Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature

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CAT HOLIC SENSAT IONALISM AND VICTORIAN LIT ER ATURE

LIVERPOOL ENGLISH TEXTS AND STUDIES, 49

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CATHOLIC SENSATIONALISM AND VICTORIAN LITERATURE

MAUREEN MORAN

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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First published 2007 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2007 Maureen Moran The right of Maureen Moran to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available ISBN 978-1-84631-070-6 cased

Typeset in Garamond Premier by Koinonia, Bury, Lancashire Printed and bound in the European Union by Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn

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To my mother, Pat Moran, and in memory of my father, Frank Moran

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Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction

viii 1

1 Sensational Invasions: The Jesuit, the State and the Family Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! and Wilkie Collins’s The Black Robe

28

2 Nuns and Priests: Sensations of the Cloister Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and the Monologues of Robert Browning

77

3 Persecution and Martyrdom: The Law and the Body Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr and George Eliot’s Romola

131

4 Feeling the Great Change: Conversion and the Authority of Affect Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair, J. H. Shorthouse’s John Inglesant and Mary Ward’s Helbeck of Bannisdale 177 5 Art Catholicism and the New Catholic Baroque The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson

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Epilogue Works Cited Index

284 292 311

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board (now the Arts and Humanities Research Council) for awarding me a Research Leave Grant which enabled me to complete this project. I appreciate the permission of Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Province of the Society of Jesus to quote from works in copyright by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I am grateful to Laurel Brake and Catherine Phillips for their belief in the book from the outset, to my Commissioning Editor, Anthony Cond, for his enthusiastic support, and to the anonymous readers of the manuscript for their perceptive comments and very helpful suggestions. I appreciate, too, the efforts of staff at the London Library and British Library to track down obscure material. John Aplin generously provided many tips on Thackeray, Pete Smith wittily shared all things Victorian, and the Medcroft Gardeners – Bryan, Henry, Mia and Victoria – offered insights, reminiscences and good cheer to further this book on its way. A very special thanks go to Linda Anderson who has assisted in countless ways throughout this research work, and especially by providing great encouragement, a razor-sharp brain, and an inexhaustible sense of humour. And, finally, my deepest thanks and loving gratitude to my parents – the wisest of guides, the keenest of supporters, and the very best of teachers.

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1 Introduction 1550–15??

Faith of our Fathers! living still In spite of dungeon, fire and sword: Oh how our hearts beat high with joy Whene’er we hear that glorious word. Faith of our Fathers! Holy Faith! We will be true to thee till death. 1 — Father Frederick Faber, ‘Faith of our Fathers’ [Persecuted] by the sword, the gibbet, the rack, and the flames … men, women, and children were burned [by Catholics] before slow fires, pinched to death with red-hot tongs, starved, flayed alive, broken on the wheel, suffocated, drowned, subjected to all kinds of lingering agonies. 2 — Henry H. Bourn, Words of Warning respecting The Jesuits

This book is about an imaginary landscape: a sensationalized ‘geography’ of Roman Catholicism constructed and widely circulated in Victorian culture. This is a contentious space. It is the site of Protestant defensive battles and Catholic countercultural skirmishes over denominational authority in a society outwardly aligned with Christian principles but increasingly reliant on science and material evidence to validate ‘truth’. This terrain of extremes is characterized by linguistic extravagances and plots of crime and violence, of persecution and intrigue. Its signposts are images of confinement, torture and deviance. It is a world peopled by victims and oppressors, law-givers and rebels. Many Janus-faced creatures are found there, too – the brave who are also sinister, the respectable who harbour malign and secret intent. Embedded in discursive and non-discursive practices of all kinds – lectures, sermons, essays and journalism, prayers and hymns, travel journals, private correspondence and public declamations, canonical literary works and the penny pulps, cartoons and art reviews, architectural styles and liturgical rites, laws and parliamentary debates – the territory of Catholic sensationalism can be glimpsed in both the secular and religious domains

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catholic sensationalism and victorian literature

that constitute nineteenth-century social experience. This book models the field, mapping its recurrent images, character types, narratives and aesthetic modes and demonstrating its persistence in imaginative writing throughout the Victorian period. As a distinctive literary practice, the sensationalizing of Catholicism both expresses and helps to shape perspectives on social reality. Responsive to the historical moment, it is inflected by different secular debates in the nineteenth century and is used in both conservative and radical contexts. These representations of excess, extremism and strangeness are diverse, appearing in a range of genres intended for different middle-class readerships from the ‘popular’ to the ‘intellectual’. However, the dominant effects of Catholic sensationalism are remarkably consistent. By interrogating Victorian myths of social freedom and harmony, it probes the individual’s control over an increasingly complex cultural milieu. In the multi-voiced religious culture of Victorian Britain, anti-Catholic mockery was a popular activity for politicians, historians and sages as well as churchmen. Cultural and social historians have tracked its deployment, suggesting its significance at national and regional levels for understanding the complex relationship between church and state at the time.3 Non-fiction and imaginative writing associated with overt prejudice against the Roman Catholic Church has also attracted recent scholarly interest for its importance in the formation of nineteenth-century Anglo-American national identities. In her informative study of anti-Catholicism in nineteenthcentury American literary and historical writing, Jenny Franchot shows how the rhetoric of religious prejudice performed a vital cultural role in the antebellum period, providing oppositional images against which an emergent Protestant middle-class identity could be asserted.4 More recently, Susan Griffin has built on this approach historically and geographically.5 By taking her study to the turn of the century, Griffin suggests that Protestant national, political and religious self-definition was a dynamic, fluid process, dependent on the flexible familiarity of anti-Catholic discourse. Juxtaposing American and British anti-Catholic novels, Griffin also reminds us of the transnational nature of anti-Catholic polemic. While each nation had its own national burdens – from the Empire to the impact of immigration on the nature of American citizenship – writing anti-Catholicism was a persistently popular way of writing ‘Protestant’ and of establishing the normative version of America and Britain. Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature argues for a much broader cultural and social role for Catholicism in the Victorian project of self-formation and self-fashioning. I am concerned with a particular mode


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through which Roman Catholicism was constructed in the period – that of sensationalism. The ‘sensationalizing’ of the Church of Rome dramatizes the many and interrelated understandings of ‘sensation’ that haunted the period: its indication of the mysterious connection between body, nerves and mind; its emphasis on extremes of emotion (and language); its association with the shocking, unorthodox and countercultural. Because of this multivalence, Catholic sensationalism is a particularly productive medium for the exploration of many secular and religious issues. It inhabits cultural domains far more diverse than those of nation and home, which to date have generally been the focus for scholars of the period. Through sensationalism, the wellknown plots, characters and motifs of Catholicism are rewritten by Victorians to explore gender, the body, artistic values, the workings of the mind and feelings. In its sensationalized form, Victorian Catholicism can signify difference that is menacing; but it can also entertain stimulating alternatives to the norms of home culture. Recognizing that these emotionally heightened articulations of Catholicism inflect all literary media of the period, this book ranges widely. It explores the phenomenon in poetry as well as novels. It seeks also to recover the mode’s meanings and significance as it appears in diverse genres and in texts drawn from both popular and elite culture. Most important of all is the recognition that this is not a discourse owned only by Protestants. While Catholic sensationalism draws on formulations from anti-Catholic rhetoric, it transcends simple denominational hostility. The epigrams that head this chapter echo each other in their emotive language of pathos, shock and triumphalism, as well as in their gruesome attention to persecution and bodily suffering. Yet one is by a mid-Victorian Catholic priest and the other from a Protestant polemical essay published late in the century. Victorian Catholics and Protestants (and those of no faith at all) appropriate the register, motifs and plots of Catholic sensationalism; and this book considers how writers of all persuasions exploit its many dimensions. My analysis concentrates on the literary side of this particular religious expression, establishing its dominant images, themes and stylistic strategies in poetic and fictional genres and showing their contribution to a wide range of cultural debates. This figuration of the Church of Rome, distinguished by extravagance and excess, proves a dynamic frame of reference for writers and readers from the beginning of the period to the turn of the century. Indeed, it is a key part of the religious ‘habitus’ of Victorians of all classes. The saturation of nineteenth-century culture by Christianity and its denominational variants makes religion always and everywhere a presence. In large


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catholic sensationalism and victorian literature 6

part, many Victorian ‘systems of dispositions’, assumptions, beliefs and understandings about religious difference remain a hidden knowledge for twenty-first-century readers; but for Victorians, they were a rich imaginative resource that generated a range of possible subject positions and perceptions. A sensationalized version of Catholicism is an important part of that sensibility. As a grammar of the imagination, the sensational representation of Roman Catholicism constructs a social world through theological differences that are elided with contrasting cultural attitudes. It thus plays an important part in the articulation of the Victorian self-image. It serves as the ‘heretical’ foil against which orthodox middle-class beliefs and structures can be reaffirmed. Yet, as the place of opposition to the dominant Protestant home culture, Catholic sensationalism functions in a subversive way too. It expresses alternative models of self-fashioning and social relations, transgressive values and tastes already rooted in domestic ‘norms’. It can even mount critical resistance to the ideals that characterize the Victorian establishment ethos. The chapters that follow offer different perspectives on the functioning of this complex rhetoric in a range of literary works spanning the period. Under the guise of clear-cut denominational argument, these representations of countercultural extremism reveal ambivalence about the cherished values of public and private life. They encode uncertainties about the rights and roles of the nation-state and the family, as well as about gender divisions and destinies. They suggest the restrictions of respectability at the same time as they reflect on the power of the law, the body and the emotions over the individual subject. They even play a role in aesthetic battles about the relative worth of artistic form over function. Most significantly of all, Catholic sensationalism demonstrates the imprint of a major and persistent theme in the Victorian cultural imaginary: the conflict between powerful authorities, collective responsibility and individual self-realization. In diverse literary manifestations, sensational portrayals of Catholicism explore the possibility of balancing these competing forces through the structures of Victorian culture; but, paradoxically, they also expose doubts about the fitness of these structures for the purpose. Underpinning the Victorian discourse of Catholic sensationalism are historical events and artistic trends that help to account both for its formation and its persistent grip on the literary imagination. This particular construction of the alien Church of Rome bears the imprint of recurrent panics about the growing visibility and strength of the Catholic faith in Britain, the Gothic revival that recalled mediaeval Catholic roots (and abuses), and


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the emergence of a sensational ‘style’ in fiction and ‘New Journalism’ that exposed the hidden treachery of crime, fraud and cultural subversion. At its base, undoubtedly, is the complex set of histories and myths about Roman Catholic designs on Great Britain that Victorians inherited. As Macaulay reminded his readers in 1848, through long experience of the Church of Rome, the English had by the 1680s formed ‘an indissoluble [mental] association … between Protestantism and civil freedom, between Popery and arbitrary power’.7 Suspicion of Catholics as creatures of divided loyalty – to King and to Pope – was well embedded in the national psyche from the late sixteenth century in ways that reinforced the Church of Rome as a dangerous religious and secular opponent. Catholic schemes against the crown, such as support for Mary Queen of Scots against Elizabeth I and the Gunpowder and Titus Oates plots, shaped a belief that the papacy continuously intrigued to control Protestant Britain by alliance with external enemies and domestic traitors. The faithful’s unquestioning obedience to an authoritarian papacy and the Vatican’s temporal as well as spiritual ambitions were fundamental to British representations of the wicked Roman Catholic Church. These stereotypes were magnified at times of social change and upheaval and were given particular prominence in narratives of cultural crisis. For example, public unrest of all kinds up to and including the nineteenth century was frequently attributed to secret Catholic machinations at work among the populace. In Victorian memory and experience, Catholicism seemed to stir up agitation within all denominational persuasions. The aggressive Protestant Association of the late eighteenth century, headed by Lord George Gordon, objected to the Catholic Relief Act, but a significant effect of the Association’s protests was to establish anti-Catholicism as a rallying point for general discontent in the populace. The Gordon Riots of 1780, when Catholic homes and embassy chapels in London were destroyed and prisons sacked, produced relatively scant sympathy for Catholic victims but ample fear of discord as an inevitable consequence of the Roman presence. Alternatively, in the mid-nineteenth century, the activities of the Irish Fenian Brotherhood seemed to link Catholics directly to civil rebellion, notwithstanding the Church’s formal opposition to this movement for Irish independence from Britain. Such instances of social disorder ensured the continued perception of Roman Catholics as a disquieting element within the state. Catholics were thought to provoke tension and bloodshed, disrupting social stability as either scapegoats or rebels. Even the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, which relieved most of the civil disabilities and restrictions on Catholic citizens, shows the high level


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of anxiety about the Catholic presence. Some supporters of this reform argued for freedom of conscience for all citizens without penalty. Yet, these civil liberties also imposed a subtle regulatory framework. Protection of the individual’s rights by the state came with a quid pro quo insistence on individual conformity with state law and communal values. Catholic loyalty and co-operation, so the reasoning went, could best be ensured by trust and full citizenship. For others, the Act was a pragmatic expedient for controlling a fraught political situation in Ireland where the unruly, subordinated Catholic majority was increasingly volatile. Nor did the Catholic Emancipation Act quiet Protestant nerves about Roman Catholic dependability and patriotism. With their allegiance to an alien (papal) crown and their ready submission to the overbearing authority of the Vatican, Catholics were still objects of suspicion. Jenny Franchot has drawn attention to the favourite disparaging ‘nicknames’ for Catholicism in the nineteenth century, such as ‘popery’, ‘Romanish’, and ‘Romish’.8 These commonplace epithets, which trope the religion in terms of its autocratic leadership and foreign location, give a good indication of the particular concerns that beset Protestant Victorians. Indeed, Catholicism in some quarters became generally synonymous with unwarranted state interference, as when opponents to the New Poor Law (1834) and the Public Health Act (1848) likened their drafter, Edwin Chadwick, to the Pope for his interventionist and centralizing policies.9 A number of spectacular events in the nineteenth century seemed to herald renewed attempts by the Church of Rome to appropriate British culture. At all social levels, sensitivity to Catholicism as an active force on British soil was revived. Given the dominance of Protestant voices in the country, it is not surprising that outrage and fear were prominent responses. Concern centred on the ease with which an alien religion could compromise an individual’s sense of public duty and undermine national institutions. However, public tension was also heightened by the sensationalist rhetoric used to denounce – or support – the Church of Rome. Emotive diction, melodramatic and morbid stories, and extravagant images of horror were employed by both sides in a shared paranoia about the role of Catholicism in British culture. The first – and in many ways the most lasting – trauma began in 1833 when a small group of influential Oxford Anglicans commenced publication of a series of Tracts for the Times. Their call for the doctrinal and devotional renewal of the Church of England, known as the Oxford (or Tractarian) Movement, sought to strengthen the spiritual authority of the established Protestant Church and secure it from improper state interference. In devel-


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oping a theological framework, the Movement focused on the divine origins of Anglicanism by tracing its continuity from Christ’s foundation of Christianity through the Early (and therefore Catholic) Church. This insistence on the ‘Catholicity’ of the national Church by reference to the apostolic authority of the Church’s bishops created controversy. From the outset, some read the Movement as a symptom of ‘the dry-rot’ that would topple the Church of England into the ‘spiritual bondage’ of Roman superstition.10 When the most influential Tractarian, John Henry Newman, converted to Catholicism in 1845 together with other followers, alarm about the collapse of the Anglican Church into the arms of Rome became widespread. Suspected for some time of being a Catholic Trojan Horse, Newman, through his conversion, seemed to illustrate the insidious encroachment of Catholicism on the Protestant foundation of the British church and state. The shock of Newman’s change of faith was kept alive throughout the nineteenth century, revived for a new generation in 1864 when Charles Kingsley publicly attacked Newman’s integrity and the latter defended himself in his spirited autobiography, Apologia Pro Vita Sua. At the same time, pronouncements by senior Catholics encouraged the view that the Vatican schemed to regain possession of England through a project of mass conversion. In 1863, for example, Cardinal Henry Manning, himself a convert, proclaimed that ‘the Catholic Church goes forth once more to evangelise the English people’.11 The evidence of a steady leakage to Rome, including such prominent laypeople as the politician, the Marquess of Ripon, suggested that the Church’s plan was beginning to succeed, a matter routinely brought to the public’s attention by the press. In aesthetic terms, too, Catholicism retained a high and controversial profile as a seductive force. The craze for neo-mediaevalism and Pugin’s Gothic revival swept Catholic architecture and artistic culture into an idiom viewed as attractive, glamorous and fashionable. Nonetheless, when Anglo-Catholic Ritualists sought to promote the Catholicity of Anglicanism by the introduction of Roman liturgical practices, vestments, church decoration and devotional pieties from the late 1850s, prosecution through the Public Worship Regulation Act seemed to be a legitimate, if hyperbolic, response to a cultural threat. In 1850, a new outburst of anxiety about Catholic aspirations occurred when Pius IX re-established dioceses and the hierarchy of Catholic bishops in England for the first time since the seventeenth century. In his first pastoral letter to English Catholics, Cardinal-Archbishop Nicholas Wiseman, the new leader of the Catholic bishops, seemed to assert temporal as well as religious authority while predicting the speedy rise of Catholicism as the


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premier national faith: ‘behold the silver links of that chain which has connected their country [England] with the See of St Peter … changed into burnished gold’.12 The name chosen for his diocese – Westminster – was greeted with dismay; it seemed, symbolically, to snatch the heart of British governance for the seat of a foreign power. The press took up the ‘AntiPopery’ cry, representing this re-organization of Catholic administration in Britain as an overtly hostile act. The militaristic phrase coined to describe the restructuring – ‘Papal Aggression’ – reinforced the sense of political invasion. Although Catholics represented a tiny proportion of declared Christians in the 1851 religious census, the restoration of the Hierarchy was viewed as the preliminary to the imposition of a foreign yoke.13 In a parliamentary debate of 1851, for instance, Robert Inglis interpreted the Pope’s action as an attack on the Queen’s ‘Crown and dignity, on the independence of Her realms, on the integrity of Her Church, and on the faith and consciences of Her people’; as such, it endangered ‘the great body of the people of England’ and the rights for which they had fought.14 Even the Queen was purported to have asked, ‘[a]m I Queen of England or am I not?’15 Prime Minister Lord John Russell publicly expressed his opposition in inflammatory language that matched Wiseman’s own. He thunderously denounced this ‘pretension of supremacy over the realm of England … inconsistent with the Queen’s supremacy’ and an ‘insolent and insidious’ action.16 Feelings were so intense that Parliament quickly passed the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill to restrict the Catholic claim on diocesan names that challenged Anglican jurisdictions. That the civil law was invoked to police structures and naming in the religious domain shows the extent to which Catholicism was seen as a subversive cultural threat. Indeed, some politicians called for even more drastic measures to pull the tooth of the Catholic serpent. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, specific Vatican pronouncements continued to provoke public hysteria about the malign intentions of Rome and its ‘hostility to the institutions most nearly identified with [British] national freedom, and our national faith’.17 The Syllabus of Errors attached to a papal encyclical in 1864 reiterated the Church’s condemnation of particular political philosophies and intellectual movements. Intended to re-assert the authority of the Pope against the Italian challenge to his temporal power, the Syllabus to Britons seemed an attack on religious and intellectual freedom and the complementary relationship between church and state that stabilized social life. The document’s rejection of naturalism, rationalism and political liberalism appeared to oppose the principles of a progressive Victorian Britain, with its growing confidence in the material


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sciences and radical individualism. In 1870, public outcry also accompanied the first Vatican Council’s proclamation of papal primacy (in juridical matters) and papal infallibility (in the Pope’s teaching capacity). British Ultramontanists – Catholics who supported the strengthening of papal authority – strongly backed the pronouncement. However, Protestants, and even some liberal Catholics, including Newman, believed the doctrine symbolized the Vatican’s insensitivity to domestic governments and culture. It renewed debates about the trustworthy compliance of Catholics with civic regulation. It suggested Catholicism was on a par with all tyrannical regimes that suppressed individual reason and autonomous judgement. These events ensured that for many Victorians, Roman Catholicism presented an ideological danger, a cultural as well as a spiritual menace to be vigorously resisted. The Church of Rome had not quietly subsided into a backwater as an historical anachronism or the colourful backdrop for fantastic Gothic novels. Rome’s pro-active involvement in British cultural politics inflected a Victorian version of Roman Catholicism associated with apprehension and shock. This sensationalized representation occurred not only in religious polemics, but also in newspaper articles, serious essays and literary works as well as in visual depictions, including book illustrations and paintings. Catholics and Protestants alike generated narratives of the Church that focused on barbarism and cruelty of an excessive kind, the perpetrators of which depended on the writer’s denominational leanings. These strategies placed power relations at the centre of most Victorian depictions of Roman Catholicism. The role of institutions in regulating individual desire and the related themes of authority, duty and resistance are embodied in the plots of conversion, invasion and martyrdom that are typical of Catholic sensationalism from the late 1830s to 1900. For both Protestant and Catholic, this rhetoric fed communal paranoia by focusing on societies in which the innocent were suspected, threatened and persecuted by secretive, tyrannical powers. In these sensational representations of Catholicism, difference slides repeatedly into deviance. Disruptions of all kinds – social, emotional and sexual – cluster about the Roman Catholic Other as a major symbol of the culturally heretical in the Victorian imagination. Because of its association with social and spiritual waywardness, the rhetoric of Catholic sensationalism offers a means of expressing fears of social crisis and breakdown. When the Browning family clergyman observes ‘as an undoubted fact, that Roman Catholic and midnight assassin are synonymous terms’ or when, in 1868, a ‘member of the University of Oxford’ describes Roman Catholicism as ‘a


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10 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature delusion of some fanatical brain’, they express disgust with a religion that appeals to the criminally inclined and the weak-minded.18 But they also embed Catholicism in a discourse of social decline today associated with the 19 sensation ‘genre’ of fiction that first appeared in the 1860s. In a flippant poem published in 1861, Punch facetiously dubbed the period the ‘age of Sensation’.20 The anonymous versifier no doubt hoped to appeal to readers bemused by the commercial wonder of the day: the best-selling sensation novel, typified by Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60) and Ellen (Mrs Henry) Wood’s East Lynne (1860–61). However, like the working-class Penny Dreadful and the popular mass culture journalism that developed in the period, this ‘new’ type of novel was just one manifestation of a significant nineteenth-century rhetorical practice. Victorians were clearly aware that sensationalism permeated ‘respectable’ and serious genres intended for the middle class, as well as less demanding entertainments for wider readerships. Punch’s ‘Sensation Sermons’ of 1867 mocked the religious use of lurid situations and extravagant language.21 In fact, reviewers concerned about the sensation fiction craze perceived the mode encroaching everywhere: Everything must now be sensational. Professor Kingsley sensationalizes History, and Mr. Wilkie Collins daily life. One set of writers wear the sensational buskin, another the sensational sock. Just as in the Middle Ages people were afflicted with the Dancing Mania and Lycanthropy, sometimes barking like dogs, and sometimes mewing like cats, so now we have a Sensational Mania. Just, too, as those diseases always occurred in seasons of dearth and poverty, and attacked only the poor, so does the Sensational Mania in Literature burst out only in times of mental poverty, and afflict only the most poverty-stricken minds. From an epidemic, however, it has lately changed into an endemic. Its virus is spreading in all directions, from the penny journal to the shilling magazine, and from the 22 shilling magazine to the thirty shillings volume.

Today, the term sensationalism is most readily associated with the genre of sensation fiction and the work of Collins, Wood, Braddon and Reade. However, as this book demonstrates through specific constructions of Catholicism, it was actually a major discursive phenomenon of the nineteenth century. As a powerful counterdiscourse set against and interacting with realism, sensationalism offers a distinctive mode of expression and interpretation, a way of ‘seeing’ that focuses attention on the ‘not perceived’, ‘not felt’, and ‘not said’ of commonplace experience. Violating the low-key, ‘transparent’ and naturalized codes of realist discourse, sensationalism proposes new, unsus-


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pected readings of the ‘real’, accessible through extremes. Lurid spectacle and gruesome event, improbable connections and strange mysteries, hypocritical heroes and seemingly respectable villains, overblown language and fantastic images – all form part of the repertoire of sensationalism in its engagement with the unorthodox, the unexpected and even the unwholesome. Above all, with its thematics of secrecy and shocking disclosure, sensationalism reveals what mainstream culture normally discounts or occludes. Realism and sensationalism are opposed in terms of effect as well as content. Literary realism, with its emphasis on the gradual development of individual character through causal plots in recognizable environments, encourages considerable confidence in material appearances and social customs, in logic and reason, and in the ideologies of individual power and social progress to interpret everyday experience. It invites judicious assessment of dominant social and moral frameworks, rather than a radical overhaul. It participates in a larger project of social discipline and control by moderating and amplifying – but not undermining – generally accepted views of the contemporary world and individual subject positions within it. Because sensationalism challenges the proper and permissible in its style and topics, it has the potential to disturb – if not erase – aesthetic and social preconceptions and norms. Its narrative emphasis on surprising incident rather than character development, for example, predicates a social order resistant to shaping by individual will power and agency. Its preference for mystery and surprise challenges consensus about the supposedly stable and comprehensible social world. Locating the strange within the familiar, and the familiar within the strange, sensationalism cultivates shock, excitement, thrill and horror. Victorian readers believed its disturbing revelations stimulated ‘the nerves’, arousing ‘sensations’ largely associated with the body and the emotions. While realism ostensibly sets up its appeal to reason and ‘common sense’, sensationalism makes its overtures to the more unpredictable and ill-disciplined of the human faculties. Victorian sensationalism is thus, in its very practice, an innately rebellious medium. With psychological disturbance as one of its primary effects, it provides scope for disrupting complacency about accepted norms in private and public life. It challenges aesthetic standards by applying the techniques of mass literary culture to serious topics, encouraging somatic and psychological, rather than intellectual, responses.23 It challenges social and cultural standards by savouring the terror hidden in mundane ‘normality’, and by adopting scepticism about appearances and the impulse to exposé as central hermeneutic principles.24 Penetrating and transgressing the boundaries of


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12 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature the ‘respectable’ at every level, it interrogates the illusions of convention and proposes a more ‘modern’ and authentic construction of truth, though this new vision can be disconcerting and unsettling. Victorian sensationalism has its roots in earlier forms. In its extreme, eccentric scenarios and language, it draws on the excess, extravagance and monstrosity of a Gothic register; in its sharp moral polarities and pathos, we can recognize the structures and emotional orientation of theatrical melodrama and the sentimental novels of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Winifred Hughes has suggested that the Victorian return to these older romance forms in the sensation fiction of the 1860s marks novelists’ response to ‘a new situation for which they found realism inadequate’.25 As the examination of Catholic sensationalism will show, Hughes’s comment is also applicable to the mode in its broadest form. Sensationalism is distinctively Victorian in its construction and interpretation of a contemporary culture in flux and crisis. Victorian sensationalism imagines modernity as a site of conflict and upheaval. Reviewers of a sensation narrative, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), might have turned up their noses at its vulgarity, but they certainly read its codes as ‘a sign of the times – the evidence of a certain turn of thought and action, of an impatience of old restraints, and a craving for some fundamental change in the working of society’.26 Evading the structures of coherence, reconciliation and progress associated with the causal, closed plots and character development of realist discourse, sensationalism uses the hyperbolic, even the hysterical, to probe the gulf between idealized narratives of social relations and real practices and behaviour. Nothwithstanding its debt to earlier genres, this discourse is also distinctively Victorian in its preoccupation with the physical and the material, and in its engagement with the fragility of contemporary cultural formations and identities. For example, in Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic novel, The Italian, or The Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), the sensational (Catholic) villain is a scheming monk (Schedoni) who represents the vestiges of a tyrannical feudal past. From the outset, his perspective is portrayed as outmoded and deviant when compared to the contemporary reader’s Enlightenment values. Unsurprisingly, he is vanquished by the ethical, social and political values of the modern benevolent state. However, rather than standing in opposition to the prevailing culture, the monsters of Victorian sensationalism are embedded within the middle-class domestic world. They are not curious remnants, but a present problem. Simultaneously alien and double, they oppose and replicate existing norms, and thus call them to account.


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Additionally, as Mark M. Hennelly, Jr. suggests, Victorian sensationalism differs from sentimental and melodramatic forms of an earlier age in its complex intellectual and emotional engagement of the reader. 27 It replaces the passive, escapist comforts of the older genres with a somatic involvement – a physical frisson that moves the reader from shock to curiosity, and thence to the active decoding of a hidden truth. The heightened sensitivity to unknown possibilities which sensationalism thus encourages encapsulates the strange mix of fascination and anxiety with which Victorians confronted modernity. But it also underpins more significant cultural deconstruction. Ann Cvetkovich has argued that Victorian sensation narratives displace and obscure the real social threats to the individual. By treating the sensational as a sign of ‘something other than itself ’, they produce a mystery that can be resolved in emotional, rather than political, terms.28 However, the analysis of Catholic sensationalism illustrates that the mode, broadly conceived, actually has subversive ideological effects in the period. Obsessed always with hidden meanings suspensefully deferred, the sensational is a porous sign that accommodates debate about alterity of different kinds. Less a disguise than an indeterminate space, it expresses cultural contradictions and explores alternatives to existing models of selfhood and social relations. Although Catholicism per se is not a dominant theme of the best-selling sensation novel that flourished between the 1860s and 1890s, the genre and reactions to it exemplify the codes of sensationalism by which Catholicism is expressed, shaped and interpreted.29 In the first place, the mode asserts itself as culturally contemporary, rather than a pastiche of earlier writing, by updating the horrid plots and character types of such Gothic precursors as the fantasies of Radcliffe, Walpole and Lewis. As Nicholas Rance has argued with reference to Collins and his school, Victorian sensationalism mediates a Gothic sense of social crisis through a modern scepticism about supernatural assumptions and absolute moral schemas.30 The domestication of such Gothic clichés as oppressive labyrinthine spaces, exotic Continental locations, murderous assassins, and intricate, impenetrable plots also creates new meanings. Dark, claustrophobic enclosures – the monastic dungeon and the prison – are transformed into the familiar, protective institutions of British culture. In Victorian sensationalism, the home and the asylum are dangerous in their own right, inhabited by plausible malefactors intent on seizing wealth, property and even the identities of others. Villains are remodelled, too. In popular sensation novels like The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret, the demonic Gothic evildoer becomes the ambivalent inhabitant of domestic culture, like the suave aristocratic émigré or the native-born


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14 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature social climber. Capable of amazing disguise and deceit, their most dastardly crime is to shake belief in the security of ‘home’. The stranger can no longer be evaluated or ‘placed’ by good manners and social conformity, since these are easily faked. Catholic sensationalism demonstrates the same preoccupations, though its explicit use of religious materials more obviously exposes Gothic roots.31 The most lurid Victorian portrayals of Catholic convents and monasteries recall the evil, imprisoning cloisters of eighteenth-century romances, with priests and nuns cast as despots and slaves. These spaces are still scenes of confinement, but modernized, they also show the psychologically devastating effects of social regimentation, dullness and a loveless unproductive existence. Other Gothic echoes symbolize the foreign ‘trickiness’ and duplicity of Catholic behaviour, suggesting also that these qualities are now embedded in contemporary public and private life. Plots dependent on unexpected twists, surprising disguises and obscure motivations do just this, simultaneously connecting practitioners of this heretical faith to other marginalized groups that menace social equilibrium. The rewriting of Gothic features reveals the ‘truth’ of Catholicism as a ‘sensational’ social reality. The thematics of exposure, characteristic of Victorian literary sensationalism and a key feature in the 1860s sensation genre, also influences the depiction of the Church of Rome. Recurrent motifs of Catholic disguise and concealment underpin this theme. Combined with suspenseful plots about those with secret motives, they suggest the boldness with which the malign can capitalize on failing moral standards and the impotence of public institutions to protect the nation. Sexual transgressions, ‘invisible’ crimes including impersonation and fraud, and shadowy acts of violence, like murder and kidnapping, constitute one category of revelation, suggesting popery’s corruption. But Catholic writers exploit the rhetoric of exposure, too, uncovering equally unsuspected ‘secrets’: the anguish of a tormented, unworthy conscience, for example, or the spiritual merit of a broken body. Through disclosure of the hidden, sensationalism presents itself as a discourse of knowledge, revealing the truth about identity and values in contemporary society. When Henry James remarked that sensation novels dealt with ‘those most mysterious of mysteries, the mysteries which are at our own doors’,32 he could equally well have been describing sensational versions of Catholicism in the period. They too unearth the buried forces in middle-class culture that belie its orderly, progressive self-image. These representations speak of lost confidence in the moral authority and judgement of ‘proper’ individuals and ‘respected’ institutions.


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The metaphors and linguistic register of sensationalism suggest a world that is unfathomable and unregulated. Eschewing the understated and referential codes of realism, sensationalism continuously heightens emotions by privileging the grotesque and the strange. Linguistic excesses typify the sensationalizing of Roman Catholicism in the period, not only to demonize the monstrosity of an unorthodox faith, but also to dramatize its devotee as exceeding the normal range of behaviours, be that through transcendent enthusiasm or overwrought fanaticism. Victorian Catholics and their detractors portray capitulation to the faith as highly charged, overwhelming in its irresistibility and intensity. Identified by their surrender to the ecstasy of exotic worship or the austere morbidity of ascetic mortifications and martyrdom, ‘sensationalized’ Catholics become a focus for the somatic and emotional anxieties that underpin other readings of literary sensationalism in the period. Indeed, the same terms used to represent ‘fanatical’ Catholicism appear in the reservations expressed by reviewers of sensation fiction in the 1860s. Both are linked in the Victorian imagination with irrationality and madness, with the capacity to ‘convuls[e] the soul’ through an appeal to the body.33 Just as Catholicism, in the minds of many Victorians, seemed to endanger social order and the moral health of individuals, so sensationalism seemed to undermine public taste and the mental equilibrium of a vast readership. Margaret Oliphant complained about the need of her age for a constant ‘supply of new shocks and wonders’ and for the ‘frequent and rapid recurrence of piquant situation and startling incident’.34 Like many of her contemporaries, she disparaged sensationalism because it aimed solely at ‘pure sensation, neither more nor less’. 35 Devoid of serious subject matter and moral judgement, such writing threatened bourgeois priorities with its anti-intellectualism and attack on traditional ideals. Even worse, it seemed to encourage a dangerous social volatility, whipping up uncontrollable ‘nerves’ and a frenzy of suspicion while pandering to prurient curiosity. As H. L. Mansel tartly noted, this was poisonous reading that carried ‘the whole nervous system by steam’ and set the reader’s ‘hair on end or his teeth on edge’.36 This emphasis on the physical reminds us that, for Victorians, the term ‘sensationalism’ had important connections with the ‘mental sciences’ and with theories about mental disturbance. Associationists, with their physiological approach to the mind, drew on knowledge of the senses, sensation, and the mechanics of perception and cognition to remodel the body–mind relationship as a continuum.37 Literary reviewers who disliked sensationalism could invoke science as proof of the connection between overstimulated nerves and


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16 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature disordered minds. The eminent psychologist, Alexander Bain, for instance, argued that sensation – the transmission of nervous impulses – was ‘the very essence of cerebral action’.38 However, the connection between vibrating nerves and consciousness was a mysterious one. Victorian physiology had considerable difficulty shaping this linkage into a coherent narrative that accounted for extreme states of mind, irrational aberrations, delusions and hysteria. Consequently, as Jenny Bourne Taylor has shown, sensationalist psychology gave at least as much attention to controlling the deviances of irrationality as explicating them.39 From the 1840s to the 1880s, theories of moral management and self-regulation played a central role in the attempt to regulate the relationship between the conscious, willed self and mysterious disturbances hidden deep in the psyche. The ability to exercise self-control independently was seen as a fundamental distinction between the mentally ‘normal’ and the lunatic. Even those psychologists who saw that mental health was conditioned by inheritance, past experiences and the environment, nonetheless urged ‘a continued culture of the intellectual and moral faculties’ to aid self-formation.40 Whether to treat the insane by oppressive institutional supervision or by more humane methods that encouraged selfhelp and self-mastery was another matter of lively debate, largely because of uncertainty about the exact nature and cause of insanity. Catholic sensationalism shows the influence of such thinking in its treatment of the Church’s authoritarian ethos of control and discipline, and in its emphasis on faith as a non-rational experience, aroused by the body through sensuous ritual or the pains of ascetic practices. It presents an important means by which Victorians could think and speak about the appropriate balance between the will, the body and the emotions and the relative merits of institutional regulation and the culture of self-management. Identified with ‘something hot and strong’ in both subject matter and effects,41 sensationalism intersects with physiological psychology and Catholicism in the Victorian imagination to entwine spiritual, mental and aesthetic perils. Reviewers of sensation novels feared that these narratives would have an unwholesome effect on the mind, agitating and unsettling: ‘they deprave the taste … enfeeble rather than strengthen the intellect … stimulate the very feelings which they should have sought to repress’.42 By admitting readers to what Margaret Oliphant called a ‘confused moral world’, the mode itself constituted a countercultural threat to the character of the nation.43 It undermined the social body as well as the spiritual and psychological stability of individuals. Religious terminology was itself invoked to


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emphasize these dangers. H. L. Mansel complained, for example, that sensation literature usurped the moral and spiritual authority rightfully belonging to the Protestant clergyman. Seizing ‘a portion of the preacher’s office’, these popular novels played ‘no inconsiderable part in moulding the minds and forming the habits and tastes of its generation’.44 Their ‘preaching to the nerves’ was a sign of social deterioration and a general lowering of standards in private and public life: works of this class manifest themselves as belonging, some more, some less, but all to some extent, to the morbid phenomena of literature – indications of a wide-spread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause; called into existence to supply the cravings of a diseased appetite, and contributing themselves to foster the disease, and to stimulate the want which they 45 supply.

An 1867 review similarly denounced sensationalism as ‘artistic atheism in its lowest phase’ because it erased traditional boundaries between right and wrong, encouraging sympathies that ‘tend to set us in active opposition to some conventional moral regards’.46 Sensational portrayals of the heretical Church of Rome in the period employed many of the themes and stylistic features which these reviewers suspected – and to similar effect. However, they more safely shunted cultural difference, contamination and decadence into an alien territory. Written and read as sensational, Roman Catholicism seemed a strange, oppositional force and a seductive spectacle. Presented as fantastic but real, a metaphor of the unorthodox, it functioned as a significant imaginary space embracing the unfamiliar, but also challenging the Victorian status quo. In Protestant Britain, the sensational depiction of Catholicism as hyperbolically different – and powerful by virtue of this difference – forms an important element in Victorian narratives of social identity. As this book illustrates, the main plots, character types and motifs of Catholic sensationalism constitute a unified rhetoric with three main effects. As signifier of the unconventional, it promotes dominant middle-class norms through comparison of these to the heretical denominational Other. Catholic sensationalism thus operates as a conservative ‘micro-mechanism of power’, to use Michel Foucault’s phrase.47 Norm-setting is accomplished by juxtaposing a scandalous Catholic culture and a sane, healthy British society identified primarily with its post-Reformation roots. The technique champions those beliefs and values that counteract Catholic ‘horrors’ and oppression. With its emphasis on papal tyranny, the imprisoning cloister and the Inquisitorial torturer, Catholic sensationalism demonstrates the dangers of an overbearing


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18 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature external ‘management’ of the population. Shocking narratives of foreign authoritarianism give ‘spiritual’ legitimacy to Victorian middle-class ideals of individualism and entrepreneurship, of self-help and self-discipline. However, Catholic sensationalism also functions more ambivalently. It exposes heterodox disturbances lodged invisibly within British cultural formations, including nationhood and gender. The imagery and plots of subversion characteristic of the mode often suggest there is a symbiotic relationship between this foreign culture and British orthodoxy. A characteristic motif for the Catholic presence is the organism that invades and lives off its host: plague and contagion, for example, or secretly rooting ‘noxious weeds’, or the destructive, burrowing pest: ‘Roman Catholics like to work in subterranean chambers; century after century, acre after acre, throwing up a little mole-heap here and there just to let their friends above know that they are alive …’48 Such sensationalizing tropes construct Catholicism as a magnet for all that subverts society from within. When Walter Bagehot gives voice to his loathing of the Catholic ‘beast’, his racially inflected comments express a fear of social contamination as much as of denominational difference: ‘every sound mind would prefer a beloved child to produce a tail, a hide of hair, and a taste for nuts, in comparison with transubstantiation, wax-candles, and a belief in the glories of Mary’.49 This ridiculing conflation of Catholic ‘superstitions’ with the degeneration of the species is indicative of the metaphoric value of Catholic sensationalism as cultural shorthand for different kinds of irregularity. In this imaginary model of Catholicism, religious and secular discourses bleed into each other to express social disquiet about dissenters at the domestic margins. Thus, rebellious spinsters and effete men, class climbers and social impostors, aesthetes who proselytise on behalf of beautiful form, sensualists and hysterics, all have their place in the plots and archetypal characters of Catholic sensationalism. Finally, sensational representations of Catholicism subtly encode a masked version of middle-class Victorian Britain. The most morbid thrills of these extravagant constructions depend on a Catholicism that is not only alien but also uncannily double. In a sensational register, the Catholic menace mirrors the very culture it purportedly threatens. Its greed, cruelty, sexual desire and self-centred obsession shadily replicate the attitudes, aspirations and conduct of the establishment and magnify its failings. Such patterns fracture the reassuring narratives that sustain Victorian middle-class confidence. In the imaginative domain of Catholic sensationalism, values seen as core to British public and private life – self-sufficiency and duty, respect-


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ability and advancement – frequently become the object of critique rather than the norm to be emulated. On the other hand, as sociologists like Chris Jenks have noted, ‘[e]very rule, limit, boundary or edge carries with it its own fracture, penetration or impulse to disobey’.50 The same is true of Catholic sensationalism in Victorian literature. The narrative patterns and images of this strange territory on occasion open a space of productive resistance in which alternative identities can be explored and mainstream beliefs deconstructed. For this reason, Catholic sensationalism can ultimately be read as the fantastic expression of the Victorian cultural unconscious, the displacement of inexpressible contradictions, uncertainties and desires. This literary modelling of Catholicism is a persistent phenomenon throughout the period. The authors and texts chosen for investigation demonstrate its range and diversity within middle-class Victorian Britain, from its opening years (with Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr) to the 1890s (with the work of Francis Thompson and Mary Ward). Catholic sensationalism is employed by male and female writers, and by those from a range of denominational backgrounds (and none): from the Broad Church Charles Kingsley to the Quaker-raised Joseph Shorthouse, from the Jewish Aguilar to the agnostic George Eliot, and of course, Roman Catholics themselves, including Hopkins and Thompson. As the selected texts illustrate, the dominant motifs of the mode are resilient. They surface in both Victorian poetry and fiction. They infiltrate a variety of genres appealing to a wide cross-section of middle-class readers of the period, from the sophisticated and serious to those who favoured mainstream and popular entertainment. Although inflected by different secular preoccupations at different moments, Catholic sensationalism is remarkably consistent in its themes, archetypal characters and effects, whether it occurs in lyrics or dramatic monologues; historical fiction or narratives with contemporary settings; romances of politics and philosophy or those of courtship and domesticity; in realist modes or fictions in a more light-hearted and extravagant register. The chapters which follow exploit this diversity in order to propose a typology for Catholic sensationalism and to explore its three-fold effects in imaginative literature of the period. Close readings of specific works, both popular and canonical, are contextualized through analysis of key character types, plots, and motifs that persist in this discourse throughout the nineteenth century: the Jesuit; the cloister; persecution and martyrdom; conversion; and worship, ritual and devotional practice. They show how Catholic sensationalism shapes the culture it articulates by revising and, at times, resisting specific assumptions and practices that underpin Victorian


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20 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature cultural formations. This book also suggests that Catholic sensationalism is a fluid discourse, variously inflected by different nineteenth-century debates about art, empire, gender, the emotions, and the body. The chapters are organized to illustrate this interaction. Chapters 1, 2 and 3 examine the relationship of sensationalized representations of Catholicism to concerns about the delicate balance between the individual and cultural institutions (state, family, gender, law). Here, portrayals of an excessive, violent Catholicism function as ‘cultural metaphors’ for contemporary versions of selfhood. In this context, Catholic sensationalism dramatizes conflicts (and possible resolutions) between individual desire, duty to a higher authority, and responsibility for the public good. The last two chapters of the book concentrate primarily on writing of the 1880s and 1890s. They relate the sensationalizing of Catholicism to the growing Victorian interest in ‘interiority’ with reference to the emotions and the imagination. Chapter 1 focuses on the archetypal representative of Catholic Otherness: the scheming priest of the Society of Jesus. With their special pledge of loyalty to the Pope, their emphasis on intellectual achievement, and their dual roles as confessors to monarchs and aristocrats and as missionaries abroad, Jesuits have a significant place in the history of European power politics from the Counter-Reformation. In British culture from the Elizabethan period, the ‘Black Robe’ Jesuit has been demonized as a wily and treacherous enemy. Allied with national opponents like Spain, he threatens to pervert English Protestant destiny through the exertion of global control. The Order’s strict authoritative hierarchy and expectation of total obedience is also read as a sign of Catholic antipathy to freedom of conscience and individual rights. The chapter shows how the Victorian representation of the Jesuit through the rhetoric of sensationalism builds on this cultural myth to express contemporary concerns about the relationship between nationhood and subjecthood. Vilification of the Jesuit ostensibly makes the case for self-sufficiency and entrepreneurship as natural British attributes. But it also reveals uncertainty about the efficacy of these traits for ensuring a productive society at its macro (state) and micro (family) levels. The myth of the Jesuit takes on a distinctively Victorian self-consciousness about the fragility of national identity and health. Although written at different historical points of the period, Charles Kingsley’s patriotic historical novel, Westward Ho!, and Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel, The Black Robe, both use the plot of Jesuit invasion to reflect on the state of contemporary English culture and the possible illusions which sustain it. With the Jesuit bid for authority over the heart of the individual and the soul of the nation comes the unpalatable


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discovery of moral hypocrisy and emotional impoverishment at the core of British society. In these exemplars of Catholic sensationalism, Victorian confidence in family and state emerges as a cultural fantasy itself, the projection of lack and insecurity. Chapter 2 is concerned broadly with social relations, focusing on representations of Catholicism that intersect with those codes of gender difference and respectability that convey status on the Victorian individual. In Catholic sensationalism, prurient representations of Catholic nuns and priests emphasize impropriety, hypocrisy and deviance. Behaviour in the cloister helps to define the anti-social and the transgressive with respect to gender roles and sexual conduct. However, these motifs of the culturally undesirable also dramatize new models for the gendered self. In Villette, Charlotte Brontë appropriates multiple readings of the Catholic convent circulating in the period to imagine a new type of female autonomy. Robert Browning exploits the contemporary relish for tales of Catholic clerical excess in his monologues about priests and monks. Through dubious churchmen, he lays bare the shadow side of masculine power and authority embodied in the reassuring Victorian images of the public man and the paterfamilias. For both Brontë and Browning, the devices of Catholic sensationalism facilitate the authors’ adoption of a culturally transgressive position. Only the unorthodox rebel can bypass the authority of convention to become a herald of social change. Chapter 3 explores the most lurid plot of Catholic sensationalism: that of bodily torment, persecution and martyrdom. The main literary focus of the chapter is on two novels that illustrate how ‘historicized’ versions of Catholic sensationalism are in dialogue with a self-conscious Victorian society. Both fictions capture a particular Victorian mood in their concern with communities in the midst of rapid change and social crisis. Horrific tales of Catholic persecution reveal uneasiness about the ways in which stability, conformity and cohesiveness might be maintained – or coerced – amidst political and intellectual turmoil. Spectacular cruelties by and to Catholics certainly express the struggle between personal conscience and institutional authority. Yet the ambivalent portrayal of Catholic victimizers and victims reveals early and mid-Victorian difficulties in reconciling two central ideologies of the time: that of individualism and that of social obligation and duty. Grace Aguilar and George Eliot remodel Catholic religious tyranny and suffering to examine what dedication and justice can mean in a competitive and individualistic society. In The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr, Aguilar contrasts the dual heroics of resistance and of social obedience in a


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22 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature novel about the Spanish Inquisition and the persecution of the Jews. George Eliot’s Romola also uses a Catholic historical setting – fifteenth-century Florence and the rise and fall of the Dominican preacher Savonarola – to reflect on the same tensions. The plot of persecution and martyrdom assesses several kinds of power relationships: that between body and soul, but also those between the individual subject and the various forces of law that seek to regulate and control. For Eliot, the persecuted body serves as a metaphor for a body politic that both deserves and does not merit its fate. For both authors, the martyred body is an ideologically bifurcated text in its own right; it speaks simultaneously of egotistical will power and humble selfabnegation. Works that draw on the plot of conversion are central to Chapter 4. The emotionalized discourse of Catholic sensationalism gives special scope for dramatizing and interpreting the complex effects of the feelings and unconscious impulses on personality and action. The secular cult of sympathy and the Evangelical belief in genuine religious experience as a matter of the heart are just two examples of the Victorian confidence in the ‘tender feelings’ as a reliable authority for moral decision-making. In the final decades of the century, however, the plot of Catholic conversion lends itself to revisions of the Victorian understanding of interiority. Because it emphasizes emotional manipulation and internal conflict, the sensationalized treatment of conversion transforms the familiar conflict between human desire and faith into a tale of self-betrayal and psychological damage. In Disraeli’s Lothair, Shorthouse’s John Inglesant and Ward’s Helbeck of Bannisdale, this plot encodes a shadow narrative about the potency of the buried life and its impact on adult subjectivity. The familiar conversion narrative of fervour and estrangement is adapted in ways that construct the modern subject as conflicted, alienated and abjected. Travel writing about the Continent as well as public religious ceremonies in Britain ensured many Victorians had at least a second-hand impression of the sumptuous and elaborate practices of Catholic devotional life. Chapter 5 examines Victorian responses to the aesthetic of sensation that informed these arts of worship. The sensationalizing of Catholic liturgy draws attention to its sensuous form and beautiful spectacle. Ritual is portrayed as extravagant and mysterious, particularly when contrasted to the low-key reserve of Anglican ceremony and the austerity of Dissenting faiths. However, these representations also reflect the struggle for aesthetic authority in nineteenth-century artistic discourses. Anticipating the anxieties about Aestheticism and art for art’s sake later in the century, the disapproval of Catholic devotional art in


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the early and mid-Victorian period focuses on its irrational, immoral and decadent nature. It establishes both Catholic practices and the aesthetic of sensation as acts of cultural subversion. Certain non-Catholic and Catholic poets of the period take advantage of this heretical space, elaborating a revolutionary poetics modelled on Catholic devotional practice. Dante Gabriel Rossetti employs Catholic topics and images to announce a radical new aesthetic – art as the worship of beauty. He privileges sensuous form, evocative effects, and emotional responses as the essence of aesthetic experience and the source of its ‘truth’. Late Victorian Catholic poetry also makes specific connection to Catholic devotions and ritual practice. The work of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson bears the imprint of the transformation in Catholic worship and devotional writing that occurred in Victorian Britain. The ‘New Catholic Baroque’ embraces an aesthetic of sensuous spirituality, highly charged emotional states, and intimate selfexposure. In thematic and stylistic extravagance, the exhibitionist poetic practice of Hopkins and Thompson invokes this new style to express the ecstasy and pain of connection with the unfathomable Divine. In the Epilogue, I offer some brief reflections on the significance of Catholic sensationalism for an interpretation of the Victorian past. In its interweaving of secular and denominational anxieties, the sensational modelling of Roman Catholicism is central to the system of symbolic thinking that constructs Victorian cultural reality. Its recurrence in diverse literary manifestations from the beginning to the end of the era establishes the persistence of sensationalism as a major discursive practice in the period. Most importantly of all, perhaps, the study of Catholic sensationalism indicates the value of re-engaging with Victorian religious attitudes at the denominational level. Religious assumptions permeate nineteenth-century cultural formations of all kinds. Not only do they shape day-to-day conduct and personal destinies, but they also form a major part of the imaginative lexicon through which the period articulates and interprets itself to itself. Poised between story and history, the sensationalized treatment of Roman Catholicism is an important cultural trope for nineteenth-century writers and readers. For moderns, it reveals new continuities and connections within the vast Victorian project of personal and collective self-fashioning.


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Notes 1 Frederick William Faber, ‘Faith of our Fathers’, in Hymns, 2nd edn (London: Burns & Oates, 1861), p. 265. 2 Henry H. Bourn, Words of Warning respecting The Jesuits, blasphemously called ‘The Society of Jesus’ (London: S. W. Patridge, n.d. [1890?]), p. 46. 3 The most comprehensive historical accounts of Catholicism in Victorian Britain focus on the denomination’s profile and development in England, a focus commensurate with the Victorian tendency to elide nationality (English) and citizenship (British). These include: George Andrew Beck, ed., The English Catholics 1850–1950: Essays to Commemorate the Centenary of the Restoration of the Hierarchy of England and Wales (London: Burns & Oates, 1950); John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975); Denis Gwyn, The Second Spring 1818–1852: A Study of the Catholic Revival in England (London: Burns & Oates, 1942); John Hickey, Urban Catholics: Urban Catholicism in England and Wales from 1829 to the Present Day (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1967); David Mathew, Catholicism in England: The Portrait of a Minority: Its Culture and Tradition, 3rd edn (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955); E. R. Norman, The English Catholic Church in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); E. R. Norman, Roman Catholicism in England: from the Elizabethan Settlement to the Second Vatican Council (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); E. I. Watkin, Roman Catholicism in England from the Reformation to 1950 (London: Oxford University Press, 1957). Rich scholarly accounts of anti-Catholic fervour in the period also give valuable insights into the Victorian Catholic experience from a range of denominational perspectives. Of particular value in this respect are: E. R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968); D. G. Paz, Popular AntiCatholicism in Mid-Victorian England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); John Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain: 1829–1860 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). For general treatment of Victorian denominational history, Owen Chadwick’s The Victorian Church, 2 vols, 2nd edn (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1970), and Horton Davies’s Worship and Theology in England, vol. III, From Watts and Wesley to Maurice, 1690–1850; vol. IV, From Newman to Martineau, 1850–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961/2) remain central works for consultation. 4 Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (London: University of California Press, 1994). 5 Susan M. Griffin, Anti-Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture No. 141 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 6 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), p. 71. 7 Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England: From the Accession of James II (1848; London: J. M. Dent, 1906), I, p. 359. For a recent historical account of the presumptions on which Macaulay’s readers would draw for their understanding of Catholicism, see Colin Haydon, ‘“I love my King and my Country, but a Roman Catholic I hate”: anticatholicism, xenophobia and national identity in eighteenth-century England’, in Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850, ed. Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 33–52. The association


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of Englishness with antipathy to Catholicism was certainly how Catholics perceived the position in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1851 a priest at St George’s (Roman Catholic) Cathedral in Southwark acknowledged the depth and longevity of the English hatred of his Church. He found it ‘a feeling that lies as deep as the gravel bottom over which London stands’ (quoted in Mary Chamberlain, ‘Growing up Catholic’, in Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. II, Minorities and Outsiders, ed. Raphael Samuel [London and New York: Routledge, 1989], p. 24). Franchot, Roads to Rome, p. xix. Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), p. 4. Anon, ‘Domestic Jesuitism’, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, XIX ( June 1839), pp. 677, 674. Henry Edward Manning, ‘The Work and the Wants of the Catholic Church in England’ [1863], in Miscellanies (London: Burns & Oates, 1877), I, p. 28. Nicholas Wiseman, ‘From out the Flaminian Gate of Rome’, The Times, 29 October 1850, p. 5. Out of a population of 17,927,609, Catholics numbered 383,630 to the Church of England’s 5,292,531 and the main Protestant Dissenting denominations 4,536,264 (Chadwick, The Victorian Church, I, pp. 363–65). In the next few decades, however, the Catholic population grew quickly, thanks to Irish immigration rather than mass conversion. By the end of the 1880s, the Catholic population in England and Wales numbered 1.25 million (Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, p. 17). Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, pp. 177, 182. Quoted in Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, p. 56. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, p. 57. A Member of the University of Oxford, A Glance at the Intrigues of the Jesuits, and their Allies, for the Humiliation of England, and the Extinction of the Protestant Religion (Bristol: I. E. Chillcott, 1868), p. 12. Quoted in G. F. A. Best, ‘Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain’, in Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark, ed. Robert Robson (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1967), p. 115; Member of the University, Intrigues of the Jesuits, p. 12. See, for example, D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1988). Miller suggests that sensation novels demonstrate Victorian paranoia about the state of the modern world. Their plotting and rhetoric assume an audience familiar with a social environment ‘where suspicion and inquiry have already become everyday practices’ due to a sense of pervasive crime and violation (p. 157). Anon., ‘Sense v. Sensation’, Punch, XL (20 July 1861), p. 31. Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder, The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America 1837–1883, vol. III, Literary Issues (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 210–11. Anon., ‘Belles Lettres’, Westminster Review, XXX ( July 1866), pp. 269–70. For example, Deborah Wynne has identified the ‘Newgate’ crime novel, sensational newspaper reporting of crime, theatrical melodrama, penny dreadfuls and Gothic fiction as influences on Victorian literary sensationalism (The Sensation Novel and the Victorian Family Magazine [Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001], p. 9). Ann Cvetkovich finds a


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further gesture of disturbance in sensation fiction; it increases class anxiety by drawing its techniques from mass culture (Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992], pp. 15–17). Ann Cvetkovich takes up Paul Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ to characterize the narrative impetus of sensation fiction ‘in which every fact that excites a sensation merits investigation’ (Mixed Feelings, p. 72). Equally important, however, is the dynamic of revelation or exposure of an unexpected ‘truth’ lying invisible below or alongside the ‘respectable’. Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 70. Anon., ‘Our Female Sensation Novelists’, Christian Remembrancer, n.s., XLVI, no. cxxi ( July-October 1864), 210. Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., ‘Reading Detection in The Woman in White’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 22 (1980), pp. 449–67. Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, pp. 84–85. Winifred Hughes’s The Maniac in the Cellar is an essential reference point for the historical contextualization and generic features of sensation fiction as a genre of the Victorian novel. A crisp survey of form, influences and handling of social and gender transgression in the genre can be found in Lyn Pykett’s The Sensation Novel: From ‘The Woman in White’ to ‘The Moonstone’ (Plymouth: Northcote House, 1994). Nicholas Rance, Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 3–4. For a comprehensive account of Catholic elements in eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Gothic literature, see Sister Mary Muriel Tarr, Catholicism in Gothic Fiction: A Study of the Nature and Function of Catholic Materials in Gothic Fiction in England (1762–1820) (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1946). Tarr’s survey of such topics as ‘monkish superstition’, ‘monastic gloom’ and ‘morbid devotions’ concludes that the Gothic use of Catholicism illustrates key eighteenth-century intellectual trends such as Deism, ‘Shaftesburian benevolence’, and the Burkean sublime (p. 122). Robert Mighall’s analysis of the Victorian Gothic briefly considers how the nineteenthcentury handled the earlier Gothic encoding of Catholicism as ‘reactionary’ against which the modern and the progressive can be contrasted (A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999], p. 6). Henry James, ‘Miss Braddon’, Nation, 9 November 1865, in Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Page (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 122. [H. L. Mansel], ‘Sensation Novels’, Quarterly Review, 113, no. 226 (April 1863), p. 483. [Margaret Oliphant], ‘Sensation Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, XCI (May 1862), pp. 564, 568. [Oliphant], ‘Sensation Novels’, p. 572. [Mansel], ‘Sensation Novels’, p. 487. For a more detailed discussion of sensationalism and associationism, see Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850–1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 59–65. Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect, 1868; quoted in Rylance, Victorian Psychology, p. 172. Jenny Bourne Taylor, In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, sensation narrative,


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41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49 50

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and nineteenth-century psychology (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 45– 46. Quoted in Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth, eds, Embodied Selves: An Anthology of Psychological Texts 1830–1890 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 280. For an overview of moral management debates, see pp. 227–30. [Mansel], ‘Sensation Novels’, p. 485. Anon., ‘Recent Novels: their Moral and Religious Teaching’, London Quarterly Review, XXVII (October 1866), p. 102. [Margaret Oliphant], ‘Novels’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, XCIV (August 1863), p. 169. [Mansel], ‘Sensation Novels’, p. 482. [Mansel], ‘Sensation Novels’, pp. 482–83. H. A. Page [A. H. Japp], ‘The Morality of Art’, Contemporary Review, 5 (May-August 1867), p. 178. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1980), p. 101. Thomas Lathbury, The State of Popery and Jesuitism in England; from the Reformation to the Period of the Roman Catholic Relief Bill in 1829: and the Charge of Novelty, Heresy, and Schism Against the Church of Rome Substantiated (London: John Leslie, 1838), p. 275; Rev. J[ohn] Cumming, The Pope, the Man of Sin: A Lecture Delivered on Tuesday, May 27th 1851 (London: Piper & Co. and John F. Shaw, 1851), p. 10. Walter Bagehot, ‘Edward Gibbon’ (1856), in The Collected Works of Walter Bagehot, ed. Norman St John-Stevas (London: The Economist, 1965), I, p. 363. Chris Jenks, Transgression (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 7.


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1 Sensational Invasions: The Jesuit, the State and the Family Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! and Wilkie Collins’s The Black Robe What is this alien on British soil? — R. W. Overbury, The Jesuits

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Where is the Jesuit do you say? yea, where is he not? They multiply as maggots in May … 2 — R. J. M’Ghee, The Poor Gentleman of Liége ‘Jesuitism on the brain’ is a phenomenon not unknown both in our political and religious world … [a] psychological condition in itself. 3 — John Tulloch, ‘The Order of Jesuits’

In 1880, a priest took the pulpit in St Francis Xavier’s Roman Catholic church in Liverpool, looked carefully at the congregation, extended his hand theatrically, and proclaimed three times in a voice rising in sonority: ‘To hell with the Jesuits.’ After a measured pause to ensure maximum impact on the startled parishioners, he continued in a voice of quiet resignation: ‘Such is the cry today.’4 This sensational moment can still strike a modern reader, as it electrified Father Tom Burke’s listeners, through its shocking juxtaposition of the sacrilegious and the familiar. Like so many nineteenth-century representations of Catholicism, this episode has an uncanny resonance; it disconcerts precisely because it relocates a pervasive social attitude in an unfamiliar space. For his audience, Burke’s teasing performance dramatized Catholic identity in Victorian society at large. Whatever the law, adherents of the Church of Rome stood culturally apart, treated as marginal, alien and sinister. And to make this point, Burke drew on a cultural commonplace: the demonization of the Jesuit as the archetype of Catholic strangeness and wickedness. This chapter explores the meanings associated with lurid portrayals of the Jesuit order – the Society of Jesus – in nineteenth-century elite and popular culture. In Victorian history writing, religious tracts and fiction, lurid representations of the Jesuit have a significance that exceeds denominational

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differentiation. They show the complex cultural politics at work in the religious discourse of the day. Throughout the nineteenth century, both polemical writing and popular narratives employ the treacherous Jesuit to examine the formation and meaning of nationhood and inscribe a distinctively British model of social conduct.5 However, when the stock Jesuit villain is read through the discourse of sensationalism discussed in the Introduction, the character emerges as a repository of conflicting feelings about the nation’s collective self-image. Constructed as an aggressive invader from Catholic countries and as a secretive infiltrator of the British domestic scene, the Jesuit plays three distinct though contradictory roles in the Victorian cultural imaginary. He is simultaneously the dangerous alien, the arch-criminal within the British underworld, and the symbol of unresolved tensions embedded in Victorian models of social relations. This chapter begins with a wide-ranging examination of this triple ‘encoding’ in Catholic sensationalism in different works, and goes on to discuss its detailed operation in two novels of contrasting types: Charles Kingsley’s historical romance, Westward Ho! (1855), and Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel, The Black Robe (1880–81). At a time of cultural upheaval, transition and expansion, the crow-like ‘Black Robe’ signifies both social confidence and uncertainty. In each of his primary manifestations, the Jesuit offers particular perspectives on a modern British subjecthood which is both an idealised abstraction or ‘imagined community’ and a ‘performed’ behaviour. As representative of a despotic foreign religious culture, the Jesuit is a force to be opposed by a distinctive, unified national identity and purpose.6 Caricatured as dangerous outsider, he becomes the unacceptable Other against which a healthy British political and social character can be constructed and affirmed. However, the other two characterizations of the Jesuit are altogether more ambivalent. Through his incursions into British territory, he gives rise to more sobering reflections on national ill-health at the levels of home and state. The Jesuit succeeds in his countercultural schemes because of social division, weakness and venality. His bizarre and covert plots reveal a pervasive criminal substructure that underlies British society in public and private spheres. Finally, in particular versions of the wicked Jesuit tale, the actions of the Society of Jesus serve as symbolic parallel rather than contrast to the principles and operations of British secular institutions. As cultural metaphor, the figure of the invisible but ever-present Jesuit is a shadowy reminder of the hidden inconsistencies concealed by the idealized British character – upright, resilient and selfless, tolerant and committed to individual freedoms. Whether at the level of the state and empire in Westward Ho! or of the intimate family


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30 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature in The Black Robe, the Victorian portrayal of the scheming Jesuit both asserts and deconstructs the myth of English liberal identity. From its foundation by Ignatius Loyola in 1540, the Society of Jesus had a distinctive Counter-Reformation commitment to support the papacy and to propagate the Catholic faith throughout the world by education, political influence and missionary work. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Reformation England, Jesuitism was viewed as the aggressive military arm of a Catholicism with global ambitions. The Society’s deep roots in mission fields that were potential English colonies, its intimate relation to papal temporal and spiritual power, and its influence at the Spanish and French courts all encouraged the vilification of the Jesuit in English narratives of national usurpation and revival. When Jesuit missionaries came to England in 1580, fears for English sovereignty coalesced around the Society. Jesuitism became a sign of spiritual and temporal invasion that would subvert not only the religious faith but also the civil allegiance of the English people. A ‘Jesuited’ country under the Society’s control would be ‘unEnglished . . . [its citizens] alienated from their nationality’.7 Similar fears are still alive in the polemics of the nineteenth century. Legislation to restore Catholic civil rights enshrines paranoia about the Society of Jesus, illustrating its deep hold on the English political and cultural consciousness. The Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 reads the Jesuit ‘plot’ as a continual and pre-eminent danger to national traditions. While the new law seeks ‘the gradual suppression and final prohibition’ of Catholic religious communities in Great Britain, the Jesuits are the only order singled out by name for this policy of extinction.8 Members of the Society domiciled in England could stay and English Jesuits might return from abroad, but no other members of the Society could enter England unless under licence and then only for six months. The Society could not proselytize or admit new members to the order within the United Kingdom. These features of the legislation were not enforced, but anxiety about Jesuit ambition and power continued throughout the Victorian period. In 1893, for example, an Edinburgh audience was warned about new Jesuit schemes ‘for the conquest of the globe … [to] plant the foot of the pope on the neck of a prostrate mankind’.9 Victorians inherited – and developed – a belief that Jesuitism represented an international menace and, more particularly, an alien presence infesting the country, attacking the nation’s constitution and social stability, and requiring a clear framework for containment and control. While there is consistency from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries


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in the characterization of the Jesuit as a dangerous enemy of England, the rhetorical strategies of sensationalism give a distinctively Victorian perspective to the reading of this ‘foreign’ Society. Although the Jesuit remains an alien figure, Victorian representations register alarm at his place in the domestic scene. No longer primarily an outside agent with diabolical powers in the black arts of political usurpation, the sensationalized Jesuit undermines middle-class British society from an integrated position within the community. His deceit subverts popular communal ideals, including belief in national progress and freedom, respect for individual rights and autonomy, and personal acceptance of responsibility expressed as self-control and dutifulness. Embedding the Jesuit in a web of verbal and narrative excess that provokes both outrage and shock, Victorian writing recasts him as an uncanny figure, terrifyingly strange and, at the same time, disturbingly familiar. Well before critics and readers gave a name to the ‘sensation’ novels of the 1860s, sensationalized narratives of Jesuit machinations occupy the same stylistic space. However, the parallels are unmistakable, and help to explain the contradictory meanings that accrued to the figure in the period. Margaret Maison, for example, has characterized the content and tone of popular Victorian religious novels with Jesuit themes as horrific in their ‘crudity, sadism, hysteria and blood-curdling violence’.10 Nineteenth-century definitions of sensation fiction single out the same semantic features. They routinely emphasize practices already commonplace in the Jesuit tale of insurrection and conversion: complex plots of ‘horror, excitement, and crime’ and duplicitous villains expert in ‘cheating, lying, swindling, stealing, forgery, dissipation, murder’.11 Even more significant for the reading of Victorian Jesuit fictions is the association of sensationalism with cultural abnormality and a certain un-Englishness. Contemporary reviews show how a sense of the foreign is embedded in the understanding of the sensation mode. Constructed as the act of the racial other, even its use is read as an exotic, if not shameful and disgusting, preference: ‘There is no accounting for tastes, blubber for the Esquimaux, half-hatched eggs for the Chinese, and Sensational novels for the English.’12 The sensation style is characterized as one of deviance, aberration and ‘strangeness’.13 Deemed ‘a plant of foreign growth’ out of step with ‘our rules of respectability’, sensationalism is understood by Victorian readers to oppose national standards of morality and conduct.14 In tone, content and effects, it speaks of aesthetic, not just cultural, difference. Whereas the English imagination is represented as distinctive ‘in its hard matter-of-fact sort of way, loving to grip everything with a firm hold,


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and to spend its force … upon something craggy’, the imagination behind sensational discourse is viewed in pathological terms. It is ‘morbid’ in its taste for excitement and shock, irrational in its ‘preaching to the nerves’, and corrupt in its commercial pandering to the ‘cravings of a diseased appetite’ and to a ‘perverted and vitiated taste’.16 ‘Outlandish’ had long been a slang term for Roman Catholics in Britain, indicating their suspect status as outsiders.17 However, the Victorian adoption of the sensationalist register for the portrayal of Jesuits recasts their traditional religious-political danger into a threat to cultural sensibility. In Catholic sensationalism, aesthetics and denominational polemics intersect to inscribe a national identity appropriate to the challenges of nineteenth-century modernity. Associated with the foreign and deviant, sensationalism overtly presents the Jesuit as lying outside the boundaries of the ‘normal’. For a start, its use implies that realism, the discourse associated with rational thought and everyday life, is inadequate for portraying the unnatural deeds of these ruthless Catholic agents. Unexpurgated descriptions of Jesuit violence in Ireland are said to ‘surpass in horror and in cruelty the most thrilling incidents in any modern “sensation” novel’.18 Polemical fiction of the period works on the same assumption. Promotional blurbs for Catherine Sinclair’s anti-Jesuit novel, Beatrice; or, The Unknown Relatives (1852), take for granted that Jesuit behaviour is most appropriately described in terms of shock and excess. The narrative establishes clear denominational boundaries between two Scottish communities – one comprising generous and reasonable Protestants and the other, greedy and overbearing Catholics. However, the main plot dynamic centres on the struggle between the shipwrecked foundling-heroine Beatrice, and conniving, hypnotic Jesuits; they wish to keep her rightful inheritance in Catholic control. Enthusiastic readers justified the sensationalism of the novel by reference to its Catholic content. Commending ‘the high dramatic effect of many of its scenes’, its ‘intense and powerful’ character and its ‘thrilling interest’, they suggest that the novel’s improbabilities add verisimilitude, given ‘the insidious wiles of Romanism’ and ‘the many deceitful acts its votaries use to entrap the unsuspecting’.19 The more startling the disclosures of the novel, the more ‘intelligible as well as perfectly credible’ it becomes, since the world of the Jesuit agent is utterly alien in its wickedness. The arcane plots characteristic of sensationalism are another feature of nineteenth-century Jesuit tales that establish strangeness and cultural otherness. The Jesuit’s manipulation of bizarre and barely comprehensible entanglements is repeatedly invoked as a sign that he represents powers outside the boundaries of an ordered community where individuals have knowledge


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of their world, exercise control over it, and can expect to predict outcomes. For example, the narrator of Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew (1845), the popular prototype of nineteenth-century British and Continental antiJesuit fictions, 20 self-consciously draws attention to the florid complications of a plot centred on the just division of a massive inheritance and Society of Jesus scheming to appropriate the fortune. He attributes the mysteries, twists and suspense largely to secretive Jesuit intrigues, especially those of the evil Rodin: Trusting that the reader’s sympathy is with the old soldier thus left desolate, with Agricola in his prison, Adrienne in hers, the madhouse, and Rose and Blanche Simon in theirs, the nunnery; we hasten to assure him (or her, as the case might be), that not only will their future steps be traced, but the dark machinations of the Jesuits, and the thrilling scenes in which new characters will perform their varied parts, pervaded by the watching spirit of the Wandering Jew, will be 21 revealed in Part Second of this work …

Unlike the reviewers of Beatrice, Sue actually foregrounds the fictiveness of the text. The authorial intervention summarizes the now hackneyed Gothic elements that will, a decade or so later, become the stock machinery of the sensationalist shocker: female victimization and incarceration; the dark undercurrents of unnameable terror within respectable institutions; destructive intrigues; hidden identities; the race for an inheritance; and even the possibility of a supernatural agency. Yet, by reminding readers of the melodramatic staginess of the novel, Sue does more than scope the extraordinary extent of Jesuit malevolence. The passage also heightens the uncanny familiarity and unknowableness of this world in which agents of Rome plot against the vulnerable. Even experienced readers who recognize the narrative formulae cannot anticipate or fully understand the events of this nightmare environment. Individual characters have become the passive subjects of a fantastic script ‘written’ by alien forces. The handling of narrative enigma positions the reader, too, in a foreign narratological ‘culture’. Narrative authority and reliability – the basis of realist discourse – are compromised, because the structural requirement for continuous bafflement means the knowledgeable narrator withholds key information.22 Like the characters subjected to Jesuit malevolence, the perplexed observer of Jesuit schemes is disabled. This breach of the familiar ‘contract’ of good faith between author and reader is extended also to characterization, establishing Jesuit foreignness as a threat to recognizable and stable social identities. In The Wandering Jew, for example, Dagobert fails to develop as the unflappable and resourceful


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34 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature stock ‘old soldier’ typical of adventure-romance. Instead, he is paralysed and demoralized by feelings of ‘a vast conspiracy, which surrounds and threatens us all’ (346). Jesuitism confounds his traditional heroic qualities: ‘I am not a coward – and yet I confess – yes, I confess it – these black robes frighten me –’ (346). This imaginative association of the alien Jesuit with impenetrable schemes, impairing individuals and the state, continues to be reproduced in the more extreme late Victorian and Edwardian accounts of Catholic difference. Walter Walsh’s alarmist The Jesuits in Great Britain pinpoints Jesuits as ‘secret wire-pullers’ (129) responsible for ‘many sensational events’ (vii) in the political and social history of the nation.23 In the discourse of Catholic sensationalism, familiar tropes of foreign wickedness are inflected by specific concerns of the historical moment. So, for example, at a time when a Victorian readership linked national identity to the power and authority of empire, Jesuit intrigues take on a breathtaking, international scale. In this rhetorical mode, the Jesuit has a global reach, disrupting social structures throughout the world with impunity because he is a master of disguise. In historical scholarship and polemical writing of the period, Jesuit viciousness is tracked – though only at second hand – through rumour and a trail of disasters. Past outrages laid at the door of the Society, such as the Gunpowder and Titus Oates Plots and the Great Fire of London, are replaced by contemporary events to update the Jesuit challenge to civil authority. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln, for instance, is said to be by a murderer who ‘was only a tool in the hands of the Jesuits’.24 Sensationalized, the Jesuits encapsulate the present danger to free and independent states. Uncannily, these mysterious ‘citizens of no country’25 have the capacity to be everywhere and nowhere, subverting national destiny and challenging the very concept of a secure, stable domestic culture. Fiction takes up this point through techniques that further emphasize the exotic cultural difference of the Jesuit enemy. Fanny Trollope’s novel, Father Eustace: A Tale of the Jesuits (1847), depicts their sly ubiquity by recalling the distant Continental dungeons and monasteries of an earlier literary tradition. The portrayal of Cuthbert Castle, with its hidden doors and secret passages, reconstructs the terrifying Gothic environment as an apt metaphor for the Jesuit ability to infiltrate secure places invisibly. Sensational language also defamiliarizes Jesuit plotting. The narrative traces a Jesuit conspiracy to defraud a family of its birthright. Using a disguised Jesuit to secure the love of the heroine, Juliana, the Society plans her conversion and the subsequent acquisition of her estate. Macabre images of monstrosity emphasize the horror of disrupting the natural line of inheritance. Each Jesuit seems to


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have ‘more eyes than are fabled in the head of a spider, and … weave[s] webs of more delicate and wide-spreading texture … than all the spiders in the world’.26 Trollope also foregrounds the Jesuit’s position as outcast by linking him figuratively to other ‘suspect’ groups alienated by their class and race, and thus incapable of rehabilitation. Jesuits are shown to prey on gullibility and superstition, as if by second nature, in order to further their designs. They are like ‘a party of gipsies dispersing themselves through a neighbourhood for the purpose of telling fortunes, they all gather something in the way of information, and then make common stock of it’ (III, 50). With the elision of religious and class difference, the Jesuit stranger comes to express the amorphous fears of a Victorian bourgeois establishment, suspicious of the concealed, hostile intentions of the ‘lower orders’. Different kinds of unnaturalness repeatedly suggest the Jesuit’s antipathy to the national or ‘home’ culture. As representative of a foreign faith, the familiar image of the Jesuit from Reformation times – the traitor and invader – is transformed through Victorian sensationalism into something physically and psychologically deviant and repugnant. Many works take their lead from Eugene Sue’s comparison of Jesuit practice to the perverse sadism of the Asian Thugs and Stranglers. In The Wandering Jew, the Jesuit, Rodin, is comfortable with these dangerous empire-builders who spread their cult of death wherever they can. The infidel himself sees the similarity between his unholy intentions and those of the Jesuit: ‘his religion, like mine, teaches to change life into nothingness’ (722). In British Protestant polemic, the alien nature of the Jesuit is reinforced by his dehumanization. The members of the Society of Jesus are ‘deadly vipers in [England’s] bosom … twisting their horrid coils around her’ or even an infestation, ‘spreading like locusts’ nationally and abroad.27 Like vampires, they can assume many plausible disguises and infect their enemies with a treacherous kiss, replacing the human with the diabolical. In Victorian sensationalism, the most traumatic powers of this Catholic Other are associated with the psychological oppression of weak and wellintentioned alike. The callous approach of Jesuits to authority and obedience within their own ranks becomes a warning for unsuspecting nations that fail to guard individual freedom and enterprise. Jesuits are fantastically imagined as automatons, subservient to the will of a Society which ‘prepares its agents for their work by first scooping clean out of their bosoms every atom of individual conscience’.28 The total self-annihilation required by the institution of its members – ‘a sort of holocaust’ of private will and judgement – transforms each individual into a mechanical tool, operating with the


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‘noiseless smoothness’ of an insentient cog in a machine. Like the zombie of Gothic nightmare, the Jesuit is represented as enslaved to the Superior’s will and designs. Reduced to a ‘thoroughly translucent’ vessel or ‘panopticon’,30 each member is a hollow shell through which the Superior watches and discovers all. These tropes of bodily horror and morbidity encode Jesuitism (and, more broadly, Catholicism) as an institution of mental abjection. The Society’s stratagem of enforced psychological submission is compared to the monstrous maiming, even emasculation, of the physical body. Its rules, including unconditional obedience, are ‘deep cut upon the fleshly tablet of every Jesuit’s heart’, resulting in ‘a frame of mind that is dry, chilled and impoverished’.31 Without independence, personal character displays ‘stunted strength’ and ‘sterility’.32 For many Victorian writers steeped in the ideology of individualism, this process of exacting total obedience seems opposed to human nature and, therefore, like torture, when ‘[b]lood oozes from every vein – the sinews crack – the marrow of the bones drops from the fingers’ ends’.33 Even more unhealthy and degrading is the hint of erotic perversion ‘in the diseased prurience’ of Jesuit training with its voyeuristic surveillance and its appeal to the masochistic ‘fascination of submission’.34 These sensational tropes of abuse establish Jesuit authority as an alien concept that infects its adherents, ‘throw[ing] them into a syncope, out of which they should never once awake’.35 Such imagery of the body also constructs Jesuit spirituality as a sham, since it associates the Society with profane desires of the flesh and the world. In Catholic sensationalism, a fascination with physical excess is displaced onto the figure of the Jesuit as a sign of sexual perversity. His decadent interests imply the moral degeneracy of the entire Church of Rome. The wicked Rodin in Eugene Sue’s The Wandering Jew, for example, savours the connections between voluptuous love, horror and death. When he tells the gruesome story of a betrayed mistress who dies unshriven, his eyes ‘sparkle with diabolic fire’ as he describes the lover mourning the corpse: ‘In his delirium, he seized that fair, beloved head, to cover it with kisses. The head parted from the body, and remained in his hands!’ (744). Similar tropes describe Jesuit ambitions for financial and political power. Their mission activities are viewed as ‘essentially worldly and carnal … the wisdom by which they were guided was earthly, sensual, devilish’. 36 Jesuit objectives are unnatural because they disrupt the proper divisions between spiritual and secular authority. Sensationalizing Jesuitism in this fashion establishes two different norms for nineteenth-century readers. By encoding the horrors of Jesuitism as sensual perversity, Protestantism can claim the health of its attitudes to


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body and governance. Jesuit extremism – all pinched asceticism, despotic cruelty and voracious appetite – contrasts unfavourably with Protestant ideals expressed in terms of balance: a restrained acceptance of the body as God’s creation, and a commitment to individual freedom steadied by benign institutional oversight. In imaginative literature particularly, these representations of excess also hint at a darker, sublimated readerly taste and apprehensiveness. Spectacular cruelties certainly enable transgressive desires to be explored and expelled through the annihilation of the Jesuit villain. Indeed, the punishments of these wicked characters may be savoured as hideous extensions of their own vice, an ending more in keeping with an indifferent and ironic Nemesis than with a Christian God of compassion. In Fanny Trollope’s Father Eustace, the Superior General of the Jesuits, who invisibly masterminds the conspiracy against Richard de Morley’s Protestant heirs from afar, is himself secretly poisoned. The greedy and sensuous Sister Agatha, a ‘female Jesuit’ enlisted in the plot, falls ‘a victim to an abundant crop of walnuts, of which she had ever been extravagantly fond’ (III, 326). In Hawkstone: a tale of and for England in 184– (1845) by William Sewell, the subtle and treacherous Jesuit Pearce, who plots against the country by encouraging rebellion among the disaffected, receives an appropriate punishment for his schemes to revive ‘Popery’. The wily priest is inadvertently trapped in a secret passageway beneath the former Catholic Priory and is eaten alive by rats. His demise is graphically imagined in a way that eclipses his cowardice. Instead, the details reveal a fascination with the mutilation of sensitive flesh and with the body’s instinctive struggle to survive: All over the pavement were traces of blood, as if the wretched man had fled from place to place before his ferocious assailants; and there were marks of bloody hands upon the walls, on one place especially, were [sic] the stones were convulsively scrabbled over with gory fingers, and a spring was found … which had closed from the other side, and could not be opened. The extremities were wholly 37 gone. The vitals must have been attacked at last.

