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Confession in Literature from Webster to Defoe

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Confession in Literature from Webster to Defoe Provided by the author(s) and NUI Galway in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title Confession in Literature from Webster to Defoe Author(s) King, Nora Publication Date 2012-12-20 Item record http://hdl.handle.net/10379/3581 Downloaded 2021-09-23T14:42:06Z Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. Confession in Literature from Webster to Defoe Nora King. December, 2012. Supervisor: Dr. Marie-Louise Coolahan. English Department, School of Humanities, College of Arts, Social Sciences, & Celtic Studies, National University of Ireland, Galway. 1 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Marie-Louise Coolahan. Her expertise, insight, guidance, interest and patience were invaluable to this study. I would also like to thank the English Department at National University of Ireland, Galway for the support I received for this research. I am grateful to the National University of Ireland, Galway and the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for funding this study. My gratitude also extends to friends who have supported this project in a multitude of ways, especially Mo Beline, Michelle Burke, Keith Conroy, Veronica Johnson, Kevin McGee, Emily O’Flaherty and Dr. Shelley Troupe. Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Nora, my daughters, Jessica, Aisling and Fiona, and my husband, Noel, for the unwavering help, support and understanding that they gave throughout the duration of this research. 2 Contents List of Abbreviations 5 Introduction 6-22 1. Confession, Augustine, and the Reformation 23-58 2. Sex, Gender and Confession in Jacobean Tragedy 59-109 3. Spiritual Autobiography: Discipline, Resistance and ‘Truth’ 110-152 4. Defoe’s Fiction: Hidden Sins and the Consolation of Confession 153-201 Conclusion 202-204 3 This thesis is all my own work, and I have not preciously obtained a degree on the basis of any of this work. 4 List of Abbreviations EEBO Early English Books Online ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography PMLA Publications of the Modern Language Association 5 Introduction Catholic confession is determined by the beliefs that the individual has free will and can atone for sin, and that the priest has the right to absolve sins and impose penance. In the sixteenth century, Luther configured private confession to a priest as a ‘papist’ invention which was not justified in the Bible. Bearing no relation to early Christian penitential practices, it was an instrument of church control which disrupted what ought to be an unmediated relationship between God and the individual Christian. He further argued that confession did not aid salvation – which was achieved by faith alone. Rather, confession before God (as opposed to a priest) cleared the conscience of destructive guilt which might otherwise impact negatively on spiritual development. He advocated a public confession of sinfulness before the congregation, but this did not entail enumeration of individual sins. Only public sins – such as theft and adultery – were deemed a matter for church discipline. Otherwise, self-examination, guided by the individual’s conscience, was the means to determine what was sinful and needed to be confessed.1 Later, Calvin argued that the concept of predestination meant that only a few – the elect – were singled out by God to be saved from damnation. 2 In Calvinist thought, while self-examination and confession before God were duties of all, there was no guarantee that God would forgive sins. It was a sign, not a guarantee, of election to engage in self-examination and confession. As England attempted to define its Confession of faith during the Reformation, there were vacillations between Catholicism and Protestantism, via-media Protestantism and orthodox Calvinism.3 This led to widespread debate about the performance of confession. This thesis demonstrates continuities and contrasts between Protestant and Catholic confession, examines the impact of changing confessional practices in England on wider relations pertaining to authority and the individual and on notions of sin, and explores how these changes facilitated the development of more complex identities. These issues are examined through a genre-based framework, which employs the 1 See Martin Luther, ‘The Pagan Servitude of the Church’, in Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1961). 2 John Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton (London, 1578). 3 To avoid confusion caused by similar terminology, Confession as referring to a profession of faith is denoted by using the upper case C, confession of sin through the lower case c. See Diarmaid MacCulloch for difficulties experienced by other countries when defining their Confessions of faith during the Reformation (New York: Penguin, 2003), Chapter Ten. 6 methodologies of textual analysis and historical research, and which examines theological positions on confession. In Chapter One, I explore the theological bases for Catholic and Protestant confessional practices. Through an analysis of Augustine’s Confessions, written between 397 and 398, I examine late antiquity and the medieval period for historical and theological developments that influenced the development of Catholic confession. I then examine debates about confession during the Reformation, and explore socio-religious factors that impacted on confessional practices in Reformation England. The subsequent chapters explore a variety of early modern English literary and autobiographical texts which depict fictional or actual confessions, and which engage with, or offer perspectives on, Reformation debates about confession. Chapter Two explores three Jacobean tragedies: John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi (1623), Thomas Middleton and Richard Rowley’s The Changeling (1622), and John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore (1633) 4; Chapter Three explores two Calvinist spiritual autobiographies: Elizabeth Isham’s My Booke of Remembrance (written between 1638 and 1639) and Richard Norwood’s Confessions (written between 1639 and 1640); and Chapter Four examines the portrayal of confession in three novels by Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1722), and Roxana (1724). Norton’s thesis, ‘Confession in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century Protestant Literature’, also explores confessional discourses in various English Protestant writing forms, including spiritual autobiography and the three Defoe novels explored here. However, he assesses how confession acquired ‘more religious and political meaning and rhetorical uses’ after the Reformation; how Protestant confessional language became central to defending Protestant religious beliefs and confessional practices in opposition to Catholic ones; and the ‘Protestant uses of criminal confession for purging England of heresy’.5 Thus, our studies differ in terms of their overall objectives. Tambling’s socio-political examination of confession includes analyses of Protestant spiritual autobiography and literary confessions. However, his study spans the medieval period to the modern era and draws on cross-cultural works.6 4 Chronologically, The Duchess of Malfi is the first text.1623 refers to the date of its first publication. The exact date of its first performance is unknown, but it was before 16 December1614. On this date the actor who first played Antonio died. See The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Brian Gibbons, New Mermaids, (London: Black Publishers, 2006), p. xxxvii. 5 James Harris Norton, ‘Confession in Seventeenth-and Early Eighteenth-Century Protestant Literature’ (unpublished PhD dissertation: Indiana University, 1994), 1-2. 6 Jeremy Tambling, Confession: Sexuality, Sin, the Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990). 7 The principal cultural and historical locations of my study position early modern English attitudes to confession as an important prism through which to explore the socio-political aspects of confession. Like Tambling, I draw on Foucault’s analysis of confession as a disciplinary tool of authority. However, while a Foucauldian perspective is important, this study also diverges in key ways from Foucault. Before discussing these differences, it is expedient here to outline his approach to confession, and illustrate its relevance to this study. Foucault argued that in Christian confession, individual desires, thoughts and dispositions that do not accord with the tenets of Christianity are renounced. Confession thus produces an individual subjectivity which sees the self as a source of sin. Emphasising the power dynamics of confession, he argues that it: unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply an interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile.7 He argues that the advent of auricular confession was a crucial development in confession’s evolution as a ‘technology of the self’ which defines subjectivity, entails self-renunciation and instils deference to authority.8 Auricular confession is the term used for the Catholic practice of an individual privately confessing sins to a priest, which he then absolves. In early Church penitential practices penitents confessed only major sins, such as adultery, or denunciation of the Church in times of persecution.9 These confessions were made
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