i

The Nun in the Garret: The Marriage Plot and Religious Epistemology in the

Victorian Novel

By

Emily Madsen

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

(English Literature)

at the

University of Wisconsin-Madison

2015

Date of final Oral examination: 9/12/2014

This dissertation is approved by the following Committee Members: Mario Ortiz-Robles, Dissertation Chair, Associate Professor, English (UW-Madison) Susan David Bernstein, Professor, English (UW-Madison) Mark Knight, Associate Professor, English (University of Toronto) Caroline Levine, Professor, English (UW-Madison) Ernesto Livorni, Professor, French and Italian (UW-Madison) i

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments...... ii

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………... 1

Chapter 1: Hiding Chains with Flowers: Allegory, Imagination and Religious Worldview in Villette...... 39

Chapter 2: Conscience and Causality: “If” in Gaskell’s North and South……………….……………………………………… 82

Chapter 3: And/Or: Realism and Faithful Reading in Adam Bede…………………………………………. 118

Chapter 4: Diamonds and Dust: Religion and Detection in The Moonstone……………….……………………………. 157

Coda……………………………...... ………………………………………....…….. 192

Bibliography………………………..………………………………………………… 200

ii

Acknowledgements

I am very thankful for the supportive environment of the UW-Madison English

Department. While dissertating can often feel like a solitary, isolating experience, my committee members and colleagues in the Department have consistently reminded me that writing is an act of communication and connection. I am especially thankful to my

Dissertation director, Mario Ortiz-Robles, who read countless drafts, talked through knotty questions of organization and evidence, and offered invaluable feedback and encouragement. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee: Caroline

Levine, for assisting me in asking and beginning to answer the big-picture questions about the scope and design of this project; and Susan David Bernstein, for her suggestions about my thinking on George Eliot that helped shape the chapters that followed. I owe a debt of gratitude to Mark Knight, whose work inspires me to continue to investigate more deeply and historically as I pursue the next form that this dissertation will take. I also wish to thank Ernesto Livorni, who cheerfully and gracefully joined the committee later in the game but no less gamely.

I’d like to thank my colleagues in the Department who read and commented on various drafts and stages of my chapters. Thank you to my Writing Center colleagues, especially Virginia Piper, and Nmachi Nwokeabia, and to those in the Middle Modernity

Group who helped me focus and refine the work on dissertation or article I undertook:

Jessie Reeder, Rebecca Soares, Cathy DeRose, Devin Garofalo, Lenora Hansen, and

Joshua Taft. I would also like to thank our Graduate Coordinator, Robyn Shanahan, for happily answering all of my questions, and being a warm and welcoming touchstone in the Department. To Lisa Hollenbach, Dominique Bourg, Andrew Kay, and Nathan Jandl, iii

I am eternally grateful. Their friendship and ability to talk through writing blocks and anxieties was more helpful than they know in getting me through.

Aside from the academic support, I have also benefited mightily from the personal support of my family members. For offering to read drafts, for sharing the joy of seeing my name in print, for asking “how is it going?” with love and great interest, I owe thanks to my father and mother, David and Wendy Madsen; my brother, Ross Madsen; my grandparents, including Helga and Cephas Gagne; and my aunts and uncles. I could not and would not want to conclude without acknowledging the endless contributions and energies of my own family of four: all my heart to Larry Moberly, my partner, best friend, conspirator, cheering section, and small still voice of reason; Willa, who arrived as the epigraph; and Delia, who came as the coda. 1

Introduction

Those who think religion can ever be eradicated from human nature do not understand human nature, nor yet do they understand the nature of religion any better. —Felix Adler

Do we want to continue believing that philosophical critiques of Western Christendom and of Western liberalism have invalidated religion as a subject of serious inquiry? —Jenny Franchot

The secular thesis regarding literature and the nineteenth century is a seductive one, perhaps for its relative neatness. In the compact vision of the secular thesis, modernization and secularization exist together and occur concurrently, taking nineteenth-century England through an increasing loss of faith into its eventual emergence as a secular and rational society. Whatever of religion remains, it is private, vestigial, merely echoing in the language of the Parliament or transferred into secular arenas such as ethics and the Victorian novel. Matthew Arnold’s “The Study of Poetry” makes this argument, seeing literature as the natural inheritor of the social and ethical work formerly undertaken by religious means. His poem “Dover Beach” famously describes the “withdrawing” and “retreating” of faith down the “naked shingles of the world” (25-8), and this definitive imagery of loss holds sway in readings of Arnold’s work and understanding of the changing Victorian conception of religious influence. The secularization narrative was certainly influential to many Victorian writers and thinkers, from Arnold to George Eliot, and their writings in turn have strongly influenced contemporary literary criticism. Critics from Terry Eagleton to Georg Lukács to J. Hillis

Miller have maintained this vision of the novel as a secular form, the natural result of the nineteenth century’s loss of faith, and a non-religious attempt to make sense of or substitute for that very religious loss. 2

Yet Arnold’s melancholy imagery is ultimately slippery: he speaks of “ebb and flow” (17) and “The Sea of Faith” that is still present, though not as “full” or “furled”

(21-2). The ocean, after all, does not simply disappear, never to return when the tide draws out. The ocean’s resurgence is integral to the process of the tides: it is a retreat and a gain, over and over. While Arnold’s work may spell inevitable loss of faith, the imagery he chooses to describe secularization is not static or teleological in the least. Even in this iconic poem, loss of faith would appear to be more complicated than the secular thesis would allow. In the past two decades especially, the secular thesis has indeed been challenged in a variety of arenas, including religious studies and post-secular theory.

These writers, such as Charles Taylor and Hent de Vries, maintain that religion did not in fact subside over the course of the nineteenth century; in fact, religion and modernity have maintained a fraught and continual interpenetration. In these readings, our societal obsession with sidelining religion has resulted in significant blind spots that do not allow us to see how religion endures and grows, shaping and structuring arguments and social issues in the present. This line of thinking has been influential, encouraging a reevaluation of religion’s relegation to the dustbin of history. Yet literary critics have been slow to explore the ramifications of these new arguments in the realm of literature.

While there has been some excellent work in this realm, spanning Jenny Franchot’s

“Invisible Domain: Religion and American Literary Studies” in the American context to

Mark Knight and Emma Mason’s Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An

Introduction in the British one, more work remains to be done, specifically in regards to the novel, supposedly the most secular of all literary forms. This dissertation observes multiple challenges to the secular thesis in the writing of Victorian novelists, arguing that 3 the secular thesis is an inadequate conception of the structure and scope of the Victorian realist novel. Furthermore, I argue that adherence to the secular thesis has damaged our understanding of how religion does shape and structure the Victorian novel, and that a reading that accounts for the complexity of Victorian religious experience and the variety of its expressions gives us pause in identifying the Victorian novel as a secular form.

Realizing that the Victorian novel may not be inherently secular, and recognizing the ways that it engages with religion, encourages us as readers to better understand how religion shifts, strengthens, retreats, and maintains its force during the nineteenth century and beyond.

In pursuing this argument, I take a consciously Dissenting standpoint. In this case,

Dissent should be read as both upper-case and lower-case. I dissent from the secular thesis, as an increasing number of readings and critics continue to do, but I also Dissent in the sense that I position myself in the critical tradition of Dissenting religions, acknowledging how literary criticism continues to be informed by dissenting reading practices of seeking and questioning. The hermeneutic roots of acts of critical reading, which stem from the disciplined study of religious texts, whether Hebrew scripture or the

Christian New Testament, are now often stripped of their crucial religious context, and my work seeks tap into this religious legacy and insist on its importance and its usefulness. Suzy Anger explores these roots in Victorian Interpretation, observing how religious interpretation was “secularized” into literary interpretation, and how the religious implications of this shift still linger. This active questioning, this generative hermeneutics of Dissent, is present but not always acknowledged in literary criticism, which often positions itself against dominant epistemologies or institutions, such as 4

Anglicanism, as a way of claiming a secular approach. I want to more self-reflexively employ Dissent with the realization that this particular critical move is also one with specifically religious roots.

The vehicle I use to make my argument is not arbitrary, though there are many plot devices I might choose to demonstrate not only the presence but the ubiquity of religion and its influence in the shape and structure of the Victorian novel, such as issues of inheritance, narratives of personal growth and education, or investigations of social issues. However, I have chosen to focus on the marriage plot, as its religious ramifications are wide-reaching and often overlooked. Literary criticism of the Victorian novel that has focused productively on the marriage plot has often ignored or glossed over religion despite its insistent presence and influence on courtship and union. Critics such as Ian Watt, Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Eve Tavor Bannet, and Helen Thompson have all contributed to an ongoing historicist reading of the rise of the marriage plot as a function of its accompanying sociological issues: the rise of the middle class, codifying gender roles, or domesticity and the household.1 Much of this work perpetuates readings of religion as a diminishing influence. As Lisa O’Connell writes so succinctly in her work on the theo-political origins of the marriage plot in the eighteenth century novel, “In these terms, scholars have generally assumed the English novel develops its marriage plot within processes of modernization and secularization” (383). This dissertation connects

1 For Ian Watt, see The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964. For Ruth Bernard Yeazell see Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. For Eve Tavor Bannet, see The Domestic Revolution: Enlightenment Feminisms and the Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. For Helen Thompson, see Ingenious Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 5 the work of post-secularist theorists with literature, adding to the conversation in the growing body of literary criticism on religion and the marriage plot, including Lisa

O’Connell’s work on the marriage plot and eighteenth century literature, Timothy

Carens’s work on idolatry and marriage in the Victorian novel, and Julie Melnyk’s work on women’s theology in the context of marriage.2 What becomes clear when the marriage plot is fully contextualized in its religious as well as institutional surroundings is that the

Victorian novel consistently uses women within the marriage plot as a staging ground for the seemingly irresolvable conflict between secular civil society and privately held religious belief. The nature of this conflict is relevant to the study of the Victorian novel because the cultural battle between religious epistemology and more secular epistemologies such as legal, scientific, or medical, seemed for so long to have been won handily by the more secular. Therefore, critical readings of the Victorian novel often still serve to perpetuate that myth. Thus, looking back, religion in the Victorian novel appears relegated to the realm of the psychological, the ridiculous: a mere character trait or plot point. But this is more in the eye of the “secular” beholder than in the texts themselves, which clearly explore the many facets and factors of religion in the Victorian Era.

Acknowledging this gap between contemporary reading practices and Victorian reading practices raises significant questions: if science has “won” the epistemological battle,

2 Lisa O’Connell: “The Theo-Political Origins of the English Marriage Plot.” Novel 43:1 (2010) 31-37. Timothy Carens: Breaking the Idol of the Marriage Plot in Yeast and Villette. Victorian Literature and Culture. 38:2 (2010) 337-353. Julie Melnyk Women's Theology in 19th-Century Britain: Transfiguring the Faith of Their Fathers. New York: Garland, 1998.

6 why does religion persist? Why does it still structure cultural and global events? And isn’t this critical blind-spot that relegates religion to the margins of the interpretation of the Victorian novel only contributing to the issues of recognizing and addressing religious conflict in the twenty-first century?

The persistence of religion and even religious epistemology in the Victorian novel suggests that secular society and religious belief cannot necessarily be reconciled, and that despite science’s powerful and increasing authority, religious belief remains a rich source of answers and formal concerns for the Victorian novel. The effects of religion’s influence can clearly be seen in its role in the marriage plot, yet observing the movement of women within this plot has not usually been attached to concerns of religion. For example, many critiques of novels such as Robert Elsmere focus on the problematic use of women as “Angel in the House” or as a vehicle for religious salvation for men without specifically examining the religious terms of this salvation. While Coventry Patmore’s

1854 poem, “The Angel in the House, ” depicts the ideal woman as submissive and pious, even using the far from secular term “angel” to describe his archetype, literary criticism often approaches the topic through the lenses of gender and class. While these are certainly important, and contribute to both our understanding of Victorian womanhood and women’s positioning in novels such as Robert Elsmere, the religious context of these expectations is just as important, if not more important, than gender and class contexts, and remains under examined. A truly careful reading of the Victorian novel insists that the machinations of religion behind such widely accepted tropes as “the Angel in the

House” deserve more attention. 7

In order to examine religion’s pervasive influence and better contextualize the

Victorian novel, this dissertation explores an alternate genealogy throughout the history of the nineteenth century novel, locating realist texts where religion and the marriage plot are inextricably intertwined in order to examine how women are used by texts to stage the conflict between secular civil society and religious belief. The genealogy, beginning with Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and continuing through Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and concluding with

Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, provides me with an archive that I may draw on to conduct what I call a faithful reading of the Victorian novel. This reading of the genealogy asks readers to reconsider religion’s relegation in both the Victorian estimates of the struggle of secularization and the estimates of contemporary literary critics who tend to overlook it.

Early on in Mansfield Park, Austen identifies a conflict between marriage and religion that can seemingly only be reconciled with the location of the right spouse:

Edmund was at this time particularly full of cares; his mind being deeply

occupied in the consideration of two important events now at hand, which were to

fix his fate in life—ordination and matrimony—events of such a serious character

as to make the ball, which would be very quickly followed by one of them, appear

of less moment in his eyes than in those of any other person in the house. (195)

These two tracks, ordination and matrimony, appear irreconcilable as long as Edmund is fixated on Mary Crawford, who disdains the idea of lowering herself to live in a vicarage.

Yet by the novel’s close, Edmund’s focus has shifted, and his gaze has fallen upon a woman who can provide him the means of combining ordination and matrimony without 8 friction, Fanny Price. “[Fanny] was of course only too good for him; but as nobody minds having what is too good for them, he was very steadily earnest in the pursuit of the blessing, and it was not possible that encouragement from her would be long waiting”

(362). I have chosen Mansfield Park as the start of my genealogy as its often-timid protagonist, Fanny Price, is perhaps the least loved of Austen’s heroines. As Amanda

Claybaugh observes, it is surprisingly not Mary Crawford whom we are encouraged to admire, but Fanny, “a heroine who seldom moves and seldom speaks, and never errs or alters” (xiii). Observant yet passive, moral to the point of prudery, Fanny is the strangest and most self-effacing of Austen’s heroines. The plot of the novel reads like something that is done to her, rather than something she does. Yet as is reflected in the previous two quotations, Fanny becomes a powerful and centering force in the life of Edmund Bertram and his family, and for reasons that are perhaps unsettling to a contemporary literary critic: her steadfast religious belief. Yes, Edmund is initially in love with Mary Crawford, and thus unsure as to whether ordination will preclude matrimony, or vice versa, but when his affections turn towards Fanny, he is ensured a spouse who will allow him to pursue his religious calling. In fact, Fanny’s religious suitability is a motivating factor in the sudden shift in his affections, as Fanny represents what is faithful and modest, whereas Mary Crawford takes a secular view of a life of religious service, demeaning it as ineffective and not economically advisable.

Here, we can see a situation in which the marriage plot is both shaped by religious transformation and inextricably involved in nineteenth-century religious developments.

Religion is both an impetus and a result, with matrimony and ordination both constituted by religion and constituting the impetus for religious continuity. Yet I believe this 9 both/and construction, which is sometimes casually applied to religion and its functions, oversimplifies how religion structures and influences the realist novel. Rather than an additive both/and, I see religion functioning through an and/or construction. By this I mean that the realist novel continually presents characters with decisions or conflicts concerning religious belief that appear to be irreconcilable: a character falls in love and wants to marry, yet can accept neither the religion of the future spouse, nor living without that spouse despite their differing beliefs. These actions do not cancel one another out, but must instead occur simultaneously in order for an individual to truly observe and honor his or her belief. Rather than a source of stasis, this conundrum is an engine; the backslash separating and/or is actually anticipatory, pointing to the right, forwards, onwards. At the most basic level, the and/or construct represents the seemingly impossible choice between being religious and a citizen of the secular nation or being religious or a citizen of the secular nation: religious and/or a citizen. Being both British and religious entails being a citizen and maintaining belief at the same time that being

British may often impose impossible restrictions on those beliefs, necessitating a choice of one over the other. In some ways, and/or is thus a recasting of the split between public and private, with public/private belief necessitating multiple competing performances of faith within a society. For example, as readers see in the early pages of Mary Elizabeth

Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, it is possible to be a good Protestant and hide an endangered Catholic beneath your floorboards at the same time your very Protestantism would deem Catholicism anathema. In fact, this contradictory construction may be structurally necessary to maintain your faith as well as the floor beneath your feet. 10

This and/or aspect of religion is clearly present in terms of the marriage plot as well, for any discussion of the marriage plot has to acknowledge the role of the Protestant

Church in regulating the role of marriage in England in the nineteenth century. The twinned regulation of Church and state effectively dictated the way that marriage settled individuals as productive members of society. Yet, as literary critic Gauri Viswanathan has pointed out in Outside the Fold, religion is also deeply troubling to marriage, setting up the possibility of spousal conversion or even abandonment due to shifting religious feelings or commitments (86). To whom is the beloved primarily responsible? What kind of love, religious or worldly, comes first? The novel navigates this and/or, this either, of marriage as well. This and/or of course parallels the and/or of being a religious individual under British rule, and is often tangled up in it. Can one be religious and faithful to one’s beliefs and a member of one’s country? Can one be religious and faithful to one’s beliefs and a member of one’s marriage? Or do some of these ands have to be ors? Depending on the context, there may be slippage between and and or here, again generating narrative momentum and formal friction in productive and telling ways. Though romantic love may obscure the politics of marriage, by making a commitment to another individual in

England at the time, individuals are coming under the scrutiny and strictures of the

Protestant Church. Yet individuals are also making a commitment to one another that can threaten and undermine the authority of Church and state simply by existing: and/or.

Marriage harnesses that which exceeds in religion. Just as religion can mean a faith and belief in a higher power that transcends state allegiances, even to the point of martyrdom, marriage can result in love and attachment to another that exceeds the love of state or citizenship: and/or. 11

The 1753 Marriage Act, also known as Hardwicke’s Act, which only exempted

Quakers and Jews, dictated that marriage was not legal unless performed in an Anglican ceremony at the proper place (consecrated grounds) at the proper time (appointed hours).

This meant that marriage became an and/or proposition in its very nature as a bureaucratic and theological function of the nation-state: those who wished to be married legally who were not Anglican were forced to maintain both their religion and an adherence to the religious dictates of the law: asked to choose between religious belief and state-sanctioned matrimony, they were and/or of necessity (for example, Unitarian and resistant to being married in the Anglican Church/ Unitarian or married by an entity unrepresentative of one’s belief). As historian Joan Perkin suggests, the and/or status of marriage was complicated in multiple laws through the ensuing years of the nineteenth century, including the 1836 Marriage Act, which “licensed nonconformist and Roman

Catholic churches for the celebration of marriages,” and “also established a wholly civil procedure for contracting marriage” (22), giving citizens the choice of a religious or a civil marriage occurring in the Registry Office. The 1836 Act ostensibly provided more flexibility for those who wanted to get married outside of the purview of the Church, yet it still illustrates the way that secular and religious strands of reasoning were entangled on the issue: the State might nominally have control over the way that marriages were recorded and registered, but the Church was significant in that it was a presence to be either accepted or bypassed during the process. While it might seem that the 1836 Act allowed citizens to both marry and adhere to religious beliefs, as many novels show, this was not true at the level of the individual who often had to struggle to honor individual 12 religious beliefs or the requests of the State, or State requirements and the beliefs of a potential spouse.

These options in the novel (religious and citizen, citizen or religious) exist in a constant state of tension, push and pull, that influences plots and characters. The backslash of the and/or indicates coexistence between terms at the same time they might cancel one another out: religious faith can coexist with secular society as long as it cannot exist with secular society (i.e. it must occupy a separate space). Confusingly, and productively, the and/or represents the cognitive dissonance involved with religious conflict and debate, exploiting and exploring the seemingly irreconcilable issues involved with navigating overlapping and often self-cancelling motivations and decisions. As in

Kierkegaard’s “Either/or” construct, and/or implies an open-endedness and a possibility for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions from a place of suspended judgment.3

Yet where Kierkegaard’s construct represents a hypothetical choice between the aesthetic and the ethical life, the and/or of Victorian religion is not a choice, but an entangled predicament that one finds oneself in. Unlike in Kierkegaard, in the Victorian novel there is no option to be involved or not to be involved with and/or. It reflects the fact that to be religious is to already have made a choice, and the accompanying fact that this choice is one of continual conflict, struggle, and debate in the context of the nineteenth century.

Mansfield Park is explicit in its representation of the and/or of religion and secular civil society, initially represented by Edmund’s desire for Mary. In an 1813 letter to her sister Cassandra concerning Mansfield Park, Austen writes, “Now I will try to

3 Kierkegaard, Soren. Either/Or. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. Print.

13 write of something else:—it shall be a complete change of subject—Ordination” (qtd. in

Chapman 298). Austen’s oft-quoted remark in regards to the novel has come under scrutiny in past criticism by critics such as John Bailey and Lionel Trilling. Is Austen being tongue-in-cheek here? If not, is Ordination to be taken purely in its religious context, or does it mean something else altogether? Overall, these critics seem to doubt ordination is the real topic at all, and they instead choose to focus on courtship, the novel’s psychological content, or, more recently, postcolonial readings of the novel, with ordination being a subordinate concern (if you’ll pardon the pun). Yet the text itself fixes marriage and ordination as two equal lodestars of Edmund’s world, and it is significant for the plot that he and Fanny end the novel safely married and ensconced at the

Parsonage, securing both of these goals. What is often treated by modern criticism and even Edmund initially as an “or,” is most definitely an “and” at the close of Mansfield

Park. It is not just that Edmund and Fanny are married, but that they are married and

Edmund is doing the work he was ordained to do with Fanny at his side. While Mary

Crawford poses the problematic construct of ordination and/or marriage, Fanny aligns ordination and marriage in a neat both/and package.

Mary herself suggests a sharper understanding of the and/or than we might initially give her credit for, however. During the tour of Sotherton’s chapel, she remarks on the impracticality of public collective worship over private belief: “At any rate, it is safer to leave people to their own devices on such subjects. Everybody likes to go their own way—to choose their own time and manner of devotion” (66). Mary’s comments presage the ongoing separation throughout the nineteenth century of these very strands of belief: the publicly performed one and the privately held one. Desire for this separation is 14 reflected in laws such as the 1846 Religious Disabilities Act, the 1858 Jewish Relief Act, and the Oaths Act of 1888, all of which lifted restrictions on various religious communities and allowed for fuller participation in British society and service. Yet these laws were often slow in arriving, and the fact that they had to be established at all in order, for example, for atheist Charles Bradlaugh to take his seat as MP in good conscience as late as 1888, represents again the and/or bind that many Victorians found themselves in. Acknowledging a division between public action and private belief as a means of securing the lifting of disabilities or the granting of rights that should already be available to a British citizen was a kind of compromise whose very foundations undermined the centrality of an individual’s closely held belief. Ironically, neither the individual, who had to compromise and be classified and legislated in this manner, nor the State, which dragged its feet on passing laws that allowed religious individuals to integrate into Victorian society and service while at the same time bemoaning religious separatism, achieves a fully satisfactory result from this interaction.

Mary’s comment above specifically refers to the institutionalized nature of religion in a privately run household, which she objects to as constricting and oppressive, aligning herself with those who would advocate for religion as a privately conducted act.

Yet both Edmund and Fanny see Mary’s comments as an indication not of strongly held private belief, but of a frivolous attitude towards religion that is dangerous in its lightheartedness. Though Mary does not know it yet, a frivolousness towards organized religion is also a frivolousness against Edmund, and a black mark against the possibility of them being married. In this way, Fanny, as opposed to the less scrupulous and much more secular Mary, is integral to the religious resolution as well as the marital resolution 15 of the novel. This is no small feat, since Fanny suffers throughout the novel as she observes Edmund’s misplaced affections and fends off Henry Crawford’s equally unwelcome ones. Yet Fanny prevails, prudery and all, and in the aptness of her match for

Edmund, suggests that at this particular point in time in this particular context, secular civil society and religious belief need not be at odds, and may in fact coexist productively. The weight here comes down upon the “and,” despite wavering through an

“and/or” that provides formal torsion throughout the novel’s plot. The backslash becomes a fulcrum, and here it does not balance, instead resting towards and, with the closure of the marriage plot also providing closure to the religious conflict of the novel. While

Mansfield Park matches the resolution of the marriage plot to a simple and over an and/or, this is increasingly not the case throughout the ensuing genealogy of the nineteenth-century novel. What becomes apparent through an examination of the marriage plot and religion is that women are depicted as existing within the limbo of and/or with greater frequency and intensity throughout the century, a fact that undermines the secular thesis and asks us to observe just how religion and the novel intersect.

Discussion of the friction between secular civil society and religious belief in a text such as Mansfield Park may seem odd, since much modern literary criticism seems to accept without question that secular civil society, with its obeisance at the altar of science, law, and medicine, has become the dominant epistemological lens through which to view literature. Beginning with Lukács, who famously remarked that “the novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God,”4 and continuing through to Terry

4 Lukács, Georg. The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 1971. Print.

16

Eagleton, who writes “The novel was born at the same time as modern science, and shares its sober, secular, hard-headed, investigative spirit” (7), criticism has sought to reinforce this scientific viewpoint by denying religious epistemology any credence, and indeed going so far as to suggest that the novel itself is a secular form. Eagleton is a particularly interesting example of this phenomenon, as his work The English Novel: An

Introduction argues that the novel “is a mighty melting pot, a mongrel among literary thoroughbreds. There seems to be nothing it cannot do” (1), and then equivocates by saying “It portrays a secular, empirical world rather than a mythical or metaphysical one… It may still retain some religious beliefs, but it is as nervous of religious debate as a pub landlord” (3). So there is nothing it cannot do, besides engage in real debate about religion. This about-face seems silly. The novel’s secularity is such a given quantity here that it is not even allowed the pretense of engaging effectively with religion, despite evidence that characters like Fanny, Dorothea Brooke, and Sue Bridehead do not and cannot inhabit a secular world, often to their great disappointment and detriment. In fact, it is women like Fanny, Dorothea, and Sue that systematically provide either impetus or resolution in not only marriage plots, but more importantly, narratives of religious development.

Such characters exist, and their existence suggests that the often explicitly stated

(and just as often overlooked) religious context of women and the female body as a commodity on the marriage market deserves attention. Time and again, in texts that are named for men or for places (Daniel Deronda, Jude the Obscure, Dombey and Son, Silas

Marner, Barchester Towers, Red Pottage, Mill on the Floss), it is in fact women’s religious experience that becomes the conduit for male religious understanding or 17 reconciliation. Perhaps this should come as no surprise, as the Anglican Church was often metaphorized as a mother throughout its history (something it shares with the Roman

Catholic Church among others): as historians John Walsh and Stephen Taylor observe,

“The Church could attract the kind of tribal loyalty given to kin or to parent; powerful feelings were drawn to it by the presence of ancestors in its graveyard. It was ‘Mother

Church’” (27). Beyond this persistent metaphor, as Mary Wilson Carpenter’s Imperial

Bibles, Domestic Bodies points out, women in the Victorian period, held to the standard of the Angel in the House, were most often the keepers of the family Bible, and the religious sphere was indelibly linked to the domestic one. However, the insistent role of women and women’s bodies as a staging ground for religious conflict in the Victorian realist novel, permeating even texts beyond those that deal with Protestantism, remains under-examined.

The inherent conflict in this religious context has everything to do with epistemologies. While each epistemology might generate its own patterns and ripples, as a pebble thrown into a pond, these epistemologies are all of the same water, and these ripples are thus destined to interact, overlap, and cancel one another out in myriad ways.

What we see in the alternate epistemologies that Charlotte Brönte’s Villette, Elizabeth

Gaskell’s North and South, George Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Wilkie Collins’s The

Moonstone address is the fact that there are multiple and evolving models of interpretation represented by various strands of figurative language, and that as all of these epistemologies begin to cohere and locate themselves in the nineteenth-century, they become inevitably entangled. Religion and culture intersect and layer, and it is often difficult to discern where one epistemology ends and another begins; some might argue 18 that it is foolhardy to do so, as it distorts Victorian understandings of the interconnectedness of these ways of understanding. However, I believe that locating religion where it appears, distorts, and influences, foregrounding it, is a necessary response to the critical failure to engage with it properly. It’s inevitable that this sort of foregrounding will distort things, but the act of untangling and examining epistemologies is worthwhile, especially in the case of religion, since while philosophy, aesthetics, science, and law are all in the process of becoming more firmly endowed with institutional authority, religion is in the process of losing its institutional authority throughout the century. It is both institutional and private, institutional or private: institutional and/or private. The and/or is a way of identifying and conceiving of religion as what Pierre Bourdieu terms a “structuring structure.” These deep, often invisible structures are those influences, such as a religious habitus, “which at every moment structures in terms of the structuring experienced which produced it the structuring experiences which affect its structure” (Outline of a Theory of Practice 86-87). Thus, the way in which religion is figured is necessarily different than the other epistemologies mentioned, and this perhaps also contributes to our understanding of how religion appears alongside the legal and the aesthetic and the scientific in the context of the marriage plot. While these other epistemologies continue to cohere and institutionalize, religious epistemology becomes more diffuse, difficult to grasp, dispersed. Sometimes it appears wedded to the legal, sometimes it appears antithetical to it. Sometimes it supports scientific progress, sometimes it undercuts it or fears being undercut by it. This shiftiness, and/or, means religion is both a source of problems in interpretation and application, and a source of religion’s force in its ability to exceed institutional boundaries. 19

As the post-secularist Hent de Vries describes it, the concept of religion is “a semantic black hole whose ‘absence-presence’ lets no single light escape, whether from its inner regions or from the surface (as if it were somehow suspended between the two, or nowhere long enough to catch the eye),” and thus “‘religion’ has resisted all enlightenment” (Religion 8). Equally problematic, religion can be too bright, or, in de

Vries’s words, “‘religion’ manifests—indeed, is said to reveal—itself as a glaring, blinding blaze, straight in our faces, leaving us nowhere to hide, visible from all sides, like a Cubist painting. In consequence of this sensory overload, it becomes almost unnoticeable, invisible, untouchable precisely because all too tangible” (Religion 8).

Either a black hole or an oppressively bright light, a finite point of darkness that noticeably distorts everything, or a blinding light that is so ever-present as to be undetectable: visible and/or invisible. De Vries’s useful articulation makes it clear that where one grasps religion, it multiplies, yet at the very same time its categories ossify, become stubborn. This is, again, the and/or: that religion can be both everywhere and nowhere, everywhere or nowhere, and both of these options at the same time, insistently, aggressively.5

This dissertation takes its title from a character that embodies this and/or aspect of religion, the character of the Nun in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette who haunts the periphery of the plot, making her most notable entrance in the school garret when Lucy Snowe believes she is alone. In the novel, Lucy retreats to the garret with her letter from Graham so as to better read his words in private, an act she indulges in as a way to recast the

5 The effects of this dual nature can perhaps be seen in literary criticism that seeks a compromise, such as M. H. Abrams’s reading of Romantic poetry as being a form of secular religion. 20 words of a friend into the more clandestine context of the words of a possible lover. The

Nun is often read as a projection of Lucy’s erotic desire and inhabits a curious space in the novel: she is apparently supernatural, yet Lucy cannot fully believe in her supernatural nature. The liminal status of the Nun mirrors Lucy’s dismal position in the marriage market, and also seems to be a projection of the conflict this produces in Lucy: her social position prevents her from being an object of desire for Graham, and her

Protestant religion is a source of chastity and the reserved nature that similarly limits her.

This Catholic Nun, this doubled figure, is a fitting representation of and/or, as she is both a ghost and/or real simultaneously, as well as a representation of the strange phenomenon that has been overlooked or deemed negligible: women’s influence on the marriage plot in the religious context. The dissertation title is thus a nod to Gilbert and Gubar’s The

Madwoman in the Attic, as the dissertation uses the symbolism of the figure of the Nun to suggest that in discussions of the realist novel as secular, religion is a ghostly presence that has been ignored as either irreconcilable to the content of the realist novel, or antithetical to its very form. Yet over and over, it is clear that it is not either religion or the novel, it is religion and/or the novel. This is continually made visible in the pattern of the presence and function of female characters as both a foil and a figure for religious conflict that has been underexplored, much as the Nun herself lingers in a kind of limbo throughout the story until she is revealed to have been flesh and blood all along. Until the conclusion, she is a ghost and real, a ghost or real, at the same time, inexplicable, haunting, intriguing.

Post-Secularism 21

Though literary critics still problematically identify the novel as a secular form, more recent work by the philosopher Charles Taylor and the post-secularist Hent de Vries suggest that there was never and can never be a truly secular age. In terms of this clash of secular society and the religious individual, Taylor writes:

We all learn to navigate between two standpoints: an “engaged” one in which we

live as best as we can the reality our standpoint opens us to [religious, naive]; and

a “disengaged” one in which we are able to see ourselves as occupying one

standpoint among a range of possible ones, with which we have in various ways

to coexist [scientific, rational]. (qtd. in de Vries “A Secular Age: Naïve and

Reflective Faiths”)

What is striking is that this critical distance he mentions marks both religion and science: science in the distance that the scientist places between him or herself and the materials or phenomena that he or she is observing, and religion, as Hent de Vries writes in his reading of Taylor’s work, in the “affirmation, but also a suspension of belief in the cosmic, social, or subjective matrices and fabrics of which we are made up. Our being-in- the world, qua believers, is, after all, if not exactly other-worldly, not-quite-of-or-out-of- this-world” (“A Secular Age: Naïve and Reflective Faiths”). And in the process, this

“disengaged” standpoint that supposedly opens up a variety of options to our vision is in fact no less limited than an “engaged” standpoint. As de Vries points out, we cannot choose choice, as our choices are the only things that we see in our embedded perspective. Thus, identifying secularity or scientific rationality as a kind of disengaged space of reflection ignores the way that secularity itself relies on immediacy and naiveté 22 in order to function, obscuring its own engagement as a means of projecting detachment and rational superiority.

The form of the realist novel is no different, and therefore cannot be a space of secular detachment, as no such space exists. All is embedded, engaged, and cannot observe a reality outside of its own terms. One of my key points is that the realist novel is or was not immune to the supposed blind spots of religion, and indeed, can replicate its patterns and structures. Despite the proclamations of critics otherwise, the realist novel relies on the same appearance of disengagement and observation as scientific epistemology as a means of projecting a non-institutional status; the novel is in reality just as involved in the systems and institutions it critiques as those very same systems and institutions, as it is inextricably imbricated in those systems and institutions. Therefore, rather than pursuing a Marxist or Foucauldian reading that holds religion at arm’s length or sees it as a peripheral or disciplining presence in the novel, I am using an explicitly religious lens to examine this imbrication.

Faithful Reading

What does it mean to use a religious lens in one’s reading? While there have been many critical attempts to read for religion, there have been few attempts to read through religion. In order to address this lack, I am proposing a new methodology, faithful reading. A faithful reading is one that takes the often-overlooked presence of religion in the novel seriously, and attempts to observe what religion is doing in this context. In the process, faithful reading also taps into the religious roots of critical reading, employing this questioning hermeneutics self-consciously. It is faithful reading that immediately makes apparent the importance of religious context to the marriage plot. While other 23 readings might subordinate religion in the marriage plot to issues of economics or gender, faithful reading takes it in good faith that the inclusion of religion in these plots is important in and of itself. In order to achieve these kinds of readings, faithful reading begins by locating and examining moments of religious introspection and conflict within the lives of characters: their moments of and/or. Many of these moments appear around the issue of the marriage plot. These moments of religious introspection and conflict have often been ignored or deemed unimportant, whereas faithful reading sees them as integral to understanding the mechanics of the novel form, and the movement of the marriage plot itself. Simply put, they matter.

Faithful reading uses these and/or moments as lenses in order to examine and unfold the rest of the text. In my first chapter, I take up the use of allegory in Charlotte

Brontë’s Villette, as Lucy’s conflation of religious allegory and literary allegory provides a model for a faithful unfolding of the allegorical aspects of the novel as a whole: the way in which worldview is simultaneously allegorized and concretized in the marriage plot between Lucy and M. Paul. Lucy’s struggles with her worldview manifest in strange and extended allegories such as her meditations on Imagination and pilgrimage. By tracking these allegories, I am able to suggest that the formal and figural use of language becomes a kind of faith itself, rather than a representation of faith, and that this allegorical compression can move beyond the repression and projection readings of Lucy’s

Protestant faith and its relation to Catholicism.

