Victorian Reformations

Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1904

Miriam Elizabeth Burstein

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780268076382
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein analyzes the ways in which Christian novelists across the denominational spectrum laid claim to popular genres—most importantly, the religious historical novel—to narrate the aftershocks of 1829, the year of Catholic Emancipation. Both Protestant and Catholic popular novelists fought over the ramifications of nineteenth-century Catholic toleration for the legacy of the Reformation. But despite the vast textual range of this genre, it remains virtually unknown in literary studies. Victorian Reformations is the first book to analyze how "high" theological and historical debates over the Reformation's significance were popularized through the increasingly profitable venue of Victorian religious fiction. By putting religious apologists and controversialists at center stage, Burstein insists that such fiction—frequently dismissed as overly simplistic or didactic—is essential for our understanding of Victorian popular theology, history, and historical novels. Burstein reads "lost" but once exceptionally popular religious novels—for example, by Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, and Emily Sarah Holt—against the works of such now-canonical figures as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, while also drawing on material from contemporary sermons, histories, and periodicals. Burstein demonstrates how these novels, which popularized Christian visions of change for a mass readership, call into question our assumptions about the nineteenth-century historical novel. In addition, her research and her conceptual frameworks have the potential to influence broader paradigms in Victorian studies and novel criticism.

Chapter One

SCOTT’S REFORMATIONS

In The Monastery (1820) the Protestant evangelist Henry Warden and the Catholic priest Father Eustace (old acquaintances, as it happens) prepare to square off for a no-holds-barred controversial spat over a prooftext. Warden yearns to offer Father Eustace help to “lay hold on the Rock of Ages”; Father Eustace, icily, declares that “my faith is already anchored on that Rock on which Saint Peter founded his church.” And Warden, not to be outdone, declares that this reading of the Rock is a “perversion of the text . . . grounded upon a vain play upon words—a most idle paronomasia.”1 The two are promptly interrupted, and all for the good, as far as the narrator is concerned; after all, “what can ensure the good temper and moderation of polemics?” (TM 303). This thwarted exchange both references what was a still fiery debate in nineteenth-century controversy—the nature of figurative language in the Bible and its role in shaping doctrine, especially of the Eucharist—and promptly sidelines it in favor of “moderation,” which is apparently incompatible with any passionate theological discourse (let alone dueling prooftexts). At the same time, the narrator’s weary observation situates him very clearly in a post-Reformation historical moment, when prooftexting is no longer a matter of life and death (Warden, after all, is being hunted through Scotland) and polite “good temper” counts for more than theological correctness.

Strategies such as this have led modern critics to praise (or blame) The Monastery and its sequel, The Abbot (1820), for their “profoundly non-partisan vision of the Reformation,” noting in particular the effect produced by what Lionel Lackey calls Scott’s “unwillingness to scrutinize fine points of theology.”2 Even those who have noticed that the novels obviously tilt toward the Protestant perspective suggest that they do so in the most unexceptionable and unremarkable of ways; Scott’s post-Reformation world is “a new enlightened age in which Christianity has been stripped of trappings designed to control the popular imagination and returned to some putative essentiality derived from Scripture.”3 Given the speed with which controversialists like Henry Warden are bundled off each time they begin to wax too warm, such responses are understandable. Even though the quarrel between Protestantism and Catholicism looms large in each novel, the uninformed reader would come away not knowing much about what either religion was, or why their adherents were fighting. And yet, this brief eruption (and squashing) of formal theological controversy easily distracts us from the duology’s more subtle questions, here creeping in through the narrator’s voice: What does it mean to think as a post-Reformation Protestant, for whom this debate is not only decided but rather stale? What role does reading—above all, reading the Bible—play in shaping this new Protestant subject? Last but not least, who reads?

