RICE UNIVERSITY The Victorian Religious Novel: Conversion, Confession, and the Marriage Plot by Eun Young Koh A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE Doctor of Philosophy APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE: Helena Michie, Professor of English, Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor in Robert~ L. Patten, Professor of English, Lynette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor, Department Chair Religious Studies HOUSTON, TEXAS August 2011 ABSTRACT The Victorian Religious Novel: Conversion, Confession, and the Marriage Plot by Eun Young Koh Victorian scholars of fiction have hitherto largely overlooked that fiction was an important site for Victorian authors and readers to engage in open discussion of religious issues in the Victorian period, often known, even to itself, as the "Age of 'Faith and Doubt."' Along with sermons and religious tracts, which often directly addressed popular audiences, fiction became one of the most popular arenas for debating theology and religious practices. My project aims to revive interest in the religious novel genre by defining the genre, positioning it within its cultural context, and looking at how it engages in active and reciprocal conversations with other genres, fictional and nonfictional. This new approach reveals how the religious novel, long derided or ignored by critics, often leads the way with narrative innovations. Most interestingly, the religious novel, whose alternative name is tellingly the "theological romance," embraces and adopts one of the most popular plot lines of the Victorian novel tradition, namely the marriage/courtship plot, and develops it into the post-marriage plot, a plot that focuses on and examines marital life. The marriage plot serves, for many of these novels, in place of detailed theological arguments as a way of producing and embodying conversion. The religious novel actually anticipates changes in the nineteenth- century novel by expanding the plot beyond courtship and marriage. Table of Contents Chapter 1 : "What Do Novels Have to Do with Theology?" Victorian Religious Context: The History of Diversity 7 The Religious Novel Genre 20 "Novels of Faith and Doubt" 35 Chapter 2: Hybridity of the Victorian Religious Novel Genre: "Not a Work of Fiction, in the Ordinary Acceptation ofthe Term" 41 Religious Tracts 50 Religious Novels and Subgenres 83 Charles Lever; or, The Man ofthe Nineteenth Century 92 The Nemesis ofFaith I 00 The Outcast 115 Chapter 3: The Conversion Narrative of the Victorian Religious Novel: "Was Blind, but Now I See" 135 Confession/Testimony 147 "Dreamland" 156 "Many Silences" 176 "The Three Happiest Years of My Life" 181 Chapter 4: After "Happily Ever After": The Journey from the Marriage Plot to the Postmarriage Plot 204 The Postmarriage Plot 214 Man and Wife in Victorian Religious Novels 217 iv High Church and Under Which Lord?: Family Power Relations 218 The Heir ofRedcly.ffe: Egalitarian Education Plot 236 The Perpetual Curate and Robert Elsmere: Wives' Stories 253 Middlemarch: The Influence of the Religious Novel Tradition 259 Works Cited 287 1 Chapter 1 "What Do Novels Have to Do with Theology?" "What do novels have to do with theology?" is the rhetorical question with which J. Russell Perkin opens his recent book Theology and the Victorian Novel (3). In the next sentence he provides one "obvious answer to this question": "not very much" (3). Perkin goes on to explain, "Of all the literary genres, the novel is the most this-worldly" and, for that reason, "it is customary to link the rise of the novel with the demise of a religious world view" (3). Nevertheless, he undertakes to provide "a theological reading of a series of mainly canonical Victorian novels" (4): My underlying assumption in this book is that if religion was as central to the life of Victorian England as we generally assume that it was, then it should have a significant impact on the Victorian novel in general, and not just on those novels in which religious issues are the primary theme. ( 5) While I heartily agree with Perkin that "canonical" Victorian novels must reflect the panoramic landscape ofthe Victorian religious world, it is "those novels in which religious issues are the primary theme" that interest me here. Perkin goes on to say that he does not include explicitly religious novels for two good reasons: [M]ost Victorian religious novels do not offer a particularly profound view of their subject matter and are often in effect fictional pamphlets that argue in favour of positions discussed with greater insight and subtlety in the theologians who formulated those positions. Secondly, there are a number of valuable studies that 2 survey Victorian religious fiction, or at least aspects of it such as the novel of faith and doubt, the novel and the Oxford Movement, or the historical novel of the early church. (5) I would take issue with Perkin's confident assertion that there have been "a number of valuable studies" about Victorian religious novels (5). 