My second chapter, on Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, amplifies this formal approach to religion by adding historical context. The chapter builds on earlier work on religious worldview by arguing that Dissent complicates our understanding of the 24 religion of the nation and encourages us to observe moments of self-authoring amongst religious characters as they move towards marriage. These moments of self-authoring are deeply troubling to class-based reasoning, and ultimately form the impetus for the productive union between the industrialist and the minister’s daughter, representing the benefits to the nation when it recognizes these same moments of individualization. In order to explore these moments, the chapter uses the lens of conscience. This shifting religious concept of personal responsibility and freedom from causal effects has an unsettling impact on both the novel’s form and the novel’s resolution. North and South gives us a new way of talking about industrial fiction, in that a lack of causality is not indicative of loss of faith, or a presaging of the detached work of the modernists to come; rather, this lack of causality is part of a strongly held belief system that is developing in a way that is deeply unsettling to both class-based and often faith-based reasoning.

Chapter three, on George Eliot’s Adam Bede, extends these initial arguments specifically to the realm of Methodism, observing that Eliot’s novel owes its framework to the sermon and the confession, both of which allow the marriage plot to conclude.

While the first two chapters locate the importance of religion in the marriage plot’s machinations, this chapter goes further in arguing that the religious content of the marriage plot is actually the dominant epistemology through which the proceedings should be understood, and that this dominance suggests that the marriage plot in the realist novel has not succeeded in moving beyond the religious structuring of marriage, nor can it.

In Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, faithful reading takes up Betteredge’s habit of bibliomancy to examine the logic of detection in the supposedly secular genre of the 25 detective novel. This logic of detection and its ensuing amassing of clues and deductive reasoning is shown to be coequal with the logic of religion that the text presents;

Betteredge is not a naïve reader, but a representative reader of a Christian community that shares a particular, and perceptive, religious ethos. It is this ethos that ultimately results in the resolution of both the novel’s theft and the novel’s marriage plot.

Here is what faithful reading is not: recuperative or symptomatic. Looking at religion in the novel cannot recover religion for us as readers, because religion has always been present in the novel, and is not often repressed or hidden. Much literary criticism focusing on religion performs the act of “restoring” to a text what has always been there, and this act of restoration itself can be distracting and confusing, reinforcing a narrative that marginalizes these very readings that focus on religion. This is not to say that recuperative readings of religion cannot be useful and engaging; indeed, they are often both, as seen in the work of critics such as Michael Wheeler and Lynda Palazzo.6

Yet these kinds of readings just as often diagnose a flaw in approaches to specific writers by arguing that they have been traditionally read in ways that either completely ignore the writers’ religious beliefs, or misread those same beliefs. The criticism then sets out to restore religious context to the writer’s novels through a selective reading of the writer’s religious beliefs and the way they then appear in the writer’s work. Diagnoses such as these are useful in that they encourage renewed attention to religion and the nineteenth- century novel, yet the resulting readings are often limited by the very terms they propose.

I use the term “recuperative” to describe the methodology because the act of diagnosing a lack then predetermines the way the lack will be corrected. By anchoring religion’s role

6 Authors of Ruskin’s God and Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology, respectively. 26 to the writer’s specific religious belief, the readings also limit themselves to an author- centered reading, rather than a reading that allows the text its full range of engagements.

However, the idea that the writer’s religious views or religious context matter is important, and a useful addition to faithful reading; where faithful reading differs is in its articulation of the way religion has always been present in these texts, with an approach that is less restorative and more exploratory.

Surface reading has been suggested as an alternative to recuperative or symptomatic readings. As represented in the emerging conversations spearheaded by critics such as Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, whose 2009 edition of Representations, entitled The Way We Read Now, addresses the issues that arise from overuse of symptomatic readings, “surface reading” argues against the often limiting practices of symptomatic reading by suggesting the importance of the surface of the text. Surface reading acknowledges that “the moments that arrest us in texts need not be considered symptoms, whose true cause exists on another plane of reality, but can themselves indicate important and overlooked truths” (18). Marcus and Best provide a new way of conceptualizing readings that acknowledges ideology and epistemology; yet, in doing so, they do not tie the results of a reading to the symptoms pursued. Rather, they encourage readers to realize the possibilities that “overlooked truths” might open up, allowing critics to see older texts in new ways by focusing on what is so present that it has been neglected, “to indicate what the text says about itself” (11).

While faithful reading would seem to tap into this vein of observing what the text is already saying about itself, the fact remains that it is not surface reading. It remains deeply interested in the inner mechanics of texts: how they ask questions about religion, 27 how they answer these questions, how they represent and, yes, repress religion. Faithful reading thus doggedly pursues the repeated representations of religion and belief that occur in the Victorian novel; these representations are often only applied to the personal religion of the writer in the early recuperative or symptomatic readings, and are not fully examined or articulated in the latter surface readings, despite their status as evidence of an overlooked truth (as well as a structural reality) within the novel. In the case of this dissertation, faithful reading lays bare what Victorian realist novels say about themselves, often using female characters: that they are deeply conflicted about the balance between the religious and secular, and remain unsure how to navigate a form that aspires towards one (secular) but cannot seem to shake the structures and influence of the other (religion).

How does faithful reading pursue belief? At its most basic level, faithful reading encourages a reading of the text that observes the presence of religion in the novel. When

I say religion here, I mean the mobile and observable figures, structures, and appearances of religious discourse and philosophy in such moments of introspection or conflict as I described above: the and/or machinations of the novel. Second, a faithful reading takes these moments where characters wrestle with and employ religious discourse and philosophy, and uses these moments as lenses through which to read the text. An example of one of these lens moments would be a passage from Mary Cholmondley’s Red

Pottage, where the protagonist Hester observes her little niece, “[She] sometimes wondered as she watched Stella conscientiously work through a dressed doll down to its stitched sawdust compartments, what Mr. Gresley would make of his daughter when she turned her attention to theology” (86), as this moment in the text provides a lens that reveals a text totally preoccupied with religious language and examination of that 28 language as a means of ascertaining faith. As Hester is a writer, her preoccupation with language and how it works in both literary and theological contexts suggests itself as a map to the novel’s engagement with religion, encouraging a critical and even dissecting eye in the reading of the novel’s language and its character’s actions.

A second, more extended example of a lens, is Edward Overton’s description of religious reading from Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh:

The drawing room paper was of a pattern which consisted of bunches of red and

white flowers, and I saw several bees at different times fly up to these bunches

and try them, under the impression that they were real flowers; having tried one

bunch, they tried the next, and the next, and the next, till they reached the one that

was nearest the ceiling… and so on until I was tired of watching them. As I

thought of the family prayers being repeated night and morning, week by week,

month by month, and year by year, I could not help thinking how like it was to the

way in which the bees went up the wall and down the wall, bunch by bunch,

without ever suspecting that so many of the associated ideas could be present, and

yet the main idea be wanting hopelessly, and forever. (103)

Overton does not completely condemn organized religion with this analogy. However, he suggests that there are more and less effective ways to engage with it, and this metaphor of the bee can be applied throughout a reading of the episodic retelling of Ernest

Pontifex’s life in the novel. The daily Pontifex prayer has become a ritual in which there is no substance—the selections of the Bible which are read, like the printed red and white flowers, are unexamined representations of religious belief that cannot serve any purpose, and will not support faith. Indeed, the story of Ernest Pontifex is a story of that lost faith, 29 and his continual search to become comfortable enough with religious ideas to allow them to be questioned. Before he grows through his spiritual journey, the slightest question about a religious text would send Ernest into a frenzy, satirizing his continual fall from faith into doubt as quite bad, reactionary reading. Overton instead urges for a reading that searches for that main idea that is clear-eyed and aware of interconnections, and this idea is as central to the reader’s progress through The Way of All Flesh as it is to

Ernest’s.

Faithful reading then uses these moments to read the novel from which they arise, and see what occurs when a critical reader believes in depictions of belief and employs the methodology these depictions suggest, embracing the and/or this process entails.

When it is subjected to this kind of pressure, the novel offers up a surprising number of maps towards its own unfolding, including the one that has inspired this dissertation: the fact that women’s religious experience is integral to the marriage plot rather than a distraction from it. The resulting readings such as this assist us in answering not just questions about gender, religion and the Victorian novel, but religion and the gendered

Victorian reader as well, who would have recognized what we now deem difficult to recover due to changing critical vocabularies and religious frames of reference.

Faithful reading acknowledges religion as the open secret of the nineteenth- century novel: always there and always offering itself up for interpretation at face value, yet largely ignored in favor of gendered, economic, or psychological readings. In response to this seemingly purposeful repression of religion, the methodology requires that readers consider religion a constructed category deserving of as much attention as the constructed categories race, class, and gender have traditionally received in literary 30 analysis and criticism.7 By proposing that religion is an openly present component of the novel as well as necessarily essential to any categorical reading of it, faithful reading draws significantly on Sharon Marcus’s formulation of “just reading.” Marcus defines her methodology in the following way: “Just reading strives to be adequate to a text conceived as complex and ample rather than as diminished by, or reduced to, what it has had to repress. Just reading accounts for what is in the text without construing presence as absence or affirmation as negation” (75). While faithful reading does attempt to avoid any positivist associations with the presence or absence of religious discourse by instead acknowledging that religion is a mobile, changeable figure, faithful reading is different from just reading in that it looks at religion not only as a significant presence or form of surface content, but also as an epistemology. It is not something that we “just” observe, it is something through which we can then interpret and understand. And unlike Marcus, who believes that it is problematic to frame an examination as scrutinizing what has been repressed, I use faithful reading to consciously take a meta-critical look at what criticism itself has repressed in its approach to the realist novel.

While “faithful,” like “just,” carries certain value judgments and valorizations, here the word “faithful” is a nod to the nature of the religious discourse that the reading engages with. It describes a faithful rendering of religion or religion’s presence that

7 Readings operating on the assumption that the former three categories are inextricably entwined have been engrained over the last decades both in essential works such as Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather; and in the diverse texts revealed in a key terms search, such as Race, class and gender in U.S. Birth politics 1920-1945, by Carole Ruth McCann; Class, Race, and Gender in American Education, edited by Lois Weis; Gender, Race and Class in Media: a text-reader, edited by Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez; and Race, class and gender in the future of the Carribean, edited by J. Edward Greene. The order of the terms may be varied, but the embrace of these three categories, and their unquestioned interdependence, is widespread throughout academia. 31 attempts to trace what is oftentimes deemed unfigurable in the realm of realism. In the process, being “faithful” in reading means not letting elusiveness stand for only itself.

Additionally, more so than “just,” “faithful” invokes the individual who extends the faith.

In many realist novels, the novel not only engages with religion, but also offers up moments of religious reading, interpretation, conflict, or action as a means of suggesting how the novel itself might be read. In many cases, these moments of reading or interpretation involve female characters’ faith and the kinds of choices women make due to that faith, just as we see in Hester’s fascination in Red Pottage with her niece Stella’s indefatigable thirst for breaking things down into their component parts.

While most of the novels discussed here (Villette, North and South, Adam Bede,

The Moonstone) do contain religious themes, these themes are traditionally read as ancillary plot points; what is thus most striking is the way in which faithful reading suggests that religious discourse structures what are commonly seen as secular plots: courtship, the solving of mysteries, family dramas. Furthermore, once this religious discourse is recognized, it begins to infiltrate even the structuring of novels that don’t overtly engage with religious content, as I argue in my last chapter on The Moonstone, suggesting pervasiveness beyond plot points. It appears that the secular novel cannot help turning to religious discourse in order to lend meaning and weight to what are otherwise figured as secular plots.

The secular novel cannot help turning to religious discourse because the debate over religion and its place amongst other epistemologies such as scientific and legal was an ongoing discussion during the nineteenth-century. Characters struggle not necessarily because of increasing secularization, though this is clearly indicated as the cause in some 32 crises; rather, they struggle for myriad reasons that are requiring new ways of positioning the self, such as industrialization and the way that religion itself was legislated during the

Victorian period. They do not necessarily undergo a loss of faith, but rather, engage in new ways of believing within the changing political and social landscape around them.

Questions about the developments in the dual public and private nature of religious belief put the nature of belief into question: should a privately held belief influence a public act? What was the nature of the private belief and the actions it inspired? If a man or woman performed a private moment of prayer alone in a room, would anyone, God included, hear it? The lifting of disabilities on varied religious groups throughout the century contributed to this anxiety about public and private faith.8 Novels accepted these challenges by presenting persuasive accounts of religion in the context of verisimilitude, and acknowledging that these struggles were worth novelizing, as they represented the reality of Victorians’ lives.

The rationale for focusing on moments of religious conflict, the and/ors, such as acts of interpretation and the belief they highlight is simple: Victorians were engaged in ongoing debates about the nature of religious choice and interpretation, thanks to cultural figures such as George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Cardinal Newman, Harriet Martineau,

Israel Zangwill, and Thomas Huxley. One example of the widespread resonance of these

8 We see this tension even now, in the calls from conservatives in California to have the decision against Proposition 8 overturned because the judge who passed the ruling has been in a long-term, committed same-sex relationship. The protesters imply that the integrity of the act cannot be maintained in the public sphere because private belief always influences public action. Yet they fail to see the ramifications of their own argument: this way of determining the recusing of justices would affect every justice (as the ultimate ruling against their case indicates), since this divide is one that every individual must navigate. Questions about this cut both ways, as the more recent Hobby Lobby ruling by the Supreme Court prompted liberal observers to question the role of Catholic belief in the ruling by the Court’s majority. 33 religious debates is the influence of the German Higher Critics beginning in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century (though German Higher Criticism became much more influential in the latter half of the nineteenth century). Interpretative acts could now be seen as religious stances; were you a confessionalist or a higher critic? A believer or a skeptic? With reading practices, and particularly these reading practices associated with religion, unsettled during this time period, it was even more important for Victorian readers to be able to think through the religious ramifications of the novel, and perhaps to reflect on how their reading of those ramifications labeled them as readers and believers.

In order to navigate these changes through the lens of our own belief, we must gain distance from critical reading practices that encourage readers to exercise a constant sense of doubt when approaching a fictional text. Instead, readers must take the risk that faithful reading asks for in its very construction: “what happens when readings function through the lens of belief, rather than doubt?” The readings this inspires are ones that aim to move beyond true and false, present or absent, and instead focus on the context of the crucial moments of interpretation, reflection, and struggle that are sometimes seamless in their performativity, or equally interestingly, navigate the distance that can occur between interpretation or reflection and performance. Texts thus can be seen as figuring and weighing the consequences of belief in ways that make the religious worlds and structures of texts legible.

Much work has been done on the durability of religion in the face of

“secularization,” whether in the form of salvation narratives, or as the underpinning to

Western European Enlightenment values that still influence reading practices and conceptions of the self today. Tomoko Masuzawa points out that even the way that 34 religion is constructed privileges Western categories that pit religion against “world religion,” establishing a structuring structure and teleology that are ultimately damaging, and which contribute to the blindness that Bourdieu describes on the part of religious adherents that allows religious authority to function. Masuzawa writes “The demarcation

[between religion and word religions] is articulated from the point of view of the

European West, which is in all known cases historically aligned or conflated, though not without some ambiguity, with Christendom” (3). This structuring clearly needs to be examined, as these structures are there, observable, even recognizable, presenting themselves for observation and discussion.

Archive: The Novel

Why does this dissertation focus on the realist novel? Simply put, religion presents an additionally challenging aspect for the realist writer, and thus is often dealt with meta-critically in the text. These moments of reflection (or, in Taylor’s words, disengagement) are necessary fodder for the critical endeavor of faithful reading. Rather than existing as an object or interaction rife for translation into a natural, fictional milieu

(a process through which it is subject only to the distortions of the writer’s mind and words), religion is itself already an imaginative translation. Its sacred texts, myths, parables, and oral history, its performance of worship, and even its structural architecture seek to translate abstract religious experience and belief into concrete, natural terms. The imaginative act through which prayer becomes a spoken missive winging straight to

God’s ear, or sacred power becomes enshrined in the form of a diamond in a statue’s forehead or the finger bones of saints and penitents, is itself a startling and multi-faceted expression of both human creativity and institutions of power. While imagination might 35 perform a translation of the abstract religious experience into what could be seen as realist terms, the fact remains that religious experience, and religious power, cannot solely be described in secular terms. Part of religion’s figuring of its own transcendence is a sense that there is that which exceeds: miracles occur that have no scientific or material explanation; prayers are answered in strange and beautiful ways; a sacred object carries with it an aura that cannot be translated, and even, as Walter Benjamin suggests, should not be replicated lest its specific contextual power be compromised and diminished (223).

The realist novel, designed to be reproduced and distributed, would then in its very existence pose a kind of threat to religious belief, ossifying it in text and robbing it of its transcendence by relegating it to a character attribute, something laughable, or as a static, hypocritical engagement that does not accomplish anything, despite evidence otherwise. Yet readings of the novel cannot and should not ignore religion’s structuring structure, and should read past the tendency to see religion as ossified, vestigial, or irrelevant. Religion as a structuring structure has significant literary roots. As D.W.

Robertson notes in his preface to St. Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine, representations of religious language dating back to the medieval period were strikingly and surprisingly

“objective.” Indeed, “much of the figurative material in medieval writing, and, in fact, much of the symbolism in medieval art, was designed to have exactly this kind of appeal

[an intellectual recognition of an abstraction beneath the surface of language]; the function of figurative expression was not to arouse spontaneous emotional attitudes based on the personal experience of the observer, but to encourage the observer to seek an abstract pattern of philosophical significance beneath the symbolic configuration” (xv). 36

St. Augustine suggests this strongly in his own discussion of literary and religious symbolism when he writes,

All doctrine concerns either things or signs, but things are learned by signs.

Strictly speaking, I here have called a “thing” that which is not used to signify

something else, like wood, stone, cattle and so on; but not that wood concerning

which we read that Moses cast it into the bitter waters that their bitterness might

be dispelled, nor that stone which Jacob placed at his head, nor that beast which

Abraham sacrificed instead of his son. For these are things in such a way that they

are also signs of other things. (8)

What St. Augustine means here is that “the ‘wood’ is a sign of the cross. The ‘stone’ and the ‘beast’ represent the human nature of Christ” (8). He distinguishes between “things,” which do not signify anything beyond themselves, and “signs,” which can be things, and are used to signify something additional. Yet “things are learned by signs.” It is not that the world appears as it is, and then the metonymic stand-ins for wood and stone are learned. It is that the allegorical signs are tantamount, and things come to be understood through them. This doctrinal equation offers a striking contrast to the realist novel’s doctrine of religious transparency, for the realist novel depends upon things referencing those same things outside of the text, and supposedly does not truck with miracles. The

Augustinian viewpoint would seem to need a Christian, institutional frame of reference to be articulated; how different are the realist novel’s signs and symbols? Perhaps the symbols of the novel are in fact another and/or: the wood is physical wood and a literal cross, physical wood or a literal cross, physical wood and/or a metaphorical cross, all at the same time. 37

CONCLUSION

What do we gain from a faithful reading, in this case of the machinations of female belief and the marriage plot? It allows us as readers to pay attention to forms of faith, both institutional and non-institutional, which expand our understanding of the

Victorians. Recognizing the presence and pull of faith beyond that of the institution opened up new possibilities in the evolving cultural landscape of the nineteenth century, as those with deeply felt faith could perhaps better adapt to the reorientation of society and coexist with the shift towards religious pluralism. While there are certainly historical examples of this, the mysticism of the Romantics presages a larger shift towards locating

God in the self, rather than in the establishment. As M. H. Abrams describes it in Natural

Supernaturalism,

They undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional

concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the

Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing

two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or

consciousness and its transactions with nature. (13)

Yet these shifts cannot, of course, be complete, Abrams warns; like poetry as it becomes a “secular” form in the nineteenth century, evolutions in religious imagination carry their predecessors within them: “Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought. The process… has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas, as constitutive elements in a world founded on secular premises” (13). 38

Modern readers, therefore, can use faithful reading to gain a better sense of not just the

Victorians’ location as readers of their religious landscape, but also where these assimilations and reinterpretations of religious ideas resurface in our secular world.

Rather than ignoring them, or writing them off as peripheral, we can locate them and thus better describe their influence, resonance, and ramifications in a world that is far from secular. This work is important, for it encourages us to invest in readings of religion as a worthwhile, important presence. By refusing to treat religion as something invisible, mystified, or irrational, we gain a stronger understanding of the ongoing tenacity and influence of religion, and we strengthen the vocabulary with which we can describe religion, the way it structured the lives of the Victorians, and the way it structures our lives now.

39

Chapter 1: Villette

Hiding Chains with Flowers: Allegory, Imagination and Religious Worldview in

Villette

A strange, frolicsome, noisy little world was this school: great pains were taken to hide chains with flowers: a subtle essence of Romanism pervaded every arrangement: large sensual indulgence (so to speak) was permitted by way of counterpoise to jealous spiritual restraint. Each mind was being reared in slavery; but, to prevent reflection from dwelling on this fact, every pretext for physical recreation was seized and made the most of. (124)

Early on in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Lucy watches a wild storm that fills her with the desire “for something to fetch me out of my present existence, and lead me upwards and onwards” (106). She does not succumb to this feeling, however. Instead, she tells the reader, “This longing, and all of a similar kind, it was necessary to knock on the head; which I did, figuratively, after the manner of Jael to Sisera, driving a nail through their temples. Unlike Sisera, they did not die: they were but transiently stunned, and at intervals would turn on the nail with a rebellious wrench; then did the temples bleed, and the brain thrill to its core” (107). With these phrases, Lucy constructs a strange allegory: at first, she appears to resist the urge to make greater meaning out of her current situation, yet she follows this by using Biblical figures to give structure to her suffering, Jael being the woman who killed Sisera by means of a tent spike that pinioned his head to the 40 ground. As she parallels her experience with that of Jael and Sisera, she suggests both a rejection of allegorical practice, in that the imagery is that of destruction, and an acceptance of the figure as a fitting expression of her theological conflict, which hinges on her need to control her imagination with what she sees as her reality. Lucy’s theological imagining of this moment is decidedly problematic: not only does her longing for spiritual transcendence, for the afterlife, for devoted love, or both, fail to die, the image of the brain thrilled to the core suggests a kind of sexual satisfaction that marks a translation of her theological imagining into an erotic context. The spiritual framework of allegory, in which Biblical figures presage later events, or the language attempts to convey “the transcendent truths that are concealed in language” (Copeland and Struck 3), is thus conflated with the secular desires of the flesh, suggesting both the twinned sacred and secular aspects of allegorical history, and the way that allegorical language points to a form of religious belief that would otherwise remain unarticulated in the novel as a putatively secular form. Indeed, the images the novel uses to bookend the experience of the storm—Lucy rejecting Catholic prayer to creep outside the window close by her bed and place her feet on the roof, where “it was wet, it was wild, it was pitch-dark” (106); as well as “the spectacle of clouds, split and pierced by white and blinding bolts” (106)—are startling, damp, and sexual as much as they are religious. The language of entry is emphasized: the phallic spike striking the flesh, the piercing of clouds by electricity. Yet the experience Lucy narrates here is not solely sexual, and the religious belief that it represents is both deeply felt and central to the structure and plot of the novel. In this one passage in Villette, we can see the way that Brontë’s Lucy attempts to represent her religious beliefs by constructing an allegorical model, yet we can also see the way that 41

Lucy’s experience resists allegory: the longings are “but transiently stunned,” suggesting the pressure that the task of conveying powerful belief exerts on the novel form.

Lucy seeks solace on the edge of the windowsill in order to escape the intense

Catholic prayer that is occurring around her, thus expressing her belief that her own

Protestantism is not in need of fervent display or expression in the face of purported danger. This conflict between Lucy’s deeply felt faith and her rejection of Catholicism’s supposed excesses is further made material in the different ways the novel conceptualizes

Protestant and Catholic worldviews overall, most importantly in the novel’s main marriage plot. In the storm episode, Lucy employs allegory as a means of explaining and denying her own desire. In order to avoid the complex intermingling of sexual desire and religious belief that the storm seems to raise within her, she employs allegory as a means of accessing the formal elements of displacement and projection. Thus, her expression of distaste at the overt expressions of Catholic belief (and her subsequent rejection of longings within herself) works to reveal Protestantism’s overall displacement of sexual desire as a means of remaining pure, and the subsequent projection of these feelings of desire on to Catholicism. As Julia Kristeva has observed, allegory’s slipperiness, its continual deferral, provides a psychoanalytic model for these acts of sublimating desire:

“[Allegory] endows the lost signifier with a signifying pleasure, a resurrectional jubilation even to the stone and corpse, by asserting itself as coextensive with the subjective experience of a named melancholia—of melancholy jouissance” (102). The novel, under the auspices of autobiography, encourages a reading of allegory that moves beyond the didacticism of religious allegory: that proposes allegory as a new way of looking, a narrative version of metaphor. The allegorical conflict Lucy describes, 42 between ideality and realism, is further reflected in the novel’s thematic treatment of the

Protestant and Catholic worldviews: the way these characters explain the world to themselves.

Readings of religion have been central in scholarship concerning Villette. There are numerous readings devoted to the thematic treatment of Protestantism and

Catholicism, many of which argue that Villette can be read as an anti-Catholic novel.

However, a faithful reading reveals this conception of the work as narrow, and I argue that Brontë’s work does not fully demonize Catholicism; instead, it employs it formally through the marriage plot in order to engage with the question of what it means to be religious and to try to understand another religion’s worldview. Here, the problem of classifying the novel’s plot as a secular structure become even clearer: while the proceedings progress through the marriage plot (courtship, complication, possibility of marriage), it is the presence of religion that provides the conflict and complication in the marriage plot (as a Protestant who is in love with a Catholic). Through this complication, religion shapes the figurative and spiritual moments of allegory that Lucy uses to express her passage through her education and toward her courtship.

Brontë’s use of the figure of allegory in the novel helps access the deeply held nature of religious belief as it is mapped onto religious worldviews and Lucy’s central conflict between the ideal and the real. Allegory also points towards the problems of representing these deeply held beliefs in a medium that would seem to categorically resist such representations, as the slippage between the sexual and the religious in the opening passage indicates. This slippage is not a failure, but rather, a revealing moment 43 suggesting a temptation even for Lucy to read allegory through sexual anxiety, when it is the register of belief that Lucy and the novel itself actually both ultimately privilege.

Belief becomes allegorized in Villette through the continually staged conflict between what Lucy terms the “real” and the “ideal.” The real encompasses her current life situation, while the ideal is the future she imagines for herself. Because she sees these exercises of imagination as futile and dangerous, she is constantly combatting the ideal

(as in her allegory of Jael and Sisera). Imagination, in Lucy’s story, is often aligned with the ideal, but the imagination occupies fraught territory, as it can be both a foil to reality, and can also constitute the very real act of believing. Importantly, these aspects of the imagination are essential to the history and character of allegory. While this chapter cannot deal with the long and varied history of allegory directly, allegory’s twinned purpose in religion and rhetoric provides a means of accessing the engine of belief. This purpose arises for two reasons: first, allegory in the religious context was often a means of producing an “encoded expression of a mystical or a philosophical truth, a manifestation of meaning that is at once immediate and remote” (Copeland and Struck 3).

Second, allegory also became known in the rhetorical context as a verbal trope. The overlap between these sacred and secular categories has been addressed throughout history by thinkers such as Bede, Silvestris, and Aquinas, yet the strange overlap remains unresolved despite the ink spilled in its service. The lack of resolution is not a failing, but rather, the source of allegory’s power. As Copeland and Struck note, “medieval vernacular authors, notably Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun… and spectacularly

Dante, found that they could play with accepted distinctions between allegory as verbal trope and allegory as theological or cosmological truth, in order to lay claim to much 44 greater authority than traditionally accorded secular poetry” (5). Even in Romantic revisions of allegory, such as Coleridge’s translucent “symbol,” theological vestiges of the form remained, clinging to the act of representation. With this hybrid history, it becomes worthwhile to observe both these allegorical functions as a means of representing belief: the theological and the ethical, the transcendent and the rhetorical.

Allegory thus occupies similar and/or territory as does religion: it must and can be both theological and rhetorical at the same time that it can only be read as one or the other.

The relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism, often crystallized in the contrast between imagination and religion, is undoubtedly crucial in Villette, as has been noted in criticism that observes the ways that surveillance curtails characters’ psyches, minds, and actions. While much has been written about the role of surveillance in Villette by Sally Shuttleworth and Tony Tanner among others,9 and Villette seems incapable of restraining itself from repeating the word “surveillance” in multiple forms and languages,

I argue that this obsession with surveillance has less to do with the prescribing of Lucy

Snow’s spatial, gendered, and imaginative movements, and more to do with the inscription of the Protestant and Catholic religious worldviews from which these restraints often stem. Religious worldviews, the novel suggests, have profound impacts on the role and range of the imagination. Critics such as Susan David Bernstein10 have argued that the Catholic threat identified in the novel becomes a fitting parallel to the gendered repression that Lucy Snowe and other Protestant women face in their home

9 For Sally Shuttleworth, see “Villette: ‘the surveillance of a sleepless eye’; for Tony Tanner, see “Substance and Shadow: Reading Reality in Villette.” 10 Bernstein, Susan David. Confessional Subjects. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Print.

45 country: fears of Catholicism and conversion were thus only peripherally about the mortal soul and were principally concerned with possible priestly usurpation of patriarchal and domestic power. Tampering with the religious identity of the believer had potentially dangerous ramifications: women might identify more with a religious institution than the bonds of marriage, rather than seeing it as integral to it. Villette explores the ways in which both Catholicism and Protestantism exert control over the imagination and identity of the believer either through surveillance by outsiders, or through self-surveillance as individuals internalized religious restraints and self-policed their own movements and thoughts, respectively. In this way, the novel asks readers to consider the tension between individual and institution and the impact of this tension on an individual’s imagination, which is literalized in Lucy’s account of her experiences and the allegorical terms with which she describes them.

Lucy is of course subject to these tensions between institution and individual, and the way that her belief is then figured by Lucy reflects both her own faith and the way that her interaction with Protestantism is shaping her imagination of her own life and thinking. I argue that Villette explores the overarching conflict between two worldviews—the Catholic and the Protestant—as a way of accessing the means and effects of the intersection of surveillance (representing institutional religion, or

Catholicism) and deeply felt faith (representing non-institutionalized religion, which is linked to Protestantism in the text), and examining the impact of the tension between the two on the power of the imagination to shape and maintain a religious worldview. The novel literalizes the differences between Protestantism and Catholicism in several exchanges between Lucy and Paul Emanuel. When they are speaking of maintaining 46 contact through letters when Paul has to travel abroad, he remarks “It would not be well to have any uncertainty about the safe transmission of letters—in short, our Catholic discipline in certain matters—though justifiable and expedient—might possibly, under peculiar circumstances, become liable to misapplication—perhaps abuse” (603-4). Paul notes the role of the surveillance of his faith in his life, and Lucy replies “I must have your letters… I am a Protestant: I will not bear that kind of discipline” (604). Both characters note the very physical effects and influences their respective religions have upon them, and this moment becomes an effective way of encapsulating the thematic differences of the novel, as well as Lucy’s imaginings throughout the novel. While Paul

Emanuel’s faithfulness and belief are supposedly maintained through suppression and surveillance, Lucy maintains her own belief, going so far as to admit it does not matter to her which of the three Protestant churches in Villette she visits. Her belief is self- maintained, and therefore not tied to a specific church building or community. Paul

Emanuel’s Catholic colleagues point to this as problematic, as he reports: “My best friends point out danger, and whisper caution… It is your religion, your strange, self- reliant, invulnerable creed…. your terrible proud, earnest Protestantism, there is the danger” (407). Yet the thematic conclusion of this staged conflict is a recognition by both figures of the other individual apart from his or her faith. As Lucy reports, “Whatever

Romanism may be, there are good Romanists: this man, Emanuel, seemed of the best; touched with superstition, influenced by priestcraft, yet wondrous for fond faith, for pious devotion, for sacrifice of self, for charity unbounded” (496). In this way, the novel crystallizes the means with which institutional thought pursues and influences even those who dissociate themselves from the institution and choose the route of deeply felt faith, 47 by shaping the ability of the believer to imagine or experience alternatives to institutional faith and its accompanying class and gender restrictions. Criticism of the novel is marked by critics who, reading the novel as a secular form, focus more on these class and gender restrictions than religion, when it is the religious epistemology that makes possible and even constitutes the novel itself. In a fitting parallel, the novel itself is marked by this same tension: in pursuing a secular structure and language, the imaginative possibilities of the novel are still limited by institutional vestiges: the highly institutionally sanctioned marriage plot, the look to the afterlife for deferred reward, and the religious and rhetorical entanglements of the allegorical model and its translation.

When we reflect back on the opening storm passage, we may still find Lucy’s violent and passionate words shocking, but they should not surprise us, as she is a religious individual who wants to describe her religious experience and express herself effectively to the reader. The difficulty of the religious individual either resisting or attempting to revise the influence of the religious institution, either through repression, projection, or determination, is writ large in the intensity of the figurative language that

Lucy employs in the storm passage. The figurative imagery, Biblical and violent, connotes both the extremity of the situation and what she deems the necessity with which she must control her impulse towards longing, or, as it is allegorically termed later in the passage, “the Ideal.” Though Lucy tries to resist being roused from “catalepsy and a dead trance” (106) by the storm and fails, the “Ideal” does not always disturb her by presenting unachievable futures. Sometimes, the Ideal soothes her, and she extends the metaphor from the opening passage to describe a subsequent night in which imagination/the ideal is not a source of torture, but a source of solace: 48

My Sisera lay quiet in the tent, slumbering; and if his pain ached through his

slumbers, something like an angel—the Ideal—knelt near, dropping balm on the

soothed temples, holding before the sealed eyes a magic glass, of which the sweet,

solemn visions were repeated in dreams, and shedding a reflex from her

moonlight wings and robe over the transfixed sleeper… Jael, the stern woman, sat

apart, relenting somewhat over her captive. (107)

As readers, we are left to wonder whether the Ideal is indeed a religious longing, a romantic one, or perhaps both, as in the lives of the mystics or the Romantics. The conflict, as Lucy terms it, suggests a need to curtail her longing to escape her present situation (either her loneliness, or her toil on earth) for another, more lovely or rewarding one, imagining perhaps both sexual and long-withheld spiritual gain.

Lucy’s fears over the ferocity and unquenchable nature of her imagination are returned to multiple times over the course of the novel. The role of imagination is figured by “longing,” “the Ideal,” “Imagination,” “sweet Help,” “divine Hope,” and “Feeling”; in these garbs it is pitted against “the Real,” which is described as “Reason,” “a devil,” and

“a step-mother.” The conflict between the two is fitting for a realist text that largely resists categorization, being hypothetically autobiographical (hence, “real”) as well as partly in the realm of the gothic imagination, a romance plot without a conclusion. The novel itself emphasizes the “reality” of the narrative in Chapter 39, where Lucy awaits the arrival of Justine Marie, telling the reader that in the strange night of the masked processions “scarce would you discredit me, reader, were I to say that she is like the nun of the attic, that she wears black skirts and white head-clothes, that she looks the resurrection of the flesh, and that she is a risen ghost” (453). Siding with Reason, Lucy 49 both exposes this potential charade and undermines it, commenting “Let us be honest, and cut, as heretofore, from the homely web of truth” (453) before dismissing Justine with the phrase “so much for ghosts and mystery” (453). Yet the novel strays from the

Real in other ways: Lucy herself distorts her narrative and conceals revelations (such as

Graham’s identity) from the reader. There seems to be a way in which the novel tries to ally itself with Reason in moments like the aforementioned, much as Lucy herself ostensibly does in the face of the sensual indulgences of Catholicism (and also her own); yet like Lucy, the novel cannot help but be filled with a longing, sexual or spiritual, which gestures beyond itself. The Real, or Reason, in Lucy’s equation, is that which she is currently occupying—her classed and gendered body—which cannot be other than it is, and should not be allowed any alternative. And in the realist novel, things are hypothetically portrayed not as they should be, but as they are. The conflict between

Imagination and the Real is engrained within the very form itself.

The novel often makes this intersection between Imagination and the Ideal a plot point, as when Lucy observes Pere Silas praying during a thunderstorm:

He seemed to forget me for his prayers; he only looked up when a fiercer bolt, or

a harsher, closer rattle told of nearing danger; even then, it was not in fear, but in

seeming awe, he raised his eyes. I too was awe-struck; being, however under no

pressure of slavish terror, my thoughts and observations were free. (380)

Again, Lucy uses Catholicism here as a means to play out a process of repression and projection that belies her own state of mind. While she may attest to her thoughts and observations being free, the reader is less likely to observe such a strict difference between her and Pere Silas, instead perhaps wondering why Lucy protests so much, 50 especially given earlier passages such as the storm passage in the novel that seem to indicate the tight rein she keeps on those very thoughts and observations.