Despite Scott’s nineteenth-century reputation as safe for evangelical consumption,4 these questions both underpin Scott’s mapping of sixteenth-century religious and political chaos and set up the terms against which Victorian controversial fiction will revolt. Some time ago, Judith Wilt found in these novels “evidence for a deep confusion or anxiety in Scott about the Protestant right-side upping of the Christian religion which he championed.”5 But although Scott makes no attempt to cover up the complexity, ambiguity, and even ugliness of the Reformation in Scotland, his duology asserts something very different from what we normally take to be his goal as a novelist: an imaginative reanimation of the past. Instead, the novels insist that the Catholic past cannot be successfully retrieved or imagined in a post-Reformation Protestant world, no matter what the narrator’s sympathies. The coming of Protestantism, which Scott plays out in dramas of gendered reading and interpretation, turns out to also be the limit to our horizon of understanding. In narrating the dispersal of Catholicism and its past, Scott’s duology also eradicates even the faintest possibility of its revival in or danger to the present.

TRAUMAS AND AMBIGUITIES: FICTIONS OF THE REFORMATION BEFORE SCOTT

Scott’s duology lies on the other side of the Catholic Emancipation barrier from the Victorian novelists of the rest of this study. His confidence in Catholicism’s slide into merely antiquarian interest derives, in a very large part, from this pre-Emancipation moment. In 1820 Catholic Emancipation (or the “Catholic question”) was certainly under intense discussion, and had been for some years; after all, it had been one of the original bargaining chips in the 1801 union of Great Britain and Ireland, until it was suddenly removed from the table when George III refused to countenance it. The arrival of French Catholic refugees during the Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, including religious houses and clergymen, had accustomed the British to think about Catholics with at least more sympathy than they had before, and by 1812 parliamentary motions for Catholic relief were being treated with greater and greater seriousness. In 1819, in fact, one such motion had just missed passing by a hair’s breadth in the House of Commons.6 But in 1820 the pro-Emancipation Whigs had other things to be thinking about, and Scott’s novels predate the birth of Daniel O’Connell’s energetic Catholic Association by three years. At the same time, the novels also postdate the notorious Peterloo Massacre of 1819, to which Scott had responded by lauding the government’s treatment of the protesters. Scott himself was not pro-Emancipation in 1820, although he grudgingly converted to the cause some time later out of sheer pragmatism: given that the “old Lady of Babylon’s mouth” had not been “stopd,” Scott wrote in his journal in 1829, “I cannot see the sense of keeping up the irritation about their right to sit in parliament.”7 Scott’s sympathy for monks subjected to Protestant depredations tells us far more about his attitude to ungovernable mobs than to Catholicism; indeed, it was shared by even doughty pro-Reformation historians like Gilbert Stuart, who several decades earlier had derided attacks on churches and monasteries as “acts of outrage and violence” or “mischief and destruction.”8

This sense of the popular chaos always lurking beneath Reformation movements, though, also derives from earlier fictions of the Reformation, which invested it with the emotional pressures of the gothic and sentimental modes. Unlike Scott’s duology, these earlier novels, such as Rosetta Ballin’s The Statue Room (1790) or the anonymous Lady Jane Grey: An Historical Tale (1791), conspicuously resist attempts to identify the Reformation with the birth of modernity. Indeed, they decouple Protestantism and “progress” in ways that contrast sharply not only with Scott but with Victorian narratives as well. Lady Jane Grey ends not with the triumph of Protestantism but with the surviving characters in European exile and Mary I still on the throne; The Statue Room celebrates Mary’s virtues and renders Elizabeth monstrous, while killing off its characters in progressively baroque ways. But the novel we know influenced Scott the most deeply, Sophia Lee’s epistolary The Recess; Or, a Tale of Other Times (1783), offers a more complex vision of Protestantism’s contingencies. The Recess imagines that Mary, Queen of Scots secretly bore two children, Matilda and Ellinor, and had them secreted away in an underground hideaway (the eponymous Recess), owned by Lord Henry Scrope. The two sisters marry (also secretly) prominent members of Elizabeth’s court, Leicester and Essex, and find themselves entangled in court intrigues, attempted assassinations, shipwrecks, and even the occasional slave rebellion; by the end, after a veritable orgy of evidentiary destruction, Ellinor has died insane, Matilda’s daughter Mary has also died, and Matilda herself is on the verge of death. As modern critics have repeatedly noted, one of the most striking things about the novel’s practice is how it consistently undermines each viewpoint character’s reliability. After observing Matilda drool over Lord Leicester at some length, the reader is taken aback to find Ellinor bluntly declaring that Leicester’s sole “charm” is physical.9 But Ellinor herself tellingly substitutes fantasy for reality when it comes to her love for the Earl of Essex, whose goals another character describes as “romance” (220). Ellinor and Matilda both badly mistake their respective husbands’ virtues, or lack thereof, prefiguring Mary’s similar error in her choice of lover (James I’s favorite Robert Carr, Viscount Rochester), and, as a result, the reader can never be quite sure how to understand their evaluations of Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I, or James I.10