Such an anarchic vision of physical excess and disintegration seems out of key with the novel’s more explicit expression of confidence in the individual and the institution. It uncomfortably reminds readers that the unruly and fragile body cannot always be regulated and preserved through effort and will power. The dangerous threat to the nation cannot always be dispelled by the transparent process of law and the principles of justice and fair play. Ridiculing these sensational fantasies of bodily destruction as the vulgar stock-in-trade propaganda of the Jesuits themselves diffuses their most


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38 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature disturbing implications for Victorian readers. Ironically, though Catholic sensationalism has its fair share of the popular, the suggestive and the indecorous, it also identifies taste as an important marker of national and individual normality. The sinister Black Robe easily entraps those unsophisticated minds enthused by mystery, adventure and romantic mayhem. In Sinclair’s Beatrice, Bessie McRonald, with her ‘too poetical and imaginative tendency’, is lured to apostasy and a Catholic convent by exciting stories of martyrdom and sacrifice.38 Masochism for her has its own glamour. She is seduced by the thought of heroic renunciation and comes to express her new Catholic principles in the violent, despotic vocabulary of her Jesuit mentors: ‘all on earth … must be crushed like a worm beneath my feet’ (II, 96). In this overwrought frame of mind, Bessie perversely treasures macabre gifts of dubious provenance: ‘a relic of decayed bone’, ‘an old tooth fit only for a charnel-house, some ancient iron instrument of torture, a lock of odd-looking red hair’ (II, 97). The off-hand tone not only suggests authorial scepticism about the origins of these tatty relics, but contempt for the sensibility that values them. William Thackeray accomplishes a similar deflation, though with less lurid detail, in Henry Esmond (1852), a Bildungsroman set in the reign of Queen Anne. For much of the novel, the eponymous hero is enmeshed in Catholic machinations to return a Jacobite to the throne. Most persuasive of all in winning the impressionable young protagonist’s loyalty to the cause are the sensational stories of swashbuckling adventure recounted by the Jesuit, Father Holt. The priest regularly excites Henry’s imagination with tales of the glories of his order, of its martyrs and heroes, of its brethren converting the heathen by myriads, traversing the desert, facing the stake, ruling the courts and councils or braving the tortures of kings; so that Harry Esmond thought that to belong to the Jesuits was the greatest prize of life and bravest end of ambition 39 – the greatest career here, and in heaven the surest reward …

Henry’s immaturity and insecurity help to justify – and excuse – his ready acceptance of these accounts. But Father Holt’s quiet advice that ‘he did well to meditate on these great things, and not to talk of them except under direction’ (33) subtly suggests to Victorian readers that even Catholics know their sensations cannot long bear the scrutiny of a mature Protestant intellect or the calm, reflective good sense which characterizes British identity. These examples also indicate how, in Victorian Jesuit fiction, sensational rhetoric operates to shape positive notions of nationhood as well as defining the boundaries of cultural difference. While the contrast of sensationalism to the discourses of realism and rationalism dramatizes the distinction between Catholic/foreign excess and Protestant/British moderation,


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humorous deflation encourages the reader to identify strongly with the satirist’s ‘superior’ values. An 1858 piece in Punch, for example, represents the national character as generously broad-minded when it describes Jesuit missionaries in Western Prussia as mad because they ‘rave’ and ‘howl’ against 40 ‘the idea of mutual toleration’. Victorian mockery of Jesuits conveys particular authority on the qualities of restraint and level-headedness, reading them as signs of truth-speaking and independence of mind. In contrast, as a raconteur of the sensational, the Jesuit is represented not only as a fantasist, but also as a liar and hypocrite. Thackeray’s benevolent Father Holt may tell tales of heroic martyrs who suffer stoically for their faith, but he coolly murders a Parliamentary soldier to save his own life. Even more damning is the Jesuit’s ineffectiveness. Thackeray turns Holt’s taste for sensational adventures against him in a way that makes Jesuit political machinations against the Protestant governance simply ridiculous. The priest’s elaborate attempts at espionage yield information that is never quite accurate. His conspiracies come to nothing. His final ignominious reduction snidely deflates the legendary Jesuit genius for disguise and infiltration. When Henry imagines the disgraced and disappointed Jesuit in America, the projection is not that of an adventurous missionary, but of a ludicrous buffoon languishing pointlessly in fancy dress. With ‘the hatchet and moccasins … attired in a blanket and war-paint, skulk[ing] about [as] a missionary amongst the Indians’, Holt is firmly unmasked and discredited as a foreign fake (553). Debunking the myth of Jesuit camouflage through absurdity, Thackeray authenticates a secular version of the British national character that is rational, transparent and matter of fact. Many Jesuit fictions of the period replicate this particular articulation of nationhood. George Stephen’s novel, The Jesuit at Cambridge (1847), for example, hinges on a Jesuit scheme to subvert the institutions that most clearly define British culture by inserting a disguised Catholic into Anglican orders. Written when the wound of Newman’s conversion was still raw, this antiTractarian narrative is informed by an urgent need to make clear boundaries between the Church of England and the Church of Rome. Stephen suggests that the distinction between Protestant and Catholic resides as much in intellectual and imaginative processes and aesthetic taste, as in specific doctrinal beliefs. He makes a contrast between the Protestant preference for ‘plain [and true] meaning’ deduced rationally from Scripture and the Jesuit appeal to religious feeling through some dubious tale of ‘miraculous agency’.41 The differentiation of the foreign Jesuit and the domestic Protestant opposes the ephemera of fancy and excitement to the solidity of material data rationally


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40 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature assessed. While ‘[r]omance, and adventure, may produce an excitement that suspends appetite for awhile’ (II, 212), Stephen suggests that the spirit and affections are more appropriately nourished by reasoned reflection on biblical texts and verifiable documented evidence. Protestant polemicists use similar terms in their denunciation of Jesuit misinformation and fictitious ‘histories’ that delude the credulous. Indeed, the principles and techniques of realism provide the methodology for deconstructing the Society of Jesus. Only analytical investigation and a cool, detached voice can expose Jesuit tales ‘that deliberately countenance recourse to fabrication and forgery’.42 Principles of literary style are translated into features of the national character in the most shocking and melodramatic Jesuit tales of the period. In contrast to the alien ‘Jesuit’ style of lurid sensationalism, the conventions of realist practice are held to be synonymous with English native tradition and culture. The clarity and concrete specificity, respect for logic and plausibility, and the privileging of an innate ‘common sense’ associated with nineteenth-century realist discourse come to signify the best qualities of the English spirit. In Henry Esmond, for example, Thackeray mixes a calm, analytical and authoritative third-person narrative voice with the authenticity of first-person focalization to suggest that personal shrewdness and solid reasoning are the characteristics of Englishness. The feeble schemes of the Jesuits – like so many improbable melodramatic plots – ultimately find no favour with the native citizenry. People and Parliament have no ‘passion for intrigue, that love of secrecy, slander, and lying’ (222). The worst excesses of the Jesuits will inevitably provoke the English people to reassert their own identity as a nation: The moral of the Jesuits’ story I think as wholesome a one as ever was writ: the artfullest, the wisest, the most toilsome and dexterous plot-builders in the world – there always comes a day when the roused public indignation kicks their flimsy evidence down, and sends its cowardly enemies a-flying. (222)

Through cultural inheritance, Thackeray implies, English identity is shaped by principles of freedom, independence and honest-dealing – the very opposite of Catholic deviousness and authoritarian tyranny. The English national character – defined through the discourse of realism – emerges as the best defence against the Jesuit, a foreign interloper defined through sensational writing and sensational practices. Similarly, particular linguistic features of sensationalism enact national identity as well as cultural difference. Rhetorical method and register show that the distinction between the alien Jesuit and the native Englishman is based on contrasting attitudes to power, authority and control. In William


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Sewell’s Hawkstone, for example, the opposing argumentative strategies of the ruthless Jesuit, Pearce, and the noble Protestant hero, Ernest Villiers, inscribe middle-class ideologies of duty and respect as the epitome of English national character at its best. The Jesuit selects working-class co-conspirators who, like him, threaten the stability of the existing political structures. Restless, dissatisfied Chartists and violent outlaws are amenable to Pearce’s control. He builds on their disillusionment and anarchic passions through dissimulation and a cynical understanding of their faults and frustrations. As a result he can manipulate each agent with ease: ‘Having the key to his mind, Pearce knew how to rule it … by alternate confidence and mystery, by maintaining his own superiority, and at the same time flattering his tool with occasional panegyrics, and prospects of advancement to a still higher share in the great work before them …’ (II, 71). The Jesuit’s verbal strategies are appropriate to an underhanded and treacherous authoritarian. His language dissembles and confuses. He creates suspense to tempt his audience and keep it docile. Sudden destabilizing shifts of mood (from ‘confidence’ to ‘mystery’) and ‘prospects’ vaguely promised and endlessly deferred show his contempt for these feeble tools of his own superior will. His hypocrisy and insincerity are apparent in the narrator’s use of words like ‘flattery’ and the overblown ‘panegyrics’. While the worthy Villiers also displays significant rhetorical talents, his methods are described approvingly through the discourse of English middle-class gentility. Villiers’s ‘delicacy of feeling’ and ‘essential good nature’ (II, 81) are opposed to Pearce’s arrogant superiority. In keeping with his desire to improve his estate for the benefit of the people, he does not seek to ‘rule’ a mind or flatter with fake praise. Instead, he tactfully places ‘confidence’ in others and appeals to ‘the name and old associations of a gentleman’ (II, 81). Where Pearce tries to wrong-foot his subordinates by a shifty flux between revelation and secrecy, Villiers maintains a straightforward consistency, implying respect, if not equality, through the ‘openness and manliness of the communication’ (II, 81). A more complex illustration of the connections between narrative mode and national identity can be found in Beatrice. Here, style explicitly takes on the role of a conservative ideological apparatus, theorized by Michel Foucault as ‘“power through transparency” subjection by “illumination’.43 The contrast between sensational and realist idioms in the novel constructs the strangeness of the Gothic register as Jesuitical – unbalanced, idiosyncratic and alien. On the other hand, the novel’s realist elements, which emphasize disclosure, visibility and a shared viewpoint, promote a dutiful


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42 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature citizenry by inscribing moderation and consensus as the healthy expression of native British culture. The bizarre images used to characterize the appearance of the sinister Father Eustace at his most despotic are drawn from the melodramatic register of Gothic excess. He is like ‘a perpendicular corpse … his whole figure crouching with assumed humility’ (II, 229). At other times, he resembles a threatening mesmerist: ‘there was an electric telegraph in his eye, which seemed always understood by his proselytes and obeyed’ (II, 227). Such sinister tropes place the Jesuit outside the boundaries of ‘real’ British life, isolating him as dead man or demonic spiritualist. Alternatively, in Sinclair’s characterization of the noble yeoman farmer Robert Carre, unadorned prose gives an everyday solidity to his uncomplicated independence and self-management – qualities equated with the British character in middle-class liberal ideology of the period.44 Like Villiers in Hawkstone, Carre is associated with the cultivation and shaping of the land for the benefit of the community as a whole. Because of this close connection to the soil, his dutiful temperament and generous commitment to the community at large can be read as typical of the nation’s ‘natural’ character. Carre’s moral attributes, signalled by his appearance, are conveyed through language that is, in effect, down to earth: simple and referential, rooted in the concrete, as unpretentious and open as the man himself. Unlike the pantomime appearance of the Jesuit villain, Carre’s ‘clear eye … open brow … native dignity … frank expression … [and] the free action of his finely-formed limbs’ (II, 229) encode an inherited tradition of honesty, straightforwardness and energetic self-control. By exploiting the discourses of realism, Sinclair can define Carre’s behaviour as an exemplary expression of an authentic national spirit. Moreover, his loyal service to the community implies that personal independence fits unproblematically with the hierarchical structures of deference and responsibility. The emphasis on the farmer’s heroic but unexceptional qualities and his positioning as microcosm of the nation dramatize what Mary Poovey has termed the distinctively Victorian ‘version of liberty – the freedom to be part of a social aggregate’.45 His eventual triumph demonstrates how the native combination of independent-mindedness and dutifulness are proof against the stealthy encroachment of a foreign sensibility like that of the Jesuits. Emphasis on Jesuit foreignness is not the only way in which Catholic sensationalism crystallizes debates about nationhood in the period. Many cultural historians have identified the importance of religious discourse, and most particularly that of Protestantism, to the definition of British character


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and destiny in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Central to this process is the notion of dispelling Catholic incursions onto British soil. For example, in the Glorious Revolution narrative of Catholic defeat and expulsion, Protestant rhetoric and the discourse of ‘civic humanism’ combine to portray British social structure as the sole guarantee of ‘civil and religious liberty, freedom of the press, the diffusion of knowledge and religious toleration’.46 By 1800, denominational allegiance is a well-established component of the modern myth of Britishness, of a ‘sense of [Britons’] place in history and a sense of worth’.47 However, Victorian paranoia about Jesuitism shows how this process of British self-formation took on renewed urgency in the nineteenth century. In the midst of vast social upheaval, a coherent concept of national identity becomes both less certain and more necessary. The sensationalized portrayal of Jesuit invasion provides a central motif through which new anxieties and confidence about the British character could simultaneously be explored and asserted. In Victorian histories, lectures, sermons, religious tracts, proselytizing pamphlets, reviews and novels, the Jesuit plot against the country is characterized as a secular danger as well as a religious menace. Insecurity is evident in generalized assertions about the Jesuits’ irrational but long-standing malevolence to Englishness itself: ‘If they hated England and Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century, they bear no less hate to England and Queen Victoria in the 19th. Let an opportunity present itself, and you shall see them again heading the rebellion, and preaching murder as the most meritorious of all actions.’48 The Victorian preoccupation with Jesuit antipathy to English culture and its political infrastructure shifts attention from religion to state. Conflating denominational and civil allegiance, it implies that even the secular dimensions of nationhood have a God-given legitimacy, and should be embraced with a sacred fervour lest ‘the liberties and freedom of England [be surrendered] to the papal power’.49 Sensationalized versions of Jesuitism in the period sustain this construction of patriotism by associating the Society with social destabilization and revolution. Jesuits are said to seek ‘to disturb the security of property, and to taint the character of the court’.50 They are ‘a corporation dangerous to the State’51 because they rival its control of financial wealth and political organization. Exaggerating Jesuit temporal ambitions in this way embeds Victorian notions of class difference into the construction of subjecthood. The general health of the country, which Jesuits endanger, is synonymous with middleclass social and economic structures. Once global superiority is integral to British middle-class affluence and commercial power, for instance, the Jesuit


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44 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature invasion is redefined as one which attacks British imperial interests: ‘with its secret agencies spread abroad everywhere, with its multitude of unknown and pledged adherents in every class of society, it is a standing danger to the Empire’.52 Similarly, the Jesuit threat to the nation’s ‘political ascendancy and pre-eminence’ obliquely equates the ruling establishment with Britain’s renown throughout the world.53 A British and middle-class inflection is even given to the representation of the Jesuit as an enemy of culture, a view popularized in nineteenth-century French anti-clerical writing. Michelet and Quinet’s well known lecture series, Jesuits and Jesuitism, portrayed the Society of Jesus as an institution opposed to freedom in all its forms and spreading ‘the spirit of death … to politics, literature and art’.54 As the enemy of intellectual liberty, the demonic Jesuit is forced to bear the weight of European anxiety about modern processes of secularization and progress – and their vulnerability. The English variant on this theme shows how bourgeois interests coalesced quite early around scientific knowledge as the basis for worldly advance. The Jesuits invading the British nation stifle innovation and modernity by blocking the expansion of learning. Sensationalized as rigid and superstitious, Jesuits are deemed the natural opponents of any society ‘pushing discovery forward in all directions’.55 This distinctively Victorian conflation of middle-class interests with national identity is dramatized in the more sensational Jesuit novels. Jesuits are routinely involved with working-class and minority unrest that undermines the authority of public institutions and fractures family security. In The Jesuit at Cambridge, for example, ‘Jesuitical intrigue … cajolery, and intimidation, and corruption’ (II, 133) are part of a wider picture of popular ‘agitation’ and political pressure groups. William Sewell’s Hawkstone treats Jesuits, Fenians, Chartists, Socialists, and even Oxford Tractarians as part of the same anti-establishment movement which is fundamentally foreign and sensational in its appeal to ‘something exciting, fervent, enthusiastic, romantic, and picturesque – something unlike the common’ (II, 226). These radical desperadoes oppose the idealized self-image of the nation as peaceful and well regulated. Instead, they cultivate upheaval and disruption stimulated by the class envy and misery of a disaffected underclass. This ‘squalid, vitiated, turbulent population’ (I, 20) is prone to disorder, responding to any one of a number of ‘distracted political parties’ (I, 20) who promise an improvement in their condition and – even better – revenge against the economic tyrants who oppress them. In Sewell’s eyes, these masses are susceptible to Jesuit manipulation because they have lost any sense of collective identity and national pride. They are infected with ‘vice, intemperance,


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and ferocity’ (II, 108) because they are cut off from the guidance and support of legitimate, natural authority. From the beginning of the novel, he makes the point that, in the troubled industrial town of Hawkstone, no ‘man of birth, and property, and sound principles’ is present to keep order and ensure ‘unity of spirit … the bond of peace … righteousness of life’ (I, 20). No longer embedded in an organic community where a hierarchy of responsibilities ensures a cohesive system of respectful deference and benevolent patronage, the working class has been detached from the framework of middle- and upper-class governance that ensures a coherent and well-ordered society: ‘The population was a body without a head, – a mass of fermenting passions, sufferings, high stimulated desires, half-instructed reason, – with no power above them to control, to guide, to be the object of affection, to sympathize with them, or to awe them’ (I, 101). It is for these reasons that Jesuit fictions often market themselves as a public service. Because the Jesuit agent is a figure of difference against which a healthy national identity can be imagined and articulated, the details of his infiltration show the need for assertive measures to preserve cultural integrity and prevent social fragmentation and revolution. A telling comment used to advertise Beatrice, for example, presents the narrative as a rallying call to stamp out a pervasive social abuse: ‘[t]he work will be to Popery … what “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has been to slavery’.56 Similarly, in the novel itself references to the recent Papal Aggression of 1850 urge collective vigilance to defend secular as well as religious freedoms and preserve the security of the state. ‘[T]he clandestine, the marvellous but imperceptible expansion of the Jesuits … while Protestants sleep on in a vague ignominious dream of safety’ (II, 39) is shown to undermine family life and parental authority. This domestic invasion is echoed at the level of the state in the restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy: ‘An Italian flag has been unfurled within the heart of our great metropolis, and bold defiance bid to our laws and religion; therefore all must now be actively true to the flag of old England’ (II, 37–38). The Jesuit plot to implant a foreign culture demands constant nourishment of patriotic fervour and confidence in the superiority of the British character. However, read through the encodings of sensationalism, representations of the Jesuit also show how Victorian culture nervously imagines a shadowy underside to its own national image of public order and private respectability. Jenny Bourne Taylor has noted that sensationalism creates a distinctive ‘strangeness within familiarity’, a disconcerting ‘sense of a weird and different world within the ordinary, everyday one’.57 The lurid portrayals of the Jesuit ‘anti-world’ within Britain evidence the same pattern. As well as


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46 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature being an invader from without, the Jesuit is also the moral poison that can infect a culture from within. His presence discloses the flaws and tensions inherent in Victorian idealizations of the nation. As an instance of surreptitious wickedness, the Jesuit – everywhere suspected and nowhere certain – tropes the darker dimensions of a progressive and prosperous society where individuals and social groups are assumed to have stable, familiar and complementary identities and roles. In a variant on the earlier ‘Burkean Gothic’ with its ‘dissolution of boundaries that delimit the proper places of various stations of society’,58 Jesuit villains populate a world that is recognizably British, but seems beyond understanding and control in both public and private spheres. These Catholic agents exploit an anarchic environment where political and social structures can be overturned, where disguised and anonymous groups can audaciously gain control, and where the unwitting individual is repeatedly subject to confusion and exploitation. In his criminal activities particularly, the Jesuit challenges the version of national identity central to liberal middle-class thought: a community committed to principles of equality, freedom, humaneness and justice. The violent illegal undercurrent associated with the sensationalized narrative of Jesuit incursions is not, admittedly, entirely new, but represents a modernized perspective on the Society in nineteenth-century British culture. Seventeenth-century propaganda characterized Jesuits as sociopaths or amoral murderers, bent on destroying the religious establishment that safeguards the spiritual well being of the people. They send forth certain very audacious murderers who by poison may kill the principal doctors and teachers of the Evangelical and Calvinian Churches … infect[ing] dishes, salt cellars, basins, cauldrons and other vessels whatsoever appointed to daily use, that though they be twenty times wiped over and made clean, yet they 59 shall retain the force of most deadly and present poison.

Although the writer of this tract invests the Jesuit with a pseudo-magical power in his strange potions, the passage goes on to hint at more mundane reasons for his success as a criminal type. He dangerously unites knowledge, networks and disguise to escape detection and penetrate every level of society in every land. The nineteenth-century transformation of this myth refocuses on the secular encroachments of Jesuit villains. Their organisation is imagined as an intricate web that penetrates all social domains: they can be found ‘creeping and crawling about your hearth’60 and simultaneously drawing together rebellious political factions in the public arena. For Isaac Taylor, the Society of Jesus cleverly exploits social weaknesses to insinuate its criminal presence. Capitalizing on public uncertainty in a world where


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moral, material, ‘commercial, and fiscal’ spheres are arbitrarily subject to ‘abstruse and uncontrollable influences’, Jesuits deceitfully promise mystical solutions at the same time as imposing ‘an absolute despotism’.61 They contribute to cultural degeneration with their equivocation and hypocrisy, with their encouragement of sedition and class divisions, and with their fraudulent practices. For a polemicist like Taylor, their pollution of British culture can only be expressed in the outrageous language of sensational excess, the Victorian equivalent of the demonic discourse of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century denunciations of the Society. The Jesuits are like the flood of some ‘putrescent stream’, a ‘Ganges of pestilential filth … from the nether world’ (332).62 In sensational discourse, the Victorian panic about Jesuit invasion centres especially on criminal designs on private property. Jesuits’ ‘mental reservations’ and casuistry enable them to rationalize theft. Pilfering by servants is legitimized in Jesuit teaching as ‘clandestine compensation’, according to W. C. Cartwright.63 Such destruction of trust between employer and employee is paralleled by their meddling with basic property rights of the family. In many fictions, such as Beatrice and Father Eustace, Jesuits scheme to ensure personal estates and wealth come within control of the Society. In the political arena, they threaten the security of property by undercutting the laws and systems that protect it. Because they destabilize traditional bonds and social structures, their countercultural schemes also disrupt social harmony between classes. Jesuits are associated with levelling tendencies and with the hypocritical support of the downtrodden against the status quo. At the same time, they impose their own leadership in a grotesque parody of civic authority and obedience in a democratic system. They use ‘the rights and the privileges of freedom for the purpose of undermining political liberty, and of subverting the very foundations of civil government, and our Protestant constitution’.64 As an archetype of consummate trickery, the Jesuit operating within domestic culture most worryingly reveals the vulnerability of social institutions to fraud and deception. In the Victorian literary imagination, the lucrative criminality of the Jesuit routinely depends on his inconspicuous integration into everyday life. Newman mocks this fear as an ignorant Protestant caricature: ‘Nay, it is awful; they disguise themselves in a thousand shapes, as men of fashion, farmers, soldiers, labourers, butchers, and peddlers; they prowl about with handsome stocks, and stylish waistcoats, and gold chains about their persons, or in fustian jackets, as the case may be …’65 Even the anti-Catholic Punch turns its sarcasm, on occasion, against this fixation with finding secret Jesuits


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in every nook and cranny. Nonetheless, there is a widespread belief that Jesuits had assimilated imperceptibly into the fabric of British social life.67 Most sensational Jesuit fictions sustain this suspicion of Jesuit false-seeming in which the disguised priest-on-the-run of Elizabethan propaganda has become an invisible malefactor defrauding the unsuspecting. Jesuit duplicity succeeds – or nearly so – because of gaps and erosions in social boundaries that the discourse of cohesive nationality normally works to play down. For example, the typical Jesuit villain has all the plausibility and good bearing of a middle-class English gentleman: ‘handsome, polite, courteous, pleasing in his manners’.68 Like the new white-collar criminals who exploit ‘urban chaos’ in Victorian popular fictions and journalism,69 Jesuit characters sidestep the accepted systems of classification that Victorians apply to place each other and to maintain a feeling of control over the social environment and social relations. In fact, the ubiquity and invisibility of Jesuit deceivers show how permeable these boundaries of categorization actually are. From the genteel to the barely respectable professions – no strata of society is imagined to be without its Jesuit spies and tools: ‘physicians, lawyers, fencing masters, hotelkeepers … servants, and policemen’.70 Particular anxiety is generated by the Jesuit infiltration of the working classes, who are assumed to be easily corruptible and unhelpfully entangled in middleclass life through trade and service industries. That a vast secret network of Jesuit sympathizers, including covert women devotees or Jesuitesses, could seem remotely probable to nineteenth-century polemicists, novelists and readers is an instructive sign of the times. Not only does it suggest a feeling that contemporary living requires continuous wariness and suspicion in the face of unspecified dangers, but it also expresses a collective disquiet with the alienating structures of a complex, modern industrial society. The undiscovered Jesuit, scheming discreetly, challenges confidence in a collective national purpose. Instead, his presence uncomfortably suggests the social fractures of modernity. He can work surreptitiously because Britons are now bound in a range of impersonal and unequal economic connections, motivated by worldly ambitions and greed, nurturing resentment rather than the spirit of duty and co-operation. Ultimately, sensational narratives of Jesuit invasion show that these villains take advantage of rather than initiate a perilous national condition. Three important features of Jesuit characterization ironically suggest why this is possible (and, perhaps, explain in part why the Jesuit exercises such persistent fascination for Victorians). In the first place, the Jesuit’s activities within the state and family are disconcertingly similar to the cultural


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practices of the world he would destroy. Even stripped of his disguise, he reveals qualities routinely promoted in Victorian secular ideologies as the sign of individual worth and respectability. Duty and deference, for example, are in practice duplicated in the Jesuit submission to authority. In one tract, the Jesuit ‘abdication of will and judgment’ to the Superior is a matter for censure, while ‘the cardinal virtue of obedience’ is simultaneously extolled as an essential adjunct to the (Protestant) ‘enthusiasm for liberty and … spontaneous virtue’.71 The dangerous constitution and regulations of the Jesuit Order are often ascribed to the single-minded, obsessive temperament of its Spanish founder, Ignatius Loyola. Yet the ‘independence and self-government’, ‘energetic temper’, and ‘power and unity of purpose’ that underpin his fiercely controlling personality72 are the very qualities deemed essential to the entrepreneurial energies of the British character. Although the Jesuit reliance on religious authority rather than personal judgement is rejected as tyrannical, Protestantism is portrayed as a desirable imposition which guarantees the temporal and spiritual well-being of the nation. ‘England herself, free, enlightened, religious England’ is civilized by the Protestant adherence to ‘the light of the Bible’.73 Such statements once again show the way religious difference operates in social formation. But these unresolved contradictions also suggest difficulties in the Victorian management of competing social ideals. Jesuit excess points up how awkwardly a commitment to individualism fits with the necessity of dutiful compliance within bounded social structures. Secondly, sensational narratives of Jesuit criminal scheming, like Beatrice and Hawkstone, give specificity to widespread Victorian fears of cultural degeneration brought about by the nation’s own moral failings and misdirections. In Beatrice, Jesuit cunning is effective because class divisions and antipathies have crystallized into a divided community with individuals jostling for status and control. Sinclair’s remedy is an idealized familial model of British society. Civil liberty and ‘our happy homes’ are coterminous with ‘the existence of British institutions, of moral worth, of natural conscience, of human virtue and human feelings’ (III, 290). Benevolent responsibility for those below and a humble deference to those above are invoked as the bland solution to an acid depiction of social fragmentation. The charitable and humane (Protestant) Lady Edith Tremorne gladly embraces the duties of her superior station. She selflessly cares for the villagers of Clanmarina, bringing physical succour and Bible instruction to the ‘honest-faced, openhearted peasantry’ (I, 143). This pattern of relations between rich and poor, well born and lower class, is entangled with notions of inherited Britishness


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50 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature and coded as duty and sympathy. Once again, though, the ideal of national unity revealed in the downward gaze of the narrator rests on structures that echo the Jesuit system of control and submission. Lady Edith’s view of the family as a community in miniature, for example, is based on a paternalistic understanding of social relations. Parents must be ‘as monarchs, governing their children and servants with affection and authority’ (III, 157). The Catholic menace in Beatrice can only be vanquished if community leaders assume this ‘parental’ role of moral discipline, taking responsibility for the direction of the benighted lower classes. Sinclair’s solution to cultural instability ultimately advocates the very class stratifications the Jesuits presume to exploit. William Sewell’s analysis of Jesuit incursions in Hawkstone implicitly interrogates another potential weak point in the Victorian conceptualization of the national character: the investment in personal enterprise, self-help and advancement. Sewell indicated that he had intended the novel to show ‘something of the working of Jesuitism’; but he also saw the Jesuit dimension as sensational ornament – ‘excitement’ and ‘spice’ – for more earnest reflection on ‘some of the evils connected with our present manufacturing and political system’.74 The schemes of Jesuits and ruffians nearly succeed in the novel because the collective duties and responsibilities of good citizenship have been forgotten. Avarice and ambition gradually destroy harmony and social progress in the town. As a result, the language of freedom and personal independence so frequently used to characterize national identity and criticize popery’s plots is subordinated by the novelist. Too much talk of tolerance and liberalism encourages greed and restlessness. Rampant selfseeking undermines the peaceful order that should distinguish the British nation from its Catholic Continental Other. To resolve the conflict between the Victorian ideologies of liberal individualism and social duty, Sewell, like Sinclair, takes refuge in the discourse of authority and obedience normally associated with the despised Jesuit tradition. For Sewell, the established church and state shape and define national character. He demonstrates throughout the novel that the subordination of individual will to the designs of these powerful institutions is essential for society’s unity, as well as for spiritual and material progress. Leadership and submission to it are represented as obligations essential to cultural equilibrium. Just as the Church ‘demands not support, but obedience … recognising and submitting to its authority’, so the duty of a citizen is ‘not to cavil at or criticise the laws, but to acknowledge the authority of his lawful sovereign’ (II, 253, 376). Like Sinclair, Sewell enforces his link between authority,


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obedience and the formation of a mature identity for the nation by emphasizing the parallels between the state and the family. As Miriam Burstein has suggested, Protestantism frequently presents itself ‘as a family religion’ with ‘paternal authority … as a type of God’s authority itself ’.75 Hawkstone explicitly draws on this concept to create an image of national harmony that is at one and the same time both providentially ordered and reassuringly familiar. The relation between subject and sovereign is described, for example, in the terms of reciprocal responsibility and affection which bind child and father. The rhetoric of domestic affection also inculcates social discipline and compliance. A mature identity and stout conscience is best formed when children ‘respect’ their elders, are ‘grateful’ to them, ‘and do everything we bid them, for our sake’ (II, 30); such terminology also defines the behaviour of a patriotic subject in the public sphere. Control and regulation at national level are benignly naturalized by reference to the authority and obedience sustaining the home. However, the Jesuit intrusion into this family plot exposes the potential frailty of the well-ordered English nation. High standards of duty and obedience can be easily compromised in the interests of self-assertion and independence. Villiers’s haughty neglect of his cruel and fretful father in his dying months results in the forfeiture of his inheritance to scheming Jesuits. The subsequent loss of his own son, again as a result of Jesuit intrigue, seems to him ‘the punishment of Heaven to be sealed upon his own disobedience to his parent’ (II, 338). This failure to submit to authority in the name of independence becomes both a symptom of modern British selfishness and a means by which un-English Jesuitical forces can disrupt the stability of a family and the community which depends upon it. Disguise is the third feature of the sensationalized portrayal of the Jesuit that articulates doubts about the security of national identity. The idealized structure of authority and obedience promoted as the solution to British social decline depends on the legitimacy of claims to govern or to be part of that community which renders loyalty and service. Because the Jesuit shows how readily evil intentions can be masked by an assumed modesty and pleasant exterior, his portrayal highlights a major cultural dilemma: the extent to which any individual has the right to the character he or she professes. Adept at masquerade, the Jesuit reveals identity as performance, rather than essence. Although he replicates the behaviour of polite society, he clearly does not share British cultural purpose and national heritage. Instead, his hidden machinations problematize middle-class social mobility and material prosperity, illustrating how trust can be abused in an


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52 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature increasingly fluid, anonymous and impersonal society. Many Jesuit intrigues demonstrate the impossibility of estimating an individual’s moral status and sincerity by relying on respectable appearances and the trappings of wealth. Fanny Trollope’s Father Eustace, for instance, uses Jesuit disguise to satirize the outward pretence that has supplanted more weighty signifiers of Englishness. Her conniving Jesuit and Jesuitess attend Church of England services and use middle-class dress and manners to cozen most of their acquaintances. Sister Agatha, arrayed as the elegant Mrs Vavasor, is immediately accepted by the gentry as one of their own because she ‘spoke with taste and feeling on the subject of horse-flesh’ (III, 34). Since she has the ‘decided appearance of fashion’, the wicked impersonator is naively respected as ‘a woman of discriminating taste and unerring judgement’ (III, 35). In a more serious vein, the distinction between false and true friends is central to George Stephen’s The Jesuit at Cambridge. The novel’s Jesuit plot hinges on multiple deceptions about identity. The sheltered, innocent Henry is slow to work out the Catholic roots of his best friend, Cyril Harrison. The alert reader steeped in anti-Jesuit discourse of the period would have little difficulty in decoding the many hints: the insinuating and deferential manner of Cyril’s father; the Mediterranean complexion and reserved manner of his wife; the family’s fervent attachment to pre-Reformation monastic institutions. Although these external signs might suggest to the suspicious that Mr Harrison is a Crypto-Jesuit, they do not disclose the nature of his audacious deception: that a Harrison son should be raised as a Catholic but, disguising this fact, be ordained and preach as a Protestant minister to undermine the established Church. In Catholic sensationalism, Jesuit disguise counterpoints Victorian narratives of self-formation, prompting questions about the meaning of ‘identity’ and the difficulty of distinguishing false English man or woman from true. As such, the motif provides an alternative perspective on the workings of middle-class theories of individualism with their high valuation of selffashioning and promise of social advancement. In narratives such as Jemima Luke’s The Female Jesuit (1851) and A Sequel to the Female Jesuit (1852), contemporary bourgeois life is portrayed explicitly as a place of danger as well as opportunity. Disguised as the autobiographical record of a traduced British family, these popular tales suggest that neither religious faith nor humane sympathy can preserve respectable households from the motiveless frauds of Marie L— G—. The impostor plays on the Jesuit fears of Mr L— and his family. She secures their friendship, shelter and financial support by presenting herself as a persecuted victim of the Society. On the basis of


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her intricately detailed tale of incarceration in a Jesuit-controlled convent and the (forged) correspondence from her Jesuit uncle, they treat her with affection and dutifully continue to harbour her, despite their gradual suspicion. Ironically, their native Protestant faith compounds the damage of their naivety, for ‘[t]hey regarded her as a child specially committed to their care by Providence, and not to be lightly cast off or too severely treated’.76 The Female Jesuit concludes with speculation about the origin of Marie’s schemes. They are tricky enough to be Jesuitical, and one theory put forward is that she is indeed an agent employed by the Society for reasons of its own. Her lying and facility with disguise, ‘the assumption of a character altogether the reverse of her own’ (431), and her indifference at having to escape to a foreign country seem proof enough. However, in A Sequel to The Female Jesuit, Jemima Luke traces the further deception, downfall and imprisonment of Marie, identifying a recurrent pattern of social fraud too intricate for even the devilishly efficient Jesuits to perpetrate. In fact, Marie directs her deceptions at Catholics and Protestants indiscriminately. Overall, the narrative, with its detailed analysis of the ways in which false identity can be maintained, highlights the corrosion of public and private life by deceit and hypocrisy. Since Marie’s dissimulation is ultimately without religious or political motivation, Luke falls back on morbid psychology to account for the young woman’s addiction to a kind of nineteenth-century identity-theft, ‘not only unchecked, but exulted and rioted in’.77 Indeed, Luke’s outline of pathological explanations, like ‘Simulative Hysteria’, suggests a world in which misrepresentation is sufficiently common to warrant scientific and medical study and categorization. Marie’s story may ‘act as a beacon-light to warn alike the trifler and the hypocrite’ (206); but in seeking ‘to put the public on its guard’ (2), Luke’s Jesuit paranoia reveals a nation suspiciously turning in on itself, convinced of the need for constant surveillance and control to police its own self-definition. Legitimate succession and inheritance – those principles essential for confirming identity of individual and state – are also shown to be vulnerable to perversion through the sensationalized representation of the Jesuit Other. In Father Eustace, for example, the ruthless Father Ambrose uses emotional blackmail and special drugs to force a dying man to change his will. He has no hesitation about plotting secretly to take ‘possession of what the laws of the land might oppose his taking openly’ (I, 24). In the discourse of Catholic sensationalism, the concept of the natural birthright serves also as an apt metaphor for those narratives of origin that define a nation and its culture. By exploiting typical sensation themes like misunderstandings and


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54 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature mysteries about legitimate heirs, many Jesuit fictions show how the disruption of the process of inheritance endangers authentic national self-definition. In Beatrice, Henry Esmond and Hawkstone, for example, Jesuit threats to a specific legacy trope the difficulty of maintaining continuity in the transmission of the ‘wealth’ of cultural values. The appropriation of inheritance parallels the less tangible hijacking of traditional standards at the level of the home and the level of the state. The preface to Beatrice, for example, warns that Jesuit interventions erode family solidarity and the cultural cohesiveness based on it. To reinforce her point, Sinclair imagines a melodramatic scenario in which a Catholic convert would destroy his home and his life by ‘relinquishing his whole inheritance’ and forcing his mother and sisters to a convent in order to enter the priesthood (xiii). In the same novel, loyalty to inheritance means loyalty also to traditional values and responsibilities within the larger community. Sir Evan McAlpine treats his leadership of the clan as a role to be performed in ‘a spirit of generous self-sacrifi ce for the common good’ (I, 67). His commitment to the villagers increases their own self-esteem such that they, too, inherit and transmit the national spirit. They learn how to seize and make use of their native strength of character and selfsufficiency, for Sir Evan has a ‘humanizing influence on the most abject or uncultivated, in raising them to energetic efforts for themselves’ (I, 151). At one level, the relationship of heredity to personal and public benefit in these narratives of Jesuit trickery constructs a distinctive image of the resilient Victorian nation, uniting family and state within a network of cultural values passed from generation to generation. The individual’s right to freedom of conscience and plain truth-speaking consistent with Protestant principles, the family’s right to the unimpeded continuity of the estate, and the state’s right to flourish in concert with an independent, peaceful and dutiful citizenry are reinforced collectively as the British inheritance which Jesuits endanger. With their greedy materialism, dishonesty, tyranny and subservience, the Jesuits represent an exaggerated version of all that degrades contemporary culture. Foreign to the authentic British character, these modern tendencies should be expelled – like the Jesuits who symbolize them. However, not even idealized versions of the public and private national spirit can emerge intact after Jesuit ‘invasion’ into the narrative scene. It is largely through the handling of the sensationalized Jesuit Other, for example, that the Victorian myths of the state and of the family are deconstructed in Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (1855) and Wilkie Collins’s The Black Robe (1880–81). On the face of it, Westward Ho! projects a romanticized version of Elizabethan imperialism as a way of reclaiming and reasserting a distinctive


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national character. Kingsley uses a range of narrative strategies to reassure his readers that the novel’s construction of British (in effect, English) identity is consistent and continuous with Victorian perspectives. Documents, correspondence, the representation of factual events like the Armada, and the interpolation of historical personages alongside fictional characters give an illusion of a ‘real’ past with which Kingsley’s readers could connect. Allusions to contemporary events – such as the Crimean War, or Papal Aggression, or even a troublesome Ireland – suggest that similar problems of loyalty, sound leadership and foreign powers challenge Elizabethan and Victorian Britons. Kingsley capitalizes on such historicism to make a number of different claims about Victorian society. On the one hand, he constructs a lost world of gallantry and economic and political success to point up the decline apparent in nineteenth-century culture. Traditions have been lost and inheritance neglected. The stately homes which once dominated the landscape of Devon have ‘long since passed into other hands, and fallen to decay’.78 On the other hand, Kingsley suggests that a moral inheritance has also been squandered. Despite the fondness of Elizabethan seafaring adventurers for ‘romance and superstition’, their innocence and heroism are preferable to the agnostic scepticism which informs the ‘hysterical’ Victorian infatuation with science, wealth and its own ‘refined and cultivated mind’ (404). Elizabethans are ‘noble’, and Victorians ‘prurient’ and dissolute by comparison. Kingsley’s explicit objective is to enable readers to recover that distinctive national character which in the past repelled foreign invaders and rivals, signified by the Hispaniolated Jesuit among others. It is not surprising that the novel was taken up as a patriotic propaganda text and distributed to troops in the Crimean War.79 Trading on the Armada as a central foundation myth of English nationhood, the confident authorial persona makes the case for what Raphael Samuel has termed ‘a national self-consciousness’.80 The same heroic concern for national glory and for the survival and dissemination of English culture which inspired the Elizabethan effort against Spain must be revived for the security and moral health of Victorian society in the 1850s: ‘[l]let us rather open our eyes, and see in these old English gallants our own ancestors, showing forth with the luxuriant wildness of youth all the virtues which still go to the making of a true Englishman’ (159). Kingsley goes on to highlight some of those traits which form ‘our own distinctive national character’ (160). In these remonstrations with the reader, his vocabulary reveals the extent to which, for Victorians, the concept of an inherited national identity is secular and expansionist. He focuses attention on those professions and institutions which ensure the prosperity and good order of


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56 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature the state at home and in its dominions: ‘commercial and military daring’, ‘political astuteness’, ‘deep reverence for law’, and a ‘solemn sense of the great calling of the English nation’ (159-60). The religious inflection of this diction – with words like ‘reverence’, ‘solemn’, and ‘great calling’ – implies a divine hand in the formation of this national character. Moreover, the affective and intellectual characteristics which Kingsley appends to his list, like ‘tenderness and mercy’ and ‘teachableness and wide-heartedness’ (160), humanize and personalize this summation. Through his historical account of the origin of national qualities, Kingsley is able to gloss British imperialism as a largely beneficial cultural exchange whereby tolerant and open-minded Englishmen ‘profit by the wisdom and civilisation of all ages and of all lands, without prejudice to our own distinctive national character’ (160). In Westward Ho! the Jesuit menace is a spur to the formation of the strong English state and the modern post-Reformation English character. Jesuits are associated with Queen Elizabeth’s political enemies, such as Spain, who threaten English economic interests at home and in the New World as well as endangering the security of individuals. The alliance of alien religious and civil authorities to secure invasion, so important a feature of Victorian anti-Jesuit rhetoric, is vividly underlined by Kingsley’s homely picture of the Devon villagers celebrating the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Described entirely in the present tense, the scene is given a contemporary immediacy. More importantly, it emphasizes the folly of separating denominational allegiance from political authority. The ‘hideous nightmare’ of a civil war, threatened by Mary’s Catholic supporters, dissolves in the fêtelike atmosphere of bells, bonfires and burning effigies of the pope, while the crowd drinks to the Protestant Queen. When Kingsley concludes, ‘[s]o perish all her enemies!’ (501), he reminds readers that Britishness entails a particular political and religious commitment. The Society of Jesus is also associated with ungodly persecution and enslavement of the innocent and defenceless. In the new colonies, Jesuits spread everywhere and impose a brutal regime on the Indian tribes: ‘military tyranny was superadded to monastic, and the Gospel preached with fire and sword, almost as shamelessly as by the first Conquistadores’ (435). In Ireland, they attack legitimate authority by fostering rebellion and disloyalty. Nor is the domain of family relationships and individual affections secure from their invasion. The ‘huge spider’s web of Jesuit intrigue’ (485) entangles the hero’s brother, Frank, and his beloved Rose in the Inquisition and death at the stake. Cannon Schmitt has associated the archetype of victimized womanhood with the construction of Englishness as a culture both threatened and


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avenging. In provoking manly Englishmen to attempt her rescue from the Spanish Don Guzman, Rose contributes to the reinvention of an English sensibility that favours the aggression and exclusivity, even xenophobia, appropriate to imperialism. But Kingsley’s narrative uses religious opposition to suggest that broad-mindedness also forms an essential part of English identity. It is the Catholic Other that oppresses all difference – denominational, national, cultural and racial. Though Christian, Frank and Rose are condemned by the Inquisitors, indistinguishable from the Jew and pagan black who die with them. The novel’s representation of Jesuits is one of the main structural mechanisms through which an idealized and timeless English character is fashioned. Kingsley displaces racial difference onto religious difference while maintaining the manichean economy central to imperialist discourse.82 He dramatizes all the usual accusations made against the Society of Jesus in Victorian sensationalism through a series of blatant binary oppositions. For each wicked Jesuit characteristic or practice, there is an equal and opposite quality or manner of conduct proposed as attractive, effective and naturally English. For example, cowardly Jesuit agent and novice, Eustace Leigh, spies and engages in petty cruelties, prurient voyeurism and spiteful treachery with horrific results for Frank and Rose. His cousin, the protagonist Amyas Leigh, is everything that Eustace is not: brave, open and forthright, courteous, tolerant, manly and heterosexual in his passions. Because the two young men are cousins, they are drawn to make their own enlightening assessments of each other, person-to-person and culture-to-culture. Eustace responds to Amyas with fear and envy. Amyas brushes Eustace aside with a confident straightforwardness. For him, Eustace, with his foolish schemes and fanatical supernaturalism, is ‘beneath argument’ and ‘a sort of harmless lunatic’ (53). As with other Jesuit narratives of the period, mocking ridicule is used in the assessment of Jesuit traits. As a kind of ‘aesthetic otherness’, derision is an effective strategy of marginalization. It deflates the status of an alien opponent, while it elevates the mocker to a position of superior disdain. Kingsley’s novel highlights the outrageous violence through which the Society of Jesus seeks to establish its power; but he also shows the institution is laughably inept and deluded. Because of his overly complicated intrigues and secrecy, the Jesuit consistently, ‘as is the wont of crooked spirits … only outwitted himself ’ (56). Kingsley uses farce to illustrate how Jesuit principles of authority and obedience are useless when translated into secular practice, especially when compared to English pragmatism and independence. For instance, the Society’s bureaucratic, hierarchical system of governance is


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58 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature given a secular parallel in the command structure of the Spanish military. The Spanish troops are incapable of thinking for themselves. Like automatons – or clowns – they obey instructions blindly and to the letter with humiliating results: The company who were to turn the left flank walked manfully down into the sea, and never found out where they were going till they were knee-deep in water. The company who were to turn the right flank, bewildered by the utter darkness, turned their own flank so often, that tired of falling into rabbit-burrows and filling their mouths with sand, they halted and prayed to all the saints for a compass and lantern. (186)

On the other hand, the English fighting men demonstrate a workmanlike and intelligent response to each battle, even when outnumbered and their fighting ships outclassed. Daring, imagination and self-help characterize their battle style, reflecting the commitment to independent thought and industrious action which Kingsley associates with the emerging English state. In the novel ‘nation’ and ‘liberty’ become virtually interchangeable abstractions; both are given material presence by the effective repulsion of foreign invaders. The English ‘wield the swords of freemen in defence of a free land’ (534); and the narrator is quick to gloss such military skill with spiritual legitimation. Kingsley suggests that English initiative is spurred on by the need to protect ‘English soil’ from the contamination of Catholic persecution, keeping it ‘safe from rack and fagot’ (534). Yet these opportunistic and enterprising fighting methods are related as much to the burgeoning commercial spirit of Elizabethan England as to spiritual faith. Much like the English sailors’ defeat of the Armada, the Queen battles through to economic prosperity by a reliance on individual innovation rather than structured economic management. While not explicitly condoning piratical behaviour, she favours ‘the leaving as much as possible to private enterprise’ (525). By such descriptions, Kingsley implies the continuity of the national temperament and identity; Elizabethan economic principles are like an embryonic version of Victorian political economy with its commitment to a laissez-faire marketplace. Lest the narrative suggest that the English spirit is selfish and anarchic, constraints on freedom are identified throughout, primarily through reference to popular Victorian images of masculine collaboration and bonding. Kingsley links English camaraderie and chivalric self-sacrifice in battle to principles of compliance expressed as fraternal co-operation. Legitimate leaders are obeyed in a compact of mutual support. This requires stout


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discipline for both those who govern and those who submit to them. Those in authority guide; those who are led express respect and affection for their superiors. Drake trains Amyas in the ways of ‘a brave and virtuous captain’ (372) by insisting on the primacy of a homosocial community of feeling. The ideal military hero is not just physically adept and strategically talented. He must have an abundance of emotional sympathy that generates understanding and, where appropriate, forgiveness of his followers. Amyas is taught to ‘feel with and for his men, to make allowances for them’ (372). In return, the men who follow him express gratitude for his ‘works and ways, which [were] always those of a gentleman’ (388). In practice, of course, it implies a calculating approach to group dynamics that knows when to turn a blind eye; his men appreciate the fact that Amyas is no jealous prosecutor of the letter of the law, looking fanatically for every blemish. As fictional hero, he acts ever from the best motivation and imagines that others are equally pure-hearted: ‘[he] saw all you ought to see, and nought that you ought not’ (388). In Kingsley’s modelling of the national spirit, temporal and religious values are conflated. Secular rank implies decency of conduct which in turn designates spiritual standing. Englishmen, he asserts, are synonymous with ‘good men, good gentlemen’ and, as such, are also the epitome of ‘good Christians’. The rhetorical blend of religion and civic pride turns faith and patriotism to the service of the imperialist state, negating class divisions and enforcing obedience as the noble response to authority. Nonetheless, several characters in the novel also display traits which hint uneasily at a darker side to this paradigm of a valorous state. The text explicitly defines Englishness in opposition to many of the countercultural and anti-social qualities familiar from sensationalized anti-Jesuit discourse. Yet these antipathetic attitudes and practices are also woven into the characters and desires of the staunch English adventurers. As the Jesuits and Spanish brutally subdue the American natives in the name of good order, wealth and Catholicism, so the English fiercely and contemptuously suppress the Irish to preserve stable governance, property and Protestantism. Both English and Spanish justify their wars as crusades directed by God’s will, entwining political interests and denominational loyalties. In the New World, little distinguishes the Jesuit-Spanish and the English in their desire for gold, their rebellious adventurous spirit, and their appetite for global expansion and power. All vie for the same spoils and economic pre-eminence. While Spain intends to be ‘the mistress of the world’, England tries to ensure that ‘English commerce, under the genial sunshine of Elizabeth’s wise rule, was spreading and taking root’ (210). English ambitions are gracefully natural-


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60 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature ized by Kingsley’s tropes, but, in the end, the objectives of conquest are the same. The most notable similarity between the Jesuit-Spanish and the English is in their shared attitudes to those who are excluded from power. By drawing attention to the oppressiveness and horror of any invasion of an-Other space and culture, the narrative contradicts the benign interpretations of English colonization expressed by the authorial persona. For example, the cruel and treacherous seduction of Rose by Don Guzman is initially represented as typical of the rampant immorality and acquisitiveness of the MediterraneanCatholic nature. Misled and traduced, Rose is humiliated in a way which suggests a foreign disrespect for the defenceless and innocent. Just as the Jesuit gulls the naive convert through sensational tales of martyrdom and hypocritical sympathy, so the Spaniard makes the English woman his trophy through the false enchantment of romantic adventure stories and insincere flattery. The perverse sadomasochism of the Jesuit also has its secular equivalent in Don Guzman’s lustful aggression. In direct contrast is the chaste, restrained passion of English gentlemen, like Frank and Amyas, who attempt to rescue Rose in an act of chivalric self-sacrifice. However, there are troubling assumptions underpinning even their conduct, which at first seems so noble an image of national identity. Rose’s hold on the sympathy of Amyas, Frank and the reader depends on the fact she marries Don Guzman and has not, therefore, offended against the middle-class conventions governing female sexuality and chastity. Whatever her innocence in the affair with the Spaniard, her continued ‘value’ as a heroine depends on strict conformity to a Victorian orthodoxy that endorses the legalized transfer of ownership of a woman from one man to another. The chivalric attitudes of Frank and Amyas, possible only because Rose is not a ‘ruined’ and fallen woman, reinforce a system in which female desires are silenced and sacrificed to fit economic structures and social propriety. Indeed, for the narrator and the characters, the finest confirmation of Rose’s status as an exemplary English woman is her brave and soundless performance during her persecution to the death by the Inquisition. The same pattern of disdain for difference can be seen in the treatment of the Central American natives. Amyas and his men are capable of contempt that echoes the attitudes of the high-handed Spanish and fanatical Jesuits and calls into question the association of English identity with tolerance, generosity and egalitarianism. The Spaniards enslave the Indians, Negroes and Zambos they defeat. Kingsley focuses graphically on their treatment of the defenceless, especially women, whose sanctified place in the English


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middle-class imagination is violated by Spanish-Catholic inhumanity. Old men, youths and ‘slender young girls, mothers with children running at their knee’ (435) are chained and whipped as they bear heavy burdens. At first, such brutality ratifies the distinction between the high moral principles of the English and the systematic tyranny of Catholic Europeans. The ambushed Englishmen who see the slaves are immediately horrified. Their indignation is represented as characteristic of the authentic English sensibility for it shows their ‘free and righteous hearts’ (435). Moral outrage is presented as the consequence of an inborn respect for ‘the instinct of freedom … [as] the righteous voice of God’. (435). However, the English also dehumanize the natives they encounter. When Amyas and his comrades wander in the Central American forests, they do not respond to the Indians in an even-handed way, but enforce English authority at all costs. They seek vengeance and retribution when threatened; benevolence comes only when they are obsequiously obeyed. Kingsley portrays the adventurers as if they were demi-gods in a new Garden of Eden, dispensing their abundant power arbitrarily but under guise of humane justice. They wander as ‘the lords of the forest and its beasts; terrible to all hostile Indians, but kindly, just, and generous to all who will deal faithfully with them’ (398). Amyas, of course, does not literally enchain native women. Nonetheless, he flays the heart of the passionate native, Ayacanora, and reduces her to an emotionally colonized receptacle of his power. She is described by him – with no apparent irony on the part of the narrator – as ‘a lovely toy’ (453) or a child. Indeed, the narrator even more explicitly subordinates Ayacanora by using tropes that emphasize her animal-like inferiority and the satisfaction she will obtain from unthinking obedience. She is represented as fawning around Amyas, ‘like a dog who has found her master’ (440). Against the grain of his explicit authorial commentary, Kingsley’s simile constructs Englishness as patriarchal and patronizing; it suggests simultaneously a belief in the unseemliness of a desiring woman and the deference to English superiority ‘naturally’ inherent in the savage breast. Ayacanora’s status in the text as a symbol of racial otherness also exposes the arrogance of her ‘civilizing’ conquerors. In Westward Ho! the Victorian project of defining national identity against the Jesuit Other actually exposes the moral murkiness of imperial discursive practices. Because the novel constructs Central American native culture using terms normally associated with dangerous Catholicism, there is an implication that the racially other should be eradicated or suppressed as a foreign menace. Ayacanora’s attempts in the forest to convince the Indian tribe that women and men can have


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62 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature equality of public position are made to seem ridiculous. Her reverence for the tribe’s ‘holy trumpet’, an ancient though meaningless artefact, is overblown. In her regard for its ‘precious mystery’, she is as superstitious as the Jesuits with their saints’ relics. Ayacanora is also threatening because of her fanatical single-mindedness, another characteristic she shares with the sensationalized Jesuit in Victorian narratives. Her impulsive actions and bizarre machinations to gain possession of the trumpet are mocked through the hyperbolic rhetoric typically used to describe Jesuit plotting in polemical writing of the period. When she is disappointed, she is said to be in ‘torment’; she loses control in ‘a fresh explosion’ (441–42). She is unwomanly and ‘uncivilized’ in her disrespect as well as in her physical strength and violence. She shrewishly burns her Indian master’s hut and seizes the trumpet after she has given her tribal superior a sound thrashing. Amyas only partly comprehends her tale of these ‘Amazonian exploits’ (442), suggesting his lack of empathy for both her female ambition and her native culture. The novel remains unable to close the gap between the ideals of national identity (with its projection of openness, love of freedom and tolerance) and Englishness in its historical, colonizing practice. Read through the eyes of those disinherited by the English conquest of Central America, Englishness in the narrative resembles nothing so much as the Spanish pattern of brutal oppression and the Jesuitical pattern of intellectual tyranny against which it is normally differentiated. The point is reinforced by the transformation which occurs when Ayacanora’s English origins are discovered. Overnight, she begins to behave in ways appropriate to respectable middle-class English femininity. Her racial inferiority – confirmed by her earlier wild insistence on personal independence – is replaced by qualities which simply enact another position of subjugation, this time prescribed by gender. Instead of self-assertion and free expression, she gratefully cultivates ‘self-restraint’, ‘temperance’, ‘softness’ (497). Like a child, she meekly welcomes Amyas’s decision to pass her to his mother for shaping into a proper, dutiful Englishwoman. While Kingsley’s concept of national identity endorses belief in equality, personal freedom and sturdy independence, its operation with respect to those deemed inferior by religion, race or gender is one of tight control and dutiful repression. Thus, Ayacanora’s declaration of devoted love for Amyas after his blinding takes the form of abject subservience. She vows to love ‘like your slave, your dog!’ (590), an expression of loyalty which Amyas does not moderate, but for which he gives thanks to God. Despite Kingsley’s fervent belief that ‘our own distinctive national character’ (160) can be recovered and redefined for his age, Westward Ho!


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gradually exposes the contradictions underpinning concepts of British subjecthood in mid-Victorian imperial culture. Read through Catholic sensationalism, the problematics of the narrative become apparent. The novel’s central contrast between Protestant decency and Catholic venality exposes as many similarities as distinctions. The strong leadership, discipline, and deference that define Kingsley’s ideal English nation increasingly resemble the authoritarian oppressiveness and subjugation the novel associates with Catholic culture. Idealized principles of free enterprise and duty in practice replicate the infamous pattern of authority and obedience so castigated in anti-Jesuit rhetoric. The same patterns of control and subjugation emerge, too, in Kingsley’s representations of gender and racial relations. In constructing a version of English nationhood defined by freedom, determination, energy and self-confidence, Westward Ho! is increasingly unable to differentiate the alien Jesuit attitudes of Catholic sensationalism from Victorian middle-class culture. Similar fissures in the ideals of nationhood expressed through family life can be tracked in The Black Robe, Wilkie Collins’s sensational romance combining sexual secrets, guilt and Jesuit conversion intrigues. A complex and fast-moving plot focusing on inheritance, madness and misrepresentation draws attention to parallel themes of fakery and manipulation in matters of faith and matters of the heart. Indeed, many resemblances between these two domains are established. Throughout the novel, the Jesuit model of authority and obedience provides the pattern against which secular relationships, particularly those of love and marriage, are measured. Conspiracies and false positions are shown to be characteristic of the institutions of Catholicism and marriage. In both Catholic and family environments, control is exercised despotically on the weakly servile and the infatuated. As in Westward Ho! the threat of Jesuit infiltration in The Black Robe stimulates reflection on the current state of Englishness and contemporary culture. Kingsley yearned for a more outward-looking British character, energetically promoting national progress and expansion. He denounced mid-Victorian scepticism, materialism and passivity. However, writing in the late Victorian period, Collins suggests that a different kind of spiritual and emotional malaise runs through society and threatens national self-image. In The Black Robe, it is not foreign powers but weak individuals who undermine Englishness, especially as it is expressed through family values and behaviour. Even protagonists seem incapable of taking personal responsibility but instead exist as empty vessels, yearning for fulfilment from some external source. In this novel, Jesuit designs on Victorian family life expose the Victorian family


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64 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature itself as a cultural fantasy, a projection of desire and insecurity, perhaps even of selfishness and greed. Father Benwell, the Jesuit in The Black Robe, is the catalyst whose schemes crystallize Collins’s critique of institutional venality and individual neediness. His characterization draws on the most common traits of the sensationalized Jesuit in Victorian writing. He is wholly untrustworthy and deceitful. Adept at casuistry and equivocation – though capable of speaking ‘the plain truth [when it] served his purpose’ (III, 87) – Father Benwell is a master of ‘moral disguises of all kinds’.83 He can switch from ‘pastoral simplicity’ to ‘fatherly interest and chastened admiration’ in a moment (I, 192, 161). Insincerity, secretiveness and discreet watchfulness enable him to uncover compromising information about his enemies, his dupes and his victims. When it suits, he accepts no responsibility for his vendettas or intrigues, falling back on a Jesuit model of obedience to his superiors and his faith: ‘I only did my duty as a priest’ (III, 263). In reality, he is a man who takes pride and pleasure in exercising authority and power. Not only has he great strength of will and tenacity, but he also has an implicit belief in his right to control others. Despite his worldly and cultivated manner, his ‘pleasant paternal smile’ and ‘remarkably light and easy step’, he is a demanding tyrant, with ‘the habit of command, and the capacity for insisting on his right to be obeyed’ (I, 119–21). Like most Jesuit villains, Father Benwell has property and wealth in mind as he shapes his schemes. His principal objective is the conversion of the nervous, sensitive Lewis Romayne and thus the acquisition of Romayne’s estate, Vange Abbey, formerly a pre-Reformation monastic institution. Benwell presents his intrigue to the honourable Jesuit, Arthur Penrose, as a fair reclamation of usurped property and an appropriate revisioning of national history: ‘We don’t mean to allow Henry the Eighth to have it all his own way for ever’ (I, 131). His argument cynically exploits the Victorian middle-class dependence on authentic origins and legitimate succession to guarantee identity. When he indicates that the estate should be restored as the rightful legacy of the Catholic Church, Benwell appeals to a revered secular principle of ownership and inheritance. But to achieve his ends, Benwell is prepared to violate this precept by blocking the estate’s transmission to Romayne’s heirs. Also behind his scheme is his desire for self-assertion, for the exercise of Jesuitical authority for the sake of it. His impatience on meeting problems – ‘What right has an obstacle to get in my way?’ (I, 142) – shows that the austerity and isolation of his calling are more than balanced by the risk and excitement of imposing his will on others.


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Father Benwell’s conspiracy to convert Romayne is explicitly paralleled by an equal and opposite conspiracy – to ensure Romayne marries. Lord Loring, Romayne’s friend, believes the owner of Vange Abbey is depressed by his solitude. He is unaware that Romayne’s moody frame of mind is due to a serious spiritual and psychological crisis arising from an illegal duel on the Continent in which Romayne killed a man. For a contemporary readership steeped in the legal journalism of the day, this violent act has already compromised the protagonist’s English heritage. By duelling – the practice of unrestrained, ‘impulsive and hot-blooded’ European foreigners – Romayne has departed from the emotional restraint routinely endorsed in Victorian courtrooms as a ‘sign of English “civilisation”’.84 His transgression of moral boundaries and accepted standards of national behaviour causes morbid guilt and deep despair. However, the unsubtle Loring misreads his friend’s suffering as the more conventional need for companionship of a female kind. In his relationship with Romayne, Loring is represented as a well meaning but shallow establishment figure. Fashionable attitudes to courtship and marriage are critiqued through Loring’s general approach to romance as a mere social and emotional diversion. His clichéd plan – ‘a sweet girl to tempt’ his friend and a ‘trap’ to bring them together (I, 95) – suggests the vapid approach of contemporary upper-class society to love and the formation of the family. It is a good indication, too, of the fragmentation and solipsism that haunt the modern individual. Even concerned friends are unable and unwilling to penetrate psychological barriers and share spiritual pain. Conversion and marriage are not simply drawn together as two parallel conspiracies. The threatening Jesuit plot to force a change of faith in order to gain an estate can be read as a displaced critique of the Victorian investment in marriage. Many similarities between the process of Jesuit conversion and the process of courtship nuance the treatment of marriage in the novel, encoding it as an institution of potential tyranny governed by commercial interest. Particularly at issue is the appropriation of an individual’s identity and property. In The Black Robe, a Jesuit and a woman struggle for authority over Romayne’s heart and fortune. The rivals in this battle are evenly matched, although Collins’s mocking descriptions of the forces of womankind massed against the Catholic clergy can undercut – as well as praise – female tough-mindedness in matters of love and romance. The guile of women in managing the intrigues of courtship, in covering awkward social moments, and in dissimulation generally, is set out in the same terms found in Victorian narratives about the Jesuit’s infiltration of the family unit through disguise, smoothness and manipulation. Lady Loring’s finesse in


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66 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature plotting Romayne’s union with Stella Eyrecourt is apparent in her verbal thrusts and casuistry: ‘[w]ith a woman’s feline fineness of perception, in all cases of subterfuge and concealment, she picked a part of the truth out of the whole, and answered harmlessly without a moment’s hesitation’ (I, 117). Even Stella’s mother, a silly social gadabout, is every bit as cunning as Father Benwell. Given a fixed social idea, such as the need for a huge fashionable wedding, Mrs Eyrecourt displays all the tenacity of a fanatical Jesuit: ‘Mrs Eyrecourt’s capacity for holding to her own little ideas, and for persisting … in trying to insinuate those ideas into the minds of other persons, was a capacity which no resistance, short of absolute brutality, could overcome’ (II, 37). While this mocking caricature of the wilful society woman pokes fun at fashionable manners and social trivia, her besting of the tricky Father Benwell elsewhere has a more telling and serious purpose. It shows Mrs Eyrecourt has will power and intuitive shrewdness surpassing even that of the most ingenious Jesuit schemer. She quickly understands that Benwell’s interest in her daughter’s past is not benevolent. Controlled and self-disciplined when acting in her own interests, she ‘foiled him at every point’ (II, 108). Indeed, Father Benwell and Mrs Eyrecourt use similar strategies to get their way. Their dependence on an iron will, their cunning reserve, and their perceptive protection of their own self-interest and position, suggest a further disturbing parallel between an ambitious foreign religion and a selfish secular world. In both, the wielding of authority and the breaking down of personal defences are fair weapons. In a number of ways, the logic of the plot also seems to suggest there is little to choose emotionally or morally between the conspiracy to marry and the scheme to convert to Catholicism in a world of limited options. Both possibilities ostensibly offer Romayne the chance of making up for an undefined lack or emptiness in his life. Even before the duel, he articulates desires which he cannot look to himself to fulfil, referring to ‘the higher needs of human nature’, which Catholicism at least acknowledges (I, 12). He yearns, too, for a sense of community and connection with his ‘fellowcreatures’ in order to achieve calm. Whether these observations reflect noble sensitivities or personal inadequacies is a moot point. Romayne marries (and Stella encourages him to do so) because he hopes she will forgive his guilt and assuage his self-torment. As Father Benwell acutely observes when he learns of Romayne’s marriage, this is a union based on neediness rather than selfless passion: ‘I counted on Romayne’s weakness, and Miss Eyrecourt counted on Romayne’s weakness; and Miss Eyrecourt has won’ (II, 108).