This tight rein appears early on in the novel, establishing Lucy as a person who is both imaginative, and deeply uneasy about that imaginative capability. As she is crossing the Channel to begin her new life in Villette, she sees a vision of a rainbow stretching across the continent. In this, one of the earliest moments of conflict between Imagination and the Real, Lucy again allegorizes her experience only to reject it, providing a passage that I read in three ways. Each way provides a different means of accessing the conflict between the Real and the Imagination, though only the third provides the most faithful account, as it uses religious epistemology to access the complete context and scope of the passage. The first reading adheres to symptomatic readings; the second represents an

Augustinian reading of the allegory that the text presents, which I’m categorizing as a kind of surface reading; the third uses the previous two readings to craft a fully expanded view of the workings of religion in the passage. This third reading, a faithful reading, incorporates St. Augustine’s suggestions and Lucy’s own lens of allegorical collapse and uses these aspects of the text to enhance readers’ understanding of both the psychological aspects and the religious aspects of the text. The passage in question occurs directly before Lucy informs the reader that “day-dreams are the delusions of the demon” (53).

The image that has sparked this self-rebuke is a vision of the European continent crossed by a rainbow. She writes:

I was not sick till long after we passed Margate, and deep was the pleasure

I drank in with the sea-breeze; divine the delight I drew from the heaving channel

waves… In my reverie, methought I saw the continent of Europe, like a wide 51

dreamland, far away… For background, spread a sky, solemn and dark blue,

and—grand with imperial promise, soft with tints of enchantment—strode from

north to south a God-bent bow, an arch of hope.

Cancel the whole of that, if you please, reader—or rather let it stand, and

draw thence a moral—an alternative, text-hand copy—Day-dreams are the

delusion of the demon. (53)

In a psychological sense, Lucy’s sense of freedom and happiness is initially palpable, and seems to stem from a cloying combination of both secular “pleasure” and the sacred

“divine.” As a result, she imagines and figures for us a rainbow arching across the site of her potential future successes. However, her immediate rejection of this happy sign encourages a symptomatic reading that diagnoses her as an individual who is unable to allow herself happiness due to cultural and social restrictions. The weather she observes is a manifestation of this psychological state: the rainbow is not possible without the rain that has caused it; Lucy’s happiness is thus always underpinned by an unhappiness that both inspires and limits it.

In contrast, the rainbow, in the world of Christian doctrinal signs in which St.

Augustine operates, is the mark of the covenant between man and God that was established after the Flood (Abrams 304).11 The reader, using this sign, could read Lucy as a spiritual pilgrim who is embarking on a new endeavor; the rainbow would first and foremost signify God’s blessing of this endeavor. God here seems to be a source of hope, yet Lucy cannot allow herself to hope, and attributes this vision to “the demon.” Lucy’s

11 Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp. Oxford University Press. 1953. 52 inability to fully accept this allegorical sign might lead a reader to question either her faith or her own ability to read religious signs correctly.

A faithful reading acknowledges these two previous readings as a means of extending our approach to the passage. The rainbow can be both a projection of Lucy’s psychological interior and a doctrinal sign that she simultaneously recognizes and rejects; the text itself encourages this melded reading by calling the sign into question and depicting Lucy as someone who is unable to let the sign stand. In fact, she tells herself, and us, to copy down “daydreams are the delusions of the Demon”; she reins in both herself and the reader as if she were a schoolmistress. The prosaic text-hand copy is juxtaposed with her extravagant dreams, yet the reader must be able to reconcile the fact that Lucy has not only generated both of them, but also done so with dizzying rapidity.

Subsequently, it is useful to examine how the text does use this moment: the figurative theological language is forced down, encumbered by the patriarchal and societal oppression Lucy faces and has internalized, yet this theological language is also integral to Lucy’s experience. It is significant that the rainbow is the sign of the covenant between

God and man, because it is Lucy’s gender that constrains her circumstances here: would the daydream truly be a delusion if she were a man setting out to seek his fortune on the continent? No. She cannot abide by a strictly allegorical surface reading of the moment powered by the imagination, nor is she psychologically satisfied pleased with the emotions that the rainbow arouses. Yet both of these resonances exist. Therefore, neither a symptomatic reading nor a surface reading is complete here: faithful reading offers a supplementary method of reading that recognizes that both of these ways of reading are lacking without the other. Lucy’s psychological state is incomplete without an 53 acknowledgment of her religious belief, and the religious belief cannot be expressed without psychological language and its ramifications. Yet acknowledging the supplemental nature of the faithful reading also means that we must extend our reading of the original passage even further. If these different readings cannot exist without one another, it must be because there is something else that powers the figurative movement: deeply held faith. We don’t know how to read for faith because this is supposedly a secular novel. Yet the novel too can be religious. The allegory here is presenting faith literally. We are not looking for a signified in place of the letter, we are looking at the signified of the letter.

Psychological readings of the text have of course continued to pursue the idea of interpretation as something in place of the letter. These readings term Lucy restricted by the same forces she fights against: though she remains reluctant to acknowledge any allegiance to a man or the goal of marriage, the text is nevertheless also marked by

Lucy’s lonely yearning for romance. She constantly searches for a place in which she can read unobserved and alone, but simultaneously feels trapped within her own solitude, seeking solace in the confessional of a religion that she characterizes as incorrect (“I thought Romanism wrong, a great mixed image of gold and clay” (409)). Lucy protests the influence and power of Catholicism, yet is drawn to confession and the patriarchal structures with which it recreates the gendered oppression she chafes against in her daily life. This continual deferment contributes to her allegorization of her situation. She is also drawn to Catholicism because of evidence of the kind of deeply held faith that she feels characterizes her religious experience. As she notes when she is at her loneliest, she goes to confession because, “Any solemn rite, any spectacle of sincere worship, any opening 54 for appeal to God was as welcome to me then as bread to one in extremity of want”

(157). While she is vulnerable at this juncture, she has also previously objected to spectacles of Catholic worship as false and deceitful. Here, she appears willing to suspend her skepticism and believe in the sincerity of Catholic worship. Despite the fact that there are ostensibly three Protestant chapels in Villette, she chooses the confessional.

Her image of “bread to one in extremity of want” is descriptive of someone who is starving, but the imagery of bread in both the Catholic and Protestant contexts of communion also suggests the body of Christ. She recognizes the sincerity of the act, if not its legitimacy, and connects this sincerity to her own deeply held faith. As part of this connection, she loosens the strictures of her own self-surveillance, allowing herself to approach a Catholic institution without fears of conversion. Normally skeptical and liable to avoid Catholic prayer (as in the opening storm scene), Lucy permits herself to observe a shared depth of belief between Protestantism and Catholicism, and appears willing in this scene to observe the sense of the letter as expressed by another religion.

It is this act of observation that shifts Lucy’s self-surveillance to a kind of voyeurism, allowing her to indulge both her curiosity and her loneliness in a controlled, tightly managed way. Readings of Villette by Beverly Forsythe, who sees Lucy’s repression as a result of her masochism; by Robert Polhemus, who reads Lucy’s faith and its expression as erotic; and by Jessica Brent, who performs a Freudian reading of Lucy’s visual displacement, among others, have touched on this aspect of self-surveillance that is particularly useful in the religious context.12 Voyeurism, in my reading, becomes another

12 Beverly Forsyth, “The Two Faces of Lucy Snowe: A Study in Deviant Behavior.” Studies in the Novel 29.1 (1997): 17-25. Robert Polhemus, Erotic Faith. Chicago: 55 way of observing the strictures and strivings of the imagination in the religious context.

To be sure, the novel lends itself to a Foucauldian reading of the power of surveillance, yet the scopophilic gaze is easily coopted by and conflated with pleasure, especially in the Catholic context, where it has historical precedent in worries expressed by husbands about the sexual economy of the confessional, and the voyeuristic gaze (or ear) of the priest. Yet voyeurism is applicable beyond Pere Silas in Villette. Whether self- surveillance or surveillance of others, the gaze in Villette is often a source of both self- denial and erotic pleasure.

There are distinct differences between surveillance and voyeurism in terms of how they allow characters to achieve goals of control and self-control. Surveillance in the novel, unlike voyeurism, I argue, is consistently linked to Catholicism, and is shown to denaturalize figurative language. Those who survey others lack imagination in Lucy’s world: Madame Beck is prosaic, steadfast, and matter-of-fact. Lucy is more imaginative than Beck, and does not fall prey to this external vision without vision, nor does she consider herself restricted in her thoughts as Pere Silas is. Yet, while not as blatantly described as the surveillance of the Catholics, Lucy herself is a constantly observing individual who scrutinizes others as closely as she is seen herself: watching M. Paul

Emanuel in the garden, observing letters dropped from windows, and catching sight of the nun who would prefer to be hidden more often than any other character, save M. Paul

Emanuel. In addition, her self-surveillance is in many ways more intense and restrictive than the outside surveillance of, say, Madame Beck, who looks through items without restraint and leaves them as if they were untouched, or M. Paul Emanuel, who peruses

University of Chicago. 1990. Jessica Brent, “Haunting Pictures, Missing Letters: Visual Displacement and Narrative Elision in Villette.” Novel 37.1-2 (2003): 86-111. 56

Lucy’s desk yet leaves gifts of books and chocolate. This Protestant self-surveillance, in a parallel to Foucault’s panopticon, is a self-maintained link to her self-denial and the role that religion plays in placing checks on the voyeuristic imagination, hence her vehement statements at the start about restraining her longing. The strictures of self-surveillance provide the emotional, psychological, and spiritual titillations that voyeurism can afford, so Lucy can effectively stage her desire and combat it as a means of proving the strength of her own belief. Lucy presents a risk to herself because she can and does imagine things for herself that are outside the realm of possibility in her present station and religion, yet her ability to repress these imaginings supposedly demonstrates her fitness for reward in the afterlife. Unlike the Catholics, who are shown to use surveillance to maintain devotion to their religion, as in the opening quotation about “hiding chains with flowers,”

Lucy’s self-surveillance is about a constant navigation of the boundary between Real and

Ideal as a way to both stage her self-repression and play out its ramifications in her life.

The figurative conflict between the real and the imagined in Villette stages the erotic moment repeatedly. In voyeurism, as Anne McClintock writes, “The pleasure arises from mastering in fantasy a situation that is fundamentally dangerous and threatening. If a restraint on sexual pleasure provokes anxiety and loss of power, the pleasure of voyeurism involves the deliberate, controlled reenactment of the loss and its subsequent mastery” (129). As Lucy watches M. Emanuel in the garden, she observes him walk “within a yard of the line of windows near one of which I sat,” where “he sauntered lingeringly, fondling the spaniel in his bosom, calling her tender names in a tender voice” (401-2). Robert Polhemus puts it succinctly: “She gratifies her desire by effacing herself and watching others, appropriating their experience, and ascribing to 57 them what is in her soul” (124). While this is a source of pain, it is also a source of pleasure.

Lucy may see herself as a self-sufficient Protestant, but the text clearly indicates the way that even Protestantism maintains its devotees through internalized guilt and restraints that disallow them to stray, a kind of self-imposed bondage or panopticon. This self-surveillance and repression is linked to Catholicism, and is closely tethered to the institutional aspects of religion. The suppression of urges resulting in pleasure is engrained in the very nature of the religious institution, because the Protestant religion is also shown to reward those who suffer successfully on earth with a blessed afterlife.

Therefore, continually staging and combatting inappropriate desires, while painful, is a cherished pain, a kind of sadomasochism, since the suffering in the current life presages rewards in the life to come. As McClintock observes, “Like Christianity, S/M performs the paradox of redemptive suffering and like Christianity, it takes shape around the masochistic logic of transcendence through the mortification of the flesh… In both S/M and Christianity, earthly desire exacts strict payment in an economy of penance and pleasure” (158). Lucy references this phenomenon in the beginning paragraph of Chapter

38, “Cloud,” which is an extended meditation on the difficulties of life through the religious lens:

Dark through the wilderness of this world stretches the way for most of us: equal

and steady be our tread; be our cross our banner. For staff we have His promise,

whose ‘word is tried, whose way perfect:’ for present hope His providence, ‘who

gives the shield of salvation, whose gentleness makes great;’ for final home His 58

bosom, who ‘dwells in the height of Heaven;’ for crowning prize a glory,

exceeding and eternal. (427)

Lucy’s resignation to her life situation is reinforced by a religion that emphasizes the grace with which one endures ones struggles as a key to achieving entrance into heaven.

Her constant self-surveillance is thus turned into a kind of religious voyeurism—if she can prevent herself from acceding to the true threat of desiring more from her present circumstances, then flirting with that boundary between what is given and what is desired consistently performs the ablutions that the Protestant soul must undergo to be purified.

Lucy, limited by her gender and economic position, forbids herself from imagining herself as more powerful or happy than she is, yet then wrestles with her desire to do so in specifically visual terms (projecting her desires into the movements of wind and rain, watching Paulina watch Graham, watching herself watching Graham). The brain thrilling to the core is another means of expressing the pleasure that arises from this “perpetually deferred,” allegorical pleasure.

Since Lucy’s torment arises from her situation as a single woman with few economic prospects, the economic context of her religious situation are crucial. The sometimes problematic connection between misery on earth with deferred reward in the afterlife is examined in the economic context by Max Weber’s influential 1905 work The

Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber notes that countries where

Protestantism was dominant were also historically where capitalism flourished. He attributes this to the ways in which the Protestant work ethic coexists beneficially with the spirit of capitalism, since capitalism depends on the continual amassing of product and profit, and thus benefits from workers who will dedicate themselves to this task, 59 seeing their work as a calling in which to express their religious devotion. If

Protestantism trained workers to be obedient and accepting of their situation in life in hopes that their actions would result in salvation, then we can see Lucy as a similarly trained individual whose religious background discourages her from liberating herself from her situation in any unorthodox manner, as to do so might be to forfeit her deferred reward for accepting life as it is and suffering in solidarity with all Protestants who suffer.

Neither religious voyeurism nor class voyeurism is fully frowned upon, however, since the key to encouraging the amassing of wealth is the continual enactment of desire for more: material goods, class status, religious release. The bondage of the wage laborer and the bondage of the human soul are thus given an inescapable sexual content, which

Villette plumbs through the medium of the marriage plot. The worker has nothing to lose but his chains, which he is unaware of as he toils in the capitalist system: his productivity, indeed, is predicated on his continual ignorance of their existence. Any chafing against them that occurs is thus only a motivation for greater work and amassing of capital. Like the worker, the Catholic and even the Protestant, as Villette shows, are restrained, and these restraints are both maintained and resisted through actions such as self-denial and confession.

Were we to leave the reading of the “Cloud” passage where it is, however, we would not be truly faithful in our reading of it. When Lucy meditates on the difficult passage of the Protestant Pilgrim through the world, she concludes with the rallying cry,

“Let us so run that we may obtain; let us endure hardness as good soldiers; let us finish our course, and keep the faith, reliant in the issue to come off more than conquerors: ‘Art thou not from everlasting mine Holy One? WE SHALL NOT DIE’” (427). Yet directly 60 after this statement, she pulls us into the world of the school: “On a Thursday morning we were all assembled in classe, waiting for the lesson of literature. The hour was come; we expected the master” (427). While this may seem like an immediate immersion in the world of the school, there exist strong typological traces from Lucy’s earlier meditation, namely, the references to Jesus’s coming. Robert M. Polhemus lays out these ramifications: “‘The lesson of literature’ and ‘the master,’ the term that the faithful use for Jesus, used just at this point and shortly after followed by references to ‘M. Paul

Emanuel,’ casting him typologically as the awaited savior, intimate Lucy’s true faith in love and show that she just cannot separate religion, writing, and love” (123). 13 While we may have just endured Lucy’s dreary prospects of suffering on earth, the supposedly abrupt return to that very life is structured by religious signs. However, these structures also support romantic, erotic attachment. Unlike earlier in the novel, when Lucy imagined herself alone and friendless (“Anomalous, desolate, almost blank of hope”

(43)), she now uses the phrase “Pilgrims and brother mourners, join in friendly company”

(427). There is the prospect of companionship in her life, which enters into both her religious and her written visions. While she is still ostensibly alone at this point, the vision of M. Paul Emanuel as both erotic interest and Jesus-figure presages potential salvation from the patriarchal and economic forces previously shaping her worldview.

This vision depicts the potential for a shift from her conception of Protestantism and

Catholicism as perpetually in conflict, and an acceptance of the ways in which believers even of different faiths may “join in friendly company,” for it is surely Paul Emanuel she imagines at her side in this passage.

13 Erotic Faith: Being in Love from Jane Austen to D.H. Lawrence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Print. 61

I do not mention these associations as a way of arguing against religion, or suggesting that religion is solely an oppressive system that predetermines one’s experiences. One of the most important aspects of voyeurism and acts of sadomasochism is the presence of control and the pleasure derived from that control. Lucy consistently displays knowledge of this power in the writing of her own “heretic” story. It is important to resist the urge to deny the agency that Lucy and others do achieve and claim, as this resistance avoids essentializing religious experience. Additionally, as Saba Mahmood has pointed out, ignoring the ways in which religious worldviews allow especially women an opportunity to write and rewrite sites of power only serves to support “normative liberal assumptions” that posit “that human agency primarily consists of acts that challenge social norms and not those that uphold them” (5). As Mahmood continues, “what may appear to be a case of deplorable passivity and docility from a progressivist point of view, may actually be a form of agency—but one that can be understood only from within the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment. In this sense, agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms” (15). Lucy’s sadomasochistic, autoerotic maneuvering does not, it’s true, remove her from her sites of oppression; however, her ability to inhabit her situation, rise to the position of a respected teacher, and eventually secure her own means of support does. Yet again, this reading of gender politics fails to fully account for Lucy’s religious worldview as the source of her suffering and her imaginative capabilities. Religion here can and should be read literally as well as figuratively. 62

The religious worldview of the value of suffering as a way of earning eternal reward then provides a different epistemology for the events of the book. The autobiography becomes a testimony to Lucy’s suffering, and thus evidence of her fitness for eternal reward, a kind of allegory whose reference is something both transcendently beyond itself and remarkably humdrum. A list of woes and a transcript arguing for reward. The form this reward takes at the close of the novel is, again, both religious and erotic. Lucy imagines herself and M. Paul Emanuel, near the close, in moonlight that is

“such moonlight as fell in Eden” (479). At first, this seems to be the reward that her litany of suffering has prepared her for. Indeed, once M. Paul Emanuel asks her to be his, she has little difficulty in accepting the mantle of beloved: this despite her earlier hesitance to accept any kind of compliment. She writes

At parting, I had been left a legacy; such a thought for the present, such a hope for

the future, such a motive for a persevering, a laborious, an enterprising, a patient

and a brave course—I could not flag. Few things shook me now; few things had

importance to vex, intimidate, or depress me: most things pleased—mere trifles

had a charm. (482)

How changed is Miss Lucy, who had no patience for Ginevra’s delight in trinkets, who denied herself pleasant food and a pink dress, who was vexed, intimidated, and depressed at every turn before this time period. Why would the novel want to reinforce the power of the imagination in imagining oneself worthy of love?

It is Lucy’s imagination that ultimately allows self-surveillance to become the more appealing act of voyeurism, which shifts painful suffering into potentially arousing

S/M. The fact that the text ends without a resolution of M. Paul’s fate (though we most 63 likely assume he has perished) subjects the reader to the same kind of deferred pleasure that Lucy often indulges in when she feels trapped by circumstance. We are left continually anticipating a climax to the marriage plot that never appears; left without definite resolution, we are then destined to suffer each time we recall the lack of closure.

Yet Lucy initially seems content and happy with this situation. She tells the reader that

“the anticipatory crunch [of her body beneath the Juggernaut] proved all—yes—nearly all the torture” (481). As in her acts of voyeurism and self-denial, it proves to be the imaginative staging of the event that produces the suffering, and through this staging, she inoculates herself and gains control over her subsequent emotions.

Yet there are still things outside of Lucy’s control, a fact that surfaces in the school’s supposed haunting by the ghost of a Nun. While Lucy depicts Protestantism as the rational alternative to Catholicism’s false idols, she cannot shake the uneasiness that arises when M. Paul asks her “Mademoiselle, do you Protestants believe in the supernatural?” (356). His question is unsettling because of the figure of the Nun, a fitting representation of the conflict between the Real and Imagination that characterizes this meeting of religions. Lucy cannot allow herself to believe that the nun is supernatural in nature, yet remains unable to identify or dismiss the nun as simply a person in disguise.

As Charles Taylor notes, the mystery of the Catholic Church raised questions for

Protestants about allegory such as “How could a piece of bread be the body of Christ?”

(231). The Nun is similarly an inexplicably referential element that represents Lucy’s projected desire and calls the machinations of her own imagination into question. When

Graham asks her to describe what she has seen, she is guarded, lest her observations be dismissed; her hesitation to speak, though, also indicates her own lingering doubt: “I 64 never will tell exactly what I saw… unless someone else sees it too, and then I will give corroborative testimony; but otherwise, I shall be discredited and accused of dreaming”

(242). Even when Graham is able to cajole what she saw out of her, she only tells him in secret, and the text itself does not record her exact testimony. Lucy herself is not comforted by Graham’s diagnosis of “spectral illusion” brought on by nerves, and the reader also remains unconvinced, due to the detailed way she has described her vision.

While the nun is ultimately revealed at the close of the novel to be not only human but also subject to the basest motivations, before this time the nun remains unsettling because she has no explanation and cannot be categorized as either real or imaginative. She encompasses many possibilities: a figment of the nervous imagination, a supernatural being, or a true remnant of the kind of religious repression that subjugates love to the idea of faith, and thus the Ideal to the Real. The nun is also a compact representation of

Lucy’s, and Protestantism’s, repressed sexual feeling that is projected on to Catholicism itself, as she first sees the nun when she sequesters herself in the garret to read Graham’s letter, and her thought upon descending to find help is that she left the letter up there:

“This precious letter! Flesh or spirit must be defied for its sake” (240). Lucy’s own monstrous sexual desire is given a home in the spectral figure. The nun is fitting because her backstory of sexual transgression and entombment gives the repression and projection an undeniably erotic content. When Lucy buries her “love” letters at the base of the tree, she turns them into a literal parallel of the supposedly entombed nun. As both an emblem of denied female sexuality and an embodiment of Justine Marie, the nun is Lucy’s Gothic double as well as her haunting. The nun, supposedly representative of a young woman who has transgressed against her vows by engaging in sexual activity, or falling in love, 65 is a twinned representation of the suppression of Catholic sexuality, and Lucy’s projection of her own romantic desire.

The figure of the nun encourages us to plumb the novel’s imagery for what is entombed therein: not as a means of performing a psychological reading, per se, but because the novel itself presents an argument for the twinned actions of suppression and projection as a means of understanding religion’s effects on the imagination. For example, when Lucy describes her violent actions towards her longings, she uses the

Biblical story of Sisera and Jael; it is no coincidence that Jael has invited Sisera into her tent and given him milk to drink. Not only is the phallic imagery of the spike sexual, the entire context of the image is erotic: the opening of the inner sanctum, the parting of the folds of the tent, the man sleep-drunk on milk. It is therefore apt that Lucy uses this particular eroticized Biblical imagery to communicate her struggle between allegiance to the Imagination or Reason, and although she assures us in the initial passage that it is a figurative practice to conjure Jael and Sisera, I, for one, would not trust the nail in Lucy’s hands.

The fact remains, however, that Lucy’s struggles are ultimately not successful.

The longings do not die, and, surprisingly, given her penchant for denying her imaginative power, the novel contains perhaps the most famous extended defense of the imagination in Victorian literature, which I will turn to in a moment. Brontë’s text asks readers to take the effects of the imagination seriously because of its powerful effects in the lives of its characters; Lucy’s sadomasochistic striving against it, Ginevra’s flights of fancy, M. Paul’s vision of Lucy’s school. In addition, she examines the role that imagination plays in shaping one’s worldview, building an argument for the 66 inseparability of imagination and religious worldview, and therefore suggesting that realist writer and religious devotee might find similar ground in their imaginative endeavors, much as Lucy and M. Paul Emanuel do upon honest and open conversation.

This conflict between imagination and reason in the context of religious worldview is writ large in the dual drafting process Lucy undertakes as she replies to

Graham’s letters. As she informs us, when she sits down to write back to Graham, she allows herself to write two versions of her reply letter, one influenced by her imagined ideal, and the other by reality. She then destroys the one inspired by imagination: “I bowed down in the house of Rimmon, and lifted the heart at another shrine” (247).

Again, the religious metaphor becomes entangled with the romantic and even the literary as Lucy addresses the disconnection between what she feels, and what she can express due to the censures of reason. Here, the divide is even physically manifested in the act of writing: no longer figurative, the difference is represented by the two separate letters that are generated in the thrall of these opposing mindsets of the ideal and real. Despite

Lucy’s assurance that “[Reason] did right” (247) in destroying her heart-felt letters, it is difficult to believe Lucy, or to see her assertion as anything more than a way of reassuring herself she did the right thing as a means of consoling her heartsickness. Her authorship of the letters becomes another way in which she can savor her self-denial; she gives herself a glimpse of what it might be like to release her full sexual and romantic powers, and then just as vigorously reins herself in. Again, the restraint, suppression, and titillation is significant. Lucy herself has told us that her allegiance is not with Reason, since, “If I have obeyed her it has chiefly been with the obedience of fear, not of love”

(224). Lucy here sounds like her own conception of Catholics, who are supposedly not 67 true believers because they do not maintain devotion through personal motivation, and are instead constantly policed and surveyed by their priestly superiors. Yet this fear is self-prescribed, and is what lends the act of writing both its sorrow and its deliciousness.

The letters represent a way of trying to combat that fear by reclaiming her ability to express herself in an unfettered manner. In addition, she performs the role of censor, claiming control over her own licentiousness.

So what is Lucy afraid of? To parallel her Catholic counterparts, the fear would seem to be of patriarchal punishment or restrictions; disappointment at realizing that one’s limitations are indeed limitations. In the picture Lucy paints of the school in the passage I use for an epigraph for this chapter, the Catholics are happy when the chains are disguised in flowers and they are allowed to remain blissfully unaware of their restriction: “large sensual indulgence (so to speak) was permitted by way of counterpoise to jealous spiritual restraint. Each mind was being reared in slavery; but, to prevent reflection from dwelling on this fact, every pretext for physical recreation was seized and made the most of” (124). When they chafe against the flowered chains, as M. Paul

Emanuel does later in the novel, it becomes a burden. Where M. Paul Emanuel is able to ultimately tell Madame Beck to let Lucy go with him because of his position as a male in society, Lucy does not have the same access to power. Yet she still sees herself as a devotee of Imagination rather than of the Reason she’s obeyed out of fear rather than love. Indeed, Lucy throws in her lot with “that kinder Power who holds my secret and sworn intelligence” (224), and the beauty with which she describes this Power at its most unfettered provides the greatest possible contrast to her violent description of Jael and 68

Sisera. Here, day-dreams (or night dreams, as the case stands) are certainly not the work of a demon, but rather, an angel:

Then, looking up, have I seen in the sky a head amidst circling stars, of which the

midmost and the brightest lent a ray sympathetic and attent. A spirit, softer and

better than Human Reason, has descended with quiet flight to the waste—bringing

all around her a sphere of air borrowed of eternal summer; bringing perfume of

flowers which cannot fade—fragrance of trees whose fruit is life, bringing breezes

pure from a world whose day needs no sun to lighten it. My hunger has this good

angel appeased with food, sweet and strange, gathered amongst gleaning angels,

garnering their dew-white harvest in the first fresh hour of a heavenly day;

tenderly has she assuaged the insufferable tears which weep away life itself. (225)

Here, the uncontested presence of Imagination is explained through truly spiritual, transcendent images. Why is imagination, here, not of the demon? Has she come to some peace with the conflict? Or is it simply because the visitation is limited to the realm of dreams, and the Real is there to awaken her in the morning?

I have claimed before that imagination allows Lucy to transform prosaic surveillance into creative and literary voyeurism. It also aids Lucy in creating and projecting her worldview. While imagination is problematic because of the temptations it presents, it is critical because it allows Lucy to take and remake limitations in a way that procures crucial dream-space and the potential for her to become what she does, in fact, become: a self-supporting woman. So what do I mean by worldview? It is not enough to simply say that Lucy trades in a provincial worldview for a more cosmopolitan one as she travels abroad, for her existence in the diminutive Villette is, again, no less limited than 69 her life was before her time abroad. It would seem that the similarity in the limitedness has predominantly to do with Lucy and how she interacts with the world, not her specific geographical contexts themselves. Lucy would be as circumscribed in any country on the

Continent, we might surmise, due to not the limitations of her imagination, but rather her unwillingness to allow it full rein and the pleasure she derives from that dialectic. Indeed, to refer back to the conflict between imagination and reason, I would argue that worldview here has to do with the space that exists between how one is seen and how one sees oneself: imagination standing for how one imagines oneself, and reason supplying the way that others perceive one. Worldview cannot solely be one or the other, for we are consistently shown throughout Villette that characters cannot or will not define their own perspective correctly: Lucy obfuscates narrative teleology at the reader’s expense, refusing to let them know until much later in her narrative that she has identified Dr. John as the Graham of her youth. Ginevra believes herself worldly and skilled in flirtation, yet cannot accept when one of her rivals directs his attention elsewhere, continuing instead

Ginevra’s narrative of Graham’s obsession and even extending it to imagining a jealous

Paulina. Worldview also cannot be completely other-imposed, as Lucy finds love even under the watchful eye of Madame Beck, resists efforts at conversion with little difficulty, and is even able to push back against Beck’s depiction of M. Paul Emanuel as a celibate devotee without much effort.

Worldview, it appears, must exist in the interstices between self-selected viewpoint, and outer-imposed viewpoint. Thus, when Lucy remarks upon arriving in

London “While I looked, my inner-self moved; my spirit shook its always fettered wings half-loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who had never yet truly lived, were at last about 70 to taste life: in that morning my soul grew as fast as Jonah’s gourd” (45), we are encouraged to see that she has a newfound sense of freedom and that she locates this in a transcendent religious framework, comparing her soul to a fast-growing vegetable.

Things are looking good for Lucy as she defines them through her own worldview at this point! Yet, despite being made fructiferous and imaginative by travel, she falls asleep in lodgings in the shadow of St. Paul’s, and celebrates the beginning of her time in London the next morning with the summiting of its dome. This Church is a veritable institution of

Anglicanism (not to mention a gigantic phallus) and a potent symbolic source of the very oppression of which she has felt herself relieved by displacement. With opportunity in front of her, she proceeds to re-identify herself and her surroundings through the most aggressively institutionalized form of religion she can locate. Aside from her vegetable freedom, the architecture of the dome is a startling and grounding panopticon. Her tethers to earth are immediately made literal through ensuing, discordant interactions with the lower classes where we see examples of how she is viewed and defined by others: she over-tips untrustworthy waiters, coachmen, and watermen, and faces the scorn of the ship’s steward and sullenness of the ship’s stewardess. Though she may deem herself more free, and identify herself as such, the reader can observe the ways her life is circumscribed by class, gender, and religion at this juncture. Her worldview, I argue, thus lies somewhere in between protest and Protestantism.

Worldview is a necessary overlap of self-determination and outside pressure, especially in terms of religious devotion, since Catholicism and Protestantism carry with them a range of associations such as the aforementioned gendered oppression. To give the worldviews context, Victorian England in the 1850s was in the grips of strong anti- 71

Catholic sentiment, also known as “antipapist excitement.” With an increased presence and visibility of Catholicism in England thanks to the Catholic Relief Act of 1829, and the reinstitution of the Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850 among other developments including Irish immigration, there was suspicion and doubt being expressed as to the motivations and power of the Catholic Church. The rhetoric of the Anglican population’s reactions linked Catholicism with fears about foreign incursions on native soil. As Susan

D. Bernstein writes, “Anti-Catholic enthusiasm gradually constituted a trope for xenophobia and social unrest, for popular and broadly supported beliefs that England was being overrun by foreign, hostile, or radical elements, whose imagined massive power was condensed into the figurehead of the roman Catholic Church and the derogatory locution of “popery”” (45).

Conversion loomed as a threat as well; travelers on the Continent spoke of the sights and beauty of Rome, and simultaneously expressed steadfastness in the face of the decorated trappings of Catholicism. Lucy, traveling to the Continent alone, places herself in what was seen as a site of danger. Even though she observes that “Foreigners say that it is only English girls who can thus be trusted to travel alone, and deep is their wonder at the daring confidence of English parents and guardians” (50), Lucy, unlike Ginevra, ultimately has no parents or guardian. While her self-sufficient Protestantism may appear to be a mantle of protection that prevents any temptation to conversion, or, we might imagine, seduction (which is often figured as the same thing as conversion via the licentious priest), this is certainly not enough and is tested almost immediately upon her arrival in Villette. The danger materializes in the form of the two men who follow her through the streets, and ends with her falling in love with a Catholic. Lacking patriarchal 72 control, Lucy looks for its boundaries, seeking help first from the anonymous Englishman who turns out to be Graham, and then trying, upon re-acquaintance, to place Graham in this role of protector, using his letters as shields against her feelings of loneliness and vulnerability.

There are many other examples of this regulation: Lucy retreats into herself when

Dr. John questions the reasons behind her scrutiny, rather than revealing their shared history (96). She often waits for others to approach her rather than approaching them, as happens when Madame Beck steps in front of her and she does not move towards M.

Paul Emanuel, remaining in Beck’s shadow as Beck preys on Lucy’s self-identified

“weakness,” “deficiency,” and “moral paralysis” (433). She will not allow herself the pleasure of a pink dress, and has to be goaded into wearing it by Mrs. Bretton (202). In addition, Lucy apparently holds her worth in abeyance to her lack of beauty, since this is one of the last and most heartfelt hurdles to her relationship with M. Paul Emanuel: “Do I displease your eyes much?” (471). Lucy cannot imagine herself as one worthy of love because she is well aware that she is not considered conventionally beautiful. Her worldview thus vacillates between her own desire for love and recognition, and her feeling that it is unattainable—the conflict between reason and imagination continues in her very sense of self.

It makes sense to pursue a reading of the contradiction between religious worldviews in the representation of the relationship between Lucy and M. Paul Emanuel because the two characters represent the most sustained and devoted interaction between the two religions in the novel. Of course, it is hypothetically Lucy’s infatuation with

Graham that causes the greatest conflict between her reason and imagination, but the 73 reader’s discovery that the “little bunch of violets that had once been silently presented to me by a stranger (a stranger to me, for we had never exchanged words)” (116), which

Lucy keeps amongst the folds of her best dress, was actually given to her by M. Paul

Emanuel (he asks her “do you recollect my once coming silently and offering you a little knot of white violets when we were strangers?” (355)) makes him or her aware that Lucy may be harboring more secrets from us as readers as to the source of her romantic conflict. Regardless, we see a striking contrast as well as a surprising accord between religious worldviews that is less figurative and more literal in Lucy’s brief courtship by

M. Paul Emanuel through observing the characters’ reading of one another’s worldviews.

Lucy identifies the kind of investigative mind shared by Madame Beck and M.

Paul Emanuel as specifically religious in nature, informing the reader that her criticism of

M. Paul Emanuel’s stealthy methods take the form of “impressions concerning his Jesuit system” (355). Surveillance here, or the act of “study[ing] the human heart thus,” and

“banquet[ing] secretly and sacrilegiously on Eve’s apples” (356), i.e. gaining knowledge that is forbidden or should be withheld, is a practice peculiar to Catholicism in Lucy’s eyes, as she subsequently tells M. Paul Emanuel “I wish you were a Protestant” (356).

Unlike Lucy, who believes that Protestantism needs no mechanism to keep the believer in check, since the Protestant is hypothetically by nature self-contained and motivated, M.