For both Ellinor and Matilda, the Reformation registers as a series of disconnected psychic traumas. Even though both of them somehow become Protestants, suggesting that the Catholic cause has already lost its traction, their Protestantism does not align them with Elizabeth (who emerges as one of the villains of the piece) or a well-defined national identity. Because they spend most of the novel shuttling from one enclosed space to the next, including repeated returns to the Recess (which, symbolically, grows more and more tattered as the novel continues), their sentimentally inflected views of history remain subjective in more than one sense of the word. Ellinor and Matilda understand history through their investments in the heroic actions of their idolized husbands, actions that turn out in the end to be neither particularly heroic nor even particularly effective; in the words of their friend Lady Pembroke, Ellinor’s understanding of Essex is at best “partial” (256). They themselves, while potentially history-altering, are systematically erased, until James I finally destroys the remaining documentation that proves their identities. Everyone, Protestant and Catholic, unites in betraying the heroines. Recusant Catholicism offers no nostalgic vistas of a harmonious British culture; Elizabethan and Jacobean Protestantism may generate private virtues in a few individuals but does nothing to constrain the evils disseminated by the royal court. The clash between Catholic and Protestant never emerges as a coherent national plot, securely grounded in biblical allegory or typology. Instead, the novel makes Protestantism’s moral effects purely personal and contingent, while it denies Catholicism any counter-weighing authority or historical significance. Ellinor and Matilda, Protestants both, find Protestant monarchs of no help at all, while Catholicism, in the person of their relative Lady Mortimer, turns out to be at best a “narrow faith” (128).

April Alliston comments that Ellinor’s eventual “madness” consists, in part, of a “recognition of the gap, of the contradiction between the reader’s demand for ‘truth’—the truth in this case being itself an abyss, the very placelessness of women in a patrie—and the social demand for a unified narrative which would deny the truth of the abyss.”11 The formal fragmentation Alliston notes in Ellinor’s narrative characterizes the novel as a whole, which not only highlights how women defined primarily by their mothers silently vanish into historical thin air but also denies that the usual stabilizing categories of Reformation history, already long operational by the late eighteenth century, have much, if any, meaning. In that sense, the episodic nature of Ellinor’s and Matilda’s extreme psychological trials reappears at the level of national history: there is no progress, no change, no greater meaning to events, no organized story to tell. Indeed, Diane Long Hoeveler suggests, gothic works such as this “actually seem to be mourning the loss of Catholicism as the state religion” or, at least, its “‘porous selves,’ magic, superstition, and irrationality.”12 The gendered historical disorder of Sophia Lee’s Reformation depends, in part, on the fragmented and frequently traumatized perspectives of her protagonists, who can only ever observe, not participate. When it comes to subjectivity, the shift from Catholic to Protestant appears to have little to no significance—so little, indeed, that in both daughters’ cases the narrative erases the actual moment of conversion.