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Almost as soon as the marriage begins, it is apparent that Stella’s victory is only temporary. Romayne is bored by his wife’s failure to provide intellectual stimulus and companionship. The narrative voice slides smoothly from Romayne’s petulant disappointment to a more generalized distinction between the ‘natural’ obedience and loyal support which a woman can offer her husband and the position of intellectual helpmate which is simply beyond her. Collins invokes the rhetoric of the angel in the house to expound on the wife’s duty to her husband: she must ‘love him, admire him, serve him, believe in him beyond all other men’ (II, 101). However, an ironically pointed question also shows how this ideological position takes no account of other differences in upbringing, education and experience which separate English woman and English man in marriage: ‘But where is the woman who can intimately associate herself with the hard brain-work of a man devoted to an absorbing intellectual pursuit?’ (II, 101). The effect of such authorial comment is to imply that marriage and family life can never fulfil the imagined projection of individual aspiration and desire. Nor can it fill the gap created by lost self-esteem and the failure to accept the moral consequences of personal actions. Romayne’s hallucinatory anxiety returns; Stella cannot take on herself or forgive his guilt for involvement in the death of another. Romayne’s morbidity and bitter disillusionment with marriage are matched by his disenchantment with conversion and Jesuitism. Vulnerable to Father Benwell’s insinuations about his wife, misled by Stella’s mistaken decision to hide a previous relationship, and persuaded by Jesuitical casuistry that his marriage is a sham, Romayne becomes a member of the Society and rises to a senior position in the hierarchy of the Church. But the romance of self-sacrifice for religion proves as delusory as Romayne’s hopes for marriage. His guilt is not assuaged but redoubles, erupting in strange fanatical sermons about the tortures of the damned. The Catholic faithful who hear him have long modulated austere piety into something altogether more fashionable and less exacting. Such direct meditations on sin, personal culpability and punishment now seem in disturbingly bad taste. Romayne’s graphic images of the tormented damned soul generate ‘hysterical shrieks’ from the female members of the congregation (III, 188) and cause even the reasonable, wellbalanced Winterfield to rush from the church in search of fresh air and a reviving bottle of champagne. In the end, Romayne finds his Church labours sterile and unsatisfying. His punishing physical mortifications, his loneliness and his guilt destroy him physically and mentally. Instead of flourishing, he inwardly dies, aging prematurely and making a ‘sad change for the worse’ (III, 232).


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68 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Romayne’s heart is only eased when he rebels against his intellectual and spiritual vanity, rejects the authority of the Society, and cunningly ensures his estate passes legitimately to Stella and their child. His final act seems to restore confidence in the role of the family and domestic life in the nourishment of the individual: ‘I know how I have erred – what I have lost. Wife and child. How poor and barren all the rest of it looks now’ (III, 247). When he re-establishes the continuity of his family line, he seems to achieve a peace which has hitherto eluded him. In his responsibility for others lies forgiveness. The hallucinatory voice of guilty accusation which has plagued him since the duel becomes ‘[h]ardly a whisper: my repentance is accepted, my release is coming’ (III, 248). The connection that Romayne seeks from the outset seems embodied in the loving, faithful wife at his deathbed and the child who inherits. The Jesuits appear, once again, to have supplied the ‘false’ principles and illusory promises against which the Victorian middleclass family can be asserted as the guarantor of personal and national good health. Critics have indeed tended to read the novel in this schematic way, accepting it simply affirms ‘normative Victorian domesticity’ against ‘Catholic misogyny’.85 However, the sensations of Catholicism reverberate in the bourgeois world of the novel in more ambiguous ways than binary interpretations suggest, indicating that the conventional portrait of marriage and the family at the end of the novel is something of a compromise. The novel actually has alternative stories to tell about domestic harmony and satisfactions. There are, for example, many more unhappy than happy families in Collins’s narrative. Married bliss exists primarily in the reader’s expectation and imagination. The relationship of Stella and Romayne ceases to be painful only at the moment of their final separation through death. Stella’s own family is a damaged one. Her aunt had become – through marriage – a fanatical and proselytizing convert to Catholicism. By the time the novel opens, she has seduced Stella’s sister into a convent, brought Stella’s father to an early death, and destroyed their family cohesion. The only happy member is the nun. Stella reveals her sister’s contentment lies in her severance of all familial connections: ‘she is so happily absorbed in her religious duties, that she has not the slightest wish to see her mother or me’ (II, 241). Similarly, the cultivated Winterfield’s improbable marriage to Emma, the circus horserider, illustrates the dangerous class mismatches arising from infatuation; passion alone cannot overcome individual vulnerabilities or weaknesses like Emma’s alcoholism. The mother of Romayne’s duelling victim lives through a marriage which is termed ‘a martyrdom!’ (I, 295), bearing with a coarse


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criminal husband, a mentally incapacitated child, and a gruelling enslavement to piecework in their Islington slum. Particularly for women, marriage and family life in the novel are shown to involve a loss of integrity. Collins’s version of the marriage market demands that women who seek husbands subordinate their own needs entirely; instead they must devote their energies to ingratiation and flattery. So great are the expectations of society concerning the English woman’s emotional attachments and romantic, maternal destiny that she can often retain selfrespect and social position only by resorting to lies and half-truths, whatever her innocence. As the narrator concludes, protecting her domestic interests within the family often puts a woman in a false position: ‘[e]ven in trifles, a woman’s nature is degraded by the falsities of language and manner which the artificial condition of modern society exacts from her’ (II, 220). Such universalizing commentary offers a strong counterpoint to the apparent endorsement of the ideal of family life in the conclusion. Maintaining a respectable domestic identity can involve as much self-delusion, irrationalism, fear and forcing of conscience as any Jesuit scheme of conversion. The most honourable characters in the novel are also the most unconventional with respect to their participation in the Victorian model of family life. Bernard Winterfield’s marital status throughout the novel goes through surprising fluctuations and twists. He assumes many roles: single, cultivated intellectual; jilted fiancé; near bigamist; unhappy, separated husband; finally, and most satisfactorily, contented widower. While his likely marriage to the widowed Stella is hinted at the end of the novel, the character of Winterfield is most admirable when he is part of a largely female domestic circle, in chaste, long-suffering attendance on Stella, her child, and Mrs Eyrecourt. Despite the difficulties of maintaining a brotherly, asexual role, he persists in self-discipline and loyal service to Stella’s needs rather than his own. Initially a man of a questionable past, his consistent attention to self-management and duty gradually reveals him as an admirable contrast to the self-occupied Romayne. Unnatural as this strange family might be, it allows Collins to endorse selfless values which his more orthodox family groups disdain in their rush for wealth, status and personal gratification. Even more sensational is Collins’s sympathetic portrayal of the Jesuit Arthur Penrose, who is both sexually and denominationally suspect. Through his priestly vow of chastity, Penrose stands outside all models of marriage and family life represented in the novel. Moreover, a delicate, effeminate sensitivity lies behind his devotion to Romayne.86 To Father Benwell, such feeling is what makes Penrose an inferior Jesuit tool; he remarks with pitying


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70 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature contempt on ‘the weakness of my poor little Arthur’s character’ (I, 263). Conscientious, ‘gentle, self-distrustful, melancholy’, he retains an innocent sincerity which, the narrator warns, could ‘be perverted to dangerous uses in unscrupulous hands’ (I, 127). Certainly, Penrose’s love for the Protestant he has been ordered to convert can be read on top of his Jesuitism as yet another manifestation of an unnatural cultural identity. Yet this homosocial – or even homosexual – attachment is ennobled by the ‘intimate sympathy’ (I, 149) and pure disinterestedness which Romayne’s marriage lacks. In addition, Penrose maintains his sincerity and truthfulness. His affection for Romayne and his sense of honour force him to take difficult decisions against the interests of his Order: to plead Stella’s cause to her husband and to abandon the plan to convert Romayne. Penrose distinguishes himself in both consistency and courage in ways the novel’s protagonist, Romayne, never does. He manages what anti-Jesuit discourse normally suggests is impossible for members of the Society. He exercises personal authority in following his conscience and ignoring Father Benwell’s instructions. He then demonstrates obedience in taking responsibility for breaking his solemn Jesuit vow. He humbly accepts a perilous posting to a Central American mission. For all this, even Winterfield acknowledges he is ‘one of a company of heroes’ (III, 192). It would seem only outsiders can exercise true valour in Collins’s world of distorted and hollow family values. The characterization of Winterfield and Penrose suggests The Black Robe is, ultimately, a subversive text that interrogates the traditional image of the Victorian family. The repertoire of Catholic sensationalism is central to this radical strand, though Collins exploits its motifs and archetypal figures in unexpected ways. A Jesuit’s affection and sense of duty are shown to be more selfless than that of any married couples in the novel. The similarities between Jesuit schemers and marriage ‘brokers’ suggest courtship entails manipulation and coercion and marriage is motivated by acquisitiveness. Overall, the most contented characters are those who live apart from traditional families or in an unusual relationship to them, like Penrose and Winterfield, or even Stella’s sister, the nun. Heroism in The Black Robe certainly does not lie in conformity to social expectations and the established models of behaviour favoured by late Victorian bourgeois culture. Instead, as Winterfield and Penrose show, integrity depends on selflessness and the ability to take personal responsibility for decisions without self-pity. In this wider context, Romayne’s deathbed confession brings peace and indicates maturity, not because it endorses marriage and family over Jesuit tyranny, but because it signals his ability to face his own errors, accept their consequences, and


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forgive himself. Indeed, the destruction of the Jesuit will and the passing of his inheritance to his child allows Romayne to re-create a more innocent and noble self in the next generation. Sensational representations of Jesuits occupy an important place in the Victorian literary imagination. Jesuits enter numerous plots as the alien agents who endanger the health and stability of nation, family and individual. With their allegiance to a Continental Superior General and the Pope, they are troped as foreign invaders of the nation, threatening its political autonomy. Represented as the countercultural Other imperilling the secular state with their intrigues, violence and tyrannical principles, Jesuits enable the expression of nationhood through opposition. Against them, the native British character can be constructed as one dedicated to freedom of conscience and personal initiative. Moreover, the excesses of sensational Jesuit practice give impetus to this task of national self-definition. As the forces of misrepresentation, Jesuits undermine stable social structures, clouding judgement and eroding confidence in public and private domains, in the authority of the state and the family. They blur, confuse and disguise their own religious and secular identities, and thus impose an urgent need on nation and individual, on writer and reader, to separate the authentic and the false in matters of cultural definition. The terminology and thematics of this sensational discourse also have metaphoric purposes in many narratives. Jesuits serve as a type of all that is unhealthy and unnatural in contemporary social relations. Integrated secretly into society at all levels, their ability to scheme unnoticed and their promulgation of a despotic system of control and blind obedience signal at least the imminent danger, if not the presence, of cultural decline. Other paradigms for public institutions and personal relationships are articulated as a response to this Jesuit ‘invasion’. At the level of the state and the level of the family, an ideal chivalric fraternity based on legitimate leadership and loyalty emerges as the antidote to the ethical and social disintegration of Victorian society. Ideologies of sympathy, respect, and duty are promoted as the way to withstand – or mend – the worst failings of the modern nation which scheming, despotic Jesuits exploit. Yet, in a sensational mode, the Jesuit also functions more ambiguously. The clear differentiation between the Jesuit as foreign, invasive Other and the Briton as the natural inheritor of the values of freedom and righteousness is sometimes blurred by irony, paradox and contradiction. Wicked Jesuit principles and practices are mirrored, not supplanted, in the societies depicted in these Victorian fictions. Benign institutions that stand in opposi-


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72 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature tion to the Jesuit and his allies are themselves shown to depend on structures of authority and compliance that, in practice at least, are similar to those of the despised Society of Jesus. The Jesuit reliance on subjugation and obedience is, on the one hand, treated with suspicion and disgust. Yet it is also re-articulated as an essential and natural characteristic of the free nation and blessed domestic circle, at least for the lesser orders. Women, workers and colonial natives are portrayed as attractive and sympathetic when they cheerfully embrace their subordination, empty their minds and surrender their wills to those with power over them. Whether located in the romanticized past or in the contemporary milieu of fashionable society, the melodramatic Jesuit villain is adept at mimicking a society that, like him, has two faces. Hidden in the most sensational Jesuit narratives are two images of the same culture: the idealized state and family sustained by the values of respectability and duty, work and responsibility, determination and enterprise; and a more disturbing vision of that society, one riven by narcissism, social hypocrisy, greed, materialism and inequalities of power. Repeatedly in Victorian Jesuit tales, the invasive Catholic Other slides worryingly and persistently into the complacent Us.

Notes 1 R. W. Overbury, The Jesuits (London: Houlston & Stoneman, 1846), p. 138. 2 R. J. M’Ghee, ed., ‘Preface and Notes’, in The Poor Gentlemen of Liége: being the History of the Jesuits in England and Ireland, for the Last Sixty Years, trans. M. Cretineau Joly (London: John F. Shaw, 1863), p. cxxi. 3 John Tulloch, ‘The Order of Jesuits’, Good Words, XVIII (1877), p. 689. 4 Christopher Devlin, ed., ‘Introduction’, in The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 11. 5 As C. J. W.-L. Wee suggests, throughout the nineteenth century the discourse of nationhood frequently fails to distinguish among the multiple nationalities that constituted Great Britain. ‘British’ is often a synonym for ‘English’; this chapter reflects such elision in the discussion of patriotism and national spirit (‘’Christian Manliness and National Identity: The Problematic Construction of a Racially “Pure” Nation’, in Muscular Christianity: Embodying the Victorian Age, ed. Donald E. Hall [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994], p. 86). 6 Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991) is one of many recent works that draw on postcolonial theory to suggest the importance of the ‘other’ in the formation of national identity. Nationhood depends on boundaries ‘beyond which lie other nations’ (p. 7); defining borders forge feelings of kinship and exclusivity essential to a strong nation-state. Anderson’s theorizing of the nation as a kind of sacred cultural community


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7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20

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is also helpful in accounting for the place of religious discourse in nationalism. The nation, he argues, becomes explicitly articulated as it replaces and defines itself against waning systems like those of religion or dynastic sovereignty. Arthur F. Marotti, Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (London: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), p.15. Quoted in Francis Edwards, The Jesuits in England: From 1580 to the Present Day (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1985), p. 168. Lecture by William Paterson, 1893, quoted in Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits: Missions, Myths and Histories (London: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 227. Wright provides a good summary of the many accusations that have been levelled at the order from the sixteenth century, including sexual debauchery, avarice, cruelty and murder, political treachery, secrecy and disguise, equivocation and casuistry (pp. 126–49). Margaret M. Maison, Search Your Soul, Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age (London and New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961), p. 169. Anon., ‘The Popular Novels of the Year’, Fraser’s Magazine, LXVIII, no. 404 (August 1863), pp. 263, 255. H. L. Mansel even singles out such plot lines as ‘a priest persuading a dying man to sign a paper’ as a characteristic device ‘of the sensation kind (‘Sensation Novels’, p. 485). For discussion of how sensation fictions built on Gothic romance and narratives of ‘religious mystery’ in terms of plot, theme and reading strategies, see Patrick Brantlinger, ‘What Is “Sensational” about the “Sensation Novel”?’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 37, no. 1 ( June 1982), pp. 1–28, and Susan M. Griffin, ‘The Yellow Mask, the Black Robe, and the Woman in White: Wilkie Collins, Anti-Catholic Discourse, and the Sensation Novel’, Narrative, XII, no. 1 ( January 2004), pp. 55–73. Griffin is concerned with the plots, character types and images of anti-Catholic fictions as a framework for the writing and reading of sensation fiction, but does not pursue the ways in which sensationalized versions of religious discourse intersect with discourses of nationalism and patriotism in the period. Anon., ‘Belles Lettres’, p. 269. [Mansel], ‘Sensation Novels’, p. 503. An unsigned review in Reader, I (3 January 1863), pp.14–15; reprinted in Norman Page, ed., Wilkie Collins: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), pp. 134–35. [ J. R. Wise], ‘Belles Lettres’, Westminster Review, n.s. XXXI ( January 1867), p. 262. [Mansel], ‘Sensation Novels’, pp. 482, 483; Anon., ‘Popular Novels of the Year’, p. 263. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992; London: Pimlico, 1994), p. 23. M’Ghee, ‘Preface and Notes’, p. cxxiv. Catherine Sinclair, Beatrice; or, The Unknown Relatives, 2nd edn (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1855), publicity testimonies from cover blurbs of this ‘Run and Read’ edition. Le Juif Errant, one of the best-selling anti-Jesuit novels of the nineteenth century, sold 120,000 copies upon publication in 1845 when it was also translated into English. Translations in German, Spanish and Italian also show the widespread European interest in its anti-clerical approach. In addition to its many reprints, Le Juif Errant was adapted for the stage in Paris and London. George Lander’s English stage version was still being reprinted in the 1880s. See J. C. H. Aveling, The Jesuits (London: Blond & Briggs, 1981), p. 23.


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74 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature 21 Eugene Sue, The Wandering Jew (1845; London: George Routledge, n.d.), p. 284. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. 22 For Patrick Brantlinger, such perversion of narrative authority is a key feature of sensation fiction of the 1860s; see ‘What Is “Sensational”?’, p. 14. 23 Walter Walsh, The Jesuits in Great Britain: An Historical Inquiry into their Political Influence (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1903), pp. 129, vii. 24 Bourn, Words of Warning, p. 59. 25 Bourn, Words of Warning, p. 54. 26 Fanny Trollope, Father Eustace: A Tale of the Jesuits (London: Henry Colburn, 1847), I, p. 71. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. 27 Member of the University, Intrigues of the Jesuits, pp. 5, 6. 28 Isaac Taylor, Loyola: and Jesuitism in its Rudiments (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1849), p. 310. 29 Taylor, Loyola, p. 242; [W. C. Cartwright]. ‘Jesuits: Der Jesuiten-Orden. by Dr. J. Huber, Berlin, 1873’, Quarterly Review, 137, no. 274 (October 1874), p. 287. 30 Taylor, Loyola, p. 310. 31 Taylor, Loyola, pp. 108, 154. 32 [W. C. Cartwright], ‘The Doctrines of the Jesuits’, Quarterly Review, 138, no. 275 ( January 1875), p. 105. 33 Taylor, Loyola, p. 298. 34 Taylor, Loyola, pp. 299, 317. 35 Overbury, The Jesuits, p. 38. 36 Overbury, The Jesuits, pp. 128, 148. 37 William Sewell, Hawkstone: A Tale of and for England in 184–. 2nd edn (London: John Murray, 1846), II, p. 422. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. 38 Sinclair, Beatrice, or, The Unknown Relatives, 1st edn (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), I, p. 249. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. 39 William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. Written by Himself Edited by William Makepeace Thackeray (1852; London: Thomas Nelson, n.d. [1904]), p. 32. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. 40 Anon., ‘Jesuits’ Bark and Howl’, Punch, XXXV (4 September 1858), p. 100. 41 George Stephen, The Jesuit at Cambridge (London: Henry Colburn, 1847), II, p. 181. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. 42 Cartwright, ‘Doctrines of the Jesuits’, p. 84. 43 Foucault, Power/Knowledge, p. 154. 44 See Robert Chambers’s comment in 1861: ‘In plain terms, on every man, no matter what his position, is imposed Individual Responsibility. …. from the power of universal selfmanagement and self-reliance … must ever spring the chief glory of a state.’ Quoted in Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830–1864 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 22. 45 Poovey, Making a Social Body, p. 109. 46 Tony Claydon and Ian McBride, ‘The trials of the chosen peoples: recent interpretations of protestantism and national identity in Britain and Ireland’, in Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c.1650–c.1850, ed. Tony Claydon and Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 20. 47 Colley, Britons, p. 53. 48 G. B. Nicolini, History of the Jesuits: Their Origin, Progress, Doctrines, and Designs


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(London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854), p. 169. 49 Anon., ‘Domestic Jesuitism’, Fraser’s Magazine, p. 667. 50 Anon., The Jesuits Exposed, 2nd edn (London: Protestant Association/Seeley, 1839), p. 19. 51 [Cartwright], ‘The Jesuits’, p. 284. 52 Walsh, Jesuits in Great Britain, p. 347. 53 Member of the University, Intrigues of the Jesuits, p. 5. 54 M. J. Michelet and M. E. Quinet, Jesuits and Jesuitism, trans. G. H. Smith (1843; London: Whittaker & Co., n.d. [1846]), p. 3. 55 Taylor, Loyola, p. 154. 56 Sinclair, Beatrice, 2nd edn, quoted on the cover blurbs. 57 Taylor, Secret Theatre of Home, p. 7. 58 Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 14–15. 59 From Aphorisms, or certain selected points of the Doctrine of the Jesuits, 1609; quoted in Edwards, Jesuits in England, p. 23. 60 A Layman, The Jesuit Priest in the Family, the Church, and the Parish: In reply to a letter by W. H. Anderdon, Sometime Vicar of St Margaret’s Leicester – now Priest of Rome (London: Houston & Stoneman, 1852), p. 156. 61 Taylor, Loyola, pp. 321–22. 62 Taylor, Loyola, p. 332. 63 [Cartwright], ‘Doctrines of the Jesuits’, p. 78. 64 Charles Hastings Collette, A Jesuit Scheme for the Government of England and Ireland, Recommended by the Rev. R. F. Clarke, S.J., for adoption ‘should opportunity present itself,’ and exposed by Charles Hastings Collette. 2nd rev. edn (London: Charles Hastings Collette, n.d. [1898?]), p. 22. 65 John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England: Addressed to the Brothers of the Oratory (London: Burns & Lambert, 1851), p. 16. 66 See, for example, the lampoon of MP George Hammond Whalley’s self-defeating categorizations of Jesuits in high places: ‘Any M. P. who mentions the Pope, in praise or dispraise, is a Jesuit. Any M. P. who never mentions the Pope is the greatest Jesuit of all’ (Anon., ‘Ostensible Occupations of Jesuits’, Punch, LXIX (24 July 1875), p. 23). 67 The novelist William Sewell was convinced the local Ipswich butcher was a Jesuit in disguise. See Shirley Foster, ‘Two Against Rome: A Family Contribution to Victorian Anti-Catholic Fiction’, Durham University Journal, LXIX, n.s. 38, no. 2 ( June 1977), p. 256. 68 Nicolini, History of the Jesuits, p. 270. 69 Andrew Maunder and Grace Moore, eds, Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 3. 70 Bourn, Words of Warning, p. 28. 71 Tulloch, ‘Order of Jesuits’, pp. 738–39, 742. 72 George H. Tragett, Notes on the History of the Jesuits (London: Bell & Daldy, 1865), p. 13; Taylor, Loyola, pp. 152, 178. 73 [Anon.], ‘A Sketch of Popery; extracted from “The Christian Lady’s Magazine’”, in Publications of the Protestant Association (London: Protestant Association/Seeley, 1839), p. 2. 74 Quoted in Foster, ‘Two against Rome’, p. 256. 75 Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, ‘Protestants against the Jewish and Catholic Family, c.1829


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76 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature to c.1860’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 31, no. 1 (2003), p. 343. 76 Jemima Luke, The Female Jesuit; or, The Spy in the Family: A True Narrative of Recent Intrigues in a Protestant Household (London: Partridge & Oakey, 1851), p. 220. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. 77 Mrs. S. [ Jemima] Luke, A Sequel to The Female Jesuit; Containing Her Previous History and Recent Discovery (London: Partridge & Oakey, 1852), p. 199. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. 78 Charles Kingsley, Westward Ho! or, The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh, Knight, of Burrough, in the County of Devon, in the Reign of Her Most Glorious Majesty Queen Elizabeth (1855; London: Macmillan, 1917), p. 248. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. 79 Martin Green, Dreams of Adventure, Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), p. 216. 80 Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, vol. I, History and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. lviii. 81 Cannon Schmitt, Alien Nation: Nineteenth-Century Gothic Fictions and English Nationality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp. 10–16. 82 Abdul R. JanMohamed argues: ‘This economy … is based on a transformation of racial difference into moral and even metaphysical difference.’ Kingsley’s treatment of Jesuits shows the way JanMohamed’s argument could be extended to include religious difference. See “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: the Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature’, in ‘Race’, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 80. 83 Wilkie Collins, The Black Robe, 3 vols, 2nd edn (London: Chatto & Windus, 1881), III, p. 87; I, p. 192. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. 84 Martin J. Wiener, ‘Homicide and “Englishness”: Criminal Justice and National Identity in Victorian England’, National Identities, VI, no. 3 (2004), p. 204. 85 Griffin, “The Yellow Mask’, pp. 62–64. 86 Tamara S. Wagner argues that Collins’s later sensitive and sentimental heroes indicate a ‘reaction to the more embarrassing and dangerous aspects of Victorian ideologies of energy, enterprise, and muscularity’, but her brief discussion of The Black Robe downplays the importance of Penrose for new definitions of heroism in a sceptical age. See ‘“Overpowering Vitality”: Nostalgia and Men of Sensibility in the Fiction of Wilkie Collins’, Modern Language Quarterly, 63, no. 4 (December 2002), pp. 474, 492.


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2 Nuns and Priests: Sensations of the Cloister Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and the Monologues of Robert Browning

The popular demand is for the prodigious, the enormous, the abominable, the diabolical, the impossible. It must be shown that all priests are monsters of hypocrisy, that all nunneries are dens of infamy, that all Bishops are the embodied plenitude of savageness and perfidy. 1 — John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics I almost wish we were Papists, and had a convent to put her in to-morrow. 2 — Wilkie Collins, No Name Of monks and nuns with morbid cravings, With visions and ecstatic ravings … 3 — Eugene Lee Hamilton

In her memoirs of an Evangelical childhood, the Victorian poet, Eliza Keary, recalled a youthful fascination with stories about sinister Catholic convents. Both Eliza and her sister succumbed to the delicious frissons of ‘nun mania’ after reading Mrs Sherwood’s novel, The Nun (1833).4 Sherwood’s narrative makes much of the Catholic cloister as an institution that oppresses both the vulnerable (innocent girls) and the assertive (those with independent religious views). A sub-plot, for example, features Sister Agnes, who, obstinately Protestant in her religious tendencies, had ‘been hidden away in a cell underground, that she might not contaminate the sisterhood’.5 Deeply moved by this portrayal of Catholic violence to a defenceless creature, the Keary girls became convinced that some frightened novice was imprisoned in a subterranean passage under their house. They spread panic and terror among their school-friends, such that one poor girl ran home ‘almost raving about a nun, and a dungeon, and the priest’.6 Indeed, such nun mania was highly infectious in the nineteenth century. Priests, monks and nuns – and the cloistered life in particular – occupy a significant space in the Victorian literary imagination. Tortured nuns, immured nuns, escaped nuns, and rescued nuns as well as licentious chaplains and perverted monks are reconstituted from more exotic Gothic precursors to feature in all manner


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78 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature of Victorian texts – from lurid journalism to scandalous autobiographies, from ‘penny bloods’ to mainstream literary works. This chapter explores the contribution of these sensational character types to the construction and interrogation of gender roles and the ideology of respectability in Victorian writing, with particular reference to Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) and certain religious monologues by Robert Browning. Throughout the Victorian period, the Catholic cloister is invoked in secular as well as religious discussions concerning gender roles and social relations; and the spectacular claims often made about this life emphasize its transgressiveness. Driven by Protestant assumptions about the wicked Church of Rome, many portrayals of nuns and priests focus on their unnatural corrupt state as servants of unholy popery. With their secluded, spartan habitations and vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, nuns and priests oppose Victorian middle-class ideals concerning productive sexuality within marriage, prosperity, social status and individual autonomy. At their most sensational, the scandalous secrets, sexual perversities and authoritarian control of the cloister plot illustrate Catholic tyranny and vice. However, as archetypes against which more orthodox models of femininity and masculinity can be asserted, nuns and priests also offer lessons in ‘true’ and ‘false’ self-fashioning for a contemporary Protestant audience. The un-English space of the cloister provides images of the culturally undesirable, monstrous regiments of despotic or hysterical women, of lascivious, depraved and hypocritical priests. However, Catholic sensationalism also encodes the heterodox space of the cloister in more ambivalent ways. As this chapter shows, it is a contested site in the Victorian cultural imaginary. Because the Catholic consecrated life segregates the sexes, requires sexual abstinence, and insists on strictly regulated conduct, it has many points in common with the Victorian construction of separate domains for private and public experience, for feminine and masculine roles and behaviour. The association of this mainstream gender pattern with a foreign and false faith renders the Catholic cloister an uncanny and disruptive domain – and a potentially subversive one. Both familiar and strange, the cloister blurs the boundaries between horrid papist practices and the social roles and manners that define respectability within Victorian culture. Moreover, as a transgressive site, the cloistered space gives licence to imagine ‘heretical’ alternatives to accepted norms of personal identity and social aspirations. In their appropriation and revision of sensational cloister images and plots, both Brontë and Browning exploit their period’s fascination with the


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sensations of the cloister

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unorthodoxy of Catholic nuns and priests. In Villette, the adaptation of the popular convent exposé and the feminized convent space provides a new model of female autonomy that challenges marriage and domesticity as a woman’s sole destiny. Browning’s monologues about Catholic monks and priests are concerned with the masculine world of the public sphere where conduct is governed by cynical devotion to respectability, convention and social appearance. In his poetry, the lurid world of the greedy and sensual Catholic priesthood serves as a microcosm and critique of nineteenthcentury middle-class life and the hypocritical attitudes that motivate secular behaviour. Underpinning the work of both authors is a complex and shifting network of symbolic meanings associated with the enclosed religious life of the Catholic Church. The contradictions embedded in cloister images capture Victorian disquiet about gender politics and social relations in general. The cloister plot becomes a significant – and popular – means of exploring the gradual erosion of male and female gender boundaries and the changing balance of power between middle-class men and women. Sensational representations of nuns and priests also reflect the shifting ambitions and expectations of the bourgeoisie in more general terms. From sociological and economic discussions to the popular taste for paintings of convent life, nineteenth-century representations of the cloister resist and reinforce ideals of womanhood and masculinity and of social achievement and success. The complexity of Catholic cloister discourse is well illustrated by the multiplicity of readings attached to the figure of the nun in Victorian culture. Public concern about the social place of single women inflects the handling of this archetype of Catholic femininity. From the 1850s, an apparent surplus of unmarried women provoked disquiet. Denunciations of spinsterhood as an ‘unwholesome social state’ and an ‘evil and anomaly to be cured’ suggest the anxiety arising when many women could no longer be safely channelled into ‘completing, sweetening, and embellishing the existence of others’.7 These redundant single women seemed to imperil cultural assumptions about the feminine as a dependent and maternal identity. However, the debate also promoted an alternative view of women’s nature and its fulfilment. Activists like Dinah Mulock Craik and Florence Nightingale embraced a radical view of women’s nature and fulfilment, arguing that purposeful work was essential to female self-development: ‘the chief canker at the root of women’s lives is the want of something to do’.8 The unorthodox social project – to provide single women with a dignified ‘refuge and an occupation’9 – attracted some early feminists to a female space already deemed culturally heretical: the religious sisterhood.


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80 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Anna Jameson, for example, suggested that the Catholic convent illustrated ‘a well-organised system of work for women’ that could be adapted to the national Protestant character and the ‘requirements of the age’.10 A sisterhood could acknowledge a ‘woman’s privilege to share in the communion of labour at her own free choice’ and train her to do so effectively.11 Admittedly, Jameson’s vision of a modern convent life seems scarcely radical to a presentday reader. She constructs her community in terms drawn from traditional Victorian ideals of femininity, so that there is a blurring of cloistered and secular domestic spaces. The sisters’ charitable endeavours with the poor, the fallen and the ignorant are consonant with the traditional understanding of women’s inclinations, with ‘the sympathies, the domestic instincts, the active administrative capabilities with which God has endowed them’.12 The regulation normally provided by the legal and cultural constraints of marriage and the family would, for Jameson, be replicated by the discipline of communal living. Like the traditional Victorian domestic environment, Jameson’s cloister would shape womanly aspirations and behaviour through a sympathetic support network and ‘the control of a high religious responsibility’.13 Nonetheless, by giving ‘domesticated’ respectability to a scheme that seems to challenge both gender and Protestant certainties of the day, Jameson’s proposal illustrates how the radical nature of the Catholic cloister could be used to imagine new alternatives to existing social structures. Certainly, in the prolonged Victorian debate about the Woman Question, the nature of a nun’s experience became a key means of portraying the advantages and disadvantages of an empowered, independent version of the feminine. The Anglican sisterhood, retaining Catholic features of separation, celibacy, collective discipline and spiritual dedication, was seen by many women as an opportunity rather than a threat. As Martha Vicinus has shown, convent life promised ‘adventure linked with duty’, providing respectable access to a public platform and exotic domains normally out of the reach of single women.14 Frances Power Cobbe, a Victorian feminist critical of religious sisterhoods in principle, admitted the attractions of such a life for an able single woman. It could be imagined as ‘a theatre whereon she may develop wonderful abilities for the government of the community and the direction of nobler enterprises … she may find a field wider than the private life of a woman can often supply’.15 The sisterhood movement thus challenged typical constructions of female identity as naturally dependent and relational. Women in a convent developed leadership and financial skills and deployed them in private and public spheres with a minimum of male oversight. Sisterhoods also challenged Victorian masculine ideologies of


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competition and self-assertion that underpinned commercial and imperial endeavours. They demonstrated how collaborative working ensured progress in noble enterprises of social welfare. Religious discourse was also involved in the rejection of these radical possibilities for female social access, self-determination and fulfilling work. Because of the cloister’s close association with the sensational depravity of the Church of Rome, anti-Catholic rhetoric was invoked to suggest the abnormality of a single woman’s life in a sisterhood (and, by implication, anywhere else). Even Protestant convents seemed to threaten the public good in their imitation of, as Bishop Wilberforce termed it ‘a semi-Romanist scheme, with its direction, with its development of self-consciousness and morbid religious affection, with its exaltation of the contemplative life, its perpetual Confession, and its unEnglish tone’.16 These denominationally inflected attacks served as a mechanism for controlling women’s maternal destiny and emotional capacity. By estranging the inhabitants of the ‘foreign’ cloister, marriage could be indirectly promoted and a single life denigrated. As one reviewer remarked, only ‘artificially excited religious emotion’ would attract someone to a sisterhood with its unwholesome Catholic undertones.17 By blending the sensational rhetoric of Catholic fanaticism and female hysteria, critics could represent attraction to this unmarried, active life as a pathological state. The same technique also undermined female intellectual ambition. The growing popularity of the convent as a life-choice was said by some to illustrate women’s inferior taste for the romantic and sentimental and their inability to cut rationally through surface appearance. A nun’s life is figured as ‘something fictitious’ with its ‘feigned parental relation between the superior and the sisters, [and] the self-humiliation where no real cause for humiliation exists’.18 Only a woman, it is implied, would be credulous enough to succumb to such nonsense. The danger of female self-will and determination is also an important undercurrent in the more sensational depictions of the cloister temptation. Women who decide to enter a sisterhood are denounced in language that is hyperbolic and overwrought. But the contradictory nature of these harangues actually exposes cultural panic about maintaining gender ideologies that are internally inconsistent. For some, a woman’s decision to honour her sense of vocation is sign of a misguided strength of will, a rebellion against family duty and parental authority.19 For others, the same single-mindedness is configured as weakness and immaturity, the mark of someone overly impressionable and with no will power at all. Because the mind of ‘a girl is plastic, & can be moulded by any one around her’, she can be enticed into ‘the


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82 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature superstition, or the vice, which may be secretly practised within the convent walls’.20 Once she is inside, some argue, a woman’s rampant egotism will likely be unleashed by the cloistered regime. Tainted by Catholic arrogance and exclusivity, convent asceticism will foster ‘self-sufficiency and spiritual pride, while it engenders self-absorption, selfishness and want of feeling’.21 On the other hand, notwithstanding the general Victorian advocacy of dutiful obedience and respectable compliance in private and public life, convent experience is condemned because it actually obliterates independence. The Catholic tradition of enforced vows demands ‘the complete renunciation of will to another’.22 Such disparagement and promotion of female obedience and autonomy within the same discursive field suggest the instability of the cultural unconscious. Victorian portrayals of the Catholic nun show the difficulty of conceptualizing an ideal of womanhood in a Protestant patriarchy that invests equally in male authority, female submission, and individual freedom of conscience. Additional gender anxiety is apparent in the contradictory understanding of a nun’s liminal position between private and public spheres evidenced in the sisterhood debate. Nuns are represented as unpatriotic because they dedicate their lives to public service rather than the family. This viewpoint relies on the familiar association of the cloister with un-English Catholic roots. From the 1850s through the 1890s, repeated attempts to enforce the inspection of convents promote the view that these institutions have secret Catholic designs on British political and social life. Edward Harper, for example, called for the Government inspection of nunneries because they are sites ‘inside which the jurisdiction of the British Sovereign is not recognised, and where the rights of British subjects have ceased to exist’.23 However, it is the violation of gender expectations rather than denominational boundaries that seems to underpin the most insistent criticism. Nuns are said to undermine the order of the nation by rejecting their natural private role within the family and trespassing on the ‘masculine’ public domain. A meeting of bishops in 1895 looked aghast at ‘the growing independence and lawlessness’ of sisterhoods,24 implying their powerful impact and high visibility, but also their anarchic rebellion in operating outside an orderly system of male regulation. Through such representations of the transgressive, antisocial cloister, independent and self-directing women are implicitly displaced, shunted outside the nation and beyond frameworks of acceptable femininity and propriety. The sensations of the Catholic cloister also offered opportunities to explore – and police – erotic ideals and behaviour, as well as gender definitions.


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Visual art that capitalized on the Victorian sisterhood debate illustrates how the portrayal of Catholic nuns simultaneously inscribed orthodoxy and permitted transgression with respect to female sexuality. As Susan P. Casteras’s study of Victorian paintings of nuns has demonstrated, the ‘partly sensational, partly sentimental’ visual images of the cloister are mainly about sex in their depiction of women pining away for lost or non-existent lovers.25 Further, such works, and reviewers’ responses to them, suggest these images carried inconsistent messages about the vulnerability of the female mind and body. Traditional theories about women’s emotional sensitivity and physical dependence are encapsulated in the favourite depiction of the calm, beautiful convent grounds. The enclosed space offers a necessary protection for women otherwise tempted, or driven, to waste themselves on unworthy men or styles of living. On the other hand, the cloister garden with its restricting walls is also an unhealthy site of repressed sexuality. Ironically surrounded by evidence of nature’s own fruitfulness in beautiful plants and flowers, the wan nun figure symbolizes the annihilation of woman’s natural reproductive capacity, her rejection of a normal maternal and domestic role. As one art critic put it, enforced celibacy leads to female de-naturing in depression, enfeeblement and death: ‘so much capability in giving and sharing delight, is immured alive … all is sadness’.26 However, the very representation of the mysterious convent world tropes a third interpretation of a woman’s physical presence – and this a more illicit and suggestive one. The viewer (or reader) is invited to adopt a scopophilic perspective, taking pleasure in gazing on the forbidden. The spectators’ penetration into the mysteries of a secret female space implies an alternative, sexualized femininity for imaginative contemplation. The figure of the nun becomes a religious displacement of (male) fantasies about the unattainable veiled virgin. These aesthetic products of nun mania collude with and challenge the secular fetishizing of virginity and associated versions of femininity. In the sensational discourse of the cloister, the chaste nun is an object of pity and titillation. Her prescribed celibacy ironically draws attention to woman’s sexual potential and presents it as both threatened and dangerously seductive. Beneath such ambivalence lies a deep-seated cultural uncertainty about whether the restraint of women is undesirable or necessary. These ambiguities are most visible in the literary modes of Catholic sensationalism where the cloister is shown to disrupt and pervert both gender and erotic norms. The excesses of Gothic horror and prurient anti-clerical revelations inflect Victorian non-fiction and imaginative writing about convents, foregrounding in particular the difficulties of self-formation in an


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84 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature environment where powerful authorities command obedience. As Robert Miles has suggested, the Gothic designates Catholicism as the alien, abjected element of British cultural memory, ‘the embodiment of the “unclean” that ought to have been expelled from the Protestant political body’.27 Gothic constructions of the cloistered space, with their frightening dark rooms and enslaved or tyrannical inhabitants, serve as a microcosm of the corrupt power of the outmoded, feudal Roman Church. Transformed into a Victorian context, such horrific settings still present Catholicism as an alien presence, but the emphasis shifts from political structures and national identity to the ways in which strict external regulation deforms the individual. Self-control and self-determination are supplanted by institutional practices that crush the mind and spirit through impenetrable seclusion, secrecy and physical coercion. Many Victorian cloister narratives marry the claustrophobic convent space of Gothic writing to the lurid plotting of the fictionalized convent memoir, popularized in the eighteenth century by such novels as Diderot’s La Religieuse (The Nun) (1796). The convent exposé provides a repertoire of sensational events and behaviour that become commonplaces of Victorian cloister rhetoric, peppering polemical tracts as well as fiction and poetry. As a purported autobiography, the genre asserts an ‘eyewitness’ level of veracity in its accounts of the most intimate activities of nuns and priests – all crime, sex, violence and depravity. The plot of these voyeuristic shockers involves an exciting mix of seduction (into the convent), betrayal (of idealized hopes), escape (from the clutches of sexual perversity and torture), and dangerous revelation (of Catholic corruption via the memoir). Bizarre penances and humiliations, the debauching of novices, murder and infanticide, torture and solitary confinement are painstakingly itemized by a lucky narrator who has fled the convent and become an enlightened Protestant. The Awful Disclosures of The Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), more popularly known as the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, is the prototype of Victorian convent ‘memoirs’. Purporting to be the personal testimony of a nun’s experiences in a Canadian convent (though the book was actually written by a Protestant American clergyman), Maria Monk was an immediate bestseller in America and England and remained a prominent cultural referent throughout the period.28 Sensationalism is the dominant mode of the Victorian cloister exposé, and its thematics and register are apparent in writing for different class and denominational readerships. A popular topic of the penny press, convent scandals featured in alarmist denominational pamphlets emanating from


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both sides of the Atlantic. The Protestant-inflected American booklet, The Thrilling Mysteries of a Convent Revealed!, was equally matched in voyeuristic detail and shocking suggestiveness by anonymous British tracts, such as the Celibacy of Priests, Monks and Nuns and The Horrors of Roman Catholic Convents, Exposed in a True Heartrending Account of the Shocking Imprisonment & Sufferings of Sister Barbara, a Polish Carmelite Nun, who was walled up alive for twenty-one years in the cold dark cell of an infected Underground Dungeon! With an awful Description of her horrible condition when she was first discovered in her dismal, loathsome Den, and the fiendish treatment inflicted upon her by inhuman Priests, Lady Superioresses and Nuns, who styled themselves ‘Spiritual Wives’, and the ‘Brides of Heaven!’ 29 Catholic tracts offered equally hyperbolic rebuttals to set the record straight, such as Herbert Thurston’s ‘The Myth of the Walled-up Nun’ (1894), which responded directly, if belatedly, to the claims in Maria Monk. Romanticized fiction for a more sophisticated readership also adapted the cloister pattern of scandals revealed. Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent (1835), a ‘memoir’ contemporaneous with Maria Monk, details the boredom as well as the humiliations of convent life. Later cloister narratives, including Harriet Martineau’s ‘Sister Anna’s Probation’ (1862), Eliza Richardson’s The Veil Lifted: or, The Romance and Reality of Convent Life (1865), Julia McNair Wright’s Almost a Nun (1868), and Augusta Webster’s extended dramatic monologue, ‘Sister Annunciata’ (1866), focus on the psychological damage done to the female subject by the repression of the cloistered life. Even popular genres, like the mystery story and the ghost tale, exploit the uncanny potential of convent seclusion and secrecy.30 Whether suffering is physical, emotional or mental, these texts reproduce the plot of kidnap or seduction, debauchery, torture and escape as the authentic narrative of ‘unnatural nunnery practices’ in ways that outrage and titillate.31 In these sensational fictions, the pressure to deny individual needs and conform to the standards of the community is read as a degrading despotism. Paradoxically, in the convent exposé, the humble obedience and strict discipline encouraged in Victorian family and civic life legitimizes criminal strategies of control and repression. In Villette, Charlotte Brontë adapts the scandalous convent exposé of confinement and escape to explore the boundaries which normally demarcate Victorian constructions of gender and social relations. On the face of it, one might expect her to take up a traditional anti-cloister stance, rejecting the life of female separation and seclusion as a tyrannical imposition from Rome. In Brontë’s privately expressed views, she was certainly anti-Catholic. The familiar language of vehement Protestant polemics can be tracked in her


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personal comments on the Church of Rome. In an 1842 letter, for example, she dismisses ‘Papistry’ as an infantilizing ‘feeble childish piece of humbug’ and ‘all the priests’ as ‘idiotic’ and ‘mercenary’.33 Her account of Cardinal Wiseman preaching in 1851 focuses on grotesque physicality to suggest spiritual corruption. Her caricatured description of his size and deportment implies unholy greed, sensuality, pride and fanaticism: He is a big portly man. … He has not merely a double but a treble and quadruple chin; he has a very large mouth with oily lips, and looks as if he would relish a good dinner with a bottle of wine after it. He came swimming into the room smiling, simpering, and bowing like a fat old lady, and sat down very demure in his chair, and looked the picture of a sleek hypocrite. … A bevy of inferior priests surrounded him, many of them very dark-looking and sinister men. The Cardinal spoke in a smooth whining manner, just like a canting Methodist preacher. The audience looked up to him as to a god. A spirit of the hottest zeal pervaded the 34 whole meeting.

Such hyperbolic contempt has been read by some, including Elizabeth Gaskell, as Brontë’s over-compensation for her own susceptibility to the imaginative attractions of Catholicism.35 And scholars have located the same hostility in Brontë’s fiction.36 Certainly, many narrative elements stress the emotional seductiveness of this foreign faith. For example, Lucy Snowe, the narrator of Villette, is sensitive to the bait of the ‘honied voice’, the ‘unction and balm’ of the Catholic tract passed to her by Paul.37 As one accustomed to police and repress her emotional needs, Lucy is particularly attuned to the lure of Catholicism for the lonely but noble spirit because ‘it sought to win the affectionate through their affections, the sympathizing through their sympathies’ (507). For female critics in particular, Catholicism in Brontë’s work also symbolizes a patriarchal culture of ‘male injustice’ demanding ‘the subjection of the self to a male authority’.38 In The Professor (1857), the Catholic schoolgirl Sylvie, destined for the convent, seems to have internalised her female victimhood at the hands of the patriarchal Church. She already typifies the disconsolate automatons to be found in the debunked religious communities of the convent exposé: weak health stunted her growth and chilled her spirits, and then, destined as she was for the cloister, her whole soul was warped to a conventual bias, and in the tame, trained subjection of her manner, one read that she had already prepared herself for her future course of life, by giving up her independence of thought and action into the hands of some despotic confessor. She permitted herself no original opinion, no preference of companion or employment; in everything she


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was guided by another. With a pale, passive, automaton air, she went about all 39 day long doing what she was bid …

Similarly, in Villette there are explicit denunciations of the ‘tyrant [Roman] “Church’ that insists on ‘servitude’ (514) and renunciation to further its ‘all-dominating eminence’ (515). For its ends, ‘women [are] most murderously sacrificed’ (515). The point is made visually in the same novel with the portrait of the nun, Justine Marie. To Lucy, the woman has been stripped of personality and energy through obedience to some overpowering force. The chaste creature, supposedly disappointed in love, seems enervated and crushed with her ‘weak frame, inactive passions, acquiescent habits’ (484). For these reasons, the Catholic dimension of Lucy Snowe’s experiences at Madame Beck’s school, which occupies the site of a former convent, is usually read as a traditional Protestant attack on the tyranny and seduction of popery with its ‘external authority and romantic spells’.40 But this is a limited view. Other comments in Brontë’s fiction and private correspondence gender Catholicism more ambivalently. Rather than treating it consistently as an extreme illustration of traditional male-authorized gender models (against which her female characters might rebel), Brontë at times links Rome to gender transgression. Sometimes, it is simply a snide way of further undermining celebrity Catholics. In her 1851 description of Wiseman’s sermon, for example, the Cardinal appears as the antithesis of conventional masculinity. A fussy, complacent ‘fat old lady’ surrounded by attentive and ‘sinister’ young male acolytes, he is sensationalized as sexually bizarre, if not perverse. More gender heresy is apparent in the Catholic world of The Professor. Here the criticism has an ambiguous effect, at least from a female perspective, since it aligns Catholicism with confident, feisty women. The (male) narrator castigates the discipline and doctrines of Rome for inculcating independent, impudent boldness in his female pupils. He dislikes their flirtatious ‘precocious impurity’, so inappropriate for girls who ‘belonged to what are called the respectable ranks of society’ (93). Indeed, he deems them ‘mentally depraved’ because they lack an air of graceful submission to the male gaze: ‘scarcely one of those girls having attained the age of fourteen could look a man in the face with modesty and propriety’ (93–94). Brontë’s Catholic sensationalism in Villette gives the novel a similarly unorthodox edge. Of course, critical attention has been given to Gothic remains that haunt the text, some associated with the cloistered space. Their traces create a narrative that is simultaneously realist and fantastic, both heimlich and unheimlich.41 Feminist critics have typically read the novel’s uncanny elements as signs of repression. Doubles (like Lucy and the ghostly


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88 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Nun), imagery of live burial and stirring corpses, coincidental meetings and ‘familiar’ strangers as well as a heightened sense of dreamlike confusion seem to arise from Lucy’s denial and displacement of her feelings; and, as Mary Jacobus has suggested, they express Brontë’s own sense of ‘the strangeness and arbitrariness of inner experience’ and the ‘incompatibility of the world of thought and the world of reality’.42 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick similarly connects these phenomena to ‘uncertainty about where to place the perimeters of the self ’ or even how to represent the unspeakable reality of individual consciousness.43 However, reading Villette alongside other examples of Victorian ‘nunnery’ sensations gives a new insight into the novel as an uncanny fiction. Brontë’s use of the contemporary cloister exposé renders Catholicism itself uncannily double. Both mirror and other, its transgressive potential accommodates models of female subjectivity previously hidden or repressed. Rather than expressing indeterminacy and evasion, Brontë’s cloister adaptations critique orthodox concepts of gender difference in a way that activists like Anna Jameson would recognize. Indeed, Brontë’s case for female autonomy in psychological, social and artistic terms draws extensively on the central motifs of the cloister plot: the claustrophobic convent space, concealment and enigmatic events, cruel physical punishment and sinister surveillance. Victorian depictions of the Catholic convent enclosure characterize it as a place of incarceration, suffering and outrage, although it is not always clear whether the nun should be viewed as casualty or transgressor in this context. In Victorian popular culture, notions of cloister imprisonment are combined with suggestions of unhealthy desires. An advertisement for The Phantom Railway entices readers with the promise of ‘a capital illustration of a Nun in Chains’,44 an image that titillates through promises of illicit religion and bondage, and thus constructs woman both as victimized and depraved. In polemical writing, representations of the cloister space are scarcely less extreme. M. Hobart Seymour’s comparison of the Continental convent and the British prison suggests both are sites of oppressive control: ‘the same lofty walls, the same massive gates, the same barred windows, and the same grated openings; the same dull, sombre, cheerless aspect; the same uninviting, repelling, lifeless exterior; the same inaccessibility from without, the same precluded possibility of escape from within’.45 Seymour’s analogy sensationalizes the cloister as a threat because it separates women from the normal business of the home. This is like Rebecca Reed’s language in Six Months in a Convent; she claims that a Catholic nun is subject to ‘involuntary confinement for life, with no power to resist’.46


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While such imagery portrays the nun as an object of pity, it also serves more subtly to abject the whole religious community. By reason of their vows, the nuns have become pseudo-criminals without rights or identities to be acknowledged. They have forfeited their claim to respect by rejecting their domestic responsibilities and by surrendering their personal development to the control of dubious authoritarian figures. This paradoxical representation of nuns as both innocent and culpable is widespread in literary work of the period. Harriet Martineau, for example, uses her novella about a Catholic novice at the time of the English Reformation to discuss a woman’s right to access all domains of knowledge, including the political and theological. While the heroine is portrayed as a sympathetic, misguided victim, ‘Sister Anna’s Probation’ suggests nuns are guilty women for perpetuating female ignorance of public life in their convent world of high walls, ‘bolts and bars’.47 In Villette, Brontë ironically exploits such ambiguities, characterizing her cloistered Lucy Snowe as both victim of oppression and transgressor against supposedly normal models of femininity. By overtly aligning tyranny and repression with Catholic foreign principles, Brontë initially allows the reader to assume that freedom and independence lie with Protestant British culture. However, as critics like Rosemary Clark-Beattie suggest, English values inscribe a secular model of feminine selfhood that oppresses Lucy and ‘obliterates [her] from view’.48 Reading the novel in the light of the popular Victorian cloister exposé clarifies Brontë’s criticism of home culture. The enclosed religious environment damages when it replicates the ideology of a separate sphere (religious or secular) that limits and controls a woman’s independence. Even more unexpectedly, Villette capitalizes subversively on sensational associations of the convent space with transgression. In the novel, the handling of the ‘heretical’ convent demonstrates how the hidden single life can challenge gender expectations and express rebellion and resistance. In Brontë’s rewriting of the convent memoir, the cloister offers a chance to recast conventional destinies for women in the world beyond the enclosure. Madame Beck’s school for girls in Rue Fossette occupies grounds which were once reputedly those of a cloister; and, throughout the novel, Lucy Snowe refers to her environment as ‘our convent’ (175). Descriptions of the physical space of this ‘socializing’ educational institution echo the usual Victorian portrayal of the claustrophobic restriction of Catholic religious enclosures. As such, they suggest how the ‘finishing’ of young ladies for the marriage market has a depressing and deadening effect – at least in the eyes of the narrator. The school building, like any cloister in the popular


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90 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature anti-Catholic literature of the day, seems imposing. The chapel is ‘long, low, gloomy’ (130); the dormitory – once nuns’ cells – is a foreign, queer space. The ‘conventual Rue Fossette’ (550) is strictly isolated in practice from the rest of the town with its promise of urban pleasures and freedom. School routine, like convent discipline, is characterized as ‘spiritual restraint’ with minds ‘reared in slavery’, the ‘chains [hidden] with flowers’ (195). Brontë uses the familiar rhetoric of convent imprisonment to emphasize the psychological pressures upon individuals in this cultural environment, too. Paul Emanuel, with his self-confessedly ‘monkish’ habits, describes himself as a ‘fettered’ man weighed down by family responsibility, religious conviction and conscientiousness (498, 500). Lucy’s loneliness is compared both to ‘conventual silence and stagnation’ and to ‘solitary confinement’ (265, 259). Her hopeless yearning for Dr John is likened to the emotional deprivation of a contemplative hermit in his cell. The school back garden is also a sign of poignant female isolation and living entombment, echoing popular Victorian readings of a convent’s walled enclosure. Designated a sacred female space (it is ‘sacrilege’ for men to be there after dark), it is neglected, overgrown and gloomy. This is a claustrophobic site, bordered by impersonal ‘windowless backs of houses’ (174) and forming a boundary beyond which the pupils are forbidden to go. Nonetheless, space can also be a site for creative thought and the display of interiority.49 By inflecting descriptions of the garden with other aspects of Victorian cloister discourse, Brontë creates a new vision of the potentiality of female separateness. Instead of seeing the garden as a sad reminder of a family world forsaken, of nature renounced or constrained, Lucy discovers in it a sign of her own characteristic individuality. Its seclusion speaks sympathetically to her sense of distinctiveness, ‘to such shades of peculiarity as were engrained in my nature’ (174). Rather than restricting her, the garden provides an outlet for action and creativity. Like other Victorian women attracted to a concept of sisterhood which redefines women’s capability, Lucy finds in her garden a chance for meaningful work. She is not a prisoner (demonstrating feminine compliance) but an organizer and cultivator (evidencing masculine energies and control). She assumes responsibility and directs herself in this task: ‘I made myself gardener’ (174). She expunges tradition, clearing ‘away the relics of past autumns’ (174); she appropriates a hidden rustic seat from which she can survey, know and control her territory. Imprisoning convent enclosures can debilitate if they mean isolation from purpose and activity. But, for some Victorian women, entrance into sisterhoods can also provide liberating opportunities for self-development and action. These multiple significations


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of the cloistered environment underpin and enrich the novel’s portrayal of female subjecthood. The convent setting of Madame Beck’s school takes up the familiar Protestant view of Catholic oppressiveness in new ways. It parallels the despotic Catholic control of the individual to the social shaping of young women for good marriages and respectable domesticity. As a place of unorthodox female separateness, the cloister environment of the novel also associates Lucy with the idea of an untraditional female life, one with radical potential for independence and agency. Many Victorian representations of the cloister gender it feminine in ways that correspond to patriarchal idealizations of woman’s separate sphere. It is domestic and familial (with ‘sisters’, ‘brothers’, Mother Superior, Father confessor). It is carefully protected from the worldly and competitive realm of masculine endeavour. In this place of piety and feeling, inhabitants are sexually chaste and innocent. Despite these attributes of female respectability, the convent in sensational writing of the period is re-imagined as an unnatural domain, all lack, absence and incompleteness. Portrayals of convent ‘abnormality’ expose a tension in Victorian responses to women’s erotic feelings and function. While sexual innocence is a required trait of respectable womanhood, so is sexual experience, provided it is channelled to childbearing in marriage. In his Daily Telegraph articles on London religious life, for example, C. Maurice Davies’s description of a nun’s profession of her vows highlights her violation of ‘natural’ expectations: ‘[t]here is to the ordinary secular mind something abhorrent in the idea of a young girl thus girding herself about “with narrowing nunnery walls;” and it may well be doubted whether the mind of England be not too large imbued with Protestantism ever to outgrow its objection in so far as the contemplative orders are concerned’.50 This critique, with its image of the woman’s physical body literally fortified and protected from penetration by convent walls, associates the imprisoning convent with a woman’s failure to realize her sexual potential (and civic duty) in marriage and reproduction. For Davies, ‘wifely, motherly work’ is woman’s God-given destiny.51 Nor is this a view expressed solely by Victorian men. In Almost a Nun, Julia McNair Wright also constructs the secluded feminine space of the cloister as unhealthy because it separates a woman from her capacities to flower, that is, to reproduce. Her morbid Sister Agnes is like a delicate greenhouse plant that becomes sickly and stunted when deprived of masculine support and the framework of motherhood: Sister Agnes was one of those clinging, faithful, true woman natures that are no more made for a life of seclusion and heart repression than is the fair, fragile


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92 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature cypress vine to hold itself upright unaided amid sun and storm. In the gloom and chill of the cloister, this life, that might have borne rich and beauteous flower and fruit, faded away, a stinted, bleached and sickly thing, even in its utter loss and 52 desolation revealing what it might have been.

This image of the nun as a drooping, unsupported vine naturalizes the notion of a woman’s dependence on men. Wright’s extravagant language of melancholia, mental pathology and fanatical rigidity also suggests that women swing to extremes without the steadying and corrective influence of masculine leadership to teach self-control. Some of the nuns become shallow and mindless, ‘[w]ire-worked automata, puppets galvanized into motion’ (257). Others tyrannize under the hypocritical guise of female solidarity: ‘[v]igilant guardians, careful jailors, indeed, were the sisters’ (287). Such depictions of the convent as a claustrophobic prison inscribe dominant nineteenth-century ideologies of femininity in which a woman’s identity is best developed through the controlled framework of marriage and maternity. It is precisely this position that Brontë challenges in Villette by a neat transfer of a secluded nun’s abnormalities to the qualities of respectable femininity. In Brontë’s narrative, character distortion and weakness, repression and submission, normally the prerogative of morbid Catholic nuns, are associated with the representatives of conventional womanhood and marriage. When Paul directs Lucy’s attention to a series of paintings idealizing ‘La vie d’une femme’, Lucy responds with disgust, reading maternity as monstrosity in the portrait of the young mother, ‘hanging disconsolate over a clayey and puff y baby with a face like an unwholesome moon’ (277). Lucy castigates these women without substance in language usually reserved for the spectres of immured nuns; they are ‘cold and vapid as ghosts … bloodless, brainless nonentities’ (278). Doubling nun and the Victorian angel in the house, Brontë resists the usual equation of gender stereotypes with the individual female subject. The beautiful Polly, who makes the most respectable marriage in the novel, is also described in terms usually applied to the deranged unhappy nuns of many convent tales and pamphlets. She is like ‘some precocious fanatic or untimely saint’, a Catholic ‘enthusiast’ (69) with a monomaniacal desire for the unattainable male (in her case no Heavenly Bridegroom but her absent father or the teenaged John Bretton). For Lucy this is a lack borne of an unhealthy determination to possess through dependence. As a child, Polly is both tyrant and slave. She lies down at John’s feet like a dog. She tries to monopolize his attention. Her pleasure is totally relational, defined by


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his desire. When Polly grows into a well-bred young woman, she displays the same tendencies, though with greater finesse and decorum. She has no personality of her own except in relation to others: ‘She had different moods for different people. With her father she really was still a child or child-like … With Mrs. Bretton she was docile and reliant … With Graham she was shy’ (384). Polly’s deepest wish is egotistical – to be loved, rather than to love. But she fulfils her desire through subordinating, even annihilating, her uniqueness so that it is absorbed by the personality of her husband. In her idealized courtship and marriage, Polly replicates the dependency of nuns like Wright’s morbid Sister Agnes. Polly even sees herself as a delicate plant which needs ‘sun, due moisture, and safe protection, sheltered, fostered, taught, by my dear father; and now – now – another comes’ (466). Juxtaposed with this image, the convent-school garden of the novel, Lucy’s natural milieu, has more promising potential for self-development. Here the narrator is figuratively in control as cultivator, not dependent specimen. Throughout the novel, Brontë subverts the separate sphere model of gender relations by showing how traditional configurations of domesticity and marriage stifle self-assertion and self-expression. Nun-like seclusion forms an important part of this strategy as an alternate model for an independent woman. The women Lucy most admires are single, the widowed, financially acute and competent Mrs Bretton, and, even more significantly, the disabled Miss Marchmont, who lives a reclusive and celibate existence like a nun. She is a secular example of notorious convent asceticism in her physical and emotional deprivation, yet Lucy responds to her as daughter to mother. While this has been read as a sign of the narrator’s attraction to the inertia of quiescence and conformity,53 such a view takes insufficient account of the narrator’s description of her employer. Lucy is fascinated by the way in which Miss Marchmont’s interior strength and grandeur of personality belie her isolation and restricted material circumstances. Her delight is not only in Miss Marchmont’s affection but also in her independence, integrity and individualism. Despite her cloistered seclusion, she dramatizes what Rick Rylance has termed ‘the power and authority of exceptionality’.54 She becomes Lucy’s most trusted model for study and emulation in ‘the originality of her character’, ‘the steadiness of her virtues’, ‘the power of her passions’, ‘the truth of her feelings’ (97). In her sternness, fierce logic and attentive correction without humiliation, she prefigures Paul; and, in her stoic self-reliance, she is a shadowy anticipation of the mature narrator at the end of the novel. Brontë’s narrator also invests convent tropes and allusions with a sardonic wit, suggesting the benefits of inhabiting an outsider’s domain. It is not


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94 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature surprising that Lucy foresees for herself only two possible destinies after her breakdown, both in their own way transgressive: as author of the ‘heretic narrative’ which becomes Villette, or as contemplative nun ‘counting my beads in the cell of a certain Carmelite convent’ (235). While these alternatives represent opposing denominational choices, they also signify two sides of the same coin of unconventional femininity for a Victorian readership. Lucy’s spiritual and intellectual inheritance lies with English Protestantism and middle-class beliefs. However, she asserts her right to a more untraditional life – not entrance to a sisterhood, but an equally rebellious future as an independent woman with the imaginative power to construct and reveal her identity in its telling. Indeed, the novel continuously exploits cloister allusions to foreground the potential of the single life for the (heretical) development and protection of female autonomy, and as an escape from imposed and limiting gender identities. By positioning her engaging and complex heroine in the heterodox, ‘foreign’ environment of the Catholic pseudo-convent, Brontë adopts a radical subject position from which to assess the roles and behaviours normally proposed for women. Her heroine is triply displaced and outcast – as Protestant in a Catholic culture, as English person in a foreign place, and as single woman in an environment where marriage is seen as the only natural female role. The separation of demi-convent seclusion helps her to interrogate the secular ideologies and practices of British culture that deform and stifle the female character and to propose unorthodox alternatives. Brontë adapts other dimensions of the popular cloister exposé with similar effects. The nineteenth-century fascination with the convent’s ‘secrecy, and mystery and concealment’55 shows how sensational Gothic plots of Catholic oppression are modulated to a domestic pitch in Victorian sensationalism. In popular stories about convents, the innocent Catholic novice is seduced and then controlled by the unknown and the enigmatic. Reserve and stealth are tools of physical and psychological control in these places. M. Hobart Seymour’s punning reference to the convent’s ‘veil of impenetrable mystery’56 locates tyranny even in the physical layout of the cloister space, for it obliterates the identity of individuals and hides violent persecution. Grates obscure nuns’ faces and voices; cellars and secret rooms stifle the sounds of immoral and criminal activities, ‘the groan of the persecuted victim, or the shriek of outraged purity’.57 In The Veil Lifted, Eliza Richardson uses lurid metaphors of physical brutality to express the psychological oppression of convent life, again insisting that the worst horrors are hidden. In the cloister, sensuous ritual and theatrical pomp disguise a perverse system that works


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upon the individual to ‘crush’ and ‘extinguish’ natural feelings and stimulate a masochistic devotion to ‘self-crucifixion’.58 Accounts of the convent space in the Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk use narrative style to enact the oppressive effects of concealment and mystery. The narrator’s detailed description of the convent interior confusingly mingles the mundane – ‘[a] large community-room, with plain benches fixed against the wall to sit’ – with the violent and horrific – ‘the next [room] is a small sitting-room, where a priest waits to baptize the infants previous to their murder’.59 Maria Monk’s simple, non-evaluative prose style suggests both the dispassionate objectivity of a good eyewitness and the emotional numbness of a vulnerable woman crushed by convent austerity, discipline and persecution. Even her detailed room-by-room description of the convent fails to give a sense of interpretive control that should come with the mapping of a secret place. Monk apologizes in advance for the inaccuracy of her account; some apartments were never seen, and the overall structure is confusing and disorienting because ‘the apartments and passages of that spacious building are numerous and various’ (50). Befuddlement is a common feature of the sensationalized convent exposé. The innocent novice cannot understand what is happening. Nuns are disoriented and then regimented into submission by carrying out orders or following rituals not fully comprehended. Even prayers seem confusing due to the use of Latin, a language Maria Monk, for example, admits, ‘I never understood a word of ’ (43). Enforced practice without understanding and enforced speech without meaning reduce a sense of personal judgement and authority. As Susan M. Griffin has suggested, the labyrinthine maze of Monk’s convent and her own confusion about it creates a ‘narrative mise en abyme, enmeshed in the density, intricacy and pervasiveness of popery’s plots’.60 In Villette, Brontë capitalizes on the reader’s association of the Catholic convent with mystery and obscurity to suggest the psychological alienation of her heroine in the modern world of male-female desire, pursuit and courtship. Initially, the standard Gothic theatrics of inexplicable and sinister events, like the appearance of the ghostly Nun or the removal and replacement of personal letters and effects, indicate Lucy’s general estrangement. Like Maria Monk and other victimized novices, she struggles to make sense of secrets beyond her understanding or control in this foreign environment with its incomprehensible language and strange religious customs. But Brontë also extends the enigmatic cloister image, transferring the reader’s expectation of confusing secret passages and rooms to the shadowy hidden depths of the psyche with its occluded motivations and unconscious desires.