Paul Emanuel represents a religion that, to Lucy, resorts to nefarious observation and constant supervision in order to ensure allegiance. Yet M. Paul Emanuel’s response to her critique instead notes a similarity between the two of them that exists despite this religious difference. It is worth noting the construction of his statement: 74

I was conscious of a rapport between you and myself. You are patient, and I am

choleric; you are quiet and pale, and I am tanned and fiery; you are a strict

Protestant, and I am a sort of lay Jesuit: but we are alike—there is affinity. Do you

see it, mademoiselle, when you look in the glass? Do you observe that your

forehead is shaped like mine—that your eyes are cut like mine? Do you hear that

you have some of my tones of voice? Do you know that you have many of my

looks? I perceive all this, and I believe that you were born under my star. Yes,

you were born under my star! Tremble! (357)

While his opening gambit establishes a kind of recto-verso relationship between himself and Lucy, he is quick to point out that these opposite pages are still irretrievably bound.

Also, he notes the parallels between them despite their physical differences using the imagery of being born under the same star, a figure that could be borrowed from any number of religious and pagan sources including the Talmud, astronomy, and physiognomy.

To Lucy, this similarity becomes apparent the more she is able to see M. Paul

Emanuel apart from his religion, or even despite it, as she begins to separate him from the institutional aspects of his faith. Again, he is a “good Romanist,” even though he is

“touched with superstition” and “influenced by priestcraft” (385). M. Paul Emanuel has a similar epiphany about Lucy, identifying her as “good” despite her faith: “You are good—Pere Silas calls you good, and loves you—but your terrible, proud, earnest

Protestantism, there is the danger” (407). Both of them profess to see or imagine the real person behind the religious trappings; however, both do so through perspectives that are unavoidably filtered through their own religious worldview. The purported separation of 75 believer and belief gestures towards, again, the separation between public and private belief that is occurring in Victorian society with the continual lifting of disabilities on political participation. But in Madame Beck’s establishment, where there is no true privacy, these distinctions are difficult to identify and maintain. The lack of privacy encourages a seamless integration of religion and practice, not necessarily as a function of religious identity, but as a necessity in and of itself. The school raises questions about anyone’s ostensible ability to separate the spheres of public and private when it comes to religion—how truly different than the cloistered oppression of the school is the wider world? Lucy, though she identifies the facet of spying on others in Catholicism as insidious, neglects to take up her own circumscription through faith and examine it; her worldview is no less limited or prescriptive, despite her protestations otherwise. While she may feel restricted by her presence in the school, before she arrives, her experience is already constrained through class, familial, and gendered strictures that are integral to

Protestant existence. Lucy’s worldview merely recreates these strictures within and without her own body.

Interestingly, Ginevra enters the pages of the novel not long after Lucy’s contradiction of her own profession of mobility, appearing on the very boat that carries

Lucy across the Channel to Villette. Ginevra, though flighty and self-absorbed, is, as many scholars have noted, the most adept at securing what she needs and desires for herself. In addition, though she seems near-sighted to the point of neglecting anything beyond the tip of her well-powdered nose, Ginevra ultimately appears to be the least constricted and confined of any of the female characters. Unlike Paulina, who exists as a fairy under the control of a father hesitant to relinquish her to another man; or Lucy, who 76 cannot escape her own bitter self- and other-imposed parameters; Ginevra both locates pleasure and secures sources for it that are creative and horrifying at the same time.

The novel stops short of suggesting that this is due to the way she is able to exist outside a static religious worldview, but it does paint a picture of Ginevra as someone remarkably unconcerned by creed or dogma. As she tells Lucy not long after meeting her,

“In to the bargain I have quite forgotten my religion; they call me a Protestant, you know, but really I am not sure whether I am one or not: I don’t well know the difference between Romanism and Protestantism. However, I don’t in the least care for that” (51).

Micael M. Clarke suggests that this passage indicates a viewpoint the reader should reject, as Ginevra represents everything Brontë believes should be rejected. But the novel is not quite that clear in this specific case. In Ginevra’s defense, she could be telling tales, as she is often unreliable in her reporting, but the novel bears out the value of her carelessness. In fact, this carelessness translates into a carefreeness that works to her advantage, as she and de Hamal concoct a disguise for him that plays on both Catholic fears and Gothic tropes. It is because there is little distance between how she sees herself and how others see her (flighty, irreverent, irreligious) that she is able to use her worldview to her advantage, relying on Lucy and M. Paul Emanuel’s shared habits of secrecy and self-doubt in order to keep meeting with her lover. She does take religion seriously: knowing that her own inability to adhere to it does not mean that others cannot, she bets on Lucy and M. Paul Emanuel’s belief as a means of securing their secrecy (for what religious person would want to admit that they had seen something as profane as a ghost?). As a result, Lucy notes, Ginevra passes through life “suffering as little as any human being I have ever known” (466). While she may still be constrained by a 77 patriarchal system in which her worth is determined by her position in marriage, Ginevra does admirably well in even this arena, netting herself a count and transforming herself into a countess in the bargain. As she tells Lucy first-off after she is married, “I have got my portion!” (464). Furthermore, Ginevra does not seem to have internalized the structures of religion that would limit her choices, or indeed restrain her from meeting illicitly and most likely sexually with her lover. Placing Ginevra’s daring meetings with her intended, who is dressed in nun-drag, beside M. Paul Emanuel and Lucy’s chaste minutes of holding hands in the garden also illustrates the level and degree to which

Ginevra’s worldview, though often frivolous, allows her freedoms that Lucy would never be capable of imagining.

Observing the conflict between the Protestant and Catholic mindset should also remind readers that these are just two of the religious worldviews that pace the world stage in this time period. While Protestantism was the purported British faith, codified by its rule in law and legislation as the national religion, in reality, Dissenters, Catholics, evangelicals, and Jews comprised approximately 50% of the English population. Indeed, the fact that Protestantism and Catholicism are seen at loggerheads, despite the fact that, as Lucy notes, “you believe in God and Christ and the Bible, and so do I” (407), speaks not only to the structures of power and gender and class that order the disparate religions, but also to the fixity of belief in this context. While we may examine these coexisting structures of power, and think through the alignment of institutional beliefs and national affiliation, we are still left with the stark fact of belief. In order to understand the conflict between Lucy and M. Paul Emanuel’s worldviews, we must take their beliefs seriously.

We must believe, if only temporarily, as Lucy believes, that 78

Poverty was fed and clothed, and sheltered, to bind it by obligation to ‘the

Church;’ orphanage was reared and educated that it might grow up in the fold of

‘the Church;’ sickness was tended that it might die after the formula in the

ordinance of ‘the Church;’ and men were overwrought, and women most

murderously sacrificed, and all laid down a world God made pleasant for his

creatures; good, and took up a cross, monstrous in its galling weight, that they

might serve Rome, prove her sanctity, confirm her power, and spread the reign of

her tyrant ‘Church.’ (409)

Lucy sees the benevolent acts of the Church, which admittedly have produced benefits in the world, as solely self-serving. While we are encouraged to skeptically read Lucy as an unreliable narrator, we must also weigh her statements carefully, trying to believe her before we discount her. Lucy’s viewpoint here could be supported by evidence of the hold that Pere Silas and Madame Beck appear to have on M. Paul Emanuel, yet M. Paul

Emanuel’s ability to finally declare his love for her would seem to indicate that the

Church is not the ultimate authority in his life: love usurps this seat.

We must also believe the objections that have been raised in M. Paul Emanuel’s mind by his own religious context: that Lucy’s “pagan” habit of going to the three

Protestant chapels of Villette “indiscriminately” suggests someone of “profound indifference—who tolerates all…[and] can be attached to none” (408). We see in M. Paul

Emanuel and Lucy’s earnest discussion of their disparate beliefs that some sort of understanding can be reached between these worldviews, yet it is a chary understanding.

As M. Paul Emanuel leaves her after one of their conversations concerning religion, she overhears “some fervid murmurings to ‘Marie, Reine du Ciel,’ some deep aspiration that 79 his hope might yet be mine” (409). By the close of the novel, this deep aspiration no longer seems an obstacle to domestic bliss.

M. Paul Emanuel and Lucy arrive at a more complete understanding of one another after he has shown her the new school he has outfitted for her. After he has left, he writes “Remain a Protestant. My little English Puritan, I love Protestantism in you. I own its severe charm. There is something in its ritual I cannot receive myself, but it is the sole creed for ‘Lucy’” (482). Perhaps in the interests of still trying to show that her faith is more true and righteous than M. Paul Emanuel’s, Lucy’s own articulation of his worth at this point remains guarded as to the value of Catholicism: “All Rome could not put into him bigotry, nor the Propaganda itself make him a real Jesuit. He was born honest, and not false—artless, and not cunning—a freeman, and not a slave” (482). While M. Paul

Emanuel recognizes the value and integral quality of Lucy’s Protestantism to her identity, and loves it in her, Lucy is still not able to allow Catholicism any influence on M. Paul

Emanuel or come to love it in him. It is because she believes he was good before the

Catholicism that she loves him; M. Paul Emanuel, however, can recognize that Lucy is what she is because of Protestantism, not in spite of it. While both have moved away from the institutions of their various religions in order to pursue love, the institutions have unmistakable holds on them still, structuring their abilities to envision a future together, and dictating the forms it must take.

Examining the function and movement of worldviews in this text allows us to observe the ways that imagination can be both limited and constituted through faith and belief. Holding worldview to the light allows us to examine religion as viewpoint, with all its attendant ramifications: motivation, limitations, imagination. It is meant to provide 80 more evidence for why religion should be a category weighted alongside “race, class, and gender.” Religion is inextricably tied to all three of these categories in the nineteenth century and beyond, and taking religion seriously means that it deserves to be included in analysis of these other elements. Interestingly, all of these categories are imaginary constructs, imaginative interpretations of appearance, social interaction, and social position. Instead of imagined communities, these are imagined categories. They are nevertheless potent. What does it mean that there are these socially constructed categories that people sometimes self-select and adhere to and sometimes are placed in by birth or circumstance that nevertheless are frequently outer-imposed, have real and visceral effects on their lives, and are inarguably kept in place by structures of power that are inescapable and definitive? Imagination in the world of Villette is not necessarily always liberating, then, but often only a means of imagining what we are not, and thus reinforcing what we are and its unavoidable essence.

Brontë’s text, I believe, looks at religion and asks the reader to consider: what does religion do? Here, it is shown to irrevocably impact worldview through its power to structure romantic or erotic experience, and its effect on the imagination of the believer.

Yet religion is not solely a repressive force: imagination, the angel that Lucy conjures, raises the possibility of shifts in worldview even as it is fettered by institutions of religion. For example, Lucy can imagine M. Paul Emanuel apart from his own religious worldview, or can imagine what it might be like to be married to him. Worldview is not always flexible; it is often, in fact, brittle. Yet imagination allows for its manipulation in the same way that imagination provides the engine for constructing an imagined real world out of a real real world. Charles Taylor has examined the way that reason and 81 revelation were separated post-Enlightenment, and suggested that this division is lacking.

“Reason,” he writes, “has, in other words, a creative component; it can and must generate new ways of conceiving the reality it is trying to understand” (“Reason, Faith, and

Meaning” 16). Perhaps it is this creative component we see at work in the text and Lucy’s allegorical representations of her life, allowing the realist novel space to figure religion, and allowing Lucy the ability to imagine a kind of paradigm shift in her own thinking.

According to Brontë’s text, imagination must be able to do something in the case of religion, as both M. Paul Emanuel and Lucy are able to imagine the source and legitimacy of one another’s faith, even if they cannot either endorse or share it. Micael C.

Clarke argues that Lucy and M. Paul Emanuel’s ability to tolerate one another’s religion and find common ground represents movement towards the secular in Victorian society—an ability, in other words, to balance disparate religious worldviews indicates the possibility of a more pluralistic, religiously diverse society that even contains room for loss of faith. Yet the worldviews are still ultimately irreconcilable. There is potential and even understanding, but there is no melding or adoption. This incompatibility structures the plot as a plot of marriage that tests faith. Lucy remains skeptical of M. Paul

Emanuel’s religion, identifying him as good and trusting and therefore malleable in the hands of his priests. This would seem to indicate both the durability of religious worldview and the limitations of the imagination in the theological context, which can envision a talking bush aflame in the middle of the desert, or an entire civilization anchored on a turtle’s back, but cannot believe as another individual believes.

82

Chapter 2

Conscience and Causality: “If” in Gaskell’s North and South

If he and Mr. Thornton would speak out together as man to man---if Higgins would forget that Mr. Thornton was a master, and speak to him as he does to us--- and if Mr. Thornton would be patient enough to listen to him with his human heart, not with his master's ears--- (163)

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South has much to say about the role of the human heart in industry. Through the characters of Margaret, whose thoughts we read above, and the factory owner Mr. Thornton, the novel stages a marriage plot that suggests the efficacy of conflating the female domestic role with the role of the master. In the case of this novel, the domestic role that Margaret inhabits is specifically religious, and it is this religious content that structures both the progression of the marriage plot and the conclusion of the novel’s financial and economic concerns. While the activity takes place within the confines of the industrial novel, the outcome is neither as bourgeois nor as straightforward as the use of the marriage plot might indicate.

As Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight note, the category of the Industrial Novel has been structured by several key identifying characteristics: “their exclusive northern 83

English setting, their preoccupation with the textile industry, [and] their middle-class perspective” (1). According to Raymond William’s Culture and Society, the “structure of feeling” the industrial novel invoked became a way for authors and readers to maintain aesthetic distance from the plight of the working class: “Recognition of evil was balanced with fear of becoming involved. Sympathy was transformed, not into action, but into withdrawal” (109). This hesitation to fully engage in the issues of the working class is not without impact. In fact, it very clearly shapes the structure and plot of the novels, as Ian

Haywood observes: “In order to contain the threat of Chartism, the social experience of the unpropertied British proletariat is forced to conform to the dominant conventions of the bourgeois novel: individualism, romance, and the property plot” (5). This domestication of the radical and uncontrollable elements of labor is certainly evident in

Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South: what might be a novel about strike conditions at a factory is instead channeled into a novel about marriage and inheritance. However, overlooking the centrality of the marriage plot, or scorning its ameliorating effect, simply assumes that the marriage plot always results in the problematic literary domestication of the working class. While the marriage plot can and has been read as a conservative, bourgeois response to class issues that are difficult to represent as well as worrisome to a middle-class reader, it is worthwhile to examine how it works as a mechanism, as well as to resist the assumption that it must always perpetuate representational damage.

This chapter examines North and South’s reliance on the marriage plot, and the specific religious component of that marriage plot, in order to argue that the marriage plot in and of itself is not doomed to be a concession directed towards the bourgeois reader.

Instead, when read through the religious register, the marriage plot can be integral to an 84 understanding of the workings of industry, secularization, and can itself be a site of resistance to dominant bourgeois narratives. Specifically, Gaskell uses the marriage plot to stage resistance to industrialization in the body of Margaret Hale, a positioning that provides an antidote to postcolonial literary criticism’s modern day readings of the female British body as responsible for reproducing British culture by providing new generations of workers. In Gaskell’s novel, Margaret’s body is presented as specifically anti-capitalist, and her religious reasoning is central to her positioning. However, her reasoning is not depicted as problematic in the context of the marriage plot. Rather than something that must be overcome, Margaret’s contrariness, and her religious and social views, are the basis for Mr. Thornton’s attraction to her, suggesting that the marriage between industry and religion is not a marriage of opposites, but rather a mutually beneficial partnership that can be deeply troubling to class-based reasoning. The novel’s closing sentences, after all, focus on the objections of both Mr. Thornton’s and

Margaret’s families to the marriage, and although these objections do not deter the couple, they certainly figure largely in their thoughts as they become engaged.

The marriage plot has been read as both a deeply conservative reification of bourgeois values and as a site of resistance to class- and status-based social determinism.

For an establishing example of the former, conservative reading of marriage, Tony

Tanner’s Adultery in the Novel (1979) explores the marriage plot and adultery on the grounds that adultery is a threat to the conservative, bourgeois social contract of marriage, and thus the novel must confront what endangers it. As an important example of the latter, resistance-centered reading, Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic

Fiction (1987) articulates the rise of the female subject through the valuing of the 85 individual and the subordination of social difference to gendered difference, an action that emphasizes the gendered power that can be gained through marriage as a means of sublimating class or social difference. However, marriage’s religious context is not often characterized as radical or important in either of these contexts. In fact, in Armstrong’s work, women’s powerful positioning in the domestic sphere only functions through the rejection of the importance of religious virtue “associated with the dominant social ideal of earlier culture” (68), as this religious preoccupation is likely to impede upon a woman’s ability to run and organize her secular and modern household.

It is true it is more common to look at marriage’s religious context in earlier historical periods, yet even these periods remain only partially examined. Recent work by

Lisa O’Connell has argued that “the English novel's turn to nuptial themes in the 1740s has not been adequately accounted for, and… the political and religious settings from which the marriage plot first acquired its purpose and meaning in English fiction remain to be explained” (31). In her work, she establishes historical context for the rise of the eighteenth-century marriage plot, including “its genesis in Samuel Richardson's novels as a High Church missionary project emphasizing proper ceremony, for instance; the distinctly male, public, and gentlemanly concerns of its earliest practitioners; or its insistence on the centrality to the social imaginary of the rural landed estate and parish presided over by vicars and squires” (31). O’Connell’s argument is convincing, and provides an important call towards attending to the political and unavoidably religious context of the marriage plot. This work is necessary in nineteenth-century readings of the marriage plot as well. This chapter’s faithful reading observes that religion plays an explicit role in the marriage plot even in the secularizing world of the industrial novel. 86

Attending to this explicitly religious content increases our understanding of the way industry and religion historically and rhetorically structured one another, and suggests ways in which this structuring remains relevant.

To date, secularization narratives have identified interest in industrial working conditions and the rise of the social problem novel as a byproduct of the increasing distance of the British public from religious belief and motivation. As Amanda

Claybaugh frames it, the societal shift from emphasizing religion-based charity to the more secular reform is mirrored by literature’s mid-century turn towards focusing on social problems. Gaskell’s earlier novel, Mary Barton, was certainly seen as a novel that addressed the problems of the working poor, to the point where it was characterized by contemporary conservative reviewers in outlets such as the Edinburgh Review and the

Manchester Guardian as too aggressive in its sympathies with them and overeager in its condemnation of the bourgeois; more liberal outlets such as the Athenaeum and the

Christian Examiner “praised the book unreservedly for its fidelity to the fact in its presentation of the masters-and-men relationships” (Hopkins 14). In addition, as

Catherine Gallagher notes in her reading of the novel, though the novel was extremely popular, its religious content was seen as antithetical to the realism of the text, causing one reviewer to remark that the ending “was a religious homily, ‘twisted out of shape, to serve the didactic purpose of the author’” (67). Catherine Gallagher has suggested that the twistiness of the novel, its variety of narrative forms (melodrama, domestic fiction), is a result of the irreconcilability of its central issue: namely, that John Barton’s political radicalism marks him as a person with a strong moral core, yet he is unable to make moral decisions and indeed commits murder in the service of those morals. Gaskell, she 87 argues, was well aware of this contradiction due to her position as a Unitarian in a changing religious landscape that seemed to be moving from an emphasis on causality to an emphasis on conscience. In fact, Gallagher argues that Gaskell was acutely attuned to the way that conventional narrative practices could “mask and distort reality” (68). Thus, the variety of genres that the novel touches upon moves towards addressing the slippage between the actual experience of the poor and its accurate representation, and this variety is further complicated by the contradiction between causality and conscience. For example, in a causal world, John Barton’s strong moral and political convictions would always render a familiar, moral series of choices. However, in Mary Barton, his conscience is shown to complicate this process.

The shift from causality to conscience in Unitarianism that was occurring during

Elizabeth Gaskell’s lifetime can certainly be read along the fault lines of the traditional narrative of 19th century secularization, as the earlier causality initially seems to be more

God-centered, and the later conscience more centered on humankind’s ethical judgment.

Causality, popular in the strain of Unitarianism fathered by Joseph Priestley around the turn of the 18th/19th century that was influential throughout the Victorian Era, stressed the role of God as the source and cause for all human action. He was, as Rev. Albert Lazenby wrote in The Unitarian Register, “the mechanician watching his worlds go round with the spin he gave them at the first” (430). Therefore, the way the world was playing out was the direct result of God’s actions, and men’s actions themselves were the effects of this cause, as well as the inevitable results of them. This idea of causality resulted in the plight of the people often being read as determinism. So, while workers suffered under conditions that damaged their bodies and crippled their souls, these conditions were seen 88 as the result of a cause-and-effect religious reasoning that gained support from scientific sources and had minimal flexibility. As The Unitarian Review describes Causality in its article “The Ethical Movement,”

It is precisely the idea of unity or totality applied to the category of causation, the

idea of a universal causation, and the consequent assumption that no effect

whatsoever is uncaused, that warrants us speaking of the laws of nature as

necessary. We ascribe the character of necessity to the principle of causality that

is in them, which they represent. We can never be sure that we have found all the

causes of any given effect; but in so far as a law does cover all the facts at present

within our field of vision, in so far and for us it is inexorable. (391)

Unity, whether it be scientific or religious, shaped any articulation of interpretation, as

God was creator of both nature and man, the ultimate and integrated Cause from which all other causes flowed. Thus, even while Unitarians looked to science for answers about social and religious issues, especially in the first half of the 19th century this scientific support tended to reify class and economic difference rather than call it into question, as it naturalized the causes and effects of the conditions of the working poor as a logical effect of the original cause. Science was yet another means of maintaining a sense of determinism about the human and religious condition, and science and religion often relied on the same structures of power and interrogation in maintaining this power of dictating cause and effect. For example, George Levine, in his work Darwin and the

Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction, observes the way that Darwinism was grafted into this ongoing Victorian conversation on science, morality, and religion by noting that Darwin’s ideas were quickly domesticated and utilized by a public that was 89 invested in “the basic themata of modern commercial and industrial capitalist society”

(12). By eliding Darwinism with social Darwinism and causality, even when, as Levine argues, Darwinism also “resists that absorption” (13), Victorians further shored up more positivist views of life’s progress with even that which might seem to radically and antihistorically disrupt them.

Causality was an act of interpretation that proposed to be more flexible than it actually was, its actual restrictiveness reflected in Unitarian practices of religious reading from the time period. As historian Timothy Larsen has pointed out, modern historians have often overlooked the influential, more conservative causality in favor of a focus on the shinier, more modern conscience. This blind spot seems to stem from a sloppy scholarly habit of using “Unitarian” as a generic stand-in for “progressive” throughout writing about the time period, thus relegating causality and its associated reading practices to the background. Thus, historians and critics are apt to privilege more progressive or radical Unitarian voices even if they are not representative of Unitarianism as a whole. As Larsen writes, “There seems to be a general tendency to assume that the

Unitarians are an exception to all general approbation applied to the Victorians,” yet

Unitarians were just as embedded in the cultural and social issues of the day, an embeddedness reflected by the fact that “the tradition was entirely Biblicist well into the nineteenth century” (138). Indeed, the Biblicist tradition of the Unitarians was predominant throughout most of the Victorian Era, with the major shift towards conscience arriving as late as the 1880s. What this means is that Unitarians were deeply invested in the Bible and readings of the Bible, and that these readings were often seen as causal in nature. Causal, in this context, still contains a sense of inevitability, 90 inexorability: the Bible could supposedly be interpreted consistently and correctly by a

Unitarian who approached it searching for harmony. Timothy Larsen presents Lant

Carpenter, the father of Mary Carpenter and an influential figure among Biblicist

Unitarians, as a fitting example of this strain of thought. In Carpenter’s work

Unitarianism, the Doctrine of the Gospels, he outlines his principles thusly:

“1. Revealed truth can be found ONLY in the records of Revelation contained in

the Scriptures.

2. Revealed truths can never be inconsistent with the general tenor of the

Scriptures, with each other, or with any truths which can be proved from the light

of reason.” (153)

His daughter, Mary Carpenter, also lived by a similar belief, that “deep human needs would be best met by the Scriptures unencumbered by creeds” (156). Absent of creeds and dogma, the Biblicist Unitarian approached religious reading under the auspices of reason—and, as we have seen, this reason was fettered throughout the nineteenth century by the idea of causality, such that reason presented itself as unified and consistent despite seeming challenges from other fields.

James Martineau, a Unitarian minister and the brother of Harriet Martineau, became a powerful voice for moving Unitarianism in the direction of conscience beginning in the 1830s. In his estimation, man did indeed have free will and was not shackled to causal activity or interpretations, as it was his choice to move towards voluntary righteousness. In his conception, “God was not the mechanician… but the ever- present energy in every throb of matter and every quiver of the human brain. This energy was akin to what we know as Will” (Unitarian Register 430). The fact that this energy is 91 seamless does not leave room for cause and effect; instead, all action is instantaneous, such that even “God does not know. He is ignorant whether I shall do the thing I know I ought to do to-morrow” (430), and it is this very ignorance on God’s part that gives man the freedom to make choices and truly become moral. If all effects were natural, then morality would not exist, as it would be predetermined and not chosen. “With Martineau the moral life dwells exclusively in the voluntary sphere,” although “any faithful reading of the human conscience spells in it the name of ‘God’” (430, emphasis mine). This shift towards free will as Martineau articulates it actually counter-intuitively moved scientific explanations to the background and used religion to foreground man’s ability to choose and make moral decisions. I say counter-intuitively because we might assume that a move towards the now more secular idea of conscience would necessarily involve a more scientific epistemology. However, what conscience could reveal was that science was also embedded in the same cultural systems of values, an obvious example being nineteenth century applications of race theory and resulting scientific racism. The Ethical

Movement article indicates the conflict that perhaps made this shift towards focusing on the judgment understandable: “Thus, we can understand that double attitude of the human intellect which regards every single law of nature as subject to revision, and yet invests it with the attribute of inexorable necessity” (391). With this contradiction at its core, causality is flawed, difficult, ironically unpredictable and open to misuse. Instead,

The principle of morality is an absolute principle, it is the principle of unity which

is founded in human reason; but the applications of that principle have changed in

the past, and must still constantly change in the future to meet the altered

requirements of advancing civilization. Progress is demanded in our statements of 92

moral truth as well as in every other direction, and we at the present day are

especially called upon to aid in this work of progress. The questions of poverty, of

the elevation of labor, of the relations of the sexes, the question of the stricter

intellectual honesty which the advancement of science and the decline of theology

has brought into prominence, present new moral problems not known to our

fathers,—problems that urgently press for solution. (400-1)

In this conception, the conflict between what was seen as the inexorable quality of religious or scientific law and its shifting basis that necessitated constant revision was not a flaw but rather, a call to action. Only with a discerning intellect and a self-reflexive gaze could humankind address the growing and changing situations in which they found themselves; man had to be moral as well as aware of the changing basis and distinctions in that very moralism.

To be accurate, this “Religion of Conscience” became popular later in the 19th century (1880s and 90s), but it was on the rise and becoming controversial during the decade North and South was written and published. Biblicist Unitarians of the time period resisted interpretations such as Martineau’s as heretical and dangerous: scriptural interpretation did not support his claims, and while Martineau might be assuaged to know that conscience ultimately triumphed, it was a long time before it took hold. Gaskell was in contact with Martineau and his sister, Harriet Martineau, and was particularly friendly, as Catherine Gallagher observes, with a colleague of Martineau’s, Francis Newman, who was instrumental in promoting Martineau’s belief. Though Gaskell was herself a Biblicist

Unitarian of the older, causality strain, her exposure to conscience-inspired ideas and her interest in them can be seen throughout her work and writings. 93

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Gaskell’s North and South, like Mary

Barton, also contains formal ramifications stemming from the struggle to plot causality

(determinism) and conscience (free will). Though Gallagher’s subsequent reading of

North and South does not take up her own earlier context of causality/conscience in order to plumb these ramifications, it is worthwhile following through on the trajectory of her earlier argument about Mary Barton. The tension between conscience and causality is still historically relevant to the later novel, and North and South is, if anything, a more deeply nuanced and accusatory look at the ravages of supposedly secular industry, as it goes much further than Mary Barton does in locating and considering what the role of religion might be in both the lives of the working poor and in the lives of the factory owner. The novel addresses some of the issues of causality and the representation of the working class raised by Mary Barton by making its central character, Margaret, both politically astute and able to integrate her politics and her moral judgment. Unlike John

Barton’s lies and crimes, which are motivated by his passions but ultimately incompatible with his political, moral code, Margaret’s transgressions are part and parcel of her religious beliefs. When she lies to authorities to save her brother, she knows the lie is morally problematic, but her faithfulness and love for her brother provide the reader with a rationale for her transgression. This is not to say she does not suffer for telling the lie, but the suffering is self-inflicted, as she upbraids herself continually for the lie and how it might affect other’s views of her. This deep internalization of religious and moral codes as well as her distress over allegiances ultimately marks her adherence to personal religion and laws of the family over laws of the nation. She is both more predictable and more thoroughly religious than John Barton, who is willing to violate his moral beliefs 94 and the laws of the nation through murder, rather than maintaining his Christian responsibility to his fellow man throughout. Yet this predictability (we do not see her violate her beliefs, merely struggle over what her heart and belief make her feel she must do) does not necessarily mark her as causal in her thought or nature: faced with implacable religious or economic reasoning, she is a questioning challenger. Her questions, rather than being stifled by a causal understanding of situations, often interrogate the status quo because her conscience cannot allow her to do otherwise.

Though Gaskell herself was a Unitarian, Margaret and the majority of her characters in North and South operate under the banner of Protestantism, and

Protestantism is both an impetus for the move that sets the novel’s events in motion as well as inspiration for the marriage that motivates their closure. Some critics, such as

Julie Melnyk, have suggested that this Protestantism is a convenient cloak for Unitarian ideas, since these ideas would be easier for the reading public to digest if they did not appear to be coming from a Dissenting source. Regardless, there seems to be a stronger backbone in religion than in political economy that allows the text to accomplish more than it might otherwise, another way in which religion seems to trump or inherently trouble class-based reasoning. Whereas Mary Barton’s divergent narrative forms cannot ultimately address the failure of genre to reproduce the problems of the working poor (as

Gallagher argues, the novel criticizes false conventions, but these very criticisms only highlight the lack of a “stable, self-assured narrative posture” (68)), North and South draws attention to these failures in a different way: by using the traditionally stable conventions of the marriage plot, and showing how this familiar plot is in and of itself problematic and lacking. If the novel cannot truly depict a marriage plot, how could it 95 possibly depict the problems of the working poor? Rather than struggling with the ramifications of a shift from causality to conscience as Mary Barton does, North and

South fully embraces the move towards a religion of conscience, depicting surprising personal decisions and unexpected alliances as moral and just, rather than as unduly complicating elements to the genre of the marriage plot typically seen as predictable and plotted.

A faithful reading of the novel makes it clear that in this context of conscience, religion is both too personal and too powerful to be fully represented in conventional fictional plots, even though it is used as a central plot point. This overpowering aspect of religion is clear in the way that the novel cannot or will not treat religious belief or its ramifications within an individual directly. While the novel takes on political economy, class difference, and even ecological issues with no hesitation, it is discreet in its treatment of religion in a way that sets religion apart. The way that Margaret and her father engage with the idea of conscience suggests a circumspect approach to religion that extends throughout the entire novel. This is not due to the fact that the novel is innately secular or bourgeois and therefore must avoid or absorb religion to hide the fact that it cannot represent it, but rather because the novel is not secular, and maintains a respectful distance from the sacredness of belief. Because the readers should no longer expect causal readings, and cause and effect cannot be taken for granted or mapped onto a predictable plot, the shift to conscience adds more interiority and more inscrutability to characters; unlike Eliot’s use of free indirect discourse in Adam Bede, Gaskell’s North and South’s ability to enter its character’s minds is much more circumscribed. Often, the reader knows or sees little more than Margaret can, and this choice in narration maintains 96 religion’s aura. Religion is faithfully represented in that it is not subsumed, ignored, or absorbed by the novel: it is given its own interiority and treated with decorum. This aura of respect remains even though religion is central to our understanding of the novel, for it is a crisis of faith that sets the plot in motion. Margaret’s father, Mr. Hale, decides to leave his post as a vicar for the Church of England and move his family to the Northern industrial town of Milton in self-imposed exile. In the wake of his self-revelation, the

Church offers him a different post. However, Mr. Hale rejects this due to his inner conviction that he “must no longer be a minister in the Church of England” (47). The reader sees here the integrity of Mr. Hale’s conduct: when the Church gives him an easy way out, offering him a new position and a chance to rededicate his faith and start anew, he cannot in good conscience accept that route, as he feels that to do so would be untruthful to himself and to his parishioners. When he explains his new doubt to

Margaret early on, she reproaches him by saying “the early martyrs suffered for the truth, while you—oh! dear, dear papa!” Mr. Hale’s answer is significant: “I suffer for conscience’ sake, my child… I must do what my conscience bids” (50). Mr. Hale’s doubt is just as thorough as his previously held belief, and seems to have no fewer rules. He must adhere to this new state of doubt with the same integrity he devoted to his ministerial duties.

Other characters do wonder about Mr. Hale’s doubt. Margaret goes so far as to question, “Where, to what distance apart, had her father wandered, led by doubts which were to her temptations of the Evil One? She longed to ask, and yet would not have heard for all the world” (63), but does not pursue this line of questioning with her father at any time during the novel. Margaret’s curiosity is stifled as she realizes that trying to enter 97 her father’s belief may end in her misunderstanding him. The doubts that she feels are the temptations of Satan may not appear so to her father, but the structure of her thoughts also illustrates that she cannot and should not try to believe as her father believes. Though the text’s treatment of Mr. Hale mirrors the larger, abstract national shift away from an understanding of religion as inseparable from political and public action to an understanding of religions as more personal and private as bans were lifted, the text also specifically asks the reader to respect the integrity and self-authoring of a certain man.

North and South goes so far towards extending this respect that it never violates Mr.

Hale’s privacy by either directly questioning his faith or expecting him to explain it. This is extraordinary, given that Mr. Hale plays a central role in the novel as the main structuring element and impetus for the movement from south to north referenced in the work’s title.

His crisis remains inscrutable, his faith or lack thereof something that the novel chooses not to represent as a means of providing it with more power and respect. It is what motivates him to make a decision that would appear to be the least causal of all

(leaving his post), but in good conscience, he cannot adhere to the effect that is expected of his cause. It is not that representing his faith would somehow literalize it and destroy it, it is that the novel resists depiction as a means towards more accuracy. Though the reasons for Mr. Hale’s crisis are never fully articulated, his parting of ways with the

Church aligns him with other Dissenters of the time period, commonly grouped under the label of “Chapel,” including the Quakers and the Unitarians. However, Mr. Hale does not identify himself as a Dissenter (although other characters do); he does not, in fact, label himself at all. This resistance to labeling is referenced throughout the novel, as Gaskell’s 98 plot populates the changing religious landscape with a succession of religious individuals that cannot be classified as either heretical or non-heretical: Mr. Hale, caught somewhere between Church and Chapel; Margaret’s brother Frederick, whose conversion to Roman

Catholicism is an act of love and cultural adaptation, not politics; the alternating faith and agnosticism of the dying working-class Bessy Higgins; and her father Nicholas Higgins, who is more thoroughly religious than any character, despite his refusal to attend services and his seeming fatalism.

These varying depictions of religious devotion indicate that the most interesting act in terms of plot and structure is not actually Dissent in a formal sense, but rather, individual acts of religious interpretation that comprise sites of resistance to the classification of the nation or even the reader. Here, I mean the nation in the historical,

Victorian sense, since religious affiliation had real and prescient political and social ramifications at the time Gaskell was writing. However, the novel also represents this classification in the class conflicts and social hierarchy of the novel. In addition, the characters present sites of resistance to readerly classifications as well. If a character’s interpretation and actions are unusual, then the workings of conscience can be observed, if not fully compassed; this lack of comprehensibility to character’s actions is part of the point. The novel resists being read and being interpreted because it challenges the reader into examining the assumptions of interpretation, i.e. should our own readings of the novel be causal or conscience-driven. If Mr. Hale’s crisis inexorably resulted in a certain religious outlook, or we could easily classify him with causal exactness, there would be no plot, no mystery, no need to read further. By allowing Mr. Hale a multiplicity of statuses, and extending respect for this potential, the novel comments on both the 99 complexity of religion and its power to motivate and structure unpredictable, conscience- driven plots.