CATHOLICISM’S VANISHING TRACE

Unlike The Recess, Scott’s duology seeks to differentiate between Catholic antiquity and Protestant modernity, and in so doing it historicizes what Lee represents as a transhistorical condition. The Monastery and The Abbot offer us different modes of confusion and enlightenment: one enabled by the “enchanted,” romance-permeated world of The Monastery, in which the mysterious, fairy-like White Lady of Avenel figures prominently and, as Charles Taylor puts it, “the boundary between agents and forces is fuzzy”; and the other enabled by the “disenchanted,” more deliberately realist world of The Abbot, in which characters find themselves adrift in a feminized political landscape where appearances are nearly impossible to decode.13 The novels closely follow the fate of the Avenel family and their associates across two generations in mid-sixteenth-century Scotland, during the heat of the early Reformation; in both cases, the male protagonists find themselves traversing an often violent Scotland, caught between the Catholic old regime and the increasingly powerful, but decentered and disorganized, Protestant insurgency. In The Monastery young Mary Avenel, orphaned early in the novel, is loved in different ways by two brothers, Halbert and Edward Glendinning; the more brutish Halbert, eventually refined by literacy and the soldier’s life, joins Mary in converting to Protestantism, whereas Edward remains Catholic and takes vows. Throughout, the Avenels (and their Bible) come under the protection of the White Lady, who is magically linked to the House of Avenel’s fate. Years later, in The Abbot, Halbert’s and Mary’s marriage, while generally happy, has been marred by childlessness and frequent absences. Into it enters the mysterious and apparently illegitimate Roland Graeme, who has been secretly groomed by his grandmother, Magdalen, to liberate Mary, Queen of Scots from Elizabeth’s control. By the end, however, Roland turns out to be both a true Avenel and a true Protestant, even as he achieves some sort of delicate balance between being “loyal to Queen Mary” and having some “influence . . . with the party in power.”14 The contentious threads of Reformation history intersect through Roland and his alliances, but as in The Recess, his love for the deposed Scottish queen silently rests on the loss of her Catholic cause.

Not surprisingly, the duology frequently finds that the Reformation seems hardly more organized from within than without. The “spirit of the times,” thinks one character in The Monastery, may best be summed up by “the unhallowed and unchristian divisions of the country” (92): the Reformation zeitgeist warps and deforms its sometimes unwitting participants, whose minds are not so much converted as perverted to ungodly ways. As the speaker, Father Eustace, is Catholic, his point of view might understandably be somewhat jaundiced—and yet, Scott denies much in the way of sacredness to the Protestantizing process. Dismissing The Monastery, Donald Cameron complains that the driving force of Scott’s Reformation is “general greed,” and certainly both novels devote much of their energy to insisting on the Reformation’s basest motivations.15 Both Catholic and Protestant forces seem primarily bent on stealing as much as they can from the remaining monasteries, while one of The Monastery’s most important converts, the fearsome Julian Avenel, turns to Protestantism explicitly for political and worldly reasons: “we of the laity care not what you set up, so you pull merrily down what stands in our way” (224). Julian’s self-interested conversion, which will be echoed by the plotter Magdalen Graeme’s deceptively enthusiastic conversion in The Abbot, suggests deeply ominous conversion plots—conversions that not only produce no difference but, in fact, are either willfully read or innocently misread as authentic by “fellow” Protestants. Here, the Reformation sounds suspiciously like a pretext for the mobs that Scott so loathed.16 Similarly, The Abbot notes Protestant court intrigues, attacks Protestant would-be terrorists (one of whom tries to assassinate the Queen of Scots) alongside Catholic conspirators, and registers how Protestant iconoclasm destroys Catholic spaces. Reformation Scotland is violent, in flux, and frequently difficult to parse.

In both novels the sense that the Reformation constitutes progress emerges only as an effect of the novels’ explicitly Protestantized narration; that is, the warrant for the Reformation’s success is the novels’ own attitude to it. And in the beginning, this attitude emerges from a fiction of an explicitly masculine and homosocial literary network. The Monastery’s introductory frame openly and self-reflexively parodies the gothic “found manuscript”: the editor (Scott) receives the manuscript from Captain Clutterbuck, who receives it from a Benedictine. The Benedictine, in turn, completed the manuscript left unfinished by his uncle, and both of them based it on “authentic materials of that period” (21). When Captain Clutterbuck expresses some anxiety about the propriety of a good ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Scott’s Reformations
• Chapter Two. The “Morning Star” of the Reformation: The Victorian Cult of John de Wycliffe
• Chapter Three. “The Word of Life lies open before us”: Reading the Reformation Bible in the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter Four. Reinventing the Marian Persecutions in Victorian England
• Chapter Five. Unnoticed Persecutions: Anglo-Catholics, Roman Catholics, and the Reformation Tale
• Chapter Six. Rejecting the Controversial Historical Novel: Barnaby Rudge
• Coda: Savonarola’s Reformation Fails
• Notes
• Bibliography