Marilynne Robinson's Gilead Sequence

MARILYNNE ROBINSON’S GILEAD SEQUENCE: LITERATURE AND THE TRANSLATION OF RELIGIOUS TRADITION Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Esther Valora Harsh November 2020 Contents Abstract……………………………………………………………………………1 Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………..2 Introduction………………………………………………………………………..3 1. Gilead…………………………………………………………………………. .20 2. Home……………………………………………………………………………51 3. Marilynne Robinson’s Shakespeare…………………………………………….88 4. The Shared Reading Experiment………………………………………………..116 5. The Individual Readers……………………………………………………….....141 6. Jack: Conclusion………………………………………………………………...174 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………..202 Abstract This thesis explores the precarious survival of religious tradition in the modern world through reinvention between generations. It concentrates on novels that deal with religious crisis and conflict, with particular reference to the work of Marilynne Robinson, an American novelist and essayist born 1943, working within the Christian tradition while still reaching a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic. It argues that once the transmission of theology becomes problematic, it is in the human melting pot of psychology that religious problems are re-experienced in ostensibly secular terms. It investigates the possibility of re-translating those psychological and existential concerns into a renewed religious understanding, via the uses of literature. In this, as a cross-disciplinary study in which Robinson’s novels acts as a holding-ground for a mass of competing concerns, the thesis takes its theoretical origins in particular from the work of philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, and psychologists William James and Wilfred Bion. The Introduction outlines this orientation, especially in light of the Victorian realist novelist George Eliot and her 1854 translation of Ludwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity which converted religion into secular terms. Robinson has been called the modern George Eliot, though working within a religious tradition. The thesis then consists of two parts: part 1 concentrating on an examination of the Gilead novels; part 2 offering case histories of reader responses. Part 1 comprises three chapters: Chapter One, The Attempt at Transmission, examines religious tradition from one generation to the next in Robinson’s novels Gilead and Lila in the light of Robinson’s understanding of theologian John Calvin (1509-64) as reinvented through Jonathan Edwards (1703-58), and including Robinson’s interest in Feuerbach (1804-72) and in William James (1842-1910). Chapter Two, The Problem, examines religious tradition in crisis in Robinson’s novel Home. It uses William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) on mental ‘hot spots’ and the work of psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion (1897-1979) to track moments and places involved in potential changes of reality and crises of belief. Chapter Three, Shakespeare’s Grace, starts from Home’s need for a way forward for blocked and damaged meaning. First it follows Robinson back to her 1977 Masters thesis on Shakespeare’s early history plays. Then it goes forward to her later non-fictional essays on Shakespeare’s late plays, offered as what she calls a ‘natural’ model for why grace might be needed and what the experience of grace might be like outside a formal religious framework. Shakespeare offers for her own fiction a tradition of literary (in lieu of formally religious) language as a holding-ground for meaning. Part 2 explores a variety of modern readers of different backgrounds and persuasions reading Home, using and testing the findings of Part 1 to ask what literature can do to carry meaning previously deemed religious. Chapter Four, Praxis in Groups, examines a live shared-reading group brought together through The Reader, using analytic research tools from the Centre for Research into Literature, Reading and Society to test the development of literary thinking in the challenge of Home. Chapter Five, Praxis in Individual Readers, focuses on individual readers of Home through the use of reader diaries and follow-up interviews. Three case histories of highly experienced readers explore the kind of thinking needed to break through the blocks described in chapter two. Chapter Six, Conclusion, considers how far the language of literature can carry forward in readers’ experience the feeling of meanings previously held within religious tradition, through an analysis of Jack (2020) in recent culmination of the Gilead novels. 1 Acknowledgments Written with love for my brother Taft and all the generations to come. Thank you to my loving husband Daniel. Thank you to the many people who have helped me with or participated in this research. I would especially like to thank Professor Philip Davis, who took my work seriously and helped me to find the language. 2 Introduction This thesis aims to explore the precarious survival of religious tradition in the modern world through reinvention across and between generations. It concentrates on novels that deal with religious crisis and conflict, with reference to the work of Marilynne Robinson, the American novelist and essayist born 1943, working within the Christian tradition while still reaching a wide audience on both sides of the Atlantic. It argues that once the transmission of theology and sacred observance become problematic, it is in the human melting pot of psychology that religious problems are re-experienced in ostensibly secular terms. It investigates the possibility of re-translating those psychological and existential concerns into a renewed religious understanding, through the writing and reading of literature. As I will explain, it takes its theoretical origins in particular from the work of philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, and psychologists William James and Wilfred Bion, while in the background lies my previous work on George Eliot and Feuerbach. But first the formal and informal background to this thesis is perhaps best given through the following introduction, taken from a letter I sent to a local author, Carys Bray, in the early stages of this research. Bray wrote a novel about the experience of a religiously devout family losing a child, and the crisis of belief that followed. A Song for Issy Bradley 1 is set within a Mormon family context, which the author herself abandoned, partly through becoming a novelist, but which I continue to embrace. I wrote to Carys Bray with regard to my broad thesis concerning the complex relation between a traditional religious faith, a family crisis, and the work of the realist novel. I wanted to ask her about her fictional work in the light of her previous tradition, but also about her own reading of Marilynne Robinson who retains her religious faith within and alongside the writing of her novels. The letter tries to find in autobiography a language that makes most honestly explicit the concerns of my research, in response to Carys Bray’s request for further clarifying explication of my questions to her. The search for a language is itself part of my subject-matter. 1 Carys Bray, A Song for Issy Bradley (London: Windmill Books, 2014). 3 I want to start with some brief ‘facts’ about myself, only as background to help explain the nature of my thesis. A) BACKGROUND I was brought up as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormonism) and remain so, but with an education in a wider culture: there has been no sense of conflict between these two traditions since both spring in particular from my father. Religion has been a grounding foundation for my father from what was a very broken and vulnerable childhood. When I was last in England to study for my Masters, my subject-matter was the transmission of what I took to be religious values and feelings into non-religious settings, without proselytizing. In this my interest was especially in George Eliot. This was because George Eliot, in her shift from her youthful Evangelicalism, believed she must and could translate the best of religion via Ludwig Feuerbach into a secular way of being – into a second language that salvaged what was humanly important. After all, as Feuerbach had shown in The Essence of Christianity which she herself as Marian Evans had translated into English in 1854, religion was itself an unconscious translation of essentially human needs in the first place. I have added to Feuerbach the work of William James and the psychological investigations undertaken in his Varieties of Religious Experience – both of whom are admired by Marilynne Robinson. This means that I take religion to be all that is to do with the most really real of serious human concerns: hence my interest in the great psychological realist novel in the hands of George Eliot. In my Masters dissertation, I offered an argument towards the extension of family feeling, with particular reference to Silas Marner. My question was: could the close human feelings felt and developed in the nuclear family at its primal best become widened and felt outside the unit, even between strangers? 4 It does not seem to matter to me if people are what I would call religious in feeling without being nominally or formally religious as such. I endorse George Eliot’s aim for a new transmission of feelings associated with religion, though I myself remain committed to my first language, my first tradition, as a Christian. Nor am I troubled by the thought that my own religion may be seen by others, in turn, as no more than a particular dressing-up of humanism. What does it matter provided somewhere, humanely in-between the extremes, connections can be made and good gets done? Though I myself do not suffer from conflict in all this. I am aware of conflict, even within my own tradition and my own family. (i) Religion and family have always been a central focus of my family. We all faced a deep heartbreak almost two years ago when my younger brother Robert was killed unexpectedly. He was walking across the street when a drunk woman going 55 miles an hour over the speed limit hit him as she ran through a red light.

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