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96 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Lucy soon masters the language and absents herself from Catholic religious observance. But the real foreign space is other people, who are glimpsed only partially, if at all, by obscure tracks and traces, the sound of a footstep, a fluttering handkerchief, the scent of a cigar, a low murmur, a ‘shaken branch’ (182). Dr John, for example, remains for much of the novel, beyond ‘the compass of [Lucy’s] penetration’ (167). Madame Beck is more obviously duplicitous, hiding a hard, grim and ruthless determination under ‘a goodhumoured, easy grace’ (165–66) and a talent for casuistry. It is not until the concluding section of the narrative that Lucy understands her as a bitter rival for the hand of Paul. Most telling of all, Lucy herself emerges as a mysterious ghostly presence haunting the cloister of her own narrative and misread by most. She often describes herself as a shade, invisible to those around her. Others’ responses seem to confirm her assessment by allowing her no more individuality than might attend to a veiled nun. Dr John praises her as a meek creature, ‘inoffensive as a shadow’ (403); and, on another occasion in the garden, he irritably observes that ‘nobody will take notice of you: I should be seen’ (191). It is not until her flight and testimony that the oppressed nun of the Victorian convent exposé can shed light on the infantile or immoral practices concealed within the convent. Villette is Lucy’s enlightened testimony. She plays the role of the escaped nun by exposing hidden motivations and desires buried in the life of the demi-convent and by rejecting falsity for truth. Her narrative authority over secrets is often demonstrated, as in her eventual revelation of the ghostly tricks of de Hamal. Cynically using the disguise of piety (a nun’s habit), he turns the convent space into a place of seduction and sensuality in his pursuit of Ginevra. Lucy’s angry destruction of the costume is an act that signifies her rejection of false roles and convenient masks as much as her frustrated outburst from self-repression. Similarly, like the enlightened nun of the shocking cloister memoir who reveals the emptiness of Catholic faith, Lucy discloses the false creed of Dr John. In his case, secular beliefs take the place of Catholicism as the basis of superstitious devotion. He is misled by materialism, class prejudice and assumptions of male superiority and, as a consequence, misvalues female worth. As the narrator cynically surmises, Dr John’s economy of love is all economics: ‘[h]ad Lucy been intrinsically the same, but possessing the additional advantages of wealth and station, would your manner to her, your value for her have been quite what they actually were? … he was not the man who, in appreciating the gem, could forget its setting’ (401, 459). In her handling of this first-person revelation, Brontë further adapts the


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methodology and motifs of the sensational convent narrative to establish the rebellious and anti-conventional credentials of her heroine. Ironically, Lucy’s power as narrator ultimately demonstrates her authoritarian tyranny over the reader. In constructing a version of herself for public consumption, she proceeds like a despotic Abbess, employing techniques that disorient the reader by confusion and concealment. For example, she withholds key pieces of information, such as the family identity of Dr John or the intended recipient of her embroidered watchguard. In the context of the Victorian convent sensation, where blockage on the transparent exchange of information by a Mother Superior demonstrates Catholic tyranny, this narrative device for suspense takes on a new resonance. It establishes Brontë’s sensitivity to the problems of aesthetic representation, illustrating its incompleteness in scoping the complexity of a woman’s heart. It shows her understanding that the female subject can never be judged by appearances alone, but instead requires protection from a prying world that would intrude in order to control. Lucy’s narrative manipulation demonstrates a belief in her entitlement to the privacy essential to self-respect and dignity: The longer we live, the more our experience widens; the less prone are we to judge our neighbour’s conduct, to question the world’s wisdom: wherever an accumulation of small defences is found, whether surrounding the prude’s virtue or the man of the world’s respectability, there, be sure, it is needed. (395)

Finally, in a novel that critiques the subjection of individuals to imposed gender roles, this technique challenges traditional assumptions about the author’s own need to be subservient to established literary conventions. Lucy’s teasing command over narrative revelation resists the reader’s expectations of a comforting clarity. It prevents easy judgements about character behaviour and motivation that function in their own right as a kind of social control and gender inscription. Brontë also revises other motifs of Victorian cloister narratives that focus on the curtailment and repression of the individual. In the convent exposé, austere bodily restrictions and cruel punishments typify popery’s persecuting despotism. Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures, for example, catalogues many kinds of abuse. Nuns are routinely starved, bound, gagged, hung upside down from the ceiling, forced to wear a poisoned cap that causes convulsions, condemned to solitary confinement, crushed to death between beds. But more generally, the language of physical torture and entombment is used metaphorically to suggest the living death of convent inhabitants and the ways in which extreme repression buries or ‘immures’ the self. For example,


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98 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Harriet Martineau uses imagery of self-entombment in ‘Sister Anna’s Probation’ to suggest the unnatural Catholic emphasis on subjugation of the flesh in order to perfect the spirit. After her profession, the heroine feels chilled, as if she ‘had indeed done with life’; her guilty longing to rebel and escape fills her with an annihilating ‘passion of self abasement’ (370). In Almost a Nun, Julia Wright likens the spiritual bondage of nineteenth-century Catholic nuns to ‘those who have been sealed up living in walls’ (293). Brontë uses exactly the same tropes to explore Lucy’s self-censorship in response to the restrictions imposed on her by social status and gender. The Rue Fossette school is reputedly haunted by the spectre of a Nun ‘buried alive, for some sin against her vow’ (172). Lucy sees this apparition at moments of emotional intensity, and the many references to her ‘buried life’ link her by analogy to the ghost. It is a connection that expresses the maiming effects of Victorian middle-class insistence on self-discipline, especially for women. Sally Shuttleworth has argued that Brontë’s Nun is one of a number of links in the novel between the practices of Catholicism and the Victorian psychiatric theories of mental alienation and moral management. The ability to exercise self-control was an important way in which Victorian medicine differentiated between the healthy and the neurotic, the sane and the lunatic, the mature matron and the hysterical girl. For Shuttleworth, images of oppressive popery in Villette signify the cruel tyranny of institutional authority, be that the regime of the asylum or the operations of the patriarchy on female sexuality. Loathing the aim of both Catholic Church and scientist to exercise ‘total dominion over the mind’, Lucy chooses instead to internalize social controls and regulate herself.61 But this is no solution. Lucy’s morbid dread of seeming too nervy and passionate shows the extent to which she unconsciously shares the cultural assumption that the construction of insanity ‘went hand in hand with that of femininity’.62 Her connection with a woman who has sinned against the regulations of her community suggests her guilty uneasiness, as if she too might expect punishment, as if her ‘mad’ desire for freedom and self-expression has offended the rules of her culture and exceeded what is permitted a ‘redundant’ Victorian spinster. Lucy’s cool remoteness can be seen as a disquieting – and not wholly effective – attempt at damage limitation. She escapes the censorious disapproval of others by overcompensation, brutally immuring her true feelings in response to limited secular possibilities: ‘I had feelings: passive as I lived, little as I spoke, cold as I looked, when I thought of past days, I could feel. About the present, it was better to be stoical: about the future – such a future as mine – to be dead’ (175). This excess of self-veiling, a grim parody of female


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reticence and demureness, undoubtedly causes further emotional damage. She is deeply depressed by her ‘despairing resignation’ (228), although she rationalizes it as a sensible response to limited emotional and economic opportunities, as important a competence as frugality. In fact, this masochistic restraint is as much a technique of psychological protection as a social necessity. Lucy repeatedly refuses to risk hope and connection, lest she expose her vulnerable need for affection: ‘no sooner did opportunity suddenly and fully arrive, than I evaded it, as I would have evaded the levelled shaft of mortality’ (477). Brontë evokes sympathy for these sexual and emotional inhibitions by drawing on contemporary scandals about convent frigidity, perversion and self-abuse. Lucy’s behaviour as a respectable unmarried woman who must deny sexual longing is likened to the abnormal mortifications of the Catholic cloister. Like the sad, wasted nun in many cloister exposés, she is tormented by unrequited love. The unhealthy nature of this self-repression is intimated by her burial of Dr John‘s letters. Gradually, the sexual desire and rejection she reads into these textual fragments are displaced onto morbid fantasies of corpses stirring in the grave: ‘[s]ometimes I thought the tomb unquiet, and dreamed strangely of disturbed earth, and of hair, still golden and living, obtruded through coffin-chinks’ (451). Sexual repression is further enmeshed in Catholic sensationalism through the tropes of physical mutilation that Lucy uses to express her desires and the need to crush them. While she delights in natural, stormy powers that carry her out of herself, she also punishes these cravings: too resistless was the delight of staying with the wild hour, black and full of thunder, pealing out such an ode as language never delivered to man – too terribly glorious, the spectacle of clouds, split and pierced by white and blinding bolts. I did long, achingly, then …This longing, and all of a similar kind, it was necessary to knock on the head … (176)

Lucy’s self-inflicted emotional asceticism, appropriate to a Victorian single woman, recalls the humiliating penances of the cloister tale – branding and whipping naked flesh, chewing glass to a fine powder, making the sign of the cross on the floor with the tongue – that simultaneously deny natural impulses, extinguish self-respect, and stimulate morbid self-consciousness. Other forces of social control that inhibit women in the novel are also inflected by sensational Victorian stories of the Catholic convent. In this discourse, the state and family spies of Gothic horrors are transformed into perverse religious chaperones who police the nuns at all times. Seymour, for example, highlights the many nooks, crannies and partitions which enable


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100 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature ‘a watching nun’ to hide and thus ‘to observe and repeat’ private conversations.63 Maria Monk reports that a nun oversees the novices in their dormitory, adopting the secretive posture of a voyeur. Her partition contains ‘two holes, through which she could look out upon us whenever she pleased’ (21). Instead of exercising control as the perceiving subject with power to make sense of her world, the nun becomes the object of a sinister clerical gaze that distances her as Other and abjects her through humiliation. Such ocular supervision is matched by intrusion into the victim’s psyche through the practice of confession which reclassifies unauthorized thoughts and feelings as rebellious, disobedient and evil. In sensationalized versions of cloister experience, remorseless convent scrutiny inculcates a disposition of cowed obedience and self-doubt. For Eliza Richardson, the systematic, controlling invasion of personal space violates the essence of selfhood. The Veil Lifted charts how, in the convent, ‘every act and motion must be regulated only according to the will and pleasure of others … [the nun’s] very thoughts laid under interdict’ (28). Brontë takes up this motif, but is more ambivalent about the (im)propriety of reserve and surveillance. As in her adaptation of other elements of the Victorian cloister narrative, she embraces the familiar understanding of the convent space as a site of transgression – but to an unexpected end. Certainly, surveillance enables Madame Beck to tyrannize staff, subdue her students and keep tabs on her rival, Lucy. However, both Lucy and Paul exercise self-mastery and assert independence benignly through watching others. For Lucy, surveillance is most obviously a mechanism of self-defence. She persistently characterizes herself as one of life’s observers; fearing life’s uncertainties, she retreats from participation. Yet she also finds watching a source of power through knowledge and of pleasure through analysis and deduction. Lucy enjoys ‘examining, questioning, and forming conclusions’ (274). Unlike Madame Beck, she does not seek to suppress others through her secret discoveries. Instead, she pursues ‘a knowledge of my own’ (444) to develop personal, independent judgement; she gains the self-knowledge needed to face opponents on an equal footing. Her surveillance of Madame Beck’s surveillance gives her confidence to stand up to a petty tyrant: ‘she did not wear a woman’s aspect, but rather a man’s. Power of a particular kind strongly limned itself in all her traits, and that power was not my kind of power … I stood – not soothed, nor won, nor overwhelmed. It seemed as if a challenge of strength between opposing gifts was given’ (141). Madame Beck’s watchful authority is often gendered masculine in this way. It reminds a reader that her oversight of the female domain, like that


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of the most despotic Abbess of any convent tale, is patriarchal; it is more concerned with the restraint and control of women than with their protection. However, Lucy’s mastery through watching and understanding offers Brontë another model for authority. She reinscribes power, not as gendered, but in terms of the resisting, autonomous self, either male or female. When Lucy achieves great success in Paul’s play, she is dressed like a hermaphrodite – mixing her womanly garb with elements of a male costume. The fear she conquers in her hybrid performance is not that of social opinion; the crowd, she says, meant ‘nothing to me’ (209). Instead she learns not to fear ‘my own voice’ (209). She has power, not because she controls an audience or gains respectability by conforming to gender expectations. She gains strength because ‘I acted to please myself ’ (211). Paul is another careful watcher. He readily understands Lucy from the beginning, despite her habit of self-concealment: ‘he meant to see through me . . . a veil would be no veil for him’ (128). As a Catholic man and violator of the veil, Paul occupies a space normally held by the debauched convent confessor and spiritual director in narratives of cloistered tyranny and degradation. Indeed, by suggesting he invades Lucy’s innermost secret self – he ‘hungrily dived into me’ (201), Lucy observes – Brontë invites comparison between Paul and the smooth, grasping Père Silas. But careful distinctions are drawn between the intentions of the priest and those of the professor. Father Silas invades Lucy’s soul during her depressive breakdown. The confessional gives Lucy her first opportunity to voice that secret, tempestuous self which social roles and rhetoric officially silence. She initially finds comfort in ‘the mere pouring out of some portion of long accumulating, long pent-up pain into a vessel whence it could not be again diffused’ (234). However, she soon discovers that the priest neither respects her integrity nor values her individualism. The unctuous confessor watches and listens in order to subordinate Lucy, override her personal independence of mind, and convert her by appealing to her neediness. The relationship he tries to promote replicates that between Polly and Graham; it is a dynamic of possession through dependence and self-annihilation. When Lucy craves affection the priest offers compassion as a lure to intellectual and moral subjugation: ‘That priest had arms which could influence me; he was naturally kind, with a sentimental French kindness, to whose softness I knew myself not wholly impervious. … he would have shown me all that was tender, and comforting, and gentle, in the honest popish superstition’ (235). Alternatively Paul offers empathy and challenge, not calculating kindnesses. His connection with Lucy is based on an imaginative understanding


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102 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature of her as a complete person with independence and autonomy, not an empty territory to be colonized. Like a discerning reader, he intuitively empathizes with her strengths, weaknesses and vulnerabilities; but he does not exploit such knowledge for purposes of judgement or possession. Rather, it enables him to appreciate and value Lucy’s distinctive separateness: he had the terrible unerring penetration of instinct, and pierced in its hidingplace the last lurking thought of the heart, and discerned under florid veilings the bare, barren places of the spirit: yes, and its perverted tendencies, and its hidden false curves. … No calamity so accursed but M. Emanuel could pity and forgive, if it were acknowledged candidly … (423–24)

Paul’s ultimate penetration of Lucy’s reserve becomes an oversight that is truly loving and protective of her individuality. ‘You need watching, and watching over,’ he assures Lucy (452). Here is possession based on a celebration of difference, not dependence. With his male energy and feminine tenderness, Paul, like Lucy in the play, exhibits a respect for personhood that moves beyond gendered dynamics of mastery and submission. He accepts and promotes Lucy as she is and as she desires to be, not as his Catholic and patriarchal culture would have her become. In the most sensational Victorian convent tales, the fortunate nuns are those who escape from victimization and slavery into the liberating enlightenment of Protestantism in the outside world. Brontë neatly echoes such a conclusion in the final stages of the courtship of Lucy and Paul to legitimize the radical notions of individualism the narrative promotes. Their relationship, with its promise of independent work in the public sphere, marks Lucy’s liberation from immurement in conventional gender roles and self-doubt. That it is a healthy escape, however it transgresses Victorian gender ideologies and the cult of the separate spheres, is triumphantly confirmed by Paul’s endorsement of her Protestantism. He does not just tolerate but appreciates this heretic faith because it is integral to Lucy: ‘I love Protestantism in you … it is the sole creed for “Lucy”’ (594–95). And he acknowledges the reciprocity of their partnership by retaining Catholicism as an essential element of his own free individualism. This is to be ‘honest … a freeman, and not a slave’ (595). Read in the context of sensational Victorian tales of the convent, Villette establishes the formation of female autonomy, not romance, as its strongest narrative line. Brontë writes both with and against the grain of cloister sensationalism to show how a Victorian woman might find redemption, not in a specific religious or social creed, but in belief in herself. She draws


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on an alternative Victorian version of convent life, the active sisterhood, to show how meaningful work provides escape for a woman from psychological and emotional restriction. Like Anna Jameson and Dinah Craik, Brontë suggests that ‘labour for independence’ (450) within a female community gives dignity, releases the imagination, and stimulates aspirations that Lucy can realize. As a teacher, Lucy is neither served nor subservient, but possesses the basis for realizing a selfhood constructed on her own terms. Establishing a school makes the most of her self-control and dignified reserve; it provides a vehicle for her intelligence and talents. The confidence she gains is essential to her relationship of mutual mastery with Paul and to her equanimity when that relationship is broken through death. Moreover, Brontë shows separation – the cloister-like seclusion from ‘natural’ female destiny – as central to the process of a woman’s growth. In a negative way, the petty authoritarian tyrannies and physical restrictions of the cloister, like Madame Beck’s school, reinforce the value of individualism by showing it threatened and at bay. However, this heretical, unconventional site also provides positive freedoms. Brontë rewrites the convent exposé to imagine radical female futures. Only here does Lucy begin to develop, freed from imposed gender and class expectations. To these she remains wholly opposed. If the demi-convent of Rue Fossette is outside Protestant denominational and British cultural boundaries, Lucy, by inhabiting a pseudocloister space, lies beyond the borderlines that define respectable femininity through marriage, money and social status. She learns to express a sense of self articulated solely in terms of resistance; as she says about Dr John: ‘He wanted always to give me a role not mine. Nature and I opposed him’ (404). Inhabiting this ‘other’ place becomes a symbol of vibrant female rebellion. Here, Lucy can, like the exponents of Victorian sisterhoods, define ‘other’ destinies, resisting cultural expectations, gaining confidence and competence, and entering the public domain as a purposeful individual to be respected. As Villette illustrates, Catholic sensationalism provides an uncanny counterpoint to Victorian arguments about the Woman Question. Functioning as Victorian culture’s mirror and contrast, fantasies of the convent are in ambivalent dialogue with contemporary models of female subjectivity, problematizing ideals of femininity and assessing alternative possibilities for women’s fulfilment. However, that is not the only intersection between Catholicism and debates about gendered social relations in the period. With its highly visible, authoritarian male hierarchy, the Church of Rome replicates the patriarchal structure of nineteenth-century middle-class society and the masculine voice of public culture. Representations of priestly


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104 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature vice – like the scandals of the convent – perform a dual role, dramatizing the unacceptable, while suggesting uncomfortable parallels between Catholicism and Victorian social values and conduct. Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues featuring priests, monks and friars demonstrate how Catholic sensationalism operates as cultural critique. These poems recycle popular images of perverse Catholic masculinity and suggest that the same moral depravity and hypocrisy permeate Victorian public culture and secular institutions. In Browning’s work, priestly conduct mirrors a social world where propriety, respectability, and an eye to the main chance are cynically exploited to achieve domination. Many troublesome priests in the poems are isolated individuals, psychically disconnected, even absurd. The venal Catholic community represented by such men is a microcosm of any society where ideals of masculine chivalry and selfless duty have given way to the contradictory demands of competition and conformity. Overall, Browning’s representatives of the Catholic consecrated life dramatize a process of cultural deterioration and de-spiritualization. Specific references to Catholicism in Browning’s writings reveal some measure of broadmindedness, but generally scholars are agreed that he entertains a ‘bitter anti-Catholic prejudice’ directed especially at the Church’s ‘pride, corruption, casuistry, sensuality, and indifference to duty’.64 The poet’s extravagant depictions of the cloister or monastery as a hothouse of greed, hypocrisy and egotism are certainly much of a piece with the contemporary relish for details of priestly deviance.65 Victorian ‘No Popery’ journals piled on the epithets when denouncing Catholic clergy as lascivious sensualists or morbid fanatics: ‘There are two classes of Romish priest. … There is your sleek, oily, rollicking, leering, capon-lined emissary of Babylon, whose priestcraft is a mere trade; and there is your lean, intellectual, intense, credulous devotee.’66 The secular press was hardly less restrained. Middle-class newspapers as well as scandal sheets regularly reported legal cases involving nuns and priests in terms which took the immorality of Roman religious institutions for granted. Avarice was a popular subject dwelt on at length, with detailed reports of priests extorting money from sufferers on their deathbeds, from penitents in the confessional, and from heiresses forced into convents.67 Even more prominent was the interest in the sex lives of clergy and the association of the cloister with uncontrolled urges. Sensational discourse regularly linked lust and perversity to the Catholic priesthood, as is evident in W. A. Darby’s 1864 innuendo: ‘Why is a Convent of Monks always connected with a Nunnery and at no great distance from it?’68 Attacks on the Catholic priesthood proffered opportunities to revel in


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the details of sexual practices normally written out of literary culture. In a lecture on the pernicious Catholic cloister in 1852, the speaker advised the packed all-male audience that he would have to discuss conduct well outside the boundaries of respectability: ‘I am now obliged to read to you that which is filthy, revolting and disgusting; you have to hear that which is hideous, horrible and unnatural’.69 (The printed text of his lecture prudently omitted the details.) So deeply was the debauchery of Catholic clergy inscribed in Victorian cultural discourse that it became central to the defence of the convert-priest, John Henry Newman, in a notorious court action. Giacinto Achilli, a former monk and popular anti-Catholic lecturer in England, had been imprisoned by the Inquisition for heretical views, monastic disobedience and ‘gross immoralities’.70 When Newman repeated these charges in lectures and published them in 1851, Achilli sued for criminal libel. The trial catered for every sensational taste, particularly in the extended procession of defence witnesses attesting in graphic terms to Achilli’s sexual depravity (including rape, the hiring of a prostitute as a servant, and many examples of fornication and adultery). Without apparent irony, Newman’s defence counsel attacked Achilli’s reliability by recourse to all the standard Victorian prejudices against Catholic priests, though Newman was one himself: ‘For what is Achilli? … Is he not a subtle disputant, and an ingenious casuist? – brought up amidst Italian priests and monks, himself an Italian, a priest, a monk?’71 Victorian accounts of priestly immorality frequently focus on the abusive power structures within Catholic religious communities. Like the sensational representations of Jesuits in the period, denunciations of the cloister draw attention to the ways in which a social group can be perverted through blind, mechanical submission to authority. This theme, centred particularly on strategies for ordering hierarchical relationships, is apt for a culture struggling with the management of rapid social change; and its handling highlights problems which the nineteenth century perceived as especially ‘modern’. For example, the portrayal of the inhabitants of the cloister en masse expresses uneasiness about ceding too much authority to any subordinate group. The result can be unruliness and crime. The demonic nuns portrayed in Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures are encouraged by priests to murder Sister Frances, mangling her body with relish and rallying ‘each other in the most unfeeling manner’ (83–84). The same cloister critiques also suggest how traditional masculine roles of leadership and service can become destructive. The stereotypical representation of despotic priests (and tyrannical, unfeminine abbesses) shows how the egotistical can pervert power to pursue gratifica-


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106 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature tion and ride roughshod over spineless subordinates. A favoured trope is the comparison of the Catholic cloister to the outmoded feudal state. The meek, inexperienced nun becomes in effect ‘the serf of a Mother Abbess, a Bishop, and a Confessor, all acting in turn as her custodians and tyrants’.72 Transgressive Catholicism offers a safe environment for the exploration of this dark side of the masculine ideal. Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–69) explores masculinity and public life by embracing and re-writing the sensationalized representations of Catholic priests circulating in Victorian Britain. While some of the seventeenth-century priest-characters in the poem are indeed greedy, lecherous, self-seeking, manipulative hypocrites, certain clerical figures exemplify sound practice in government and social interaction. They offer persuasive leadership that maintains order and equality across civil and religious boundaries. The diverse aspirations and practices of different Catholic priests expressed in the monologues juxtapose contending versions of masculine conduct in the public sphere. At the same time, they define ideal and degraded patterns of social relations, justice and institutional power-broking that are recognizably contemporary and British. In Book X of the poem, for example, Browning presents a construct of Pope Innocent XII that is essentially heroic. The pontiff is supreme authority for he must balance the different perspectives on a murder case and provide a conclusive judgement on the guilt of the villain, Guido. Some critics characterize the Pope’s monologue as the voice of an enlightened Protestant masquerading under a pontifical tiara.73 There are indeed some grounds for this interpretation. The Pope seems un-Catholic in his suspicion of ‘the totalitarian character of any predetermining system’.74 He invokes Victorian anti-Catholic rhetoric to denounce smug friars and monks. He despises the cant and grotesque hagiographies that shore up their self-serving, exclusive ‘boundary-line / ’Twixt true and false religion and the world’.75 Overall, however, the Pope’s monologue is less concerned with denominational differences than with the exemplary qualities that can inspire a well-ordered society. As the final authoritative voice to decide on Guido’s fate, the Pope is sole arbiter of the claims of both civil law and the Church. Yet neither institution has his confidence. He rejects the slack tolerance of secular opinion that would, on balance, extend mercy to the middle-class murderer of a difficult wife. He is equally disinclined to take up the opinions of his friars and archbishops because they are primarily governed by selfish, worldly considerations. They conspicuously fail to act to save the abused victim, Pompilia, from her murdering husband. They collude in concealing civil crime and


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spiritual sin to uphold the economic thrust of the marriage contract and to preserve social appearances. Anti-conventional in his own reasoning, the Pope has respect only for the other romantic rebel in this familial tragedy – Caponsacchi, the priest who attempts to rescue Pompilia. It is by selflessly resisting frameworks of propriety and regulation that Caponsacchi reveals God’s truth and becomes an agent of His justice. He champions the socially disregarded, showing pity for the oppressed and ‘[h]elp for honour’s sake’ (X, l. 1551). To the gossips of secular Rome, Caponsacchi is at best a naive, at worst a lascivious, cleric, but to the Pope, he is a model of manly leadership in action. Caponsacchi intuitively perceives a new expression of God’s truth in the world, ‘[u]nrecognized yet, but perceptible’ (X, l. 1865). By defying the cant of respectability and the drive to self-advancement to help Pompilia, he redefines heroic masculinity. Browning uses rhetoric normally associated with the criticism of Catholic priests to represent two opposing responses to Caponsacchi – the contempt of the multitude and the admiration of the Pope. To some, Caponsacchi acts like a superstitious – even effeminate – Catholic martyr, blindly obedient to emotive zeal and extinct codes of self-sacrifice. He pointlessly risks life and reputation to aid another man’s wife. In this way, his conduct is also an affront to social order in which male control and possession are expected to be dominant. He dangerously disrupts an established principle of patriarchal social structure, the supposedly ‘natural’ authority of husband over spouse. On the other hand, the judicious Pope defines this priest’s masculinity in approving terms that dissociate it from the imperatives of the public sphere and notions of respectability. When Caponsacchi removes Pompilia from her abusive relationship despite social convention, he does indeed seem fanatically pious in a distinctively Catholic way: ‘[a]ll blindness, bravery and obedience!’ (X, l. 1555). However, this ‘blindness’ is caused by the brilliance of Divine enlightenment. The priest, argues the Pope, is ‘as a man would be inside the sun, / Delirious with the plenitude of light’ (X, ll. 1556–57). Caponsacchi’s obedience is redemptive precisely because it has nothing to do with masculine respect for power, possession and propriety. Instead, his actions stem from his imaginative sympathy with the Divine Plan. In this, he transcends gendered attitudes, prefiguring a new pattern of social behaviour that welds masculine energies to spiritual insight. As the Pope acknowledges, Caponsacchi’s pity for Pompilia – a potentially feminine response – prompts him to imitate the ultimate sacrifice of Christ, characterized in terms of masculine ‘strength’:


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108 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature How can man love but what he yearns to help? And that which men think weakness within strength But angels know for strength and stronger yet – What were it else but the first things made new, But repetition of the miracle, The divine instance of self-sacrifice That never ends and aye begins for man? (X, ll. 1645–51)

Caponsacchi’s rebellion against clerical conformity to save a victimized woman modifies the aggressive and competitive dimension of mid-Victorian masculinity. He couples entrepreneurial ‘determination and skill’76 to the principle of selfless love that governs God’s relation to His creatures and should underpin creatures’ relations with each other. In The Ring and the Book, social relations in civil and religious communities demonstrably fail to live up to this principle. Most of the male characters evidence a lust for social status, money and sex that is associated in the popular Victorian imagination with the corrupt Continental and Catholic past. The scandalous sensuality, avarice and cruelty of many priests and nuns in the poem suggest most Catholic religious characters project the worst features of an amoral Churchbound culture. However, Browning also encourages the reader to discover disturbing parallels between this seventeenth-century world of the Church and contemporary England.77 For a start, he erodes the boundaries between the cultural imaginary of the past and contemporary beliefs and fears by articulating familiar complaints about Catholic priests in anachronistic, nineteenth-century terms. For example, the cynical priest, Paolo, explicitly dramatizes a common Victorian anxiety about the displacement of male authority through the intrusion of a Catholic confessor into the home.78 He sees women as bait by which power can be purchased or seized: ‘Mothers, wives and maids, / These be the tools wherewith priests manage men’ (IV, ll. 501–502). Connections are also clearly established between the worldly (Catholic) society of Rome and the creeping secularism and materialism of Victorian (Protestant) culture. The Pope, for instance, describes his society as one in which ‘the light from heaven [is] still more / And more encroached on by the light of earth’ (X, ll. 1811–12). Religious commitment has been displaced by self-aggrandizement which deadens the spirit. ‘Earthly incitements’ tempt ‘mankind [to] serve God / For man’s sole sake, not God’s and therefore man’s’ (X, ll. 1814– 15). Opportunities for social mobility, the assumption of disguised origins and identities, a vicious marriage market, and pervasive greed and lechery motivate many characters in The Ring and the Book. Using themes familiar to


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readers from Victorian sensation fiction and popular journalism, Browning creates a Roman culture which parallels the contemporary British urban scene at its worst. In this poem, seventeenth-century Catholic corruption is typical of any culture where conformity to expected social behaviours conceals voracious individual desire. This conflation in the poem of past and present, of Catholic and secular exposes the dubious foundation of those social institutions and practices in which Victorians placed their trust. Throughout the poem, for example, the destructiveness of marriage in a self-seeking world of malign masculine intentions is suggested by images and commentary that link it to suspect structures of Catholic domination and control. Pompilia experiences family life, whether as daughter or wife, as imprisonment typical of a Catholic convent. Her domestic environment is hemmed in by garden walls and ‘householdbars’ (III, l. 776). She is under observation at all times. Guido defends himself in his first monologue by describing his marriage as a commercial transaction that also mirrors the cloister hierarchy. He initially uses economic tropes to establish his rights over Pompilia as property – like buying a hawk that will render docile service. Yet it is quickly apparent that the dynamic of their relationship replicates the worst excesses of Catholic governance in its brutal enforcement of authority and obedience: The obligation I incurred was just To practise mastery, prove my mastership:– Pompilia’s duty was – submit herself, Afford me pleasure, perhaps cure my bile. (V, ll. 714–17)

The supposed sanctity of marriage is revealed as a sham. In practice, it is violent and abusive, and its horror is made manifest by explicit connection to the demonic priesthood of Rome: … yet priestliness Can find a parallel to the marriage-bond In its own blessed special ordinance Whereof indeed was marriage made the type … (V, ll. 722–27)

Social relations in both church and state are perverted by the same tyrannical values. Difficult monks and difficult wives require the same discipline in this Renaissance culture with its nineteenth-century undertones: ‘prescribe short chain and sharp scourge / Corrective of such peccant humours’ (V, ll. 739–40). Similarly, Browning problematizes Victorian middle-class social goals by exploiting various cloister stereotypes embedded in the nineteenth-century


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110 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature cultural imagination. Grasping lascivious priests in The Ring and the Book may reinscribe comfortable denominational boundaries for a Protestant readership, but they also raise disturbing questions about the ultimate value of prosperity and social rank. The worship of both is shown to displace conscience. Guido’s slimy brother, Paolo, a ‘[s]mooth-mannered softspeeched sleek-cheeked’ priest (III, l. 251), is recognizable as an egregious nineteenth-century social climber. He is an adept and wily operator, exploiting his career (in the Church) to further his voracious ambition. He views marriage not as a sacrament but as a source of money and connections. Guido’s other priest-brother, Girolamo, exploits his ostensible respectability as priest and family member to make sexual advances to his sister-in-law. The Convertite nuns with whom Pompilia is lodged after leaving Guido show how easily women can collude in such masculine despotism under the guise of social propriety. When Pompilia is caught in her flight from Guido, the convent serves as an instrument of repressive social convenience. The relegation of Pompilia to the nuns offers her some measure of protection, but it is primarily a public appeasement of Guido’s male pride and a way of keeping a troublesome woman subdued. Similarly, Victorian fastidiousness about social appearances is mocked when Catholic clerics display the same tendency. Caponsacchi’s bishop easily deals with the young man’s scruples. Worldly insouciance characterizes the bishop as a social sophisticate, skilled at displaying the outward signs of pious austerity without experiencing any of its inconveniences: Qualmish of conscience? Thou ingenuous boy! Clear up the clouds and cast thy scruples far! I satisfy thee there’s an easier sense Wherein to take such vow than suits the first Rough rigid reading. … … Nobody wants you in these latter days To prop the Church by breaking your backbone … (VI, ll. 270–74, 287–88)

In a culture where ease and self-gratification take precedence, ideals of manly self-sacrifice are impossible to imagine. The gossips of Rome, circulating the usual prejudices about priestly lust, can only think that lechery motivates Caponsacchi. They pronounce him a debonair lover of Pompilia or even a dissolute frequenter of brothels because ‘vows can’t change nature, priests are only men, / And love likes stratagem and subterfuge’ (I, ll. 1049–50). Other Browning monologues employ a similar mirroring strategy. The sensational immoralities of Catholic religious men that figure in Victorian


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polemics are rehearsed in ways which give visibility to the insidious corruption embedded in sterile codes of social respectability. ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ (1842), for example, draws many of its details from familiar Protestant indictments of the celibate priestly life that leads to frustration and perversion. The dangers of cloistered denial are apparent in the identification of the speaker as both monk and madman, consumed with irrational hatred for his colleague, the mild Brother Lawrence. The stream of curses (‘Hell dry you up with its flames!’) and insults (‘you swine!’) together with the periodic break-down of language itself (‘Hy, Zy, Hine’) and even human speech (‘Gr-r-r’) suggest a mind out of control as well as a priest out of touch with Divine Love and charitable forbearance. In these terms, Catholicism is imagined as a pathological state, and the monastic cell not far removed from a room in the asylum. Curiously, though, this poetic voice is compelling as well as repellent, a paradoxical effect achieved by the dialogue between different versions of masculinity throughout the monologue. Compared to the pallid Brother Lawrence with his effeminate pastimes of tending plants, filling vases, picking fruit and attending prayers, the speaker displays all the traditional features associated with Victorian views of male energy. He is quick-minded and learned, sexually virile, and imaginatively creative in his increasingly fantastic schemes of revenge.79 Certainly, the juxtaposition of speaker and Lawrence suggests that the monastery is no place for manly men. The repressive regime of small-minded routines contorts male capacities into insane hatred. Such cloister damage is further troped in the metaphoric emasculation of the speaker’s grand designs. Despite his dynamic intensity, the only actual harm he does is the secret nipping-off of flower buds. Nonetheless, certain ambiguities give the poem a more complex network of possible meanings beyond the commonplace inscription of Catholic error. As a dramatic monologue, the poem forces the reader to adopt an indeterminate position of judgement. With its emphasis on the unwitting self-revelation of the speaker, the genre invites speculation about motivations the persona cannot directly acknowledge. In ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’, the speaker’s arrogance, self-obsession and competitive hatred are made to seem delusional because his distorted assessment of reality is increasingly pushed to the fore. He projects his own unconscious fantasies and fears onto the world around him. His lust for the washerwomen becomes Lawrence’s lechery even though there is no concrete sign that the Brother’s ‘dead eye glow[s]’ (l. 30).80 He even imagines the possibility of a fearsome physical Satan who could be outwitted in a bid to damn Lawrence. With


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112 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature the realization of the speaker’s skewed perception comes the implication that the unmasculine Brother Lawrence may be noble after all. Against the speaker’s reading of Lawrence’s failure can be set an alternative model of masculine probity and honourable conduct embodied in the simple Brother. Self-effacing modesty, humble love of God’s natural creation, and steady obedience to monastic rule can be deduced from the same material evidence the insane speaker uses to prove Lawrence’s inadequacy. Read in this way, a Catholic monastery might house both disturbed mind and saintly soul. The same interpretive ambiguity also connects cloister sensationalism to Victorian social manners in the poem. A nineteenth-century reader might begin by expecting that the speaker’s hatred is born of the unnatural frustrations of Catholic monkery. But Browning more explicitly attributes his fury to Lawrence’s sidestepping of proper appearances and codes of etiquette. Despite his own instinctive vulgarity (women squat; lips are ‘chaps’), the speaker professes his superiority and refinement through petty and arcane rituals. Like the biblical Pharisee, his piety depends on pretentious, empty ceremonies that touch neither heart nor soul: When he [Lawrence] finishes refection, Knife and fork he never lays Cross-wise, to my recollection, As do I, in Jesu’s praise. I, the Trinity illustrate, Drinking watered orange-pulp – In three sips the Arian frustrate; While he drains his at one gulp! (ll. 33–40)

A standard jibe at Catholic ritual elaborations is joined to the advocacy of plain, straightforward conduct, even if somewhat lacking in social niceties. It is the gentle, earthy simplicity of Brother Lawrence that becomes the touchstone of masculinity and morality in the poem. Insanity gradually becomes synonymous with phoney cant and a preoccupation with the empty respectability of appearances. Hypocrisy and respectability are also overt themes in ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ (1855), a monologue that encourages the reader to draw parallels between the deceit of Catholic priests and the pretence of social ambitions. Set in 1850s England and taking the form of an extended interview between the Bishop and Gigadibs, an agnostic journalist, the poem broadens the familiar criticism of deceitful Catholic clergy into an appraisal of the Victorian preoccupation with social status. The monologue is, at one level, steeped in the public outrage occasioned by the restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy


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in 1850. Browning once admitted that the worldly, slippery Blougram was based on the new Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, Nicholas Wiseman, and that his subject was not ‘ungenerously’ treated.81 While the poet drew back from any suggestion that he was attacking Catholicism per se, readers of the day clearly understood the monologue in the context of Victorian anti-popery. When George Eliot praised the poem’s masterful revelation of complacent, ‘ingenious sophistry’,82 she implied that such intellectual dishonesty was hardly a surprise, given the Catholic speaker. To establish Blougram’s insincerity, Browning contrasts his speaker’s dazzling argumentative rhetoric with the bland, hazy and banal faith his argument is intended to sustain. For example, the Bishop develops an elaborate sea-faring metaphor to explain how institutionalized religious belief can be adapted for the progressive believer in a world which trusts only reason, material evidence and individual judgement. For him, worldly pragmatism is the solution. Like Caponsacchi’s Bishop, Blougram avoids the awkward trouble of transcendent ideals and absolutes. Truth becomes a matter of relativity, morality a matter of adroit negotiation of temporal circumstances. He prefers to focus on what is possible without having to sacrifice worldly dignity and success: The common problem, yours, mine, every one’s, Is … … finding first What may be, then find how to make it fair Up to our means … (ll. 87–91)

Resembling a man who can take only limited baggage on a sea voyage, Blougram’s believer must make the best of what he can accommodate and jettison everything that is inconvenient or does not fit his own view of what is comfortable. It is even sufficient to twist doubt into a belief of sorts; in this way, compelling modern philosophies of materialism and rationalism are scarcely troubled. ‘The grand Perhaps!’ (l. 190) makes God a possibility as much as a superstitious folly. Such deft rationalization directly connects the Bishop’s belief (such as it is) to his social position. His avowed faith, however hedged with qualifications, gives him a place in a powerful institution that provides everything he wants. Blougram’s desires are defined wholly in the worldly terms of a confident man of the establishment. He seeks – and has – material comfort (as gourmand and wine-lover), intellectual opportunities (to suit his scholarly and cultivated tastes), celebrity status (he plays a highly visible role in Church spectacles), and authority over the masses. That critics remain


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114 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature divided about Browning’s fascination with some of Blougram’s arguments suggests the persuasiveness and ingenuity of this subtle character.83 However, when read in conjunction with the steady output of sensational Victorian revelations about the worldly acquisitiveness and duplicity of Roman clerics, the monologue shows the significant extent to which the poem exploits contemporary rhetoric about Catholic priests. Blougram’s adroit reasoning and argumentative skill can never be admirable, for they dramatize the prevalent view of Catholic clergy as arrogant, hypocritical and self-serving. The self-confidence and bravado that Blougram displays in the face of Gigadibs’s unspoken criticism represents him as the discredited agent of a heretic faith but also as an exemplary Victorian individualist. Browning’s portrait gives new meaning to the Victorian concept of the self-made man, ‘free to “select his own credo, construct his own opinions’.84 For all his protestations about loyalty to the Church, Blougram is essentially his own authority; his most deeply held belief is in himself. The bishop perceives the world solely in terms of his own yearnings; and his considerable talents are devoted to satisfying his appetites. Much of his monologue is given over to shaping other’s opinions (like those of Gigadibs) or to moulding circumstances (his metaphoric sea-cabin) to suit his own perspectives and reinforce his superiority. Indeed, one of the arguments for faith on which he places most weight is that it supplies his desires: ‘what I want, I have’; ‘I wish and get’ (ll. 540, 547). With this formulation of the Bishop’s sustaining principle, the monologue’s attack on Catholic hypocrisy broadens to connect with the midnineteenth-century debate about egotism and altruism in social relations.85 As Blougram demonstrates, when the advancement of the self has priority in a community, dishonourable self-seeking and hypocrisy seem inevitable. His love of control, demonized by its Catholic foundation, shows the repellent side of ethical frameworks predicated on radical individualism. Browning’s own highly individualistic violation of generic conventions through the addition of a coda is a strategy that shows again how unattractive features of Catholicism duplicate, and thus problematize, contemporary secular attitudes. In the body of the poem, the Bishop’s self-presentation has a cynical frankness that implies honesty. However qualified his faith, it seems the result of unromantic reflection and shrewd assessment of losses and gains. For this reason, his relaxed, confidential tone conveys some measure of personal authority to his claims. Yet the epilogue exposes this, too, as no more than a convenient disguise. Blougram has, all along, maintained social power and control over his listeners (and readers) through a careful attention to appearances and an artful hypocritical concealment:


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For Blougram, he believed, say, half he spoke.

… Some arbitrary accidental thoughts That crossed his mind, amusing because new, He chose to represent as fixtures there … (ll. 980, 984–86)

Browning’s unusual addition of this supplementary passage spoken by an omniscient commentator reveals the extent to which the skilled manipulator of social language and expectations can deceive. Even the usual codes of poetic form are insufficient for penetrating Blougram’s polished surfaces, because the concealment of truth is the truth of his moral character. Only a detached voice can confirm this. Insincerity is the mark of the man and, by association, of the Church whose authority and power he wields. At the same time, Blougram’s worldly rationalism and concern for status and respectability identify him as a caricature of the self-satisfied, self-fashioned public man of the Victorian middle class. His ambitions and rationalizations are inseparable from the cynicism, acquisitiveness and egotism that, for some Victorian intellectuals, seemed to taint mid-Victorian public life. Seen through the lens of Catholic failings, contemporary British culture privileges amoral self-seeking, which may well explain Gigadibs’s sudden departure for an Australian farm at the end of the interview. Browning also exploits the sensational association of sexual vice and Catholic priests to dissect the tyranny of conformity and hypocrisy in a materialistic culture obsessed with social appearances. ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St. Praxed’s Church’ (1845) and ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ (1855) tap a rich seam of imaginative writing on nuns and priests in ways that go beyond the scandal of Rome itself and satirize the false prudishness and affected piety that infect middle-class manners. The language of sexual excess, evasion and revelation found in the cloister exposé shows how easily codes of linguistic ‘propriety’ disguise, even rationalize, the sordid reality of lived experience. In Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures, for example, the convent serves as a seraglio for the priests in an adjacent presbytery. Like an epidemic or plague, the men invade the body of the cloister from many doors and secret passages, at any hour of the day or night, under the pretext of religious duties. They spread infection as they go; both nuns and priests are riddled by venereal disease. In this predatory social model, fastidiousness about the sins of the flesh veils an inability to confront and deal with the power of sex. This sensational version of Catholicism suggests that external censorship of natural desires (rather than reliance on self-discipline) leads to moral blindness. The twisted logic of concealment even justifies murder and infanticide to hide the scandal of


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116 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature uncontrolled male passion. Linguistic evasions in the convent exposé also show how the discourse of conventional orthodoxy can hide an infested world. Orgiastic priests and nuns use convolutions and silence to present warped and abusive relations as normal and natural. When the syphilitic clergy of the Awful Disclosures disappear for medical treatment, they are said to be on a ‘holy retreat’ (125). Even the testifying narrator is implicated in an evasion of the truth. For the sake of her own respectability in the eyes of her readers, her description of convent rapes is silenced by the euphemistic reference to ‘the practice of criminal intercourse’ (38). Browning’s use of this sensational ‘Catholic’ language of respectable impropriety in ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed’s Church’ connects the Bishop’s Renaissance world to nineteenth-century narratives of Catholic vice. Like the revelatory convent memoir, this monologue foregrounds the way language functions as an ideological tool, recasting moral corruption as respectable behaviour. The Bishop’s deft handling of linguistic deflection paradoxically exposes his hidden unsavoury motivations in ways that have some relevance for a Victorian middle-class readership. Browning himself suggested the poem had contemporary cultural resonances at the time of composition; he anticipated a good reception for it in 1845 in the light of Tractarian controversy, ‘the Oxford business, and Camden Society and other embroilments’.86 Certainly, the Bishop’s deathbed memories would play well to a jittery audience hostile to the encroachments of Catholicism. His traits explicitly reinforce Victorian views of the priest of Rome as encapsulating the demonic inversion of ideal masculinity in his impiety, sexual transgression and greed. But even early readers of the poem saw that the monologue encompassed more than a simple denominational attack. In Modern Painters, John Ruskin praised the poem’s brilliant evocation of a whole culture in its religious and secular dimensions. He especially savoured its subtle interpretation ‘of the Renaissance spirit, – its worldliness, inconsistency, pride, hypocrisy, ignorance of itself, love of art, of luxury, and of good Latin’.87 In its exposure of the bishop’s corruption, the monologue shows how men gradually come to redefine their values in a materialistic, competitive society and how subtle semantic circumventions play an important part in this process. For the Bishop, identity exists purely in relation to his position in the social hierarchy. Neither personal conscience nor religious belief conveys self-worth. Instead, physical trappings and status ensure fame and prestige, the only terms in which this essentially worldly man can envisage survival after death. Through verbal strategies of exaggeration and evasion, the dying man works energetically to suppress whatever threatens his social superi-


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ority. While reminiscent of the rhetoric of clergy in the convent exposé, these linguistic habits also echo the familiar pieties of the Victorian middle classes. The Bishop conceals his anxieties beneath reassuring discourses of social respectability and family loyalty. It soon becomes apparent that the Bishop’s attitudes and speech mimic the social values and linguistic behaviours of nineteenth-century Britain. If Bishop Blougram can be said to represent a depressing example of Victorian masculinity enacting its public institutional role, the dying Bishop is the dark side of the Victorian paterfamilias. The latter’s linguistic evasions, substitutions and displacements reveal how hypocrisy and worldliness pollute traditional notions of the family as the foundation of social stability. In keeping with mid-Victorian understanding of the mechanisms of repression,88 his verbal processes conceal disturbing secrets about family relations through attention to outward form. At the same time, they expose feelings he is reluctant or unable to admit. For example, he gives the young men who gather at his deathbed a dual identity as ‘nephews’ and ‘sons mine’ (l. 3). The slide in terminology from the conventionally discreet term for priests’ bastards (nephews) to the biological fact (sons) establishes the Bishop’s history of sexual transgression. It suggests too that careful attention to respectable appearances is after all but a flimsy mechanism that can never fully rewrite the truth. Further linguistic trickery reveals that the Bishop treats fatherhood as a game of power, not responsibility. His open acknowledgement of his sons on his deathbed is not driven by love or even a sense of remorse, but by a desire to enforce obedience. The Bishop ‘orders’ his tomb by disclosing his specifications; but he also ‘orders’ it by attempting to impose his authority and will on others to create it. He appeals to the conventional notion of filial duty as well as to his sons’ greed to ensure they build his tomb as he directs. Their silent departure before the Bishop has finished his monologue suggests the emptiness of family relations based on economic interests rather than affection or loyalty. The young men stand by the bedside just long enough to be confident their father is truly dying and their inheritance is safe. While the Bishop sees this fact, he remains linguistically oblivious to it, reinterpreting their behaviour so that it fits into his own framework of conventional manners. At one point he rebukes them for ignoring him and his wishes: ‘For ye have stabbed me with ingratitude / To death’ (ll. 114–15). But in his final confused ramblings, he assumes the role of a kindly father taking leave of loving sons. Even though only their retreating backs are to be seen, he goes through the formalities, while stage-managing the physical props of his


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118 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature dying: ‘Well, go! I bless ye. Fewer tapers there, / But in a row …’ (ll. 119–20). In a culture of hypocritical respectability, family relations are reduced to theatrical performance concealing tyranny and sullen acquisitiveness. The language with which the Bishop discloses his relationship to his mistress reveals the same corruption of family relations by worldly motivations. The prelate’s sexual activity, hidden by his vow of celibacy, is in keeping with the typical sensations of Protestant polemic popularized at the time. But Browning actually directs more attention to the Bishop’s attitudes to women than to his sins as a priest. The dying Bishop’s memories show his coldness. He recalls his lover purely in physical terms; she was ‘so fair’, ‘with her talking eyes’ (ll. 5, 94). Yet the same features also reveal the Bishop’s fear of female sexual power. His mistress is both possession and succubus, her eyes quick as a lizard, glittering ‘for my soul’ (l. 105). Moreover, in this worldly framework, the notions of desirable beauty and romantic attachment become evasive codes to conceal personal competitiveness. The Bishop’s mistress is really of value only because she establishes her lover’s manly dominance in the eyes of his rival, old Gandolf. Professional relationships in this acquisitive society fare no better, as evidenced by the Bishop’s obsession with Gandolf. The latter’s well-located, modest tomb suggests he was a humble man without conspicuous ostentation and respected by the Church. Nonetheless, like the mad monk’s characterization of mild Brother Lawrence in ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’, the Bishop’s reconstruction of Gandolf is an imaginative projection of his own egotistical motivations and jealousy. He uses language that portrays Gandolf as a schemer, cozening the Bishop to ‘snatch’ the best tomb location and fantastically poised in death to savour the Bishop’s humiliation in the form of an inferior monument ‘which Gandolf from his tomb-top chuckles at!’ (l. 67). This displacement of Gandolf the man by Gandolf the stone effigy is a linguistic slip that once again tropes the Bishop’s identification of people with property. Such distorted values lie at the base of a metaphoric web that gradually consumes the whole poem. Scandalous images of sensuality and materialism obliterate the spiritual, and even, as E. Warwick Slinn has noted, ‘the discrimination and control’ associated with ‘aesthetic values’.89 Blasphemously, the Bishop merges a grand chunk of lapis lazuli, erotic desire, and idealized and spiritualized womanhood typified by the Virgin Mary. The stolen stone signifies for him the visual and tactile pleasures of the flesh, ‘[b]lue as a vein o’er the Madonna’s breast’ (l. 44). Another simile for the stone – ‘[b]ig as a Jew’s head cut off at the nape’ (l.43) – captures the dehumanizing effect of the Bishop’s greed through a display of casual brutal prejudice as


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easily found in nineteenth-century bigotry as in the Renaissance. The egotism that corrupts the Bishop’s social relations in public and private domains also taints his faith. Rather than attributing his unbelief to the false Roman creed, the poem emphasizes how the idolatrous worship of self-interest can corrupt spiritual understanding. The Bishop’s rhetorical excess reveals the unholy extent to which he consumes the entire reach of his imaginative vision. He describes his effigy for the tomb in terms which equate him with his Creator. He demands a pose normally reserved for the omnipotent Divinity: So, let the blue lump poise between my knees, Like God the Father’s globe on both his hands Ye worship in the Jesu Church so gay … (ll. 47–49)

Contrasts in diction and register similarly convey the stunted nature of the Bishop’s spirituality. When the cleric describes beautiful objects to convey his sensual delight in the physical, he is at no loss for words and images. Rich alliteration, sensuous detail and the multiple embedding of concrete images express his obsession with material experience. The marble for his tomb is both delicate and luscious, like ‘[p]each-blossom … the rare, the ripe’ (l. 29). His imagination richly conflates sounds, scent, taste, colour and movement simultaneously to portray it ‘[a]s fresh-poured red wine of a mighty pulse’ (l. 30). Yet when the Bishop attempts to delineate religious practice and belief, his language is crude and simplistic. Indeed, the terms of his description sound like those to be found in many Victorian anti-Catholic tracts. When the dying prelate speaks of Catholic ritual and dogma, he resembles any outspoken member of the Protestant establishment in Browning’s Britain. The prayers of the Mass are no more than ‘blessed mutter’ (l. 81), and Transubstantiation a blasphemous process by which ‘God [is] made and eaten all day long’ (l. 82). In the selfish society of the poem, social status and wealth are the worldly preoccupations that edge out spiritual values, even at the point of death. The Bishop’s vision of eternity has nothing to do with individual salvation, but everything to do with personal aggrandizement through pomp. The commodification of the soul may repress thoughts of eternity, but it returns uncannily in the Bishop’s unconscious linguistic confusions. For example, he constructs a life after death that is reassuringly physical but also totally self-defeating. As he lies on his deathbed he muddles his living presence with the effigy on his sepulchre ‘[w]hereon I am to lie till I must ask / “Do I live, am I dead?’ (ll. 112–23). His perception that there is little difference between


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120 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature the two states is further dramatized by his attempt to shape his body into the form of the statue: ‘I fold my arms as if they clasped a crook, / And stretch my feet forth straight as stone can point …’ (ll. 87–88). This mimicry of a process of metamorphosis from life to stone vividly suggests the inert nature of his living heart and the spiritual blank which has been his life. The Bishop remains consistently unaware of this desiccated spiritual state. Obsessed with maintaining his veil of status and respectability, prosecuting to the end his competitive rivalry with Gandolf, he uses Christian rhetoric purely because the social occasion calls for its utterance. Language which might prompt a moment of self-revelation, like the opening reference to Ecclesiastes and the vanity of human wishes or the admission that ‘[e]vil and brief hath been my pilgrimage’ (l. 101), is stripped of its signifying potential. The emptiness of these pious platitudes is indicated by their textual isolation. They remain discrete phrases, disconnected from the Bishop’s central meditation on fame and material grandeur as the new eternity. Even the message the Bishop orders for his monument in ‘Latin pure, discreet’ (l. 98) is no call to repentance or memento mori. The Bishop’s imagined tomb – like any beautiful work of art – will speak to generations to come, but it has two stories to tell. On the one hand, for the Bishop it is set to become the conclusive utterance of his superior status and illustrious nature. On the other, its design and likely non-realization become, for the reader, a message about the ethical distortions inherent in a selfish and materialistic culture. The Bishop’s version goes nowhere. He speaks only to the mouldering corpse and silent effigy of his rival Gandolf. But to a community of Victorian readers, the poem suggests trenchant connections between the despised Catholic Other and any society that conceals the desire for selfgratification and domination beneath the cant of propriety and the respectability of appearances. Like the popular sensations about Catholic priests circulating in the middleclass Protestant culture of Victorian Britain, Browning’s monologues of the corrupt clergy of Rome emphasize their worldliness and hypocrisy. Wicked priests are especially repugnant in their cultivation of piety while indulging in vice and self-aggrandizement. However, Browning’s monologues also offer a masculine version of the scandalous Victorian cloister exposé that proposes an alternative vision of ‘spiritualized’ secularism. ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ and the Caponsacchi soliloquy in The Ring and the Book each present the revelations of an admirable priest-monk who has left the Catholic religious enclosure. These characters, like the liberated nun figure of the convent memoir, use personal experience to explain the failures of monastic life.


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Like their nun-parallel, they too are presented as admirable rebels against oppressive authority. While the nun who breaks free of the cloister advocates an enlightened Protestant faith as the guide to salvation, these men find redemption in free and honest expression and selfless action. This becomes the measure of Browning’s manly man: he is a living vehicle for truth and an agent for social change. Browning’s ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, for example, uses the familiar cloister escape plot and its accompanying testimony to assert the heroism of defiance. By making the case for aesthetic rebellion, the speaker shows how a spineless respect for convention and conformity can be replaced by an honesty that is both energizing and inspirational. At the opening of the monologue, the friar, arrested after curfew, seems to conform to the standard Victorian portrayal of the debauched monk. Fra Lippo Lippi is full of improper energies, with his coarse oaths, knowledge of the seamy world of ‘sportive ladies’, crude jokes and irreverent, slangy speech. And yet, as the monologue develops, it clearly follows the pattern of the convent exposé. An enlightened and credible witness strips away cant to reveal the hypocrisy, sensuality and repression of the Catholic religious institution. When first taken into the monastery, Lippi learns that the friars might preach austerity and renunciation, but certainly do not expect to surrender their comforts, including … the good bellyful, The warm serge and the rope that goes all round, And day-long blessed idleness beside! (ll. 103–105)

Sensual gratification is everywhere apparent in Lippi’s monastic environment, just as in the overwrought descriptions of the monastery in Victorian Protestant propaganda – but so is censorship of the body. Clerical leaders evasively attempt to deny the centrality of the flesh to human experience, a point that the escaped Lippi is quick to mock. His Prior, like the Bishop at St Praxed’s Church, pays lip service to the transcendent soul but can conceive it only in material terms. His feeble theological understanding is exposed as laughably inadequate when he tries to regulate and constrain Fra Lippo Lippi’s attempts at religious art. The Prior has only contempt for Lippi’s realistic approach to biblical scenes and Christian legends because he cannot acknowledge the sanctity of the human body permeated by soul: Faces, arms, legs and bodies like the true As much as pea and pea! it’s devil’s-game! Your business is not to catch men with show, With homage to the perishable clay,


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122 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature But lift them over it, ignore it all, Make them forget there’s such a thing as flesh. Your business is to paint the souls of men – Man’s soul, and it’s a fire, smoke … no, it’s not … It’s vapour done up like a new-born babe – (In that shape when you die it leaves your mouth) It’s … well, what matters talking, it’s the soul! Give us no more of body than shows soul! … Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms! Rub all out, try at it a second time. Oh, that white smallish female with the breasts, She’s just my niece … (ll. 177–88, 193–96)

The Prior’s inability to express his own theory of religious art in concrete terms, his childish and clichéd images to invoke the soul, his ogling along the way of a female breast (which may, perversely, be that of a niece, illegitimate daughter or mistress), and his irritable petulance all combine to expose the falsity of any spiritual truth which separates humanity from the world of matter, action and desire. As fugitive from the cloister’s false understanding of art and spirit, Fra Lippo Lippi draws on his own perceptions to validate his discovery of the truth. In his resistance to the inhibitions of the monastic enclosure he, too, has pierced the veil that hides reality. What he uncovers through artistic practice is the real relationship between body, soul and God, the Divine Artist: If you get simple beauty and nought else, You get about the best thing God invents, – That’s somewhat. And you’ll find the soul you have missed, Within yourself when you return Him thanks. (ll. 217–20)

The soul is stimulated, not distracted, by expression of the individualistic, fluid material world. In the aesthetic response to a sensuous world, both artist and perceiver can make an imaginative leap of feeling and gain insight that is synonymous with true spirituality. Artistic creativity becomes both sign of the soul’s life and praise of God. Following the motifs of the cloister narrative, Fra Lippo Lippi has ‘escaped’ his order to testify to this new belief and his own discovery of a ‘personal religion’. However, for Lippi, this is a religion of art rather than Protestantism: ‘I’m my own master, paint now as I please – ‘ (l. 226). His artistic commissions for a wealthy patron in fact resemble the convent exposé itself. They


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express his independent insights, now unfettered by imposed regulations that simply enforce the power of past. For him, cloister repression is summed up by the Prior’s preference for old-fashioned religious art. Its formulae are the aesthetic equivalent of monastic routines, which express the Church’s corrupt gloss on the truth. To comply would be to expunge the soul’s independence and integrity – and thus to create a falsehood. Lippi therefore rejects the path taken by the reticent painter in Browning’s ‘Pictor Ignotus’ (1845). That unknown artist yearns for respectability and status, deciding this can be secured by reproducing conventional themes in a traditional manner. While he dreams of creating a new, more naturalistic, artistic style, he refuses to take the risk. It is easier to subjugate talent and vision to ‘[t]he sanctuary’s gloom’ (l. 63) than court possible ridicule for artistic rebellion. He therefore plays safe, repressing individuality by complying with outmoded, commonplace tastes. The result is inevitably a failure – the arid product of an atrophied imagination: My heart sinks, as monotonous I paint These endless cloisters and eternal aisles With the same series, Virgin, Babe, and Saint, With the same cold, calm, beautiful regard … (ll. 58–61)

Fra Lippo Lippi, on the other hand, offends the pious decorum of the status quo by rejecting conventional formulae and received styles. In an image that revises the typical stereotype of monastic greed, Browning imputes a voracious aesthetic appetite to his friar. His energy is focused on consuming the truth of God’s creation. To do so, he frankly acknowledges the value of the world and the flesh for the spirit: … This world’s no blot for us, Nor blank – it means intensely, and means good: To find its meaning is my meat and drink. (ll. 313–15)

This personal vision is the friar’s salvation; but his art also guides others, leading them to find a similar meaning and purpose that will liberate their imaginations. Lippi proposes a new basis for cultural renewal located in art. His aesthetic underpins delight in the material world with a selfless concern for truth, and its expression is for the good of all: … Art was given for that – God uses us to help each other so, Lending our minds out. (ll. 304–306)

The priest Caponsacchi in The Ring and the Book also journeys from clois-


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124 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature tered delusion to free expression. Initially, Caponsacchi is represented as naive, falling in with the view of his fellow clerics that the Catholic priest is a modified version of the secular gentleman. He easily adopts the mask of the insidiously charming confessor recognizable from Catholic sensationalism. His ‘polished presence’, ‘genteel manner’, ‘wit / At will, and tact at every pore’ (VI, ll. 367–68) give him authority over the laity. However, his encounter with Pompilia is an epiphanic moment. Each comprehends the other through a gaze of equals that penetrates through body to soul. Independent of gendered, social or religious power, their intense connection goes beyond cultural roles and respectable reserve: … As I Recognized her, at potency of truth, So she, by the crystalline soul, knew me, Never mistook the signs. (VI, ll. 916–19)

Pompilia touches more than Caponsacchi’s manly chivalry, or his sensitivity to beauty, or his sensual desires, or even his pity for a friendless person in trouble. Her acknowledgement of his individual spiritual core is what transforms him. It by-passes his institutionalized role and the stereotypical expectations of conduct that it imposes. Her gaze frees him to know and value his own independence, integrity and moral responsibility: Pompilia spoke, and I at once received, Accepted my own fact, my miracle Self-authorized and self-explained, – she chose To summon me and signify her choice. (VI, ll. 903–906)

The consequences of this validation of individual worth are far removed from the egotism of Bishop Blougram or the dying Bishop of St Praxed’s church. Like the escaped nun figure, Caponsacchi feels compelled to bear witness to a divine mission. In obedience to God’s truth, he resists the duties of conformity imposed by the religious and civil authorities that control him. He willingly risks ostracism because, in order to rescue Pompilia, he must sacrifice his reputation within and outside his order. As in the cloister exposé, such flouting of decorum is represented as a selfless, dangerous act but also a sign of integrity: ‘There was no duty patent in the world / Like daring try be good and true myself ’ (VI, ll. 1800–801). Moreover, it promises to renew those who hear the testimony and are moved by it. Caponsacchi intimates that his statement at Guido’s trial will also affect society at large. Through him, the court will know the truth about innocence, honesty, cruelty and deception as he now does, and it will be brought to honour that


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truth in its judgements: Why, there’s a Judge weeping! Did not I say You were good and true at bottom? You see the truth – I am glad I helped you: she helped me just so. (VI, ll. 1864–66)

Imaginative empathy, self-knowledge and self-sacrificial action emerge as the guiding principles through which men might renew public life. The authority of convention and the lure of ego are displaced by a selfless independence. Rebellion against worldly values actually strengthens ties of sympathy and humane understanding. Victorian cloister sensations, with their images and plots of Catholic clerical corruption, interface with nineteenth-century anxieties about gender, social relations and the tension between independence and conformity in private and public life. Browning’s religious monologues draw extensively on the rich signifying potential of religious sensationalism in ways that move his characterizations beyond a simple critique of the Church of Rome. The familiar cloister motif of veiled evil becomes a strategy for exploring the psychological complexity of individual motivation. Characters’ techniques of evasion are not simply indicative of Catholic hypocrisy, but also of the general deceptiveness of verbal and visual signs of propriety. These monologues have a broader secular application as well. Catholic they may be, but Browning’s weak and wicked priests also dramatize the decadence of any culture with a cynical devotion to respectable appearances, prosperity and self-promotion. Their ‘foreign’ papist attitudes and behaviours mirror similar motivations and manners to be found in nineteenth-century Britain. Through these competitive, status-conscious and sensual men, Browning deconstructs paradigms of masculinity gaining currency in prosperous middle-class English culture. On the other hand, drawing on the familiar sensations of the cloister exposé, he uses the liberated priest figure to propose an alternative male subjectivity that functions benignly in the public sphere. Eschewing respectability and fleeing institutional conformity, these men show how to balance individual insight and collective responsibility, free expression and public service. Like Brontë’s Villette, Browning’s sensational monologues of the cloister become secular narratives about the dangerous impact of convention on an individual’s self-formation, on social relations in both private and public spheres, even on artistic production and interpretation. With their complex intertwining of the horrors of oppression and romances of rebellion and escape, Victorian literary imaginings of the cloister are spectacular examples of a pressing middle-class conundrum: the difficulty


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126 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature of striking a sound balance between tyranny and control, between self-expression and disciplined restraint. In literal terms, the displacement of character – and reader – to the strange, secretive and entrapping world of the Catholic cloister demonstrates the impact of an isolated, superstitious environment on vulnerable individuals and the advantages of a healthy Protestant outlook. However, these representations of ‘heretical’ nuns and priests also challenge dominant social attitudes in Victorian Britain, exposing in particular the dangers of conformity. They express the inadequacy of prescribed gender roles, the danger of smothering erotic feeling, and the torture of constraining self and social relations within the straitjacket of institutional authority and respectable appearances. Ultimately, these shadowy sensations of the cloister play ambivalently against each other. In the strictly bounded and regulated convent space, heroic self-command and unnatural repression can, ironically, be mistaken for each other. In the cloister, selfless dedication to duty and the oppressive submission to external powers occupy common ground. Dignified privacy and duplicitous secrecy, brave resistance and reckless selfishness become increasingly difficult to distinguish. Embedded in these horrific tales of nuns and priests are the disruptive nightmares shaped by Victorian ideologies of gender, by the conflicting Victorian commitments to individualism and duty, by the urgent need to define respectability for a culture in social and spiritual transition. For all these reasons, in the end, the Roman cloister and the English hearth cast remarkably similar shadows.

Notes 1 Newman, Lectures, p. 134. 2 Wilkie Collins, No Name (1862; New York: Dover Publications, 1978), p. 54. 3 Quoted in Hoxie Neale Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry, vol. IV, 1830–1880: Christianity and Romanticism in the Victorian Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), p. 355. 4 Eliza Keary, Memoir of Annie Keary, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1883), p. 32. 5 Keary, Memoir of Annie Keary, p. 28. 6 Keary, Memoir of Annie Keary, p. 34. 7 W. R. Greg, ‘Why Are Women Redundant?’, National Review, XIV, no. 28 (April 1862), pp. 436, 440. 8 Dinah Mulock Craik, A Woman’s Thoughts about Women, in Elaine Showalter, ed., Christina Rossetti: ‘Maude’; Dinah Mulock Craik: ‘On Sisterhoods,’ ‘A Woman’s Thoughts about Women’ (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 64–65. See also Elaine Showalter, ‘Florence Nightingale’s Feminist Complaint: Women, Religion, and Suggestions for Thought’, Signs, 6, no. 3 (Spring 1981), pp. 395–412. 9 Craik, ‘On Sisterhoods’, pp. 47–48.


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10 Anna Jameson, Sisters of Charity: Catholic and Protestant, Abroad and at Home (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1855), pp. 13, 15. 11 Jameson, Sisters of Charity, p. 11. 12 Jameson, Sisters of Charity, p. 10. 13 Jameson, Sisters of Charity, p. 94. 14 Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850– 1920 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 48. 15 Frances Power Cobbe, Essays on the Pursuits of Women, 1863; quoted in Susan Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers: Anglican Sisterhoods in Victorian Britain (London and New York: Leicester University Press, 1999), p. 63. 16 Quoted in Michael Hill, The Religious Order: A Study of Virtuoso Religion and Its Legitimation in the Nineteenth-Century Church of England (London: Heinemann, 1973), p. 182. 17 Anon., ‘The Service of the Poor’, Fraser’s Magazine, n.s., IV, no. 21 (September 1871), p. 374. 18 Anon., ‘Service of the Poor’, p. 374. 19 See, for example, Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers, p. 176. John Scobell felt his daughter’s entrance into a convent against his wishes was a violation of his ‘family peace’ and a direct challenge to his ‘parental authority”.’ 20 M. Hobart Seymour, Convents or Nunneries: A Lecture in Reply to Cardinal Wiseman (London: Seeley, 1852), pp. 18, 19. 21 From a Protestant Alliance Tract, quoted in Hill, The Religious Order, p. 257. 22 Anon., ‘Two Views of the Convent Question’, Macmillan’s Magazine, XIX, no. 114 (April 1869), p. 542. 23 Edward Harper, The Papal Invasion of Jesuits, Monks and Nuns; with Twelve Reasons for the Government Inspection of Nunneries (London: John Harper, n.d.), p. 3. 24 Mumm, Stolen Daughters, Virgin Mothers, p. 141. 25 Susan P. Casteras, ‘Virgin Vows: The Early Victorian Artists’ Portrayal of Nuns and Novices’, Victorian Studies, 24, no. 2 (Winter 1981), p. 157. 26 From a review in Art Journal, 1852; quoted in Casteras, ‘Virgin Vows’, p. 174. 27 Robert Miles, ‘Abjection, Nationalism and the Gothic’, in The Gothic: Essays and Studies 2001, ed. Fred Botting (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 66. 28 Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade 1800–1860: A Study of the Origins of American Nativism (New York: Macmillan, 1938), pp. 101–102, 108. In 1851 Newman still felt the need to incorporate an extended denunciation of the Awful Disclosures as the vulgar outpourings of ‘a worthless stroller’ in his Lectures (p. 166). As late as 1894, Catholic Truth Society pamphlets dealt robustly with ‘slanders which are still industriously circulated’ about Catholic convents, including improbable stories of immured and escaped nuns and the dubious testimony of the unreliable Maria Monk (Some Protestant Fictions Exposed [London: Catholic Truth Society, 1894], p. iii). 29 While there are no publication details for The Horrors of Roman Catholic Convents, internal evidence suggests this penny pamphlet had an Irish origin. 30 See, for example: [William S. Hayward], ‘The Nun, the Will, and the Abbess’, in Revelations of a Lady Detective (London: George Vickers, 1864), and Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘The Poor Clare’ (1852), in Curious, If True: Strange Tales, ed. Jenny Uglow (London: Virago, 1995). 31 Anon., The Horrors of Roman Catholic Convents, Exposed in a True Heartrending Account


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32

33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42

43 44

45 46

47

48

of the Shocking Imprisonment & Sufferings of Sister Barbara, a Polish Carmelite Nun, who was walled up alive for twenty-one years in the cold dark cell of an infected Underground Dungeon! With an awful Description of her horrible condition when she was first discovered in her dismal, loathsome Den, and the fiendish treatment inflicted upon her by inhuman Priests, Lady Superioresses and Nuns, who styled themselves ‘Spiritual Wives,’ and the ‘Brides of Heaven!’ n.p., n.d. [1872?], p. 6. Marianne Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 28. Rosemary Clark-Beattie argues that Brontë’s religious thinking reflects the theological positions and attitudes found in popular fiction of the day, although the specifics of her anti-Catholic reading remain uncertain (‘Fables of Rebellion: AntiCatholicism and the Structure of Villette’, ELH, 53, no. 4 (Winter 1986), p. 846). Quoted in Margot Peters, Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Brontë (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1987), p. 109. Peters, Unquiet Soul, p. 334. Peters, Unquiet Soul, p. 334. See, for example, Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion, pp. 24–25. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Mark Lilly (1853; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 507. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 426; Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 226. Charlotte Brontë, The Professor (1857; London: Penguin, 1995), pp. 97–98. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text. Michael E. Schiefelbein, The Lure of Babylon: Seven Protestant Novelists and Britain’s Roman Catholic Revival (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), p. 142. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 154. Mary Jacobus, ‘The Buried Letter: Feminism and Romanticism in Villette’, in Women Writing and Writing About Women, ed. Mary Jacobus (London: Croom Helm; New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979), pp. 47, 52, 55. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions (New York and London: Methuen, 1980), p. 30. Quoted in John Shelton Reed, ‘A Female Movement”: The Feminization of NineteenthCentury Anglo-Catholicism’, Anglican and Episcopal History, LVII, no. 2 ( June 1988), p. 227. M. Hobart Seymour, Nunneries: A Lecture delivered at the Assembly Rooms, Bath, on Wednesday, April 21, 1852 (London: Seeleys, n.d.), p. 5. Rebecca Theresa Reed, Six Months in a Convent: The Narrative of Rebecca Theresa Reed, late inmate of the Ursuline Convent, Mount Benedict, Charlestown, Mass. (London: Thomas Ward & Co., 1835), pp. 84–85. Harriet Martineau, ‘Sister Anna’s Probation’, Once a Week, VI (22 March 1862), p. 338. Subsequent references to the weekly instalments which ran from 15 March–12 April are cited by page number parenthetically in the text. Clark-Beattie, ‘Fables of Rebellion’, p. 826. Kate Lawson similarly argues that Protestant Reason in the novel represses unconscious desire while Catholicism sublimates eroticism and refocuses it (‘Reading Desire: Villette as “Heretic Narrative’, English Studies in


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Canada, XVII (1 March 1991), pp. 59–60). 49 Liana F. Piehler, Spatial Dynamics and Female Development in Victorian Art and Novels: Creating a Woman’s Space (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 1, 43. 50 C. Maurice Davies, Unorthodox London: or Phases of Religious Life in the Metropolis (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1873), p. 414. 51 Davies, Unorthodox London, p. 421. 52 Julia McNair Wright, Almost a Nun (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Publication Committee, 1868), p. 247. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text. 53 For example, see Karen Laurence, ‘The Cypher: Disclosure and Reticence in Villette’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 42, no. 4 (March 1988), p. 459. 54 Rick Rylance, ‘Getting on”: Ideology, Personality and the Brontë Characters’, in The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës, ed. Heather Glen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 164. 55 Seymour, Nunneries, p. 15. 56 Seymour, Nunneries, p. 14. 57 Seymour, Nunneries, p. 16. 58 Eliza Richardson, The Veil Lifted: or, The Romance and Reality of Convent Life (London: Morgan & Scott, n.d. [1865]), p. 13. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text. 59 Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, and the Startling Mysteries of a Convent Exposed! (1836; Philadelphia: Peterson, n.d.), pp. 51, 55. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text. 60 Griffin, Anti-Catholicism, p. 32. 61 Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, p. 222. 62 Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, p. 232. 63 Seymour, Nunneries, p. 15. 64 Barbara Melchiori, ‘Browning in Italy’, in Robert Browning, ed. Isobel Armstrong (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1974), p. 174; Jacob Korg, Browning and Italy (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1983), p. 132. 65 Andrew Tate suggests that Browning’s prejudice against Catholicism was in keeping with the general attitudes of his time (‘He Himself with His Human Air”: Browning Writes the “Body of Christ’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 25, no. 1 (March 2003), pp. 44–46). K. I. D. Maslen has established clear links between Browning’s treatment of Renaissance Catholicism and that of Macaulay (‘Browning and Macaulay’, Notes and Queries, 225 [1980], pp. 525–57). 66 Bulwark, I ( January 1852), p. 175, quoted in Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, p. 55. 67 Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, p. 13. 68 W. A. Darby, Monks and Nuns: A Lecture in Reply to Two Lectures by ‘Father Ignatius, O. S. B.,’ April 14, 1864 (Manchester: John Heywood, 1864), p. 41. 69 Seymour, Convents or Nunneries, p. 35. 70 Nicholas Wiseman, writing anonymously in the Dublin Review, 1850; quoted in Matthew C. Mirow, ‘Roman Catholicism on Trial in Victorian England: The Libel Case of John Henry Newman and Dr. Achilli’, Catholic Lawyer, 36, no. 4(1996), p. 405. 71 Quoted in Mirow, ‘Roman Catholicism on Trial’, p. 442. 72 Harper, Papal Invasion, p. 8. 73 Richard D. Altick and James F. Loucks, II, Browning’s Roman Murder Story: A Reading of ‘The Ring and the Book’ (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p.


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130 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature 68. 74 Herbert F. Tucker, Jr., Browning’s Beginnings: The Art of Disclosure (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), p. 187. 75 Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book (1868–69; New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), X, ll. 1569–70. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text. 76 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class: 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 229. 77 The main parallel noted to date focuses on gender. See Susan Brown, ‘Pompilia: The Woman (in) Question’, Victorian Poetry, 34, no. 1 (Spring 1996), pp. 15–37. 78 This topic caused outrage throughout the 1850s and 1860s; see, for instance, John Echlin Armstrong, The Confessional: its wickedness (Brighton: Edward Verall, 1856). 79 For Daniel Karlin, these are the features of the rebellious Romantic artist; the speaker is alive to the world as the other shadowy monks are not (Browning’s Hatreds [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993], pp. 77–78). 80 This poem, ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed’s Church’ and ‘Pictor Ignotus’ from Robert Browning, Poems, Vol. 1 (London: Chapman & Hall, 1849). For ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ and ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, see Men and Women (London: Chapman & Hall, 1855). 81 Julia Markus, ‘Bishop Blougram and the Literary Men’, Victorian Studies, 21, no. 2 (Winter 1978), p. 194. 82 George Eliot, ‘Men and Women’, Westminster Review, 55 ( January 1856); reprinted in Browning: The Critical Heritage, ed. Boyd Litzinger and Donald Smalley (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 176. 83 E. LeRoy Lawson, for instance, suggests Blougram and Browning share the same relativist starting point though they reach different conclusions about the ‘contingent character of faith’ in the nineteenth century (Very Sure of God: Religious Language in the Poetry of Robert Browning [Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1974], pp. 115–16). 84 Edwin P. Hood, The Age and Its Architects: Ten Chapters on the English People, in Relation to the Times (1852), quoted in Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind 1830–1870 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 96. 85 Stefan Collini offers a comprehensive analysis of the political and philosophical bases of this debate in Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850– 1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). 86 Letter to F. O. Ward, 18 February 1845, quoted in Gregg Hecimovich, ‘Just the thing for the time”: Contextualizing Religion in Browning’s “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church’, Victorian Poetry, 36, no. 3 (Fall 1998), p. 259. 87 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, 3rd edn (1846; London: J. M. Dent, 1906), IV, p. 449. 88 W. David Shaw, ‘Philosophy and Genre in Victorian Poetics: The Idealist Legacy’, ELH, 52, no. 2 (Summer 1985), p. 487. Shaw suggests that, by the 1850s, many Victorians understood the unconscious as a method of mental operation rather than an object. Browning’s 1845 poem certainly dramatizes such processes. 89 E. Warwick Slinn, ‘Browning’s Bishop Conceives a Tomb: Cultural Ordering as Cultural Critique’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 27 (1999), p. 261.


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3 Persecution and Martyrdom: The Law and the Body Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr and George Eliot’s Romola [P]ersecution is Religion’s handmaid. – You must persecute to be consistent. 1 — William Makepeace Thackeray, letter to Percival Leigh Yet it may seem well to ask ourselves … when we read of … great religious persecutions on this side or on that … not merely, what germs of feeling we may entertain which, under fitting circumstances, would induce us to the like; but, even more practically, what thoughts, what sort of consideration, may be actually present to our minds such as might have furnished us, living in another age, and in the midst of those legal crimes, with plausible excuses for them … 2 — Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean

Religious persecution offered much sensational interest in nineteenthcentury literary and visual culture. The physical and psychological torments of heroic martyrs – perplexed by conflicting loyalties to state and church, family and conscience – are a stock feature of popular Victorian fictions by both Catholic and Protestant authors. Even though critics derided such works ‘as a “literary nuisance’,3 the exciting blend of gory tortures, riotous mobs, and wily entrappers of the innocent faithful provided vicarious adventure and spiritual gratification simultaneously. This chapter argues that the complex Victorian rhetoric of Catholic torture, persecution and suffering is of particular importance for understanding nineteenth-century anxieties about the individual’s relation to institutional authority, expressed in terms of the rights of the law over the body. Its operation can be tracked in a wide range of martyrdom writing throughout the period, and it provides an important context for reading Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr (1850) and George Eliot’s Romola (1863). Victorian martyrdom narratives, like many sub-classes of historical fiction in the period, directed attention as much to contemporary culture as to the past. The Early Christian romance, for example, usually portrayed the sanctity of a small, attractive community of Christians withstanding the onslaught of the official and dissolute pagan state. Written at a time of religious crisis


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132 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature in Britain when secularism and agnosticism threatened faith, these novels invited readers to make encouraging connections between the heroism of early saints and the stoicism of Victorian Christians who persevered despite modern temptations like materialism and unbelief. Popular representations of religious persecution in the period had an incisive denominational edge, appealing to readers’ identification with martyrs on strictly sectarian grounds. The architect and Catholic convert, Augustus Welby Pugin, recalled how stories about popery’s torture of nonCatholics was an important way of validating Protestant identity when he was growing up: I was thoroughly imbued with all the popular notions of racks, faggots, and fires … with all the usual tissue of falsehood so industriously propagated through the land, that by such means men may be led to detest and fear what they would 4 receive with joy and reverence could they but behold it in simple truth.