The reader should thus be invested in his or her own reading assumptions. Indeed, the novel offers Margaret as a model for the reader when she reacts to her own father’s doubt: she does not want to know more and dares not ask him, yet as she looks out her bedroom window, she has a vision that is shockingly bleak and godless:

She looked out upon the dark-gray lines of the church tower, square and straight

in the centre of the view, cutting against the deep blue transparent depths beyond,

into which she gazed, and felt that she might gaze for ever, seeing at every

moment some farther distance, and yet no sign of God! It seemed to her at the

moment, as if the earth was more utterly desolate than if girt in by an iron dome,

behind which there might be the ineffaceable peace and glory of the Almighty:

those never-ending depths of space, in their still serenity, were more mocking to

her than any material bounds could be--- shutting in the cries of earth's sufferers,

which now might ascend into that infinite splendour of vastness and be lost---lost

for ever, before they reached His throne. (61)

This is a dark moment in the text, mirroring the darkness Margaret feels in her soul as she struggles with her father’s news. After hearing of her earthly father’s doubt, she reevaluates her reading of her celestial Father, telescoping her vision outwards and reading her own loss and need for evidence of purpose and peace into the evening sky.

Margaret does not gaze upon the grandeur of the sky and immediately feel the presence and scope of God, as might be expected in such a causal reading. Instead, her reading of the landscape provides an image of alternative readings, conscience-driven readings that 100 are not necessarily secular, but use the lens of religion more reflectively or flexibly. We as readers see more of Margaret’s doubt than of her father’s, a fact she acknowledges after this depressed reading of the landscape (“Her father might be a heretic; but had not she, in her despairing doubts not five minutes before, shown herself a far more utter sceptic?” (62)), yet she continues with her faith through the novel and it is her faith that ultimately sustains her, buoying her objections to Mr. Thornton’s treatment of his workers, and motivating her actions such as visiting the ailing Bessy.

Margaret’s act of reading and interpretation of the landscape after her father’s confession illustrates both the variety and the intense privacy of the interpretive act. As far as we see in the text of the novel, she never admits this momentary lapse to anyone despite her disappointment with herself for other transgressions. Indeed, it is never mentioned again. Rather than suggesting that Margaret is flawed or doomed to repeat her father’s failings, the narrative depicts an unusual and counter-intuitive faltering of belief that does not mark its adherent as a heretic. As these individual acts of interpretation mirror the individual interpretations of the novel by readers, the novel itself encourages a shift from a causal reading of the plot to a conscience-driven reading of the plot. This shift also parallels shifts in Biblicist Unitarianism at the time, moving from the idea that scripture, or the novel, will unfold itself and can be interpreted consistently and correctly each time without outside creed or orthodoxies to an acknowledgment that even this

“New Critic” approach to the Bible may result in multiple and varied readings due to individual consciences. In this latter scenario, each individual reader is free to interpret the text without creed or orthodoxies, yes, but the interpretation is not fated or determined to be the same each time: like characters who guard their religious individualism, readers 101 react and make both private and informed translations of the plot into their own lives. All of this is to suggest that narrative is fallible, which is not necessarily problematic, but rather, a strength, allowing a text like North and South to maintain verisimilitude while moving closer to representing the experiences of those who are different than us and must remain different from us due to our inability to fully imagine another’s interiority. The problem of representing the working class and its struggles must remain a problem: like

Mr. Thornton as he retrains himself to see the working-class as the experts in their own lives, the reader must reexamine previous beliefs and learn again to read people as individuals who are resistant to such acts of interpretation because they are humans and not interpretable pieces of matter or text.

Though the title North and South is commonly taken to mean the split between

England’s more rural south and the industrial development of the north, and the Hale family’s navigation of their move from one to the other, I argue that this split is also meant to indicate fundamental differences in faith, suggesting that the novel is just as importantly about religion as it is about economics and class. Hugh McLeod lists some significant geographical statistics about the Church and Chapel split:

The 1851 census, as well as showing that chapel-goers outnumbered church-goers

in most of the large towns, indicated that there was a marked regional pattern of

rural religious practice… Church was far ahead in most of southern England from

east Devon to Kent, in most of the south and west midlands… Chapel was

dominant in Cornwall… in much of the north midlands, east Lancashire,

Yorkshire and the north-east. Church and chapel were neck and neck in the… 102

industrialized areas of north Somerset, north Wiltshire and south Gloucestershire.

(28)

This map, from The Economic History Society and the Historical Geography Research

Group of the Royal Geographical Society with the Institute of British Geographers, illustrates this general distinction between North and South, as well as accompanying attendance rates:

In this context, the family’s move is not only geographically, but religiously unsettling.

Moving from the more rural, Church-dominated south to the more industrialized, Chapel- leaning north represents a fundamental shift in characters’ references for faith-based reasoning. Though the characters concern themselves with education, medicine, and industrial reform once in the north, the recurring backdrop for these issues is the diverse religious environment in which the characters find themselves. 103

Gaskell is quick to provide readers with an example if they doubt that this is the case. One of the first individuals that Margaret meets upon her move to the north is

Nicholas Higgins, or the “infidel weaver” as her father calls him at first, a man who makes it clear that he does not believe in Heaven or predestination. As Nicholas tells

Margaret soon after meeting her, “I believe what I see, and no more” (138). This empirical framing of his belief, seemingly similar to the early scientific, causal model adopted by the Unitarians, is influenced by his experience as a worker in the factory system, specifically, the cotton and weaving industry. Yet Nicholas’s reasoning turns out to be anything but causal, and it hinges on his use of the word “I.” Whereas in causal readings his reference point would be God, here, the empiricism stems from his own observations: he believes what he sees, and what he sees is the suffering of the working class, which moves his conscience and motivates him to act against what might appear the natural order of things. In another example of religious variety, under Nicholas’s own roof his daughter, Bessy, is dying of fluff in her lungs from her time at the factory. In her despair, she confesses to Margaret that she was born under a bitter star, and that God has destined her to be unlucky. Margaret is aghast: “‘Nay, Bessy—think!’ said Margaret.

‘God does not willingly afflict. Don’t dwell so much on prophecies, but read the clearer parts of the Bible’” (214). As R.K. Webb notes in “The Faith of Nineteenth-Century

Unitarians: A Curious Incident,” the Unitarians felt that prophecies and miracles in the

Bible were much harder to subject to scientific scrutiny: “Some miracles could be explained away, some were convincing as proofs needed in a rude age of the divinity of

Jesus’s mission” (128). Some Unitarians thus overlooked the miracles and other less scientific aspects of the Bible; other, Biblical Unitarians such as Mary Carpenter’s father, 104

Lant Carpenter, worked hard to reconcile interpretations of the miracles with other aspects of scripture, and remained insistent that Scripture was not inconsistent. Though

Margaret is not identified as Unitarian, she employs the sentiments of both schools of religious thought in her address to the dying girl. Margaret’s urging for Bessy to attend to the “clearer parts” could be read as a slightly patronizing attempt to protect the girl from attempting Biblical, causality-based analysis that she is not capable of due to her intellect and station, but this is belied by Margaret’s command to “Think!” Though an imperative, the suggestion that Bessy use her mind and her own thoughts to come to terms with the

Bible, and to draw out of it a reading that challenges her own morbid assumption of a predetermined life, is an ultimately liberating one that mirrors the shift from a Religion of

Causality to a Religion of Conscience.

Yet in a literal sense, Bessy’s life has been predetermined: by the factory, if not by God, and this is where the irony of the interpenetration of religion and industry is laid bare. The cotton industry has imprinted itself on her body, much as other toxic materials and occupations of the time damaged those who held them, such as the phosphorous that used to eat away at the jaws of female matchmakers of the time period (Friis 350).14

Bessy’s industrially acquired illness aligns her with these workers damaged by the chemicals they employed in their labor, as well as the other workers whose cramped and contorted bodies were physically altered by long hours at the machines where they worked. The cotton industry is literally killing Bessy just as it metaphorically oppresses

14 This disease, called “phossy jaw,” often ended in severe pain, pus filled abscesses, and the need for the removal of the jawbone. Other diseases associated with the occupations that caused them in the nineteenth-century were miners’ asthma, potters’ rot, miners’ phthisis, brass-founder’s ague, filecutter’s paralysis, painter’s colic, bakers’ itch, mule spinners’ disease, hatters’ shakes, and Caisson disease (Friis 350). 105 the nation’s working class as its means towards functioning. Where the text takes issue with this industrial conflict is in its opposition to the supposed religious brotherhood that exists among individuals in the Protestant nation and the pews of the Chapel-goers.

Obsequious individuals concerned with the souls of the poor devote no time towards thinking of the souls of the factory owners who oppress the poor with soul-crushing work, a fact that Margaret seeks to make visible in her conversations with Mr. Thornton.

Consider an example from an early conversation between them in the text: “‘You consider all who are unsuccessful in raising themselves in the world, from whatever cause, as your enemies, then, if I understand you rightly,’ said Margaret, in a clear, cold voice. ‘As their own enemies, certainly,’ said he, quickly, not a little piqued by the haughty disapproval her form of expression and tone of speaking implied” (127). The discussion in which this exchange occurs is triggered by Mr. Thornton’s expressed philosophy that the working class and the factory owners are in perpetual war. This combative framing of labor issues is shown to be at odds with Margaret’s religious conception of the world, where worker and owner are integrally connected and responsible for one another’s well-being. In this conversation, as in many others, she tries to shift metaphors of war and class-struggle to ones of peaceful negotiation on both sides, or at least make the dominance of the violent metaphors visible to their adherents.

The cotton industry becomes the representation of class conflict and its religious component in North and South. It snakes throughout the novel and implicates everyone from Mr. Thornton the factory owner; to Frederick, Margaret’s brother, a court-martialed sailor who has spent time on a West Indies sailing ship that is most likely carrying cotton 106 to England; to Margaret and her cousin Edith in their muslin dresses.15 Against the backdrop of this pervasive presence is the pathetic figure of Bessy coughing up blood, and men like Nicholas Higgins and the other men of the factories of Milton who threaten to strike because of the combative treatment they feel they receive from the factory owners, who in turn summon their own fierce mode of resistance. Interestingly, the strike, in Higgins’s words, seems as much religiously as economically motivated

(indicating the inextricability of these forces in this text as well as political economy). As

Nicholas describes in a conversation to Mr. Hale, “If salvation, and life to come, and what not, was true—not in men’s words, but in men’s hearts’ core—dun yo’ not think they’d din wi’ it as they do wi’ political ‘conomy? They’re mighty anxious to come round us wi’ that piece o’ wisdom; but t’other would be a greater convarsion, if true”

(33). Mr. Hale is not convinced that the connection Nicholas identifies between economy and religion is necessarily true, but Nicholas maintains that there is an inescapable insidiousness to a system that proclaims an interest in the souls of men and women yet neglects their mortal bodies.

Unitarians in this time period were concerned about the unequal ways the souls of the lower classes were conceptualized. In a sermon from 1828 by the American Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, he writes that man’s greatest achievement is to emulate a kind and loving God. Channing, who greatly influenced British Unitarians, helped to solidify the Unitarian front against the slave trade in Britain as well as

Unitarian activity in the labor reform movement: “A friend of Channing, Joseph

15 The novel North and South would have also been serialised on paper with significant rag content, and therefore itself would also be implicated in the insistent system of circulation that created the conditions of Bessy’s demise. 107

Tuckerman, had ministered to the poor in Boston and originated the casework method of evaluating the needs of the poor. In 1834 he came to England to encourage Unitarian missionary activities. Webb highlights the special domestic missionaries, who came to the slums of the towns and helped to relieve the burdens of the poor… Unitarians actively lobbied for the reform bill of 1832 and championed anti-slavery legislation” (Browde

16). Channing’s rhetoric insistently calls Unitarian ministers on both sides of the ocean to

“hold fast [to] a faith in the greatness of the human soul, that faith, which looks beneath the perishing body, beneath the sweat of the laborer, beneath the rags and ignorance of the poor, beneath the vices of the sensual and selfish, and discerns in the soul a divine principle, a ray of the Infinite Light, which may yet break forth and ‘shine as the sun in the kingdom of God’” (254). In this egalitarian Unitarian vision, everyone has the same value and worth no matter what their situation. All human souls have the capacity to aspire to be like God, and all have this potentially illuminating power.

The Unitarian outlook was ultimately inclusive, but also closely linked to personal property and personal faith. Though the souls of every individual are associated with

God, there is also something personal and redemptive about them—something that neither hypocritical proselytizing nor the machinery of the factory can efface or erode.

Ironically, these rights extend to the owner of the factory as well, a fact that Mr. Thornton himself argues when he asserts that he cannot attend to the spiritual and physical wellbeing of his workers without neglecting his own human and economic rights.

Margaret acknowledges that he has a right to look after his own interests, as he is an autonomous individual. However, she also indicates that this does not necessarily make it right: “I said you had a human right. I meant that there seemed no reason but religious 108 ones, why you should not do what you like with your own” (118). Religion, when the economic vision of the state becomes detrimental, can comprise a site of reflection and resistance. Here, religion is figured as that which should hold factory owners back as they talk about limiting workers’ rights. Though they have their own rights, they must also concern themselves with the souls and well-being of those under their care; they must treat them not as adversaries, but as partners and brothers. With her words, Margaret tries to convince Mr. Thornton to see in a new way: to listen to Nicholas and to his workers, and to think less in the binary of north and south, worker and owner, and move towards an attentiveness to the individuals he employs. Mr. Thornton has a soul, yes, but his workers also have souls, and these souls are mutually dependent on one another in a way that makes strict binary classification futile.

Religion and capitalism have of course long been associated in criticism of the nineteenth-century due to Max Weber’s influential 1905 work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber notes that countries where Protestantism was dominant were also historically where capitalism flourished. He attributes this to the ways in which the Protestant work ethic coexists beneficially with the spirit of capitalism, since capitalism depends on the continual amassing of product and profit, and thus benefits from workers who will dedicate themselves to this task, seeing their work as a calling in which to express their religious devotion. Ensuing criticism by R.H. Tawney and others has pointed out that Weber essentializes Protestantism, and that there were many types of

Protestantism at work in Europe during the time period he describes. Yet Weber’s powerful framing of religion as a source of economic productivity still endures alongside its complimentary role as Marx’s famed salve. 109

In North and South, both the worker and the factory owner are enmeshed in this system, though they seem much more aware of this fact than we might expect from

Weber’s scholarship. In fact, the notion that Nicholas Higgins is both an “infidel” and a worker agitating for a possible riot would seem to indicate that shifting religious views could expose the hypocrisy of both the religious and the economic system. Nicholas represents the dissatisfied worker, who has been told that accepting religious and economic rationale for his current situation is what it means to be truly religious, but

Nicholas is not satisfied with the causal promise of spiritual riches in the afterlife in exchange for poor working and living conditions in the real world. He challenges Mr.

Thornton, a figure who stands in as a representation of factory owners whose desire to amass capital relied on content workers. Nicholas’s equation of a dedication to political economy with a halfhearted interest in the true quality of the soul is telling: true change would mean a revelation not only in religious terms, but a true extension of religious brotherhood to the souls of workers in the economic sphere as well. Mr. Hale asks

Nicholas to consider his own objections to the ownership when Mr. Thornton argues that the Union also oppresses its own members, citing the Union’s antagonistic treatment of

Boucher, who does not want to support the strike, as an example. Nicholas fiercely objects to this, saying

“it's th masters as has made us sin, if th' Union is a sin…It's a necessity now,

according to me. It's a withstanding of injustice, past, present, or to come. It may

be like war; along wi' it come crimes; but I think it were a greater crime to let it

alone. Our only chance is binding men together in one common interest; and if 110

some are cowards and some are fools, they mun come along and join the great

march, whose only strength is in numbers. (43)

Nicholas’s first reading of the Union here smacks of causality, which stems again from the combative metaphors used by both sides in the class struggle between worker and owner. Margaret and her father try to temper Nicholas’s support for the necessity of the

Union with an appeal to his conscience, another instance in which they become catalysts for less causal reading practices. Immediately before Union-member Boucher’s suicide,

Margaret urges Nicholas to look beyond this conception of the Union, crying out

“Higgins, I don't know you to-day. Don't you see how you've, made Boucher what he is, by driving him into the Union against his will---without his heart going with it. You have made him what he is!” (140). Higgins takes this to heart after Boucher’s death, realizing his own role in reproducing the conditions of owner and owned, which have been shown to lead to only one end: death. It is his own causal reasoning that has resulted in

Boucher’s suicide.

Dissent, such as Mr. Hale’s or Margaret’s in the face of Cromwellian industry, represents a rebellious element to the Protestant/capitalism equation. If Protestantism trained workers to be obedient and accepting of their situation in life in hopes that their actions would result in salvation, Dissenters like Unitarians encouraged a questioning of this natural order, since it demeaned the souls of workers; hence the involvement of many

Unitarians in agitating for labor rights, which resulted in reforms such as the Ten Hours

Bill of 1847 and changes to the tax system (Browde 16). This is not to say that all

Dissenters were interested in economic justice or worker’s rights, or even that Unitarians always made thoughtful factory owners. In fact, Unitarianism was so intertwined with the 111 leadership in the manufacturing industry that Manchester was a city identified both for its

Unitarianism and its manufacturing strengths. But Gaskell’s conception of what a relationship between factory owner and worker should be like is certainly more like

Margaret’s and Mr. Hale’s than Mr. Thornton’s. Interestingly, Margaret, who the novel presents as the religious alternative to Mr. Thornton’s hard-hearted capitalist, is still a

Protestant, and not a Dissenter herself. Yet perhaps because she is not a Dissenter, her more radical envisioning of religious and political equality is not framed as so dangerous: indeed, Margaret successfully pushes back against the exploitation of workers we see modeled in Weber’s thesis, and argues for a much more nuanced, interpersonal understanding of religion and economics. The changes at Thornton’s mill, including the construction of the mess hall, the men’s recognition that roast is Thornton’s favorite, and their ensuing invitations to him to share their table, are one visible expression of this interpersonal reconciliation.

The peripatetic nature of the novel—north vs. south, rural vs. industrial, home vs. abroad, church vs. chapel—is played out most directly in the religious and economic debates that Margaret and Mr. Thornton have with one another, which are entangled in their courtship plot. Their obvious attraction to one another complicates the novel and appears to be fueled by their very incompatibility. During one of their initial meetings,

Mr. Hale tries to hurry the conversation to its conclusion, “smiling yet uneasy at the thought that they were detaining Mr. Thornton against his will, which was a mistake; for he rather liked it, as long as Margaret would talk, although what she said only irritated him” (189). There is something about Margaret’s fierceness of opinion that appeals to

Mr. Thornton despite its opposition to his own. Gaskell’s staging of the marriage plot 112 between two such differently-minded individuals provides, yes, a model of how religion and commerce might be integrated; the resolution of the marriage plot seems secondary to the improvement of Mr. Thornton’s workers’ conditions or the status of his reputation despite his mill’s failings. Even Gaskell apologizes for the rushed way in which the text concludes, remarking in a preface added to the three volume version “the author found it impossible to develope the story in the manner originally intended, and, more especially, was compelled to hurry on events with an improbable rapidity towards the close. In some degree to remedy this obvious defect, various short passages have been inserted, and several new chapters added. With this brief explanation, the tale is commended to the kindness of the reader; ‘Beseking hym lowly, of mercy and pité,/ Of its rude makyng to have compassion’” (Preface). Though the resolution of the marriage plot would seem to be the most important, and it does indeed end the text, it is an abrupt and strange scene that is initially non-verbal on Margaret’s end, and only serves to show the depth of communication between Margaret and Mr. Thornton that is now possible once he has been humbled and she has become a wealthy woman. The initial distance between them is what makes the closing both so satisfying, and also so in need of further exploration.

The way in which both individuals decide against their better social judgment to love one another speaks again to the uncoupling of decision-making from strict causal reasoning.

This uncoupling moves the marriage plot from a matter of teleology to one of contingency, a much more interesting and fraught path.

At the start of the text, Margaret’s and Mr. Hale’s viewpoints on the ways in which factory workers should be treated are diametrically opposed. Mr. Thornton’s views are steeped in predestination and power dynamics, which Margaret attributes to his 113 valuing of money above all else. Mr. Thornton tries to explain himself: “I believe that this suffering, which Miss Hale says is impressed on the countenance of the people of

Milton, is but the natural punishment of dishonestly-enjoyed pleasure, at some former period of their lives. I do not look on self-indulgent, sensual people as worthy of my hatred; I simply look upon them with contempt for their poorness of character” (128). As a self-made man, Mr. Thornton has little pity for those who appear to be incapable of self-making, and adheres to a causality-inspired reading of their suffering: in order for them to be in pain at the moment, they must have made poor choices or sinful choices in the past, and this is as God intended it to be. Margaret urges him to think of his employees in a less combative manner, since the masters and workers both depend upon each other in order to be productive and successful. Instead of modeling himself on his hero, Cromwell, who exercised strict authority in resolving the English Civil War, she suggests that he think of the owner/worker relationship as a more symbiotic arrangement:

“I see two classes dependent on each other in every possible way, yet each evidently regarding the interests of the other as opposed to their own” (183). In her skeptical viewpoint, there can be no rational explanation for the subjugation of an entire class of people; it is not logical that all of these individuals should deserve punishment due to

“poorness of character” any more than Mr. Thornton’s success is solely due to his strength of character. Though the text does not make this explicit, we might be encouraged to read Mr. Thornton’s later failures and misfortunes as a lesson to him on this front: these have certainly not come about because of any misdeeds or lowness of character, rather, out of market forces and issues of timing that he had no control over.

Mr. Thornton also begins to realize this about his workers after he reconsiders offering 114

Higgins a job, noting that his waiting for “Five hours…it's a long time for a man to wait, doing nothing but first hoping and then fearing” (182) marks him as a man of character no matter his social status. Indeed, the text and Margaret hold Nicholas Higgins up to be a man with more strength of character than any other individual encountered.

The apparent contention between capitalism and religious belief comes to a breaking point when Margaret pays a social call to the Thorntons and finds the house besieged by workers furious that Mr. Thornton has brought in outside, Irish employees to break the strike.16 Mr. Thornton is content to wait inside his house until the police arrive and make an example of the protestors, but Margaret thinks that this is unacceptable:

“Mr. Thornton,” said Margaret, shaking all over with her passion, ‘go down this instant, if you are not a coward. Go down and face them like a man. Save these poor strangers, who you decoyed here. Speak to your workmen as if they were human beings. Speak to them kindly” (275). In Margaret’s vision, nothing can be accomplished as long as master and worker are at odds with one another, especially if the master does not view his workers as human beings with souls. And in contradiction to his Cromwellian, God as

King way of viewing life, she asks Mr. Thornton to dissent, to embark on his own act of interpretation, and to judge through not just the monetary register, but the logic of

Protestant brotherhood as well.

Margaret believes in this logic so strongly that she is willing to sacrifice herself to it. Earlier in the novel, she has listened to Mrs. Thornton’s description of life in Milton as being hard and violent: “So I went up to the roof, where there were stones piled ready to drop on the heads of the crowd, if they tried to force the factory doors. And I would have

16 Who, interestingly enough, are most likely Catholic. 115 lifted those heavy stones, and dropped them with as good an aim as the best man there, but that I fainted with the heat I had gone through” (180). Yet Margaret herself does the opposite when she is in a moment of strike-related crisis. Rather than staying upstairs with the women as striking workers surround the house, angered by the Irish scabs Mr.

Thornton has imported, she rushes downstairs to place her body between Mr. Thornton and the mob. Rather than preparing to drop stones on the workers, she offers herself as a target. She cries “For God’s sake! Do not damage your cause by this violence. You do not know what you are doing” (279), before she is struck by a rock on the temple and sinks into Mr. Thornton’s arms. Her body becomes a literal site of resistance to class conflict, and by her presence, she strives to ensure that no harm comes to either Mr.

Thornton at the hands of the mob, or the mob at the hands of the approaching soldiers.

She sees this act as one of necessity due to the respect offered to her gender, and her role as a religious woman: “‘If I saved one blow, one cruel, angry action that might otherwise have been committed, I did a woman’s work. Let them insult my maiden pride as they will—I walk pure before God!’” (297).

The logic of her religious register is significant, because it is an inclusive, almost utopic logic, unlike the strict determinations of the nation: “‘It was not fair,’ said she, vehemently, ‘that he should stand there—sheltered, awaiting the soldiers, who might catch those poor maddened creatures in a trip—without an effort on his part, to bring them to reason. And it was worse than unfair for them to set on him as they threatened’”

(297). If Protestantism teaches brotherhood and the value of souls, then an economic system that oppresses and leaves its workers to “clem”17 is neither truly religious nor

17 “Starve,” in the workers’ dialect. 116 truly rational. Interestingly, in the world of North and South, it is religious questioning and Dissent that provides the strongest antidote to rampant industrialization; the text argues against a sense of predetermination in the lives of workers and factory owners, and instead proposes that any skeptical look at the logic of the economic system can only reveal hypocrisy in its reliance on religious reasoning that is only able to simply further the cause of industrialization because it has gone unquestioned.

The pat ending of the novel, with Margaret and Mr. Thornton suddenly mutually in love, indicates the difficulty in reconciling these issues between economics and religion. The movement towards the culmination of the courtship plot at the end becomes a more typical depiction of the dominant genre—rather than allowing Margaret and Mr.

Thornton to remain unclassified in love as in religion, Gaskell fits them into the mold of future husband and wife too neatly. This very move indicates the fundamental difficulty of challenging systems of religious and economic classification that would seek to write their participants into known identities and viewpoints: worker and factory owner, saved and damned, lover and beloved. Yet the fact that this resolution feels like a throwaway, an afterthought, also contributes to the sense that this novel is about representation: the abruptness of the conclusion demands a reevaluation of the significance of the marriage plot and its power. Here, the plot is shown to be a fallacy: Margaret and Mr. Thornton cannot be an ideal marriage of economy and religion because this marriage does not exist. They cannot be perfect examples of people because there is always something that exceeds: what is the source of Margaret’s tears, for example? Why are objections from family the final references of the novel? Will Mr. Thornton be satisfied to continue to work to improve workers’ lives, bankrolled by his wife’s convenient inheritance? There 117 are no resolutions here, and the lack of resolutions further encourage the reader not to be dissatisfied (though Gaskell is worried they may be), but to examine where this dissatisfaction stems from. Why must the questions be answered? How are they traditionally answered? Wouldn’t Margaret’s story be more likely to continue to defy classification?

So where are we now with the marriage plot? Here, Gaskell both creates ideal types for industry and religion in her romantic leads, and simultaneously undermines them. We can see that Margaret and Mr. Thornton are compatible in their passion far before they can, yet we can also see the way that both resist classification: though

Margaret disagrees with Mr. Thornton, she sees it as her religious duty to dialogue with him; though Mr. Thornton disagrees with Margaret, he can also be seen as a fairly compassionate and pragmatic mill owner who truly takes some of what she says to heart and uses that to grow as a person and as a captain of industry. Through the marriage plot,

Gaskell is able to suggest ways for industry and religion to coexist, even though these viewpoints may initially seem irreconcilable. Ironically, in a novel where Margaret emphasizes the importance of people treating one another as individuals in non- combative ways, the dialogues between Margaret and Mr. Thornton seem to take the form of small skirmishes. Yet, the marriage plot’s conclusion allows this to be absorbed and ultimately softened, with the violence of the discussions presaging the passion of the union between the two.

It is not so simple as merely using Margaret to stage Mr. Thornton’s religious

“convarsion,” as it were. Mr. Thornton’s only reward for growing as a person and developing new plans as a mill owner, it seems, is Margaret herself, as his business fails. 118

Yet Margaret’s interiority, her singularity, as well as the interiority of the novel’s other religious believers, suggests that the plot is of necessity bi-directional: Mr. Thornton also allows Margaret to stage her doubts about industry and her resistance to love framed in an unequal power and economic situation. It is not until she is a woman in charge of her own finances and future that she is able to submit in other ways to Mr. Thornton’s love.

Chapter 3

And/Or: Realism and Faithful Reading in Adam Bede

Certainly I could, if I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be. Then, of course, I might refashion life and character entirely after my own liking; I might select the most unexceptionable type of clergyman and put my own admirable opinions into his mouth on all occasions. But it happens, on the contrary, that my strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box, narrating my experience on oath.

(174)

George Eliot and Realism

George Eliot begins the seventeenth chapter of her 1859 novel, Adam Bede, with a much-discussed extended moment of introspective reflection on the part of her narrator.

In this meditation on the role of the writer, she articulates the role of fiction in recording the writer’s impressions of real life as accurately as possible. At the same time, she 119 admits that any attempt at verisimilitude is inevitably a construction. This flaw is not enough to make fiction a less than admirable pursuit, in Eliot’s opinion; instead, it is precisely this tension that gives fiction value, and prevents it from becoming a didactic, preaching form of literature. Her narrator’s interjection here echoes Eliot’s own essay from 1856, “The Natural History of German Life,” which looks at the way “the peasantry” has been misrepresented. “How little the real characteristics of the working class are known to those who are outside them, how little their natural history has been studied, is sufficiently disclosed by our Art as well as by our political and social theories”

(268). Instead of making assumptions about the working class, or using them as mouthpieces for social and political ideas that they would not or could not espouse, Eliot argues that the writer should strive for truthfulness in his or her depictions: “The thing for mankind to know is, not what are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on the laborer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences that do act on him” (271). Rather than cast the narrator as a writer who exercises control over the novel in a way that distorts it for instructional purposes, Eliot chooses to position the narrator as someone who distorts her writing only as a byproduct of her own act of interpreting the truth of the world, an act which therefore results in a novel that is paradoxically more edifying to the reader. The clergyman will not say what he ought to say, but what he would say if he were real, and the more realistically the character can be matched with the words, the more realistic he will become overall. While this process may not seem all that different from moralizing, since both situations involve some degree of manipulation stemming from authority over the text, Eliot’s desire to shift the fictional model from one of pure invention to one of painstakingly truthful interpretation 120 marks a significant reevaluation of the moral grounds of the fiction writer. By arguing that fiction gains meaning not from what is inserted into it, but from the way the writer’s mind shapes the persuasiveness of the novel’s contents, Eliot reminds us, as readers, of our own role as interpreters. She thus encourages us to construct individualized readings that value both the persuasiveness of the writer’s attempt at verisimilitude, and the often confusing and entangling obstacles that “real” life presents to the act of interpretation.

The fact that this reflective passage is sparked by a conversation between Arthur

Donnithorne and the clergyman, Mr. Irwine, that touches on the subject of marriage, and in which Arthur’s infatuation with Hetty Sorrel is not mentioned, is significant in that it identifies religion as a reading practice that is apparently difficult for the form of the novel to integrate. Not only does the passage about mirroring take place directly after this exchange, but during the conversation, Mr. Irwine suggests another metaphor for reading to Arthur: “There are certain alternative doses which a man may administer to himself by keeping unpleasant consequences in mind: this gives you a sort of smoked glass through which you may look at the resplendent fair one and discern her true outline; though I’m afraid, by the by, the smoked glass is most apt to be missing just at the moment it is most wanted” (170-1). Mr. Irwine’s version of “through a glass darkly” expands to take in

Prometheus and the classics, suggesting that if a man is able to remember the Chorus in

Prometheus cautioning that one should not marry outside one’s rank, he may be saved from being ruled by his emotions, though the value of the reading is most as risk of being forgotten at the moment of greatest temptation. This “religious” guidance is surprisingly literary, and relies on its listener’s ability to construct his own smoked glass through which to read, a process that depends upon his knowledge of literature and its warnings, 121 as well as his own emotions. Here, Arthur is paralleled with the gods that the Chorus prays will not fall in love with them, for love from a higher rank is a source of misery and torture (as in the story of Io, which Prometheus uses to stage this reflection). The conversation comes about because of Mr. Irwine’s religious position (he is uninterested in doctrine), but it also comes about because the lust that Arthur feels for Hetty interferes with her presumed marriage plot with Adam Bede, and Arthur seems to feel he needs religious guidance or restraint from Mr. Irwine. Irwine’s advice amounts to little more than pressing Arthur into mastering his own emotions, suggesting that a nobleman should have the literary and emotional backbone to suppress his desires. Irwine’s advice to

Arthur is no different than what he would offer to his rural parishioners: “the only healthy form religion could take in such minds was that of certain dim but strong emotions” (76).

Interestingly, though the glass that religion or literature offers is smoked, it is this very constructedness that allows the user to see with greater realism and clarity: Irwine suggests, and Eliot continues on to confirm, that the constructed edifice of literature can actually achieve a greater illumination, a kind of amplification, of the reality of life precisely because it must wrestle with such complicated aspects, such as religion, with honesty.

Eliot’s definition of realism and its goals intersects with and has also inspired past critical readings of the goals of nineteenth-century prose. Peter Galison and Lorraine

Daston have read nineteenth-century literary and scientific moves towards objective representation as part and parcel of allowing nature to represent itself (81-128). George

Levine builds on these readings by observing the moral good nineteenth-century philosophers and scientists assigned to the objective observer’s self-abnegation, and 122 argues that this drive towards disinterest is not always a cover for ideological violence.

He connects his reevaluation of the positive effects of disinterest to Eliot’s Chapter 17 meditation, noting “There is nothing wrong with [giving herself to the complications of truth, always being aware of limits]; it does seem to me a condition of good knowing and of good narration” (7). This dissertation’s use of faithful reading and its exploration of faith acts intersects with what Levine suggests is essential in unpacking any epistemology due to what he calls: “the oddly necessary interaction of narrative and epistemology… how philosophy behaves when it is embodied and its ideas take on the life of metaphor and mean something in the lived experience of people located in particular times and places” (8). While Eliot has proved inspirational in such critiques, her language itself suggests the need to include what these previous readings have neglected: religion.

Interestingly, even readings of Eliot’s philosophy of realism in a text so thoroughly occupied with religion as Adam Bede have often fallen short at this same juncture: Eliot clearly indicates that the accurate depiction of religion is essential to realism, and that portraying religion in as real a way as possible should be part of the goal of the realist novel. Yet J. Hillis Miller’s well-known reading of Chapter 17’s extended reflections in The Ethics of Reading focuses on aesthetics and ethics to the exclusion of religion, and this outlook has proved influential in subsequent criticism. However, there has been a marked turn recently, in the spirit of George Levine’s reevaluation of disinterest (which stages itself as a kind of surface-reading that observes what disinterest can accomplish over what it may suppress), towards examining religious depiction on its own merits in Eliot. Recent articles on Adam Bede that work towards an understanding of how religion functions in the text include Daniel Siegel’s “Preacher’s Vigil, Landlord’s 123

Watch: Charity by the Clock in Adam Bede,” John Mazaheri’s “Religion and Work in

Adam Bede,” and Alessandra Grego’s “George Eliot’s Use of Scriptural Typology:

Incarnation of Ideas.” This chapter is particularly interested in building on the ideas presented in Jon Singleton’s “Malignant Faith and Cognitive Restructuring: Realism in

Adam Bede,” which argues that Eliot parallels religious reading and its limitations with the limitations of interpretation itself. Unlike Singleton, however, who reads Eliot as hostile to the “cognitive structure of faith” (239), I read Eliot as powerfully demonstrating the ways in which faith shapes both narrative and realism in sometimes destructive, sometimes productive ways, in a manner designed to broaden understandings of faith and form.

Faith, specifically religious faith, does create friction within form. Through Mr.

Irwine’s aforementioned words, for example, the and/or of religion emerges once again: the double bind that means that religion can only exist in harmony with secular life when it is in fact not coexisting with it, when it is occupying different space. And/or indicates the way that religion must simultaneously inhabit the possibility of connection (and) as well as the possibility of negation (or). In Adam Bede, this and/or complicates matters of both plot and structure: in Arthur’s case, he is searching for religious restraint and wise counsel, yet in the world of realism, Mr. Irwine can only give him one or the other, a fact that must coexist with the desire the Narrator articulates on the part of the reader to have real didactic advice. In the larger context of the novel, it is religious motivation and romantic motivation that brings Adam and Dinah together, yet this very fact seems to entail a choice between religious belief or romantic love. The novel is ostensibly about

Adam Bede, yet his courtship with Hetty and later Dinah is instead used to stage the 124 novel’s larger questions about religious belief, faith, and this and/or aspect of religion. Is his lived faith enough to save Hetty? Can Dinah be convinced to compromise her religious ideals to enter into matrimony with him? The Narrator continually lays out the issue: is it religious edification or verisimilitude, can it be realism and religious belief, or are characters forever consigned to the ongoing oscillation of and/or?

