Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies LORI BRANCH, SERIES EDITOR All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. PURITANISM and MODERNIST NOVELS From Moral Character to the Ethical Self Lynne W. Hinojosa THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PREss • COLUMBUS All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Copyright © 2015 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hinojosa, Lynne W., 1966– Puritanism and modernist novels : from moral character to the ethical self / Lynne W. Hinojosa. pages cm. — (Literature, religion, & postsecular studies) Includes bibliographical ref- erences and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1273-8 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9378-2 (cd) 1. Modernism (Literature)—Great Britain. 2. English fiction—History and criticism. 3. English fiction—Irish authors—History and criticism. 4. Puritan movements in literature. 5. Christianity and literature. I. Title. PR478.M6H56 2015 823'.91209112—dc23 2014027044 Cover design by Mary Ann Smith Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Sabon Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. For Mom and Dad Victor Miriam and Monica All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Part One • Theory and Context CHAPTER ONE From Moral Character to the Ethical Self 3 CHAPTER TWO Theory: Puritanism, the Bible, the Novel, Modernism 21 CHAPTER THREE Historical Context: The Legacy of Puritanism in the Late Nineteenth Century 61 Parto Tw • Puritanism in Four Early Modernist Novels CHAPTER FOUR Reading and Hegelian Tragedy in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray 83 CHAPTER FIVE The Renaissance of the Self in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View 109 CHAPTER SIX The Metaethical Self: Nietzsche and Joyce 134 CHAPTER SEVEN “I Leave It to You”: Church, State, and Morality in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier 158 CHAPTER EIGHT Conclusion 191 Works Cited 203 Index 211 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. AcKNOWLEDGMENTS CHOLARSHIP is always produced in community, and I am deeply S thankful to be part of a wonderful community of teacher-scholars at Baylor University. I offer my thanks especially to my Baylor col- leagues Andrew Wisely, David Lyle Jeffrey, and Ralph Wood for their helpful comments and suggestions on the manuscript. Pericles Lewis and Elizabeth Newman each generously read various chapters and offered helpful comments. I also thank and remember with much admi- ration and affection my late colleague, Susan E. Colón, who read many pages and evaluated ideas with me, offering encouragement and wise advice. I thank the Young Scholars in the Baptist Academy organization and the members of our 2009 meetings who read the very first pages of the project. The Honors Program and Honors College at Baylor Uni- versity, as well as Baylor’s Institute for Faith and Learning, all supported my research at the British Library. I am very grateful to Thomas Hibbs and the Honors College at Baylor for granting me a research leave to work on the book. Parts of the book have already appeared in print. My thanks go to the editors at Christianity and Literature and the Journal of Modern Litera- ture for allowing material they originally published to appear in Chap- ters Two and Five of this book, respectively. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family, both extended and immediate, all of whom have been so supportive. My daughters, Mir- iam and Monica, bring joy and delight every day. My husband, Victor, ix All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. x • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS has sacrificed a great deal to support my work, more than I even know, all the while encouraging me. I cannot thank him enough for this and for so much more. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. PART ONE Theory and Context All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. CHAPTER ONE From Moral Character to the Ethical Self HEN TEENAGER Briony Tallis, the central figure in Ian McEwan’s W 2001 novel, Atonement, submits the first draft of her novella to the new literary magazine, Horizon, she thinks the following about novelistic form: What excited her about her achievement was its design, the pure geom- etry and the defining uncertainty which reflected, she thought, a modern sensibility. The age of clear answers was over. So was the age of charac- ters and plots. Despite her journal sketches, she no longer really believed in characters. They were quaint devices that belonged to the nineteenth century. The very concept of character was founded on errors that mod- ern psychology had exposed. Plots too were like rusted machinery whose wheels would no longer turn. A modern novelist could no more write characters and plots than a modern composer could a Mozart symphony. (265) Briony reaches this position through a conversion into what she thinks is adulthood. When she sees from a window a scene at a fountain in which her sister undresses in front of a male friend and then submerges herself into the fountain waters for unknown reasons, Briony seems to sense a significant change in her outlook. She recognizes she does not understand all that happened, that her perceptions are limited in getting at the truth of what she has witnessed. She self-consciously moves from her earlier 3 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. 4 C • HAPTER ONE childhood mode of writing plays and fairy tales in order to give the viewer or reader a moral lesson, to what she sees as a more mature epistemo- logical uncertainty. From now on, she thinks, “There did not have to be a moral. She need only show separate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive” (38). If she “write[s] the scene three times over, from three points of view,” highlighting the incompleteness of any one perspective of reality, she thinks she will pro- duce an “amoral” novel (38). Later, however, the editor of Horizon, presumably Cyril Connolly (who edited the journal from 1940 to 1949), writes Briony back with a rejection letter, albeit with much interest in her talent and detailed sug- gestions for revisions. Briony’s novella, it turns out, has been rejected pre- cisely because it does not have enough plot and character development: Our attention would have been held even more effectively had there been an underlying pull of simple narrative. Development is required. // So, for example, the child at the window whose account we read first—her fundamental lack of grasp of the situation is nicely caught. So too is the resolve in her that follows, and the sense of initiation into grown-up mysteries. We catch this young girl at the dawn of her selfhood. One is intrigued by her resolve to abandon the fairy stories and homemade folk- tales and plays she has been writing (how much nicer if we had the fla- vor of one) but she may have thrown the baby of fictional technique out with the folktale water. For all the fine rhythms and nice observations, nothing much happens after a beginning that has such promise. This static quality does not serve your evident talent well. (294–95) The editor’s letter goes on to suggest that not only are plot and character development the qualities most readers desire to have in stories but also these are the essential elements that make stories what they are: In other words, rather than dwell for quite so long on the perceptions of each of the three figures, would it not be possible to set them before us with greater economy, still keeping some of the vivid writing about light and stone and water which you do so well—but then move on to cre- ate some tension, some light and shade within the narrative itself. Your most sophisticated readers might be up on the latest Bergsonian theories of consciousness, but I’m sure they retain a childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense, to know what happens. Simply put, you lack the backbone of a story. (296) All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. FROM MORAL CHARACTER TO THE ETHICAL SELF • 5 No matter how sophisticated writers become in describing and represent- ing the complexities of human beings, the editor implies, readers still have a “childlike” desire for storytelling: plots with conflicts, suspense, move- ment, moral and spiritual development, in which they can trace the shades and nuances of human beings living the realities of life. According to the editor, Briony has perhaps been too much influenced by Virginia Woolf (295). Those who have read Atonement know how differently and more complicated Briony’s “final” 1999 draft of the story turns out, fifty-nine years after that initial rejection. With typical postmodern self-reflexivity, McEwan wants readers to consider Briony’s changing choices as a novel- writer and in the process to consider what it is that novels are supposed to do, what they actually do, what is supposed to happen to the reader through the process of reading, and what the writer’s responsibilities are to the reader, to truth, and to justice.1 Briony struggles as a writer in 1940, in the middle of World War Two, the event that leads to the supposed divide between modernism and post- modernism.