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,