Eliot does not deem it necessary to take time to reflect on the narrator’s role in an extended manner until religion makes it imperative to distinguish between invention and reflection. Her position-taking is important, both in terms of situating religious interpretation and in terms of Eliot’s writing, which must necessarily position itself among other forms of writing in the literary marketplace, as Simon R. Frost notes in The

Business of the Novel: “In the British context, with the industrialization of the book trade from the end of the 1820s, first-edition Victorian literature was coordinated into the economic structures of publishing, wedding aesthetic literary practice to its commercial meditation” (1). Eliot was thus not only beholden to a reading public, but the economic and practical concerns of her publishers. In addition, a variety of forms besides the novel circulated that were blatantly didactic, evangelical, or moralizing, taking the shape of tracts, instruction manuals, and sermons: readers who were solely looking for edification and found themselves frustrated by her resistance to putting words in Irwine’s mouth, for example, had many other literary forms to consume. As Eliot uses the narrator to articulate how her writing takes its place among these forms, she argues that there are specific ways in which her writing presents a faithful reading that avoids the preaching faults of explicitly religious writings (which would presumably ignore religion’s and/or entanglements in favor of presenting religion as the universal and that must always be 125 attained). Eliot’s novel thus stages another form of intervention that works towards determining both the role of the fiction writer and the fiction reader at this time when reading practices were far from settled, arguing that the intersection of religion and literature allows religion to be presented amidst all its complications and realities, thus actually strengthening its message and power. We may think of the similar conclusion to

Middlemarch, where marriage to Will Ladislaw is not necessarily an easy or easily accepted solution for Dorothea, yet marriage where she can see her partner clearly, and not as an opportunity to martyr herself for religious devotion, becomes the most productive way of finding a realistic path towards making change in the world.

The reader can sense the uneasiness of the relationship between religious discourse and the novel form in Adam Bede through the shifts that occur in Eliot’s metaphors at the end of this same passage, which are worth examining. She begins with the image of the mirror, which has a long and varied history as a philosophical and aesthetic vehicle for metaphor. As traced in Richard Rorty’s 1979 text Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, the mirror maintains a long-standing rhetorical association with the mind. Rorty invokes Descartes as he examines how the idea of the mind as a mirror of nature contributes to Descartes’s and subsequent philosophers’ efforts to acknowledge the role of the mind in perceiving, interpreting, and augmenting reality. Eliot’s imagery calls upon this history, indicating that it is particularly important in matters of religion, as in the religious advice Arthur seeks from Mr. Irwine that includes the image of the smoked glass. We may consider the mirror as a parallel for the writer’s mind in terms of narration, but also as a parallel for religious interpretation, which is no less augmented, distorted, or limited by its reliance on the mind. This conception of the mirror is of course 126 different than her invocation of the mirror at the very opening of the novel, where the supernatural informs writing metaphors: “With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the

Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader” (17). Writing about these events “in the year of our Lord 1799” (17) calls for a supernatural mirror and a faithful one, as well as a realistic one or a preaching one. The compromise Eliot seems to find, as Jon

Singleton notes, is the metaphor of the window: for example, when Hetty and Dinah are paralleled in their rooms, Hetty’s limited worldview is represented by her obsession with her reflection, while Dinah’s slightly less limited view is shown through her observations of the landscape outside her window. The window itself is a terminus of and/or; one can both see through it and see one’s reflection simultaneously, yet one can also focus on one aspect or the other, seeing through or seeing oneself.

While the image of the mirror initially suggests representation as scientific or philosophical, Eliot ultimately shifts references once more, leaving us with the image of the legal language of the witness box. As the practice of giving evidence and testifying is an increasingly important epistemology at this point in the century, it would make sense that Eliot references it as a way of persuading; the codification of legal language and the standardization of legal practice becomes a means of providing weight to the image of testifying. Theorists have long noted this overlap between legal epistemology and the realist novel. Perhaps most famously, Ian Watt observes that in addition to scientific influences, “the novel’s mode of imitating another reality may… be equally well summarized in terms of the procedures of another group of specialists in epistemology, the jury in a court of law. Their expectations, and those of the novel reader coincide in 127 many ways: both want to know ‘all the particulars’ of a given case” (31). Jonathan

Grossman notes this about Eliot particularly, writing “For her, as for many other novelists, the law courts, understood as a containing structure for retelling stories, provided a constitutive way of imagining her novel’s form” (4). The realist novel has thus been seen as borrowing from legal epistemology in order to establish its own authority.

Similarly, as witnesses and defense lawyers gradually gained the legal right to testify on their own or their clients’ behalf throughout the nineteenth-century, testimony became more and more modeled on narrative, which could be offered to convince the listening courtroom. Eliot locating the Narrator on the witness stand is a logical extension of this interpenetration of epistemology: writer as witness, reader as jury or judge.18

All of these varied epistemologies follow directly upon Eliot’s declaration of a desire to be “faithful” in her account of “men and things,” language which is not accidental. In Eliot’s review of Ruskin’s Modern Painters she writes “The truth of infinite value that [Ruskin] teaches is realism—the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definitely, substantial reality” (626). Adam Bede offers an extended opportunity to examine this “humble and faithful study of nature,”19 as it includes multiple long and dilatory passages of description of village and natural life. As Amy King notes, these studies of nature had

18 For an excellent examination of the ways in which theological testimony and legal testimony were historically interrelated, see Jan-Melissa Schramm’s Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology. 19 Even though her earliest work Scenes of Clerical Life also discusses these themes, and in fact uses an explicitly religious lens to do so, I have chosen to focus on the longer novel because it offers an opportunity to observe how religion structures a work of substantial length. 128 historical and religious precedent in the work of natural theologists, as “to observe carefully and particularly, and to dilate upon that observation, had a built-in justification, for to observe the named world was to demonstrate, as the title of John Ray’s 1691 volume posits, ‘the wisdom of God manifested in the works of creation’” (166). King argues that this theological underpinning to dilatory description became secularized in the nineteenth-century realist novel, yet the novel’s inheritance from natural theology renders it “a religio-ethical base at the level of what we might think of as its genetic code” (162).

Eliot’s use of “faithful” may touch at this DNA-level presence of religio-ethical impetus to description, and I think King is correct in maintaining its influence. Furthermore, I don’t think the novel can completely shake that genetics-level association with natural theology; in fact, by addressing the nineteenth-century realist novel’s secularization of description as a question rather than a fact, it is clear that this religio-ethical underpinning is still deeply felt by writers such as Eliot, even in the very project of realism itself.

In this light, Eliot’s statement of her desire to be faithful in her account is significant. She does not claim to be “truthful” or “legal” in her descriptions, though the word carries the same connotations of verisimilitude. Yet faithfulness additionally carries a connotation that cannot disavow religion any more than the novel can eliminate scientific, philosophical, or aesthetic epistemologies. While being faithful does not always mean maintaining religious faith, it often significantly indicates this. I do not mean to conflate these two meanings of “faithful”; rather, to suggest that Eliot herself is interested in the slippage between the faithfulness of realism and its connection to the idea of a faithful account of life inclusive of religion and its influences. Thus, while Eliot may believe that it is important to adhere to accurate representations of nature, the realist 129 novel itself is her ongoing faithful expression of this belief. In Eliot’s articulation, the novel cannot seem to avoid, even in her most basic articulation of its realist goals, using language weighted with religious connotations as a means to effectively persuade. The idea of faithfulness in description and observation suggests that religion is what Pierre

Bourdieu refers to as a “structuring structure” in this situation, an inherent and inextricable element of Eliot’s conception of the supposedly secular nineteenth century realist novel. I argue that this association carries beyond Eliot’s novel, and requires readers to locate religion as a significant gesture through which to interrogate the goals of the realist novel, one of which is the settling of its romantic leads in the blissful state of marriage following a marriage plot. While romance can be read for romance alone, the fact remains that marriage was and is an act and a contract negotiated between individuals, the state, and what may or may not have been the religion of those individuals.

Adam Bede explores the and/or role of religion in the marriage plot with the prospective spouses it provides for Adam. With Hetty, we have a representation of the worldly aspects of love and lust. With Dinah, the novel presents a prototype for the union of religious love and worldly love. Dinah serves as a kind of invocation of the marriage plot in both her presence at the start of the novel and her status as a single woman preaching. Hetty represents closure to the plot, with her guilt and transgressions marking her as unfit for marriage. The arc of Adam’s character is shaped by his interactions with these two female characters and his developing ability to use the smoked glass of his religious experience to see each woman clearly. 130

Of course, it is not Adam who initially loves Dinah, it is his brother, Seth. When

Seth’s love for Dinah is initially described, Eliot writes, “He was but three-and-twenty, and had only just learned what it is to love—to love with that adoration which a young man gives to a woman whom he feels to be greater and better than himself. Love of this sort is hardly distinguishable from religious feeling” (47). In these words, we might recognize a resonance with other Eliot characters, such as the adoration that Dorothea initially holds for Casaubon, which leads to her feeling her calling as his wife. In this way, the novel conflates the marriage plot and religious awakening: Seth finds

Methodism as he finds love for Dinah.

Adam’s trajectory in love and belief is not as simple. While Adam is struck by

Dinah early in the narrative (“It was like dreaming of the sunshine and awaking in the moonlight,” (120)), his initial allegiance is to Hetty, the sunshine. In Chapter 15, “The

Two Bed-Chambers,” we learn he believes her “dear, young, round, soft, flexible,” as her childlike external beauty convinces him that “her heart must be just as soft, her temper just as free from angles, her character just as pliant” (153). The narrator suggests that we not condemn Adam (or even Arthur), since it is difficult if not impossible to think the worst of the person you’re in love with: “No: people who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it” (153). Yet while we may not condemn Adam, it is also not long after this that we reach Mr. Irwine’s advice to

Arthur, and the narrator’s warning that it is in fact damaging to only search for what we think we should find in the world of narrative. Adam, unlike the narrator, is unable to take even the pretense of an objective stance towards Hetty; his appreciation for her beauty clouds his perceptions, rendering the smoked glass initially useless. It is not 131 insignificant that this observation of Hetty and men’s response to her, including Adam’s, takes place in a chapter entitled “The Two Bed-Chambers,” since the chambers in question are Hetty’s and Dinah’s. Dinah is shown to be more perceptive regarding Hetty in that she recognizes she is troubled, absent of warmth or tender feelings, and perhaps in need of help. Dinah, through her exchange with Hetty and through this doubled vision of the women, is thus marked as a more faithful or realistic reader than Adam, and in the process is staged as the alternative choice for Adam.

However, Dinah is not shown as without limitations. In the same chapter, as Jon

Singleton observes, Eliot does not solely contrast the two women: she also “subtly links the two girls’ self-centered modes of searching sings for meaning” (241). Unlike Hetty, who searches in the mirror, Dinah turns to her Bible, opening it at random and “taking

‘the first words she look[s] on’ as divine guidance.” Singleton goes on to note “In its own way, her practice is no less foolish, egocentric, or arbitrary than is the way a lover jumps to conclusions about a beautiful girl’s character. Like the lover, Dinah finds in the Bible what she wants to see” (241). Eliot uses these depictions of religious reading throughout

Adam Bede to meditate on the limitations of religious interpretation. Just as the narrator invariably distorts the proceedings with her mind, and the lover only sees what he or she wants to see of the beloved, the religious reader here is shaped by and constantly shaping his or her interpretation. This is significant to both faithful reading and the idea of faith acts, as “Faith materializes as beliefs shape perception, perceptions shape belief, in hermeneutical spirals coiling out to exert benign or malignant force on believers’ material lives” (Singleton 239). A faithful reading here observes these perceptions as they are reflected in moments of interpretation, such as Dinah’s use of the Bible here. However, 132 the faithful reading also pursues the effects of these hermeneutical coils, as the constitutive power of these very actions is what comprises the fabric of faith and thus produces concrete effects in characters’ lives.

In the context of Adam Bede’s treatment of religion and/or love, Dinah and/or

Hetty, the reader must ask him or herself: why is it necessary that Eliot ask us to believe her, and how do we, as readers, interact with Eliot’s desire for us to take her “faithful account” on faith ourselves? Reading and the interpretive act are central to these kinds of inquiries, as Eliot makes clear in her discussion of the role of the writer and reader, even though each reading is limited by its embedded context of faith, belief, or philosophy.

Her meditation brings together the layered actions of reading, writing, and interpreting in an effort to persuade the imagined reader that we should see her novel as a convincing work. In describing this situation, she is cannily able to suggest her rhetorical goals at the same time that she is already accomplishing them. Since it is fiction, she notes, that is the medium through which she can attempt to accurately present her reading of the world, the performance of “authoring” that she carries out in the opening quotation effectively must be accepted as its own evidence for existence. Furthermore, the very nature of her attempt means that she both acknowledges her own role in her reading, and refuses to allow this insertion of the self to detract from the reading’s persuasiveness; indeed, her act of interpretation is essential to the novel’s capacity to convince because her interpretation encapsulates her belief as to the state of the universe.

However, Eliot does not neglect the role of the reader in this equation, since it is the reader who sparks her reflection in the opening passage by hypothetically questioning what she’s chosen to include in her writing. Instead of her own narrative voice, she 133 inhabits the voice of the reader, and the Narrator becomes “you”: “How much more edifying it would have been if you had made him give Arthur some truly spiritual advice!” (174). Since she ventriloquizes the reader, and does so with tongue firmly in cheek, Eliot does not seem to be distressed that the reader is skeptical. Instead, she is distressed by the reader’s desire to see things “as they never have been and never will be”; as “edifying” rather than realistic. This, she argues, is not what she as a writer is interested in supplying, nor is it ultimately useful to someone who is looking to the book for guidance, since the advice would be unrealistic in the context of her attempt at verisimilitude. Yet in engaging with the imagined reader, Eliot also suggests that an active, questioning reading practice is not necessarily wrong or worthy of outright dismissal. Even the reader’s interjection is given a serious and studied rebuttal here. In constructing her reflection, Eliot instead argues that the interpretive act depends on faith in order to be successful: both the faith of the writer in constructing the fiction, and the faith of the reader in engaging with it. The narrator’s imagined readers within this faith model should not ask questions that are focused around “why not?”, since this question expresses doubt over the veracity of the writer’s interpretive act. Rather, readers should ask questions that acknowledge that this is how the text is, and the reading of the text is what makes meaning, with Eliot’s narrator in her role as mirror. In doing so, the reader she imagines addressing is reading for the integration of form and content, rather than simply interrogating the content. As Eliot brings this to our attention, she also literally occupies the space of the imagined reader, closing the gap between writer and reader significantly. Instead of gesturing towards a distance between writer and reader, as we might expect from the tone of the question itself, she accomplishes an alignment between 134 these two individuals in her moments of apostrophe by creating an imaginary reader in her own image.

With the demand for faith in the realism of the writer’s project extended, reading fiction begins to unfold as less of a suspension of disbelief than as a sustained series of choices to maintain belief in the face of challenges; in other words, to keep faith. This is not to say that all texts are credible, or that every “mirror,” including the reader’s mind, is accurate, as the very point of Adam Bede’s depictions of readings, whether the Bible or the mirror, is that each reading is limited by the structures of the reader’s worldview and belief system. As Eliot herself points out, there are doubtless flaws, which are reflected repeatedly in her choice of optical metaphors: distorted reflections in spoons, the need for a microscope to observe what lies beyond sight, the dangers and benefits of blindness.

This form of reading acknowledges that the interpretive act is always based on faith in what cannot be seen, and as such, this faith must be taken seriously. The difference with this kind of reading is that it is asking us to reconsider the status of faith in the context of the various coequal epistemologies made visible in the nineteenth century novel. It is asking us to value religious modes of inquiry like we value scientific or philosophical ones, and, just as significantly, it uses religious epistemology to suggest that scientific and philosophical epistemologies rely no less significantly on faith in the context of the novel and even beyond, as scientific and philosophical epistemologies must also be necessarily embedded in those individuals who employ them through individual acts of interpretation reflecting individual limitations. While disinterest, or objectivity, may be the goal, it is equally because of the moral benefits that Eliot observes as it is because of 135 the all-pervasive aspects of the subjective worldview, whether it be in a realist narrative or an account of scientific observation.

The possibility of conflating religious and scientific methodologies is of course important in the Victorian context. Theology and interpretation are unavoidably intertwined in the nineteenth-century literary landscape when it comes to the question of belief, and Eliot was well aware of this entanglement, given her work translating some of the important texts of German Higher Criticism, such as David Friedrich Strauss’s Life of

Jesus and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity, into English. It is worthwhile examining the religious context in which Eliot operated, as well as her own direct involvement with these discourses, though not in the aforementioned recuperative way that might seek to “fix” the religious meaning in her writings, but rather in a way that pursues its “structuring structures,” to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term for the underlying and sometimes invisible forces that shape our lives and actions. A lack of fixity is not difficult to achieve here, because the religious context in which Eliot found herself was far from fixed. Eliot herself moved from childhood belief to skepticism of religion as a young woman. Her own arc of inquiry suggests the myriad configurations of religious identity available to Victorians overall. Early on in the century, Dissenting religions such as

Unitarianism began to draw inspiration for new reading practices from the developing field of science. In this shift, Dissenters were influenced by men like Joseph Priestley, who likened religious inquiry to the scientific process—once all of the facts and facets of an item were examined, the individual could come to his or her own informed decision about the object of study, be it a bivalve or a Bible verse (Webb 127). These new, supposedly more scientific frameworks allowed the role of the reader to expand, as the 136 interpretive act of the reader became integral to the making of meaning. The developments also added momentum to religious interest in German Higher Criticism in the latter part of the nineteenth-century, which from the late eighteenth century had advocated for a new approach to religious texts that acknowledged that they were open to interpretation just as any other literary text might be. German scholars such as Halle,

Altdorf, and Eichhorn (from whom the movement received its name) encouraged reading the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, as “literature from the childhood of the human race rather than as absolute truth” (McCalla 87). 20 According to Eichhorn, the Old

Testament of the Bible was built on myths, yet the myths themselves could, if carefully interpreted, point towards actual historical accounts. Eichhorn’s attempts to analyze the

Old Testament led to distinctions between writing styles and patterns that allowed him to offer evidence that the Bible was a collectively written document. The Bible was thus more properly categorized as historical evidence of past beliefs, rather than a sacred text that could be used to support current religious beliefs.

In its link to the earlier legal and scientific epistemologies Eliot’s writing introduces as a means of thinking through religion, Higher Criticism took its place as another way to investigate texts during the nineteenth-century. Through encouraging the use of a more detached historical or scientific lens for viewing religious texts, it also put further pressure on the separation of private belief and public act, as can be seen in the issue that arises at the close of Adam Bede when Dinah must give up public preaching in order to marry (though the text frames this decision as voluntary). The resolution of the

20 McCalla, Arthur. The Creationist Debate: The Encounter between the Bible and the Historical Mind. New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006. Print. 137 marriage plot is dependent on the coexistence of the contexts of Methodism and

Anglicanism. Religion is a central aspect of the marriage plot, and in order to faithfully read the text, we as readers must attend to the ways in which marriage is shown as inescapably both structuring and being structured by religion.

Adam Bede famously concludes with Hetty’s confession to Dinah of infanticide, yet the other extended moment of religious action that bookends the novel has received less critical attention. While Hetty’s confession is a focal point of the end of the novel,

Dinah’s sermon at the start of the novel is clearly meant as a companion piece, laying the groundwork for the eventual confession (and a means of entry to Hetty’s cell, thanks to its influence on one of the sermon’s listeners) and providing a framing piece for the novel as a whole. I argue that this structuring asks the reader to reorient his or her understanding of Adam Bede’s courtship plot by seeing the religious framework as the channel through which the courtship plot flows. In this sense, the form of the novel becomes the content, reminding readers that the status of marriage as both a legal and sacred institution during the nineteenth century is in flux. By asking the reader to see the marriage plot as a narrative of religious belief, Eliot’s novel indicates that courtship cannot be separated from its religious structures, even as it is growing further from the oversight of the Anglican Church in the 1850s when she is writing, thanks to rulings such as the 1836 Civil Marriages Act (which allowed non-Anglicans to be married in their own Church, or at a Registry Office) and the 1837 Registration Act (which centralized the recording of marriages at Registry Offices and removed them from the sole purview of the Anglican Church). 138

While contemporary readers and critics may not expect to encounter a reproduction of a sermon in a novel, Victorian readers were active and voracious consumers of sermons in textual form, as printed copies of sermons circulated widely through both lending libraries and pamphlets. Tamara S. Wagner notes in “The Victorian

Sermon Novel: Domesticated Spirituality and the Sermon’s Sensationalization” that professional preaching and popular fiction were both “at the mercy of an increasingly competitive marketplace that can be detrimental to the writer’s and the preacher’s vocation” (309). Both forms had to position themselves in the marketplace as persuasive, competitive articulations for explaining how the world worked and what was significant.

There were numerous debates about the status of the sermon throughout the beginning of the nineteenth century, including objections to this increasing “marketability,” which threatened the religious integrity of a sermon with the realities of the commercial marketplace. There were also disagreements about how ongoing sermon reform might adapt under these increasingly commercial situations: ministers and preachers debated over whether the sermon should be written, recalled from memory, or constructed on the spot. The debate also probed at the sermon’s rhetoric and content, asking whether it should be pedantic in its persuasion, or more colloquial. These Victorian disagreements were part of a larger debate about sermon reform stretching back to the 1640s, and were greatly influenced by neoclassical questions of style and oration.

Ultimately, as Robert H. Ellison notes in The Victorian Pulpit, by the 1850s and

60s, “the stylistic guidelines set forth by the Victorians represent[ed] the culmination of a shift from an ornamented oral rhetoric to a plainer, more natural, more literary approach to sacred speaking” (28). This movement away from ornamentation was primarily 139 influenced by the sense that excessive attention to rhetoric would inevitably sacrifice the significant truths that the sermon had to offer in favor of reflecting well on the clever writing style of the delivering minister. The point, Victorian preachers and ministers began to conclude, was not to enhance the glory of the speaker, but to convince the listener, and as such, “they were quick to point out that the persuasion toward which the sermon should be directed was not merely intellectual” (Ellison 18), and should instead

“compel…men and women to embark upon a spiritual course of action” (19). Dinah’s sermon certainly seeks this end amongst her listeners, with the observer that the narrator uses to observe the sermon’s effectiveness noting “the quiet depth of conviction with which she spoke seemed in itself an evidence for the truth of her message” (37). Though we read on past the sermon before we encounter Eliot’s narrator’s conviction in the veracity of her own representations, the epigraph of this chapter cannot help but stir echoes of Dinah’s own convincing rhetorical marriage of her belief and her actions in the opening sermon. She is presenting things as the mirror of her own mind has observed them, and trying to do so in a way that hews closest to truth; she is unadorned, speaks from no notes, and appears to be bound to speak this truth as much as the narrator claims to later be. Her sermon itself is a faith act, and she seeks to inspire faith acts among her listeners.

We can see the text of the sermon and the text of the realist novel working towards similar rhetorical goals in the mid-nineteenth century, both moving towards inspiring what J. Hillis Miller names the “I must,” the reader’s ethical reaction to language that propels action. In some ways, Miller’s “I must” seems to be a sort of speech act, mirrored in the way that Victorian actions such as marriage were performative 140 contracts. When individuals spoke the words “I do” in the felicitous context of the

Church, under the auspices and authority of the Church, they were able to marry. The very utterance expressed faith in the Church’s ability to join them together. Yet faith remains an under examined element in the readerly “I must.” While Miller sanitizes the

“I must” by insisting on its grounding in ethics rather than religion, the similarity between the goals of the nineteenth-century realist novel and the nineteenth-century sermon encourage us to examine the roots of this ethical urge more closely.

I argue, in fact, that this overlap of the rhetorical goals between the sermon and the realist novel suggests a space that is unavoidably religious, where faith coheres and is made visible by what I’ve termed “faith acts.” While the idea draws on J.L. Austin’s theory of “speech acts,” where “the uttering of the sentence is, or is part of, the doing of an action” (5), and is “the leading incidence in the performance of the act” (5) in the sense that a faith act is an action where faith is the leading incidence in the performance of the act, and is in fact constitutive of it, the faith act is obviously not always solely linguistic. The idea of the faith act answers Bourdieu’s call for greater attentiveness to the context of action, which cannot be attributed to the power of words alone, but must rely on “the appropriateness of the speaker—or, better still, his social function—and of the discourse he utters” (111). But who can decide who has the authority to carry out an act of faith?

Bourdieu writes of speech acts that “their specific efficacy stems from the fact that they seem to possess in themselves the source of a power which in reality resides in the institutional conditions of their production and reception” (111). In the case of religion, Bourdieu argues, a lack of awareness of these institutional conditions or a 141 willingness to overlook them “constitutes the most indispensable condition for [social rituals’] accomplishment” (116). Yet the novel depicts myriad faith acts that are both institutional and non-institutional, sometimes simultaneously. In this context of and/or, it may not be possible to determine who has the authority to decide whether an act of faith is felicitous or infelicitous. In fact, this may be the very source of religious conflict, especially in the case of women’s religious experience.

Faith acts can be performed publicly, as in worship in a religious building at an appointed time, or privately, as in confession with only one other person. Indeed, institutional rituals focused around faith acts both create a belief system and sustain it.

However, there is always a further triangulation of the faith act in a way that transcends the authority a speech act relies upon, since faith acts are contracts between an individual and his or her gods. In this sense, faith acts are not value neutral; there is always the question of faith and the question of the higher power that is inevitably involved. Faith acts need to be considered separately from speech acts in the sense that the speech act is supposedly always seen as value neutral. Examining the faith act means pursuing the value judgments from which it springs, making sure to fully contextualize these moments. Unlike speech acts, which are often coercive or binding, as in legal situations, faith acts are often moments of reflection or wrestling within an individual, followed by individualized action. Faithful reading pursues these faith acts and both reads them and reflects on them in ways that seek the immediacy of the moment as well as the valuation of the context.

Beyond the rhetorical alignment between the novel and the sermon, the sermon itself appears in the nineteenth-century novel in a variety of ways. Rarely is it quite as 142 foregrounded or extended as in Adam Bede, but it does often appear in truncated and summarized forms for satirical as well as religious purposes. Looking at the ways in which the Victorian novel uses the sermon, Wagner identifies

Three major developments in the sermon’s role in the Victorian novel: first, a

growing preference for a more generally social, if not necessarily secularized,

morality in domestic fiction; second, the domestication of spirituality within the

idolized Victorian family as both the effect of and a potential counterpoint to this

shift; third, and what is perhaps the most creative articulation of the anxieties

underlying these developments, a sensationalization of preachers, both

professionals and amateurs, and their sermons in fiction. (311)

Wagner’s work is useful because it closely examines the similarities in rhetorical goals between sermons and fiction, and she helpfully points out that although we may now make distinctions between morality and belief, even this shift to a social morality is not

“necessarily secularized.” I argue that these religious roots to social or secularized morality cannot be ignored, and that to overlook them is to miss that crucial, structuring structure in the novel itself: religion. While Eliot may seek to excuse herself from any role other than transparent stenographer of the real, the fact remains that she presides over the proceedings. Not only that, but she does directly address the reader, styling herself as a kind of preacher in the spirit of Dinah, who also lets the words come from her heart and express the truth of what she observes and experiences. In Eliot’s use of free indirect discourse, it is also apparent that the narrator has greater access to her character’s minds and thoughts than a simple realistic depiction would entail; she is god-like in her ability to enter into their consciousness, and preacherly when it benefits her to sermonize. 143

Sermons and the realist novel indeed took part in a highly competitive market that necessitated both the assessment of what was most relevant to religious readers, as well as what the sermon and realist novel could offer in order to market themselves effectively to the more general reading public. As Eliot indicates, both in her reflection on the role of the reader, and in her inclusion of Dinah’s sermon, the realist novel and the sermon are both trying to offer solutions to the Victorian reader. The ability of the sermon to offer these solutions is emphasized by the way it creates the structure for the novel and its eventual confessional pay off: Hetty’s spiritual and legal confession is part of a package that includes the possibility and the impetus for Adam and Dinah to marry. In examining the listener’s reaction to Dinah’s sermon, as well as the sermon itself, we can start to construct a lens through which to view the rest of the novel, including events like Dinah’s eventual abandonment of public preaching in favor of domesticity and marriage, and

Hetty’s confession.

In the interest of foregrounding its importance, the novel does not take long to begin recounting Dinah’s sermon and actions word for word, highlighting the importance of religion by making the sermon the first significant plot event the reader encounters.

Not only does religion motivate or infuse the words that Dinah speaks, it is also powerful enough to grant authority to her as a woman speaking in public. The reader is drawn into the spectacle of the sermon through the figure of a “stranger” who comes across Dinah preaching on the town green, and is encouraged to reflect on the preaching and the situation through the eyes of this stand-in for the reader. The sermon can be read as a way of understanding Dinah’s character at the start of the novel, or as a quaint set piece that allows Eliot to add descriptions of town members. However, the sermon should be 144 examined on its own merits, and not as a way of depicting anything else. If the sermon is a faith act, what beliefs or actions does it actually promote and provoke?

Dinah’s sermon is worth examining in this context, and as mentioned before, it has yet to be subjected to much criticism. This lack of contemporary engagement with the sermon itself does not reflect historical interaction with the text, since Victorian readers were not only habituated to reading sermons, they were so taken by the opening sermon that they expressed doubt that Eliot had written it herself, rather than researching and copying down word for word the sermon of an early Methodist preacher. In a letter to

Sara Sophia Hennell, Eliot vehemently denied this accusation, saying, “How curious it seems to me that people should think Dinah’s sermons, prayers, and speeches were copied—when they were written with hot tears, as they surged up in my own mind!” (qtd. in Hodgson 47). Eliot’s quotation draws a distinct parallel between her own creative invention as a writer, which is so successfully realistic that it seems to have been plagiarized, and Dinah’s apparently spontaneous generation of the heartfelt religious content of the sermon. Having grown up in a variety of religious contexts, from the

Anglicanism of her childhood to her evangelical school days to her eventual loss of faith,

Eliot’s ability to access this expression of faith seems to be a point of pride, and also indicative of the power she wields in the text.

Dinah’s Methodist sermon begins with a prayer, or invocation. When she begins the sermon itself, she describes a childhood misreading of religion in which she mistakes

Mr. Wesley the Methodist preacher for a heavenly presence. She believes that he has come to earth like Jesus to teach the Gospel. After establishing this story, she begins to address the audience as “We,” linking her narration with the story: “Why, you and me, 145 dear friends, are poor. We have been brought up in poor cottages and have been reared on oat-cake, and lived coarse; and we haven’t been to school much, nor read books” (35).

This is the first of Dinah’s rhetorical moves that bring both the audience of the text and the audience of the reader into closer consort with the text, much as Eliot’s address of the

“you” of the reader serves to create a closer relationship between writer and reader. “We” creates a listening community through the narrator and through Dinah’s interjections, whether it is the villagers, the stranger, or the person who has picked up the book. It is the kind of bridge that then allows Dinah to extend the power of this “We”: “We can understand what Jesus felt, because he came in a body like ours and spoke words such as we speak to each other” (37). Once she has created this mobile community, the “we” becomes a flexible construction that can then be employed to persuade. Dinah is described as successful by the stranger listening to the sermon, both for the simple quality of her speech, as well as for the fact that “She was not preaching as she heard others preach, but speaking directly from her own emotions and under the inspiration of her own simple faith” (Eliot 38). The stranger’s description of Dinah sounds remarkably like

Eliot’s description of her own process of writing the sermon; we can see that despite the

“we” that Dinah carefully constructs here, the figure of the preacher is also itself seen as part of the sermon’s ability to persuade. We might refer to Bourdieu, who argues that the context of speech acts suggests that Dinah is only effective as far as she is able to claim and maintain the authority of the preacher at the same time that she does not draw attention to this act. Yet the villagers are aware of the way in which she constructs herself, paying attention to her words and her dress. If they are drawn in, it is in spite of these actions, rather than because of them. 146

The reader is encouraged to observe from both the stranger’s and the villagers’ reactions that Dinah believes what she is saying, and it is this belief that in turn affects the listeners. The Narrator’s interventions also support this depiction of belief, with ruminations on the role and duty of the Narrator serving as a kind of sermon of their own, the narrator’s own faith acts. “Wiry Ben was feeling very uncomfortable, and almost wishing he had not come to hear Dinah; he thought what she said would haunt him somehow… Sandy Jim… had rubbed away some tears with his fist, with a confused intention of being a better fellow” (39). The sermon unsettles the listeners and persuades without directly instructing them; the intensity of Dinah’s conviction and the quality of her words does this work for her. Interestingly, the stranger, though impressed by Dinah’s words, is not ultimately affected in the same way as most of the listeners—he is even able to distance himself enough to wonder if she will be able to stir “their more violent emotions, which must surely be a necessary seal of her vocation as a Methodist preacher”

(39). Even this doubt is eventually laid to rest as her sermon progresses.

The stranger is one of the strongest textual indications of the formal link between

Dinah’s sermon and Hetty’s confession. While the sermon seems to encourage the reader to align him or herself with the listening villagers, at other times, the stranger becomes a much more powerful focalizing point. This stranger is more skeptical and “secular” in his interaction with the setting of the sermon; however, we find at the end of the novel that the sermon has also influenced him in some way. He initially rides away from the sermon at the start of the novel with no apparent change in his thoughts, appearing to be a kind of mediating figure between the intensely religious content and the realist goals of Eliot’s novel: “the stranger, who had been interested in the course of her sermon, as if it had 147 been the development of a drama—for there is this sort of fascination in all sincere unpremeditated eloquence, which opens to one the inward drama of the speaker’s emotions—now turned his horse aside and pursued his way” (42). However, his unremarkable exit here is belied by his actions later in the novel, as he allows Dinah to visit Hetty in jail at the end of the novel, since he happens to be a magistrate. This strange coincidence is, of course, no coincidence. Just as the novel separates the sermon from the confession that must come from Hetty, the novel separates the stranger’s listening from his later act, forcing the reader to try and integrate the “secular” figure of the stranger,

Colonel Townley, with an act that is more than just one of charity. When Dinah pleads

“Oh sir, it may please God to open her heart still,” the stranger replies “Come then… I know you have a key to unlock hearts” as he rings to let her into the jail itself (423). The figure of the stranger on horseback in the opening scene is also paralleled in the novel by the character of Chad’s Bess, who does not reappear in as significant a role later on in the novel, but rather, serves as a stand-in for Hetty herself in her reaction to Dinah’s sermon.

Chad’s Bess creates a structure that is then played out in the formal repercussions of

Hetty’s confession.

Like the stranger, Chad’s Bess, or Bessy Cranage, becomes a focal point through which to observe the impact of Dinah’s words. Though we are informed continually of her vanity and her earrings, and though she is not originally engaged by the words of the sermon, preferring to wonder about “what pleasure and satisfaction there could be in life to a young woman who wore a cap like Dinah’s” (39), the words ultimately reach her at a deeper level. Dinah concludes her sermon by abandoning the “We” of her invocation and beginning to tearfully address individual listeners in this crowd. From the responses the 148 stranger and the Narrator observe, this abrupt transition is rhetorically effective: she undermines the original “We” as a means of drawing more power from subsequent direct address, and Bessy Cranage’s response registers this effect. As she listens, she begins to feel “very much as if the constable had come to take her up and carry her before the justice for some undefined offense” (40). Bess’s eventual removal of her earrings startles the observers, including her father, who leaves the sermon to return to his work to avoid being “‘laid hold on’ too” (41). Bess’s action comes from a place of terror, which the reader might never have imagined existed within the girl given Eliot’s earlier descriptions of the placid, materialistic character. Yet in her removal and throwing down of the earrings, we see Bess perform a faith act, inspired by the persuasion of Dinah’s words.

Whether or not the change in Bess will last is immaterial at this moment; all that matters is the moment of transformation itself, and her all-consuming belief in that moment that causes the performative faith act of rejecting the worldly goods of the jewelry. Bess’s action is made possible by the fact that Dinah is also engaging in a faith act.

This intersection of faith acts again brings us back to this chapter’s opening quotation. Just as Eliot has presented the reader with a retelling of how things have mirrored themselves in her mind, so does Dinah, right down to her childhood misreading.