Polemical material produced during the century confirms Pugin’s memories. In a hostile survey of Catholicism in England, Thomas Lathbury, for example, identifies brutal persecution as a defining feature of the Roman Church; it ‘employs the fire and the sword to extirpate heresy. Its cruelty is one of its marks, together with perfidiousness.’5 Catholic viciousness to Protestants in England and abroad was a favoured topic in Nonconformist periodicals which often provided grisly illustrations of tortures to accompany stories about the Bartholomew Day Massacre, the Gunpowder Plot and the Inquisition; the gutter press followed suit with shocking claims about modern Catholic barbarity, including ingenious strategies for inflicting pain and maiming victims.6 Horrific engravings of Inquisition punishments circulated widely.7 In the early part of the century, pictures appeared in the West Country demonizing Catholics as sadistic tormentors of the helpless. These provocative images, recalling Herod’s massacre of the Innocents, showed priests quartering infants and impaling young naked girls while still alive.8 The controversial campaign in the late 1830s to erect a monument to the Reformation martyrs burned by Mary Tudor, and numerous reprints throughout the century of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (or the Book of Martyrs), reinforced assumptions about ‘Romish despotism’ and the excessive violence of Catholicism to those who would not conform.9 There were certainly countering narratives by Catholic writers who published historical and fictionalised accounts of the sufferings of priests and laypeople under Elizabethan penal laws. But these texts were in the minority and themselves the subject of strong rebuttal in the Protestant periodical press. Notwithstanding his contention that ‘Protestants are just the very last persons in


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the world who can with safety or consistency call Catholics persecutors’, John Henry Newman rightly surmised the predominant disposition in the Victorian literary imagination: that ‘[t]he Catholic Church is a persecuting power; and every one of us is a persecutor; and, if we are not by nature persecutors, yet we are forced to be persecutors by the necessity we lie under of obeying a persecuting Church’.10 Newman’s comments imply something of the complexities of the Victorian representation of Catholicism as an institution of spectacular cruelties. The most sensational representations of the Church of Rome routinely associate it with acts of savage violence against those who break its laws and with the morbid celebration of the mortified, abused bodies of its saints and martyrs. Moreover, Newman’s observations about Catholic obedience point to an ambivalent theme that emerges from the intertwining of the law and the body in the more lurid Victorian writing about persecution and Catholicism. This material raises questions about the value of an individual’s submission to institutional authority; it counts the cost of inscribing and policing such compliance in secular as well as religious contexts. When dutiful conformity is represented as a sacred act for the good of the community, persecution is inevitably institutionalized as the appropriate response to resistance. But the same scenarios of suffering can also present the ‘disobedient’ personal conscience as the bulwark against oppressive organizations that abuse power. Expositions of Catholic persecution and martyrdom give Victorian writers and readers considerable scope for exploring these contradictory positions and for examining the subtle processes involved in the politicization of conscience. As this chapter will argue, plots about a despotic foreign Church provide a safe distance for evaluating two contentious contemporary subjects. Through the extremes of sensationalism, the narrative of Catholic persecution brings sharply into relief the merits and dangers of confronting the authority of religious and secular law at different cultural levels – what might be termed the ‘Law of Conscience’ (the personal), the ‘Law of the Father’ (the familial), and the ‘Law of the State’ (the social). At the same time, the excessive focus on the body, legitimized by overt religious content, invites debate about the significance of somatic experience and the relation of unruly individual bodies to the demands of an unruly body politic. The theme of persecution in Catholic sensationalism focuses on the relationship of religious belief to secular power, rather than on the rights and wrongs of specific doctrines. In this writing, the torture of the body for the benefit of the soul is located in the domain of political action and interrogates the kinds of responsibility which a civil government should


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134 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature have for the well-being of its people. While there is continuity in British Protestant representations of the Church of Rome as a tyrannical regime, the Victorian inflection of the persecution plot gives a particular nuance to the intertwining of secular power and religious motivation. Significantly, this emphasis coincides with the attempts of Victorian historians, like Macaulay, to account for the origins and evolution of British constitutional freedom, that ‘long struggle between our sovereigns and their parliaments … the rights of the people and the title of the reigning dynasty’. In this Whig view of national development, the Glorious Revolution with its anti-Catholic thrust marks a watershed, for it ensured an appropriate balance between personal rights and freedoms and state power and conformity: ‘the authority of law and the security of property were found to be compatible with a liberty of discussion and of individual action never before known’.11 Victorian accounts of Catholics as persecutors or as martyrs show how the nation itself might be undermined when the boundaries of religious authority and ‘the authority of law’ are blurred or confused. Certainly, as Royal Rhodes has suggested, the portrayal of Catholic persecution in the period reflects theological concerns about ‘conversion and apostasy, faith and doubt’, and the meaning of an ‘English’ church.12 However, the conflict between ‘faiths’ also gives opportunity to ask awkward secular questions about individual freedom of conscience and dutiful submission to the law. That the ‘religious wars’ between Catholics and Protestants in sixteenthcentury England proved a continuously fruitful topic for Victorian writers of both denominations underlines a prevailing cultural theme of the age: how to respect social law through conformity and yet honour personal beliefs, however out of step they might be with the mainstream. For both denominations, the Reformation period of persecution offers pointed lessons for a modern Britain. In particular, it demonstrates how inappropriate interference by state or religious powers can erode social cohesion and compromise individual rights. Depending on the denominational predisposition of the writer, those persecuted under Catholic Mary Tudor and under Protestant Elizabeth are described either as saints loyally committed to spiritual truth or as outlaws rebelling against the truth of nationhood enshrined in civil law. Of course, as G. B. Nicolini admits about Jesuits executed under Elizabethan penal laws, it is difficult to separate prejudice from partisanship: ‘The one party calls them innocent martyrs, the other infernal traitors. The one complains that they were most unmercifully treated, the other, that they had too much lenity shewn them.’13 But overall, the Victorian handling of such persecutions shows a persistent attempt to imagine the boundaries of secular


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and religious authority in ways that might balance individual freedom of conscience and the need for social regulation and constraint. In their treatment of religious persecution in the sixteenth century, Victorian Catholics and Protestants both fasten on the primacy and power of the law. Fanny Taylor’s Catholic romance, Tyborne and Who Went Thither in the Days of Queen Elizabeth (1859) portrays executed Catholics as ‘saints and martyrs’, not criminals; respecting the law, they were ‘no more traitors than the Apostles were in imperial Rome’.14 Her central character, the Jesuit priest Walter de Lisle, asserts that he is condemned for a matter of conscience because he refuses to give up his faith. On the scaffold, he makes a point of reiterating his whole-hearted obedience to the state as ‘a faithful and true subject to my queen’ (168). Written in the aftermath of the Papal Aggression fears of 1850 when Catholic allegiance to the crown was particularly under scrutiny, Taylor’s novel employs a sympathetic, articulate hero to argue that religious and civil obedience are separate and distinct. Unorthodoxy in the former does not imply rebellion in the latter. While nineteenth-century Catholic historians, like John Lingard and John Morris, also make a distinction between civil law and spiritual or religious belief, their concern is to show how the former may be exploited to erode personal rights of conscience, especially if clear boundary lines are not drawn. Morris, for example, describes the barbarous execution of men as traitors ‘for no crime but for having been reconciled to the Catholic Church’ or for being a priest and refusing ‘to take the new-invented oaths’.15 Similarly, Lingard suggests that Elizabethan civil law was explicitly constructed to maintain an apparent distinction between the spiritual and secular, while blurring both. Sincere Catholic practitioners who fully acknowledged the sovereign’s temporal authority were trapped by the ‘miserable sophism’ that legislated on acceptable forms of worship. The requirement for ‘external conformity to the law’ by attendance at Protestant services in practice forced individuals to betray their religious beliefs, since forms of worship manifested particular doctrinal positions.16 In Catholic versions of the persecution plot, only a transparent disaggregation of religious and secular authority guarantees the claims of individual conscience and ensures social stability. It becomes the business of the state to respect and enforce this borderline, and thus guarantee personal freedoms. Protestant writing on Catholic persecution reverses the identification of victim and persecutor and casts Rome as the illegal tyrant. Nonetheless, similar lines are drawn between civil authority and personal conscience, and similar fears expressed about the subversion of the law for inappropriate


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136 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature ends. Protestant texts suggest Catholic political ambitions masquerade as personal religious faith, so that temporal power and spiritual authority are confused. Throughout the period, polemicists remind their readers that ‘not one Papist was executed in consequence of his religious creed, but on account of treasonable practices against the state’ and because of ‘conspiracy against the life of the queen’.17 In this version of the persecution plot, treacherous Catholics seek to destroy civil order in the name of spiritual belief: ‘patriotism was numbered among the sins against which every true son of the Church [of Rome] should most especially guard himself ’.18 Implicit in this construction of Catholic persecution is the need to protect and enforce the law of the state as the principle mainstay of a stable society, notwithstanding Protestant valuing of the independent conscience. Many Victorian iterations of the Catholic persecution plot take up this perspective. Religious oppression becomes part of a complex Victorian narrative about the health of the body politic and the need for firm civil control over those who abuse distinctions between personal belief and social duty. Secular law is represented as regulating the freedom of the individual to believe, speak and act freely. Disobedient questioning or rejection of the law is thus constructed as an antisocial and alien act. Catholic insurrections past and present are a useful means of making the point, for they seem to show how leniency in interpreting personal freedoms can slide quickly into political anarchy and insurrection: ‘the Romish party in England and Ireland always made common cause with radicals in claiming what they call civil and religious liberty; that is, liberty to gain power to make others slaves’.19 This comment from a pamphleteer of the 1830s is matched in 1890 by a similar association of Catholicism with all political movements that challenge legitimate governments in order to gain advantage and power. Catholic agents like the Jesuits are still seen to be ‘actively engaged in sowing treason, anarchy, rebellion, and every evil work, in order that the Pope of Rome may become the universal sovereign which may God in mercy prevent!’20 Religious propaganda is not the only issue here. This portrayal of Catholic persecution implies obedience to secular law is pre-eminent. It is the sole protection of the community from those, like Papists, who lack ‘peaceable intentions’.21 In Victorian discussions of Catholic religious persecution, the qualities of authoritative leadership are also a matter for reflection. Representations of the sixteenth-century Marian persecutions, for instance, vilify sovereigns who sacrifice the interests of their subjects for reasons of their own personal prejudices and predispositions. In effect, they, too, are like rebels, supplanting the law they should uphold. In the History of England from the Fall of Wolsey


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to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, James Anthony Froude combines images of physical torture with notions of usurpation of the law. The abusive force of Catholicism is typified by ‘the stake and the rack, the gibbet, the inquisition dungeons, the devil enthroned upon the judgment seat of the world, with steel, cord, and fire to execute his sentences’.22 Victorian commentaries on Foxe’s Book of Martyrs also focus on the barbaric treatment of the Protestant martyr’s body to dramatize Mary Tudor’s corruption of the body politic. She contaminates the authority of the law by using political supremacy to impose her personal Catholic beliefs. As a result, all levels of society are exposed to systematic brutality. Victorians stress that the ‘records of faith, heroism, and constancy’ of the Protestant martyrs express an edifying dedication to civil freedom as well as religious conviction.23 These horrific descriptions of suffering recast martyrdom as social duty. Protestant martyrs protect the English birthright by dying both for their religious sincerity and their opposition to state tyranny. By not hesitating ‘to speak their minds very freely in the presence of their persecutors’, they demonstrate the importance of safeguarding civil liberties and protecting the people from intolerance and the imposition of ‘truth by force’.24 The Catholic persecution plot thus enfolds a double logic for Victorian readers with respect to individual rights and the authority of law. The Protestant victims of religious oppression may have rebelled against the civil law of Catholic rulers; but their Reformation roots imply their orthodoxy when judged by the standards of middle-class Victorian culture. Their characterization as martyrs sanctifies the nineteenth-century status quo. They are models of religious good standing (committed to the established national church) and of patriotic citizenship (dedicated to upholding the British rule of law with its constitutional commitment to civil liberties). But these victims of religious persecution also offer models of resistance disturbingly similar to Catholic martyrs under Elizabeth. With particular emphasis placed on the shocking horrors of bodily torture, Catholic sensationalism garners sympathy for rebellious individuals persecuted under either faith system. Resistance to a legal authority that oppresses in the name of spiritual and social cohesiveness rewrites disobedience as a heroic act. Persecutors of both denominations are implicated in the same contradictory perspective. They might dutifully invoke the law to preserve social stability, enhance communal solidarity and protect the nation; but such power is counterbalanced by the association of law-making with potentially self-serving or tyrannical motivations. The Catholic plots of persecution in Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr and George Eliot’s Romola reflect the same problematic, suggesting


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138 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature contemporary disquiet about the appropriate balance of power between the unified state and the free individual. By sensationalizing the competing demands of obedience and independent judgement through the suffering body, both authors turn abstract political theory into a somatic reality for the scandalized and pitying reader. Grace Aguilar’s The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr is an Inquisition romance about the suppression of the Spanish Jews that employs many plot motifs typical of sensationalism, including suffering heroes and heroines, secret identities, adventurous escapes and ennobling pathos. Like Victorian non-fiction accounts of Catholic persecution, Aguilar’s treatment of Catholic violence and fanaticism highlights important secular themes: the clash between conscience and law, and the boundaries of righteous authority for both individual and state. Michael Ragussis has argued that Aguilar uses Gothic renderings of the Inquisition to garner sympathy for Judaism from her largely Protestant readership. By representing the persecution of the Jews through a literary discourse that features Catholic abuse of Protestants, the novelist heightens Victorian respect for Jewish integrity and turns religious difference into similarity. The Jew, like the English Protestant through the centuries, is nobly opposed to Catholic tyranny and may thus be safely trusted to respect the British ethos.25 Ragussis’s approach implies Aguilar produces an unproblematic harmonization of personal liberty and compliance with state regulation. However, the handling of Catholic brutality and oppression in the novel actually reveals substantial ambivalence about the politicization of conscience and the legitimate reaches of the law. Throughout the novel, Aguilar takes full advantage of the most familiar elements in sensationalized narratives of Catholic persecution – disguise and secretive plotting, incarceration, torture and forced testimony. However, her historical contextualization of these thrilling features predisposes the reader to reject the forces of legitimate social authority and sympathize with a heroine who is alien by Victorian standards. The setting is late fifteenthcentury Catholic Spain during the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the fanatical Spanish Inquisition is intent on the suppression of all heretics, but especially Jews. The heroine, Marie, is identified from the start as a potential victim of injustice for she is a beautiful Sephardic Jewess in love with a Gentile Englishman, Arthur Stanley, who has fled the War of the Roses to escape imprisonment. While persecution and prejudice are the motivating drivers of the plot, Aguilar offers no comfortable resolution of the crises they provoke. Not only are these tendencies not easily expunged; they eventually are not even clearly differentiated from conduct and feelings that would be


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regarded tolerantly by a middle-class Victorian reader. As a consequence, contradictions abound. The cunning, political acumen and strength of will normally reserved for Catholic despots characterize the rule of enlightened and generally effective monarchs. Disguise and deceit are essential protections for innocent, hard-working and noble citizens as well as the diabolical agents of the Inquisition. Scenes of torture act as a proving ground for ennobling self-control and arouse positive feelings of pity, but they are also associated with sadistic gratification. Moreover, in the novel, the authority of the law at every level – individual, family and state – is both worthy and oppressive. Aguilar uses these ambiguities as a way of re-evaluating the differing heroics of resistance and conformity as they impact on the individual and the community. At the start of the novel, the familiar motifs of Catholic persecution establish that the boundary between the barbaric and the civilized is secured only by law. False imprisonment, torture and murder by the Inquisition show what happens when civil legal structures are treated with contempt. Functioning surreptitiously within the newly unified Spanish state ruled by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Inquisition operates in a manner that mimics official legal processes in a grotesque parody of justice. All levels of society are subject to its machinations. Its procedures purport to follow the systematic sequence of investigation, inquiry, decision and sentence that distinguished the reform of legal systems in Europe from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.26 Yet this Catholic court is lawless in its secrecy; it stands outside any recognized framework of judicial regulation and open-minded commitment to discovery of the truth: Many a family wept the loss of a beloved member, they knew not, guessed not how – for those who once entered those fatal walls were never permitted to depart, so secret were their measures, that even the existence of this fearful mockery of 27 justice and religion was not known …

For Ferdinand and Isabella, the real horror of the Inquisition lies less in its cruelty (for they, too, sanction torture) than in its challenge to the rights and responsibilities of the state to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. Taking orders from a foreign power (the papal state), this Catholic institution invades the body politic with its own quasi-judicial system and erodes the legitimate rule embodied in the crown. Its unsanctioned operation within the boundaries of the kingdom is ‘an act of such especial disrespect to the sovereign power and of injustice towards the queen’ (184). The novel further contrasts Catholic lawlessness to secular authority by presenting an anachronistic democratic interpretation of the late mediaeval Spanish state.


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140 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature The Inquisition is portrayed as an insult to the people of Spain, who set aside petty rivalries to rise up against it. The ferocious resistance of a Catholic people to this Catholic body validates the authority of the state, implying that civil law embodies the will of a just people. Obedience to this law is an expression of communal solidarity to be applauded. The lawlessness of Catholic persecution is also demonstrated by Aguilar’s vivid characterization of the chief Inquisitorial villains; they disguise malevolent motives with outward respectability in familiar sensational style. Uncontrolled passions motivate the devious Don Luis Garcia. On the surface, he appears to his fellow Spaniards to be a man of intense spirituality, though a Victorian reader would certainly detect the dangerous signs of Catholic fanaticism in his many repressive acts of mortification and penance. Indeed, his piety speaks not of calm self-discipline but of barely suppressed primitive and violent emotion: ‘under the cold austerity of the ordinary man lay coals of living fire. It mattered not under what guise excited – hate, revenge, ambition, he was capable of all’ (50). Envy of the disguised Jew, Ferdinand Morales, prompts Garcia’s scheme to discredit, humiliate and eventually murder the man whose decency and good fortune enrage him. At first, Ferdinand is only suspected and watched. But when he marries Marie, Garcia’s sexual jealousy and lust stimulate a ‘whirlwind of contending passions’ (52). Neither religious belief, civil law, nor even natural sympathy makes any impact on Garcia’s will. Nothing alters his determination to seek revenge through ‘persecution … [driven] by personal and ungovernable hate’ (49). The dangers that arise from a similar lack of discipline and control at community level are demonstrated when Aguilar connects the Catholic persecution of the Spanish Jews to Victorian debates about Jewish emancipation and assimilation. Aguilar argues, in Elizabeth Fay’s words, for ‘a culture of exchange’ between different elements of society, since enforced boundaries of exclusion ‘predict inquisitory practice’.28 To make her point, Aguilar suggests intolerance is a kind of communal eruption of those uncontrolled passions and hatreds that drive the semi-sane Garcia. Prejudice reveals itself as a lawless phenomenon that escapes secular regulation, but ferments when strict categorizations block the understanding of difference and generate suspicion. In such an environment, fear of dissimilarity overrides community cohesiveness and even instinctive feelings of affection and compassion. For example, the monks of St Francis maintain an unbending ‘rigid exclusiveness regarding religion’ (138). Such attitudes discount the loyalty of non-Catholic subjects, and the financial and scholarly contribution of Jews to Spanish culture. Their religious difference and strange customs are sufficient reasons


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for denying them the protection of civil law and the benefits of citizenship. Catholic fanaticism, that staple of Victorian persecution sensations, is an important motif in the novel, illustrating how inflexibility can disrupt peace and threaten both body and law. In The Vale of Cedars, spiritual narrowness and intellectual rigidity feed a desire for conformity that results in acts of brutal suppression. It is the monks’ arrogant, ‘uncompromising’ view of faith that leads them to neglect God’s law of love and pursue a policy of ‘stern abhorrence towards and violent persecution of all who in the slightest degree departed from it, or failed to pay it the respect and obedience which they believed [it] demanded’ (138). Aguilar characterizes such severity as a perversity, because it violates the natural law of pity that should restrain excesses of zeal. Isabella’s unbending obedience to her Catholic faith is portrayed as abnormal, for example, because it overrides her intuitive love for Marie and her sense of womanly solidarity. In an omniscient aside, the narrator invites the Victorian reader to exercise imagination and extend a tolerance towards Isabella that the Queen cannot herself express towards her Jewish subjects. An understanding of the cultural and historical context puts Isabella’s harshness in perspective. However, Aguilar’s commentary also implies that the attitudes of contemporary readers, enshrined in law and custom, might be equally skewed by subtle, undetected influences: We must indeed deplore the mistaken tenets that could obtain such influence – deplore that man could so pervert the service of a God of love, as to believe and inculcate that such things could be acceptable to Him; but we should pause, and ask, if we ourselves had been influenced by such teaching, could we break from it? ere we condemn. (194–95)

Implacable zealotry also menaces the fanatic’s own integrity, a point which Aguilar deftly – and ironically – makes through the language of Catholic martyrdom. By contrast to the cool, measured tone of the narrator, Isabella’s fervour seems a deluded, neurotic exercise in self-repression. The Queen convinces herself that self-abuse – the eradication of feeling – is a worthy sacrifice for the faith. She must ignore her instinctive goodheartedness to force Marie to convert: Once impressed that it was a religious duty, she would do violence to her most cherished wishes, sacrifice her dearest desires, her best affections . . . not without suffering indeed; but, according to the mistaken tenets of her religion, the greater [sic] personal suffering the more meritorious was the deed believed to be. (194)

In the irrational economy of persecution and martyrdom, Isabella’s most admirable, spiritual qualities – her compassion and love of innocence – are in effect destroyed, though not with the benefits she thinks.


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142 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Fanaticism figured as duty is just one of the Catholic excesses used in the novel to show how identity can be threatened by principles of authority and obedience taken to extremes. Victorian accounts of the horrors of Catholic persecution typically highlight the Church’s illicit command of the individual’s conscience through intimidation or physical force. The Vale of Cedars reproduces this theme in the characterization of Catholics who scheme outside and against the law. The murderer hired by Garcia to attack Morales, for example, has been totally subjugated and dehumanized. Now wholly compliant to Garcia’s direction, he lacks the capacity to judge the morality of his actions for himself. He has become one of many ‘mere mindless and feelingless tools’ manipulated by the illegal Inquisition (232). The authority of all Catholic persecutors in the novel is called into question by their brutality, but also by their audaciousness and lack of moderation. Their desire to convert Marie is figured as a sinful usurpation of God’s power since the conscience they would control is the ‘divine part of our mingled nature’ (255). To force compliance is to violate the integrity of God’s creation. The point is symbolically made when Marie is imprisoned by Garcia. It becomes clear that what he really intends is the possession of her body through rape. He rationalizes his plan as religious duty, a way of forcing Marie’s conversion and securing her redemption. But it is the exercise of total domination over her, the display of his irresistible power, which really excites him: ‘It matters not to me what thou art after death, but before it mine thou shalt be’ (202). The repugnant techniques of the Inquisition, monstrous in their cruelty and lack of control, transgress other boundaries that the law traditionally upholds to guarantee individual and communal security. Disguise, espionage and secret plotting create confusion and render the external world a destabilizing place of mysterious but unspecified threat. Isolation in dark and filthy dungeons without trial and fair hearing, the fearful anticipation and experience of pain more terrible than death, and the horror of self-betrayal through extracted confessions can momentarily turn even the self-possessed Marie into an unthinking creature. Instead of presenting a reasoned argument or plea for mercy, she can utter ‘no sound save a shriek so wild, that it seemed for the moment to drown all other sorrows’ (198). Aguilar’s use of several devices drawn from the unrestrained theatrics of Gothic fiction and melodrama also suggests that the relentless ingenuity of the fiend-like Inquisitors lies outside any legal and rational regulation. Trap-doors, ghostly hooded figures, hideous masked creatures, and hellish subterranean dungeons and torture chambers extending ‘far and wide,


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beneath the very bowels of the earth’ (197) locate this version of Catholic authority in realms beyond the jurisdiction of human or even heavenly law. Aesthetically, too, this domain is apparently lawless. Fantastic and inhuman in its savagery, the Inquisition escapes the boundaries of representation in an empirical, realistic mode. To the eyes of Marie and the narrator, the torturers defy classification. Bearing ‘the figure of the cross upon the breast … that emblem of divine peace’ (197) as they inflict savage pain, they grotesquely eradicate categories that normally distinguish the godly from the demonic. Their work quite literally becomes indescribable; so horrific are the torments they inflict ‘that the pen shrinks from their delineation’ (197). Though the sufferings inflicted are physical, no concrete detail can represent their effects. Uncontained by the specifics of time and space, the persecutor’s work can only be glimpsed by bodily signs, such as Marie’s maimed and shrivelled arm or the disembodied voice uttering ‘[t]he shrillest sounds of agony … from the gloomy arches, in which no object could be distinguished’ (198). Against the anarchic, inhuman regime of Catholic persecution, Aguilar sets two alternative institutional authorities, both embodying a civilizing and protective rule of law: the state and the family. Each promises a framework of justice and personal fulfilment in exchange for loyalty and dutiful obedience on the part of the individual. Yet, ambivalently, each authority comes to replicate the persecution plot in ways that undermine individual freedom and impose suffering and loss. Ferdinand and Isabella present their sovereign rule and civil law as the antidote to an anarchic and divided nation. Their marriage is as much political union as love match, bringing together the territories of Aragon and Castile under their joint rule. Before their reign, lawlessness threatened security and peace: Rapine, outrage, and murder had become so frequent and unchecked … The people acknowledged no law but their own passions. The nobles were so engrossed with hatred of each other, and universal contempt of their late sovereign, with personal ambition and general discontent, that they had little time or leisure to attend to any but their own interest. (18)

Unrestrained violent passions and ill-discipline underpinned criminality and vice as rampant in secular Spain as in the secret membership of the Inquisition. The selfish gratification of desire was the sole guide to conduct ‘before which honour, innocence, and virtue fell powerless’ (50). The administration of Ferdinand and Isabella, on the other hand, espouses the health and security


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144 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature of the community at large in opposition to the might of an aggressive, elite few. Their redistribution of power to the ‘people’ from the nobles is represented as a major factor in the restoration of national stability and prosperity. Aguilar describes their reforming measures in terms that portray the ‘new’ Spain as a prototype for the political ideals of post-Reformation Britain. She plays down the absolute power of the monarchs, focusing instead on their reconciliation of the rights, needs and expectations of different classes to ensure peace and liberty. Indeed, Spain is even portrayed as a sanctuary from political persecution abroad, as in the case of Arthur Stanley, who left England to escape imprisonment. In this interpretation of Spanish history, social mobility through accomplishment is a spur to progress and civic order. Spain, like Victorian Britain, promotes the ideology of meritocracy. Even those of ‘inferior rank’ (120) are entrusted with offices of state when they prove their loyalty and ability. Above all, however, it is the authority of secular law and the community’s respect for it that re-establishes national unity. Law is idealistically equated with the people’s will and with their contentment. When Isabella requires the systematic application of the law in Castile, she replaces ‘misery and anarchy’ with ‘the happiness and freedom of her subjects’ (119). Law provides for consistency of judgements and offers a framework for right action. The exercise of legal authority is continuously equated with justice and truth; its transparency keeps sedition and upheaval at bay. Isabella, for example, wishes as many ‘citizen-subjects’ as possible to be present at the trial of Arthur Stanley for Ferdinand’s murder in order ‘to witness the faithful course of justice’ (137). Civil law guarantees personal freedoms, social justice and the punishment of those who threaten security. Importantly, the law is shown to ensure peace by institutionalizing a strong code of dutiful submission to the leader who both embodies and enforces authority. Isabella publicly uses the discourses of chivalric honour and partnership, rather than the language of mastery, to encourage obedience. In a persuasive and inspirational address to the people of Segovia, she skilfully employs flattering, romanticized images of co-operation and common purpose: She depended on them, her people, to aid her with heart and hand; and bade them remember, no individual was so insignificant as to remove his shoulder from the wheel on plea of uselessness. She trusted to her citizen subjects to raise the eternal glory of her kingdom, as she did to her nobles to guard their safety, elevate her chivalry, and by their untarnished honour and stainless valour present an invincible front to foreign foes. (64–65)


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However, the narrator’s concluding aside is more ambivalent about Isabella’s appeal for support, constructing it as an exercise in rhetorical manipulation. The calming effects of the speech, with the citizens psychologically ‘bound for ever to her service’, shows the Queen’s flair in calculating her subjects’ fears and desires, and exploiting these. She ‘knew human nature well’, and uses this understanding to subdue the population to her personal command. She masks autocracy as pseudo-democracy. She conflates submission to the authority of law and personal devotion to a beloved liege lady. By so doing, she strategically obscures any conflicts that might arise between an individual’s personal interests and his or her public duty to the monarch and to the nation-state at large. The effectiveness of such manoeuvres is apparent when Marie agrees to testify at Arthur’s trial, although this will endanger the innocent man she loves, her own reputation, and the honour of her late husband. Marie has internalized the Queen’s model of obedience, as well as her rhetorical style. Like Isabella, she makes no distinction between a hierarchical system of social deference and the mutual sympathy and tolerance on which personal relationships depend. Marie submits because she recognizes ‘the respect and deference due from a subject to her sovereign’ but also the personal ‘kindness’ which Isabella has shown her (134). The explicit clash between personal safety and social obligation is masked by a cult of loyalty that implies private feelings and public duty are the same. Emotional blackmail is also used to secure Marie’s conversion to Catholicism, and Aguilar’s narration revises the image of the law and the authority of the monarch in the light of such unfair tactics. In its operation, the law is no longer the apparatus of the peacemaker, but the tool of a fanatical despot. Isabella reminds Marie of a subject’s duty of obedience, though the Queen shrewdly recasts this unjust invasion of private conscience in terms of natural feelings and personal reciprocities. Conversion is reconstituted as a sign of love and gratitude. As the Queen says to Marie, ‘I cannot believe that all the kindness and affection I have shown have been so utterly without effect, and that thou wilt evince the ungrateful obstinacy so unhappily the characteristic of thy blinded people’ (251). Isabella’s anti-Semitic gibe and the reader’s sympathy for an attractive, beleaguered heroine promote an alternative interpretation of the Queen’s command. However tenderly phrased, her requirement for obedience through religious conformity seems the oppressive imposition of the authority of the state on a vulnerable individual. Coming from the monarch who is the emblem of law and just governance, this comment opens an irreconcilable gap between the idealized theory of law and its more sinister practice, between its apparently


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146 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature benevolent commitment to even-handedness and its tyrannical potential. Similar ironies raise questions about the authenticity of legal authority, since the command and control of social groups works through particular individuals. The characterization of Marie’s Jewish husband, Ferdinand Morales, suggests authority can be manufactured by rhetoric and depend on the perception of others, whatever the facts. Governor Morales is revered by the people as ‘one who had ever, noble as he was by birth, made himself one with them, cheering their sorrows, sharing their joys … teaching all and every age the duties demanded by their country and their homes, to their families and themselves’ (121–22). This dynamic of governance, like that of Isabella and her people, is a configuration of social relations familiar to early Victorians; Aguilar draws on the language of political authority in vogue when she drafted the novel in the mid-1830s. This rhetoric ironed out the conflicts between laissez-faire individualism and the consensus needed to ensure peace and progress. Compliance in Morales’s world is ensured by constituting authority as the will of the people – the ‘instructed democracy’ and ‘the public at large’ – and submission to it as a voluntary – and thus free – act, a sign of willed agency.29 The discourse of familiarity and affection represents the interests of the state and individual as compatible and mutually enhancing, while disguising the real hierarchies of subjugation and control. Aguilar’s narratorial summary draws on this language to confirm the benevolence of the Jew and the people’s willing submission to his guidance. However, for a Victorian reader steeped in Catholic sensationalism, with its anxieties about the dangers of blind obedience, Aguilar’s conventional normalizing of authority and rule is more problematic. Morales may be spoken of as an equal, but his rank gives him considerable power to enforce his will. Moreover, this man of the people, ‘one with them’, is really a disguised Jew. As such, he is all difference: alien by faith and culture, outcast by the law he represents and administers. When Morales is murdered, the adoring citizens turn into a frenzied mob demanding vengeance. The volatility of the people and the periodic eruption of violence in the novel are further ways in which anxiety about the effectiveness of the law comes to the fore. Even a centralized and transparent system of governance, managed by a combination of ‘restraint and legal severity’ (50), cannot fully subdue the social body. While the Spanish monarchs use the rhetoric of chivalric loyalty and familial affection to enforce obedience to the law, they are unable to change or even constrain individual passions, including their own: ‘Over the public safety and reform they had some power, but over the hearts of individuals they had none’ (50). Even Ferdi-


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nand recognizes that ‘justice herself [may] be but a cover for prejudice and hate’ (142), and, from time to time, both he and his wife display an irrational hostility to difference. The juxtaposition of the novel’s narrative of civil reform and the plot of Catholic persecution highlights a further weakness in the authority of state law, which can oppress the individual in the apparent interests of communal well-being. Although the processes of justice that operate in the kingdom are more public than those of the Inquisition, they rely on similar strategies of imprisonment, bodily degradation and brutality to extract self-incriminating confessions or crush resistance. The innocent Arthur Stanley, framed for the murder of Morales, is one such persecuted victim, his body ‘heavily fettered’, ‘his attenuated form’, ‘white cheek and haggard eye’ all testifying to ‘intense mental torture’ (142–43). The legal penalties Marie faces unless she bows to the civil law and converts replicate the punishments of the Inquisition: life imprisonment, torture or even death. Prejudice against particular individuals and groups as well as imperial ambition – all traits normally associated with illicit Catholic persecution – are enshrined in the public policy of reform and progress. Ferdinand’s war against the Moors reflects a Catholic and racial hatred of difference, for the King sees them as an expendable, savage, heathen culture. Moreover, his campaign conceals his worldly desire for personal power and reputation. Ferdinand and Isabella want to ‘send down their names to posterity, as the founders of the Spanish monarchy’, and, to this end, they seek to strengthen control over all (55). Such aspirations also lie at the heart of the crown’s institutionalization of the Inquisition as a publicly constituted body. While at first this seems another instance of the insidious erosion of the secular state by Catholicism, it, too, is represented in a way which signals anxiety about any power unjustly wielded through law. Torquemada, the wily head of the Inquisition, easily manipulates the weakness of rulers and their wavering principles. He takes advantage of the monarchs’ pride and bigotry to embed the processes of Catholic persecution in the machinery of the reformed state. He appeals to the King’s political vanity by suggesting that the formal recognition of the Inquisition would establish Ferdinand’s secular reputation and supremacy. He fans Isabella’s racial and religious prejudices by presenting the Inquisition as a tool of cultural, social and spiritual purification. By the end of the novel, the Law of the State is fully implicated in the lawless motivations and persecuting practices of the organization which it once nobly opposed. While the representation of civil law in the novel offers no satisfactory framework for the reconciliation of individual conscience, communal needs


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148 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature and social duty, the Law of the Father enshrined in familial affections and loyalties is equally fraught. In the domestic domain, too, the Catholic persecution plot encodes uncertainty about the relative merits of resistance and conformity. Aguilar laces the novel with historical and statistical evidence to show that Catholic and state authorities collaborated in the ‘lucrative oppression’ of the Jews and the appropriation of their property (190). The narrator’s representation of this systematic persecution actually serves to embed Judaism into mainstream contemporary culture, because it constructs the Jewish community as an ideal Victorian family. The Spanish Jews are portrayed as cohesive and stoic, loyal and self-sacrificing. A ‘mysterious bond of brotherhood’ (27) unites the tiny, secluded group in the Vale of Cedars. Their heroic refusal to conform depends on deep attachments generated by shared suffering as well as blood ties. They are united by a sense of common danger and ‘struggles secretly endured’ as well as by cultural affinities, ‘feelings and sympathies’ (27). From the most ordinary domestic events, such as a shared meal, to the milestones of family life, like a wedding, it is the sense of mutual support in the face of mortal danger that distinguishes the secret conclaves as ‘something holy’, a ‘hallowed’ kinship (44). This language of religious sanctification legitimizes the values of the communal ‘family’, particularly when the peaceful co-operation of the Jews is contrasted to their inhuman treatment by the Inquisition. Their resistance to Catholic authority seems divinely inspired and courageous, but also entirely rational. A truly wise person refuses to adopt the beliefs of his or her tormentors: ‘Persecution, privation, tyranny may torture and destroy the body, but they cannot force the mind to the adoption of and belief in tenets, from which the very treatment they commanded must urge it to revolt’ (190). However, in the novel, the systematic Catholic persecution of the Jews impacts on their integrity in other less admirable ways. The security of the Spanish Jewish community depends on the keeping of a ‘fatal secret’ (9). The myth of heroic resistance is maintained only by resorting to the fiction of conformity. Since the public acknowledgement of their Jewish faith means degradation and death, the Vale inhabitants live as secret Jews and pseudoChristians, gaining peace, freedom and social advancement as a consequence. False appearance and disguise has become an inheritance as natural as blood: ‘From father to son, from mother to daughter, the solemn secret descended, and gradually spread, still in its inviolable nature, through every rank and every profession … over the whole land’ (191). The protection of such secret knowledge from the state is a vital duty dependent on the individual’s selfcontrol and silence. As an inherited truth, it is preserved by family loyalty


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and sanctioned by obedience to the Law of the Father that governs both individual blood relatives and the extended family of the secret Jews. The romance plot of the novel shows that the Law of the Father can have an oppressive effect, as punitive as any civil law or religious persecution. Marie’s father views her love for the Gentile, Arthur Stanley, as both an affront to her faith and a danger to all disguised Jews within the kingdom. It is thus not surprising that Marie believes that her innocent love for Arthur is a sin ‘against her God’ and faith (30). But she compounds her own guilt and psychological suffering because she fears her father’s censuring anger: ‘she knew too well not only the grief such tidings would be to him, but what his judgment must be, and she shrunk in agony from the condemnation of her feelings by another’ (30). When she does finally explain, her father exploits his authority to finalize her betrothal to the secret Jew, Morales. He commands her to conceal her true feelings from her husband. Critics have read Marie’s abject surrender to this plan as a calculated strategy on Aguilar’s part. It shows that Judaism is compatible with Victorian spiritual and cultural values, confirming, for example, the Jewish woman’s participation in a domestic ideology of female dependence and obedience.30 But, viewed in terms of the Victorian sensationalizing of Catholic persecution and martyrdom, Marie’s behaviour conveys more ambivalent meanings. Her language of penance and self-abnegation resembles that of fanatical, selfmortifying Catholics: ‘… pain shall be welcome, if it may in time atone for the involuntary sin of loving the stranger, and the yet more terrible one of grieving thee. Oh, my father, do what thou wilt, command me as thou wilt – I am henceforth wholly thine’ (35). Obedience to the Law of the Father obliterates personal desire and individual identity in unhealthy ways. By embracing her subjugation so meekly, Marie inadvertently sets in train a plot of jealousy, rivalry and revenge that brings about her husband’s murder. If the Law of the Father in the domestic circle of the family is prescriptive and oppressive, its application in the wider context of the Jewish brotherhood mimics the process of Catholic persecution itself. Marie’s revelation of her Jewish identity at Arthur’s trial subverts the Law of the State because it prevents her testimony against him. However, it also arouses the wrath of the Jewish community as a whole and places her in equal danger from opposing sources of authority that claim her allegiance and person. Aguilar’s portrayal of Marie’s terror explicitly juxtaposes the behaviour of Jews and Inquisition in ways that suggest their shared tyranny over the individual. The heroine realizes she is suddenly in


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150 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature danger, not merely from the vengeance of the Church for long years of fraud, nor from the secret and awful tribunal of whose existence she was conscious … but danger from the wrath and terrors of the secret members of her own faith, who might naturally imagine their own safety endangered in the suspicion engendered by her rash confession. (162)

Catholic and Jewish forces are indistinguishable in their desire to punish the individual who defies their authority. Neither group gives scope for the workings of individual conscience, the exercise of noble feelings, or the tolerant acceptance of difference. Marie’s invidious position illustrates the effects on the individual of resistance and obedience in a culture where public and private domains as well as religious and secular experience are tightly structured by external laws and customs. Images normally associated with the worst excesses of Catholic persecution are used to describe her psychological despair. She collapses with ‘an overpowering, crushing sense of all she had drawn upon herself, such fearful, spectral shapes of indefinable horror’ (162). Her love for Arthur, revelation of the Jewish secret, and civil duty to convert torment her as if she endured the severe physical tortures – also ‘indefinable’ – of the Inquisition. As loyal subject, daughter and Jewess, as loving woman, and as an individual committed to truth, Marie finds herself in a position where she must both adhere to and break the Law of the State and the Law of the Father. The result is the torment of conflicting loyalties and duties, of anguished guilt and self-doubt. In this dilemma, the strength for endurance is provided not by religious law nor social conformity, nor even by human love. It is the Law of Conscience that underpins Marie’s spiritual belief and gives her ‘the martyr spirit’ (266) which Isabella admires and by which Garcia is defeated. As the guarantor of individual integrity, it is the resource on which Marie must draw to withstand the oppression of lawless and legal authorities. As a suffering victim, Marie evokes pity and admiration, a response encouraged by Aguilar’s application of the discourse of Christian martyrdom to her silent, stoic heroine. Certainly, this strategy gives the novelist a subject position from which she can mediate Jewish identity for a Victorian Christian culture. But it also accords with the novel’s own transposition of the plot of Catholic persecution. In The Vale of Cedars, the familiar motivations and practices of the oppressive Church of Rome are mirrored in the secular structures that regulate public and private life. Marie finds suffering thrust upon her from all directions – from establishment and outsiders, from those who oppose her religious difference and those who share it. Her heroism resides in her response to this comprehensive victimisation. Like the sincere martyr


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of Early Christian narratives, she humbly embraces her suffering, content to turn from the temporary pleasures of worldly love to more elevated concerns. She believes her ordeal is divinely ordained ‘to try our spirit’s strength and faith, and so prepare us for that higher state of being in which the spirit will move and act’ (282). Her emotional struggle to remain loyal to her faith is as poignant as any physical trial at the hands of pagan or Catholic persecutors: ‘It was a fearful contest … so terribly was its index inscribed on those white and chiselled features’; it calls forth a sincere avowal of belief characteristic of a martyr’s stoical consistency: ‘Imprison, torture, slay, with the lingering misery of a broken heart, but I cannot deny my faith!’ (265–66). Troped as martyrdom, Marie’s suppression of her own desires for personal safety and for Arthur’s love is constructed as a positive and inspiring act. This meek acceptance of persecution anticipates ‘the peace, the calm, the depth of quietude’ of life after death (281). Consoling Arthur, Marie discloses a vision of heaven that knows no law but love. Boundless, undifferentiated eternity promises tolerance, liberty and inclusion: ‘In heaven I feel there is no distinction of creed or faith; we shall all love God and one another there, and earth’s fearful distinctions can never come between us’ (284). But there are no such consolations for temporal existence where severity and subjugation seem the norm. The novel’s plot of lawless Catholic persecution embeds a disturbing counterplot of oppression by the authority of law in public and private domains. By the end of the novel, it is apparent that even the most well-meaning citizen is trapped within narrow boundaries of conflicting orthodoxies and obligations. In balancing the individual’s right to free conscience with the community’s right to stability through consensus and conformity, the only heroic mode possible lies in self-sacrifice and patient endurance. In The Vale of Cedars, as in other Victorian novels of Catholic persecution and martyrdom, the heroism of endurance and the power of temporal authority are both made visible by sensational acts of violence against the individual body. As Foucault suggests, systems of law and punishment show how the body is ‘directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs’.31 Cultural historians and literary critics have shown how, in general terms, the imaginative treatment of pain in the nineteenth century is ‘part of a complex and unstable system of signification, manipulable by those with power’.32 Sensational narratives of Catholic suffering and torture are part of this discursive context, for they demonstrate how the infliction of physical anguish is an important


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152 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature adjunct of authority, enforcing its desires. What is more, representations of the tortured martyrs draw attention to the role of the body as an expressive sign. It proclaims the individual’s response to the law, encoding it as submission or resistance. Aguilar’s narrative dramatizes this signifying potential of the body. The suffering of Arthur and Marie, enmeshed in a fated love for each other, is conveyed more often by gesture and physical appearance than by words. Marie’s intense gaze at Arthur when he is rescued from the scaffold is one such instance. Her cheeks flush crimson and she trembles with the fervour of relief. Such techniques of characterization reflect Victorian physiological and psychological theories about the relation between mind and body. Alexander Bain suggests, for example, that ‘the physical and the mental – [are] a double-faced unity’, a fact recognized in mediaeval art in which ‘the martyr, the saint … manifested their glorious nature by the sympathetic movements of the mortal framework’.33 In this model of selfhood, the body has special value as a conduit of interiority, since emotions ‘have no independent spiritual substance, but are in every case embodied in our fleshly form’.34 Further weight is given to somatic signification through Aguilar’s use of the motifs of Catholic persecution. Because, in an Inquisitorial culture, verbal testimony can incriminate and condemn, it is expedient to cultivate reserve and silence. One consequence is a greater reliance on instinctive, unwilled bodily signs as a guide to truth. Aguilar offers a primitive variant of this belief when the superstitious mob inspects the mangled corpse of Ferdinand Morales, anticipating portentous clues to the murderer’s identity. Sensationalism directs special attention to the expressive potential of the damaged body in Victorian narratives of Catholic martyrdom and persecution. Dwelling on the infliction of physical agony dramatizes the corruption of powerful institutions. In the Catholic historical novel Fabiola (1854) by Nicholas Wiseman, the ferocious Roman persecution of Christians is represented in terms of sensual perversity and excess. The ‘wholesale butchery’ of the pious victims is likened to sadistic gluttony.35 The crushing, comprehensive ‘grandeur’ and ‘terror’ of ‘the majesty of imperial command’ (167) suggests the spectacular scale of this legalized tyranny. In novels about religious persecution, torture is a monstrous exemplar of the law’s mechanisms of normalization, a visible sign of those cultural systems that regulate the boundaries of the permissible and enforce the individual’s containment within these borderlines. Like the ‘symbolics of blood’ which Foucault identifies in his analysis of nineteenth-century sexuality, torture of the body speaks of ‘the law, death, transgression, the symbolic, and sovereignty’.36 Harrowing details


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of flesh abused to enforce the will of the state certainly make the law and its ramifications real. However, by evoking horror and pity, they also encourage the reader to resist any authority that would impose its power upon the body through agony. The cruelty of oppressive social frameworks, an important theme in sensational martyr plots whether Protestant or Catholic in inflection, also draws attention to the body as an ambiguous text in its own right – and one requiring careful interpretation. Victims of religious persecution are simultaneously portrayed as outcasts and heroes, traitors and saints. Their mangled bodies are contested sites on which competing spiritual and secular values struggle for mastery of the human subject. Victorians found the bodily aspects of martyrdom a source of disturbance, notwithstanding the prominence of these images. Anna Jameson, for example, urges artists and historians to focus on the noble feelings that martyrs demonstrate and inspire, ‘the ineffaceable instincts of good implanted within us!’37 The degraded and abject body has, for her, neither moral nor aesthetic value, but instead conveys distressing messages about its own weakness and uncontrollable physicality. Jameson would silence this kind of expressiveness, supplanting it by sanitized representations of calmness and fortitude: ‘in the best examples we find the saint preparing for his death, not suffering the torments actually inflicted; so that the mind is elevated by the sentiment of his courage, not disturbed and disgusted by the spectacle of his agonies’.38 Jameson’s guidance uncouples self-mastery and the behaviour of a body in pain, implying her anxiety that the body might all too easily evade the discipline of will power and faith. Such uneasiness parallels the ambivalent treatment of the body in sensationalized martyrdom plots where the discipline of flesh is an outrage, but its control an (implicit) necessity. Heroically resilient and inspirational, but also a point of vulnerability and weakness, the body in extremis is a potentially treacherous dimension of self, and its representation often reflects pity and mistrust. In Sabine Baring-Gould’s Early Christian novel, Perpetua (1897), the heroine is tortured for refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods. Perpetua’s sweet-natured passivity and the angry magistrate’s fierce determination to force her obedience construct the character as a sympathetic example of violated womanhood. Against her is pitted the dominance of the law, degraded by its scope for sadism as expressed in the crowd’s taste for the spectacle of physical agony. The public enforcement of the law is degrading, and portrayed like a rape. The ‘modest Christian maiden’ is physically humiliated, ‘despoiled of her raiment’, and brutally racked in the arena.39 Of course, the martyr never submits; her faith is firm despite her physical vulnerability.


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154 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Even so, the narration of this scene replicates the subjugation of woman that the plot critiques. Baring-Gould ‘appropriates’ the heroine by erasing her physicality altogether, despite the fact that Perpetua’s holiness is confirmed by her bodily suffering. The dangerous expressiveness of the female body is controlled so that it conforms to conventional ideals of ‘(dis)embodied’, angelic femininity. Perpetua’s suffering presence is only shown aslant – by a gasp or cry, the track left by her bound feet in the sand, lips moving in prayer. Too distracting to contemplate, the woman’s body is censored and silenced, replaced in the reader’s imagination by Perpetua’s presence in heaven, an idealized incorporeal soul to be emulated. Graphic physical torture in Catholic sensationalism also invites curiosity about the body’s rebellious strengths and unruly desires. Wiseman’s Fabiola and John Henry Newman’s Callista (1856), for example, feature courageous Catholic victims, oppressed by Roman law and the fear and envy of the common pagan people. These novels treat persecuted, murdered Early Christians as ideal models of spirituality and grace under social pressure and alienation. However, unlike the Anglican Baring-Gould, Wiseman and (to a lesser extent) Newman do not flinch from robust, detailed depictions of bodily torture. The roasting of St Lawrence on the gridiron in Fabiola is especially spectacular. Wiseman’s extended account of the physical effects – all steam, hiss, blister and ‘tremulous quivering’ (205) – lingers intimately with the sadistic viewpoint of the persecutors, before belatedly drawing attention to the saint’s ecstatic and serene gaze heavenwards. Paradoxically, the violent abuse is shown to enhance the body’s signifying value; it is equated with a mark of sanctity. The fire ‘created a glory round his [Lawrence’s] beautiful head and countenance, which made him look as if already in heaven’ (206). In Newman’s narrative of Christian persecution in third-century North Africa, the body of the martyred Callista is an object of desire for superstitious relic-hunters: ‘[t]hey have thought to get portions of the flesh for magical purposes; a finger, or a tooth, or some hair, or a portion of her tunic, or the blood-stained rope which was twisted round her wrist and ankle’.40 Even the loving and more sophisticated Agellius retains portions of the sand moistened by her blood in an action that uncomfortably blends fetishistic longing with reverence. Similarly, in Fabiola, the young Christian Pancratius is encouraged by his mother to kiss a sponge steeped in the blood of his martyred father. Wiseman’s narrator interprets the act in terms of ‘the deepest emotions of a Christian and a son’ (15). In other words, respect for the broken body is a worthy act of submission to the Law of the Church and the Law of the Father. However, the language of duty and affection is


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accompanied by a physical phenomenon infused with morbidity. As Pancratius’ quivering lips are drawn back from the kiss, they are ‘empurpled’ with his dead father’s blood. In a sensational vampiric trope, masochistic delight becomes part of the spiritual economy of religious persecution, with its recurrent motifs of physical domination and submission. The shocking portrayal of the brutalized body in Catholic sensationalism rehearses the more general Victorian preoccupation with what Regina Barreca has termed ‘[a]ffliction … [as the] construct of passion’.41 Acts of bodily sacrifice and self-denial associated with extravagant Catholic practices of mortification, as well as martyrdom, hint at erotic desire in a way that is scarcely veiled. Victorian readers found the phenomenon both fascinating and repellent. Notwithstanding his professed revulsion at the ascetic penances of an effeminate, prurient Catholic ‘monkery’, Charles Kingsley, for example, admitted the ‘visionary’ stimulation afforded by bodily abuse: I went into the woods at night and lay naked upon thorns and when I came home my body was torn from head to foot. I never suffered so much. I began to understand Popish raptures and visions that night, and their connection to self-torture. 42 I saw such glorious things.

Kingsley’s half-guilty feelings of arousal and distaste were no doubt widespread. Even Catholics were sensitive to their reputation for an abnormal fixation with ‘holy’ masochism and tried to avoid scandal. When a macabre hagiography of Rose of Lima – filled with explicit details of self-torture and bizarre acts of physical humiliation – was published in Frederick Faber’s series on the Lives of the Saints, both the Catholic Bishop of Birmingham and Newman urged that the series be suspended. They argued such material was culturally inappropriate, ‘unsuited to England and unacceptable to Protestants’.43 The leaking of repressed sexuality into ascetic and martyrdom discourse has implications for the reading of bodily torment in narratives of Catholic persecution. John Maynard has argued that all ecstatic religious experience that has sadistic and masochistic practice at its centre deliberately reoccupies ‘shunned sexual territories for a specifically religious aim’.44 Many nineteenthcentury meditations on physical suffering in general adopt this position. What twentieth-century theorists have dubbed the ‘personal cultivation of pain’ is imagined as ‘an ecstatic union with God in which suffering is finally indistinguishable from love’.45 In the discourse of Catholic sensationalism, the process of self-abuse and suffering that leads to spiritual fulfilment is akin to the pleasurable pain of sexual self-abandonment. The torments of


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156 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature martyrdom and ascetic practice provide an opportunity to entertain fantasies of desire alongside those of exemplary behaviour, such as self-discipline and fortitude. This discourse of bodily suffering encodes the sacrifice of the body as both duty and pleasure in more ways than one. The unorthodox meanings adhering to Victorian representations of Catholic martyrdom are an important part of a broader discourse of somatic ‘rebellion’ and ‘resistance’ in the period. Although health and physical strength are celebrated as the norm in many Victorian disciplines, ranging from psychology to aesthetics and cultural analysis,46 the abject, damaged physique on occasion conveys nobility on the unconventional and different. As is the case in Perpetua and The Vale of Cedars, the physical suffering of attractive characters transforms pain into a sceptical critique of legitimate authority, inviting the observer to adopt a stance ‘of popular resistance and criticism of official meaning’.47 By stimulating pathos and sentiment through scenes of hyperbolic suffering, Catholic sensationalism suggests sympathy for the broken is a more spontaneous, ‘natural’ response than awe and respect for the dominant and the powerful. Harriet Martineau makes exactly this point in her treatise on physical suffering. She argues that witnessing the pain of others is an admirable spur to the feelings and imagination. The attention is riveted ‘when anecdotes are telling of any old martyr who suffered heroically’.48 Moreover, such responses to bodily pain have a socializing function. They help individuals to bond sympathetically as a community of sufferers, drawing consolation and strength from the realization that individual anguish is a shared experience. Victorian narratives of Catholic persecution and martyrdom reflect a growing reliance on such fellowship as the ‘antidote’ to competitiveness, solipsism and oppressive cultural ‘controls over human behaviour’.49 While the infliction of pain is corrupting, empathy with others’ suffering leads to a more democratic understanding of the social model. The persecuted body evokes a compassion that can re-interpret and remodel the ‘body politic’. In Romola, for example, Catholic persecution and martyrdom narratives configure the body as a powerful text on just such a social level. George Eliot’s depiction of fifteenth-century Florence represents the body politic – like the unruly physical self with its conflicting desires and voracious appetites – as a lawless organism endangered by selfish interests, though capable of higher, enlightened purposes. The novel begins with the death of Lorenzo de’ Medici and the removal of his repressive controls. Without his superior political mastery, social disorder and violence quickly erupt. Like Aguilar, Eliot explores a society in crisis and transition where social harmony is


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challenged by transgression in different spheres. In this dangerous milieu, the social body and the individual soon become entities for secular and religious attention and control. Focusing on the attempt to regulate nonconformity by both Catholic Church and state, both Aguilar and Eliot consider the difference between healthy social management and dangerous oppression. However, in her treatment of the Catholic persecution plot filtered through tropes of the body, Eliot reaches a different conclusion about authority, selffulfilment and heroism. Aguilar accepts the inevitability of submission to the law in private and public spheres. Individual heroism is constructed by her as passive, stoic endurance that safeguards integrity; fulfilment is likely only in the life to come. But Eliot foregrounds the suffering, persecuted body to reconstruct heroism as energy and work. She shows pain as a spur to productive action. Rejecting the paradigm of martyrdom as self-obliteration bartered for a transcendent future, the novel fashions martydom as self-assertion and noble rebellion. Romola extols heroic resistance through immersion in the suffering of the body politic. Romola is permeated by imagery of the body as a vehicle of self-expression and agency, not simply an object of scrutiny. Eliot described the composition of her fourth novel in terms of a physical outpouring: ‘there is no book of mine about which I could more thoroughly feel that I swear by every sentence as having been written with my best blood’.50 Indeed, throughout the novel, the body and its composite parts are used as a source of revelation, so that the text is quite literally written by the body. Somatic descriptions, for example, are a key feature of the narrative technique. Because they focus attention on a character’s material state rather than on an otherworldly spirituality, they readjust the traditional emphasis on the transcendent in plots of Catholic persecution and martyrdom. For Eliot, the body bears a contingent relation to the mind,51 communicating temperament as well as alterations in the individual’s interior life. Both Romola and her father, for example, display physical features that indicate their strength of purpose and self-possession as well as their social and intellectual superiority. They share ‘the same refinement of brow and nostril’.52 In each face, the ‘firm mouth and powerful chin’ signify a ‘proud tenacity and latent impetuousness’, which is reinforced, in turn, by posture, such as ‘the backward poise of the girl’s head, and the grand line of her neck and shoulders’ (94). The mixed language of physicality (‘firm’, ‘powerful’) and moral evaluation (‘refinement’, ‘poise’, ‘grand’) imply interdependence of the body and the depths of a personality. For Eliot, the body does not mask, but discloses, the subtle complexity of the interior being. Savonarola is introduced in the novel by repute, and


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158 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature at first exudes harsh austerity and power; he is more moral mouthpiece than man. But his physical appearance reveals a surprising delicacy that hints at a vulnerable, frail humanity. A striking disjunction of physical features conveys the contending elements of his personality. Zeal, strength and a forbidding authority are signalled by his hooked nose, prominent lower lip and mass of thick dark hair, all of which ‘tell of energy and passion’ (214). On the other hand, his pale eyes, ‘shining mildly’, and his fine-boned hands speak of ‘acute sensitiveness’ (214). These signs can be read by all, not just by an omniscient narrator. It is Savonarola’s bodily presence, his glance and gestures, which account for his ‘subtle mysterious influence’ (214) and his capacity to bend others to his will. Even so, to read the body is to interpret a slippery text. Throughout the novel, and most particularly in her handling of bodily descriptions, Eliot shows the trickiness of reliance on external material appearance alone as an infallible guide to motivation and intention. The duplicitous Tito, for example, hides important secrets under a smiling, bland handsomeness. He holds as a principle that ‘concealment had been wisdom’ (235). In private life, he connects secrecy with security, because it preserves Romola’s trust in him and avoids the unpleasantness of her moral indignation and disapproval. In the political life of Florence with its contending factions jostling for power, concealment of prejudices and loyalties is essential for a man like Tito who wishes to hedge his bets and play one group off against the other. Only the perceptive artist, Piero di Cosimo, an expert in the close scrutiny of the physical body, can accurately detect dissimulation and deceit in Tito’s cheerful suave good looks. This is why he believes the young Greek stranger would be an excellent model for Sinon, the notorious betrayer of Troy: ‘A perfect traitor should have a face which vice can write no marks on – lips that will lie with a dimpled smile – eyes of such agate-like brightness and depth that no infamy can dull them – cheeks that will rise from a murder and not look haggard’ (87). In Eliot’s view of the body-mind continuum, however, even the most determined will power cannot wholly mask truths of the soul. As Savonarola moves more deeply into political machinations to save his reputation and life, his anxieties and desires are signalled by a range of bodily betrayals: ‘his eyes were liable to a dilatation and added brilliancy that no strength of will could control’ (615). The traces of the hidden, unconscious dimensions of the individual are inevitably shadowed on the body. In a review of Aurora Leigh in 1857, Eliot objected to ‘the lavish mutilation of heroes’ bodies, which has become the habit of novelists’, since it ‘weakens instead of strengthening tragic effect’.53 Yet, in Romola, the wounded body is


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a telling metaphor that discloses emotional and moral states of which characters themselves may be unaware. As a trope, it functions rather like the ‘real’ abjected bodies in many martyrdom narratives of the period which also hint at a range of suppressed desires and fears. Sometimes, the revelations are quite obvious. The physical blindness of Romola’s father, for example, is an apt parallel for his stubborn underestimation of his daughter’s intelligence and sense of duty. More subtly, however, images of bodily damage and suffering dramatize inexpressible feelings. When Romola decides to abandon Tito, she disguises herself as a nun in order to evade public curiosity from which she shrank ‘physically as from the imagination of torture’ (399). The image gives insight into the complicated nature of Romola’s pain. Like an innocent victim of persecution, she feels ‘degraded’, humiliated and exposed by Tito’s betrayal of her trust in selling her father’s library. She cannot explain to herself why she should suddenly feel such attraction to ‘the pictured agonies of martyrdom’ (396). But for the reader, the association of her emotional turmoil with religious persecution indicates both her vulnerable nobility and the unjust torture of a loveless relationship. More sinister metaphors of bodily wounding and maiming also permeate the novel. On one level, these convey the intensity of primitive emotions like fear, hatred and the horror of rejection. Although individuals may be restrained by circumstance or inhibited by convention, their suppressed passions are vented in imagery of anarchic violence as a tool of power. Baldassarre, the foster father whom Tito selfishly abandons to pirates and enslavement, is obsessed by a single bodily sensation – of ‘plunging that dagger into a base heart, which he was unable to pierce in any other way’ (378). Imagery of violent self-abuse also encodes the destructive, conflicting impulses with which characters struggle and by which they are sometimes defeated. Tito’s desire for approval and an easy life leads him into a series of half-truths and then outright deceptions, so that he is incapable of resisting serious temptations to betray family and state. His culpability is suggested in terms of moral suicide, for his decent feelings ‘had been slowly strangled in him by the successive falsities of his life’ (420). Metaphors of self-wounding also suggest the moral and emotional cost of more noble desires. Romola’s need to give and receive affection causes her to suppress a growing disenchantment with Tito: ‘The great need of her heart compelled her to strangle, with desperate resolution, every rising impulse of suspicion, pride, and resentment; she felt equal to any self-infliction that would save her from ceasing to love’ (313). The narrator immediately locates Romola’s behaviour in the Victorian context, that of a gendered submission to authority. Her struggle represents the


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160 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature universal experience of every ‘loving woman’ who must ‘subdue her nature to her husband’s’. Yet the image of mortifying ‘self-infliction’ recalls the alienating asceticism of her brother, Dino, the Catholic monk. Romola’s noble self-sacrifice as an exemplar of ideal femininity is ambivalently represented also as an unnatural and self-destructive act of repression. The use of the persecuted body as an expressive text is central to Eliot’s handling of psychological and moral development. As Romola’s marriage fails and her trust in Tito gives way, her face becomes haggard, thin and wasted, an outward expression of her inward stress and sorrow. In Tito’s case, Eliot uses violent bodily tropes to show the steady erosion of standards and principles. The plot of the novel tracks Tito’s moral degradation from an easy misrepresentation about his background to outright betrayal in private and public life. Initial decisions etch deepening tracks of deceit on his soul, and Eliot uses descriptions of bodily aggression to express the extent of this hidden amorality. In his determination to exercise power over the righteous Romola, his features change subtly but permanently, ‘as a face is altered by a hidden muscular tension with which a man is secretly throttling or stamping out the life from something feeble, yet dangerous’ (490). The image suggests more than the strength of Tito’s passion to override pity, control Romola, and protect his own interests. It also captures his essentially lawless nature. For Tito, the Law of Conscience is supplanted by the rule of pleasure and self-gratification. The simile of frenzied attack points to the perilous lack of restraint beneath Tito’s easy-going manner, a lack that also defines the wider political world of which he is both servant and exploiter. Just as the individual body expresses inner values and passions, so the outward behaviours of the body politic reveal the lawlessness and corruption at its core. In institutional terms, Florence is a community driven by jealousy and ambition, and uncurbed by discipline or control. Without the strong rule of the despotic Lorenzo de’ Medici, the city is ‘like the alchemist’s laboratory when the wisdom of the alchemist is gone’ (121). The dangerous conjoining of greed and self-interest transforms freedom into licence. All values are inverted in a continuous state of moral anarchy glossed by a veneer of civilized elegance. Florence is a world in which lust and obscenity, lying and treachery, oppression and murder, were pleasant, useful, and when properly managed, not dangerous. And as a sort of fringe or adornment to the substantial delights of tyranny, avarice, and lasciviousness, there was the patronage of polite learning and the fine arts …(271)

Images of bodily excess characterize the immorality of the city. The spiritual corruption of the Catholic Church, for example, is figured in terms of


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debauched physical appetite. The cardinals and bishops ‘traffic in her inheritance that their hands may be full to pay the price of blood and to satisfy their own lusts’ (65). Similarly, the Peasants’ Fair episode is an elaborate set piece linking moral anarchy to unregulated bodily display. The festival is a cynical sanction of misrule by the authorities. By temporarily investing the people with ‘power’, the carnival provides distracting, ribald entertainment, and permits the exhaustion of troublesome energies and discontent. The Fair is characterized by inversions of all kinds. The confusion of sacred and pagan and the transposition of authority, such that a street trickster can mockingly mime the behaviour of a bishop and marry the gullible, mirrors the chaotic disarray of the social body as a whole. The language of bodily functions and hankerings used by the stall-owners is simply a coarser variant of that undignified scramble for gratification that permeates the whole city: ‘Matrimony to be had – hot, eaten, and done with as easily as berlingozzi!’ (198). If the public square is a ‘hellish hubbub’ (200), the interior of the church of the Nunziata is no less a confused place of unregulated disorder. Once again, grotesque imagery of the body delineates the immorality and worldliness of this society and its institutions. A curious jumble of fragmented and decaying wax figures covers the walls and ceilings of the church: the effigies of great personages … Florentines of high name … some of them with faces blackened and robes tattered by the corroding breath of centuries … And wedged in with all these were detached arms, legs, and other members, with only here and there a gap where some image had been removed for public disgrace, or had fallen ominously, as Lorenzo’s had done six months before. (200)

Superstition, curiosity and awe for wealth and temporal power are the main attitudes to which the sacred space panders. It is as an antidote to this atmosphere of moral and civil chaos that Savonarola promotes the new culture of the abjected individual and social body. His programme presents austerity and self-repression as the necessary correction to unregulated excess, an argument prompting some to interpret the novel as a Positivist allegory of history.54 The Dominican’s emphasis on masochistic self-sacrifice signals the best and worst of a monotheistic culture. It represents an advance on the polytheistic egoism of the classical mode and prepares the way for a Comtean religion of humanity. However, a closer examination of Eliot’s treatment of Savonarola in the context of Catholic sensationalism invites a less rigidly schematic reading. Indeed, it reveals Eliot’s reservations about Comte’s idealized theory. In Romola, the persecution plot disrupts Positivist confidence in the human capacity to reconcile co-operation and self-interest and in the ability of law to effect ‘the harmonious relationship


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between the individual body and the body politic’. Savonarola presents his project of reform in terms of Catholic martyrdom 56 discourse. As he tells Romola, the body should be denied for the good of the spirit; it is ‘a barrier against the gifts that purify the soul’ (214). The desires of the flesh must be subordinated to the ‘noble yearnings towards great ends’ (500). His Pyramid of Vanities consumes the signs of unrestricted sexual pleasure and other implements of gratification and adornment, from immodest works of art ‘held too likely to incite to vice’ to ‘rouge-pots, false hair, mirrors, perfumes, powers, and transparent veils intended to provoke inquisitive glances’ (497, 498). Eliot’s own free recasting of Savonarola’s sermons emphasizes his carefully fashioned self-image as a tortured martyr. Through an overwrought rhetorical style, he presents himself as a model for emulation and a witness to the truth. In direct imitation of the crucified Christ, his body is the tortured text expressing inner zeal and faithfulness to God’s law: ‘O Lord, thou knowest I am willing – I am ready. Take me, stretch me on thy cross … let the thorns press upon my brow, and let my sweat be anguish – I desire to be made like thee in thy great love. But let me see the fruit of my travail – let this people be saved! … let my blood flow and the fire consume me; but let my witness be remembered among men, that iniquity shall not prosper for ever.’ (293–94)

Savonarola does not preach the mortification of the flesh simply to advance the cause of the spirit. The denial of the body is a catalyst for the remaking of the body politic into a just and lawful organism. The repudiation of sexual immorality, for example, is designed to encourage other acts of self-control that will benefit Florence. The Dominican friar urges his audience to ‘put away the envy and hatred that have made your city as a nest of wolves’ (293). For Savonarola, self-sacrifice and humble service are signs of resistance to the corruption of civic life. He rejects a Law of the State based on physical domination and submission, ‘where men show their teeth at each other’ or ‘show their tongues and lick the feet of the strongest’ (416). Instead, he promotes a society in which care of the poor and suffering is the real sign of prosperity, since ‘God will not have silver crucifixes and starving stomachs … [but prefers] the gems of holiness and the fine gold of brotherly love’ (411). In subordinating the desires of the rich to the needs of the oppressed, Savonarola’s austere programme of social renewal evolves into a more inclusive model of governance. The law should nurture ‘a popular government, in which every man is to strive only for the general good, and know no party names’ (415). His aspirations are not, in fact, dissimilar to ideologies of consensus,


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sympathy and pleasurable co-operation which Victorian social theorists adapted to ameliorate the apparent selfishness of political economy.57 It is in the translation of theory into practice, however, that Savonarola is revealed as the typical agent of Catholic persecution, rather than the suffering martyr-victim. The strength of will that enables his repression of the body is translated politically into rigidity and an autocratic demand for submission to his viewpoint alone. The attractiveness of discipline in the midst of anarchy is suggested as a reason for Savonarola’s initial influence, and is endorsed by the universalizing stance of the omniscient narrator: ‘There is no kind of conscious obedience that is not an advance on lawlessness’ (500). Nonetheless, a counter-perspective is gradually introduced. The focalization of the trustworthy Romola first provides balance, for she realizes that there is an alien inflexibility in the friar’s application of spiritual righteousness to secular governance. Eliot further tempers enthusiasm for Savonarola’s policy of disciplined obedience by using the rhetoric of Catholic tyranny that was commonplace in Victorian narratives of religious persecution. Critics have often suggested Eliot’s dependence on Villari’s biography of Savonarola for her characterization of the Dominican as proto-Protestant in his calls for democratic reform and his rejection of church corruption.58 But this reading takes insufficient account of the elements of Catholic sensationalism deployed by Eliot in characterizing the friar’s politics. Her curious mixture of Protestant–Catholic discourse creates a figure who is as culturally ‘double’ as he is ‘other’ for Victorian readers. Savonarola embodies the contradictions inherent in many nineteenthcentury ideals. His violent and aggressive language of bodily disgust is a case in point. His offensive denunciation of women, for example, is of a piece with Victorian views of fanatical Catholicism as an institution prone to devalue the feminine. Where a Protestant Victorian would imagine woman as a pure and beautiful ‘angel in the house’ whose body is the source of maternal affection and tenderness, Savonarola envisages a demonic receptacle of temptation and undisciplined animality: ‘He called us cows, and lumps of flesh, and wantons, and mischief-makers’ (178). Yet this hysterical language of the flesh actually replicates ‘sadistic’ nineteenth-century constructions of dangerous femininity, such as the witch, the fallen woman and the femme fatale.59 These Victorian stereotypes of female monstrosity encode the same fear of the irrepressible female body as seen in Savonarola’s abusive comments. Similarly, his preaching on Divine vengeance suggests an unconscious horror – historical, Catholic and Victorian – of the fundamental lawlessness of the modern competitive state that, like female sexuality, will inevitability erupt


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164 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature from containment. His vision of the new civil order is one expressed solely in terms of bodily violence. Savonarola preaches prophetically of justice, but does so only in terms of physical cruelty, as if force alone can subdue hostile class groupings and guarantee conformity to social ideals and the new law. He repeatedly envisages painful political reform as God’s ‘scourge’ that will flay ‘hypocrites, libertines, and oppressors’ (271). Like the unruly body that must be mortified into submission, the body politic must suffer ‘the sword of God’s justice’ as a ‘purifying punishment’ (271). Foreign invasion, plague and famine are the torture instruments required for the regeneration of the city. They will be the sign of God’s ‘avenging wrath and purifying mercy’ (269). This rhetoric of persecution, punishment and purification is gradually given tangible embodiment in destructive political manoeuvres rather than in the harmonious altruism Savonarola intends. Devoted followers who should piously encourage their fellow-citizens to serve the needy turn into bullying thugs. At the Pyramid of Vanities, Savonarola’s young supporters, like gangs of ‘inquisitors’, torment the population in a cruel pastiche of carnival misrule: [t]o coerce people by shame, or other spiritual pelting, into the giving up of things it will probably vex them to part with, is a form of piety to which the boyish mind is most readily converted; and if some obstinately wicked men got enraged and threatened the whip or the cudgel, this also was exciting. (499)

In familial relations, too, the persecution of the body for the good of the soul is seen to destroy the more natural affective bonds of loving responsibility. Romola is repelled by the ‘dastardly undutifulness’ (209) of her brother, Dino, who has piously renounced the Law of the Father by becoming a Dominican friar. His emaciated body, subjected to extreme practices of mortification, is represented as distant and untouchable, the shell of ‘some spirit not human’ (211). His main response to the ills and passions of the world is neither pity nor righteous anger, but a ‘loathing’ that prompts only retreat into an introspective mysticism. Savonarola’s disciplined will and bodily self-denial – the self-control of the martyr-saint – become inseparable from an autocratic desire for control over others. He becomes preoccupied with the need to command in order to reassert the message of God’s Law and Justice. Eliot acknowledges the ironic tragedy of the friar’s good intentions. His most noble feature, his ‘zeal for God and man’, is inextricably bound up with ‘his imperious need of ascendancy’ (300). Rigidly blinkered in his application of law to others, he fails to see that his own strength of character and determination could destroy his ideals:


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having once held that audience in his mastery, it was necessary to his nature – it was necessary for their welfare – that he should keep the mastery. The effect was inevitable. No man ever struggled to retain power over a mixed multitude without suffering vitiation; his standard must be their lower needs and not his own best insight. (300)

The familiar dynamic of the Catholic persecution narrative in which the religious fanatic is unmasked as the cruel despot comes fully into play once Savonarola begins to interfere directly in the muddled politics of Florence. He sacrifices Romola’s sincere and honest godfather, disguising his selfinterest and personal resentments with cant. The humiliating destruction of an old man’s body is, he claims, ‘a light matter weighed against the furthering of God’s kingdom upon earth’ which he alone mediates (578). In Savonarola, egoism finally overwhelms the ‘hunger after purity and simplicity’ (576). When he counters Romola’s pleas for clemency by the observation that mercy can be ‘weakness, and even treason against the common good’ (574), the persecutor supplants God’s law with his own. Savonarola’s ascetic discipline and strictness have degenerated into a cruelty and indifference scarcely different from that of the lawless body politic he would reform. Savonarola takes on the role of Catholic persecuting agent through his rigid imposition of personal authority. He will punish the body – literally and metaphorically – to produce compliance with orthodoxy. Individual judgements and alternative perspectives, religious and political, must be subordinated to his position as God’s sole emissary of truth. His stance represents, for Eliot, the tyranny of religious dogmatism. Almost two decades before the composition of Romola, Eliot used the imagery of bodily torture to describe her own battle with religious orthodoxy and the psychological cost of intellectual rebellion. Deciding to stop church attendance, she created a painful rupture with her father that outweighed her feeling of release: When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope … [then] Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds. Agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union. We find that the intellectual errors which we once fancied were a mere incrustation, have grown into the living body, and we cannot in the majority of cases wrench 60 them away without destroying vitality …

In this description of the persecuted intellect as a tortured body, Eliot attacks the social and cultural pressures of any age, especially her own, which would


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166 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature enforce conformity and ‘rack’ freedom of thought. But she also uses the body as an image of the fragile realities of mixed human character, which needs affection as well as righteousness. Even the well-intended, stern correction of misjudgements and error, can, like Savonarola’s zeal, maim and destroy the living organism one would protect and save. Eliot’s solution is to resort to compassion and sympathy, ‘the truth of feeling’ that overrides difference to create cohesion. Her allusions, in this early correspondence, to the vulnerable body – abused and tyrannized to effect its salvation – prefigures the bodily tropes of Romola and the tragedy of Savonarola. But the passage also looks forward prophetically to the novel’s resolution. Pity and ‘the truth of feeling’ become the antidote to persecution and the balm which heals the tortured body politic. In the novel, Romola most clearly represents the noble altruism that Savonarola initially equates with the workings of God’s will on earth. She is no zealot; her vision of the ‘transcendent moral life’ (539) is not dependent on external law forcefully imposed. On the contrary, she is the practical manifestation ‘of the sympathetic impulses that need no law, but rush to the deed of fidelity and pity’ (151). Romola operates by her instinct for empathy, combining independent judgement and sincere feeling. Like the faith of any martyr, Romola’s truth of conscience is expressed in bodily terms. However, her inner convictions take positive form in practical service. Rather than the negative practices of bodily denial, or the impassioned phrases of inspired testimony, Romola asserts her truth in labour for others, such as the nursing of the sick and the care of the outcast poor. Romola’s bodily conduct shows that human relationships need not be governed by the compulsion of the law, provided ‘duty and love have united in one stream and made a common force’ (169). Voluntary selfless work, not stoic passivity, nurtures social relations and creates a strong community, albeit at a localized and domestic level. Eliot revises the plot of Catholic persecution in ways that redefine the heroism of the suffering victim. Unlike Marie in The Vale of Cedars, Romola is no submissive saint. In her secular humanitarianism, the new ‘religion of her life’, she exercises self-restraint for the sake of affection, ‘tenderness and keen fellow-feeling’ (391). Her painful obedience to her vows as wife, for example, depend on the same courageous self-denial and willed conscientiousness that martyrs also practise. Prompted by this similarity, the Catholic Victorian, Richard Simpson, read Eliot’s handling of ‘renunciation and selfsacrifice for the benefit of others’ as founded in Christian theology: ‘[i]n this she speaks as a Christian, even as a Catholic.’61 But Simpson ignores the


