage seems to represent a sample of the well-documented and much discussed Victorian domestic ideology, implying as it seems that the home is a region distinct from the field of 1 economics, in which a man—and it is clear that the passage is speaking specifically of men, not generically of human beings—may find solace.1 In fact, however, this passage is not pro-domestic at all, at least not in the conventional sense. It is the work of a man who chose never to marry, who advocated celibacy for others, and who eventually left the closest thing he had to a home (Oxford University) in order to embrace an institution which, in the eyes of many of his contemporaries, threatened the English home. The passage is taken from John Henry Newman‟s sermon “The Church a Home for the Lonely,” published in 1838 in Plain and Parochial Sermons.2 In the paragraphs following the one cited above, Newman goes on to clarify what he sees as the real significance of the universal desire to make a home, namely that “Our Lord Jesus Christ” after his death and Ascension, “left in the world what before was not in it,—a secret home, for faith and love to enjoy, wherever found, in spite of the world around us” (190). This secret home is not to be found in the domestic sphere, or among one‟s family, since it “is the Church of God, which is our true home of God‟s providing, His own heavenly court . in which we forget the outward world and its many troubles.” And, unlike the national temple of Israel which prefigured it—a 1 Thus, this passage might initially seem in keeping with works such as Mary Poovey‟s Uneven Developments, which suggests that virtue and moral life were increasingly separated from the fields of economics and politics and relegated to the domestic sphere, where virtue became the province of women (10). As Elizabeth Langland points out, this nineteenth-century ideology of the home as haven presided over by an “angel” obscured the reality that “the house and its mistress served as a significant adjunct to a man‟s commercial endeavors” (8). 2 Note the publication date: this sermon was delivered and published several years prior to Newman‟s conversion to Roman Catholicism. When he speaks of “the Church” it is clear that he does not, at this point, mean the Roman Catholic Church, but rather an invisible
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