The reader or listener must then take this account on faith—believe that the Narrator and

Dinah have faith in what they are saying, and then faithfully receive that very belief—but this does not rule out the fact that a listener may undercut the assertion of a faith act with his or her own disbelief. Some of the listeners, we may assume, disbelieve, which motivates their wandering off. However, those who believe and listen are themselves impacted. Bess embodies this response, and her father even recognizes it as bodily in its 149 scope: she has been “laid hold on,” triggering an “I must,” as in Miller’s description from before. What we see in this model, and in our consideration of what it might show us about faithful reading, is that realist fiction depends on a series of faith acts like Bess’s religious epiphany, through which the tissue of the text is then also constructed. Unlike

Miller, who articulates this process as secular and ethical, Eliot’s Adam Bede suggests that solely relying on the secular to explore motivations and what has been read as the realist world of realist fiction is problematic, since the veracity of acts is not based on an ethics alone. I do not intend to conflate ethical and religious readings here, but rather, suggest that they must coexist in the realm of the realist novel; one does not trump the other, nor can either provide a full account on its own merits: we are back to and/or.

Ethics pretends to the secular by determining its distance from the religious, yet in determining this distance it also acknowledges a strange symbiosis. This connects to

Eliot’s own use of the word “faithful” to describe the task of realism: it is only possible to read faithful as secular if we ignore its religious connotations, yet even if these connotations are ignored, they still inextricably coexist with legal or philosophical ones.

The reason it is worthwhile examining a character like Bess and her reaction to

Dinah’s words is that Bess is an early textual shadow of Hetty. If we were initially unclear as to how Bess is supposed to function, we are later given the image of Hetty alone in her room at night, wearing earrings of “coloured glass and gilding” (151).

Hetty’s vanity, like Bess’s, is tied to her good looks, and to the material enhancement of these looks. When Dinah comes in to see her later in the evening, what Dinah reads as

Hetty’s genuine remorse and thoughtfulness is actually self-preservation and fear: “Hetty, full of a vague fear that something evil was some time to befall her, began to cry” (160). 150

Hetty’s “vague” fear parallels Bess’s “undefined” ones, but does not produce a faith act as Dinah originally thinks when she observes Hetty’s tears. Ultimately, Hetty refuses

Dinah’s effect on her, asking her “Why can’t you let me be?” (160). Interestingly, the novel, in its comparison of the two women, does not portray Dinah as blameless for her misreading of Hetty’s response, remarking in the narrator’s voice that “I think the higher nature has to learn [the] comprehension [of the lower], as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and fancying our space wider than it is” (161). Dinah’s faith has proved fatal to her reading of Hetty, as her faith in what she cannot see is ultimately misplaced. Here, the novel implies, Dinah has betrayed the very “We” she utilized so effectively at the start of the novel, instead viewing her relationship to Hetty as that between two unequal individuals. Her faith act is infelicitous because she does not fully account for the context of it: it is problematic that she assumes her addressee’s response without listening to Hetty’s motivation; while she sees what she wants to in the Bible verse she randomly turns to, she also sees what she wants in Hetty, no different than

Adam’s obsessive love. She has not accounted for Hetty’s entire reality, and perhaps cannot at this point, due to her own limited perception. Yet Dinah’s reaction when she realizes her initial misreading of Hetty’s tears is not a questioning of the limitations her faith places on her powers of observation. Instead, it is to pray on her own back in her room. Prayer, like the sermon, is an act that in and of itself performs and constitutes faith.

Even though Dinah has misread Hetty, and now realizes her error, her faith is not shaken.

We see the ramifications of Dinah’s faith when she enters the jail to speak with

Hetty a few nights before she is to be executed. Hetty has not been allowed to speak on 151 her own behalf at her trial, nor has her lawyer, this not being allowed at this point in

British history (as opposed to Eliot’s narrating voice, offering testimony in the witness box from the safety of the 1850s). Instead, other witnesses, who, like Eliot, narrate the events of their interaction with Hetty as faithfully as possible, offer testimony. When

Dinah enters the jail cell, her initial interaction with Hetty seems only likely to replicate the women’s previous interaction, with Dinah at risk of misinterpreting Hetty’s reactions due to her religious zeal. Yet something has changed. Dinah maintains her offer of friendship and solace, and Hetty, rather than using her fear as an excuse to ignore Dinah’s offer, asks for help: “Dinah… help me… I can’t feel anything like you… my heart is hard” (427). Dinah’s call has met a response. What is the difference? The difference is of course in the context, as Hetty is now facing the kind of hardship that Dinah threatened earlier in the novel when she entered her bedroom. Yet the difference is also in Dinah’s approach. Rather than assuming her words are enough to influence Hetty, she literally kneels down beside her and prays, performing a faith act that then triggers Hetty’s confession.

Here, we can see the impact of Dinah’s sermon circulate throughout the text. The confession is an important companion piece to the original sermon because we again watch Dinah give an extended address. This is a private sermon, whose only measure will be its ability to persuade Hetty of the value of accepting God as a presence in her life even at this late stage. Dinah makes her case by drawing a metaphor between her physical presence beside Hetty, and the way that God can assist Hetty: “If you could believe he loved you and would help you, as you believe I love you and will help you, it wouldn’t be so hard to die on Monday, would it?” (426). This metaphor, coupled with Dinah’s 152 kneeling beside Hetty, brings forth Hetty’s confession. We are left unsure if Dinah’s work has left its mark, for even though Hetty does confess, she closes her confession by asking “Dinah, do you think God will take away that crying and the place in the woods, now I’ve told everything?” (431). For Hetty, the act of confession does not constitute faith. She is left with doubt at the end of the action, and feels that there should now be a sort of exchange, a lightening of her worries and cares because she has told the truth.

Dinah’s response is to return them to praying for God’s mercy.

The result of the confession is to return Dinah to a person of interest in the proceedings of the characters of the novel. On the morning of Hetty’s scheduled execution, “All Stoniton had heard of Dinah Morris, the young Methodist woman who had brought the obstinate criminal to confess, and there was as much eagerness to see her as to see the wretched Hetty” (437). Dinah’s religious actions are seen through the public’s eyes as legal in effect, pulling out Hetty’s confession. This gathering by the gallows bookends the gathering on the green to hear Dinah preach at the start of the text, with Hetty now a filled-in portrait of the sketch of Bess the reader registered earlier. The conclusion puts pressure on the and/or aspects of a religious structure to a realist plot: the formal pull to have Dinah’s original sermon end with confession and redemption for

Hetty appears to lack the formal strength to encapsulate the novel, since events continue.

Hetty is saved at the last minute by Arthur Donnithorne’s actions. Yet is this rescue borne of worldly love? Or is Hetty being rewarded for her tentative new faith in the goodness of

God? While He cannot save her from the crying and the place in the woods, has He saved her from the gallows? 153

Though Hetty was originally presented as a potential bride for Adam, the novel continues onward until Dinah and Adam have found domestic bliss with one another. In this way, the novel also builds a meta-structure where the reader learns to use the construction of literature to discern outlines clearly: by being a faithful reader, and focusing on Hetty as an individual whose actions resonate, rather than on the lure of the marriage plot between her and Adam, the reader already knows more about Hetty than those around her. The reader is also aware of Dinah’s value long before other characters

(besides perhaps Seth). Thus, the reader can predict the ending, as the narrative depicts

Adam growing to understand Dinah in a more perceptive way than he understands Hetty long after the reader has already realized Dinah’s superiority as a potential partner. He even speaks of his change in perception of Dinah to Hetty: “I used to think when I saw her here as it was nonsense for her to dress different t’ other people; but I was never rightly noticed her till she came to see mother last week, and then I thought the cap seemed to fit her face somehow as th’ acorn cup fits th’ acorn, and I shouldn’t like to see her so well without it” (218). Though Adam is not himself a Methodist, he is able to see past his initial impression of Dinah’s appearance and observe how it is integral to the way she moves through the world. Her actions of comforting his mother and her kindness actually prompt a reevaluation of her appearance, rather than her appearance blotting out any visibility of her flaws (as with Hetty).

Yet the narrator never condemns Adam’s inability to see Hetty’s flaws, and in fact explicitly refuses to do so, noting that “I respect him none the less” (338), and continuing on later by observing that “Adam had a devout mind, though he was perhaps rather impatient of devout words, and his tenderness lay very close to his reverence, so that one 154 could hardly be stirred without the other” (374). While his love may be misplaced, there is no doubt that it is deep, and deeply linked to his feelings of religious devotion that infuse his work and life. Domestic union with Dinah becomes a way of achieving religion and marriage, Hetty and Dinah (as Dinah has assisted Hetty, and the presence of Dinah will always be a reminder of Hetty). This domestic bliss, Adam’s ability to discover a simple and, of course, necessitates an and/or for Dinah, who must choose between preaching and married life. The text conveniently makes this a non-issue by introducing the fact that Methodists no longer allow women to preach after this point in time. Would

Dinah have been happily married had the state not intervened and made religion and obedience to the state compatible? Has religious love replaced her need to speak out or risk feeling a hypocrite who does not heed God’s call?

If we were to read unfaithfully, the novel seems to be indicating here, despite its deep engagement with religious themes and the important set pieces of the sermon and the confession, that religion is ultimately not powerful enough to provide the rationale for a realist plot. Instead, the novel must turn to the traditional courtship narrative to provide a suitable ending. Yet a faithful reading encourages us to ask if the traditional courtship novel can really be separated from its religious content. Isn’t religion the impetus for

Dinah and Adam’s marriage, both in terms of the legal act of marrying and the emotional decision towards union? As Dinah says, “ It is the Divine Will. My soul is so knit to yours that it is but a divided life I live without you… I have a fullness of strength to bear and do our heavenly Father’s Will that I had lost before” (501). Where religion had once been a stumbling block to their union, with Dinah feeling she has to choose commitment to religion or commitment to marriage, the ending provides readers with an and. Dinah’s 155 religion becomes a way for her to further pursue God’s will, even providing it where it had been lost. Marriage is a romantic union and a salvific one. Dinah as prototype succeeds, simply because Adam becomes indispensable to her faith acts: her belief and its context are not whole unless she and he are one. And Dinah as prototype moves into appropriate political context by the end of the novel as well: religious rulings solve any lingering and/or issues of the marriage (marry and give up preaching, or preach or be married). At the close, rather than being a public, performative act, religion becomes of necessity a privately held belief—we are told that because “Conference has forbid the women preaching,” Dinah has “given it up, all but talking to the people a bit in their houses” (506). We may wonder, too, if Dinah and Adam would have ever found domestic bliss together if it were not for Dinah’s religiously-motivated care for Hetty, or if Adam’s inability to marry Hetty is actually his own salvation.

Eliot’s formal move to replace a transcendent figure of religion with that of the domestic or quotidian can be read as a rejection of the transcendent capabilities of religion in the context of “secular” life; in this case, Seth represents a more radical possibility, stating that if he and Dinah were married and the Conference had forbid preaching, they would “ha’ left the Wesleyans and joined a body that ‘ud put no bonds on

Christian liberty” (506). Yet this placement of religion in the domestic context identifies what has been the motivating current throughout the work, indicating that religion’s place or resonance doesn’t necessarily impact its efficacy, and that religion indeed has to be present in order for the domestic to function. In fact, it is a recognition of Dinah’s good sense in her domestic context that gives her authority, according to Adam: “Most o’ the women do more harm nor good with their preaching—they’ve not got Dinah’s gift nor 156 her sperrit—and she’s seen that, and she thought it right to set th’ example o’ submitting, for she’s not held from other sorts o’ teaching” (506). While martyrdom or religious protest may seem more compelling, the fact remains that the nineteenth century is made up of many people like Adam and Dinah, people who live in a community, work, and have faith, yet will not leave any legacy besides their children. These people performing faith acts may not be particularly compelling, but Eliot needs to show that they are real, and their continual actions are what sustains faith both before and beyond the legislation of the state. They live the reality of and/or, navigating what it means to be a member of a religious community as well as a national citizen.

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Chapter 4

Diamonds and Dust: Religion and Detection in The Moonstone

Following the prologue, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone’s first narrative opens with an immediate reference to another literary text, Robinson Crusoe. In fact, the narrator, Gabriel Betteredge, quotes this text before he even reaches the third sentence of his narrative:

“In the first part of Robinson Crusoe, at page one hundred and twenty-nine, you

will find it thus written: ‘Now I saw, though too late, the Folly of beginning a

Work before we count the Cost, and before we judge rightly of our own Strength

to go through with it.’ Only yesterday, I opened my Robinson Crusoe at that

place.” (21)

We readers learn this before we learn Betteredge’s name, his location, or the context of his narrative. He informs us of the reasons behind his opening later in the first chapter:

“I have sat helpless (in spite of my abilities) ever since; seeing what Robinson

Crusoe saw, as quoted above—namely, the folly of beginning a work before we

count the cost, and before we judge rightly of our own strength to go through with

it. Please to remember, I opened the book by accident, at that bit, only the day

before I rashly undertook the business now in hand; and, allow me to ask—if that

isn’t prophecy, what is?” (22) 158

This is a shocking way to begin an ostensible detective novel: flying in the face of logic and reasoning, Betteredge casts his lot with prophecy. A situation that would seem to call for the examination of clues becomes an examination of text, an act of bibliomancy. Why would a text that is supposedly invested in the rational solving of a mystery so quickly and decisively resort to such strange tactics? I argue that the novel uses Betteredge as a representative of the value of religious epistemology. In the process, the novel draws parallels between the way the suspense of the mystery depends on not knowing, and the way that faith is maintained in the presence of not knowing. The marriage plot becomes a formal vehicle through which the observe the interrelationship of religion and mystery, as it makes visible the Christian and Hindu context to both the possible scandal in the

Verinder household, and the movement of the Diamond itself through the text.

Religion and the marriage plot would seem at best to be merely peripheral presences in the traditional detective novel, yet what The Moonstone reveals is that, surprisingly, in texts that appear dominated by scientific and rational thought-processes, religion and the marriage plot are entangled in and even central to the proceedings. This confluence should not be surprising, given that religion is inseparable from marriage during this time period, even after the passage of laws such as the Civil Marriage Act of

1836, which loosened the grip of the Church of England on the institution by allowing individuals to be married in other licensed churches. The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, which further moved marriage from ecclesiastical to civil oversight by legalizing divorce, is indeed often linked to the rise of the sensation novel. Dissatisfaction with the law, which dictated that husbands could divorce wives by proving adultery, but provided stricter qualifications for women looking to divorce their husbands, contributed to the 159 sensation novel’s engagement with themes of adultery and bigamy. The Matrimonial

Causes Act itself led to an increase in the nascent field of detective work: “by far the biggest boost to commercial investigative activity came with the Matrimonial Causes Act

1857 which enabled detectives to develop a specialist role in the field of divorce”

(Newburn, Williamson, and Wright 278). The entanglement of the religious with the legal and the civil in the context of marriage thus makes religion indispensable in thinking through the rise of the detective novel and its supposedly scientific epistemologies. Though religion is not often the focus of discussions of the marriage plot by contemporary critics such as Elsie Michie and Jennifer Phegley, it is almost impossible to find a Victorian novel that does not address it, and in fact, does not include it as a central part of the courtship and marriage process, reflecting its institutionalization in both legal and religious terms. Though the detective novel would appear to occupy different territory, the way that religion and courtship are actually staged as both the framework and the endgame of The Moonstone, suggests that religious reasoning and romantic plotting are just as significant to the solving of the mystery as the scientific and rational thought-processes emphasized in subsequent readings of the genre of the detective novel.

Faithful reading allows us to observe the religious epistemology in The

Moonstone in greater detail. However, faithful reading can also be applied to the work of these readers themselves. While Betteredge, Franklin Blake, and Ezra Jennings, the three main amateur detectives in the mystery, might all seem invested in literary, cosmopolitan, or scientific reading practices, upon closer examination each of these individuals has his own method of faithfully reading the world around him. While Betteredge practices 160 bibliomancy, Franklin Blake employs an ability to shift between Continental epistemologies that would seem to mark him as an exceptionally astute navigator of competing ways of understanding the world (as Betteredge observes, “After he had learnt what the institutions of Germany could teach him, he gave the French a turn next, and the

Italians a turn after that” (15), noting his Continental contexts); Ezra Jennings is a literal hybrid who, like Betteredge, considers himself a Christian above all else, but who also borrows from Blake’s facility with ways of knowing (in Jennings’s case, this ability is represented by the slippage between the scientific and the romantic or imaginative register). These three religious readers and their participation in the detection and the novel’s marriage plot present a cross-section of class and methods that ask us to reconsider the influence of the clear-eyed, rational detective in criticism, especially since the detective as we have come to know him or her did not take shape until after the publication of The Moonstone. These amateurs access the truth through a variety of epistemologies, and religion is significant, sometimes deeply so, in these acts of detection. In addition, the centrality of Christian religion draws out the strength and importance of the Hindu context for the novel, which is equally important to any understanding of the nature of the novel.

Our initial depiction of a religious reader in the novel is of course Betteredge:

Robinson Crusoe is a deeply Christian text in which he searches for guidance. Not only that, but Betteredge’s reading practice parallels Crusoe’s own reading practice. When

Crusoe is in need of advice or inspiration, he turns to the Bible just as Betteredge turns to his copy of Crusoe, opening it and finding solace in the first words that he happens upon.

It is this action that first leads Crusoe to Christian prayer, and it is suggested that 161

Providence (“I went, directed by Heaven no doubt” (94)) shapes his actions and intuitions as a means of preserving his life. The Moonstone’s initial depiction of reading thus establishes Betteredge in this tradition, and a faithful reading of the novel takes this seriously, asking how the metaphor that Betteredge presents can shape our understanding of the novel. Betteredge’s reading practice suggests that in order to understand how religion is employed in the novel, we must first realign our expectations about how a religious identity shapes perception: while bibliomancy may at first appear tautological

(with the selection of the verse always conveniently speaking to the issue at hand), bibliomancy in fact becomes a metaphor representing a mode of religious knowing driven by consistent belief even in the face of challenges that might inspire doubt; a religious knowing that is integral to the individual at the level of personal identity. This consistent belief is not shown to be misplaced. Betteredge, though he is introduced as comical, and he confirms his own beliefs with enthusiasm, is in fact proved correct by the plot. In fact, his desire to protect what he knows as true results in his being one of the only characters who does not wrongly suspect the maid Rosanna of wrongdoing, even in the face of physical evidence to the contrary. Quick to align prophetic text with event, Betteredge is actually slow to question his religious assumptions if he feels they align with things as they are. While Betteredge’s phrase, “If that isn’t prophecy,” may smack of the supernatural, it appears that he is instead delineating the parameters of his religious identity in relation to other depictions of religion the reader encounters. Unlike the

Hindus of the text, who disconcertingly seem to be trying to read the future in a young boy’s palmful of ink, Betteredge seeks his signs in literature, and pits his prescience against that of the Hindus with a strange kind of certainty. Yet both are ultimately 162 seeking signs in ink, another indication that the realist novel, represented in its very early form by Crusoe, is significantly wrapped up in religion.

Despite the fact that Betteredge is distrustful of the Brahmins, the novel actually depicts them as righteous. Indeed, they are shown to be more religious and devoted than their eventual victim, Godfrey Ablewhite, who is held up in British society as a paragon of piety but is in reality an unscrupulous thief. Unlike the Brahmins, who are identified by Murthwaite as willing to give their lives for a cause that will benefit their entire religious community, Ablewhite is only willing to give his life for a cause when it results in monetary gain for himself. Religion thus ironically provides effective cover for

Ablewhite, allowing him to function undetected for far longer than he might have otherwise. While he might seem to be a model of a faithful reader, he is in fact the opposite: the metaphors suggested in his actions are those of performance and empty rhetoric. This play-acting at religion as an identity can only last so far, however, since he lacks true integration: the duplicitousness of his word vs. his actions is represented in the way he is discovered at the end of the novel, disguised in face paint as a foreigner and initially unrecognizable.

His religious cover ultimately does less harm than that of Miss Clack, who participates in laughably destructive philanthropy: “the Mothers’-Small-Clothes-

Conversion-Society. The object of this excellent Charity is—as all serious people know—to rescue unredeemed fathers’ trousers from the pawnbroker, and to present their resumption, on the part of the irreclaimable parent, by abridging them immediately to suit the proportions of the innocent son” (102). As any serious person reading will know, the presumption inherent in this task is but a small representation of Miss Clack’s habit of 163 placing herself where she shouldn’t belong. A Christianity based on deprivation and distrust only enables characters like Godfrey and Miss Clack in their designs on others’ money and secrets.

However, the community that ultimately solves the mystery is not based on this same deprivation and distrust. The members of the Verinder country house community, like Betteredge, practice a benevolent and dedicated Christianity. His whole-hearted embrace of forgiveness for the maid Rosanna stems from his Lady, Lady Verinder, of whom he recounts:

The matron’s opinion of Rosanna was (in spite of what she had done) that the girl

was one in a thousand, and worthy of any Christian woman’s interest in her. My

lady (being a Christian woman, if ever there was one yet) said to the matron upon

that ‘Rosanna Spearman shall have her chance in my service.’ (18)

While The Moonstone begins and ends in the Hindu context, the ability and desire of the central community to self-police draws from this understated Christian context, which is thrown into relief by Clack and Ablewhite. Clack and Ablewhite’s actions function to highlight the subdued religion of other characters, as well as the true dedication of the

Brahmin, who have given up their caste and their families in order to pursue the Diamond and return it to its rightful context. Though the Indians are shooed away by servants, languish in jail, and are held under suspicion throughout the novel, they are neither deterred nor prevented from their given task as custodians of the Diamond.

Interestingly enough, the presence of religion has not gone unnoticed in the detective novel genre, but it has not yet been faithfully read. This chapter builds on D.A.

Miller’s observations about detective novels, and about The Moonstone in particular. He 164 writes that the detective novel performs a kind of “parable of the modern policing power that comes to rely less on spectacular displays of repressive force than on intangible networks of productive discipline” (51). In Miller’s thesis, the appearance and success of amateur detectives, such as we see in The Moonstone with Franklin Blake and Ezra

Jennings, reveals that society effectively regulates itself without either agency or the presence of the official police. In the case of The Moonstone, “the work of detection is carried forward by the novel’s entire cast of characters, shifted not just from professional to amateur, but from an outsider to a whole community” (42). Miller, however, rejects the work of critics who would attribute the ability of the community to stumble across the solution without agency of detection to Providence, remarking that “the ‘providential’ here is divested of any explicit religious dimension” (44). While I agree with Miller that it is certainly not Providence that ultimately guides the Christian characters of The

Moonstone towards the solving of the mystery, we must also acknowledge that there are very explicit religious contexts to the success of the detection that certainly nod towards the possibility of Providence in the Hindu framework of the novel: notably, that the

Christian composition of the Verinder household seems to prove no match for either the cursed Diamond or its presaged return to India as part of the success of the Hindus’ quest.

While the Christian religious context is shown to be central to the Verinder community’s ability to police itself, the Hindu religious context is also shown as disturbingly effective.

Religion in both cases offers a different kind of logic than detection, one that both others those who are unlike, and identifies those who are, generating its own momentum in the novel. In the detective novel, this momentum is linked to the not knowing of suspense: faith is a kind of solution to this not knowing, as faith is a continual choice to 165 maintain belief in the face of not knowing. In Caroline Levine’s recent work on the role of narrative suspense, she finds the model of the scientific hypothesis useful in that it encourages readers to actively test their own hypotheses as they move through the process of not knowing into the shock of finding out. Suspense, in Levine’s reading, is a crucial component of this process, teaching readers to wait, and not to jump to conclusions. Yet religion and the idea of faith is also fundamentally about not knowing: while suspense might democratize the scientific method in Levine’s reading, faith de- institutionalizes it due to the construction of religious communities beyond national boundaries. In The Moonstone, religion is certainly a category with equal weight as gender, race, and class, and it can even, in some cases, trump differences between those categories, highlighting the way that religion creates alliances that disrupt national classification. Set up as the underdog or the laughingstock in Betteredge’s opening lines, religion ultimately becomes an element central to both Rachel’s marriage plot and to the mystery.

Miller’s resistance to reading the role of religion in the detective novel can be explained by past criticism’s investment in the scientific or legal aspects of the genre. In

Bloodhounds of Heaven, Ian Ousby proposes that this tendency dates back to an argument by Régis Messac that maintains “the literary interest in detection can be explained largely by reference to the growth of science and the popularization of scientific method” (ix). Messac may be one of the earliest proponents of this viewpoint, but it has certainly been borne out in subsequent criticism, which locates the detective novel as a form of narrative and scientific understanding that attempts to codify, reproduce, and maintain systems of Enlightenment understanding. As literary critic 166

Ronald R. Thomas succinctly summarizes it: “Together, scientific fact and fictional narrative generated a system of knowledge and created a body of literature that not only provided psychological reassurance about the security of life and property at home, but also manifested and controlled cultural doubts in Victorian England about the policies of the empire abroad” (235). Critics of the detective novel have thus approached the genre from decidedly scientific epistemologies including psychoanalysis in the aforementioned work of Ronald R. Thomas, and criminal narratives and literary genealogy in Heather

Worthington’s work, as well as formal epistemologies such as Levine’s aforementioned reading of suspense.

These various readings, concerning themselves with categories such as class, gender, and race, do not weight religion on an equal plane. Given the preponderance of scientific, legal, and postcolonial approaches to the detective novel, the detective novel is simply not seen as a genre that has anything to do with the social and spiritual workings of religion. Yet religion and the idea of faith is also fundamentally about not knowing: while suspense might democratize the scientific method in Levine’s reading, faith de- institutionalizes it due to the construction of religious communities beyond national boundaries. In The Moonstone, religion is not just a category with equal weight as gender, race, and class, it is the category to end all categories: the trump card. Set up as the underdog or the laughingstock in Betteredge’s opening lines, religion becomes an element more influential than any other in both Rachel’s marriage plot and the mystery.

This ability to trump the other categories is shown to be tied to the way that religion encourages its practitioners to read: when we meet Betteredge and he introduces us to the key characters in the unfolding mystery, he cannily summarizes the character of 167

Rachel’s eventual scorned suitor, and the perpetrator of the crime, Godfrey Ablewhite in a few sentences by comparing him to a dancing woman. “As a speaker at charitable meetings the like of him for drawing your tears and your money was not easy to find…

The lady did it with a band of music. The gentleman did it with a handkerchief and a glass of water. Crowds at the performance with the legs. Ditto at the performance with the tongue.” While Betteredge goes on to insist that Ablewhite is “the simplest and the pleasantest and easiest to please,” his prefatory remarks indicate that Ablewhite is a huckster, all style and no substance. Betteredge constructs this reading despite sharing the same Anglican faith as Ablewhite, and despite his convictions that Franklin Blake has no chance against Ablewhite as a suitor. Again, this reading is set up as humorous, yet

Betteredge’s formal analysis of Ablewhite’s empty rhetoric is important. In observing

Ablewhite’s religious rhetoric as spectacle, he raises questions about the status of faith within and without an institution.

Religion’s ability to influence the marriage plot even within the detective novel is of course not without precedent. The detective genre draws from its predecessors the

Gothic novel and the sensation novel, and these roots are decidedly supernatural and often religious in nature, as well as deeply concerned with sexuality. As Patrick

Brantlinger observes:

The scandal of Gothic arises partly because, in relation to both religion and

sexuality, it demonstrates that rationality is either impotent or itself profoundly

irrational…And the blasphemy is, in a sense, double, as is just about every other

feature of this Manichaean genre: against religious orthodoxy (or, anyway, against

“superstition,” “priestcraft,” and Roman Catholicism), but also against 168

Enlightenment rationality. (27)

Brantlinger’s reading of the Gothic links superstition and sexuality very convincingly: excessive sexuality is the monstrous other side of the coin to religious repression. While this engine appears effective in the Gothic, it seems to be domesticated in the case of the detective novel into romantic channels. Ronald R. Thomas makes this argument in

“Minding the Body Politic,” observing in both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s and Wilkie

Collins’s work the replacement of “the historical event with the romantic intrigue” (234).

Rachel’s conflicted courtship with Franklin would seem to support this idea: that the presence of the marriage plot in the detective novel is a kind of antidote to concerns about monstrous and untamed sexuality.

Yet these concerns are certainly still present, the unspoken motivation behind whispered gossip over Rachel’s virginity and the obsession over the recovery of the

Diamond. The Diamond needs to be recovered intact, and this obsession with its status indicates both the value of its religious context in the Hindu sense, and its metonymic relationships to the Christian context of marriage and Rachel’s virginity. Indeed, the

Diamond itself is a kind of hymen, as its safe return can clear Rachel’s name and her reputation. Neither Rachel nor the Diamond could maintain economic or cultural capital if they were to be penetrated: the fact that Franklin is both the individual who introduces the Diamond in to the household and the one who unwittingly removes it actually preserves, in a strange sense, Rachel’s honor and the potential for their courtship to be consummated. In The Moonstone the channeling of the sexual into the romantic is important, since the novel is not only concerned with identifying the correct culprit, but also the correct spouse for Rachel Verinder. The “romantic intrigue” parallels the 169 detection, with clues indicating both who has stolen her diamond and who is her most suitable suitor. The suppression of sexuality in service to this romantic turn surfaces in the story in the smudge of paint on Blake’s nightgown: both a clue and a potential marker of immoral sexuality, rendering the virginal Rachel unfit for Christian marriage.

While the roots of the detective novel’s history in the Gothic may be buried deeply, the twinned engine of religious repression and sexuality still thrums beneath the more chaste romance and the seemingly asexual scientific detection that depends upon rational knowledge and evidence. In The Moonstone, Rachel’s Christian purity is at first taken for granted, and is called into question under the presentation of this evidence: the paint placing her at a point in time and in a situation dangerous to her reputation.

However, the illogic of the Christian faith’s not knowing turns out to be more correct than the logic of the scientific not knowing. In other words, when Rachel’s Christian household maintains her innocence in the face of what might be evidence otherwise, this turns out to be a more accurate reading of the clues than the scientific or deductive one is able to provide. The novel thus uses the marriage plot to stage a rival performance of detection. In the process, it even contrasts this rival, identity-based detection as dominant over a third process, Miss Clack’s form-based detection, which relies on useless pamphlets to reverse-engineer a set of clues that could lead to their discoverer’s salvation.

Again, even though scientific evidence (and Rachel’s own eyes) would identify Franklin

Blake as the culprit, religion and its accompanying romantic reasoning make it impossible for the community to point fingers at one of its own. While this initially seems foolhardy, it ultimately ends up trumping science, which can only prove that Blake has indeed taken the Diamond, not who the ultimate thief is. Religious and romantic faith is 170 rewarded when it is proved that he did so when he was not in his right mind, and that the true culprit had escaped detection all along.

In its machinations toward a conclusion, the Gothic, Brantlinger observes, often circles around missing or destroyed documents. “In doing so, the Gothic romance calls into question the authenticity of all stories and texts, shadowing forth the ultimate anti-

Enlightenment scandal: the thought that representation as such may only be a form of superstition” (39). While the Gothic seems invested in these missing forms as a symbol of illegibility, the detective novel attempts to wrestle with similar questions regarding the role of religion in a (supposedly) rational society while maintaining faith in ultimate legibility. In this process, the detective novel seems to side solidly with the

Enlightenment rationality that the Gothic novel supposedly interrogates. Yet The

Moonstone does not endorse this form of Enlightenment rationality, centering as it does around a missing cursed Diamond that could be hypothetically broken apart, its aura destroyed, nor does it provide a comforting sense of the usefulness of the colonial project that the genre supposedly reinforces. Whether it cannot shake its Gothic roots, or whether

Enlightenment rationality is unable to make its case clearly enough, Collins’s text reveals detection and false religious piety as a small kind of hubbub that occurs against the background of a much longer durée of Christian knowledge and Indian history. While

Christianity is shown to be just as valid a way of arriving at both supposedly scientific and romantic conclusion (indeed, it is right all along in the way it reacts to clues and forms exegetic responses to them), whereas science much amass clues and test its not knowing continually, Hinduism is also shown to be valid, in fact, more valid, in that the

Christian detection succeeds but does so only to lose the Diamond to the Hindus and the 171

Diamond’s rightful return to its homeland. In addition, by contrasting the Verinder household and the Hindus with characters like Miss Clack and Godfrey Ablewhite, there is very clearly a religious epistemology that is valued and validated, and one that is rejected.

This logic of religion deserves greater attention that it has received, since

Victorians were asking questions about belief and thinking about proof in ways that indicated both religion’s tenacity as well as the surprising interpenetration of what would seem to be mutually exclusive epistemologies. In the case of The Moonstone, the successful pursuit of truth is shown to be Anglican to the core: Anglican despite the trappings of Anglicanism. As Betteredge puts it, “I have myself (in spite of the bishops and the clergy) an unfeigned respect for the Church” (23). This pure form of religion, which can be disassociated even from its institutional structure, is the direct basis for his reasoning, as well as the reasoning of the Verinder community for which he functions as a mouthpiece. Faith de-institutionalizes suspense just as it de-institutionalizes its constituents.

It is this unspoken connection between Anglicanism and logic, and the subsequent suggestion of a logic of religion that exceeds scientific epistemologies, that this chapter has been pursuing. Religion here is not simply belief or faith, as it is repeatedly shown to be a significant element of the central Verinder community’s sense of identity, as well as an overlooked factor in that community’s ability to police itself. The text’s treatment of religion as identity rather than as belief or performance mirrors contemporary Victorian views of religion. As Gauri Viswanathan points out in Outside the Fold, national responses to individual and mass conversions in the nineteenth century and elsewhere 172 reveal “the degree to which national boundaries are made continuous with uniform religious and social composition” (xi). In Victorian England, naturally, these national boundaries were dependent on Anglican uniformity; this was represented both in laws that prohibited Dissenters and other religious minorities from participating in government, and in the suspicion and mistreatment of Catholics, Jews, and other individuals seen as threatening to the state due to the insularity of their religious and cultural identities, which were seen as inseparable.

This line of thinking, which ties religious belief inextricably to religious identity and thus, rights within a society, coalesces and becomes more visible in the latter half of the nineteenth century, specifically after the 1870 publication of Edward Tylor’s anthropological work on religion, which sought to find evidence of the origins of belief in activities like dreaming that were inseparable from the living of everyday life. Tylor’s influential work identified a supposed teleology of religion that was tied to the developments, both cultural and material, of the societies in which it was practiced. Thus, early beliefs were primitive, centered on ritual, and while small aspects of these beliefs might exist within the more sophisticated religious environment of Victorian England (a horse following the casket at funerals, for example), these were mere vestigial reminders of the distance between Anglicanism and more primitive, early forms of worship. This kind of teleology fit in snugly with cultural discussions of atavism, or the appearance of primitive characteristics in individuals that accounted for criminal activity; appearance could mean a concrete link to earlier times, both emphasizing the distance traveled from those times, and the less favorable aspects of more primitive society. 173

In The Moonstone, Murthwaite represents a basis for Tylor’s philosophy in that he is the kind of actual explorer whose accounts Tylor might reference in his more sedentary work as an armchair anthropologist. Yet Murthwaite does not seem as limited by ideas of atavism or the hierarchy of religions. Despite his problematic presence as a representative of Orientalizing and colonizing impulses, he is both a source of information on the

Hindus, and an advocate for their faithfulness to their religion. He identifies the Hindus as even more attached to their religion as identity than the British are; they are willing, he points out, to murder in defense of their religious values. Yet in his emphasis of their bloodthirstiness, he also provides fodder for the very teleology that establishes Eastern religions as more savage or base than their more supposedly sophisticated Western counterparts.

With Tylor’s philosophy on its way towards more explicit expression later in the century, a text like The Moonstone works towards exploring what it means to self- identify as religious not necessarily through the kinds of faith acts described in the previous chapter, but rather, through the establishment of religion as the basis for identity. This integration of identity and religion is shown by the text to be natural, or too obvious to question. Betteredge even addresses the reader at one point to confirm this, including a “(Nota bene: I am an average good Christian, when you don’t push my

Christianity too far. And all the rest of you—which is a great comfort—are, in this respect, much the same as I)” (173). There is no room for question that either Betteredge or his readers are Christians, or that this Christianity is the basis of their reasoning and comportment. Betteredge cannot do otherwise, it would seem, and as the voice of the

Verinder community (of all others, his chapter takes up the most space, and he is the one 174 originally asked to recount the events), he indicates that neither can they. He is Anglican despite his reservations about or use for the institution of the religion. It is this seamless integration that provides him both his identity, and as a result, his de-institutionalized basis for detection and interpretation.

This implied connection between Anglicanism and the ability to deduce and interpret is a byproduct of the use and maintenance, by the government, of a national religion. The use of Anglicanism as a national religion, or as a religion that was assumed to be coeval with a Victorian English identity, meant that studies of religion ultimately supported the superiority of the reasoning and mythology behind the Anglican faith.