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extent to which Romola’s heroism also demands qualities of assertion and resistance. Unlike Tito, whose every whim and fear encourage him to bend to avoid difficulty and strain, Romola possesses a nature ‘made to command’ (313). This strength of purpose she applies to her energetic work, her ‘life of active love’, on behalf of the common people (464). To do this, she opposes the social laws and class customs of her society, espousing the cause of the marginalized. Romola’s bond with those discarded and condemned by society is an unorthodox model for the relationship between personal need and social duty, for the connection between the body and the law. Her own private experience sensitizes her to the bodily pain and mental anguish of the unjustly oppressed. Her need to give and receive affection and her capacity for pity also attract her to share a ‘fellowship of suffering’ (396) with individuals crushed by social and political authority and by emotional trauma. Eliot ennobles Romola’s motivations by formulating her natural response to human distress as a martyrdom in its own right. As Savonarola urges, she crucifies the ‘selfish will – to die at last by laying our bodies on the altar’ (436) by shouldering the yoke of the miserable in the social body. Feeling and work, rather than asceticism and prayer, are the instruments used by Romola to model herself on Christ crucified, the prototype of all Christian martyrdom. She carries her cross through ‘pity’ and ‘labour’. Her life is surrendered to practical expressions of connection and concern: ‘if there is a cry of anguish, you, my daughter, because you know the meaning of the cry, should be there to still it’ (435). She exercises the courage and endurance of the tortured martyr by forsaking her privileges of class and social standing. She does not abandon her obligations as Tito’s wife; nor does she shrink from caring for her husband’s mistress and children, or from standing steadfastly by her godfather when he is falsely branded as a traitor and conspirator. In all these experiences, Romola suffers the anguish of conflicting loyalties – to the state, her family, her personal sense of proud honour and integrity. But what she learns is the primacy of affection expressed through the body in service; this has a greater claim on her than the might of any institutional authority and law. Her faith rests in ‘that sympathy with the individual lot that is continually opposing itself to the formulae by which actions and parties are judged’ (583). In Romola, the ‘Law of Affection’ supplants theological doctrine, social law and conventional behaviour. It replaces both a morbid sacrifice of the body and a mechanical submission to the law of church and state. A generous heart teaches self-knowledge, self-assessment and humility. Romola’s prac-


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168 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature tical work with the outcast Jewish victims in the plague-stricken village gives her time and impetus for self-contemplation. It keeps her ‘keenly alive to the possible experience of others’ (651). For Romola, the greatest nobility entails a reaching out. Affection finds its bodily expression in labour; it is ‘the heroism not of hard, self-contained endurance, but of willing, self-offering love’ (587). Different as this rationale may be from the bodily mortifications of sensational persecution plots, it has its own visceral logic: ‘could anything utterly cease for her that had once mingled itself with the current of her heart’s blood?’ (651). Romola’s role as a secular martyr-saint in this revised narrative of persecution is established, in large part, by the juxtaposition of her impassioned altruism with a range of degrading deaths and false martyrdoms. Tito’s murder, for example, both reveals and undermines one possible relation of the individual body to external authority and law. For Tito, bodily selfdenial is irrational; in his economy of success, identity is wholly invested in bodily care. Material pleasure and self-protection are the regulating laws of his existence, and the community is simply a source of gratification or threat. Portrayed as a sensual Bacchus figure in his commissioned triptych, Tito revels in a sense of himself as all body, and he flaunts an Epicurean sensibility. He seeks out material gratifications and all manner of bodily delights – fine food, wine, clothes and jewels. Self-restraint and self-sacrifice seem unwarranted. Indeed, he ridicules the Catholic reverence for mortification and martyrdom, seeing it as grotesque and unnatural. Using the sensational register found in Victorian Protestant polemics, he sarcastically dismisses the fixation with ‘skin-clad skeletons hanging on crosses, or stuck all over with arrows, or stretched on gridirons; women and monks with heads aside in perpetual lamentation … looking like an index to perpetual spasms and colic’ (77). Drained of any reference to human courage and faithfulness, these images are easily dismissed as the sign of an ignorant and superstitious faith. However, Tito’s venality inflects his assessment of bodily discipline and restraint. His progress through the narrative dramatizes the disastrous effects of a policy of bodily culture and hedonism, by showing how the pursuit of material luxury and privilege leads to moral and psychological degradation and to an ignominious end. To preserve the body and its pleasures, Tito sacrifices his conscience, his integrity and even his appealing charm in both public and private life. He recoils from physical danger and suffering and, as a consequence, is consumed by nervous anxiety and ‘the undying habit of fear’ (635). When the body becomes the sole object and expression of identity,


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its vulnerability is the source of continuous, self-centred terror. Tito’s obsession with his own physical safety at all costs drives his impulsive leap into the river to escape the furious mob, an action that ironically delivers him to Baldassarre and death in the rank grass and sewage-filled gutter. Disdainful of the law, except as a means to his own ends, Tito exemplifies the futility and dishonour of living selfishly for the body alone. Baldassarre, on the other hand, presents a more complex illustration of a possible relationship between the body and the law, one that illustrates the fine line between the zeal of the martyr and the fervour of the persecutor. Stripped of the transcendent abstractions of religious doctrine, Baldassarre’s relationship with Tito reveals the egotistical nature of fanaticism. Inspired by Savonarola’s austere but ennobling rhetoric of divine punishment, Baldassarre seizes on the idea of a single-minded commitment to a cause. Like the most inspired religious martyr, he feels ‘the indestructible independent force of a supreme emotion, which knows no terror, and asks for no motive, which is itself an ever-burning motive, consuming all other desire’ (407). However, his internalized ‘Law of Vengeance’ entails self-sacrifice for all the wrong reasons. He seeks to inscribe his presence on Tito’s body by force when claims of affection and loyalty fail. He is undoubtedly a victim of Tito’s self-serving, cruel indifference. But Baldassarre’s desire for revenge is underwritten by a thirst for power. He is consumed by the need to have his authority as father acknowledged by his adopted son; and this craving transforms him into the most ardent of persecutors. Noble self-discipline and calm patience keep Romola faithful to Tito when he betrays her. However, Baldassarre’s strategy in a similar situation is one of aggressive self-assertion to satisfy his own hatred. His persecution of Tito is not even based on natural justice, on punishment for a breach of familial law. Instead, he toys with the man’s body to sign his personal identity. He wishes not simply to kill, but to be acknowledged when he does so: ‘I wish I may see him [Tito] lie with those red lips white and dry as ashes, and when he looks for pity I wish he may see my face rejoicing in his pain’ (339). As he strangles the barely conscious, uncomprehending Tito, he must convince himself he has been recognized and his superiority acknowledged: ‘[y]ou see me – you know me!’ (638). Baldassarre’s actions display a particular kind of social power based on competition and isolation. In this model of human relations, as Elaine Scarry has suggested, the ‘unsharability’ of pain opens an unbridgeable gap ‘between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons’.62 Like any torturer, Baldassarre becomes obsessed with power, with the ‘self-conscious display of agency’ enacted on


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the sufferer’s body. His Law of Vengeance is a debased authority that results in his own mental isolation and defeat. The humiliating collapse of Savonarola’s Ordeal by Fire and his subsequent arrest and execution more closely resemble a traditional martyrdom plot; and the events establish the horror of any law that would test truth and compel conformity by imposing bodily torment. However, Savonarola is no conventional saint for emulation. His own merciless determination to shape the external world to his spiritual vision brings about his suffering and abjection. Nor does he survive the oppressive operations of the law with his integrity and faith intact. Faced with the real possibility of excruciating pain and death, even the austere Savonarola is paralysed by his mixed motives and failing confidence in the relationship of body, law and divine authority. On the one hand, he has confidence in his own virtue as a sign of messianic destiny. His strict, righteous conscience ‘guarantees’ the ‘inward’ miracle of his prophetic intuitions. On the other hand, he is caught in an intellectual dilemma familiar to Eliot’s contemporaries. He cannot reconcile his inner voice with either his knowledge of the laws of nature or with his Church’s teaching on God’s oversight of human justice. He cannot trust in the miracle of bodily survival in walking through a fire. He does not even wholly credit his own will power to endure such torment. He schemes to turn the Ordeal into a vindication of his work, while safeguarding his life. By so doing, he sacrifices the honesty and high-mindedness that constitute his sense of self. At once, he understands that he acts as an ‘impostor’; false to himself, he has thrown away that ‘daring that made a sacred rebel’ (614, 622). Savonarola’s scheme to revitalize society by subordinating the body to an abstract spiritual law is a fiasco. His attempt to stave off ruin by acting the part of an incipient martyr leads to disgrace and arrest as a heretic and traitor. Execution as a common criminal deprives him of the comforts of a martyr’s crown and strips him of the heroic status belonging to those who sincerely resist oppression: But to die in dishonour – held up to scorn as a hypocrite and a false prophet? O God that is not martyrdom! It is the blotting out of a life that has been a protest against wrong. Let me die because of the worth that is in me, not because of my weakness. (626)

Nor is Savonarola sustained by his own religious faith. At the very moment when he assumes the traditional role of saintly martyr in the plot of persecution by a corrupt Catholic Church, he fails the test of steadfast endurance. He succumbs quickly to torture. His recantations further destroy his reputation and sense of self-worth. Whatever the ‘moral magnificence’ of his


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schemes to redeem Florence, ‘ignominy, torture, and the fear of torture, had laid bare every hidden weakness of his soul’ (385). Savonarola’s theories of reform lead disastrously to the triumph of the religious and social establishment over the passionate single-minded individual. Even on the scaffold, Savonarola is silent. He offers no inspirational witness to God or justification of his innocence and integrity. His passing seems to signify the failure of the zealot as both persecutor and noble victim and the triumph of a cynical pragmatism. However, the Epilogue of the novel marks his recovery by Romola and a more tempered appraisal of the individual who strives against a self-interested social milieu. The homely altar shrine that Romola has erected to the friar now positions him visually as an inspiring martyr-saint. The scene both confirms and extends understanding of Romola as the embodiment of the Law of Affection. Repelled by Savonarola’s inflexible superiority and righteousness, she nonetheless can reach out and connect to him in his posthumous role as suffering outcast. Such sympathy sharpens her sensitivity to his complex legacy. She can empathize with Savonarola’s noble aspiration to redeem the general good, while deploring his methods: As Romola thought of the anguish that must have followed the confession … that anguish seemed to be pressing on her own heart and urging the slow bitter tears. Every vulgar self-ignorant person in Florence was glibly pronouncing on this man’s demerits, while he was knowing a depth of sorrow which can only be known to the soul that has loved and sought the most perfect thing, and beholds itself fallen. (665)

That Romola could imaginatively connect with the Lucifer-like Savonarola is a sign of selfless maturity gained through personal experience. Her own perseverance with the painful rather than the easy has enlarged her compassion and imagination, and given her the ability to intuit and respond to the anguish of others. She demonstrates her blood bond with suffering humanity through a swift identification with Savonarola’s feelings of dejection and self-disgust. Public opinion, fuelled by the corrupt laws of church and of state, reaches half-truths and false conclusions. Only Romola’s reliance on a generous empathy and the Law of Affection enables her to grasp the worth of the friar when he is brought low. Eliot’s revision of the sensational narrative of Catholic persecution imagines a new form of noble self-sacrifice more suited to a modern secular age. Outpouring of feeling for the scorned, disgraced and the disgusting is the basis of her new faith, and in Romola Eliot makes clear this requires a disciplined self-emptying rather than complacent philanthropy. Romola is


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172 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature increasingly aware that her future involves the same difficult decisions that confront any heroic victim of religious persecution. Just like the martyr faced with apostasy or death, Romola is caught between the rights of external authorities to exact loyalty and the inner law of feelings and conscience. The need to choose between these competing claims gives much pain: ‘She was thrown back again on the conflict between the demands of an outward law, which she recognised as a widely-ramifying obligation, and the demands of inner moral facts which were becoming more and more peremptory’ (552). Through her own struggle to honour her marriage but remain true to her inner sense of loyalty and love, she sees how her options resemble those that Savonarola must make when challenged by the powerful interests of church and the state: ‘the law was sacred. Yes, but the rebellion might be sacred too’ (552). Indeed, it is in his persecution by the law that Savonarola’s true nobility becomes most apparent to Romola. She sees the extent to which institutionalized authority is based on ‘alarmed selfishness’ and the ‘vicious’ wielding of power (540-1). His fate throws into relief the best elements of the friar’s mixed motivations. While he may have sought his own glory, it was inextricably linked to higher objectives, the restoration of virtue in the public domain and the urgent concern for ‘the moral welfare of men’ (664). In his aspiration to ‘turn beliefs into energies’ that challenge the complacent and immoral, Romola perceives how resistance and rebellion can be heroic duties, too. Renunciation of the power and status that the law protects is central to Romola’s heroism. She finds fulfilment in a life of obligation to those on the social margin who, nonetheless, are part of the common good. To be ‘a sacred rebel’ is the paradigm of martyrdom she discovers through Savonarola’s humiliation and fall. Only outside the structures of power can the body resist the life of ‘pleasure and escape from what is disagreeable’, and give itself over ‘to a life spent in struggling against powerful wrong, and in trying to raise men to the highest deeds they are capable of ’ (675). In Victorian re-imaginings of the Catholic persecution plot, the painful clash between individual desire, institutional authority, and dutiful obedience moves well beyond doctrinal battle lines. Familiar motifs of torture and oppression, of self-discipline, mortification and courage offer space to explore contradictory perspectives on the value of the body and its regulation through conformity to law. These narratives express concern about the appropriate balance between body and soul, and between fervent individual and the interventionist state. Restraining the lawless body can be an act of courageous mastery, an unhealthy pleasure, or an oppressive display of power. The operation of law on the social body can suppress freedom and self-


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realization or ensure peace and productive harmony. Fanatical persecutors and their equally intransigent victims mask strong passions that can inspire or destroy. Not far below the surface of these sensational plots of bodily anguish lie narratives about social fragmentation and injustice, about the value and danger of submission and resistance in private and public domains. The unsettling discovery of ‘some folly in martyrs and some judiciousness in the men who burnt them’64 signifies an anxious reassessment of the ideologies of dedication and justice in a competitive, individualistic culture where conscience and conformity are increasingly at odds.

Notes 1 Letter to Percival Leigh, February 1854, in The Letters and Private Papers of Thackeray, ed. G. N. Ray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945-6), III, p. 350. 2 Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (1885; London: J. M. Dent, 1966), p. 138. 3 Maison, Search Your Soul, Eustace, p. 156. 4 Quoted in Bernard Ward, The Sequel to Catholic Emancipation: The Story of the English Catholics Continued Down to the Re-establishment of Their Hierarchy in 1850, vol. I, 1830– 1840 (London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1915), pp. 85–86. 5 Lathbury, Popery and Jesuitism in England, pp. 165–66. 6 Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, pp. 54, 61. 7 Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, p. 16. 8 Colley, Britons, p. 331. 9 John Foxe, The Acts and Monuments, 4th edn, rev. and corrected by Rev. Josiah Pratt, also an introduction, biographical and descriptive, by the Rev. John Stoughton (London: Religious Tract Society, 1877), I, p. 46. See also Chadwick, The Victorian Church, I, pp. 176–77. 10 Newman, Lectures, pp. 175, 174. 11 Macaulay, The History of England, I, p. 9. 12 Royal W. Rhodes, The Lion and the Cross: Early Christianity in Victorian Novels (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1995), p. 4. 13 Nicolini, History of the Jesuits, p. 161. 14 Mother Mary Magdalen [Fanny] Taylor, Tyborne and Who Went Thither in the Days of Queen Elizabeth (1859; London: Burns & Oates, 1954), p. ix. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 15 John Morris, The Life of Father John Gerard of the Society of Jesus, 3rd edn (London: Burns & Oates, 1881), pp. 202, 209. 16 John Lingard, The History of England from the First Invasion of the Romans to the Accession of William and Mary in 1688 (Dublin: James Duff y, 1874), VI, pp. 159–60. 17 Lathbury, Popery and Jesuitism in England, p. 65; Nicolini, History of the Jesuits, p. 163. 18 M’Ghee, ed., ‘Preface and Notes’, p. lxii. 19 M’Ghee, ed., ‘Preface and Notes’, p. 126. 20 Bourn, Words of Warning, p. iv.


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174 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature 21 Lathbury, Popery and Jesuitism in England, p. 87. 22 James Anthony Froude, History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, 1871, quoted in Kathleen Grant Jaeger, ‘Martyrs or Malignants? Some Nineteenth-Century Portrayals of Elizabethan Catholics’, Early Modern Literary Studies, Special Issue 7 (May 2001), pp. 16, 22. 23 Foxe, The Acts and Monuments, p. 85. 24 Foxe, The Acts and Monuments , pp. 87, 85. 25 Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: ‘The Jewish Question’ and English National Identity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 131–50. Similar arguments are to be found in Michael Galchinsky, The Origin of the Modern Jewish Woman Writer: Romance and Reform in Victorian England (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), p. 137, and Elizabeth Fay, ‘Grace Aguilar: Rewriting Scott Rewriting History’, in British Romanticism and the Jews: History, Culture, Literature, ed. Sheila A. Spector (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 229. Both Galchinsky and Fay suggest that there are parallels between Catholic persecution in the novel and Victorian Anglo-Jewish relations. These include the problems of ‘passing’ and assimilation in a liberal Christian democracy and the pressures to convert arising from a perceived ‘Catholicisation’ of the Church of England. However, these critics do not explore the ways in which Aguilar’s persecution plot raises more general (and secular) issues about the authority of law and individual obedience. 26 John Edwards, The Spanish Inquisition (Stroud: Tempus Publishing, 1999), p. 22. 27 Grace Aguilar, The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr: A Story of Spain in the Fifteenth Century (1850; London: Groombridge & Sons, 1869), p. 20. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 28 Fay, ‘Grace Aguilar’, pp. 216, 217. 29 Edwin Chadwick, writing in 1836 on the New Poor Law, quoted in Poovey, Making a Social Body, p.109. 30 See Galchinsky, Modern Jewish Woman Writer, p. 167 and Linda Gertner Zatlin, The Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Jewish Novel (Boston: Twayne, 1981), p. 39. 31 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 25. 32 Lucy Bending, The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), p. 4. 33 Alexander Bain, Mind and Body: The Theories of Their Relation, 2nd edn (London: Henry S. King, 1873), pp. 196, 8. For a detailed account of the development of Victorian physiological psychology, see Rylance, Victorian Psychology. 34 Bain, Mind and Body, p. 8. 35 Nicholas Wiseman, Fabiola; or, The Church of the Catacombs (1854; London: Burns & Oates, 1865), p. 167. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 36 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1979), p. 148. 37 Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art, I, p. 4. 38 Jameson, Sacred and Legendary Art, I, p. 17. 39 Sabine Baring-Gould, Perpetua: A Story of Nîmes in A. D. 213 (London: Isbister & Co., 1897), p. 307. 40 John Henry Newman, Callista: A Sketch of the Third Century (1856; London: Burns & Oates, 1962), pp. 206-207.


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41 Regina Barreca, ed., Sex and Death in Victorian Literature (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 6. 42 Quoted in Susan Chitty, The Beast and the Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974), p. 75. 43 Quoted in Ward, Sequel to Catholic Emancipation, II, p. 249. 44 John Maynard, Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 14. 45 David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (London and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 132, 135. 46 George Henry Lewes insisted sound bodily function determined mental harmony and moral strength. Ruskin thought it an essential requirement for a great painter. Carlyle argued in ‘Characteristics’ that the ‘perfection of bodily well-being’ was the essential first stage to improving the health of the spirit and thence the whole social framework. Tom Hughes believed courage and a strong, healthy body ought to be cultivated ‘for they are given us to protect the weak, to subdue the earth, to fight for our homes and country if necessary’. See Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1978), pp. 3–4, 66, 72, 151. 47 Roy Porter, ‘History of the Body’, in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 207. 48 Harriet Martineau, Life in the Sickroom: Essays by an Invalid (London: Edward Moxon, 1844), p. 157. 49 James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 81. 50 Letter to John Blackwood, 30 January 1877, in The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1955), VI, pp. 335–36. 51 Eliot’s developing ideas about the interrelationship of somatic and psychological fields, especially in relation to the psychological theories of George Henry Lewes, are tracked comprehensively throughout Rylance, Victorian Psychology. 52 George Eliot, Romola, ed. Andrew Sanders (1862/3; London: Penguin, 1980), p. 94. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 53 Quoted in Mary Wilson Carpenter, ‘The Trouble with Romola’, in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, ed. Thaïs Morgan (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 116. In her Lacanian reading of the mother/daughter theme in Romola, Carpenter suggests that Eliot’s violent expulsion of all paternal figures is intended in order to recover ‘the maternal voice as story-teller, interpreter, and teacher’. But she does not explore connections between the ‘disillusionment in the father’ and the novel’s analysis of the relation between law, the individual, and the culture of obedience. 54 See, for example, J. B. Bullen, ‘George Eliot’s Romola as a Positivist Allegory’, Review of English Studies, 26 (1975), pp. 425–35, and Dorothea Barrett, Vocation and Desire: George Eliot’s Heroines (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), pp. 77–83. 55 Paul Milton, ‘Inheritance as the Key to all Mythologies: George Eliot and Legal Practice’, Mosaic, 28, no. 1 (March 1995), p. 56. 56 Few critics have considered the relationship between Romola and Victorian representations of martyrdom. Michael Schiefelbein has argued for Eliot’s interest in the emotional attractions of the iconography of Catholic culture, suggesting incarnational theology


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57 58

59 60 61

62 63 64

affirms the novelist’s belief in the value, necessity and esteem of suffering (‘Crucifixes and Madonnas: George Eliot’s Fascination with Catholicism in Romola’, Victorian Newsletter, no. 88 [Fall 1995], pp. 31–34). Parallels between the Victorian novel of martyrdom and Romola have been used by David Carroll to define Savonarola and Romola as heroic apostates who learn through abjection how to cleanse themselves of egoism and reliance on any systems of belief (‘George Eliot Martyrologist: The Case of Savonarola’, in From Author to Text: Re-reading George Eliot’s ‘Romola , ed. Caroline Levine and Mark W. Turner (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp. 105–22). Neither critic considers how Eliot’s treatment of the body in the light of the Victorian discourse of Catholic persecution illuminates secular concerns about authority, law and the boundaries which structure the identity of individual and the body politic. Suzanne Graver, George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 162–64. See, for instance, Gennaro A. Santangelo, ‘Villari’s Life and Times of Savonarola: A Source for George Eliot’s Romola’, Anglia, 90 (1971), pp. 118–31 (which lays out basic structural parallels and themes), and Andrew Thompson, George Eliot and Italy: Literary, Cultural and Political Influences from Dante to the ‘Risorgimento’ (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 72–82 (where Savonarola is discussed as part of the Risorgimento narrative and an exemplary figure of moral gravitas like Dante and Petrarch). Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 1982, p. 157. Letter to Sara Sophia Hennell, 9 October 1843, in The George Eliot Letters, I, p. 162. Quoted in Barry Qualls, ‘George Eliot and Religion’, in The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed. George Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 129. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 4. Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 27. Eliot, Romola, p. 541.


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4 Feeling the Great Change: Conversion and the Authority of Affect Benjamin Disraeli’s Lothair, J. H. Shorthouse’s John Inglesant and Mary Ward’s Helbeck of Bannisdale Go forth, my son, and bring your Brethren and fellow countrymen by thousands and tens of thousands into the one true faith. 1 — Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman One of the most important converts who has recently professed Popery, made this mournful declaration: ‘If I had not gone over to Rome, I must have gone mad.’ It is greatly to be feared that many do both … 2 — Catherine Sinclair, Popish Legends or Bible Truths

The Victorian passion for progress has many iterations, not least in the voracious appetite for accounts of the individual’s moral, intellectual and spiritual formation. The public relish for genres like the Bildungsroman and the novel of religious faith and doubt shows how certain fictive narratives took up territory occupied by the memoir and biography in order to illuminate the evolution of an individual subject. Crisis and transformation are key themes in the Victorian ‘spiritual quest’ plot3 where self-development is characterized by progress from ignorance to enlightenment, and thence salvation. Whether the focus is secular or religious, maturity is encoded as a form of redemption, and the process of growth a conversion from illusion and misapprehension to a new – and true – insight into selfhood. In its analysis of three best-selling novels from the later Victorian period – Lothair (1870), John Inglesant (1880), and Helbeck of Bannisdale (1898) – this chapter shows how, in the last three decades of the century, emotionalized representations of Catholic conversion provide an imaginative structure for exploring the hidden forces that shape personality and determine belief and action. Joseph Childers has suggested that, in periods of cultural upheaval and transition, ‘a discourse will discover its own shortcomings and begin to look to other public discourses as a means of shoring up its enterprise’.4 Childers’ assertion is borne out in the nineteenth-century treatment of the conversion experience. As secularism and material sciences gain currency, the discourses of moral philosophy and psychological investigation are increasingly invoked


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178 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature to account for the transformation of an individual’s beliefs. Through their focus on the authority of personal emotion as a guide and impetus to action, Victorian conversion narratives – both fictive and biographical – provide a testing-ground for two contradictory models of the individual’s ‘feelings, states of feelings, pleasures, pains, passions, sentiments, affections’.5 On the one hand, as Fred Kaplan has established, the understanding of ‘instinctive moral feeling’ reinforces confidence in the validity of the emotional faculty.6 In this ‘sentimental’ philosophy, the ‘innate moral sense … operates as feeling rather than as thought’.7 Religious belief stimulated and endorsed by emotional intensity has legitimacy because, for many Victorians, affect is the basis for principled conduct; noble feelings legitimize values. On the other hand, developments in the new field of mental science or mental physiology present a more ambivalent role for the emotions in identity formation. The material study of the psyche suggests that both conscious and unconscious feelings and processes shape the individual in dynamic ways that are not always susceptible to self-knowledge and self-control. As early as 1830, studies of mental derangement persuaded medical practitioners that the emotions were usually to blame for intellectual disorder: ‘we may observe each passion and emotion in excess disturbing the mind by a direct impairment of the comparing power, and, consequently, the judgment’.8 The theory of unconscious cerebration seemed to indicate that emotions are essentially unruly and disruptive, shaped mysteriously in a hidden psyche impervious to consciousness. Only systematic intellectual discipline could keep them in check. As William Carpenter suggests, in proportion as our Will acquires domination over our Automatic tendencies, the spontaneous succession of our Ideas and the play of our Emotions show the influence of its habitual control; while our Character and Conduct in Life come to be the expression of our best Intellectual energies, directed by the Motives 9 which we determinately elect as our guiding principles of action.

Through the different revisions of his influential textbook, The Emotions and the Will, Alexander Bain goes further. He suggests that even mental training is insufficient to prevent the feelings from overwhelming past intellectual positions, including religious beliefs. The emotions – including sexual feelings – are figured as ‘rebels or innovators’ or even ‘destroying Vandals’ such that ‘[o]ur feelings pervert our convictions by smiting us with intellectual blindness’ and ‘we come into the predicament of renouncing, or, as it is called, disbelieving, for the moment, what we have formerly felt and acted on’.10


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Victorian narratives of conversion paradoxically exploit both models of the feelings. In the double-jointed allusion to the moral value of emotional experience and its destabilizing effects, the typical conversion plot reveals concern about the power of the affective domain and its challenge to conceptualizations of a stable, cohesive identity regulated by reason and will power. The rhetoric of conversion assumes that the deepest, hidden core of the self can be moved impulsively by a range of powerful forces and telling circumstances, spiritual or material. It also focuses attention on the ways in which feelings can prompt individuals to change entrenched positions that previously seemed essential to their personality and state in life. Even secular studies of personal development invoke these principles. In his Autobiography (1873), for example, John Stuart Mill uses the terminology of religious conversion tales to represent an alteration to his philosophical outlook marking a change in his core identity. He refers not only to ‘a crisis in my mental history’, but also to a ‘transformation in my opinions and character’.11 The depression and anxiety preceding his shift from barren over-rationalism to radical humanitarianism is compared to ‘the state … in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first “conviction of sin’.12 Moreover, the resolution, when it comes, involves the same appeal to intense emotion that characterizes many literary and factual accounts of Christian conversion in the period. Mill’s ‘medicine for [his] state of mind’ is found in the effects of Wordsworth’s poetry on ‘sympathetic and imaginative pleasure’.13 His conversion involves ‘the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of ’.14 Mill’s Autobiography assumes a readership familiar with a language of conversion that validates interior development by emotional, and not just rational, experience. Whether the process involves a move from sinful apathy to spiritual conviction, a change of denominational allegiance, or an alteration in philosophical and ethical principles, conversion for Victorians concentrates attention on the feelings in both the method of transformation and its outcome. From the early part of the Victorian period, the Evangelical influence on religious rhetoric ensures a strong connection between ‘the great change’ and the emotional side of religious experience. As Edmund Gosse’s father believed, the process of spiritual development requires ‘tears and renunciation’ to be efficacious.15 For him, a sincere conversion is not only stimulated by emotion but is indeed an interior sensation – ‘sudden, patent, palpable’. It presupposes emotional upheaval because faith is ‘a state of heart’.16 Even later in the period, when scientific and philosophical theories are brought to bear on conversion as a psychological phenomenon, its connection to the affective domain is of


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180 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature primary interest. Alexander Bain, for example, consistently links religious faith to ‘the fountains of human feeling’ and suggests that conversion is an example of emotion overwhelming intellect and volition: ‘[t]he explanation of sudden conversions is no doubt to be sought in some overpowering impression upon the mind that supplies a new and energetic motive to the will, thereby initiating a new line of conduct’.17 By the turn of the century, the relation of feeling to transformation of belief had become well embedded in psychological theorizing. William James’s influential study of religious conversion confirmed his belief that ‘feeling is the deeper source of religion, and … philosophic and theological frameworks are secondary processes, like translations of a text into another tongue’.18 James detects different patterns of emotional engagement in conversion, ranging from violent excitement to involuntary sensations associated with the subliminal mind or unconscious. Yet the effect is the same: a renewed interior life is experienced primarily in terms of emotional release and energy, if not ecstasy, and an intuitive sense that hidden truth is now perceived. Because of this association of ‘the great change’ with feeling, the Victorian narrative of conversion is a cultural text that expresses secular concerns about emotional processes at the same time as it prescribes strong denominational positions. Located in didactic plots about the folly or wisdom of switching creeds is a more ambivalent narrative about the power of unconscious desire and the control exercised by irrational impulse over individual will. The sensational element of Catholic conversions in many Protestant accounts depends, for instance, on sinister papist agents who manipulate their victims by an appeal to sincere feelings. In the last quarter of the century, a more informed understanding of the complexity of psychological processes inflects such plots with new perspectives on the trickiness of emotions. Affect as a guide to values and action is shown simultaneously to be both irresistible and dangerous, informative and misleading. In Lothair by Benjamin Disraeli, John Inglesant by Joseph Henry Shorthouse, and Helbeck of Bannisdale by Mary (Mrs Humphry) Ward, the integrity of the protagonists is established by their emotional acuity and depth. In Lothair, idealism and romantic aspirations guide the eponymous hero. John Inglesant’s refined sensibility links aesthetic emotions to an attractive spirituality. An unconscious psychosexual dynamic generates sympathy for the central characters in Helbeck of Bannisdale, who gingerly negotiate the obstacles of falling in love. But the sensational dimension of these novels – the secretive scheming by Catholics to secure converts – also shows how emotional impulses can beguile and delude the individual. Embedded in the threatening plot of Catholic


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conversion is a shadow narrative which tests the authority of feeling and anxiously probes the treachery of hidden passion. The Victorian discourse of conversion that these novels exploit is diverse and complex, structured throughout the century by denominational prejudices and differing attitudes to emotions and the importance of felt experience. Some descriptions of conversion represent the process as a movement from emotional disturbance to health. The convert in this model is a more secure and fully realized individual in whom feelings play a part – but only a part – complementing reason, intellect and spirit. This is the pattern adapted by Mill in his Autobiography where naturalized imagery and the diction of coherent control portray his gradual ‘cultivation’ of ideas about how to balance the principles of moral and political economy.19 It is also the structural framework underpinning John Henry Newman’s autobiography of his conversion to Catholicism, Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), and his novel, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (1848). Newman’s narratives represent the journey to Catholicism as a search for equilibrium between the rational and the affective faculties. In both works, the route to the Church of Rome involves caution and measured thought. The hero of Loss and Gain, Charles Reding, suggests that spiritual fulfilment must incorporate different elements of the psyche. In the light of his temperament, he sets about balancing the intense emotionalism of Evangelical enthusiasm with Divine guidance through reason: ‘I don’t mean that reason is everything, but it is at least something. Surely we ought not to act without it, against it.’20 Yet his final certainty of the truth of Catholicism is presented in the language of emotional ecstasy: ‘His heart beat, not with fear or anxiety, but from the thrill of delight.’21 Similarly, in the Apologia, Newman suggests feelings and reason are in harmony in his own conversion process. His attraction to the Church of Rome is represented in terms of impulsive desire: ‘I had a secret longing love of Rome.’22 He applauds the appeal of the Church to the noble ‘feelings of awe, mystery, tenderness, reverence, devotedness’.23 Still, he portrays his willed assent to the Church as a rational decision when he recalls his ‘wish to go by reason, not by feeling’.24 The resulting peace and stability is figured in an intellectualized economic metaphor (of loss and gain) but with undertones of affect. The separation from friends and ‘old associations’ causes heartache. The gain brings ‘happiness’ and a sense of emotional relief, ‘like coming into a port after a rough sea’.25 However, in what D. G. Paz has termed ‘an age of growing denominational militance’,26 conversion discourse can also carry a more stressful emotional charge. In the aggressive paradigm of conversion, rejection and substitution


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182 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature – a violent upheaval and supplanting of one faith by another – replace the balanced developmental model portrayed by the likes of Newman. Crisis dominates these narratives of religious change, reinforced by the increasingly sensational plots and images that highlight the suffering involved in a switch of church party or creed. For example, the martyrdom novels of Early Christianity employ gruesome depictions of imprisonment and torture in ways which figure conversion as an extravagant process of self-emptying and re-fashioning. Additionally, boundary crossing – from pagan ‘establishment’ to Christian ‘outlaw’ – marks conversion as a socially disruptive and transgressive act with a high physical and emotional cost as well as spiritual gain. Conversion narratives set in the contemporary period draw even more dramatically on the elements of sentimental romance and sensation fiction. Ann Cvetkovich has argued that sensationalism was an important conduit for ‘the politics of affect’ in the period, by which she means that it suppressed social discontent by reconstructing (and resolving) political problems in terms of the personal domain and the individual’s expression or restraint of feeling.27 While Cvetkovich focuses primarily on constructions of femininity and domestic ideology, she notes that many Victorian discourses represent ‘the expression of feeling as fundamental to individual subjectivity’.28 This view is borne out by the sensationalized conversion plot, which characteristically dwells at length on the emotional motivations behind a decision to change belief.29 Victorian critics denounced the melodramatic excess of these persistently popular novels, whatever the denominational bias. In 1874, for example, one reviewer in the Jesuit periodical The Month, despaired of the literary standard of Catholic quest-for-faith fiction: ‘Trash is trash, in whatever form it presents itself, and Catholic trash is the worst of all.’30 Nonetheless, while the literary merit of these tales may be debated, their overdetermined fixation on psychological dislocation and emotional distress is fascinating. Child death-scenes are one popular motif, as are morbid states of mind, lurid accounts of sin, depravity and repentance in low-life haunts, and wrenching separations from home and those who are loved. The pity, fear and disgust evoked in the reader by such narrative extravagance parallel the emotional extremes depicted in the novels. Powerful responses not easily understood or disciplined, like grief and guilt, are shown to be both source and outcome of the conversion process. In these extreme plots of pathos, change of faith is a contentious, even subversive, procedure. Its most distinctive characteristic is the loss of emotional control and mental equanimity. The most spectacular conversion traumas in the period are undoubtedly found in Protestant representations of conversion to Catholicism. Unlike


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Evangelical ‘great change’ narratives where a personal turning to God is often legitimized by material success as well as a new spiritual confidence, these accounts depict conversion to Catholicism as a socially transgressive act. The sensational language associated with the turning to Rome enlivens political abstractions; it gives imaginative expression to recurrent Victorian panic about the security of British institutional identity and authority. Newman’s high profile conversion in 1845 presaged for many pessimists a capitulation to Rome by the Tractarian wing of the established church. While this never happened, conversions attendant on events like the Gorham Judgement, the restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy and the publication of Newman’s Apologia periodically suggested imminent English thraldom to the scheming Catholic enemy. The conversion of members of the establishment, such as Lady Georgiana Fullerton, Lord Bute and Lord Ripon, a former Liberal member of Cabinet and Grand Master of the English Freemasons, sharply focused public attention on the dangers of leadership by those whose secret convictions suddenly seemed contrary to public interest.31 The Times even linked Lord Ripon’s conversion to a betrayal of national trust: ‘a statesman who becomes a convert to Roman Catholicism forfeits at once the confidence of the English people … To become a Roman Catholic and remain a thorough Englishman are … almost incompatible conditions’.32 Gladstone’s pamphlet on the declaration of papal infallibility at the Vatican Council of 1870 also connected Catholic conversion to a failure in reason and judgement that compromised the security of the state. For Gladstone, the act of swimming the Tiber destroyed intellectual independence and a sense of social duty: ‘England is entitled to ask, and to know, in what way the obedience required by the Pope and the Council of the Vatican is to be reconciled with the integrity of civil allegiance?’33 Like the discursive practices encircling Jesuitism in the period, these assessments of Catholic conversion draw hard-edged boundaries in terms of national identity. The convert to Rome is not simply a deluded member of a minority faith, but an unpatriotic presence to be expelled. Many Victorian Catholic converts, acculturated to this symbolic logic, anticipated social rejection and emotional agony. Robert Hugh Benson, for instance, envisaged a lonely existence, cut off from cultural as well as spiritual roots, impoverished by ‘the loss of friends, income, position, and even the barest comforts of life’.34 The reality of submission to Rome was scarcely better. Henry Manning felt himself a pariah, like ‘a dead man out of mind’.35 John Henry Newman extrapolated from his own experience to suggest some of the weapons turned against the convert: ‘he gets no more


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184 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature invitations; he is not a welcome guest; he at length finds himself in coventry; and where his presence once was found, now it is replaced by malicious and monstrous tales about him, distorted shadows of himself, freely circulated and readily believed’.36 Newman’s emotive language expresses the intensity of the psychological alienation experienced by the Catholic convert in English society. Not simply an object of suspicion, the convert is an invisible and voiceless presence, an absent signifier whose ‘danger’ can be represented in sensational reconstructions of beliefs and conduct. Robert Benson uses a different emotional register to express the same sense of social persecution. He recounts the ways in which, following his conversion, many Anglicans regarded him ‘as a deliberate traitor … an infatuated fool, or … an impatient, headstrong, ungrateful bigot’.37 Benson does not make clear whether this hyperbolic language is a verbatim record or a metaphoric attempt to express his own feelings of exile. However, his generally low-key style suggests he is using expressions that are commonplace in the period. Emotional extravagance and linguistic hysteria are routinely employed to sensationalize Catholic conversion as an experience beyond reason and control. Only feelings and impulses that are dangerously unregulated could compel the social and spiritual suicide of turning to Rome. Only degrading epithets like ‘traitor’ or ‘fool’ will suffice for those whose emotional ill-discipline has opened the way to irrational passions. It is not surprising, therefore, that Benson is contradictorily characterized by friends and colleagues as ‘headstrong’ and ‘infatuated’. In other words, his feelings make him both agent and victim – stubbornly obsessed, yet passively possessed by some alluring and seductive force associated with unruly emotions. The fear of Catholic persuasiveness is another dimension of the Victorian conversion debate that reveals suspicion of the feelings. Sensational reports of Romish methods focused largely on emotional processes and effects. They show how anxieties arising from the discoveries of mental science intersected with – and to some extent were displaced onto – discussions about religious allegiance and disloyalty. Victorian psychological theorists, such as Alexander Bain, were fascinated by the difficulty of spotting true feeling when masked by ‘reticence, reserve, disguise, dissimulation and hypocrisy’.38 This is the central problem dramatized in the depiction of Catholic attempts to win converts. Prayers incorporated in Catholic services – That it may please thee to hasten the conversion of this our miserable country, and reunite it to the ancient faith and communion of thy church, 39 We beseech thee, hear us –


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were alarming because they used pious emotion as a code for cultural usurpation. Newspaper articles on ‘forcible conversion’ and the involvement of Catholic servants in secret baptisms of non-Catholic children40 suggested the ease with which Catholics could hide their true feelings and intentions. Charles Kingsley took the same line about Newman, arguing in a private letter that the mild and reasonable convert of the Apologia was really a deceiver. Kingsley caricatures his Catholic opponent by focusing particularly on his secret feelings, troped as violent, primitive and unnatural. He is ‘like a treacherous ape, [who] lifts to you meek and suppliant eyes, till he thinks he has you within his reach, and then springs, gibbering and biting at your face’.41 Styles of Catholic proselytizing also provoked concerns that centred on the power and mystery of feeling and its impact on reason and will. Some statements by leading Catholics blatantly suggested that Rome was bent on national conversion by audacious authoritarian methods. When the Catholic Hierarchy was re-established in 1850, Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman’s words to describe his ecclesiastical boundaries – ‘we govern, and shall continue to govern, the counties of Middlesex, Hertford, and Essex’ – were especially ill chosen and inflammatory.42 However, of equal concern from mid-century was the effect of sustained emotional appeals on individual convictions. With heart-rending prayers, sentimental rituals, and fear-inducing hellfire sermons, Continental priests worked their new English mission with gusto; they fell, as John Bossy puts it, ‘upon industrial England like men who had not eaten a solid meal for a long time’.43 More measured statements by English Catholics seemed to confirm that feeling, not reason, was the principle conversion target. When Newman argued that Catholics had ‘as much right to make converts in England, as any other denomination’, he based his claim on the emotional fervour the faith fostered, since ‘that religion which inspires the most enthusiasm, has a right to succeed’.44 Newman’s endorsement of spiritual ‘enthusiasm’ recalls the widespread Evangelical influence in the period. For all denominations, religious language was permeated by the merit of the ‘heart’ as the conduit of faith and morality. But the rhetoric of Catholic sensationalism applied to conversion also creates an alternative ‘heretical’ space where doubts about the heart’s reliability might be safely entertained. Rome’s underhand tactics illustrate, for example, how impressionable feelings can render the mind susceptible to external control. Jenny Bourne Taylor and Sally Shuttleworth argue that, for early Victorian culture with its strong ideological investment in ‘the forceful, directive will’, psychological practices like mesmerism were deeply


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186 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature threatening because they posited both ‘a new form of invisible force’ and ‘new potentialities of the mind’.45 In some of his Anglican pronouncements, Newman had taken up precisely this theme, denouncing Catholic emotional manipulation: ‘[we] see it [Roman Catholicism] attempting to gain converts among us, by unreal representations of its doctrines, plausible statements, bold assertions, appeals to the weaknesses of human nature, to our fancies, 46 our eccentricities, our fears, our frivolities, our false philosophies’. In this critique, the Church of Rome is shown to work on conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche, on ‘fears’, ‘fancies’ and delusions as well as on uncurbed passions, ‘weaknesses’ and disordered ‘eccentricities’. With its emphasis on emotional suggestibility and abnormality, the sensationalization of Catholic conversion dramatizes the power and authority of the feelings in ways that suggest the difficulty of regulating desires and impulses that have unconscious origins. Indeed, the inability of the individual to control extreme emotion is a frequent theme in both positive and hostile accounts of Catholic conversion in the period. New Catholics present the experience as an emotional struggle that compels submission. Gerard Manley Hopkins, for instance, alludes to God’s sign to the convert as an irresistible ‘beckoning finger’.47 Hopkins implies the passivity of the convert’s will under the onslaught of intense feeling. Protestants fix on the same phenomenon as a characteristic of conversions to Rome. However, following contemporary theories of madness, they read conversion as mental aberration and incipient insanity because lunacy is defined as the overturning of reason by passion.48 When Gerard Manley Hopkins’s father contacted Henry Parry Liddon, the Oxford clergyman and theologian, to stop his son’s conversion, he focused on emotional vulnerability and volatility: ‘He [Gerard] is following impulses, even fancies, but with some present obstinacy.’49 Manley Hopkins portrays his son as a kind of split personality, unnaturally detached and unemotional, yet sentimental and irrationally fervid: ‘He writes in an impassioned style about “adoring the five blessed wounds” &c, & speaks with perfect coldness of any possible estrangement from us, who have loved him with an unchanging love.’50 Father sees son as one possessed, taking rash decisions ‘without seeking any advice whatever’, and thus acting without rational ‘caution’, ‘deliberation’ or ‘hesitation’: ‘Is not that almost absurd?’51 In fact, many of the tropes used to discount Catholic conversion show how suspicion of Catholicism and of the emotions are mutually reinforcing in the last half of the nineteenth century, notwithstanding the popular taste for sentiment and the middle-class cult of sincere affections. The imagery


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of poison and contagion found in scientific and popular speculations about the ‘invisible agent’ of brain disease and mental derangement52 has its parallel in representations of the sneaky proselytizing of the Roman Church. The figure of plague, for example, suggests the Roman scheme for ‘national conversion’ is an irresistible and fatal disease that will disorient the state. An article on the new Catholic Hierarchy focuses on the insidious persuasiveness of ‘priestcraft’ which can easily contaminate the social body: ‘[l]ike the pestilence, disappearing from the higher orders, it lurks in the rags of the populace, and waits only some new chance of earth or air, to ravage the land again’.53 Attacks on Catholic conversion methods also trade on secular concerns about the predisposition of the affective domain to disorder. One author shows how the emotionally weak can fall prey to the priest’s ‘suasive tongue of softest tone’ that administers ‘not medicine, but poison to “a mind diseased’.54 Imagery of insanity provides a scientific rationale for suspicion of the convert, whose emotional conviction becomes a material symptom of mental derangement. As Newman’s bitter caricature suggests, this connection was a frequently used polemical strategy of the day, a way of marginalizing and punishing the convert: ‘when I became a Catholic, grave persons, Protestant clergymen, attested … either I was mad, or was in the most imminent danger of madness. They put it in the newspapers and people were sometimes quite afraid to come and see me.’55 Yet such rhetorical excess had its basis in the physiological and psychological theories of the scientific community. Even medical specialists linked conversion to biological malfunctioning and hysteria of different kinds, arising from ‘pubescence … trauma, nervous illness, or sexual panic’.56 The association of hysteria and hypersensitivity with aberrant sexual desire and emotional excess provides another popular semantic field for characterizing Catholic proselytizers and their convert-victims. Infatuation, seduction and conversion are conflated to reveal and reinforce the disturbing power of Catholicism and the affective domain to which it appeals. Oscar Wilde’s dalliance with Catholicism campily mixes temptation and flirtation, spiritual and erotic pleasure: ‘I could hardly resist Newman I am afraid.’57 The down-to-earth W. G. Ward’s bizarre dream of a dinner party seems to draw on a Victorian cultural unconscious that connects compulsive emotional attractions, Catholic conversion and confused categories of erotic desire which threaten established boundaries. As Ward retold it, he found himself at a dinner party next to a veiled lady, who charmed him more and more as they talked. At last he exclaimed, ‘I have never felt such charm in any conversation since I used to talk with John Henry Newman, at Oxford.’ ‘I


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188 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature am John Henry Newman,’ the lady replied, and raising her veil showed the well58 known face.

Throughout the period, the language of unorthodox sexuality is invoked to demonise conversion to the Church of Rome. ‘Perversion’ is the favoured epithet to characterize this switch of faith, in casual asides as well as in polemical anti-Catholic tracts. In an 1846 letter, Thackeray mimics common parlance in an off-the-cuff remark about the spread of Catholicism: ‘But I think Romanism begins to be drawn rather milder; and the Poop of Room that Scarlick Harlock is not perwhirting so many as fommly’.59 Almost twenty years later, John Cumming uses the same language of deviance and irresistible sexual allure to represent the danger of Church of England Ritualists who lean to Rome: Prodigious efforts are being made by the Ritualists to enlist converts, or rather I should say perverts. Young men and women are captivated and charmed by beautiful music, by a gorgeous ceremonial, by rich and variegated dresses, which also, whether at the ball or at the opera, or in a Ritualistic Church, are no doubt 60 very attractive.

Jonathan Dollimore has argued that pre-Freudian references to perversion incorporate ideas of ‘intellectual and moral subversion’, and refer generally to any libertine departure from authenticity and righteousness, rather than exclusively to homophobic fears.61 In this sense, converts are perverse because they reject their cultural destiny, which is underwritten by Protestant principles, values and worship. But the frequent Victorian association of proto-Catholic Ritualism with attitudes deemed both foreign and effeminate also shows how moral and gender panics of the period are implicated in two interrelated fears: the unmaking of the individual through conversion to Rome and the unmaking of the stable, gendered, rational self through submission to deviant impulses and unconscious desires. This connection between the power of Rome and the power of affect is, of course, in part an analogous relationship. Both conversion and desire involve experiences in which irresistible feelings transgress the boundaries of propriety in sacred and secular life. Yet, for many Victorians, religious faith and sexual desire actually occupied the same field of emotional energy. Psychologists and moral philosophers of the period speculated frequently about the relation between erotic and spiritual experience. The influential psychiatrist, Henry Maudsley, characterized the religious ecstasies of St Theresa and St Catherine de Sienne as ‘the influence of excited sexual organs on the mind’,62 suggesting that the emotional enthusiasms of religion are


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displacements of frustrated sensual feelings. Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol, makes a similar connection in his notebook entry on ‘Control of Passions’: ‘The right use or the right regulation of the passions in religion. How to kill the sense or lust and leave the ideal or aspiration.’63 Charles Kingsley’s attacks on Catholicism (and Ritualism as its shadowy Anglican counterpart) also imply a semantic relationship between the emotional cravings that compel conversion and those that underpin sex. Seduction and erotic misbehaviour are, for Kingsley, appropriate terms to describe a deviant slide into the clutches of Rome: I confess myself unable to cope with it [the ‘Romish’ tendency], so alluring is it to the minds of an effeminate and luxurious aristocracy … I never attempted but once to rescue a woman out of —’s hands, and then I failed utterly and 64 completely. I could not pamper her fancies as he could …

These metaphors of illicit sexual practices are typical of the way many Victorians represented and interpreted Catholic conversion; and they have multiple implications for reading identity politics in the period. They sensationalize the moral unorthodoxy of Catholic conversion through allusion to the strictly policed fields of gender and sexual behaviour. The condemnation of those attracted to Rome as effeminate particularly exposes suspicions about secret interior dispositions that flout established boundaries, be they sexual desires or yearnings for a foreign faith. Such epithets also have the effect of ascribing unorthodoxy not just to moral and religious attitudes, but also to the faculty of affect in general. This symbolic language casts doubt on the authoritative nature of emotional experience itself. In the Victorian discursive field of gender, feelings are feminized; they are opposed to masculinized control through reason and intellectual and moral energy. A woman’s emotional sensitivity by definition implies her psychological instability in the language of Victorian physiology: Greatly inferior to man in reasoning powers, extent of views, originality and grandeur of conception, as well as in corporeal strength, woman possesses more acuteness of external sensation, of apprehension, and of emotion, though a smaller range of intelligence and less permanence of impression … less consistency, impetuousity, courage, and firmness of character … She is more disposed 65 to believe all things … to adopt the opinions and habits of others …

Unruly feelings, so central to nineteenth-century narratives of Catholic conversion, are held responsible for the dangerously ungovernable aspect of female nature with its propensity to hysteria and irrationality, its susceptibility to tempt and be tempted. To (ef )feminize the Catholic convert is to


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190 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature denigrate both the beliefs of Rome and the emotional domain to which they appeal. Representations of conversion thus offer a good illustration of the contradictory cultural investment which the Victorian middle-class made in the faculty of affect. Notwithstanding the high priority given to reason and material culture in the period, conversion tales and rhetoric acknowledge the crucial part played by intangible and volatile emotions in the formation of moral identity. Narratives of faith transformation can suggest feelings carry the authority of their Divine Creator; they convey the inner, noble voice of conscience ‘heard’ through the promptings of the heart. Affections stimulate self-assessment, repentance and transformation; they motivate inspirational conduct. Yet as the more sinister plots of Catholic conversion indicate, Victorians also fretted over the emotional faculty as an authority open to abuse. Feelings can deceive and mislead, encourage the individual to succumb weakly to external pressure and temptation, foster rebellion and dissent. Throughout the nineteenth century, as the mental sciences developed and a more complex version of the psyche was formulated, the unstable and unpredictable nature of an individual’s emotional impulses became a matter for concerned speculation. Scientific exploration of the power of the ‘subliminal’ or unconscious dimension of the mind created disquiet about the possibility of exercising control to shape interiority in ways of benefit to the individual and society. With its exploration of feeling as the mediator of unorthodox attitudes, the plot of Catholic conversion in the late nineteenth century offered a tightly configured space for the expression of such ambivalence about the emotional domain, often in advance of medical theorizing. Lurid tales of Catholic conversion provided scope to imagine a world in which individuals were shaped, not by the determined exercise of reason and will power, but by impulses, sensations and feelings that arose spontaneously without control. Even more importantly for an anxious culture facing the stresses of modernity, they gave an opportunity to test and contain the social repercussions of ceding authority to sentiment, passion and the affective faculty in general. Disraeli’s Lothair, for example, uses Catholic conversion as the narrative impetus for a study of the way feelings affect both individual self-development and adherence to civic duty. At the time of publication, the novel enjoyed tremendous popularity in England and America.66 While part of Lothair’s success was undoubtedly due to Disraeli’s status as an ex-Prime Minister, the novel’s portrayal of a likeable hero who is almost trapped by Rome also traded on public fascination with the high-profile conversion of


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the Marquess of Bute to Catholicism in 1868. From the outset, critics treated Catholicism as the key to interpreting and evaluating the novel. Henry James, for example, reviewed the book with some disdain for its levity and superficiality in dealing with ‘the cunning Roman church’.67 As a roman à clef, the novel also has a Catholic dimension. The wily, duplicitous Cardinal Grandison is thought to be Disraeli’s vengeful portrait of Cardinal Manning, who had created political mischief for the Tory leader in dealing with the Irish question. Thematically, the novel has been analysed as an attack on Catholic fanaticism, guile and authoritarian propaganda, as well as a critique of all those who ‘break with English tradition’ and ‘the ideals of England’s past’ as embedded in national institutions like the Anglican Church.68 Certainly, Disraeli himself attached a high social and cultural importance to Catholicism – in his attraction to the Gothic revival, of course, but more negatively in his suspicion of un-English authority. In his preface to the eighth edition of Lothair, he suggests that conversion to Rome can create national disruption: ‘the secession of Dr Newman … dealt a blow to the Church of England under which it still reels … It was a mistake and a misfortune’.69 For Disraeli, the Catholic Church threatens national peace and good government because it sets its face against patriotism, English history and the civic order. Only a church rooted deeply in the history of the nation can exercise that dual religious and political authority necessary for a stable English society. The treatment of Catholicism in the novel is undoubtedly consonant with Disraeli’s personal confidence in the Anglican Church as guarantor of ‘our local government, and therefore … our common liberties’.70 It has been claimed that Disraeli declines to engage with ‘the psychology of religious conversion’ in Lothair.71 On the contrary, read through the ‘emotionalized’ discourse of Catholic conversion in which his readership would have been steeped, Lothair is a novel with two psychological plots: a cheeky story about dalliance with and escape from Rome and a darker, ambivalent narrative about the power of feelings to shape private and social destiny. The connection between personal choices and public consequences focuses on the mixed capacity of the affections to inform, to ennoble and to betray. The novel draws explicitly on the familiar model of conversion to Catholicism as seduction; but its central concern is neither dogmatic nor spiritual orientation. Rather, it uses the temptations of the Church of Rome to illustrate the ease with which idealistic fervour and romantic affections can be perverted so that self-fulfilment and social responsibility are fractured and harmfully disaggregated. As a Bildungsroman, Lothair draws on other conventions as well, including the gradual maturation of a naive but well-


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192 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature intentioned hero. In keeping with the genre, the protagonist undergoes a series of tests, of which the pull to Catholic conversion is the most intense and persistent. Like the heroes of most nineteenth-century novels of education and formation, Lothair must learn to balance the demands of the world for dutiful social action with private desires and personal conscience. In his particular quest, the power of feeling is both a vehicle for enlightenment and a point of weakness and vulnerability. Lothair’s emotional dimension – his idealistic aspirations, his desire for love and his eager sympathies – establish him from the outset as an admirable hero in a world of social climbing, snobbery, greed and affectation. Seen from this angle, he represents Victorian confidence in the moral guidance of a sincere, affectionate heart. His ‘strong religious feeling’ is allied with a longing for heroic struggle and ‘the most sublime conduct’.72 His intuitive emotional responses at the personal level are manifested in warm generosity to those in difficulty, like a friend in debt, for instance. He transfers such feelings to the arena of social duty, too. Part of the youthful charm of the character lies in his idealistic yearnings to ‘influence the future welfare of millions, and even effect the salvation of his country’, although he is hazy about how to fulfil ‘this great duty’ and make religion the core of life (62). He seeks always to act sincerely according to noble emotional convictions, not deviating from ‘the standard of right feeling, or even of common sense’ (354), though he gradually becomes aware that such abstract standards are not always sufficient to save him from disgrace, dishonour and humiliation. However, the idealistic feelings that underpin the characterization of Lothair as romantic hero rather than chump are also a source of confusion and error. They cloud his capacity to make shrewd assessments of his more worldly and astute companions or of the options with which he is presented. The principles that his emotions endorse shift and waver, suggesting affect alone provides no clear verification of truth. Lothair is compelled to admit that, to him, ‘everything seems like a dream’ (77). Even the strong feeling that a decision is needed – to convert or live a social, worldly life – makes it no easier ‘to decide upon what it should be’ (90). Because he is driven by the energy of feelings rather than reasoned reflection, he is intuitively drawn to the devout Catholic, Clare Arundel, who argues that emotional conviction and the Church, not ‘[h]uman thought’ (232), is the way to discern Divine truth. Such noble impulses ultimately fail as guides to decisive action or even the correct spiritual orientation: ‘But what is an heroic purpose?’ exclaimed Lothair … ‘my mind is uncertain and unsettled … you could not conceive society without religion. It is what I feel


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myself, and most strongly … I think I am prepared to die for Divine truth. I have examined myself severely, but I do not think I should falter. Indeed, can there be for man a nobler duty than to be the champion of God? But then the question of the Churches interferes. If there were only one Church, I could see my way.’ (155)

Worse than such vagueness and indecisive muddle is Lothair’s failure to exercise management over his most agitated feelings. In this he demonstrates symptoms that Victorian writers on mental states associate with derangement. Whereas ‘a man of strong mind represses’ the feelings that clamour for expression and indulgence, ‘the man of weak mind yields to them, and then he is insane’.73 Lothair’s cultivation of emotional sensation and his neglect of reason are turned into a pathological state of abnormality and disease. Thus weakened, he is vulnerable to his calculating guardian, Cardinal Grandison, who skilfully manipulates Lothair’s feelings in order to snare him for the Church. Disraeli’s handling of the conversion plot does more than cast doubt on the reliability of feeling for self-knowledge and good judgement. It builds on the insights of later Victorian theorists of mental science to reveal how the deepest emotional cravings are inaccessible to consciousness and thus impervious to the kind of self-discipline physiologists and moral philosophers recommended. For example, Lothair’s noble aspiration to save the world through heroic action is based on psychological lack rather than altruism. When the Cardinal outlines the need for a prophet to proclaim the Divine Truth, he cynically exploits Lothair’s unacknowledged craving for approval: ‘all the poetry and passion and sentiment of human nature are taking refuge in religion; and he whose deeds and words most notably represent Divine thoughts, will be the man of this century.’ ‘But who could be equal to such a task,’ murmured Lothair. ‘Yourself,’ exclaimed the Cardinal, and he threw his glittering eye upon his companion. (67–68)

It is Lothair’s positioning as convert-dupe that deepens the resonance of the temptation scene, so that Lothair himself, and not just Grandison, is subject to scrutiny and critique. The experienced reader of Victorian conversion sensations will already suspect the hero’s quiet attentiveness masks a fatal weakness, and that he is given to dangerous feelings like self-love and the need for admiration. If the higher emotional register of idealism and heroic duty is a flawed guide to sound action, Lothair’s romantic feelings (and opaquely represented sexual passion) are shown to be equally dangerous. Lothair has been interpreted


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194 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature as a ‘Lothario’ figure, taking his values from repressed erotic drives rather than reason.74 However, Disraeli actually represents the emotional attractions between men and women in a more ambivalent fashion. Lothair’s deep love for Lady Corisande is his security and salvation. His infatuation with the beauty, serenity and Hellenic values of ‘the divine Theodora’ Campian teaches him to prize social action informed by principles of civic freedom and inclusiveness. However, the same intense devotion is also a source of potential dishonour and disgrace since Theodora is a married woman. Most disastrously, Lothair’s tender feelings for Clare Arundel and his gratitude for the nursing care that saves his life are levers used to seduce him to convert. Lothair’s passion for Clare is represented in terms familiar to readers of the more extreme Catholic conversion narratives. As a symbol of Catholic faith, Clare is a visible embodiment of those superficially attractive traits which Protestant polemicists, such as Kingsley and Cumming, denounce as lures to Catholic conversion. Like Catholic ceremonial, she appeals to aesthetic and sensual feelings with a beauty that conveys both mystical depth and the consolations of human sympathy. It is significant that the same fevered emotions that Lothair finds soothed and delighted by the theatrical Tenebrae services of Holy Week are also nourished by Clare’s physical attributes, a point reinforced by the use of similar imagery to represent ritual and woman. The service is held in a darkened chapel, so that the tiny points of light from the candles gleam strikingly in the gloom. Clare’s body has exactly the same delicious contrast with ‘her large violet eyes, darker even than her dark brown hair, and gleaming with intelligence’ (37). The ceremony unites a doctrinal point – a better understanding of the significance of the Passion – with an emotive call to sympathy. Clare’s appearance does exactly the same, since her intelligent eyes are complemented by ‘her rich face mantling with emotion’. Daniel Schwarz has suggested that Disraeli’s fiction gradually developed interest in ‘complex psychological problems’ and ‘emotional needs’.75 In Lothair, the rhetoric of Catholic conversion provides the framework for investigation of the psychology of sex and the dangers of erotic longing. Disraeli figures Lothair’s response to Catholicism and Clare in precisely the same terms of seduction and possession. Clare is certainly a dangerous Catholic schemer, craftily seducing Lothair into the arms of the Church through female charms. However, by conflating the fields of religion and sex, the novel also explores how the energies of unconscious craving can threaten personal welfare in both spiritual and temporal areas of life. Like the victim of Roman proselytizing in the most lurid Catholic conversion tales, Lothair is depicted as one driven and drawn by desire despite


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himself. He is incapable of reasoned self-denial or restraint. When he is mesmerized by the eloquent religious speeches of Lady St Jerome, the dispassionate narrator makes clear that her appeal is mainly to sensual feelings emanating from an occluded dimension of the hero’s psyche. Lothair is fascinated by the ‘beautiful hands that fluttered with irresistible grace; flashing eyes and a voice of melody’ (51). By employing Lothair’s focalization, Disraeli exposes the inadequacy of traditional romantic language for representing the real nature and power of emotional desire. On the basis of diction alone, Lothair seems drawn intuitively and idealistically to Lady St Jerome’s elegance, beauty and grace. Yet the narrator suggests an alternative explanation by channelling attention to Lothair’s visual interest in specific, erotic zones of the woman’s body – the hands, eyes and voice. Of course, this unacknowledged sexual drive is made all the more sinister by its association with conniving Catholicism. The scene reinforces the folly of relying on emotion – romantic or religious – as an authoritative guide to self, truth and action. Even the conventional language that expresses romantic feeling blandly masks the real nature of desire. Associated with Lothair’s naivety, it is revealed as the displaced, sanitized version of more elemental erotic impulses hidden from and impervious to reasoned analysis. Doubling the plot of Catholic conversion, the plot of sexual passion speaks of entrapment and destruction, not love and contentment. The treachery of the affective faculty is also demonstrated through the pointed use of the language of pseudo-religion, fantasy and myth to articulate Lothair’s romantic feelings. He finds Clare a ‘priestess’, ‘divine’ and alluring in her fascination; his time with her is ‘magical’ (124, 125). These allusions to the imaginary remind the reader that Lothair constantly deceives himself, even with respect to his religious convictions. He is motivated to build a new Catholic cathedral by desire to possess Clare rather than by willed commitment to a specific doctrine. The vague abstractions of his thought are equally illuminating. He believes that Clare’s ‘divine convictions’ and ‘graceful energy of human feeling’ would spur him in his noble action and ‘fascinate him to its fulfilment’ (72). However, his unexamined and imperfectly comprehended feelings blind him to her manipulative skill. He fails to see that her irresistibility lies in her elegant flattery of him and in her teasing withdrawal and vivacious connection that stimulate and increase longing. It is not until he reads the erroneous reports of his military engagement on behalf of the Papal cause and his impending conversion that he realizes that Clare’s emotional influence had been used to entrap him as a convert, when more overt strategies had failed: ‘What system of sorcery had encompassed his existence?


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196 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature For he was spell-bound, as much as any knight in fairy tale whom malignant influences had robbed of his valour and will and virtue’ (352). The passage recalls the familiar Protestant accusations of trickery and duplicity levelled at Catholic tactics; and Lothair casts himself as the passive, innocent victim of Roman manoeuvring. Yet, the very fact he asks the question shows the extent to which he is unaware of the power of his own feelings, and unable to admit that his emotional cravings have betrayed his good judgement and his conscience into the hands of the unscrupulous. Disraeli’s characterization of the heroic Theodora Campian also suggests that anxiety about the power of emotion is as central to Lothair as contempt for Catholic conversion efforts. Structurally Theodora is juxtaposed to Clare as the antidote to the poisonous Catholic usurpation of individual conscience through the appeal to feeling. It is Theodora who recognizes Lothair’s vulnerable sensitivity, his ‘gentle and brave, but perhaps too susceptible’ nature (304). She extracts the promise which saves him from capitulation to Rome. Intimate friendship with her expands Lothair’s horizons, teaching him tolerance and a more inclusive and active approach to social duty: ‘his views had become larger, his sympathies had expanded; he considered with charity things and even persons from whom a year ago he would have recoiled with alarm or aversion’ (188). Because she constructs political action as duty to humanity, she gives him the sense of practical heroic purpose he craves, and introduces him both to military discipline and an advanced and radical concept of social justice and civic freedom. It is under her leadership that he serves Garibaldi’s cause against the temporal power of the Papal States. Nonetheless, the emotional bond between Theodora and Lothair has its untrustworthy dimension as well, signalled not least by the Catholic nuance of her surname which recalls the famous Jesuit missionary to England in the sixteenth century.76 Significantly, the language of enchantment and manipulation typically found in anti-Catholic conversion discourse and used in the depiction of Clare Arundel is applied also to Lothair’s relationship to Theodora. His passion for her becomes obsessive, and his transparent attempts to gain more intimate access to his married ‘idol’ suggest the dangers of infatuation. Lothair deliberately suppresses any clear-headed consideration of his need to monopolize her interest and affection. The ‘precise character’ of his feelings, hopes and views about Theodora he has ‘neither the time nor the inclination to make certain’ (188). Like some zealous convert to a new religion, he is content to submerse himself in ecstatic feelings of adoration. He lavishes time and money on her. He visits


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her at least daily and sends her expensive gifts anonymously. Overwhelmed by emotional need, Lothair resembles the most besotted victim in plots of Catholic conversion: ‘he could conceive no felicity greater, and all that he desired was that it should endure … he felt a want which meeting her, or the daily prospect of meeting her, could alone supply’ (188–89). At first, Lothair rationalizes this ardour as dedication to Theodora’s social principles and her gracious Hellenic ideals of sweetness and light in art and morality. However, it gradually becomes apparent – even to Lothair – that his risky relationship is driven solely by undisciplined emotion. Disraeli’s narrative summaries focus attention on the ways in which desire can override sound judgement, noble aspirations and even religious faith: ‘All his musings, all his profound investigation and high resolve, all his sublime speculations, on God and man, and life and immortality, and the origin of things, and religious truth, ended in an engrossing state of feeling, which could be denoted in that form and in no other’ (214). The indifference of high society protects Lothair from scandal. However, the impossibility of developing the relationship further, of acting on feeling, plunges him into a new kind of emotional excess. He moves dizzyingly from rapture to an ‘abyss’ of despair. The result is further emotional trauma and turmoil, culminating in agitation and paralysis, more ‘feelings over which alike he seemed to have no control, and which seemed to have been evoked without the exercise of his own will, or that of any other person’ (215). Lothair’s infatuation is encoded in the Victorian language of mental pathology – and Catholic conversion. In a manner analogous to his entrapment by wicked Catholics, including the Cardinal, Monsignore Catesby and the St Jerome family, Lothair’s obsession with Theodora seems to him a delicious enchantment. He falls under ‘her commanding spells … her bewitching ascendancy’ (271). Employing language typical of sensational portrayals of Catholic conversion in the period, the narrative draws attention to the irresistible power of emotional impulse in general. This is the point of similarity between Lothair’s romantic-erotic fixation and convert fanaticism. Like the victim of Catholic conversion tales, he is drawn, despite himself, at first by curiosity but also by ‘a wondering and deeply interesting enquiry when he should see her again’ (169). He is attracted by the aesthetic appeal of Theodora’s delightful Roehampton villa, her delicate, modest reserve, and her sincerity and geniality. In its replication of the Catholic conversion experience, Lothair’s capitulation to Theodora invokes the attitudes of a fervent worshipper: ‘I have long resolved, were I permitted, to devote to you my fortune and my life’ (259). This ‘conversion’ to Theodora is indeed an ambiguous change of faith.


