The Persistence of Catholicism: How Eighteenth-Century English Writers Imagined a Minority Religious Community
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The Persistence of Catholicism: How Eighteenth-Century English Writers Imagined a Minority Religious Community by Geremy R. Carnes A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in The University of Michigan 2012 Doctoral Committee: Professor Lincoln B. Faller, Chair Professor David J. Hancock Professor Clement C. Hawes Professor David L. Porter Assistant Professor Sean R. Silver © Geremy R. Carnes 2012 Acknowledgements This dissertation could never have been written without the guidance, assistance, and simple goodwill of my colleagues and friends. I owe particular thanks to my committee members for seeing me through this project. I benefited immensely from the incisive criticism offered by my chair, Lincoln Faller, but even more so from his advice and wisdom. Several times in the past few years, he helped me steer my project back on track when it threatened to slip off the rails. David Porter’s comments on my work have refined my thinking and my writing in ways I never knew they needed refining, and I derived incalculable benefit from his dependably cheerful demeanor. My conversations with Sean Silver, whether about my research or the practical side of academia, are always as enjoyable as they are beneficial, and I look forward to having many more of them. And I am grateful to Clem Hawes and David Hancock for their generosity with their time. My exchanges with them helped me to define my project. Also, although they are not on my committee, I would like to thank Tina Lupton and Sunil Agnani for their insights and collegiality during my years in the program. There are many other individuals and groups without whose assistance I could not have finished this project, and I apologize for my inability to name them all here. But I would like to acknowledge my gratitude to the members of the Eighteenth-Century Studies Group and the Nineteenth-Century Forum for bearing with me through repeated workshops of my chapters; the Rackham Graduate School for their generous fellowships ii and grants; the staff at the British Library who assisted me with my research; and Jan Burgess, Senia Vasquez, and the rest of the staff in the English Department, who are as responsible as anyone for the fact that I made it through this program. Finally, and above all, I wish to thank my friends and family for their encouragement over the years. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my brilliant graduate cohort, particularly to Alison Carr, Molly Hatcher, Brian Matzke, Karen McConnell, and, most particularly, to Andromeda Hartwick, my partner in crime narratives. I will be forever grateful for their assistance, both tangible and intangible, over the past six years, but not nearly as grateful as I am for their friendship. iii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. ii Abstract ................................................................................................................................v Introduction ..........................................................................................................................1 Part One: John Dryden, Catholicism, and the Limits of the Restoration Stage Prologue to Part One ..............................................................................................24 Chapter One: Staging Tolerance in Tyrannick Love ..............................................28 Chapter Two: Persecution and Conversion in Don Sebastian ...............................70 Part Two: The Protestant Novel and the Unrepresentable English Catholic Prologue to Part Two ...........................................................................................123 Chapter Three: Roxana and England’s Catholic Captivity ..................................126 Chapter Four: Samuel Richardson and the Limits of Tolerance..........................168 Part Three: Catholic Literature and a Feminine Religious Community Prologue to Part Three .........................................................................................211 Chapter Five: Alexander Pope and Catholic Division .........................................214 Chapter Six: Intersections of Catholic and Female Identity in A Simple Story ...265 Coda .................................................................................................................................321 Bibliography ....................................................................................................................332 iv Abstract This dissertation studies the engagement of five major eighteenth-century English writers with their nation’s minority Catholic community. Though at the margins of English civil and social life, English Catholics continued to attract converts and remained politically and culturally important throughout the century. Anxieties about the place of Catholics in England suffuse the literature of the period, but they have been obscured by misleading narratives of the rise of a secular, tolerant modernity. This dissertation closely considers plays, novels, and poems whose concerns about English Catholicism have been mostly overlooked, and it investigates the political, cultural, and deeply personal work these texts perform. A central feature of that work is a refiguring of practices of the representation of Catholics and Catholicism. Even hostile writers recognize that the portrayal of Catholics must move beyond the simplistic demonization of traditional imagery. Playing with generic and formal boundaries, or turning to emerging techniques for portraying interior experience, these writers attempt to reimagine Catholics and England’s relationship with them. The first two chapters study John Dryden’s sympathetic portrayals of Catholics in plays written before and after his conversion. The pursuit of Catholic toleration informs his influential experimentation with Restoration heroic drama in Tyrannick Love, while the dramatic form of his masterpiece, Don Sebastian, models the closeting of English v Catholicism following the Glorious Revolution. Another pair of chapters compares novels whose explorations of human psychology work through anxieties over the vulnerability of Protestant identity. Daniel Defoe’s protean heroine in Roxana and Samuel Richardson’s immutable hero in Sir Charles Grandison variously represent their authors’ efforts to educate readers on how to resist seduction by the Catholic world. A final pair of chapters examines Alexander Pope’s proto-Gothic poems, Eloisa to Abelard and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s proto-Jacobin novel, A Simple Story. Exploring the feminization and victimization of their community, their works anticipate two genres very much concerned with the portrayal of oppression. This dissertation seeks to enrich our understanding of eighteenth-century literature by recovering the imaginative work English writers performed as they explored their nation’s troubled relationship with its Catholic community. vi 1 Introduction In 1685, John Gother, a Catholic priest, published a polemic titled A Papist Misrepresented, and Represented: Or, A Twofold Character of Popery. His stated goal is to compare the “Calumnies and Scandals” under which the Catholic Church stands accused by Protestants, with the actual “Faith and Doctrin of that Church.” While he devotes far more space to vindication than to slander, the Papist Misrepresented is inevitably the more compelling figure. Gother sums him up as “a perverse, malicious sort of Creature, Superstitious, Idolatrous, Atheistical, Cruel, Bloody-minded, Barbarous, Treacherous, and so Prophane, and every way Unhumane, that ’tis in some manner doubted whether he be a Man, or no.” Indeed, Gother reveals how intimately familiar he is with the nature of this devilish being. He informs us, I … have describ’d him exactly according to the Apprehension I had of a Papist, fram’d by me when I was a Protestant; with the addition only of some few Points, which have been violently charged against me, by some intimate Friends of late, to shew the unreasonableness of my Choice, after the quitting that Communion.1 Gother was raised a Presbyterian before converting to Catholicism as an adult. The Papist Misrepresented had been living in his imagination long before the Papist Represented took up residence there. And given the venom with which Gother describes this monster, it appears that even after his conversion, the Papist Misrepresented continues to haunt him. 1 John Gother, A Papist Misrepresented, and Represented: Or, A Twofold Character of Popery (London, 1685), 10, 111, 11. 2 The fact that this figure pervaded English culture indicates the immensity of the challenges confronting Catholic converts. Not only did converts have to submit to legal penalties that effectively revoked their status as English subjects, but they were also faced with the conceptual and emotional obstacles generated by prejudices that their culture constantly reinforced. And then, of course, there were the social obstacles to conversion, of having to confront “intimate friends” who were still very much in the grip of their anti- Catholic prejudices. Indeed, Gother’s friends are faced with a severe psychological struggle of their own. They have to watch a fellow countryman and coreligionist, and a man of obviously strong mental faculties, transform into one of these “Unhumane” creatures. Of course,