Again, Edward Tylor’s work on the anthropology of religion becomes a striking example of this in the late nineteenth century, as Tylor tries to both identify the origins of religious identity, and locate their remnants in modern-day religious belief. In observing this trajectory, Tylor is clear in expressing the evolution and refining of religion; its current form is the least pagan and the least superstitious. The British nation benefitted from othering religions that were not Anglican in that it implied that Anglican superiority was unchallenged; however, as Viswanathan points out, this desire to relegate other religions towards being politically limited reveals more anxiety about their own power than dismissiveness of others’ beliefs. On a smaller scale, the detective novel mimics this anxiety, and its act of othering religion or downplaying its significance should only raise suspicions about what diverse or Dissenting religions are truly able to accomplish.

While Tylor’s work concretizes the Anglican habit of hierarchizing religion, the roots of this project are of course much deeper: religious hierarchies had historical precedent. For example, as Tomoko Masuzawa observes in The Invention of World 175

Religions, theologians maintained throughout the early modern period that “the most significant chasm among nations was between those that had knowledge of the one supreme deity and those who did not,” the latter existing as “spiritual rustics, as yet untouched by the civilizing knowledge of Christianity” (48). Interestingly, the four taxonomic categories of early religious thought (Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, and heathens) were thrown into disarray in the mid-nineteenth century, as the study of “world religions” developed. Masuzawa continues: “not coincidentally, it is precisely in this interim period of taxonomic volatility that the scientific study of religion—or what was to become the very backbone and legitimating authority of the modern discourse on religion—took root” (64). With this scientific tension, the hierarchy was rearranged, and

“world religions” became everything that Anglicanism was not. Not only, then, did national boundaries and religious boundaries align, these boundaries were then once again ranked by the “West,” which prioritized its own supposedly logical and refined religion above that of everyone else’s. The movement in the Gothic away from the supposedly cultish trappings of Catholicism to the safety of Anglicanism mirrors this process of hierarchizing; we see the process again in the way that the detective novel rejects or ridicules the overtly religious. In The Moonstone, Miss Clack represents these overtly religious views, and the novel uses both Clack’s own words and actions as well as the disregard of the other characters to indicate that her fervent need to express her belief actually indicates something less-evolved or rational than the form of Anglicanism that the Verinder community practices.

The religious context for Betteredge’s detection calls into question the traditional readings of the detective novel as a secular enterprise in order to suggest that the novel is 176 not entirely secular, nor do the workings of religion move without consequence throughout the text. In fact, the community’s religion is central to its ability to police itself. The Moonstone is a fitting text with which to explore this self-policing since it follows many of the conventions that Tzvetan Todorov noted in his 1966 essay “The

Typology of Detective Fiction,” even though it was written far earlier than the stories he was studying, which were written between WWI and WWII. Notably, The Moonstone contains two tellings of a story: the story of the crime (or the fabula), and then the story of the investigation of the crime (also known as the sjuzet). They are, respectively, “what really happened,” and “how the reader… has come to know about it” (Todorov 45). In addition, Viktor Shklovsky has noted that when the sjuzet of a novel is interpreted as closed, or as providing all the information needed to bring the story full circle, the emphasis is then on the conditions of solving the enigma that the text presents. A text like

The Moonstone, which depends on the suspension of a solution until the close of the text, is thus constructed in a “buckle” form: “the end reverses and refers to the beginning in some way: we sense the end as such because it echoes the situation of the beginning”

(Thompson 40). In this way, the enigma becomes the driving force behind the narrative, and the foregrounding of different character’s readings of the situation then becomes the sjuzet. The question in regards to the detective novel, then, is what is the best method of solving the enigma? Will legal epistemology suffice? Scientific? Religious? The

Moonstone anticipates this question by including multiple epistemologies throughout; however, within this jostling, the placement of religion can still be faithfully read as a formerly overlooked though essential player in the resolution of the enigma. 177

The nature of the enigma in The Moonstone yields evidence that cannot be solely read through scientific means. In fact, the amassing of evidence in The Moonstone and closely related sensation novels from the time period highlights a confluence that is essential to the construction of evidence: the truth is that many of these legal matters and testimonies used to glean clues are religious in nature. Birth, marriage, and death records are held by the church or church representatives in many of the sensation texts. The most damning evidence in Collins’s The Woman in White is the parish record of Sir Percival

Glyde’s birth (or lack thereof). The jostling between the legal and religious register is apparent here, as Walter Hartright recounts that he was “not aware that a legally-certified copy” of the church register was necessary, and that “no document merely drawn out by myself could claim the proper importance, as a proof” (166). Percival Glyde’s birth certificate, consumed in the parish fire along with his body, is a literal representation of the way religious identity is shaped and administrated by the Church.

The very marriage that Rachel and Franklin contemplate is state-sanctioned,

Anglican matrimony. And evidence, mentioned so often in texts such as Trollope’s The

Eustace Diamonds in a legal context, is in fact inescapably tied to religion as well. In the aforementioned Trollope novel, testimony under oath is even depicted as a way of interrogating testimony under oath; this circuitous logic obscures the basis of the validity of the oath by implying it is somehow related to character. As the “learned sergeant” remarks, “That she did so she herself stated on oath in that evidence which she gave before the magistrate when my client was committed” (387), which suggests that the oath itself is proof enough that the statement is true. Yet while the oath might seem simply legal, it is in fact religious as well. As Jan-Melissa Schramm notes: 178

“The outstanding feature of the Victorian law was ‘the extent to which it

prevented potential witnesses from giving testimony.’ The parties to a civil case

and the accused in a criminal trial were the most notorious examples… but many

other potential witnesses were prevented from testifying on oath, by reason of

their past histories or their religious beliefs. Non-Christians were regarded as

incompetent to give evidence as they were unable to be bound by the solemn oath

of truthfulness.” (64)

At every turn for Victorians, even in the ability to give legal testimony, religion as identity is inescapable, as the Anglican church constitutes a governing body that oversees the events of British life, conferring them with the legal approval (or disapproval) of the nation-state. Whether characters are Anglican or not (perhaps especially if they are not), the Church holds sway and enforces the legitimacy of its control through its administration of these documents and testimonies. In this atmosphere, Catholicism is a mark of oppression and secrecy; Judaism others its practitioners; conversion is dangerously unsettling; and being non-Christian effectively removes the legitimacy of one’s testimony as a witness, or the evidence one might offer.

The Gothic, the sensation novel, and the detective novel reflect the role of the

Church; obviously, this occurs for reasons of verisimilitude, as religion is a part of characters’ lives just as it was an unavoidable part of Victorian’s lives. However, the way that religion appears demonstrates an overlap between genre and topic that goes beyond convenience or coincidence. Beyond the distrust of Catholicism or the role of the

Anglican church, the texts gesture towards religion in a way that indicates that religious belief is in the process of changing from public to private. Betteredge’s early comment 179 about being Christian despite his feelings on the structure of the church, the clergy, speaks to this shift. Once disabilities on participation in government began to be lifted throughout the Victorian period, religion became something that could be practiced privately in the home without the implication that it impacted public participation and performance. At least, this is the tacit understanding that the lifting of disabilities both implied and perhaps encouraged. However, as shown in The Moonstone, this separation between public and private, while perhaps nominally identified by legal shifts, cannot be seen as strict or without complications. In the case of the central community, what appears to be a series of individuals with private beliefs is actually revealed to be a coherent group with a specific social ethos that, even though it often remains unspoken, still holds sway. In the case of the Brahmin, this also proves true, as their quest is almost solely religious in cause.

It is essential to take into account the religious context of the Moonstone

Diamond, in that the text is specific about the nature of its origins. Collins makes it clear in his introduction that the diamond is modeled on “two of the royal diamonds of Europe.

The magnificent stone which adorns the top of the Russian Imperial Sceptre, was once the eye of an Indian idol. The famous Koh-i-Noor is also supposed to have been one of the sacred gems of India; and, more than this, to have been the subject of a prediction, which prophesied certain misfortune to the persons who should divert it from its ancient uses” (4). He also takes care to locate it in the framework around the novel, describing it in the prologue’s letter as a diamond that had been “set in the forehead of the four-handed

Indian god who typifies the Moon” (11). He recounts the diamond’s history, including its salvation from Muslim pillaging in the eleventh century, and the ensuing vision that three 180

Brahmins have of Vishnu, who “commanded that the Moonstone should be watched, from that time forth, by three priests in turn, night and day, to the end of the generations of men” (12). Like any good antiques assessor, Collins knows that the key to an object’s mystique and value is its provenance. The introduction establishes the line of possession of the diamond, and makes it clear how it has made its ill-gotten way from India to

England. It also describes the aura that surrounds the object. This object is not just a diamond, it is a specific, named diamond whose very moniker references the Moon god from whose forehead it sprang.

The fact that the Moonstone begins and ends in its religious context raises questions about its religious power, but also suggests that the religious community retelling the story of the Moonstone’s loss is equally invested in the Moonstone returning to its Hindu context. Indeed, the only one who seems to truly mourn the Moonstone’s loss is Rachel, and even this distress is revealed to be of the romantic, rather than the economic or aesthetic kind. The other characters are all concerned with the entrance of the Moonstone into the Verinder household, and, as it breaks apart Franklin and Rachel and perhaps contributes to the decline of Lady Verinder’s condition, the Moonstone seems to confirm these characters’ worst fears.

Some of these fears stem from the ill-gotten gain of the diamond, but they just as clearly stem from its “cursed” nature. Betteredge refers to it as a “plaguy diamond,” and when Franklin Blake introduces the story of the diamond to Betteredge, he concludes his tale by asking, perhaps rhetorically, “In bringing the Moonstone to my aunt’s house, am I serving his vengeance blindfold, or am I vindicating him in the character of a penitent and Christian man?” (54). Betteredge and Franklin discuss the danger that the diamond 181 presents, and explore both of these options, implying that vengeance cannot be Christian, and that only under a change of heart that is religiously motivated could the gift of the diamond be pure. Because of the impossibility of answering these questions, the diamond remains tainted by both its Hindu origin and the proposed unchristian motives behind the

Uncle’s gift. The fact that the Moonstone is taken seriously as an object that carries its own danger indicates its threat to the Christian community it enters, as well as establishes the common religious outlook held by its members across class structure. Both

Betteredge and Franklin Blake see the diamond as problematic for the same reasons, which stem from the prophetic nature of its provenance. The diamond is ill-gotten, and the shunning of the man who stole it from India seems to cast a pall over the item. In addition, the Uncle’s paranoia about the safety of his life, and his belief in the reality of the threat against him, are both reasons to view the diamond and its entrance into the house with suspicion. Could it still be carrying that curse, and could it be placing the household in danger, either physically or metaphysically?

Ultimately, the fact that the diamond could hypothetically carry its own religious power is unsettling to the Christian community it enters, and the fact that it seems to fulfill its purpose predetermines the necessity of its exile from that same community.

Indeed, the events of the book don’t even require a detective, ultimately, only a kind of stenographer or assembler. While Ezra Jennings’s experiment reveals how the diamond left the Verinder household, Ablewhite’s death and the diamond’s true loss, which happen despite wariness, mark the true ending of the mystery, paving the way for the diamond to return to its origins and Rachel and Franklin to happily marry. Thus, The

Moonstone is indeed a detective novel that argues against the necessity of detectives. 182

Jennings’s trick is surely neat, but it only confirms what the community already knows: that Blake could not have taken the diamond in his right mind, and that Rachel is innocent of any sort of stain on her reputation. The fact that the community already knows this confirms Miller’s argument about its ability to self-police, yet makes a convincing argument for the role of religious knowing in this act of self-policing. This self-policing is specifically identified as religious later on in the novel, yet the systematization of its detection is not disciplinary, but rather, expansive. While scientific self-policing seems to indicate culpability, deflowering, and deceit, religious self-policing emphasizes knowledge of one’s identity and that of one’s fellow community members in the face of outside attempts to define and clarify. Most importantly, religious self- policing emphasizes forgiveness. When Rosanna is distressed, Betteredge comments to her: “Why not speak to my lady? The way to relieve your mind is to speak to the merciful and Christian mistress who has always been kind to you” (155). While others are quick to judge Rosanna, Betteredge and his lady extend this Christian model of mercy and forgiveness long past when it appears correct to do so. However, the novel proves them right. Rosanna is innocent of stealing the diamond herself. She is not entirely innocent, in that her crime is the love and devotion that causes her to try and prevent others from discovering Franklin Blake’s involvement, but she has not stolen the diamond as she has been accused of doing. The Christian basis for Betteredge’s knowledge remains a fact that prompts the reader to inquire why it is important that the community is able to religiously police itself in particular.

Part of this importance seems to be that the ability to correctly interpret stands as a measure for the health and endurance of the community itself. The reader’s abilities are 183 matched against the community’s, as the text encourages the reader to examine the materiality of the clues alongside the narrators, presenting the reader with the nightgown that becomes a metaphorical burial shroud for Rosanna, the smudge of paint that carries the aura of sexual impropriety, and the money-lender’s banking receipt for an object of

“great value.” Miss Clack, who circulates her own system of ineffective, religious clues in the form of pamphlets, is contrasted with Lady Verinder, who politely refuses her religious tracts and continues to practice her own form of Christianity.

The fact that the characters of the text distrust and avoid Miss Clack at all costs indicates that the community is able to successfully read the more egregious of religious manipulations. Godfrey Ablewhite escapes scrutiny for much longer, as his performance of religious identity is ultimately more convincing. But to only pay attention to the

Christian context as a litmus test for successful reading and detecting is problematic, because the text itself presents Hinduism as a troubling and intriguing alternative. While the Moonstone might be valuable in its temporary Christian community as a representation of Franklin and Rachel’s love (he is the one who delivers the gift, even if it is not his) and significant economic value, in the context of the Hindu religion it is valuable because of its religious form and function.

The Moonstone has received extensive attention in its postcolonial context.

Timothy Carens and Ian Duncan, among other critics, have observed that the presence of

India in the text seems to present a savage counterpoint to British rationality, but that in reality, this savagery can be located in the colonizing country itself. As Duncan notes in the most faithful reading of the novel to date, the colonial epistemology of the novel does not solely use India as an other. According to Duncan, “India bears instead ‘the 184 irresistible positivity’ of an alien force that breaks in and out of the domestic order, effortlessly eluding a circumscribed agency of detection” (302). However, Duncan is not alone among postcolonial critics in that he does not pay sustained attention to the specific religion associated with India and its intrusions into the colonizing country referenced in

The Moonstone, referring to it in his essay only as a “cult” and a “devilish Hindu culture”

(297, 300). Krishna Manavalli’s 2007 essay “Collins, Colonial Crime, and the Brahmin

Sublime: The Orientalist Vision of a Hindu-Brahmin in The Moonstone” argues that ignoring this specific religious context is problematic, in that allowing it to go unexamined allows Collins’s Orientalizing to stand without question. I argue that it is problematic to ignore the religious aspect of this intrusion simply because the text introduces the idea of the religion and presents it as coeval with a kind of detection.

Duncan’s conflation of the religious and the supernatural in his dealings with

Hinduism is perhaps understandable, as it is even encouraged by Collins’s text, which does not decisively conclude whether the Brahmin are admirable priests in disguise, or sinister figures with the power to co-opt a young boy and force him to see the future in the palm of his hand. As Betteredge remarks of the Moonstone itself, “here was our quiet

English house suddenly invaded by a devilish Indian Diamond—bringing after it a conspiracy of living rogues, set loose on us by the vengeance of a dead man” (46). Even

Betteredge cannot believe that this is occurring in the current time period, “the nineteenth century, mind; in an age of progress, and in a country which rejoices in the blessings of the British constitution” (46). This devotion to religion in pursuit of an object, and the juxtaposition with supposedly rational English motivations, baffles Betteredge. He goes so far as to locate the quest as regressive, measured against “progress” and the “British 185 constitution.” The constitution here, of course, could be both the makeup of the British individual (presumably sensible, rational, and unlikely to pursue a religious artifact21) as well as the British constitution itself, involving parliamentary sovereignty and the recognition of the Church of England as the official Church in England. Sensing himself in danger, Betteredge falls back on his British identity, and the blessings that it brings

(including Anglicanism) as a way to differentiate his community from the three “rogues.”

Yet while Betteredge takes this stance about the priests early on, Franklin Blake and Murthwaite eventually convince him and other Christian characters in the novel that the faith of the Hindus is to be taken seriously. Even though Franklin Blake refers to the religion as “some old Hindoo superstition,” he goes on to remark that the actions of the priests seem “perfectly consistent with everything that we know of the patience of

Oriental races, and the influence of Oriental religions” (51). Blake links the religion of the priests with their identity as well, providing an apt if perhaps unsettling parallel between the Hindus and the Christian community in which the Diamond now finds itself.

This basis for their reasoning is not to be dismissed. For example, Betteredge releases the dogs onto the grounds at night just as much because the three Indians are Hindu and

“other” as he does because they might enter the house and steal the Diamond. Mr.

Murthwaite has warned him of this threat explicitly, telling him that the men have sacrificed their caste, a system in which they were Brahmin, in order to pursue the diamond. This religious choice highlights the seriousness of their cause and the lengths they will go to achieve it: “The sacrifice of caste is a serious thing in India. The sacrifice

21 As we know, this is untrue, given the colonial history of pillaging other countries’ holy artifacts, including the initial pilfering of the Diamond that sets off the story’s events. However, it is an important façade to maintain in order to differentiate the colonizing country from the colonized. 186 of life is nothing at all” (85). Betteredge, though the idea of murder for the sake of a religious icon clashes with his “English ideas” (84), must come to terms with this seriousness; in addition, observing this seriousness as a strange thing for an “other” to possess both emphasizes the depth of his Anglican devotion and worldview and obscures the way that his own religion is no less a determinant of his actions.

The danger Murthwaite notes is repeatedly and explicitly tied to the diamond’s religious context, as Murthwaite underscores at Rachel’s birthday party: “If you ever go to India, Miss Verinder, don’t take your uncle’s birthday gift with you. A Hindoo diamond is sometimes part of a Hindoo religion. I know a certain city, and a certain temple in that city, where, dressed as you are now, your life would not be worth five minutes’ purchase” (78). Collins, through Blake’s Orientalizing and Murthwaite’s own colonial intrusions, is able to rely on the trope of the mysticism of Eastern religions in order to present a strange and alluring counterpoint to the supposedly rational imperialist

Anglicanism. In fact, the novel goes so far as to suggest that this supposedly rational

Anglicanism must reject these forms of mysticism in order to maintain its presumption of rationality and Protestantism, even if Anglicanism is relying on similar mystical constructs (Betteredge’s bibliomancy, or Blake’s doubts about carrying out the dying

Uncle’s “curse”). For example, seeing the palmful of ink as “hocus-pocus” (52) is integral to recognizing the seriousness of the priests’ quest, which is in fact ultimately successful.

Duncan convincingly argues in his reading that “the English failure to recover the

Moonstone mirrors an Indian success. The Moonstone is not lost but restored, to sacred origins” (301). This restoration stages the colonial epistemology as one of anxiety (or 187 relief) due to the fact that “The Moonstone apprehends an India that exceeds and outlasts

British dominion and knowledge” (302). An India that endures and thus presents a site of resistance to British imperializing is indeed troubling to the colonial project, though the novel gives the reader both negative (Betteredge’s) and positive (Murthwaite’s) views of the Indian people. While Murthwaite’s view is undoubtedly Orientalizing, due to his status as an agent of colonialism, the novel does ultimately privilege his descriptions of the three Indians, as he is a first-person observer of their character. He also has, literally, the last words in the novel as the concluding speaker, communicating to Franklin Blake from India itself. The anxiety around the resistance of India to its colonial occupation is directly connected to India’s religious context. Not only is the diamond a religious artifact, any recognition of the durability of Hinduism and its adherents is a threat to

Western religion, in that Western religion is shown to be less storied, less historic, and even weaker in comparison.22

If we take Collins’s suggestively historical lens from the prologue seriously, then the religiously-motivated guarding of the Moonstone has resulted in the fulfillment of its curse. Though the conclusion of Rachel and Franklin’s romance and the solving of the mystery itself might seem to be the focal point of the text, the conclusion of the framework argues otherwise: “And there, in the forehead of the deity, gleamed the yellow

Diamond, whose splendour had last shone on me in England, from the bosom of a woman’s dress!” (472). These words, spoken by the disguised Murthwaite, are some of

22 The novel includes a fitting metaphor for this occupation in the discussions between the Constable and the gardener about roses. Grafting and importation of foreign plants for the English country garden was often paralleled with the colonization process: did the foreign intruders bear diseases that would disrupt the garden? Would they weaken or improve English stock with grafting? 188 the last in the novel. The Diamond, we are told, has made its way back to its religious context after having survived the insult of a secular, aesthetic one. We no longer hear of

Rachel, we hear only of “a woman,” as if the preceding story can be reduced to abstract descriptors, and the yellow Diamond is returned to its deity’s forehead.

Yet although Rachel is reduced to “a woman” in the conclusion, the Hindus are not given principal treatment in the novel. In fact, the structure of the novel itself actually parallels the policing that occurs in the novel, as the only parts in which the Hindu context of the Moonstone are focused on directly are the literal borders of the novel. The strange religion is expelled from the Verinder community in the same way that the advice of outsiders and the eventual diamond thief are. In addition, when the Indians appear in the novel, it is almost always peripherally. While they appear in person more than once at the beginning of Betteredge’s narrative, the other times they are discussed are second- hand accounts of their presence outside of a bank, their time in jail, or descriptions of a certain scent when a narrator enters a room.

Giving Murthwaite the final word, though it is describing the loss of the diamond, does assert the dominance and control of the Christian worldview over the telling of the narrative. Narrating, here, is a form of power, which controls the text just as the national narration of religion allows the nation to nominally control and delineate the powers and rights of religions. However, as Gauri Viswanathan points out, naming and granting rights to religions instead revealed cultural discomfort over the nation’s lack of power over religions, which were seen as encouraging allegiance to an entity other than the nation. In Viswanathan’s estimation, the process that began in the nineteenth century resulted in religion being co-opted by the very system that it challenged. Here, the 189

Hinduism of The Moonstone represents something even more foreign and threatening than Dissenting religions or Judaism; Murthwaite being the focalizer through which we receive news of the diamond’s return can be an image of control, yet can also indicate this same uneasiness. The way that the text describes the heathenness of Hindu prophecy and practice ultimately raises significant questions about its counterpart, Christianity.

Namely, if it is problematic or frightening that the Hindus might see the future and predict its machinations, why isn’t it problematic that it appears to be the Christian nature of Betteredge and Lady Verinder that allows them to correctly surmise who has not stolen the diamond?

As a way of accessing this question, the text presents the character of Ezra

Jennings as a kind of model that navigates between the supposed mysticism of the Hindus and the supposedly logical Anglicans. Much has been written about the character of Ezra

Jennings and this liminal status. Critics including Jenny Bourne Taylor, Melissa Free,

Sharleen Modal, Jaya Mehta, and Vicki Corcoran Willey have wrestled with Jennings’s status in both the text and in the colonial context, identifying him as a hybrid whose presence unsettles the text as a reminder of colonial legacies and casualties. His origins, while hinted at in the novel, are never made explicit, which, along with the nature of the scandal that unfairly follows him, is the novel’s truly unsolvable mystery. Yet Jennings is a hybrid in another, previously unexplored way as well: he presents a link between the scientific reasoning that is usually aligned with the detective novel and the religious epistemology that is central to the Verinder community’s ability to police itself. And he does so from a position that is necessarily and visibly entangled with the colonies. 190

Through his hybridity, he represents a melding of the British and the colonized; as

Blake, the most perceptive reader in the novel, remarks “He had suffered as few men suffer; and there was a mixture of some foreign race in his English blood” (181). He is hybrid in other ways as well—his “dreamy” (159, 181) eyes gesture towards an

Orientalist understanding of the mysticism of the East. In addition, his capacity to imagine, portrayed in his stitching together of Mr. Candy’s narrative, meshes strangely but effectively with his scientific and psychological abilities. He proves to be a figure that combines epistemologies with skill and dexterity, using this ability to help solve the mystery.

He is unusual in this ability to integrate. After meeting resistance from Bruff,

Jennings encounters a stubborn Betteredge, who draws a direct parallel between the science of the experiment and the Hindu seers: “It ends, Mr. Ezra Jennings, in a conjuring trick being performed on Mr. Franklin Blake by a doctor’s assistant with a bottle of laudanum; and, by the living jingo, I’m appointed, in my old age, to be conjuror’s boy!”

(195). In fact, to Betteredge, the experiment itself is an example of “Christians [taking] leave of their senses” (195). This outburst refers us back to Betteredge’s opening remarks, when his reading of a Christian text establishes his identity; his naïve reading eliminates the possibility of placing trust in science, and instead throws into relief

Jennings’s own ability in terms of constructing a hybrid narrative. The text does not have to dismiss the lure of the supernatural in order to address a scientific epistemology. While

Betteredge may associate the experiment with the hocus-pocus of the Indians, Ezra

Jennings appreciates both the power of science in constructing narratives as well as the strength of religion in confirming them. 191

As he remarks when he meets Franklin Blake and is treated with respect by him,

“I can only assert my innocence. I assert it, Sir, on my oath as a Christian. It is useless to appeal to my honor as a man” (184). In terms of an anthropology of religion, Jennings represents the most extreme extension of the idea: his identity as a man comes second to his identity as a Christian, and the religion is the reference that matters in terms of his character and honor. Belief becomes seamless in this context, yet, as Jennings shows, there need not be conflict between religious and scientific epistemologies. In fact, a successful integration of the two may provide not only the impetus for the solving of the mystery, but proof beyond a doubt as well. It is significant that he is able to achieve this integration, for the way that he bridges the divide between scientific rationality and mysticism is in fact through imaginative narrative. His faithful reconstruction of Mr.

Candy’s “wanderings,” which he has transcribed as if he were taking Mr. Candy’s confession at his bedside, and the way he describes his piecing together of the puzzle as

“a confirmation of the theory that [he] held” (182) locates him as scientist, author, and receptive confessor, and all of these contexts are crucial to the resolution of the mystery.

192

Coda

Catherine’s night was a night of intense mental struggle. Her struggle was one

with which the modern world has perhaps but scant sympathy. Instinctively we

feel such things out of place in our easy indifferent generation. We think them

more than half unreal. We are so apt to take it for granted that the world has

outgrown the religious thirst for sanctification, for a perfect moral consistency, as

it has outgrown so many of the older complications of the sentiment of honour.

And meanwhile half the tragedy of our times lies in this perpetual clashing of two

estimates of life—the estimate which is the offspring of the scientific spirit, and

which is forever making the visible world fairer and more desirable in mortal

eyes; and the estimate of Saint Augustine.

(131)

Catherine, the protagonist of Mrs. Humphry Ward’s immensely popular Robert

Elsmere (1888), undergoes great suffering as part of her courtship with the titular Robert.

Interestingly, Catherine does love Robert, but she is loathe to marry him because she does not feel she can stray from the religion she has inherited from her father. As Ward writes,

“This girl amid her mountains had carried religion as far as religion can be carried before it meets life in the wrestle appointed it. The calm, simple outlines of things are blurring before her eyes; the great placid deeps of the soul are breaking up” (118-9). The opening passage identifies this “wrestle” of religion meeting life as the conflict between the

Protestant view of Saint Augustine as a patron of the Reformation, and science; a clash between a vision of salvation and a world that is increasingly shown to offer scientific 193 explanations to questions usually seen as answerable only in the deferred promise of that divine afterlife. While this may seem anachronistic to a modern reader, Ward cautions that this struggle is very much an ongoing one, and that to take the resolution of the struggle for granted is to open oneself up to tragedy. In the interests of exposing the habit of taking this struggle for granted, the novel itself stages Catherine’s depth of belief as anachronistic, much like Eliot’s depiction of the misplaced saintliness of Dorothea earlier in the century. Since she is structured by the fiercely loyal faith of her father, Catherine is hard-pressed to imagine anything beyond the worldview she has inherited from her family and cloistered mountain community. Religion, here, is figured as something that the individual maintains, which can ultimately rub up against “life,” or perhaps, “reality.”

However, the fault is not solely held by the individual whose beliefs appear anachronistic: it is also shouldered by a society that refuses to acknowledge the way that conflicts of belief still inescapably shape the fault-lines of “modern” society. The tragedy

Ward identifies in this passage seems to be that of a misreading: not recognizing the root cause of conflict can only lead to more conflict in a society; deeming the conflict between sacred and secular settled when it is in fact still a source of great strife, is problematic.

Published so late in the century, Robert Elsmere’s story of a young clergyman’s loss of faith would seem to be an appropriately secular-leaning bookend to the nineteenth-century. While it’s true that Elsmere loses his faith in the divinity of Christ and the possibility of miracles, he does not in fact become an atheist or agnostic, and instead dedicates himself to the establishment of a Dissenting religion for non-believers like himself. As I have recounted in the course of this dissertation, there has been historical and critical work done complicating the secular thesis concerning the 194 nineteenth-century, and one need only look at the popularity of Robert Elsmere to confirm that religion was not only still a very relevant part of many Victorians’ lives, but that the status of religion and its treatment in the novel was also far from settled at the century’s close. Indeed, it remained a rich source of conflict and exploration in terms of philosophical and emotional inquiry, as well as a specifically powerful tool through which novelists might investigate the changing status of marriage.

Robert Elsmere spoke to large numbers of readers, and in subsequent criticism of the work, this widespread appeal was actually seen as a danger. The appeal of nonconformist writers at the end of the century drew crowds similar to those who would attend the speeches of ministers, and with similar fervor. In light of this blurring of distinctions, we might imagine Dinah’s sermon on the green in Adam Bede re- contextualized as a talk on a kind of book tour, which in fact, given its literary representation, it already is. Lynn Hapgood notes: “Priest and novelist appeared to have exchanged or at least blurred their traditional roles. This alteration in the relationship between fictional, theological or related texts and reader response became a subject for debate between priests and literary critics” (5), with anxiety expressed on both sides. As

E.M. Chapman described in a 1910 survey of literature and religion, Robert Elsmere

“was more intellectually dangerous because of its assumption of spurious theological authority,” which “demanded [a] non-literary response because the hero’s loss of faith is directly related within the text to actual biblical, theological and scientific works and extracts, which presents ‘impregnable premises and invincible arguments’ before which

Robert’s faith crumbles” (5-6). This non-literary response treated the novel as a theological tract, with readers parsing these very biblical and theological extracts in 195 hopes of either combatting or supporting Robert’s embrace of Higher Criticism. The realism that was perhaps too real, as in Eliot’s generated sermon in Adam Bede, illuminates again the centrality of the act of interpretation to the intersection between religion and literature.

In Ward’s world, love can be interpreted as both scientific and Augustinian.

While Catherine’s initial love is akin to religious fervor, her developing process of learning to love a man who is losing his religious faith becomes much more scientific:

Catherine examines and weighs her entrenched beliefs, and learns how to imagine loving her husband once he has abandoned the Church and perhaps even the concept of the divinity of Jesus. As Catherine reprimands herself after much prayer, “That I should think it could be God’s will that I should leave you, or torture you, my poor husband! I had not only been wicked towards you—I had offended Christ. I could think of nothing as I lay there—again and again—but “Little children, love one another; little children, love one another” (873). Catherine is able to analyze the components of her belief and find a meeting ground between Robert’s corruption by the scientific world and her own faith: deeply held faith, which she arrives at after reexamining the inherited institutions of her own world and finding them lacking. The novel shows Catherine and Robert to be a true religious partnership; she supports him even in his heretical move towards establishing his own church. This love can still be read as an Augustinian sign of the love and forgiveness of Christ, as well as an Augustinian vision of love on earth leading to reunion in the afterlife. At the close of the novel, Catherine is shown to worship in her own

Church on Sunday mornings, and spend Sunday afternoons at the church building that

Robert has constructed. Ward writes, “She lived for one hope only; and the years passed 196 all too slowly” (604). Catherine and Robert are to be reunited in heaven in her vision, and her earthly love has made life on earth almost unbearable in her desire to reach the afterlife to reunite with her beloved.

This is quite a contrast, of course, to Mansfield Park. Fanny, unable to articulate her resistance to those around her whom she finds toxic or problematic, is never her own person before she is subsumed into marriage, and her marriage is a mutually beneficial conflation of her identity with her spouse’s that provides earthly union with no question of union in the afterlife. In Adam Bede, Dinah is conveniently aided in her retirement from public preaching into domestic duties by the revision of the Methodist laws shortly after her marriage, abdicating her of any responsibility to try and maintain her status as a female preacher in a marriage that would have frowned upon it. In The Moonstone,

Rachel’s faith in Franklin is rewarded, and, though she is wealthy before they fall in love, their inter-familial marriage maintains her household’s Christian beliefs as well as gestures towards a cosmopolitan future for their union. In Villette, Lucy’s fierce interiority and inscrutability stages the differences in worldview, Catholic and Protestant, that characterize the marriage plot, which remains ultimately unconsummated, perhaps due to this very interiority. Whereas Fanny and Dinah can be subsumed by marriage,

Lucy and Margaret cannot and remain a resistant narrative element. While Margaret and

Mr. Thornton do seem as initially incompatible as Lucy and M. Paul Emanuel, their eventual union is not doomed by storm or surveillance. Margaret, with her unrestricted access to the streets of Milton as well as the homes of its inhabitants, is Lucy’s handsome opposite. Here, religion is not a stricture but rather a structure that inevitably draws the marriage plot’s participants together. Margaret is also an individual who cannot enter into 197 marriage until she is independently wealthy and assured of her own power and control.

Marriage does not consume her; rather, it gives her greater oversight of both industry and her own relationship.

These later developments in the intersection between religion and the marriage plot seem paradoxical in light of Victorian debates about secularization and loss of faith.

Since women were seen as being in charge of the domestic sphere, and since this sphere was closely tied to home and the religion of the family, women were often blamed for the increasing loss of faith that supposedly unfolded as the century progressed. As women won concessions in property rights and custody issues, and as women sought to move beyond the sphere of the domestic, this was seen as a threat to established religious order and the institutional sway of marriage. By extension, this threat to religion and the married household could undermine aspects of national identity and loosen British control of what it meant to be a citizen. However, in these novels, women’s increasing independence and ability to articulate deeply held belief actually becomes an asset: when women are able to fully navigate the and/or of that faith, they in turn become more fully realized as characters, partners, and, quite possibly, citizens. Rather than weakening social fabric, these women are shown to become productive business-owners, reformers, and educators. And rather than limiting their marriage options, these expanding roles become integral to their functions as spouses and as religious adherents. The variation and complexity of religion in the texts suggests a groundwork for religious pluralism that, while it may trouble the control of the nation, actually strengthens narrative variety and structure, uncoupling cause and effect in a way that presages the developments of modernism. 198

To conclude, the novel, far from rejecting religion or attempting to sideline it in the interests of presenting itself, as Matthew Arnold suggests, as a newer, secular way of allowing novelists to investigate questions of ethics and morality, proves itself interested in the way that the secular and the sacred remain intertwined. This interpellation proves much more complicated than we might expect, given its visibility as a source of humor or grounds for dismissal in typically “religious” figures such as Miss Clack, Reverend

Chadband, or Mrs. Proudie and Mr. Slope. What we find, in examining the depictions of deeply held faith in the novel, is that even authors such as Collins, Dickens, and Trollope are invested in the question of the role of the faithful individual in society. A faithful reading recognizes the presence and influence of religion in many arenas. Focusing here on the marriage plot has allowed us to observe how women especially are used to stage, reconcile, and complicate the question of private belief vs. public citizenship in the context of partnership. This tradition, which is visible in the novels discussed here as well as other Victorian texts from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe to Mary Cholmondeley’s Red

Pottage, establishes and codifies an enduring structure in the novel, suggesting the religious roots of the seemingly separate epistemologies such as law and rhetoric endure and maintain in spite of or even because of Victorian’s and literary history’s preoccupation with the secular thesis. Indeed, this tradition of working through the issues of secularization through women and women’s role in the marriage plot and the novel can be seen to pervade discourse outside literature to this day, as women’s bodies and their roles in the house and their community are continually used as a staging ground for political and legal conflicts that have everything to do with their underlying religious structures. Acknowledging the religious debt of the Victorian novel, and observing the 199 way that religion continues to structure Victorian plots, means that we can not only more fully understand the history of the Victorian novel, but that we may begin to build a more complete vocabulary with which to discuss the renderings of religion in our contemporary society that are often still treated as mystified or illegible.

200

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