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198 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Although Disraeli himself disapproved of Garibaldi and international liberation movements,77 he depicts his protagonist’s Italian adventures in largely sympathetic terms by connecting the battle for Italian civil freedom and unity with the rejection of Papal control. In keeping with the conversion plot of the novel, the Italian episode inscribes orthodox denominational boundaries by portraying the Catholic Church as a tyrannical authority against which all high-minded lovers of freedom should unite, regardless of national or parochial interests. Moreover, Lothair’s military experience is also related to the Bildungsroman narrative of self-cultivation and growth to maturity. His duties on the field counteract the worst effects of emotional excess by providing a regulated structure and outward-looking purpose for his life. The risky enterprise teaches him how to achieve personal fulfilment through spirited political interest and social duty. It channels his idealistic sentiments into self-sacrificial action, so that he is seen, accurately by Garibaldi’s revolutionary forces and mistakenly by the Catholic faction, as a noble hero. But at the level of emotional experience and motivation, the relationship of Lothair and Theodora is represented more critically. His espousal of his beloved’s cause is less a philosophical-political conversion than a passionate determination to unite with her at any cost. In many ways, his grasp of Theodora’s concepts of truth and justice remains just as vague and idealized as his romantic feelings for Clare. However, what Lothair, the secular ‘convert’, does learn is the manipulative emotional technique normally associated with Catholic schemers. For example, a stock denunciation of Popish priests in the novel finds a direct parallel in Lothair’s own manoeuvrings to infiltrate Theodora’s domestic arrangements. Catholic clergy are seen to interfere in married relationships, supplanting the husband to secure the wife’s commitment to the Church: A man should be master in his own house. You will be taking a wife some day; at least it is to be hoped so; and how will you like one of these Monsignores to be walking into her bedroom, eh? And talking to her alone when he pleases, and where he pleases; and when you want to consult your wife, which a wise man should often do, to find there is another mind between hers and yours? (238)

Similarly, while the relationship between Lothair and Theodora remains chaste, he, like the dread Monsignores, holds a place her husband does not. In the last hours of Theodora’s life, Lothair sees her alone after her husband and remains with her until she dies. His is the embrace she yearns for at the end, ‘for I wish that your spirit should be upon me as mine departs’ (304). On her part, Theodora also manipulates Lothair’s feelings to gain her


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political objectives and secure funding to support military action in Italy. In her sketch of suffering Italy, she is all melodramatic theatricality, ‘throwing up her head with that tumult of the brow’ (255), using evocative language to suggest ‘the tortures’ of her soul, and flattering Lothair’s sense of intimacy with her. Like the Cardinal, she banks both on Lothair’s vanity and cravings for heroism and acceptance. He will be the man to reform Italy, she suggests, just as Grandison pinpointed him as the man to renew the world’s religious dedication. Theodora tells him ‘there is only one person I can appeal to’, and Lothair is that man (255). In her mixed appeal to duty and vanity, Theodora is no different from the Catholic schemers of the novel. Like the Cardinal, she uses personal influence to secure solidarity with her cause. So similar are Theodora and Grandison in their strategic exploitation of ‘taste’, ‘cultivation’ and ‘performance’ that the Cardinal can even imagine her an ally; he speculates on how ‘such charms and powers could be enlisted in the cause of the Church’ (212). At the level of social objectives, too, there are disturbing resemblances between the ostensibly antagonistic political interests of the Catholic party and Theodora’s plans. Domination in temporal governance through the conversion of hearts is the key aim of both plotters. Their machinations are equally deceitful. The Cardinal’s piety is sardonically exposed as the veil over more sinister designs on England: ‘We must all pray, as I pray every morn and every night,’ said the Cardinal, ‘for the conversion of England.’ ‘Or the conquest,’ murmured [Msgr] Berwick. (41)

Catholic intrigue is characterized by murky secrecy; it is furthered by oblique conversations, reports from foreign agents, and the involvement of Irish priests from the subversive Fenian movement. Theodora’s work for a secular and united anti-papal Italy is no different. She, too, draws on the language of spirituality to encode political revolution. Her cause is a holy war, ‘the sacred cause of truth, of justice, of national honour’ (256). She, like Monsignore Berwick, has dark associates, such as Captain Bruges. Indeed, Bruges connects both sides through his liaison with dangerous Fenians and Garibaldi’s forces. At different moments, Lothair’s emotions place him under the influence of these opposing parties. Though he always fails to perceive their sinister alliances, hidden goals and similarities, the reader does not. This juxtaposition of the Catholic conversion plot and its secular parallel in Italy blurs the distinction between heroic resistance and national destabilization. The disconcerting parallels between religious conversion to a heretic faith


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200 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature and political conversion to a radical ideal of freedom expose the riskiness of any sentimental philosophy that equates feeling with truth and which sees soft heart as the spur to worthy action. Nonetheless, this revelation remains but a momentary eruption from the textual – and cultural – unconscious. Ultimately, Lothair endorses a ‘useful’ and practical heroism which falls back on the language of romantic feeling to elide personal fulfilment and public duty. Lothair’s love for Corisande proves the one reliable emotion of his passage to maturity. The language of sanity and control characterizes this relationship in which feelings are shaped by, and subordinated to, rational understanding and calm assessment of worth. Admiration and respect, rather than sexual desire and obsessive infatuation, are shown as central to a mature love match. It is the earnest – rather than the dreamy or ebullient – Lothair who attaches himself to Lady Corisande at the beginning of the novel. His instinctive love for the young girl when he is himself an innocent suggests the purity of their attraction. Other elements confirm the rightness of his choice. His proposal to her at the end emphasizes, for example, the unwavering nature of his devotion. By acknowledging that his love is characterized by consistency and stability, Lothair demonstrates his new capacity to distinguish transient impulses from unshakeable loyalty: ‘I have committed many mistakes, doubtless many follies, have formed many opinions, and have changed many opinions; but to one I have been constant, in one I am unchanged, and that is my adoring love for you’ (466). The representation of Corisande shows most effectively how the novel uses the ideology of romantic love in conjunction with the conversion plot to contain the problematic power of the affective domain. Corisande is loved for her personal qualities, but these are inseparable from the wider framework of English civic life in which her characterization is enveloped. Although she, too, is young and inexperienced in love, she has a mature grasp of public standards and this guides her personal views. Her condemnation of conversion to Catholicism establishes her credentials as a moral and political touchstone. For her, conversion is both unmanly in its affectation and a failure of national responsibilities: ‘when I hear of young nobles, the natural leaders of the land, going over to the Roman Catholic Church, I confess I lose heart and patience. It seems so unpatriotic, so effeminate’ (49). Her muted invocation of familiar terms of deviance for those who turn to Rome confirms Corisande as the idealized embodiment of Victorian Protestant values. To love her is to love the cause of England itself, and the initial chapters of the narrative dramatize this proposition. When Lothair is first aware of his strong desire to marry Corisande, his love is placed in the wider


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context of an affectionate, extended family and the beautiful Brentham estate, well maintained and harmonious in its ordering of the English countryside. Brentham and its inhabitants visibly demonstrate how civic duty and personal fulfilment coincide, not through resistance or craven submission to tradition, but by cultivating it afresh. Lothair comes to this realization at the end of his adventures when he resolves to assume the social duties of his station. His decision brings him once more into the Brentham circle and the sympathetic friendship he desires. By improving his own English estate, he learns how traditional beliefs and structures school idealistic aspirations and turbulent feelings. The deference and respect of his workers and his own sense of responsibility provide a local stage on which his new inclusive class sympathies can be enacted. The institution of marriage offers a socially legitimate framework for romantic feelings and sexual desire. The national church accommodates his religious idealism by encompassing both spiritual commitment and freedom of conscience. Disraeli’s novel of conversion is a narrative of emotional formation. The plot of potential crisis and dangerous religious transformation is defused into the traditional romance plot of social conservation through marriage and dutiful conformity. The emotional trajectory of the novel parallels this plot structure; turbulent feelings and unconscious impulses are displaced by energetic social action that improves, but maintains, existing institutions. The power of the affective faculty and anxiety about its value and danger are finally channelled into the love of a good woman who is also representative of a good, Protestant nation. With Lothair’s proposal of marriage comes a proposal to make the garden at Muriel House. The cultivation of private feelings and public estate go hand in hand. Personal fidelity harnessed to English social responsibility is the reassuring narrative solution to Disraeli’s conversion plot of emotional, social and spiritual upheaval. Written ten years after Lothair, Joseph Henry Shorthouse’s best-selling John Inglesant also uses a plot of Catholic conversion to explore the authority of feelings. However, with its focus on the new and controversial aesthetic sensibility, this historical romance envisages a less orthodox role for the emotions in the formation of a mature identity. Set in seventeenthcentury England and the Continent, the narrative makes use of the rivalry and political machinations of Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans from the reign of Charles I and the Civil War to the Restoration as the backdrop for the sensitive hero’s quest. He hopes ‘for some solution of the mysterious difficulties of the religious life’.78 Like Lothair, John Inglesant falls in with clever and calculating Catholic priests who seek to shape his denomina-


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202 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature tional allegiance. Like Lothair, Inglesant must also find a way of reconciling different emotional influences on his principles and behaviour, particularly on his sense of personal and civic duty. Yet there are striking ways in which the novel departs from the traditional structure of the Catholic conversion plot which Disraeli adapted. Shorthouse’s work is more ambiguous about the nature and priorities of religious responsibility and social obligation. A prescriptive view of denominational preference is avoided, largely because the sharp distinctions between religious creeds usually endorsed in conversion fiction are treated as an irrelevance. Shorthouse himself maintained that ‘[t]he book is a protest on behalf of culture of every kind against fanaticism and superstition in every form. It is, in fact, totally opposed to the popular ideas of religion (or the popular religions of the day)’.79 Instead, Inglesant’s search for the true way to follow Christ suggests a growing late Victorian confidence in the primacy of the individual’s interior life and the value of the refined aesthetic temperament as a guide to right action. Shorthouse consciously promoted this view in his lifetime, claiming the novel was designed ‘to exalt the unpopular doctrine that the end of existence is not the good of one’s neighbour, but one’s own culture’.80 To a limited extent, the novel conforms to what Carolyn Williams has dubbed the ‘secularised spiritual autobiography’, in which ‘conversion experience has been transposed into the aesthetic key’.81 Yet to read the narrative primarily as a hymn to ‘the religion of beauty’ by a ‘spiritual voluptuary’ or as ‘a quest for perfect elegance’ by an unimaginative ‘dandified stick’82 is to ignore the interpretive significance of the Catholic conversion narrative which forms the backbone of the text. Initially, the novel promotes itself as a traditional anti-Catholic tale of popery’s lurid plots and counterplots. Emotional shocks and thrills are promised from the outset, with claims in the opening chapter that Inglesant’s life story ‘is a more entertaining and even exciting one than the sensational novels of the day’ (3). Certainly, the protagonist is implicated in hair-raising adventures as a result of bold Catholic conversion schemes, including the plan to restore Catholicism to the nation by undermining the Church of England and manipulating the monarchy. Many Catholic characters – clergy and laity alike – display the devious hypocrisy typically associated with the agents of Rome in Victorian sensationalist writing. In public life, for example, a number of families, including that of John Inglesant, play a duplicitous civic role. While pretending to conform outwardly to the Church of England, they secretly maintain Roman beliefs. As a consequence, they achieve worldly success as professionals and courtiers, while hedging


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their spiritual bets. Moving easily between Catholic and Protestant factions at court, the Inglesants have a useful part to play in mediating between rival religious interests, or indeed, playing one denomination off against the other for political advantage. Catholic priests in the novel also conform in many ways to the charming and sly tempters of anti-Catholic conversion discourse. Represented by the Jesuit, Father Sancta Clara, they are adept at seeking out vulnerable temperaments. Through style and learning, ‘elegant and fascinating manners’ (30), they imperceptibly gain command of their selected victim by witty argument and an appeal to feeling. In John Inglesant’s case, Sancta Clara recognizes the young boy’s ‘excitable and enthusiastic nature’ (33) and cultivates this in order to secure his influence. In a moment of apparent frankness, Sancta Clara reveals his cynical understanding of the human heart and religious motivation. For him, passionate zeal is a useful tool for manipulation and control. At best it is a sign of youthful idealism, but it has little relevance to the authority of Divine Truth, any more than a particular political party holds the sole key to righteous governance: When you [Inglesant] have … outlived the enthusiastic and pleasing illusions of youth, you will find your love and pity for the race increase tenfold, your admiration and attachment to any particular party or opinion fall away altogether … This is the most important lesson that a man can learn – that all men are really alike; that all creeds and opinions are nothing but the mere result of chance and temperament … that no creed does more than shadow imperfectly forth some one side of truth … (74)

Such controversial insight into the psychology of religious allegiance is a new departure in conversion fiction. Of course, it covers familiar ground in illustrating the emptiness and hypocrisy at the heart of the Catholic conversion project. Even the Jesuit agrees privately that the Church of Rome has no exclusive grasp of Divine Truth. But this particular comment also suggests a significant role for private sensibilities – for ‘love and pity’ rather than dogma – in the validation of spiritual directions and ethical conduct. The subjectivity of belief is central to Inglesant’s experiential quest for salvation and a sense of identity. His ethical philosophy eclectically blends different perspectives that appeal to his sympathies, feelings and tastes. It is through his personal sensibility, for example, that he is able to reconcile the claims of earthly life and a transcendent realm. His emotions are touched by the charitable social practices of Catholics; and he learns from this as much as from the abstract idealism of classical philosophies. The narrative uses visual symbolism to indicate this unorthodox hybridity. In his portraits, the hero is shown as unworldly monk and elegant cavalier. The effigy on his


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204 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature tomb depicts him effectively dedicated to both civic duty and sacred service for he is portrayed with tonsured head in the gowns of an Oxford scholar of civil law. Inglesant’s emotional sensitivity also makes him receptive to other lessons from his Catholic teachers. In this, Shorthouse argues against the cultural grain and its growing suspicion of affect. He makes the case for the significant value and, indeed, authority of feelings in the maturation process. They are an aid rather than impediment to personal growth. Unlike Disraeli’s handling of Lothair as a naive hero, Shorthouse’s characterization of his protagonist adopts a sophisticated approach to interiority and emotion. Inglesant’s deepest temperamental affinities ensure that even Catholic teaching elevates rather than contaminates his spirituality. Father Sancta Clara, for example, urges his protégé to exercise tolerance as a means to a political end. Empathy with ‘the struggle of humanity’ (32) is, for the priest, an expedient way of securing confidences and side-stepping counter-intrigues. But the effect of his teaching on someone of Inglesant’s emotional acuity is to enlarge the youth’s capacity to transcend differences of all kinds, including those of class. Through the cultivation of feeling, he develops the inclusive ‘kindly love of humanity; that sympathy with its smallest interest; that toleration of its errors, and of its conflicting opinions; that interest in local and familiar affairs, in which the highest culture is at one with the unlearned rustic mind’ (32). John Inglesant incorporates a number of themes characteristic of the sensationalized Catholic conversion plot; at a surface level, unsurprisingly, these are handled to show the follies of Catholicism. Sancta Clara, for example, inducts Inglesant into a Catholic mode of obedience to higher authority. Neither hesitation nor reserve is permitted. As in many conversion narratives, this schooling is sinister because it exploits the hero’s emotional susceptibilities: a need for affection and approval; a strong sense of honour; and a desire to prove worthy of others’ confidence. Even Inglesant realizes he is enslaved by such compliance. He becomes nothing but an automaton, ‘the agent of a mighty will, of a system which commands unhesitating obedience – obedience which is part of my very being. I cannot even form the thought of violating it’ (85). In line with the usual trajectory of conversion fiction, such dutifulness is shown to be self-destructive. Submission to external authority enmeshes him in treacherous dealings with rebellious murderers and in disingenuous testimony to save a weak monarch. Ultimately, obedience nearly costs him his life on the scaffold. Eventually, Inglesant accepts that ethical behaviour is not always compatible with political sure-footedness and obedience to powerful institutions. However, instead of reinforcing


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Victorian anxiety about the psychological health of the ‘hypersensitive male’ who eschews personal responsibility,83 such episodes draw attention to what today might be called Inglesant’s emotional intelligence. They illustrate how a temperament guided by the affective faculty can reject Catholic doctrine while using its emotional effects for psychological and spiritual enhancement. Inglesant learns, for instance, that the prime authority of personal feeling is a safer guide to right action than mindless compliance with the plans of others. Even more unexpectedly, his sensitive temperament is the better for these Catholic lessons of rigid self-denial and submission because they teach him steady resilience in the face of temptation. Left to the workings of his highest sympathetic feelings, unwavering obedience is transformed into a loyal steadfastness and admirable self-command. In these ways Shorthouse refashions the diabolical plot of Catholic conversion to focus on the authority of the affective domain. Unlike Disraeli, he expresses little confidence in social institutions and civic responsibility as regulators of interiority. As he suggests in the Preface, his primary concern is ‘the ceaseless throbbing of [the] quivering heart’ of human life (ix), rather than the dangers and advantages of specific denominational and political affiliations. Different religious and secular philosophies are formative only when they appeal to his hero’s conscious and unconscious feelings – tastes, sympathies and enthusiasms. It is these by which he is defined and compelled. Additionally, Shorthouse offers examples of the instability that occurs when religion overrides the authority of emotional life. The Puritan, Mr Thorne, is a man torn by frustration and regret. His asceticism causes emotional trauma and mental disturbance when he represses his desire for Mary Collet. Inglesant instinctively perceives Thorne is damaged, not only because of the disjuncture ‘between his real nature and the system of religion which he had adopted’, but also because his emotions – the source of his personality – have been denied. His ‘original nature had been subdued and nearly extinguished’ (80). Such inhibition can be only temporary. When Thorne can no longer keep his deep feelings at bay, his conflicting emotions are stirred violently to rebellion. In other words, spiritual equilibrium and moral conviction are balanced only by an open acknowledgement of the value of human feeling. For a character like John Inglesant, with his delicate ‘temperament of sensibility’ (252), responsiveness to one’s own complex emotional voice is the best guarantor of truth and right conduct. This is not to say that affect is represented without reservations in the novel. Like Disraeli, Shorthouse uses tests of conflicting loyalty characteristic of conversion tales to show feelings can be both admirable and treacherous.


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206 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Inglesant’s response to various temptations reinforces a model of conscience that is based on feeling; but it also expresses Victorian psychological theory which imagines clear hierarchies of emotion.84 The novel distinguishes, for example, between dangerous primitive passions emerging uncontrollably from the unconscious and noble enthusiasms and desires. John Inglesant, unlike Lothair, suggests that the most violent and anti-social instincts and emotions – hatred, lust, revenge – are best subordinated by an appeal to other (more elevated) feelings, rather than to external institutions and social discipline. Indeed, Hobbes’s materialistic philosophy, which extols ‘law and strong government’ (65), is discredited in the novel by the political intrigues, double-dealing and vacillation of those controlling public affairs in both England and abroad. Rather, unconscious energies like lust and hatred are effectively regulated by a refined, emotionally driven sensibility whose judgements are more often felt or intuited than reasoned. For example, when sexual passion urges Inglesant towards an immoral intimacy with the beautiful Lauretta, he initially ignores the ‘restraining voice’ of conscience (330) imbibed from religious teaching. However, his fastidiously cultivated temperament ultimately subdues physical impulse. Although Inglesant ‘felt his frame aglow’ (332), his emotional inclination to honourable, measured sympathies, as much as good sense, provides the necessary impetus to restraint. He steps aside with a ‘revulsion of feeling’ that subdues the flesh and thus ‘regained the mastery by a supreme effort, even at the moment of unsatisfied desire’ (336). The power of irresistible unconscious energies is also represented when Inglesant is overwhelmed by hatred for the murderer of his brother, Eustace. The violent and unnatural disturbance of his cognitive faculties illustrates how the affective domain controls even the mechanics of sense perception. At this point in the narrative, Inglesant experiences his environment as a hallucinatory derangement. The plains and piazzas seem ‘thronged with ghastly phantoms, all occupied more or less in some evil or fruitless work’ (252). Nothing comforts his ‘fevered fancy’ and feelings of ‘oppression and confusion’ (253). Nonetheless, when the murderer, Malvolti, falls unexpectedly into his hands, Inglesant spares his enemy. In this circumstance too, it is an emotional instinct that prompts the act of mercy, not reason nor a willed adherence to religious and civil law. When the hero draws back from blood vengeance, he is confused ‘by the sudden overmastering impulse upon which he had acted’ (368). His subsequent explanation to the local priest indicates that his self-restraint is motivated by noble feelings, by his sympathy with the throbbing heart of humanity, modelled on the pity of the suffering Jesus.


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The voice of conscience central to all conversion plots of the period has been shunted from intellectual reliance on external doctrine and denominational sureties to the cultivation of refined emotion as the most reliable guide to ethical choice. The quest for faith that provides the structure of conversion fiction is coterminous in John Inglesant with the protagonist’s cultivation of a sensibility led by the faculty of affect. Inglesant explores various routes to spiritual sanctification, but rejects those that devalue his temperamental inclinations and feelings. Periodically, he weighs up the benefits of Catholic asceticism, represented in the novel by the Benedictine, De Cressy. A life of service to the poor appeals to his own need to give affection and to be judged worthy of a supreme trust. But the accompanying renunciations – the rule of mortification and the surrender of intellectual and aesthetic pursuits – make him draw back. This is not because he would regret the loss of material comfort. Instead, Inglesant sees such sacrifice as an obliteration of his integrity; it would deny the emotional core that primarily defines his identity. The suppression of feeling and affective delight would constitute a renunciation ‘of himself, of his intellect, of his very life, – and distinctly of his free choice he refused it’ (203). An alternative religious community, Nicholas Ferrar’s Little Gidding, is much more in keeping with Inglesant’s emotional disposition, and it contributes significantly to his development. Ferrar and his followers practise good works and strip away material vanities, although with less narrow fanaticism than is found in the Catholic monastic system. But what really touches Inglesant is the aesthetic appeal which the simple services and the pious community make to his imagination, his sense of solemn beauty, and his taste for exquisite music. His appreciation of the ‘gracious and yet commanding’ stained-glass figure of Christ (59), like his love of the saintly Mary Collet, is represented in terms more applicable to affective than spiritual experience but conflating the two. His response to holiness is expressed in the language of imagination and feeling; he is moved by the ‘very sweet’ nature of the Church and the devotion of the worshippers which ‘struck his fancy, so liable to such influences’ (155). Additionally, his emotional attraction to Mary’s ‘love and tenderness’ (86) impresses her beliefs on his heart and confirms his own intuitive reliance on the authority of subjective feelings. She praises the rightness of his instincts. These, she believes, are the promptings of that inner voice urging individuals to follow ‘as the divine call shall lead’.85 For Inglesant, her trust in personal feeling reinforces ‘all that was pure and holy in his heart’ (87) and remains an important reference point as he


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208 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature deepens his own spirituality. The Little Gidding episode also initiates the novel’s complex exploration of unconscious desire as a powerful determinant of subjecthood. The service and its setting touch Inglesant at a deep level of feeling beyond simple aesthetic pleasure. This, Shorthouse believed, was where God was at work.86 The language of the fantastic is one way of imagining this psychological dimension that evades conscious control. Inglesant delights in Ferrar’s community as ‘strange and romantic’ (55), and, at other points in his life, he gives himself over to the irrationality of reverie and prophetic vision. As a young boy, he is entranced by St Theresa’s mystical ecstasies, though he is repelled by her fanatical self-denial. Similar contemplative raptures when the soul enters directly into visionary connection with the Divine spur his interest in the teaching of Michael de Molinos and the Quietists. Such attractions, like Inglesant’s own repute as a seer, confirm the different levels at which his emotional faculty operates, not all equally accessible to self-analysis. The model of the psyche that Shorthouse implies through Inglesant’s occult abilities suggests that powerful emotional undercurrents circulate within the most secret depths of the self and may intrude on consciousness at any moment. Shorthouse’s adaptation of the typical conversion plot expresses the late nineteenth-century fascination with these unruly impulses and the best mechanisms for tapping and constraining these feelings. Inglesant’s hallucinations and dreams partially anticipate the new theory of the unconscious soon to be articulated by Freud. They often signify deep-seated anxieties and guilt. Instead of self-knowledge, they convey paralysis, confusing and unsettling the hero so that he becomes incapable of decisive action. Such experience encourages caution about religious mysticism as a system of faith. Inglesant recognizes the need to discipline his fantastic self, lest he become enslaved by morbid imaginings. Equally suspect is the alluring excitement of mystical devotion. Immersion in a secretive celestial swoon is also shown to be a potentially dangerous contact with the unconscious. Molinos’s direct communion with the divine requires delicate lines to be drawn between freedom and licence, between manly enlightenment and excessive effeminized indulgence in overwhelming hysteria. Shorthouse’s assessment of the aesthetic sensibility, defined as an emotional response to material beauty, also tempers complacency about the authority of affect. Aesthetic feelings might degrade rather than spiritualize the individual. Delight in beautiful sensations for their own sake can weaken resistance to selfish, sensual indulgence. The pleasures of the elegant Stuart


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court at Oxford or of a cavalier’s luxurious life in Italy establish a direct correlation between sense gratification and spiritual deterioration. Several episodes in these settings dramatize the disastrous consequences of a purely physical and hedonistic version of Aestheticism. Other manifestations of a late Victorian fear of cultural degeneration through emotional indulgence can be tracked in the acknowledgement that the aestheticized sensibility is not for the populace at large. Conservative middle-class anxieties inform Inglesant’s view that only the elite can exercise moral management of the sensations and emotions generated by the pursuit of beauty: ‘in the ideas of the majority of the people’, such a quest leads to sensual ‘thoughts and actions the most unlovely and undesirable’ (289). Shorthouse replicates nineteenthrather than seventeenth-century stereotypes of the unsophisticated working classes and their contribution to the perceived contemporary malaise. These individuals lack the finely tuned emotional register that can transform sensuality into enhanced moral sensitivity. Nonetheless, for a refined elect, the cultivation of emotion stimulated by uplifting aesthetic experience can ennoble and console. As the characterization of Inglesant demonstrates, for a sensitive nature, artistic beauty is valuable because it can enhance the best affections, can ‘melt your heart’ (263). Shorthouse distinguishes these feelings from the epicurean and hedonistic by describing them in spiritual terms. St Peter’s architectural splendour brings a sense of awe and comfort to Inglesant’s soul. Although he is not persuaded by the dogma of the Catholic Church, the emotional effect of his aesthetic contemplation is expressed as a momentary ‘conversion’ that deepens his piety: ‘he conceived for the moment that this was the house of God, and that the gate of heaven was here’ (268). The art of the people, too, effects a kind of conversion. By giving insight into ‘the common path of men’ (279), it stimulates a love of humanity that enlivens feelings of solidarity and tolerance. Thus, Inglesant’s cultivated artistic feelings become an important code in the novel for spiritual and moral maturity. In later life, his music gives expression to that human sympathy and pity which transcends religious difference. His masterly violin improvisations communicate human sweetness and suffering, joy and melancholy ‘transfigured to peace’ (440). The empathic feelings needed to make and respond to art underpin Shorthouse’s new morality of affect. In the artist’s outpouring of self to others in creativity is a model of the sacrifice of Christ, the selfless mercies of the converted murderer Malvolti, the most gracious actions of Inglesant on battlefield and gentleman’s estate. Unlike Disraeli, Shorthouse rewrites the Catholic plot of conversion,


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210 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature offering a radical approach to spiritual formation for a modern, sceptical age. This can be seen partly in his resistance to the generic conventions of the conversion narrative. He endlessly defers the question of Inglesant’s final denominational belief. Rumours abound, but it is never clear whether the protagonist becomes a Catholic or not. Nor does it matter. Not doctrinal compliance but the cultivation of refined feeling and respect for the affective domain is the conversion that will enable a mature identity to ‘mak[e] this life spiritual’ (42). Inglesant’s depth of character depends on his ability to temper and enlarge his feelings of sympathy and self-command, of empathic devotion and selfless love. Different systems of belief contribute variously to this self-cultivation, but no one faith dominates and constrains his religious understanding. He serves God in pleasure and suffering, through all sincere denominations and none. Neither dogma nor creed defines his version of Christianity, which remains personal and subjective, stemming from and yet expanding the emotionally sensitive nature God has bestowed on him. By the turn of the century, new models of the psyche begin to inflect the Catholic plot of conversion with sensations that herald the ache of modernity. Anne Hogan suggests that the melodramatic literary modes stimulated by Catholic themes from the early 1800s are supplanted late in the period by a more realistic treatment of ‘the spiritual and psychological significance of holding a belief ’.87 Nonetheless, even in this mode, traces of Catholic sensationalism continue to preach to the nerves, disclosing the self-destructive compulsions of the unconscious. A fin-de-siècle preoccupation with the psychology of sexuality informs the handling of such familiar conversion motifs as the conflict between earthly love and denominational allegiance. The treatment of conversion also captures the new emotional traumas emerging as Catholics integrated more fully into the cultural mainstream.88 The Catholic Other is still shown to menace domestic peace, but within wedlock itself; in ‘mixed’ marriages, the duties of the Catholic demonstrably encroach on the personal rights and expectations of partner and children. The difficulty of reconciling family and Church responsibilities had always been a theme in Catholic sensationalism. By the 1890s, it serves as a vehicle for exploring the emotional and psychological power relations between men and women in love. In Mary Ward’s Helbeck of Bannisdale, the intense attraction between an older, ascetic Catholic and his spirited agnostic ward combines these new social and psychological concerns to test the authority of feeling in the context of modern culture. At the level of plot, the novel deals with themes typical of fiction about Catholic conversion: the conflict of human


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love and faith; the alienating strangeness of Catholicism to the outsider; and the need for submission to the external power of the Church. However, in Ward’s narrative, these topics are transformed into tropes for unconscious psychosexual dynamics, as well as for the incomprehension and struggle for power arising when modern and traditional views of class and gender come into conflict. The stress of Catholic conversion, with its painful rejection of the familiar and implantation of the strange, is transposed into a domestic tragedy in which emotional repulsion and attraction form the central dynamic of sacred and secular experience. Helbeck of Bannisdale draws on Ward’s personal knowledge of the ways in which conversion to Catholicism could destroy family security in the nineteenth century. When her father, Tom Arnold (the son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby and brother of Matthew Arnold) converted to Catholicism in 1856, Ward’s family was psychologically devastated and socially and financially ruined. Arnold had to resign his post as Inspector of Schools in Tasmania; thenceforth, his life was a largely unsuccessful quest for a permanent position in order to support his wife, Julia, and eight children. Through Newman’s patronage, he spent a few unhappy years in Dublin teaching at the new Catholic University College. Arnold’s subsequent career – in temporal and spiritual terms – was marked by indecision and vacillation. Although he moved back to England to be close to Newman in Birmingham, he apostatized in 1865. Having rejoined the Church of England, he made a living of sorts through tutoring students in Oxford. When he subsequently reconverted to Catholicism, he became ineligible for a professorship. Julia wrote to Newman accusing him of encouraging her husband ‘to ignore every social duty and become a pervert … From the bottom of my heart I curse you for it.’89 However, the main impact of Ward’s novel is not derived from its insight into the familial and social ramifications of Catholic conversion. Rather, the bold parallels between sex and religion, foregrounded through the intertwining of courtship and conversion plots, turn anxiety about conversion to Rome into a sombre meditation on the shaping of subjectivity by inaccessible feelings. Well before Freud’s model of the unconscious began to circulate in British culture, Ward imaginatively postulates the dynamic effects of repressed fears and longings on individuals’ management of their emotional lives. The provisional title of the novel, ‘Alan Helbeck’s Passion’,90 uses a punning allusion that ambiguously connects sacred and earthly feelings. ‘Passion’ can refer both to spiritual suffering and sacrifice – a personal Calvary – and to one person’s love for another. In Lothair, this conflict between


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212 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature human desire and faith is happily resolved by a love which endorses a British middle-class ideology of social and religious conformity. In John Inglesant, worldly passion is subordinated to the cultivation of a refined emotional sensibility that leads to personal conviction and faith. But in Ward’s narrative, emotional fulfilment and psychological equanimity seem incompatible with assent to belief of any kind. Seduction is no longer simply a trope describing the dangerous appeal of Catholicism. Nor is romantic entanglement a sly Catholic tactic to induce conversion. Instead, Ward constructs a plot in which incomprehensible sexual drives and emotional needs, expressed through a conflict between spiritual outlooks, destroy both the traditional Catholic and the modern agnostic. From the outset, Ward’s novel shows its revisionist approach to Catholic conversion narratives by drawing attention to the characters’ attitudes to emotion, rather than to doctrine and denomination. Ward uses Laura as the focalizer for many of the scenes involving nuns and priests who visit Bannisdale, and, through her, voices a familiar attack on the methods of Roman proselytizing. However, Laura’s criticism of these figures is not intellectual but centred on affect. For example, she responds sceptically to the effusive sentimentality of the nuns who fuss over the Helbeck household. She finds their overt expressions of emotion both insincere and impertinent. They make a ‘cloying, hypocritical impression’ with their kissing of the potential convert.91 In the long run, Laura’s judgement is vindicated because the sisters’ affection is revealed as superficial. The nuns become cold and hard once Laura threatens Catholic supremacy in the household. Similarly, in Laura’s eyes, Father Bowles is obsequious, effeminate and sly, infantilized by a ‘childish chin’ and ‘rather mincing gentleness’ (53). He offends through his presumption, inserting himself into the household as a ubiquitous presence. The language of affect and passion – the priest is ‘intimate and possessive’ (56) – establishes the immoral and predatory nature of his intrusiveness. He has designs on the heart as the seat of belief and the core of identity. Even when the author mocks those who would invade conscience and convert others to their system of thought, she is untraditional, implicating most of the characters in such psychological gamesmanship. Catholics are criticized, to be sure, but Dissenters and even non-believers are also on the list. The embittered Mrs Mason and her Evangelical mentor, Reverend Bayley, scheme to capture Laura’s allegiance. The narrative voice treats their fanatical anti-Catholicism with high-minded contempt. Mrs Mason and Bayley are compared to aggressive, scavenging animals with their ‘eager nosing out and tracking down of every scent of Popery’ (404). They are also figured as petty


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tyrants who enjoy exploiting others’ emotional vulnerability. They greet Laura’s broken engagement to Alan with ‘fierce triumph’ (407); and ‘joy of bullying’ is evident in the brutal physical imagery used to describe their religious onslaught on Laura. She is verbally ‘pelted and harried from suppertime till bed’ (407). Even Laura’s beloved father, the freethinking Stephen Fountain, is loath to apply his intellectual tolerance too liberally. He, too, sets out to bend others to his way of thought and behaviour. Tropes typical of the anti-Catholic rhetoric of conversion establish a connection between his patriarchal authoritarianism, intellectual arrogance and emotional belligerence. He ridicules Augustina’s religious faith as ‘inherited Mumbo Jumbo’; but he fears it also as a ‘damned poison in the blood’ (29). Fountain has one way of dealing with difference, and that is to crush and exterminate it. When he notices Augustina’s irritating verbal pretension, he decides instantly it is a habit that he would ‘break’ (27). Her religious thought is similarly to be in his control; he will make no concessions to Catholic marital requirements. As Augustina later confides to her brother, ‘Stephen always had his way’ (61). Under such pressure Augustina abandons her faith and conforms to his beliefs. Although conversion is criticized in terms of its despotic manipulation of individuals, Ward’s main focus is on the emotional costs of religious belief and any alteration to it. The figure of a love match made and broken is used frequently to represent the bonds of loyalty and obligation which tie Catholics to religious creed. A fervent Catholic is designated as one ‘in love with his Church’ (386). The bishop is said to be ‘just broken-hearted’ (275) at the prospect of Alan’s marriage to an unbeliever. But at a deeper figurative level, the narrative intensifies these rather clichéd tropes into images of real emotional damage. Edward Williams, the Jesuit novice and painter, attributes his conversion to Catholicism entirely to his relation to Alan Helbeck. His description of growing religious fervour is encoded in terms more appropriate to hysterical obsession or homoerotic attraction than spiritual enlightenment. He deems Helbeck his chivalric ‘friend and rescuer’ (304). Like a besotted lover, he is ‘cut to the heart’ (305) when a painting error angers Alan. He stalks the older man on his daily journey to Mass, and a direct connection is made between his fixed gaze on the ruggedly handsome patron and an intense emotional experience: ‘I watched you day by day, till the sense of something supernatural possessed me’ (305). The ‘something’ undefined implies religious faith and connection with Divinity. But as Williams recounts his conversion tale to Helbeck, the repressed unspecified returns again. Williams bases his


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214 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature intimate care for Helbeck’s well-being on ‘“the gratitude, the strong and filial gratitude, which I feel towards you – for that, and much, much else” – his voice shook – “might be my excuse –”’ (305). Neither faith nor Christian duty, but personal connection is the young man’s rationale for his persistent, obsessive interference in Helbeck’s romantic life. It is an intimacy that implies forbidden erotic attraction because these feelings cannot – or dare not – be articulated; but it clearly discomforts both men. The association of religious fervour and emotional disturbance is also apparent in Laura’s penetrating insight into the spiritual struggles of the convert, Father Leadham. She is appalled by evidence of the hidden life of the convert and the mystic leaping every now and then to the surface, and driven down again by a will that makes itself felt … as a living tyrannous thing, developed out of all proportion to, nay at the cruel expense of the rest of the personality. Yet it is no will of the man’s own – it is the will of his order, of his faith. (207)

The mechanics of emotional repression are particularly harrowing. Laura’s incisive analysis fixes on the psychological violence of ascetic self-mastery. The battle between will and feeling, with the alternating dominion and suppression of emotion, is destructive of the whole man. The conflation of courtship and conversion plots in the relationships of Augustina and Stephen and Alan and Laura similarly associates patterns of emotional damage and the unhealthy distortion of feeling with faith. Augustina and Stephen are mutually attracted because of the emotional sterility of their lives. Both feel isolated and lonely. But Augustina has a second motivation for escaping her family home. She cannot endure her brother’s religious austerity and his excessively high spiritual standards manifested in the denunciation of any worldly delight or affection. Helbeck’s ‘all-exacting creed’ (30) seems to extinguish normal social intercourse and even brotherly tolerance and kindness. Living under such a stifling regime destroys Augustina’s sense of self, stripping away confidence in her own femininity. It deprives her of the moral authority she might expect to exercise as the nurturer and emotional heart of the family: And it’s hard to be always pulled up and set right by some one you’ve nursed in his cradle … it’s the way he has of doing things – the changes he makes. You feel how he disapproves of you – he doesn’t like my friends – our old friends – the house is like a desert since he came. (26–27)

Alan’s implicit disapproval of his sister becomes overt when she contracts a mixed marriage without Church dispensation. His harsh rejection of her illustrates the unnaturalness of any creed that treats human feeling and


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religion as mutually exclusive and tightly prescribed domains. The harm of subordinating emotional needs in this way is made apparent in Augustina’s own behaviour after Stephen’s death. Returning to her brother’s home as a refuge, she succumbs passively to his regimented strictness. Religion now fills an emotional vacuum in her life in an unbalanced way that limits selfknowledge and self-acceptance. The feelings it engenders are extreme and undermining, for they swing from intoxicating sentimentality to guilt and scrupulous torments: ‘Alan’s a saint! … I was so blind and wicked’ (45). The relationship between Alan and Laura similarly constructs human love and religious belief as exclusive territories, pitted against each other for control of the individual’s personality. This standard dilemma of the conversion plot, however, now says less about faith than about the psychosexual dynamics that structure adult subjectivity. Religious discourse becomes a means of expressing human desire with its craving to master and yield to another at the most intimate level of being. Laura, for example, denounces Catholicism in terms learned from her father and consistent with the more sensational charges of Victorian anti-Catholic rhetoric. She proclaims it an illiberal, superstitious and selfish religion because it is tyrannically opposed to ‘all the natural human things that creeds and bigots were always trampling under foot’ (50). But in terms of her relationship with Alan, she really perceives Catholicism as a rival for his deepest emotional core which she herself wants to possess. She fears and resents the ‘mystical emotion’ (317) that allows religion to absorb his most personal attention and energies. His faith occupies psychic space denied to her; it is hidden behind ‘that closed door in her lover’s life and heart’ (316). In this novel’s version of the courtship plot, Catholicism, not another woman, is the love object Laura believes she must defeat in order to win her lover’s wholehearted commitment. When they spend time at the seaside after their engagement, Laura feels mastery over Alan’s heart because they are away from the Catholic rituals and projects of Bannisdale. But she despairs when he is involved again with the business of his faith. She had seemed to hold his life, with all its unexplored depths and strengths, in her hand. And now! – She threw herself down on a rock that jutted from the wet grass, and gave herself up to the jealous pain that possessed her. (320)

Laura’s deep distaste for the activities of Bannisdale makes the psychological inflections of the late Victorian conversion plot explicit. Her response is immediate, emotional and visceral. This is not an intellectual resistance to


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216 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Catholic dogma. Nor is it Ward’s own reactionary depiction of femininity as hostile ‘to mental activity’.92 It is the revulsion that comes from bitter hatred of a competitor. Like Laura, Alan constructs human passion and spiritual faith as competing spheres of psychological and emotional experience. He perceives his physical attraction to the young woman as a threat to his Catholic principles. In his model of faith, there is no space for human desire. When his mind wanders to her during prayers, he reproaches himself ‘for a light and unworthy temper’ (138) and thus devalues his own emotional needs. In his imagination, Laura is synonymous with the world of the flesh that tempts and diverts the spirit from a steady fixation on Christ. He acknowledges sexual distraction only as something shameful, ‘a sin to be repented’ (138). The development of Alan’s attraction to Laura continues to imply his view of sexuality as a rival religion. This is why he can articulate desire only with a quasi-religious vocabulary. In his own mind, erotic sensuality must be translated into haloes and desire into prayer: ‘He saw the dainty head, the cloud of gold under the hat, the pretty gait, the girlish waist, all the points of delicacy or charm he had worshipped through his pain these many weeks’ (252). Alan’s strategy for managing intense adult feelings is simply to shift passion to spiritual objects as a kind of fetish. Only a model of emotional life that depends on the rivalry of competing ‘faiths’ can accommodate the conflicting emotions that Laura provokes – joy and guilt, resentment and obsession. Alan therefore deals with his desire by rewriting his own courtship narrative as a plot of Providential guidance and potential conversion: Secretly, he had come to believe, with all the obstinate ardour of the religious mind, that the train of events which had first brought Laura into his life, and had then overcome his own resistance to her spell, represented, not temptation, but a Divine volition concerning him … [he felt] the drawing of a heavenly force, the promise of an ultimate and joyful issue. (297)

Other narrative strategies reinforce the sense that these intelligent, sincere and sympathetic characters only partially grasp the feelings and drives that structure personal identity. The use of a detached omniscient narrator for purposes of summary and reflection at moments of emotional crisis and choice balances the intimate but limited immediacy gained through the focalization of individual characters. For example, the omniscient viewpoint highlights Alan’s unacknowledged yearning for sympathy and love. He cannot explain why Laura’s tears touch him when he kindly alludes to her bereavement. Even his physical actions stem from emotional motivations of which he is unaware. He does not understand that, when he ‘unconsciously drew


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a little nearer to her’ (127), he craved a share in her affection. The narrator, but not Alan, comments also on how his feelings for Laura healthily release a buried life, ‘something hidden and passionate’ (139) so that in her presence ‘he ventured to be himself, or something near it’ (128). This more comprehensive overview reverses the trajectory of the traditional conversion plot which the central characters seem consciously to expect and enact. Instead of demonstrating the rival claims of human love and faith, this secondary narrative of release reveals the common psychological drives that underpin both experiences. In so doing, it illuminates the powerful desires and fears of the unconscious life. These, Ward suggests, are the real forces that forge the subject and compel behaviour. And, on a wider scale, they shape cultural experiences of such bounded domains as class and gender. Laura, for instance, experiences the enticement of both romantic love and religious belief as the recurrent rhythmic tension between some inexplicable emotional attraction and repulsion, between the desire to yield and the need to resist. On the surface, her actions reflect typical dilemmas facing the finde-siècle woman who can imagine both independence and domestic enclosure as possible destinies. It has been suggested that Ward’s work dramatizes late Victorian tensions between liberal and social feminisms, between the demand for equality and the acknowledgement of women’s compassionate and dutiful nature.93 In some ways, Laura embodies both of these models. However, Ward exploits the Victorian discourse of Catholic conversion to explore contradictory motivations at an even deeper level of the hidden self. As Laura becomes familiar with Catholic manners and ceremonies, practice and thought, for example, she is drawn by the way in which the ‘order and discipline’ (316) of Catholicism complements her own wild, restless and chaotic inner self, all tempestuous impulse unsupported by reasoned argument. At the same time as she is entranced, she is also terrified and appalled at the thought of surrender to what her father deemed superstitious nonsense. Images of sexual passion and destructive violation, typical of the plot of Catholic conversion, are used to represent her conscious resistance to religious belief: She could recall – with trembling – many a strange moment in Helbeck’s presence, or in the chapel, when she had seemed to feel her whole self breaking up, dissolving in the grip of a power that was at once her foe and the bearer of infinite seduction. But always the will, the self, had won the victory, had delivered a final ‘No!’ into which had rushed the whole energy of her being. (316)

The projection of Helbeck as both object of desire and threatening foreign faith suggests that both religion and human love manifest the same uncon-


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218 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature scious urge. In her responses to Catholicism and to Helbeck, Laura feels compelled both to submerse herself in an Other and to retain exclusive control over a bounded self through the exercise of conscious will. Only in this way can she continue to feel in charge of a separate and complete identity she has defined. However, Ward’s blending of sexual and religious diction also suggests that the individual is subject to secret yearnings for absorption in what is beyond the self. The power of such unconscious impulses is asserted in the novel in a range of ways. As in the passage quoted above, Ward repeatedly indicates the shaping presence of the unconscious in Laura’s revolt against religious belief which seems to come from ‘something independent and unconquerable, of which she was the mere instrument’ (317). Exhilarating in their strangeness, such feelings also nuance the way Laura perceives the external world. To Laura, the energy of the natural environment, ‘the great race of the clouds, the fresh beating of the wind’, not only suggests freedom but resonates with her own unspecified cravings: ‘[I]t was like the rush of something passionate and straining through her girlish sense; intensifying all that was already there’ (20). Laura Fasick argues that such imagery implies a deterministic view of the female character. A woman is simply ‘the helpless product of natural forces’, whereas a man, like Helbeck, can ‘sustain his emotions through an intellectual and spiritual component’.94 But this is to discount the way in which the novel’s plots of conversion and romance also erode gender differences. For instance, a similar undercurrent of unconscious energy – the ‘ebb and flow of mystical emotion’ (317) – connects Helbeck’s passion for Catholicism with Laura’s passionate temperament that also ebbs and flows between guarded reserve and impulse. These parallels highlight an unconscious dynamic of affect common to religion and love, found in both men and women. The pattern of attraction and repulsion underpins the religious, romantic and sexual feelings of Laura and Helbeck. Its continuous presence in all spheres of personal experience suggests how subjecthood is always and everywhere dependent on the intricate mechanisms of exposure and repression. In both the courtship and conversion plots, the erratic course of the protagonists’ relationship shows a repeated pattern of resistance and submission that has little to do with reasoned responses or social proprieties. Her initial pert coolness and his reserve, her defiance and his anger over Laura’s friendship with the Masons, her abject capitulation and betrothal, the broken engagement and its passionate resumption, and, finally, Laura’s suicide and Helbeck’s retreat to the Jesuits suggest the behaviour of characters driven ostensibly by thoughtful principle but in reality by powerful impulses which


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often run counter to their better judgement and will power. Ward’s intermingling of the discourse of mysticism and sexual desire, typical of Victorian constructions of conversion, also conveys the feelings of fascination and terror that come with intimate emotional connection experienced as a cycle of mastery and submission. The technique is effective in suggesting the unconscious drive to dominate the relationship and, at other times, to withdraw or surrender. When Helbeck reflects on Laura’s anxiety about a mixed marriage, neither he nor the narrator can distinguish between his reasoned aspiration to convert her and his unconscious masculine urge to possess her forcefully: ‘Once or twice he let himself imagine the capture of her little struggling soul, the break down of her childish resistance, and felt the flooding of a joy, at once mystical and very human’ (296). For Laura, falling in love traces the same emotional trajectory normally followed by the convert to Rome. A certain ‘power and mystery’ associated with the love object appropriates the self, through ‘the winning of her imagination, the subduing of her will’ (280). The paradoxical blend of spiritual and erotic language to describe Laura’s feelings shows how she is moved neither by reason nor principle but by ‘the most contradictory impulses and attractions’ (128). These cannot be explained by recourse to a single discursive field: She seems to have been fighting against something that all the time had majesty, had charm – that bore within itself the forces that tame a woman. In all ages the woman falls before the ascetic – before the man who can do without her. The intellect may rebel; but beneath its revolt the heart yields. Oh! to be guided, loved, crushed if need be … Strange passion of it! – it rushes through the girl’s nature in one blending storm of longing and despair (247)

This commentary on Laura’s emotional state dramatizes both the inaccessible and irresistible nature of the impulses which propel her. Detached analysis of a woman’s psychological responses breaks down into exclamation and wonderment. Even the narrator’s authority surrenders to the ‘strange passion’ and ‘longing’ that defy explication. Instead, the style can hint only obliquely at the complexity of unconscious fears and yearnings, reading them solely in Laura’s own contradictory excitement and pleasurable pain when faced with the challenge and mystery of Helbeck’s self-containment. These overpowering feelings of attraction are also disturbing because they confound all rational expectations arising from the different background, values and beliefs of Helbeck. For this reason, Laura senses desire as something alien and unfamiliar – an ‘invasion’, a ‘strange drawing’, a ‘magnetism’ (199, 200). Her feelings are uncanny ‘phantoms’ (200) that haunt her conscious understanding of herself as a coherent and reasonable being, independent and in control. The lure


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220 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature and loathing characteristic of the sensational plot of Catholic conversion are transferred to Laura’s psychosexual dilemma. At different moments, she would (and would not) wrest ‘her old free self ’ (200) back, not from the grip of Rome that never really attracts her, but from the structures of her own unconscious and from the mesmerizing mastery of Alan Helbeck. The conflation of courtship and conversion in the novel also illustrates the importance of primitive emotional energy in structuring social identity. As in the treatment of unconscious desire, Ward’s handling of traditional elements of the Catholic conversion story has a metaphoric import in her representation of class and gender. In many Victorian narratives of Catholic conversion, the strange culture of the Church of Rome is both an exotic temptation and a sign of foreign values to be rejected. In Helbeck of Bannisdale, class difference fulfils a similar role. The same curiosity and alienation that characterize Laura’s experience of Catholicism define her friendship with her working-class cousins, the Masons. She enjoys the rebellious freedom of defiance by consorting with people her guardians find socially inferior, ‘vulgar, low-born folk!’ (71). Yet on the whole she is bored by their uncultivated behaviour and offended by their bitter grudge against Helbeck. Similarly, Ward’s portrayal of the Masons makes use of denominational rivalry to expose the intense personal feelings – anger, envy, bitterness – that motivate prejudice and reinforce class as well as religious divisions. As poor farmers and Dissenters, the Masons are socially marginalized. Their instinctive response is to hate the highborn Helbeck and to lay claim to Laura’s affection, loyalty and status. Their bid to convert her is primarily a means of punishing the owner of Bannisdale and asserting their own power. Helbeck’s feelings of pride largely determine his view of class difference. His contempt mirrors the Masons’ animosity. In both families, religious belief becomes the mechanism for expressing and acting out social hostility and cultural differences. Just as the Masons couple Calvinistic righteousness with resentment of their place at the bottom of the social hierarchy, so Helbeck defines his position through social snobbery and religious exclusivity. His condemnation of Hubert Mason reflects dislike of Mason’s coarse manners and social mobility, not his Calvinism. Hubert is to Helbeck a drunken, disreputable creature and a ‘vicious hybrid’ (112). These judgements demonstrate his own sense of superiority as ‘[t]he aristocrat and the ascetic, the man of high family and the man of scrupulous and fastidious character’ (112). Ward shows that secret feelings rooted in the unconscious also influence and compound such attitudes. Helbeck’s distaste for Hubert is stimulated as much by sexual jealousy as by clear ideas about social station and defer-


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ence. His professed fear for Laura’s reputation, first at the country dance and then after her disastrous visit to the steel works, is acknowledged initially as care for family name. For him, the violation of class boundaries creates ‘a certain sense of dragging a lady from her sphere – of making free with the old house and the old family’ (155). But when Laura misses the train and is apparently out all night with her cousin, Helbeck’s response reveals that he is driven by competitive sexual urges far in excess of his conscious estimation of class difference and social propriety. He moves ‘blindly’ about the room in irrational ‘storms of excitement’; his ‘madness’ is ‘half jealousy, half pride’ (252). Unconscious impulses of attraction and withdrawal also exercise authority over the boundaries of gender relations in the novel. In this facet of the narrative, the emotional sensations traditionally associated with Catholic conversion represent the power of affect that shapes the ideologies and rhetoric of masculinity and femininity. Men and women pursue each other and fall in love like the persistent proselytizers and dazzled victims of conversion fictions. Stephen, Hubert and Helbeck, for example, exercise a priestlike guile and determination to control. This is coupled with a fanatic’s fervour to be subsumed by the incomprehensible Other – in this case not God, but the female principle. Like the convert drawn to the exotic attractions of the Church of Rome, Hubert initially performs the role of eager, admiring devotee entranced by his elegant, refined cousin. He ‘hung upon her with all his ears’ (107). But Ward shows how his behaviour is really shaped by more brutal longings of which he is imperfectly aware. In his violent gestures, hot, vulgar speech, and reckless actions at the dance when he is drunk, his need to master resistance – by force if necessary – is apparent. Hubert is compelled to pursue and possess Laura by feelings that defy analysis and regulation. His emotions are primitive and urgent: ‘[a] cry of animal jealousy – of violence – rose in his being’ (219). When he deceives Laura about the train arrangements after the steel accident, he cannot grasp his own motivations, though it is clear he is creating a situation in which he will have control over a frightened and vulnerable woman: ‘Good God! How could a man know what he had thought!’ (235). Despite their social, religious and class differences, Hubert and Helbeck are united by the same unacknowledged desire to conquer the female spirit. This in itself gives weight to the narrative’s emphasis on the power of the unconscious to cut across cultural boundaries and systems of belief and to shape behaviour in ways which are barely susceptible to conscious control. Both men find Laura’s defiance attractive. Both take pleasure from imagining


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222 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature victory over a force which is both captivating and weak. Helbeck, for all his refined manners and natural chivalry, is enchanted by the delicious contrast ‘between [Laura’s] violent words and the shrinking delicacy of her small form’ (192). While Hubert relies on his rugged strength and handsome physicality to attract and master Laura’s desire, Helbeck depends on more subtle powers of argument and intimate self-revelation. But the object is the same in both cases – to exert control and to vanquish. When Helbeck sees his chance to quell Laura’s resistance to him by recounting his most personal emotional connections to faith and another woman, the mixed tenderness and anger he feels are motivated by deeply suppressed but potent sexual desires: ‘His own hidden self rose at last to the struggle with a kind of angry joy, eager at once to conquer the woman and to pierce the sceptic’ (348). The aggressive assertion of will over another, the exercise of emotional authority, these are the objectives that unconsciously propel him to violate his own reserve in order to best Laura’s resistance. Ward’s representation of unconscious female emotional energies is more complex, suggesting that cultural constructions of femininity only partially recognize, and to a large part repress, women’s deepest passions. On the surface, the narrative’s anti-Catholic resonance critiques Victorian idealizations of woman. The supposedly ‘natural’ female qualities promoted in traditional gender models – obedience, emotional sensitivity and dependence – are those characteristics which Catholic characters would have Laura cultivate and which she resists. Anne Hogan agrees that Ward’s particular depiction of Catholicism pits it against the modern world, just as Laura is torn between traditional Victorian models of female identity and new ideals of individualism and agnostic feminism.95 But Ward’s invocation of the more sensational elements of the Catholic conversion plot shift attention to the domain of affect in her modelling of modern womanhood. Through the fascination and revulsion which Laura has for Catholicism and Helbeck, Ward stresses that woman should be seen as a desiring subject, torn between the urge to protective separation and the bliss of submission to a more powerful force. Laura’s pleasure in submission and the counter-rhythm of domination is, the narrator suggests, an important feature of female subjectivity. At an elemental emotional level, Laura enjoys being actively thwarted. She ‘liked to feel the curb’, ‘to be commanded, not to command’ (286, 295). At the same time as she seeks Helbeck’s ‘curb’, she resents the power of his will over her emotional independence, the sense of being ‘mewed up all one’s life’ (209). She, too, wishes to have mastery: ‘She had the woman’s passion for influence; and he [Hubert] seemed like wax in her hands’ (161).


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In Helbeck’s faith, she discovers another form of resistance to break. His Catholic concerns especially inflame her, not because of superstition or untruth, but because they ‘were the evidences of forces and influences not hers – forces that warred with hers … at the touch of resistance in him, her own will steeled’ (282). This oscillation is apparent in other characters, suggesting that it is an essential female principle. Like Hubert and Helbeck, Augustina and Laura are contrasted in terms of different backgrounds, values and personalities; but both are shown to submit readily to the dominant male principles in their lives – brother, husband, father, lover. Both enjoy being the object of male attention. Both relish situations of dependence. Nor is this simply attributable to social acculturation. Ward universalizes the motivation of specific female characters to suggest the existence of the same elemental impulses in all women. Ward indicates that deep-seated, primitive responses to origins – to tradition and inheritance, to blood kinships and even more elemental ties – are another unconscious urge that structures individuals irrespective of the social proprieties of gender, class or religion. The power of such feelings is illustrated by the sympathy for the rugged wilderness that first draws Helbeck and Laura together. Their mutual attraction to the savage energies of nature seems analogous to their passionate, unconscious feelings for each other. Both protagonists have an acute sensitivity to the natural world, and both respond instinctively to its cycle of growth and decay, its pulsing, throbbing force. Despite their stiff detachment and irreconcilable religious differences, they are drawn together in a shared impulsive joy in the natural world: His own strong feeling for his native place was all a matter of old habit and association. The flash of wild pleasure in her face astounded him. There was in that fiery, tameless something that was the girl’s distinguishing mark, her very soul and self. Was it beginning to speak from her blood to his? (147)

Similarly the bonds of family, a sense of shared inheritance, forge unconscious allegiances that are impervious to more pragmatic social concerns. Laura’s modern agnosticism and radical views of individual freedom as well as her tolerance of the Masons are not consciously thought-through positions. They emerge from her love and loyalty to her father because she has emotionally rooted her sense of self and security in him. Helbeck has the same kind of emotional investment in Catholicism. The history of his family’s religious faithfulness through generations of oppression provides him with a sense of continuity that defines his place and nature. Helbeck, like Laura, has affective allegiances to blood origins that cannot readily be


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224 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature dislodged because they confirm his own sense of identity: ‘there had been a passionate oneness between him and his inheritance, between his nature and the spirit of his race. Their privations and persecutions, their faults, their dumb or stupid fidelities, their very vices even, had been the source in him of a constant and secret affection’ (256). As in the traditional conversion plot, the protagonists of Helbeck of Bannisdale must compromise their self-defining inheritance – that is, lose or at least loosen their hold on cultural traditions – in order to gain a new faith. For Helbeck and Laura, love of each other takes the place usually reserved for the convert’s devotion to God. Conversion discourse becomes the means of encoding the unconscious rhythms of attraction and withdrawal which both experience. In their emotional plight, each demonstrates the same kind of self-torturing vacillation which any convert feels who must reject the security of kinship and yield to a power beyond the self. In fact, the buried emotions that drive Ward’s protagonists are seen to replace religious faith and the ‘divine’ impulse as the authoritative explanation and framework for behaviour in the modern world. A craving for independence and absorption, resistance and subjugation informs both spiritual and secular connections, male and female principles, even the boundaries of class. The tragedy of Helbeck of Bannisdale lies in the inability of both Laura and Helbeck to disentangle, comprehend and trust these disturbing and contradictory needs. Shaped by different patterns of kinship and inheritance, they cannot cast aside past ties to accommodate a future united in and with each other. In Lothair, resistance to conversion is a sign of mental health. Now, with a modern sense of the mind’s complexities, a new urgency and value is attributed to the affective domain. The refusal to ‘convert’ – to respond to the irresistible beckoning finger of desire rather than Divinity – leads to psychic destruction. Of course, both Laura and Helbeck consciously profess their respect for each other’s beliefs. Helbeck assures Laura he will not attempt ‘to disturb her inherited ideas’ (280). She agrees to ‘[s]ay whatever you want me to say … do what is required of me’ (447) in order to gain his emotional commitment in its entirety. But this religious stalemate disguises the real problem. Neither Laura nor Helbeck is willing to cede authority over feeling and capitulate to the demands of intimacy. They cannot satisfy their mutual yearnings to be entire unto themselves, and yet to be utterly mastered. Religious faith is the ostensible ground over which these battles of influence are fought. But, in the secularized modernity of Ward’s novel, conversion is only one manifestation of the psychological imperatives that propel individuals. Unlike previous protagonists of the Catholic conversion plot, Laura does not find spiritual and


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emotional satisfactions in orthodox ideologies of romance and duty, or even in the cultivation of her energetic and questioning sensibility. In the bleaker turn-of-the century world, emotional connections of all kinds are stymied. Only in death do Laura and Helbeck bitterly enact the mastery and submission which both are unconsciously compelled, self-destructively, to seek. Helbeck dies psychically through Laura’s suicide. He maintains the integrity of his blood-inheritance, mastering temptation to despair by entering the Jesuit novitiate. But the dissolution of his emotional life is clear. As soon as he discovers her body in the river, ‘[t]he half of personality – the chief forces of that Helbeck whom Laura had loved, were already dead with Laura’ (460). He becomes a disconsolate and prophetic emblem of twentiethcentury solipsism, living ‘a life all within’ (464), the external world of human connection and natural energy reduced to a mere shadow. Helbeck’s isolated stoicism gives the character a measure of sympathetic dignity. But it is Laura’s suicide which transforms the failure of both conversion and courtship to a more noble and tragic level. Laura’s confused explanatory letter and her eccentric appearance and behaviour prior to her death suggest the fin-de-siècle female malady of neurasthenia. Yet her derangement signifies more than a nervous impairment arising from the rejection of ‘prescribed social and sexual roles’, as was the usual diagnosis of the condition.96 Enclosed within a sensational plot of Catholic conversion with its emphasis on the manipulation of emotion and unconscious needs, Laura’s death shows clearly that the irrational forces of affect shape destiny. She is, finally, subject to the unconscious impulses that she has struggled to repress and release throughout the novel. On one level, Laura’s drowning suggests a final assertion of individuality, will and the need for liberty. She exerts total control over her life, and by surrendering to the wild forces of the river, articulates a symbolic allegiance to the freedom of the unrestrained natural world. But throughout the novel, the force of nature has also symbolized those passions which humanity can neither acknowledge nor resist. These desires are only fully realized by Laura in her act of suicide. In death, she keeps mastery over and protects her integrity, for she resists a faith she emotionally and intellectually distrusts. But she surrenders totally to Helbeck as well, destroying herself for love of him to release him from false hope. Stephen Fountain once explained the fundamental flaw of Christianity to Laura as a failure of logic. Sacrifice of one’s life for another goes against reason: ‘It may be Christian –” he added, in a murmur, “but it isn’t sense’ (35). In these terms, Laura’s final self-sacrificial act becomes her unintended conversion, her irrational and ironic ‘Christian’ act of total love.


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226 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Throughout the nineteenth century, the economics of conversion – the potential profit and loss of abandoning tradition for new, unorthodox positions – is a recurrent theme in religious and secular literature associated with the shaping of a mature identity. In non-fictive and imaginative writing, narratives of audacious Catholic schemes to convert individuals (and even the nation) sensationalize emotional excess as the inverse of psychic and spiritual good health. These plots subordinate the importance of affect while reinforcing the boundaries between truth and illusion in matters of belief, morality, personal happiness and social duty. However, as cultural and religious orthodoxies begin to shift and waver, the plot of Catholic conversion is gradually entwined with other discursive fields to portray new ideas about the formation of the subject and the possibility of self-fashioning. Because of their focus on feelings and belief, on will and surrender, novels of outrageous Catholic proselytizing are an important way in which cultural revisions of interiority circulate in the period. These later Victorian portrayals of Catholic evangelizers and victims contain a more anxious parallel narrative about individuals who are impressionable and volatile and who unconsciously resist the claims of tradition and reason. New insights into the complexity of psychological processes and new concerns about the strength of unconscious desire and irrational impulse are reflected in the rewriting of the sensations of Catholic conversion. These new iterations of a familiar plot show how, in late Victorian culture, ideologies of will power and duty lose ground as the guarantors of sound conduct and secure identities. Focused on the manipulation of unconscious desire and the unreliability of tender feelings, the tale of Catholic conversion provides opportunities to explore modern perspectives on the authority of emotion and the power of buried cravings. Lothair’s idealized romantic feelings, the refined aesthetic sensibility of John Inglesant, and the psychosexual dynamic that shapes personal and social relations in Helbeck of Bannisdale all illuminate changing attitudes to the affective domain in the last half of the century. As Disraeli’s confidence in the regulation of personal feeling through traditional institutional frameworks gives way to Shorthouse’s radical reliance on cultured feeling as moral guide, the conversion plot takes on new ideas about the way emotion shapes personal values. No longer a narrative of sharply defined denominational choices, the fiction of Catholic conversion tracks the mysterious processes by which identity is formed. It reveals subjectivity as complex, conflicted and provisional. As seen in the chilly gloom of Helbeck of Bannisdale, the authority of feeling and the power of unconscious impulse determine the conversion plot for a


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new century in which isolation and death are the most profound and bitter manifestations of love and faith alike.

Notes 1 Said at the reception of Henry Manning into the Catholic Church, 1851; quoted in K. S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), p. 121. 2 Catherine Sinclair, Popish Legends or Bible Truths (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1852), p. lxi. 3 Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), p. 150. 4 Joseph W. Childers, Novel Possibilities: Fiction and the Formation of Early Victorian Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), p. 3. 5 Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1859), p. 3. 6 Fred Kaplan, Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 4. 7 Kaplan, Sacred Tears, p. 26. 8 John Conolly, An Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity, with Suggestions for the Better Protection and Care of the Insane (London: John Taylor, 1830), p. 225. 9 William Benjamin Carpenter, Principles of Mental Physiology, 2nd edn (London: Henry S. King, 1875), p. 26. 10 Bain, Emotions and the Will, 3rd edn, pp. 20, 21. 11 Mill, Autobiography, pp. 82–83. 12 Mill, Autobiography, p. 83. 13 Mill, Autobiography, p. 91. 14 Mill, Autobiography, p. 91. 15 Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (1907; London: William Heinemann, 1922), p. 180. 16 Gosse, Father and Son, p. 180. See also Davies, Worship and Theology in England. Davies characterizes nineteenth-century Evangelicalism as ‘the religion of the heart’ which despised ‘the proper claims of reason’ particularly in matters of conversion and spiritual renewal (III, p. 240). 17 Bain, Emotions and the Will, 3rd edn, pp. 532, 453. 18 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature: Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered in Edinburgh in 1901–1902 (1902; New York: Random House, 1974), p. 422. 19 Mill, Autobiography, p. 92. 20 John Henry Newman, Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (1848; London: Burns & Oates, 1962), p. 63. 21 Newman, Loss and Gain, p. 244. 22 John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. David J. DeLaura (1864; New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 133. 23 Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, p. 135. 24 Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, p. 150.


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228 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, p. 184. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, p. 156. Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, pp. 2–3. Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings, p. 131. Maison, Search Your Soul, Eustace, pp. 111–12. Maison’s plot descriptions of a range of conversion and spiritual quest novels suited to different denominations evidence both the popularity and sensational treatment of the topic throughout the nineteenth century. Quoted in Maison, Search Your Soul, Eustace, p. 155. David Mathew, ‘Old Catholics and Converts’, in The English Catholics 1850–1950: Essays to Commemorate the Centenary of the Restoration of the Hierarchy of England and Wales, ed. George Andrew Beck (London: Burns & Oates, 1950), p. 235; Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England, p. 92. Quoted in G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain: 1869–1921 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 78–79. W. E. Gladstone, The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation (London: John Murray, 1874), p 43. Robert Hugh Benson, Confessions of a Convert (London and New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1913), p. 89. Quoted in Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, II, p. 404. Newman, Lectures, p. 183. Benson, Confessions of a Convert, p. 136. Bain, Emotions and the Will, 3rd edn, p. 33. From a litany composed for recitation after the restoration of the Hierarchy; quoted in Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 389. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, p. 15. Quoted in David Alderson, Mansex Fine: Religion, manliness and imperialism in nineteenth-century British culture (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 91. Wiseman, ‘ Flaminian Gate’, p. 5. Bossy, English Catholic Community, p. 317. Newman, Lectures, pp. 186, 188. Taylor and Shuttleworth, eds, Embodied Selves, p.6. John Henry Newman, ‘Catholicity of the English Church’, British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review, XXVII ( January 1840), p. 88. Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Sermons and Devotional Writings of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Christopher Devlin (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 25. See, for example, John Barlow, On Man’s Power Over Himself to Prevent or Control Insanity (London: William Pickering, 1843). Gerard Manley Hopkins, Further Letters of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Including His Correspondence with Coventry Patmore, ed. Claude Colleer Abbott, 2nd edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 434. Hopkins, Further Letters, p. 435. Hopkins, Further Letters, pp. 96, 97. Jane Wood, Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 121–22. Anon., ‘The Popish Partition of England’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, LXVIII (December 1850), p. 746. A Layman, Jesuit Priest in the Family, pp. 4, 2.


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55 Newman, Lectures, p. 236. 56 Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 117. 57 Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 266. 58 Wilfrid Ward, The Life of John Henry Cardinal Newman, Based on His Private Journals and Correspondence (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1912), II, p. 349. 59 Thackeray, Letters and Private Papers, II, p. 253. 60 John Cumming, Ritualism, The Highway to Rome, 1867, quoted in Norman, AntiCatholicism in Victorian England, p. 194. 61 Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 240–41. 62 Henry Maudsley, Body and Mind: An Inquiry into their Connection and Mutual Influence, Specially in Reference to Mental Disorders (London: Macmillan, 1870), p. 85. 63 Quoted in Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 50. 64 Frances Kingsley, ed., Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1888), I, p. 201. 65 John Elliotson, Human Physiology, 5th edn (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1835), p. 705. 66 As Vernon Bogdanor notes in his introduction to the novel, the first edition was sold out in two days, and eight editions were brought out in the first year of publication alone (Lothair, ed. Vernon Bogdanor [London: Oxford University Press, 1975], p. ix). 67 Review in Atlantic Monthly, XXVI (August 1870), pp. 249–51, reprinted in Disraeli’s Novels Reviewed, 1826–1968, ed. R. W. Stewart (Metuchan, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1975), p. 256. 68 On the political background and Manning’s perceived treachery, see Thom Brown, Disraeli the Novelist (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 134. David E. Painting offers a reading of the novel’s attack on Catholic propagandizing in ‘Disraeli and the Roman Catholic Church’, Quarterly Review, 304 (1966), pp. 21–23. Nils Clausson has written on the novel’s call to preserve English traditions and the past in ‘English Catholics and Roman Catholicism in Disraeli’s Novels’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, XXXIII, no. 4 (March 1979), pp. 466, 474. 69 Quoted in William F. Monypenny and George E. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, new and rev. edn (London: John Murray, 1910–20), II, p. 84. 70 Quoted in Monypenny and Buckle, Life of Benjamin Disraeli, II, p. 96. 71 Griffin, Anti-Catholicism, p. 186. 72 Benjamin Disraeli, Lothair, Bradenham Edition, vol. XI. (1870; London: Peter Davies, 1927), p. 51. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. 73 Barlow, On Man’s Power, p. 45. 74 Painting, ‘Disraeli’, p. 24; Daniel R. Schwarz, Disraeli’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 130. 75 Schwarz, Disraeli’s Fiction, p. 59. 76 Edmund Campion (1540–81) gave up a promising career as an Oxford scholar, left for the Continent, and recanted Protestantism. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1573. In 1580, despite the penal laws, he and Robert Persons, a fellow Jesuit, secretly entered England with the mission to re-convert the country to Catholicism. After almost a year of itinerant, clandestine teaching and ministering to English Catholics, he was arrested, tried for treason and political conspiracy, and executed by being hanged, drawn and


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77 78 79 80 81 82

83 84

85

86 87

88 89 90 91 92

93

94 95 96

quartered. He was canonized as an English martyr in 1970. See Michael A. R. Graves, ‘Campion, Edmund [St Edmund Campion] (1540–1581)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4539. Bogdanor, ‘Introduction’, p. xiv. J[oseph] H[enry] Shorthouse, John Inglesant: A Romance (1880; London: Macmillan, 1883), p. 273. Subsequent references are cited in the text. J. H. Shorthouse, Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, ed. by his wife [Sarah Scott Shorthouse] (London: Macmillan, 1905), I, p. 123. Shorthouse, Life, Letters, I, p. 124. Carolyn Williams, ‘Pater in the 1880’s: Experiments in Genre’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, IV (1983), p. 47. Maison, Search Your Soul, Eustace, p. 290; Joanne Hutchinson, ‘John Inglesant, Victorian Cavalier: History as Faith in the 1880s’, University of Hartford Studies in Literature, 13, no. 1 (1981), p. 13. Wood, Passion and Pathology, p. 78. See, for example, Bain’s complex system of classification in The Emotions and the Will, such as the emotions of ‘wonder’ and ‘terror’, ‘sympathy’, ‘tender emotion’, ‘emotions of self ’, ‘emotions of intellect’, ‘the aesthetic emotions’, ‘the ethical emotions: or, the moral sense’ (1st edn, pp. viii–xvi). Shorthouse, John Inglesant, p. 86. Mary’s certainty recalls Shorthouse’s own Quaker background with its confidence in the Divine Voice of the heart; see Robert Lee Wolff, Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (London: John Murray, 1977), p. 169. Shorthouse, Life, Letters, I, p. 123. Anne Hogan, ‘Angel or Eve?: Victorian Catholicism and the Angel in the House’, in Women of Faith in Victorian Culture: Reassessing the Angel in the House, ed. Anne Hogan and Andrew Bradstock (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), p. 93. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, II, p. 403. Quoted in Patrick Allitt, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 5. John Sutherland, Mrs. Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 153. Mary Augusta Ward, Helbeck of Bannisdale, 2nd edn (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1898), p. 65. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. Laura Fasick, ‘Culture, Nature, and Gender in Mary Ward’s Robert Elsmere and Helbeck of Bannisdale’, Victorian Newsletter, 83 (Spring 1993), p. 27. Robert Lee Wolff senses Laura’s ‘repulsion’ for Helbeck and the Catholic ceremonies of Bannisdale is ‘at times sexual’, but does not pursue the way in which Ward appropriates the metaphors of conversion rhetoric to explore the complexities of unconscious desire (Gains and Losses, p. 472). Beth Sutton-Ramspeck, ‘Shot out of the Canon: Mary Ward and the Claims of Conflicting Feminisms’, in Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, ed. Nicola Diane Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 205–207. Fasick, ‘Culture, Nature, and Gender’, pp. 25, 30. Hogan, ‘Angel or Eve?’, pp. 95–96. Wood, Passion and Pathology, p. 163.


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5 Art Catholicism and the New Catholic Baroque The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson

Is there not some mystic and magnificent ceremony wh is performed by the deluded votaries of your unhappy creed on the eve of Easter Sunday that is Easter Saturday – ? My Mamma is very desirous of witnessing the horrid rite, and has commissioned me to find out where it is best enacted. 1 — William Makepeace Thackeray, Letters Of Catholic priests I had a far less distinct idea. I knew only that they had their little suburban chapels, in which they perpetrated ineffable rites. 2 — Canon Frederick Oakeley Better far to flutter like a moth round the candles of a gay Benediction, than to live without love in the proprieties of sensual ease and worldly comfort. 3 — Father Frederick Faber

In the year following his conversion to Catholicism, John Henry Newman reviewed a new volume of religious poetry by John Keble, his friend, former colleague and leader of the Oxford Movement. The essay is a bristly affair, its literary criticism punctuated by extended passages of self-justification and sharp protestations against those ‘who have spoken or written harshly of recent converts to the Catholic Church’ and who merit ‘more lenient measure’ on the ‘Great Day’ of Judgement than they have seen fit to dole out themselves.4 In this hypersensitive mood, Newman welcomes the volume’s denominational discretion. Unlike Keble’s previous collections of religious poems, Lyra Innocentium maintains ‘an emphatic silence on the subject of other Churches’; no Catholic could ‘find fault’ with its depictions of an essential Christianity (422). Nonetheless, Newman is not above engaging in a bit of denominational one-up-manship. Of course, he praises his old friend’s literary contribution to the transformation of the Anglican Church: ‘[h]e did that for the Church of England which none but a poet could do: he made it poetical’ (442). Yet he suggests that this is a poor substitute for the truth and beauty of Catholicism itself:


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232 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Poetry is the refuge of those who have not the Catholic Church to flee to and repose upon, for the Church herself is the most sacred and august of poets … She is the poet of her children; full of music to soothe the sad and control the wayward, – wonderful in story for the imagination of the romantic; rich in symbol and imagery, so that gentle and delicate feelings, which will not bear words, may in silence intimate their presence or commune with themselves. Her very being is poetry; every psalm, every petition, every collect, every versicle, the cross, the mitre, the thurible, is a fulfilment of some dream of childhood, or aspiration of youth. Such poets as are born under her shadow, she takes into her service; she sets them to write hymns, or to compose chants, or to embellish shrines, or to determine ceremonies, or to marshal processions … (442–43)

In the overall context of the review, this passage is clearly a rhetorical strategy to justify Newman’s own conversion to the full satisfactions of the Roman Catholic faith. But what is particularly significant is the ground on which Newman decides to fight and the discursive weapons he chooses. He foregrounds as virtue the aspect of Catholic material culture most objectionable to staid Protestants – its elaborate liturgy and mysterious ceremonial. And he defends it in terms, not of religious dogma, but of aesthetic truth and satisfaction. Indeed, he extravagantly reinforces the point by contrasting the glories of Catholic arts of worship to the denuded, battered and prosaic Protestantism found in the Church of England before the Tractarian intervention. Like an impressive work of art in which form and meaning are perfectly integrated, religion should, Newman argues, express its doctrine and sanctity though the physical appeal of ceremonial apparatus. To strip away the sensuous element is to destroy the meaning altogether: the Anglican system [was] all but destitute of this divine element, which is an essential property of Catholicism; – a ritual dashed upon the ground, trodden on, and broken piecemeal; – prayers, clipped, pieced, torn, shuffled about at pleasure, until the meaning of the composition perished … antiphons, hymns, benedictions, invocations, shovelled away … vestments chucked off, lights quenched, jewels stolen, the pomp and circumstances of worship annihilated; a dreariness which could be felt … a smell of dust and damp, not of incense … huge ugly boxes of wood, sacred to preachers, frowning on the congregation in the place of the mysterious altar … and for orthodoxy, a frigid, unelastic, inconsistent, dull, helpless dogmatic [which] … resented every attempt to give it a meaning … (443–44)

Newman’s connection of beauty and faith is illustrative of the ways in which Victorian aesthetic terminology and concepts inflected and were nuanced by the attitudes to Catholic styles of worship and devotional practice. In this oscillating and symbiotic merging of discursive fields, views on the purposes


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and effects of art permeate discussions about the form and meaning of religious ceremonial. For both Catholics and Protestants, the liturgy and ritual of Rome seem to work like poetry at its most inspiring and its most dangerous: providing spiritual and moral inspiration through beauty and splendour, or seducing reason and conscience through an extravaganza of sensuous pleasure. This chapter explores the significance of these dual responses to Catholic arts of worship in the Victorian cultural imagination. The first section considers the critiques of Roman ‘mummery’ and of art ostensibly ‘corrupted’ by unwarranted attention to Catholic themes and motifs, like that of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In this facet of Catholic sensationalism, aesthetic tastes and theological differences reinforce each other in establishing boundaries of decorum for artistic and religious practice. Much earlier than many critics accept,5 the terms of the cultural debates about Aestheticism and art for art’s sake are inscribed in the responses to Catholic devotions. Conflicting views about the nature and function of art, and particularly the fascinations and dangers of sumptuous form, underpin the denigration of exotic, sensual and enigmatic Catholic ritual. The Protestant response to Catholic arts of worship inscribes a conservative moral and utilitarian aesthetic and emphasizes the cultural subversion implicit in an aesthetic of sensation. Conversely, as the second section of the chapter suggests, elaborate devotional practices heralded a countercultural act of aesthetic resistance for the Victorian Catholic community. As Newman’s 1846 review implies, Catholic denominational identity was bound up with a distinctive aesthetic sensibility. Particularly in the last half of the century, liturgy and devotional literature (prayers, hymns and sermons) were characterized by increasing flamboyance and extravagant emotional appeals that directly challenged the Protestant tradition of low-key and plain-speaking services and religious verse. Theatrical grandeur, intricate rituals and evocative ceremonials were central to an up-beat redefinition of Catholic spirituality and culture. Sensation and display expressed a unique Roman Catholic experience of and assent to the Divine. This New Catholic Baroque style – recalling the symbolic excess of Counter-Reformation art, architecture and literature – provides an important but neglected context for understanding some of the stylistic innovations and thematic preoccupations of the Victorian Catholic poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson, both of whom were steeped in this devotional revolution. The art of ‘operational’ Victorian Catholicism, with its shock, excess and elaboration of affect, is central to their lyric sensationalism.