1 Most of these books focus on a small aspect of Victorian religion, and, as valuable as their studies are, they are quite outdated. While Margaret M. Maison and Robert Lee Wolff provide helpful surveys on Victorian religious novels in general, their books are actually introductions to the world of Victorian religious novels, rather than scholarly studies themselves. 2 As I discuss later, Wolff meant his Gains and Losses to become a combined introduction to 121 novels in his important series Victorian Fiction: Novels of Faith and Doubt published from 1975 to 1977 by Garland Publishing. This project pays close attention to novels that are dismissed by Perkin as being "in effect fictional pamphlets that argue in favour of positions" and suggests reading these Victorian religious novels as a genre, a missing link in the rich tradition of the Victorian novel, that not only explains various Victorian religious references that are now unhappily overlooked or misunderstood by current scholars, but also reveals how "canonical" realistic novels have come to assume their characteristic features (5). The canonical authors Perkin studies-William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Bronte, 1 The books that he lists are Margaret M. Maison's Search Your Soul, Eustace: A Survey ofthe Religious Novel in the Victorian Age (1961; its US title is The Victorian Vision: Studies in the Religious Novel); Robert Lee Wolfrs Gains and Losses: Novels ofFaith and Doubt in Victorian England (1977); Joseph Ellis Baker's The Novel and the Oxford Movement (1932); Raymond Chapman's Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence ofthe Oxford Movement (1970); and Royal W. Rhodes's The Lion and the Cross: Early Christianity in Victorian Novels (1995). 2 When I say Maison's book is not scholarly, I do not mean to depreciate the value of her Victorian Vision, which is the book that has triggered my interest in the Victorian religious novel in the first place. However, it is hard to call a book with no referential data a serious work on the Victorian novel. It is sometimes quite challenging to locate some quotes she incorporated in her book. 3 Charlotte Mary Yonge, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy, along with Mary Augusta Ward (Robert Elsmere) and Walter Pater (Marius the Epicurean) in his conclusion-wrote their novels in the context of a diverse group of fictional texts that I am calling the Victorian religious novel (VRN). While the canonical novels Perkin cites are not as overtly propagandistic as the religious novels he excludes from his study are, I argue that these canonical novels, however indirectly or delicately, refer to or rely upon the VRN tradition in delivering their respective religious positions. The influence of these less canonical novels can hardly be overlooked. Perkin reads only a number of well-known Victorian realistic "canonical" novels to see the pervasiveness of Victorian religion. On the other hand, Wolff includes and reads mostly obscure and strongly propagandistic religious novels in his Victorian Fiction: Novels of Faith and Doubt series to reach the same conclusion. My project reads both "canonical" novels and obscure VRNs in the Novels of Faith and Doubt series to study the reason for the VRN's popularity, its generic characteristics and popular tropes, and its relation both to other genres and to the novel generally. Perhaps I need to clarify my definition of"canonical" here since mentioning "canonical" novels and VRNs separately might give the false impression that I take these two as two separate entities and "canons" as inscribed in stone. Canons do change, as we are well aware. We know how many of now "canonical" works were neglected in the past decades as books not worth the time it takes to read them. On the contrary, some VRNs enjoyed far wider circulation than did most novels we recognize as belonging to the Victorian "canon. "3 What I mean by "canon" is the group of realistic novels by authors like Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, the Brontes, and George Eliot, "classical Victorian" novels that we find 3 Chapter 2 compares numbers of circulations for some religious works and "canons." 4 under such a heading in bookstores and that we now often use to teach Victorian-novel courses. Since this project aims to trace influences and find reciprocal relationships, it is inevitable to designate separate names for each group of texts I discuss, but each name does not signal unchangeable entity. The Victorian age, appropriately titled by John Sutherland as the "age of 'Faith and Doubt,'" was an age of diverse religious faith in England, with various sects holding often-conflicting religious opinions (529). In the complicated history of Victorian religious conflict, fiction, along with sermons and religious tracts, became an important place for the representation of religious ideology and experience.