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Sensationalizing Catholic Ritual Throughout the nineteenth century, contentious debates about the power of aesthetic experience both shape and are sharpened by the discourse and material practices associated with Catholic worship. Isobel Armstrong’s masterful political reading of Victorian poetry and poetics has shown how the disruptive potential of pleasurable sensation underpins aesthetic anxieties continuously from the 1830s.6 But the epistemological crisis that culminated in late Victorian Aestheticism was not – as so many contemporary critics imply7 – a matter solely for the Victorian intelligentsia, with its sages and artists, its critics, scientists and philosophers. Attitudes to the sensations of Catholic ritual show other cultural domains were also involved in a prolonged struggle for aesthetic authority that set objective ‘truth’ against subjective pleasure, moral knowledge against sensuous appeal. Competing views of art in the period variously privileged referential content, affective powers, moral impact and sense impressions – all are in play in Victorian responses to Catholic ceremonial and devotions. For Protestants, the ecclesiastical art of Rome was sensationalized as an object of double-edged anxiety, for it seemed to express questionable religious values at the same time as it gratified dangerous sensual tastes. Victorians who read Catholic ritual as a sign of flawed and superstitious belief grounded their judgements in an aesthetic that combined ethical and utilitarian views. Concentration on the meanings signalled by a work’s formal properties implied art was serious and, in the broadest sense, educational. It should be committed to expounding important truths central to the human condition. As Matthew Arnold suggested, art had the capacity to reveal ‘the ideas and laws of the inward world of man’s moral and spiritual nature’.8 Most middle-class Victorians were preoccupied with the usefulness as well as the truth of cultural forms, including those in the artistic domain.9 Ethics and aesthetics were entwined with function through insistence on the uplifting and consoling nature of art. Ruskin’s influential Modern Painters was explicit on this point, indicating that art’s high intellectual purpose refined the spirit. The greatest art conveys ‘the greatest number of the greatest ideas; and I call an idea great in proportion as it is received by a higher faculty of the mind … and in occupying, exercises and exalts, the faculty by which it is received’.10 Ruskin’s language implies transcendent, absolute and universal criteria are available for the adjudication of symbolic meanings. His theorization represents artistic practice as a medium of moral and intellectual influence; it portrays aesthetic evaluation as an objective assessment of that influence.


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The prevalence of attitudes such as these explains why Catholic ritual and devotions were treated as strange practices, but also bad art. Their meanings and merits were assessed through the foreign beliefs of the despised Church of Rome. Of course, Victorian Protestants and Catholics made extensive use of the moral-functional aesthetic model to extract telling propaganda points from the sensations of Catholic ceremonial. Augustus Welby Pugin, the convertarchitect, defended his revival of English Gothic style through an appeal to history that explicitly connected art and great ideas in a Ruskinian manner. Pugin took as his artistic goal the restoration of ‘the Christian ideas of our Catholic ancestors, for they alone are proper for our imitation’.11 All the artistic apparatus of a sacred place – building, interior decoration, furnishings, music, lighting, vestments, altar and ceremonial furniture, even the details of the devotional act itself – should embody and express ‘the faith of Christianity’ and ‘fill the mind with veneration’.12 Pugin also made clear that only one ‘version’ of Christianity would suffice: ‘everything grand, edifying, and noble in art is the result of feelings produced by the Catholic religion on the human mind’.13 For him, the weakness of contemporary art demonstrated the inadequacy of Protestant beliefs and taste: ‘the degraded state of the arts in this country is purely owing to the absence of Catholic feeling among its professors, the loss of ecclesiastical patronage, and the apathy with which a Protestant Nation must necessarily treat the higher branches of Art’.14 Ruskin, however, used the same aesthetic model to disparage Catholic art. Because he associated artistic merit with artistic function – the ‘service either of great and just religion, or of some unselfish patriotism, and law of such national life as must be the foundation of religion’15 – he evaluated Catholic ritual and artwork as doctrinally and aesthetically inferior. His treatment of the physical artefact points up the poor materials and faulty workmanship in Catholic ‘tinsel and glitter, in the gilding of the shrine and painting of the image, in embroidery of dingy robes and crowding of imitated gems’.16 The lexical range of this passage elides material and moral evaluation, tactile phenomena and faith. Like its altar furniture, Ruskin implies, Catholicism flaunts an impoverished and illusory creed. Catholic liturgical art reveals the failure of Catholic truth because its superficial showiness contradicts ‘the true spirit of Christian offering’. Because early and mid-Victorian aesthetics hailed the artist as prophet and truth-teller, the sincerity and personal views of the creator were taken as seriously as the creation itself. John Stuart Mill is one of many nineteenthcentury critics who define a poet’s greatness in terms of ‘the fineness of his


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236 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature perceptions’ and the ‘moving thoughts’ through which his ‘feeling speaks … and finds response in other hearts’.17 Protestant assessments of Catholic ritual use this interpretive model to reinforce the immorality of the Church of Rome. The contrast of opulent rites to the spareness of Protestant services is read as an explicit sign of popery’s greed and sensuality. Only a decadent clergy would sanction luxurious devotions that pander to excess and, ‘without limitation and restraint, [to] the various demands of their lusts and passions’.18 Similar assumptions underpin Fanny Trollope’s scandalized descriptions of Catholic worship in A Visit to Italy (1842). She detects a disreputable foreign sensibility in the magnificence of Catholic liturgical art and architecture. Disturbing traits of Italian national character, such as ‘idleness’ and ‘the love of pleasure’, are manifest in the lavishly ornamented churches and in the ‘eternal recurrence of Popish fêtes and festivals’, which, to her mind, simply encourage laziness and weakness of will.19 As well as the signifying potential of Catholic devotions and their related arts, the emphasis in Catholic liturgy on performance and spectacle drew conspicuous attention to their existence as concrete, material practices. The allure of their richness and mystery seemed to open the door to a dangerous aesthetic and religious depravity. Excitement seemed to replace God’s truth as the main focus for the devotee. Early Victorian concern about the way Roman devotions emphasized the sensuous and eclipsed the spiritual anticipates the panic about Aestheticism in the 1870s and 1880s. The notorious theorist of art for art’s sake, Walter Pater, who extolled the charm and emotional power of Catholic ritual, though he was himself agnostic, argued that the experience of art had nothing to do with moral teaching. Responding to the aesthetic moment meant relishing the pleasure of aesthetic emotion, of ‘being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects’.20 Like dangerous Catholic rituals, avant garde theories of art in the last half of the century privileged emotional thrill rather than the communication of shared knowledge. As Eneas Sweetland Dallas argued, aesthetic power depended not on intellectual ‘content’ but on the perceiver’s unconscious: The poet’s words, the artist’s touches, are electric; and we feel those words, and the shock of those touches, going through us in a way we cannot define, but always giving us a thrill of pleasure, awakening distant associations, and filling us with the sense of a mental possession beyond that of which we are daily and 21 hourly conscious.

Through delicious sensation, art conveyed the perceiver out of the conscious domain in an ecstasy that seemed semi-sexual.


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From the start of the period, Protestant polemics had already modelled – and condemned – this aesthetic of sensation through critiques of Catholic ritual. Indignant responses to Catholic worship voiced suspicion of the pleasures of beautiful liturgical artistry which threatened to overstimulate the nerves and produce other irrational, even pseudo-sexual, effects. Catholic ritual was sensationalized as a practice that ‘ravishe[d] the eye and the ear, [but also] stupefie[d] the conscience, and starve[d] the soul’.22 The sensuality of grand ceremonial was termed a seduction of the intellect and the will. It sacrificed content to form, self-restraint to indulgent physical and emotional stimulation. Popish ritual might offer ‘enchanting music and the most fascinating mummeries’ and ‘splendour of vestment’, but such distractions left the mind open to the control of others.23 Catholic ritual seemed a perfect illustration of the subversive potential of artistic form; its pleasurable sensations could easily sidestep conscious thought and control. Charles Kingsley, for instance, believed Catholic ritual to be dangerously addictive. Its beauty lured the unsuspecting into ‘habits of religious excitement’, numbing reason through the ‘self-forgetfulness’ of ‘the spiritual laudanum bottle’.24 Even the more sympathetic Frederick Faber observed, in his Tractarian days, that Catholic ecclesiastical arts and practices were ‘fitted to the deepest devotional cravings of which we are capable’, and, as such, spoke strongly to private instincts, fears and desires.25 At a time of general uneasiness about the changing basis for ‘intellectual authority in all disciplines of knowledge’,26 multiple discursive fields, including history, anthropology and comparative religion, were invoked to police the boundaries of artistic and religious expression by demonizing the Catholic devotional sensibility. Widespread suspicion of the (Catholic) aesthetic of sensation was enflamed by its association with a foreign and decadent religious sensibility. By suggesting the Church of Rome appropriated the worst of strange cultures, Catholic worship could be represented as both outlandish and racially suspect, a sign of ‘every other unchristian superstition’ and idolatry.27 To this end, Catholic rites were frequently connected to heathen religious practices past and present. Charles Kingsley referred to them as ‘pure Buddhism’,28 suggesting their incomprehensibility but also their source in an un-English, inferior society. Others cited the unfamiliar actions and objects of Catholic ritual, such as the use of statues, holy water and incense, as evidence that popery had regressed from Apostolic simplicity to primitive ‘[p]agan rites, forms, and ceremonies’, complete with idol worship and superstitious magic.29 Hyperbolic rhetoric emphasized Catholic ritual as the remnant of a primitive, degenerate past. Churches were ‘temples’,


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238 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature images the subject of ‘adoration’, ‘pretended saints’ substitutes for ‘[h]eathen deities’, and processions and architecture an echo of ancient Egypt.30 Even the professional anthropologist E. B. Tylor commented on the fascination of the Catholic Church ‘to the ethnologist for its maintenance of rites more naturally belonging to barbaric culture’.31 The cultural strangeness of Catholic baroque ceremonials and art is a strong element in the writings of Victorian travellers to the Continent. In many of these works, Catholic devotions are made to seem shocking because they are discussed as aesthetic-cultural objects, devoid of spirituality. Commentators are ambivalent, however, about whether the fault of such worship lies with heretical beliefs or with the dangerous attractions of aesthetic sensation itself. In A Visit to Italy, Fanny Trollope, for example, describes pontifical High Mass as both preposterous and meaningless. Her evaluation intimates that the best standards of aesthetic judgement are aligned with national (British) and religious (Protestant) perspectives: ‘I cannot say that I was greatly edified by the peculiar ceremonies of this papal worship (I speak as a heretic)’ (I, 270). Her mocking self-characterization as a ‘heretic’ in Catholic eyes confirms she analyzes these inexplicable art forms from a healthy, objective standpoint, untinged by fanaticism and error. Underneath this off-hand dismissal lies an aesthetic, rather than theological, belief: that the value of any art lies in its capacity to embody and express ‘shared symbolic knowledge’.32 Trollope’s criticism of Roman ceremonial that positions her as outsider implies that cultural capital, not beautiful style, guarantees aesthetic value. Trollope’s single-minded focus on the outward form of Catholic arts of worship establishes a clear relationship between aesthetic principles and religious and cultural rectitude. In this way, she implies the insufficiency of art that prioritizes sensuous form. Emphasizing only the externalities and concrete details of the ritual, Trollope constructs Catholic liturgical arts as defective signifying practices offering little for the soul. As foreign objects and acts, they remain empty signifiers, pointing to meanings that are unintelligible or even non-existent. This analytical method effectively strips Catholic liturgy of spiritual import and worth. Instead of considering the metaphoric or affective possibilities of material form, Trollope applies empirical tools to concrete phenomena. She calculates the duration of each ceremonial activity and reads the dynamics of foreign power in the difference ‘between the time bestowed on prayer, and that devoted to the homage offered by each cardinal to the pope’ (I, 270). Overall, Trollope’s breezy refusal to consider religious ritual expressively reinforces an aesthetic that subordinates emotional pleasure and symbolic structures to didactic moral


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and religious instruction. The foregrounding of sensuous luxuriance and beauty is associated only with heretical and subversive intentions. In her eyes, artistic merit is derived solely from the communication of orthodox cultural attitudes and Protestant beliefs. Charles Dickens’s critique of Catholic art in Pictures from Italy (1846) similarly epitomizes Victorian uneasiness about the power of aesthetic sensation. However, his strategy is to sensationalize by overwriting, rather than suppressing, its emotional effects. Dickens focuses primarily on the capacity of Catholic devotional practices to bypass the perceiver’s rational control. Imagery of theatricality, pathology and Orientalism is repeatedly used to indicate the dangers of elaborate ornamentation and sensuous form. Such rhetoric implies that the sensations aroused by beautiful ceremonial are actually illusory, unnatural and immoral. His descriptions of the spectacular ostentation of church decoration, for example, suggest that concrete beauty and splendour can be a gorgeous display disguising a debased spirituality. In Genoa, the rich altar furnishings of San Lorenzo, including candles, small silver lamps and gold-embroidered draperies, make an impact like a good stage trick, ‘very mysterious and effective’.33 The majestic ceremonies of St Peter’s are summarized as ‘the opening scenes in a very lavish pantomime’ (120). The faithful are like well-drilled actors in their strict adherence to every minute detail of observance. Dickens notices with bemusement how, at the consecration of the Eucharist during a Papal Mass, ‘every man in the guard dropped on one knee instantly, and dashed his naked sword on the ground’ (124). Even the pomp of a papal procession discloses the mundane frailty beneath elaborate spectacle. The Pope borne through the crowd is no more than some foolish carnival effigy; with ‘a great mitre on his head, and his head itself wagging to and fro as they shook him in carrying, he looked as if his mask were going to tumble off ’ (124). The language of materialistic excess permeates Dickens’s description of St Mark’s in Venice in a way that makes a susceptibility to aesthetic sensation equivalent to an illness or state of regression. Dickens’s own lavish diction certainly indicates that the cathedral’s baroque luxuriance cannot fail to impress. The building of ‘immense proportions’ appeals to every sense of the perceiver, for it is ‘golden with old mosaics; redolent of perfumes; dim with the smoke of incense; costly in treasure of precious stones and metals, glittering through iron bars’ (84). Yet this ornate opulence is fakery; its impact is like an hallucination: ‘unreal, fantastic, solemn, inconceivable throughout’. Underlining this alienating effect, Dickens describes the cathedral’s magnificence as typical of ‘the wild luxuriant fancies of the East’. Such


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240 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature comments characterize Catholic arts of worship as gorgeous, but redolent with the unspeakable dreams of a pagan and infantile Orient. Even the effigies of roadside shrines imply a childish outlook since they are like ‘a perfect toy-shop of little objects’ (112). Catholic decorations and furnishings reflect the degraded taste of a savage culture content with ‘the veriest trash and tinsel’ (51). Catholic devotional practice is also tainted by the mystery of the Eastern Other in Dickens’s eyes. The familiar sign of the cross made by the Pope when blessing the crowd becomes unnameable, reduced simply to a sinister and secretive ‘mystic sign’ (124). Even the ‘monotonous, heartless, drowsy chaunting’ (136) at services is made to seem a menacing Oriental deceit, inducing a hypnotic torpor that creeps over the observer ‘like a mild dose of opium’ (48). In fact, Dickens’s imagistic range neatly encapsulates the three distinctive aspects of the sensationalized representation of Catholic ceremonial that circulated widely in Victorian culture: its material splendour; its emotional appeal; and its capacity to affect the practitioner in powerful, irrational ways. For a nineteenth-century readership, these tropes suggest that only the credulous or depraved would succumb to such aesthetic taste (and the Church which promotes it). Victorians understood that Catholic worship generated a range of symbolic meanings with cultural, as well as spiritual, import. Chris Brooks has shown how the nineteenth-century interest in the past, including the religious past, developed appreciation that ‘cultural practices and products’ had an intimate relation to ‘the social formations to which they belonged’.34 Victorians became accustomed to interpret all manner of aesthetic experience, including the arts of worship, in terms of the cultural sensibility that underpinned it. Schooled by Ruskin, nineteenth-century audiences appreciated art as the embodiment of social meanings: ‘the Polity, Life, History, and Religious Faith of nations’.35 Once the arts are read as cultural texts in this way, the deliberate adoption of a style associated with a foreign sensibility can become a provocative ideological act, invoking the authority of difference rather than of conformity. For this reason, Catholic religious ceremonial and the aesthetic of sensation with which it was aligned became signifiers of heterodoxy in Victorian cultural politics. Artistic practices that drew on the stylistic and semantic field of Catholicism – from Protestant religious services to poems intended for a secular marketplace – were treated by the middle-class establishment as culturally subversive. The depravities associated with Catholic worship, for instance, were read into Church of England Ritualism and early Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry; as a result, both were deemed socially disruptive. At the heart of the criticism were the


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usual aesthetic-religious complaints about Catholic worship with its joint appeal to sensation and the (sensationally) unorthodox. Ritualism was a mid-nineteenth-century outgrowth of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement that had commenced in 1833. The Tractarians sought to reinforce Church of England authority and spiritual independence by stressing the apostolic lineage of the Church and its pre-Reformation links to Western Christianity. Mediaevalized Catholic styles of worship – termed ‘advanced ceremonial’ or Ritualism – became a visible expression of this argument. Those who disapproved of this new liturgy invoked lurid interpretations of Roman Catholic ceremonial in order to police Anglican borderlines. Drawing on the widespread public sense of the ‘cultural queerness of Catholicism’,36 repudiators of Ritualism fastened on the ‘Roman’ abnormality of its adherents. Their ‘strangeness’ was both religious and cultural. Ritualists’ inclination to the practices of a foreign faith was treated as an aberration; equally suspect was their apparent taste for a liturgical aesthetic of sensation that privileged sensuous delight over doctrine and sanctification. Ritualism was troped as deviant, the off-shoot of a doubly heretical sensibility which relished the dubious in religion and liturgical arts. Clerical authorities and the secular press denounced the movement as perverse foppery, ‘a fastidious, maundering, die-away effeminacy which is mistaken for purity and refinement’.37 The Dean of Chichester chastised Ritualists for the cultural (not doctrinal) failings evidenced in their modest liturgical revisions. He disdained the lack of manly vigour and patriotic fervour evident in ‘this miserable resuscitation of effete Medievalism. It is of the earth, earthy, an unspiritual, an unwholesome, a mawkish, a wholly un-English thing.’38 The establishment of a Royal Commission on Ritual and the passing of the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1875 both show a continued cultural suspicion of Catholic devotional arts, based at least in part on its implied aesthetic values. The widespread view of Catholic liturgy as culturally subversive also impinged on secular artistic practice, though it informed the judgements of mainstream reviewers and the work of avant garde artists and poets in different ways. The reception of early Pre-Raphaelite painting and the poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti demonstrates the general suspicion of Catholic emblems and artistic effects, whatever their context. Rossetti’s paintings, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini, as well as Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents, disconcerted critics with the handling of sacred subject matter in a highly naturalistic manner. However, it is the Catholic symbolic language incorporated into such homely family scenes that seemed


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242 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature especially alien and thus aesthetically repugnant. Early reviews of these works imply that their artistic weaknesses have a Catholic origin. The paintings are referred to as ‘monkish follies’, a phrase that constructs them as outmoded, ludicrous failures.39 The core artistic reference points for reviewers echo the tropes of deviance found in Protestant denunciations of Catholic worship. Particular scorn is reserved for the heavy reliance on material detail and the use of mystic, incomprehensible signs and symbols: ‘a circumstantial Artlanguage from which we recoil with loathing and disgust’.40 The language of these judgements muddles criteria from aesthetic, religious, cultural and ethical fields. In style and content, the work fails because it is foreign (full of ‘eccentricity’ and ‘waywardness’), unhealthy (in its ‘strange disorder of the mind or the eyes’), and degraded (with its ‘servile imitation’ and ‘puerility’).41 Read iconographically and stylistically as Catholic, these paintings seem to present all the moral dangers traditionally associated with the emotionalism of ‘Romanist’ ritual. These ‘instance[s] of perversion’ are said to appeal to ‘morbid infatuation’ and to seduce ‘minds that are intellectual without belonging to the better orders of intellect’.42 Even Ruskin, a keen defender of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, took pains to distance himself from the group’s ‘Catholic’ sympathies when he enthusiastically defended their work. In a letter to The Times on the subject, he reinforced his cultural credibility by assuring readers that ‘[n]o one who has met with any of my writings will suspect me of desiring to encourage them in their Romanist and Tractarian tendencies’.43 His long essay on the Brotherhood also elides Catholicism with unacceptable artistic style and principles: ‘If their sympathies with the early artists lead them into mediaevalism or Romanism, they will of course come to nothing.’44 In the Victorian marketplace, an alien sensibility predicates aesthetic and commercial failure. The careful family management of Rossetti’s own literary reputation demonstrates another way in which the countercultural associations of Catholicism shaped artistic values in the nineteenth century. In 1848, Rossetti sent a manuscript collection of poems to William Bell Scott and Leigh Hunt entitled ‘Songs of the Art-Catholic’. In terms of content, a casual reader might be forgiven for assuming that the collection expresses a specifically Catholic spirituality. ‘Mater Pulchrae Delectionis’ (1847), for instance, incorporates phrases from traditional Catholic prayers to Mary, elevates her to a place beside the Godhead, and foregrounds distinctive Roman beliefs, such as Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven and the intercession of the saints for those on earth. ‘Seated beside the Ancient Three / Thyself a woman Trinity’, Mary is portrayed as beautiful daughter, wife and mother of God,


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bending her ear to those on earth, shaking back her long tresses the better to listen to humanity’s griefs.45 Even William Bell Scott, who had some personal acquaintance with the family, erroneously believed Rossetti was Catholic due to his favoured subject matter and symbolic style: ‘He is an Italian, a Romanist of course, worshipping that young Nazarene, the “mother of the body of Christ”.’46 Whatever other criticisms were made of the Pre-Raphaelite sensibility and technique, it was the charge of Catholic sympathies that most alarmed William Michael Rossetti in his construction of the Brotherhood’s public image. He took pains to record in his diary that Ruskin’s imputations of Romanist tendencies were ‘utterly non-existent in fact’ but that ‘it might not be amiss to repudiate [them]’.47 Even though he muses that such a public correction would ‘afford an opportunity for entering into any other details or rectifications seemingly advisable’, it is the rumour of a Catholic foundation for the work that he is most anxious to quash. Similarly, a few days later he again notes bad reviews, but the only detailed allegation that he troubles to set out is a Punch piece ‘directed in part against supposed Romanizing tendencies’ (304). Throughout his career, Dante Gabriel Rossetti manoeuvred to counteract such assumptions by systematically erasing or at least modifying traces of a Catholic dimension in his early work. His brother recorded that the title of the painting Ecce Ancilla Domini was changed to The Annunciation ‘to guard against the imputation of “popery’ (309) by dropping the Latin. Similarly, he altered the title of ‘Mater Pulchrae Delectionis’ to the simpler ‘Ave’ (1870) hesitating to reprint it ‘because of the subject’.48 Such strategies of defence show how the sensationalizing of Catholic ritual as deviant was an effective instrument for controlling aesthetic boundaries. However, the case of Rossetti also suggests that particular significations attached to Catholic worship in the period could offer a route to aesthetic resistance. Radical artistic viewpoints could be articulated by drawing on the connections between Catholic devotional art, the privileging of sensuous form, and its strange emotional effects. When he decided the technical excellence of ‘Ave’ outweighed the risk of anti-Catholic scorn, Rossetti composed a footnote to explain (away) its apparent religious perspective: ‘This hymn was written as a prologue to a series of designs. Art still identifies herself with all faiths for her own purposes: and the emotional influence here employed demands above all an inner standing-point.’49 Read closely, this apologetic gloss is actually a subtle declaration of a new, unorthodox poetics. Rossetti makes use of contemporary assumptions that Catholic arts of worship are all form without moral content and function; but he uses this in a positive way,


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244 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature treating Catholic iconography as a technical resource for purposes of design. This explanation severs artistic form from a literal-minded assumption that art can and should have an external referent, such as doctrine or moral prescription. He shifts attention instead to emotional tone and evocative effects and away from extra-textual meanings. His insistence that the competent reader make an imaginative projection into the ‘inner standing-point’ of the poem blocks the simplistic identification of poetic persona or voice with the personal beliefs of the poet and the artist’s spiritual disposition. Finally, Rossetti emphasizes the emotional effects of form, here embedded in religious symbolism, rhetoric, tropes and narrative. His new aesthetic resembles Catholic devotion itself, stimulating powerful feelings through beauties of design rather than doctrinal communication. In Rossetti’s critical explanation, the Catholic elements of ‘Ave’ provide the basis for an intense aesthetic thrill arising from a direct encounter with what is concrete, awe-inspiring, beautiful and strange. Rossetti’s imaginative writing uses allusions to Catholic piety and worship to dramatize this avant garde artistic credo. In the short story ‘Hand and Soul’ (1850), Chiaro, the artist-hero, becomes ‘aware that much of that reverence which he had mistaken for faith had been no more than the worship of beauty’.50 Throughout the narrative, Rossetti appropriates elements drawn from Catholic devotional art to propose a poetics of defamiliarization. Unique personal experience must feed an artist’s inspiration. In Chiaro’s mediaeval Catholic world, only religious worship, with its investment in a kind of sensuous spirituality, offers the model for the union of matter and vision that is fundamental to all great art. In Rossetti’s formulation of an aesthetic of beautiful sensations, it is the distinctive methodology of Catholic worship, rather than any specific spiritual meaning, that stimulates the poetartist. This view is put into practice in his sonnet, ‘St Luke the Painter’ (1849), an allegorical history of Western art since Christ. The poem characterizes aesthetic change as an evolutionary progress. Shifts in subject matter are used to represent significant moments of cultural transition. Artistic effort thus moves steadily from the depiction of the religious to a delight in the material and secular world. Significantly, Rossetti uses the trope of devotional practice to signify key moments in this history. In the opening lines of the poem, the personified figure of Art is taught by St. Luke ‘to fold her hands and pray’ (l. 3). As religious faith wanes and the images of worship are gradually emptied of significance, Art turns from the obscure ‘mist / Of devious symbols’ to find inspiration in an exhilarating natural world of ‘sky-


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breadth and field-silence’ (ll. 4–5, 6). Even in this worldly context, artistic creativity is presented in terms of performance and concrete form, coded as an act of religious worship. Sensuous appreciation inspires mind, spirit and feeling with sublime insight. Art ‘looked through these to God and was God’s priest’ (l. 8). The poem acknowledges, of course, that no single artistic approach remains fresh forever. New stimulus inevitably wanes, and artistic sensibility collapses into repetitive conventions, those ‘soulless self-reflections of man’s skill’ (l. 11). Nonetheless, the figure of Art promises renewal; and new inspiration is once more described in terms of a devotional act: ‘Yet now, in this the twilight, she might still / Kneel in the latter grass to pray again’ (ll. 12–13). Religious practice has become the legitimizing metaphor for the religion of art. In part, one might surmise that these vague motifs of Catholic worship reflect Rossetti’s own delight in provoking the establishment. However, the allusions also make a serious point that draws on the Victorian view of Catholic ritual as spiritually, aesthetically and culturally Other. For Rossetti, unorthodox Catholic arts of worship offer an unorthodox model of the artistic process that approximates his personal creative method: the union of the senses, the feelings, the intellect and the spirit in a sensual act of devotion. For the Catholic, the act will be a ritual ceremonial adoring Divinity; for the agnostic poet-painter Rossetti, it will be the act of poetry-making performed in the erotic and visionary worship of Beauty as Truth.

The New Catholic Baroque The interpenetration of sense, passionate feeling and spiritual intensity expressed in Rossetti’s controversial Art Catholicism is also central to the revolution in English Catholic ceremonial style from the late 1830s. Unlike the restrained devotional practices of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Victorian Catholic worship is marked by flamboyance and emotional fervour, a highly developed sensuous apparatus, and, most strikingly perhaps, a spirit of vulgar showmanship. The adoption of Italianate devotions that were evocative and sensuous suddenly gave a distinctive and sensational glamour to Catholic culture in England.51 A description of the neo-baroque ‘Italian Renaissance’ Brompton Oratory, opened in 1884, suggests the exotic appeal of the new style. Mediterranean richness eclipsed the secular dreariness of the Victorian urban scene, a point obvious in the comparison of


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246 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature the dull and dismal streets of our great city and its begrimed, driven and melancholy population, with nothing to raise their spirits but a bank holiday … [with] [p]rocessions with banners and images, confraternities with their habits, festoons and lights innumerable, orchestral and popular music – all that makes a Catholic 52 Feast … as completely and simply as in a Catholic country.

With its massive space and majestic dome, its architectural solidity and its awe-inspiring baroque statues, the Oratory connects sensuous magnificence with Infinity. The high altar painting of St Philip Neri in ecstasy is both tribute to the founder of the Oratorians and a celebration of highly charged emotional states and the intimate exposure of a soul. The New Catholic Baroque of the Oratory is an excellent emblem of a distinctive aesthetic sensibility that comes to permeate Victorian Catholic culture.53 To Protestant onlookers, the aesthetic of sensation expressed in this new devotional style was typical of Catholic sentimentality and excess. John Ellerton, an Anglican, commented on the lack of decorum which disgraced Catholic hymns with their ‘[t]heatrical displays of emotion’ and ‘sensuous language’.54 Robert Bridges was even more scathing about the pre-eminent hymnist, Frederick Faber: ‘I have nothing to say, except that a maudlin hymn of his … provoked my disgust’.55 For Victorian Catholics, such stylistic extravagance gave them a cultural identity that was, simultaneously, both contemporary and highly distinctive. Evangelical revivalism had encouraged a trend to the dramatic in religious preaching and services in the nineteenth century. As Mary Heimann has suggested, some revisions to Catholic liturgy were of a piece with this style.56 A lingering post-Romantic nostalgia for the sublime and the picturesque is also just detectable in the Catholic taste for material grandeur, especially in architecture. However, the most florid aspects of the Catholic devotional revolution grew in popularity with the restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850 and the enthusiasm for papal authority in Rome encouraged by the likes of the Ultramontane Cardinal Wiseman. A new repertoire of services, extended by unfamiliar but splendid Continental ceremonies, provided a revised historical framework for English Catholic identity. No longer relegated to the margins of domestic culture, English Catholicism visibly announced its international lineage and European associations. By the last decades of the period, even the style of major ecclesiastical buildings, like the baroque architecture of Brompton Oratory and the Early Christian Byzantine design of Westminster Cathedral, looked assertively outwards, beyond the stylistic boundaries of the nation. After Newman’s conversion in 1845, Catholics in general were more confident; vociferous middle-class converts relished the chance to confirm their


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new identities and express their fervour in a spectacular ceremonial form. To outsiders and Catholics alike, the new public devotions, like the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and Quarant’ Ore (Forty Hours Devotion), highlighted the Church’s distinctive doctrinal edge, including belief in the Real Presence of the Eucharist. The moving Stations of the Cross service invited reverent meditation on the details of the Passion in a penitential way; but its genuflections, processing, prayers and hymns also created an event of theatrical pity and pathos. Ceremonies associated with lay confraternities in full regalia and dedicated to various patron saints dramatized a uniquely Catholic conceptualization of a vibrant community of faithful both living and dead, and provided comforting reassurance of a pious believer’s access to saintly mentors and helpmates. Church art, architecture and ritual developed in ways that gave Victorian Catholicism a distinctive thematic flavour, too. Many devotional arts and practices highlighted the mystery of God’s contradictory immanence and transcendence. Highly ornamented altar furnishings, liturgical vestments and ceremonial artefacts, as well as actions like the heavy incensing of the altar, showed reverence to the Divine Being physically present in the sanctuary and, simultaneously, acknowledged the grandeur of God the Omnipotent to whom pleasing offerings should be made. Demonstrative hymns, prayers and services catered in part for working-class and Irish ‘folk’ tastes, but encouraged all Victorian Catholics to respond more emotionally to Christ’s majesty, suffering and sacrifice. Psychologically draining retreats and outdoor meetings that incorporated sentimental touches became increasingly common. These put special emphasis on self-castigation and repentance. A mission preached in Rotherhithe in 1861 culminated ‘with indulgences offered for kissing a 10ft. cross that bore a red thorn crown and had scourges and a lance and sponge attached to it’.58 The notes made by Lady Georgiana Fullerton during a retreat in 1862 show the spread of the cult of abjection in private devotional experience, too: ‘The soul a running ulcer,’ she reported with grim satisfaction: ‘Saw the Father immediately afterwards – told him how depressed I was in body and mind.’59 By the 1850s, this transformation of Catholic arts of worship was well institutionalized in England.60 With its ornate decorative elaborations, strong imaginative appeal to the senses and feelings, and focus on dramatic self-exposure, this devotional style expresses a sensibility usually associated with an earlier period of Catholic renewal: that of Counter-Reformation baroque culture, itself a matter of revived academic interest in the nineteenth century.61 Notwithstanding the theoretical difficulties of defining a distinc-


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248 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature tively baroque literary method and subject, certain principles underpinning the seventeenth-century baroque aesthetic have close parallels to the aesthetic of sensation that informs Catholic worship in Victorian Britain.62 Like the architecture of Brompton Oratory and new popular forms of devotion, baroque culture marries the sensuous and mystical. In baroque plastic arts, massive material luxuriance and horizontal structures, befitting the Deity’s grandeur and power, are balanced by fluid curves, strong vertical lines, optical illusions, flowing draperies and entwining decorative ornamentation to draw the imagination exuberantly from earth to God’s boundless perfection. Dramatically lit altars and paintings and sculptures of saints lost in ecstatic contemplation perform a similar function. The corollary in baroque literature is a style that is highly, even artificially, ornamented. ‘[F]lorid, precious, decorative’ mannerisms create a kind of ‘sensual mysticism’63 through verbal dexterities, violent syntactic distortions, bold paradox, and ingeniously elaborate, even bizarre, conceits. The epigraph to ‘The Weeper’ by the seventeenth-century baroque poet Richard Crashaw, for example, is a compressed fusion of shocking images: ‘Loe where a wounded heart, with bleeding eyes conspire; / Is she a flaming fountaine, or a weeping fire?’64 The startling tropes that open this meditation on the tears of Mary Magdalen create a dense linguistic, intellectual and emblematic play on material and emotional contraries: water/fire, tears/blood, desire/sorrow, zeal/pain. These strained, paradoxical joinings demand a response that is simultaneously intellectualized (to decode enigmatic transformations and relationships) and sensual (to imagine the colour, shape and tactility of the objects). In addition to this ‘spiritualization of sense’,65 the fantastic nature of these conceits challenges the cool order of rational humanism. Baroque culture is ‘passionate and ecstatic’.66 The luxuriance of erotic love and selfabandonment that characteristically infuses religious and secular baroque writing is intense and extravagant. A contrapuntal movement of selfexposure and self-display is also a hallmark of the baroque. With extravagant expressions of fervour, baroque devotional literature articulates a ‘genuinely personal relationship with Christ’ that self-consciously reveals the secretive, interior self in an excessive ‘rapture of surrender’.67 To argue that this New Catholic Baroque aesthetic is evident in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Francis Thompson does not suggest a simplistic pattern of direct textual influence from the seventeenth century. Certainly, both men had knowledge of Counter-Reformation literature and were part of networks that had strong connections to the baroque. As a member of the Society of Jesus, Hopkins would have been exposed to the Jesuits’ reputa-


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art catholicism and the new catholic baroque 249 tion as founders of the baroque revolution in seventeenth-century Europe. He celebrated the work of the baroque composer, Henry Purcell, and knew the writing of the English baroque Jesuit poet, Robert Southwell. Coventry Patmore, who corresponded with Hopkins and also knew Thompson, was another connection to Counter-Reformation poetry and religious expression, as he had an interest in baroque contemplatives (such as St John of the Cross) and poets (such as Crashaw).68 Francis Thompson produced a fine essay on Crashaw whose dense linguistic style and strange, contorted conceits bear considerable resemblance to Thompson’s own poetic idiom. Hopkins also took pleasure in the complex, distorted linguistic style and striking, violent comparisons typical of baroque religious poetry. Indeed, he could on occasion produce the macabre conceits for which baroque poetry is notorious. As a fellow Jesuit recalled: ‘[h]e was not always judicious in his sermons; once he compared the Church to a milk cow and the tits to the seven sacraments’.69 Some critics have remarked in general terms on baroque rhetorical and emblematic techniques appropriated by Hopkins and Thompson, accounting for these variously in the light of a sacramental attitude to nature, Catholic theology or even a moral eccentricity based on masochism, frustrated sexual desire and a decadent ‘surrender to the aesthetic moment’.70 Yet none of these explanations gets to grip with the stylistic and thematic indebtedness of their poetry to a Catholic devotional tradition that was peculiarly Victorian. The ethos embedded in the New Catholic Baroque – that extravagant ‘operational’ Catholicism of the day – forms the cultural framework in which their poetic techniques and preoccupations developed. On a purely experiential level, both men were drawn emotionally and imaginatively to the rich ceremonial life of Victorian Catholicism. On the brink of conversion when a student at Oxford, Hopkins denied he was drawn to the Church of Rome for ‘fancy and aesthetic tastes’ because ‘bad taste is always meeting one in the accessories of Catholicism’.71 Subsequently, as a Jesuit priest however, he regularly used devotional works popular in the period, including those by Faber, Newman and mystics like Anne Catherine Emmerich.72 In his Long Retreat notes of 1869, he records his distress while reading Sister Emmerich’s account of Christ’s Agony in the Garden and again while watching the Maundy Thursday procession with the consecrated Host. As his journals and diaries indicate, he was moved by many of the new devotional services, including Forty Hours and Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, processions and feast day services for the Sacred Heart. While a few critics have suggested the structural and rhetorical resemblance


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250 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature of his poems to traditional hymns, prayers, homilies and litanies, echoes of Victorian devotional style and themes have received scant attention.73 Hopkins’s prose also bears the methodological imprint of Catholic devotional discourse in the last half of the nineteenth century. Even when he writes privately for himself, his meditations on Church doctrine articulate spiritual experience through shocking images of physical sensation. His religious notes demonstrate a peculiarly Victorian Catholic tendency to hyperbolic expressions of self-exposure and castigation: ‘above all my shame, my guilt, my fate are the very things in feeling, in tasting, which I most taste that selftaste which nothing in the world can match. The universal cannot taste this taste of self as I taste it’.74 When Hopkins explains and justifies his particular poetics of sensation, he adopts a reader-response model that has much in common with the nineteenth-century Catholic view of religious ceremonial. He argues for the importance of artistic form by comparing it, as Jude Nixon has shown, to externalities of devotion such as ritual and prayers, finding both serve ‘some higher, nobler, even moral, cause’.75 In his consideration of poetic techniques, he privileges sensation rather than idea in a manner that parallels Victorian Catholic enthusiasm for luxuriant religious rites. For Hopkins, beautiful form is paramount because it engages the reader’s physical, emotional and imaginative faculties with a special immediacy: Poetry is speech framed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest of meaning. Some matter and meaning is essential to it but only as an element necessary to support and employ the shape which is contemplated for 76 its own sake.

In valuing sound over meaning, Hopkins positions his reader as devotee, succumbing to aesthetic delight and transforming pleasure to adoration of the Divine energy that makes creation possible. Francis Thompson was also drawn to the imaginative stimulus of the New Catholic Baroque liturgy, finding in its richness a contrast to his dull, prosaic family life. An enthusiastic altar server, he appreciated the pattern and symbolic mystery of the complex ceremonies.77 His keen interest in Victorian devotional style is evident in his appreciation of the writing of Faber as well as Newman and in his many poetic references to specific liturgical rites and artefacts.78 Even more explicitly than Hopkins, Thompson establishes parallels between devotional acts and poetic practice and effects. Whether he reflects on art or on religion, he perceives a vital relationship between the


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sensory and emotional pleasures of form and the invisible realities to which it corresponds. In his essay, ‘Form and Formalism’, for example, he uses the Incarnation as a justification for the sensuous elements of Catholic worship and any work of art: Many think in the head; but it is the thinking in the heart that is most wanted. Theology and philosophy are the soul of truth; but they must be clothed with flesh, to create an organism which can come down and live among men … This is a concrete example of an abstract principle – the supreme necessity under which 79 truth is bound to give itself a definite shape.

The same commitment to sensation as a vehicle to truth appears in his notes on poetics. As an ‘ally’ of religion, poetry should be free to enter ‘into the complexity of human sensation’ and describe ‘under a veil of artistic beauty, the amazing, the unfamiliar, and even the portentous phenomena which it encounters’.80 The interrelation of spirituality and sensation to which Hopkins and Thompson allude is central to New Catholic Baroque literary arts, such as hymns, prayers, meditations and sermons. The same extravagance and excess that distinguish the new Italianate ceremonials typify popular devotional writing for a Victorian Catholic readership. In the treatment of God’s aweinspiring grandeur, in appeals to strong emotion as an essential experience of faith, and in the cult of abject self-exposure, devout literature by Catholics such as Faber and Newman triumphantly encapsulates the style, methods and thematics of the ‘foreign’ arts of worship that scandalized nineteenthcentury Protestant culture. This writing is an important reference point for the poetry of Hopkins (written between 1875 and 1889) and that of Thompson (published between 1893 and 1897). Notwithstanding their distinctive artistry, the two poets seem most clearly of their cultural moment in their adaptation of the stylistic and thematic idioms of the New Catholic Baroque sensibility and its aesthetic of sensation. The thrill of the unfathomable emphasized in Catholic liturgical practice is developed in Victorian devotional literature as a way of rendering God’s inexpressible Otherness real and, paradoxically, concrete. Baroque architectural style favours clearly defined spaces that link the material world and the infinite, teasing the imagination through optical puns, paradoxes and illusions. Many Victorian Catholic hymns achieve a similar effect by blending conventional epithets with destabilizing contradictions. In Faber’s ‘Majesty Divine’,81 a traditional material image – nature’s own magnificent display – is used to represent God’s transcendent grandeur:


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252 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Full of glory, full of wonders, Majesty Divine! ’Mid Thine everlasting thunders How Thy lightnings shine! Shoreless Ocean! Who shall sound Thee? Thine own eternity is round Thee, Majesty Divine! (ll. 1–7)

Although the song is simplistic in language, rhythm and rhyme, it is underpinned by playful and paradoxical elements that hint at a more baroque taste. Familiar epithets are deconstructed to extend an understanding of God’s infinite power. Faber acknowledges the ‘unreality’ of all representations by the suggestion that the vast forces of nature are only approximations of God’s ‘glory’ and ‘wonder’. Even the troping power that is the basis of the poem must fail. Human imagination – unrestricted by time and space and capable of embracing what can never be – is ultimately defeated by God’s self-sufficient eternal magnificence. No one can ‘sound’ Him. Similarly, in ‘The Holy Trinity’, God’s revelation of His mystical nature is an illumination that paradoxically renders sight useless: ‘We worship Thee blinded with light’ (l. 63). God’s majesty is not to be understood but to be intuited and praised. In his 1857 sermon, ‘Omnipotence in Bonds’, Newman uses baroque rhetorical extravagance – syntactical variety and balance, a biblical register, contrast and paradox, repetition and accumulation – to dramatize God’s incomprehensible majesty in a way that unites worldly and transcendent: He can make, He can unmake; He can decree and bring to pass, He can direct, control, and resolve, absolutely according to His will. He could create this vast material world, with all its suns and globes, and its illimitable spaces, in a moment. All its overwhelming multiplicity of laws, and complexity of formations, and intricacy of contrivances, both to originate and to accomplish, is with Him but the work of a moment. He could destroy it all in all its parts in a moment; in the same one moment He could create another universe instead of it, indefinitely more vast, more beautiful, more marvellous, and indefinitely unlike that universe 82 which He is annihilating.

Newman’s linguistic flourish and density mimic the limitless, all-encompassing power that he attributes to God. But, like the devotional practice of nineteenth-century Catholicism and baroque architecture, Newman’s prose also expresses a glimpse of Infinity through a monumental summary of the material order. While some scholars have argued that Newman’s homiletic style and tone alter little after his conversion, a clear Italianate flavour is


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apparent in the verbal dexterity and complexity and in the focus on sensory experience as a stimulus to spiritual comprehension and the assent that constitutes faith.83 The passage anchors itself in a massive overview of every human creative endeavour and achievement that signifies Victorian ‘secular’ progress: making, controlling and legislating on earth; uncovering the astronomical secrets of the heavens; detecting the complex laws of matter; building and engineering ‘contrivances’: in fact, knowing and appreciating all the world has to offer which is ‘beautiful’ and ‘marvellous’, be it natural or man-made. Yet the insufficiency of this comprehensive survey is its real meaning; to accomplish all this is nothing for the Omnipotent. Material specifics can never define God’s transcendent Majesty. This is why God’s nature can only be represented aslant, through abstract adverbial qualifiers – ‘indefinitely’, ‘absolutely’, ‘more’, ‘unlike’ – rather than nouns and verbs which limit and define. Similarly, in ‘Pied Beauty’84 Hopkins relies on the inclusiveness of all sensory experience – of objects natural or man-made – to characterize Divine Infinitude. As J. Hillis Miller observes, piedness offers ‘a finite image of the infinite God’.85 Taken as a whole, the poem functions like a religious ritual itself, offering visual and auditory sensation as a vehicle for the apprehension and praise of Divinity. Material phenomena stimulate an intuitive kind of knowing that in turn prompts the impulse to worship. Moreover, in its catalogue of sensations, the poem displays a number of features of the New Catholic Baroque sensibility. Like Newman and Faber, Hopkins represents infinity through a foregrounding of earthly grandeur and material diversity. This ‘method’ of excess is itself a conceit for the limitless nature of God. In an amalgam of specifics and the boundless, the poem spirals exuberantly from overly determined concreteness to the intangible and spiritual, moving from thanksgiving (‘for dappled things’) to adoration of the majestic single source of created plenitude: ‘Praise him’ (ll. 1, 11). In the opening lines, sensuous comparisons of incongruously juxtaposed natural phenomena – the mottled blue of sky, the dappling of a cow, the colour of a mole and the reflective light glancing from the scales of a trout – suggest the power of a Creator with an eye for detail. The quality of diversity itself, with no end to possible variety, is also extrapolated as a mark of God’s infinite playfulness and ingenuity in managing both natural and manufactured orders, with their ‘gear and tackle and trim’. And, finally, Hopkins characterizes God’s majesty in terms of being itself – a paradoxical conflation of abstract and contradictory essences beyond human capacity to design, bring to birth, or hold in imaginative tension: ‘Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) / With swift, slow;


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254 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature sweet, sour; adazzle, dim’ (ll. 8–9). In embracing the multiplicity of all he ‘fathers-forth’, the poem achieves the baroque spiritualization of sense. It unites sensory appreciation and spiritual jubilation in an act of contemplative devotion. In ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, the awe and adoration of God are related to personal perception and experience – baroque in extremity and excess, in excitement and shock. In the opening stanza, God’s majesty is represented simultaneously on cosmic and intimate planes. Like Newman’s Omnipotent Deity, Hopkins’s God controls the vast power and cycles of nature, holding the most elemental forces in check, transcending time in his mastery of ‘living and dead’ (l. 4). Simultaneously, He fashions the intricate physical and spiritual complexity of a single man, binding ‘bones and veins in me, fastened me flesh’ (l. 5). Indeed, God functions like a CounterReformation poet, embracing what is disparate and contradictory in His act of creation.86 Hopkins’s imaginative use of sprung rhythm enacts the same baroque capacity to hold difference in unresolved tension. The first four lines confine the stresses largely to monosyllables, creating a fast-paced, imperious assertion of God’s power and dominion. This thunderous opening is counterbalanced in stanza five. Here, more multi-syllable words carry the three-beat stresses, creating a longer, lilting verse sentence to contemplate God as Mystery, rather than Master. Divinity is invisible, elusive and traceable only by effects. Recalling acts of Catholic worship that simultaneously assert God’s intimate presence on the altar and His distant perfection, the speaker salutes the stars. They convey God’s being, like a fragrant ceremonial incense: ‘wafting him out of it’ (l. 35). Paradoxically both transcendent and immanent, God is the life-vein which sustains ‘the world’s splendour and wonder’ (l. 38), but neither the light nor the fragrance itself. At the end of the ode, Hopkins takes up the position of the fervent and faithful worshipper at a ritual, spiritually intuiting Divine mastery from evocative sensation. God is adored for His cosmic control as the all-powerful ‘master of the tides’ (l. 249); but the world of the senses must inevitably mediate this perception. The deity is a sovereign who ‘heeds but hides’ (l. 256). Francis Thompson takes a more theoretical approach to the representation of Divine grandeur by focusing on the aesthetic problem of representing the unnameable, but his methodology also reflects a baroque devotional style. Counter-Reformation artists drew heavily on emblem theory to deepen spiritual understanding through sensation. To this end, they aimed to stimulate thought by provocation. Their handling of concrete imagery teased curiosity and tested the reader’s own imaginative ingenuity.87 In baroque


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religious poetry, riddles, diagrams, metaphors and conceits point to God’s infinite complexity and the artist’s own dexterity in uncovering it. Correspondence between the world of sensation and infinity lies at the heart of this technique. The ideal poem is ‘a Symbolical Witticism, lightly hinted at by the Divine Mind: elegantly revealed by the mind of man’.88 In ‘The Heart II’, Thompson uses this analogical technique, but also examines its adequacy as a method for troping Divinity. The central emblem of the poem is the heart, a symbol for the state of longing that stimulates self-expression. The sonnet opens with an assertion of the correspondence between the soul and its visible shadow, the body. It concludes by extending this relationship to all human endeavours. In every human creation, the material bears an intimate relation to the imagination and desires that create it: ‘all man’s Babylons strive but to impart / The grandeurs of his Babylonian heart’ (ll. 13–14). However, Thompson also suggests that analogy is more than simple parallel or reflection. It implies a value-laden connection by which the lesser element obtains its quality and significance from the higher source that sustains it. In sacred art, for example, the signifier – ritual, text or ‘hieratic chant’ (l. 6) – gathers meaning and power from the divine referents to which it points, ‘its mighty habitants’. In a twist of baroque wit and density, Thompson employs analogical practice itself as but another conceit for God’s immanence in His creation. Only God has the power to embed His incomprehensible majesty fully and with accuracy in the world He creates. Since ‘[a]ll’s vast that vastness means’, even the lowliest creature of Nature – the worm that God ‘builds’ – contains a ‘scope’ beyond human understanding (ll. 9, 11). The New Catholic Baroque aesthetic of sensation emphasizes the paradox of material form as both a sign of the Creator and an inadequate expression of His comprehensive glory. This conundrum is itself a stimulus to praise and worship. Thompson’s ‘New Year’s Chimes’ dramatizes this principle through a play on the relationship of Utterer and Uttered to establish God’s profundity. In a radical reformulation of the connection between signifier and signified, between form and meaning, he challenges conventional assumptions about the authority of language to express truth. This song of the stars uses a lilting interweaving of contraries to suggest God’s place as the fixed, sure centre of the cosmos: ‘The many things, and the one Thing, / The one that runs not, the many that run’ (ll. 8–9). However, while God’s grandeur shines through His creation, the poem can celebrate, but not penetrate, His mystery. What can be known is the world of the senses. As sign, however, this universe is problematic. The material signifier conveys no referential meaning that the human mind can encompass. Connection to the Divine


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256 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature signified remains endlessly deferred, though desired. Even the poetic structure enacts this enigma through its competing centripetal and centrifugal combinations of sound and visual image. Verbal repetition and the chiming rhyme scheme give coherence to a text which threatens to fragment through its impossible contradictions: ‘unheard’ sounds are audible; night is found in light; leashed hounds are free to run. ‘Ever telling the never told’ (l. 12), creation can only allude to the inexpressible Other that brings it all into being. Like Newman and Hopkins, Thompson rests in the conviction that God’s veiled power can only be surmised from sensation. Nonetheless, for all this intellectual puzzlement, the poem itself becomes an act of affectionate and delighted praise: ‘Sweeter song’s none’ (l. 4). Similarly, in ‘To a Snowflake’, the sensuous evocations of Divine Power render God both accessible and matchless. In this poem, the familiar trope of God as an artist is subject to an exhilarating array of imagistic transformations and conflations. The poetic persona displays his own originality through bold metaphoric transmutations. The snowflake is not just ephemeral ice crystal, but also and at the same time, delicate flower and perfect artefact: ‘O filigree petal!’ (l.3). Only the accomplished Divine Metal-worker in Paradise could surpass such craftsmanship, creating ab initio, then sculpting and embossing ‘[m]ightily, frailly’ (l. 19), just as the poet manipulates language and conceit. Even this domestication of God’s creative power becomes a homage to His infinite inventiveness, however. As the snowflake reminds the poet, for all his emblematic permutations, ‘[t]hou could’st not have thought me!’ (l. 16) An alternative interpretation of Divine grandeur as fearsome rather than ingenious occurs in ‘The Hound of Heaven’ where Eternity is represented by an enormous citadel overseen by a powerful warrior king. God’s spiritual realm is conventionally troped as a place beyond the boundaries of sensation, and hence, obscure to mortal vision. Aside from a distant trumpet blast, the battlements are silent and shrouded in cloud and mist, giving only glimpses of turrets, walls and a threatening figure ‘enwound / With glooming robes purpureal, cypress-crowned (ll. 149–50).89 The speaker’s insight into the Power that rules in this celestial world is audacious. In a mannered shift from King to Divine Farmer, the poem represents God’s omnipotence as a force that stimulates horror rather than joyous amazement. Here is a gleaner of ‘man’s heart or life’ (l. 152) who paradoxically cultivates through destruction. The blunt crudeness of Thompson’s diction – ‘must Thy harvest-fields / Be dunged with rotten death?’ (ll. 153–54) – delivers a shock of aesthetic and emotional disbelief, a new kind of incomprehension of God’s nature and will. This inscrutable Divinity, ambiguously in league with Death, displays a


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power that commands a sublime capitulation, whether that be in adoration or in terror. The predilection for the expression and evocation of such naked, fierce emotion marks a significant difference between Catholicism and Anglicanism in the Victorian period. The Church of England applied its taste for subdued decorum to spirituality and aesthetics alike. While still an Anglican, John Henry Newman warned his congregation that ‘[t]o be excited is not the ordinary state of the mind, but the extraordinary, the nowand-then state. Nay more than this, this ought not to be the common state of the mind.’90 Church of England poetics found aesthetic merit and religious reverence in the understatement of God’s nature, as the Tractarian, John Keble, suggests. In his Lectures on Poetry, he argues that its cathartic effect depends on indirection and reticence. Poetry is ‘a kind of medicine divinely bestowed upon man: which gives healing relief to secret mental emotion, yet without detriment to modest reserve: and, while giving scope to enthusiasm, yet rules it with order and due control’.91 The Tractarian taste for poetic analogy reinforces this appreciation of quiet humility in the face of sacred truth: ‘analogy and Reserve see to it that the [poetic] expression will be veiled, indirect, subdued, and self-effacing’.92 Victorian Catholic devotional and religious art, on the other hand, identified piety and sincere personal faith with overt emotional display. As a convert, Frederick Faber was able to make this comparison with experience from both sides. He suggested that Catholic devotional style had more in common with the fiery excitement of non-conformist worship than with Anglican decorum: One of the most striking things is that the more Roman I get, the more I seem to recover, only in a safe way and with make-weights, of old boyish evangelical feelings instead of the cold gentility-izing ethics of [Tractarian Isaac] Williams 93 and others which never came natural to me.

In such spiritual writings as Growth in Holiness, Faber pursues this idea by distinguishing between piety and faith. The latter entails a workmanlike dedication to God’s ‘worship and service’ – a ‘hard-hearted, stout-willed, businesslike affair’.94 It is a habit of mind, subordinating intellect and will to God’s authority. Piety relates to the warmth of heart and emotional intensity that sustains a personal relationship with God: ‘[e]ither we are lukewarm, or we are fervent’ (431). If not doctrinally admissible as a sign of election, this devoutness is, nevertheless, a significant part of spiritual development: fervour is the state of the saints on earth, and in one sense of the Blessed in heaven; and in its degree, it ought to be the normal state of all who are aiming


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258 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature at perfection. It is at once the growth of holiness, and the strength by which holiness grows. (441)

The same relationship between faith and emotional intensity characterizes Victorian Catholic writing on the function of devotional arts and of religious art in general. In ‘Christian Art’, Nicholas Wiseman argues that emotion stimulates the religious imagination. Theoretically, Wiseman entertains conservative Victorian aesthetic principles. His case for establishing a Catholic school of art in England follows a conventional moral line that treats art as the expression of truth rather than a pleasurable sensation that is good in itself. He takes for granted that there is a direct relationship between the artistic product and the personal beliefs of its creator. This is why he advocates training Catholic artists through the study of old Catholic masters but also through ‘holiness of life’ that the artist might ‘realize in himself the character that he wishes to depict’.95 However, Wiseman’s New Catholic Baroque sensibility is evident in the value he attaches to the emotional effects of aesthetic sensations: ‘[t]he object of all art is to speak to the eye, and, through it, to the feelings; and the object of religious art is consequently to excite, through the sight, religious emotions adequate to the subjects or persons represented’ (361–62). After 1850, and under Wiseman’s episcopacy, such emotional arousal increasingly distinguished Catholic devotional practice. Gerald Parsons has remarked on the ‘experiential spirituality’ of Catholic worship in the Victorian period.96 Services like public rosary and open-air processions involved the laity more explicitly as venerating participants rather than mere onlookers. Flamboyant preaching also legitimated the explicit display of extreme feelings as a unique mark of Catholic identity – an act of social ‘resistance’ in the face of a restrained Protestant culture. At a Redemptorist mission in London, for example, a crowded service for men created such intense emotion that the congregation abandoned all pretence to manly stoicism and ‘burst forth in one long continual wail and lament during, but particularly towards the end of the Fathers’ farewell address’.97 Father Frederick Faber’s sermons similarly cultivated a range of emotive responses by shedding constraints and inhibitions. He defamiliarized the sacred by discussing it in playful domestic terms, a sign of the childlike purity of heart and innocent trust he sought to arouse in the Catholic faithful. Saints became family members and intimate friends; he even called the Virgin Mary, ‘dearest mamma’.98 While the result is a disconcerting blend of the colloquial and the reverent, this overt appeal to emotion through sentimental language and imagery clearly redefined the spiritual experience of Catholic congregations in the nineteenth century.


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Catholic devotional and imaginative literature in the last half of the period cultivates the same emotionalism through a range of ornate, baroque strategies. Particular weight is given to tender but extreme feelings, ranging from affection to horror and aroused largely through extravagant linguistic registers and the representation of subjects associated with violence and suffering. Special significance is attached to the representation of Christ as Deity Incarnate but also as the supreme figure of pathos. Catholic devotional arts shun the more abstract Atoning Sacrifice or triumphant Risen Lord of Victorian Evangelical tradition. Rather, the focus is on the human temperament of Christ – all love and pain – to whom pity and remorse are the only possible responses. For Victorian Catholics, Christ’s physical self is also the explanation for the ritual which Protestants despised. As Coventry Patmore argues, ‘those symbolic acts and rites which few now venture to call mummeries’ are validated by God’s assumption of flesh; the material objects and gestures associated with the Sacraments also flow from this Incarnation.99 When Patmore justifies the ‘intimate participation of the body in the life and acts of the spirit’ (192) rather than the subordination of one to the other, he formulates the aesthetic of sensation that underpins the New Catholic Baroque sensibility. Newman’s ‘Omnipotence in Bonds’ sermon is an excellent example of the way in which the new Catholic devotional ethos cultivates affect through the use of details that are concrete and physical, but also sensational, that is, shocking and unexpected. This sermon is underpinned by the theology of the Incarnation; God’s graciousness in assuming human form to save His creation is an incentive to thanks and adoration. However, Newman’s tropes and image clusters actually devote far more attention to the distressing realities of Christ’s human life, so that the listener’s wonder is eclipsed by sorrow and contrition. The mystery of the Incarnation is not presented as an abstract doctrine to be assimilated intellectually, but a willed act of personal generosity and love that compels an impulsive, sympathetic response. Newman emphasizes the astonishing condescension of a Supreme Being who owes nothing to His creatures, but who embraces every suffering for their salvation. Awe and horror are evoked through the humanizing of God as destitute outcast. Divinity’s decision to embrace the ‘infirmity’ of flesh is represented as a degrading subjugation, ‘an abject captivity’ (88, 83). In every situation, Christ is an innocent prisoner deserving of pity and grief. Newman’s sermon achieves its effect largely from the boldly unorthodox handling of Christ’s bondage and incarceration. He abandons the usual pious sentimentalities of a charming Baby Jesus, a joyful Holy Family, or of Christ


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260 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature as supported by loving disciples with crisis only in the horror of the Passion and Crucifixion. Instead, Newman’s Lord is imprisoned and humiliated continuously and in every way. Crushed in Mary’s womb, strapped physically in swaddling bands and temperamentally in ‘the feebleness of infancy or the slow growth of manhood’ (81), inhibited by His culture’s rituals and expectations, besieged by friends, beset by enemies, and finally tortured, executed and entombed, Christ is, for Newman, the principle of holiness in action. Selfless, obedient and trusting, He is the opposite of sinful pride and insubordination. By tracking each stage of Christ’s human life as a painful submission to the yoke of distressing circumstances, Newman portrays Him as a figure who elicits an immediate sense of identification and obligation. The devotee’s self-consciousness is another feature of New Catholic Baroque emotionalism that this sermon evidences. Awareness of personal feeling is an important part of spiritual formation that embeds sincere belief. In the structural organization of his sermon, Newman follows this principle explicitly. The insistent repetition of the central trope shifts attention from Christ as the passive object of contemplation to the listeners whose sins have necessitated His shackling on earth. The congregation can feel the relentless constraint on Christ’s nature and His continuous anguish through the sermon’s linguistic variations on binding and encasement. The faithful are enjoined, in turn, to convert guilty, horrified awareness into sincere feelings of regret for ‘our haughty contempt for His ordinances, our determination to do things for ourselves without Him’ (89). In The Foot of the Cross, Frederick Faber employs a similar imaginative projection into the human feelings of sacred personages to elicit devotional resolve on the part of his readers. Although he acknowledges that the spiritual and mental agonies of Jesus and Mary ‘transcended all human experience … where no other hearts of flesh can follow them’,100 he draws on melodramatic, concrete images of physical suffering to involve readers directly in the soultorture of Christ and His Mother. Faber’s images are a populist Victorian rewriting of the sensuous spirituality of seventeenth-century baroque: Her pains were martyrdom reversed; for the seat of the anguish was in the soul and flowed over, blistering and burning, on the sympathetic flesh, while with the martyrs the soul poured sweet balm into the wounded flesh, and the heaven within burned more brightly than the lighted fire or the wild beast’s eye without … (89)

The theatrical verbal devices which pepper Faber’s devotional prose also carry an overt emotional appeal. Exclamations, direct address and rhetorical questions allow him to speculate audaciously on Mary’s probable feelings as


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another way of drawing the reader into a closer intuition of the mysterious sensation of holiness: O Mother! We cannot tell how it was, only that so it was! Thou wert all joy, and being so near God, how couldst thou help but be so? Thou wert all sorrow, and what else couldst thou be in those dark abysses of the Passion? (90)

These meditations lead to guiding principles to assist the faithful in their daily service of God. However, even these riddling epithets are framed in terms of emotional pain as the corollary of ecstatic devotion and faith: ‘[t]he house of sorrow is always a house of love’ (94). Moreover, throughout the book, emotional fervour is viewed as the measure of spiritual resolve: O how, after long meditation on the Immaculate Conception, love gushes out of every pore of our hearts when we think of that almost more than mortal queen, heartbroken, and with blood-stains on her hand, beneath the Cross! (92)

Faber’s lavish vocabulary, with its punning play on the sensate and emotive connotations of words like ‘gush’, implies the intensity of Mary’s sorrow and the reader’s loving reverence. Moreover, these horrifying images encourage the spontaneous rush of feeling, so that the reader is transformed from distanced, cool observer to grieving participant in a holy scene. Popular Catholic hymns and prayers of the period use similar sensations to elicit feelings of dismay, pity and sorrow for sacred suffering. Faber’s London Oratory hymn, ‘Jesus Crucified’, and Newman’s prayers to the Sacred Heart both stimulate this intense response through dramatic, direct contact with Christ’s suffering humanity and the Virgin’s maternal heartbreak. Faber, for example, calls explicitly for the devotee’s personal involvement in the scene on Calvary. ‘See’, ‘come and mourn with me’, ‘[c]ome, take thy stand’ (ll. 2, 1, 37) are among the imperatives that imply action and inclusion rather than detached intellectual acknowledgement of a distant event. Additional persuasion is provided by Faber’s use of techniques popularized in CounterReformation baroque meditations. These encouraged reflection on sacred scenes by fleshing out their concrete detail. Faber’s hymn achieves exactly the same effect by imagining the full horrors of the Crucifixion as a continuous Divine Sacrifice, present today to the eye of the Catholic devotee. Christ’s sorrowing mother was there, and is now a figure who communicates directly with the believer: ‘Mary calls us to her side’ (l. 2). Exclamations imply that spontaneous pity is the only possible response: ‘Ah! Look how patiently He hangs; / Jesus, our Love, is crucified!’ (ll. 7–8). In this hymn, physical sensations are merged with the morbidity and ‘feminine tenderness’ associated with baroque religious verse.101 Faber implies that


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262 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature emotional reticence and decorum are impossible, once faced with Christ’s physical agony on the Cross: How fast His Hands and Feet are nailed; His blessed Tongue with thirst is tied; His failing Eyes are blind with blood … (ll. 9–11)

Extravagant diction reinforces feelings of guilt as well as pity for Christ’s exquisite suffering. Punished as a common lawbreaker, the Lord’s only crime is His noble ‘excess of love’ (l. 25). The devotee’s unworthiness in the face of such sacrificial outpouring is heightened even further by a macabre violation of distance. It is not enough to understand the need for contrition. A gruesome and distressing ‘bodily’ presence must also be imagined: Come, take thy stand beneath the Cross, And let the Blood from out that Side Fall gently on thee drop by drop … (ll. 37–39)

While Christ’s own willing sacrifice and care for humanity are implied in a word like ‘gently’, the anguished suffering of loving Mother and innocent Son rebounds more brutally on the spectator. Traditional sentimental responses, like pity and sorrow, are transmuted into punishing feelings of self-loathing and chastisement, violently expressed: Oh break, oh break, hard heart of mine! Thy weak self-love and guilty pride His Pilate and His Judas were … (ll. 33–35)

Newman was among those who had little sympathy for Faber’s emotional excesses, and he commented coolly on various popular devotional texts of the day in terms of their ‘bad taste and extravagance’.102 Nonetheless, he also privileged sensation and the sensational in order to establish a ‘felt’ commitment to a living Christ: ‘I am touched by my five senses, by what my eyes behold and my ears hear … I gain more from the life of Our Lord in the Gospels than from a treatise de Deo.’103 Newman’s comment suggests that there is an essential relationship between sensation, emotion and piety; and, though less melodramatic and sentimental to a modern ear than Faber, he provides another good illustration of the importance of affect in Catholic devotional culture of the period. In his prayers of adoration to the Sacred Heart, for example, his use of the sensation of touch, even more than that of visualization, renders the Incarnate Christ a physical presence commanding pity, horror and terror: ‘for Thou didst burst and break, through agony, in the garden of Gethsemani, and Thy precious contents trickled out, through


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the veins and pores of the skin, upon the earth. And again, Thou hadst been drained all but dry upon the Cross’.104 Meriol Trevor has commented on Newman’s ‘static’ style of meditation, ‘so primitive in comparison with the 105 rich psychology of the mystical tradition of the Counter-Reformation’. But this assessment ignores the extent to which Newman’s prose after 1845 takes on a disconcerting physicality and ingenuity more typical of the new baroque sensibility of Victorian Catholicism. Abandoning the reserved decorum of his earlier Tractarian style, the Sacred Heart prayers graphically depict Christ’s passion as an act of violence. In Catholic iconography, the symbol of the Sacred Heart traditionally represents Christ’s ‘love for human beings … usually but not invariably associating it with his wounds, and with that made by the lance in his side’.106 But Newman’s aggressive tropes of bursting, trickling and draining introduce a new range of associations with a reference point of brutality rather than love. Newman moves quickly from Christ as God to a vision of the Heart as an emblematic vessel, broken, spilled and wasted. The focus on the physical body makes an immediate appeal to feelings of horror and disgust, and thence to guilt and contrition, overwhelming the traditional correspondence between the Heart and the Chalice of the Eucharist, which, for Catholics, contains Christ’s sacred blood. Newman’s prayerful construction of Christ’s presence as a material reality employs linguistic defamiliarization that strengthens feelings of sorrow, regret and penitential resolve. Conventional Christian platitudes – of living within God’s grace and according to His will – take on new urgency and a Catholic nuance when presented as literal and concrete. One case in point is Newman’s effective elision of the heart as a physical organ and as the imagined seat of tender feeling. Because Christ’s Sacred Heart ‘did beat for us’, ‘yearned over us’, and literally ‘ached for us, and for our salvation’ (86), Newman’s later prayer to ‘make my heart beat with Thy heart’ (87) implies a minute-by-minute physical, emotional and spiritual incorporation into God’s presence. The pious metaphor of ‘living in Christ’ is reconceived as an immediate material sensation, involving every action of the body and every feeling. The poetry of Thompson and Hopkins also resonates with the impassioned devotional discourse that distinguishes the New Catholic Baroque style. The solicitation of explicit and extravagant emotional responses, particularly to a physical and sensationalized depiction of Christ’s Incarnation, is evident in many of their works. In Thompson’s ‘Orient Ode’, the structure of the poem enacts both ritual (the Holy Saturday Vigil service before Easter Sunday)


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264 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature and the poet-speaker’s own sense impressions that convert abstract doctrine into a felt reality. The exotic, unfamiliar handling of many devotional beliefs and images suggests a voluptuous, barely contained excitement very much in keeping with the Victorian Catholic taste for spiritual mysteries mediated through rich ornamentation and rhetorical flourishes. Thompson’s baroque excess is particularly evident in the intricate accretion of metaphors forming the backbone of the poem. These entwine nature and Catholic ritual as a means of celebrating the enigma of Christ as Divine and Human, Infinite yet captured both in historical time and Eucharistic sacrament. Fantastic shifts and reversals drive the emotional logic of the poem, finally transforming mundane quotidian reality into an exuberant Christ-centred agape. While Faber and Newman use disturbing visualizations of sacred events and iconography to shake a devotee’s complacency, Thompson employs a complex analogical schema to subvert the reader’s expectations and create wonder. This hymn to the sun opens with a jolting challenge to believers and non-believers alike. Instead of using images of the natural world to allude to the power and majesty of the Divine, Thompson opts for a seemingly sacrilegious reversal of priorities. The detail of Catholic religious ritual is used to magnify a purely natural phenomenon. Lusciously sensual descriptions of the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament build to a crescendo of praise for the sun, an ‘orbèd sacrament confest / Which sprinkles benediction through the dawn’ (ll. 6–7). With twilight serving as a ‘violet-cassocked acolyte’, the so-called sacramental solar presence is raised aloft for adoration ‘[w]ithin the flaming monstrance of the West’ (ll. 11, 15). From this seemingly blasphemous pantheism, Thompson orchestrates a deft intermingling of the profane and sacred, the earthly and spiritual which gives fresh and moving insight into the Incarnation. The whole poem depends on the punning equation of the Sun of the cosmos and the Son of God. Myths of the Sun’s origin – ‘the incarnated Light / Whose Sire is aboriginal’ (ll. 78–79) – and function in bringing warmth and fruitfulness to the Earth become simultaneously the narrative of Christ, Divine Majesty and intimate collaborator in the world of human flesh. With each stanza sustained by this rocking indeterminateness, Thompson gradually develops a breathless suspense about the nature of the ‘signified’ to which this poem of worship points. Periodically, the poetic voice hints at a coded divine mystery to be revealed concerning ‘the ancient miracle’: Till I can translate into mortal wire – Till I can translate passing well – The heavenly harping harmony,


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Melodious, sealed, inaudible Which makes the dulcet psalter of the world’s desire. (ll. 114–18)

Conceits become more strained and exotic in the poet’s intensity to penetrate this secret. At the climax of the poem, Thompson spans a vast range of explanatory narratives that account for the cycle of existence. Myth, biological facts, history, religious rite, biblical song and Catholic doctrine, analogies of the natural and the supernatural: all are crushed and conflated to a single point. For example, in lines 156–95, Thompson begins with packed allusions to the effect of light on vegetation and the process of osmosis, and ends with homage to the Incarnate Christ as the single underpinning principle of divinity and humanity, of the sacred and the secular. The sun’s stimulation of earthly growth, binding ‘gold lightnings’ round ‘the chrysolite of the grape’, is translated into the ‘blood’ of wine that makes ‘the gusty Maenad, drink and dance’, and thence to a nourishing presence in human flesh which in its own terms becomes ‘a tabernacle’. The Sun/Son is ‘Husband’ to earth’s ‘Wife and Church’; a sacrament; a Lord of light and darkness; the binding force of ‘Essential Heavens and corporal Earth’; an object of worship ‘with my gold, my incenses and myrrhs’; an exotic traveller ‘from the spiced / Regions and odorous of Song’s traded East’; a ‘victim daily born and sacrificed’; the source of the fire of poetic inspiration by which ‘the pinion of this longing verse / Beats’. This magnificent compendium, the poetic equivalent of baroque architectural structure rooted in natural solidity and splendour but leading the eye and mind wonderingly to endless space beyond, results in a sudden moment of epiphany. Homage is due ‘[t]o thee, O Sun – or is’t perchance, to Christ?’ The final section gives the answer in the previously inaudible song of stars and heavens: ‘Lo! Christ is here’, ‘Lo here! lo there! – ah me, lo everywhere!’ (ll. 207, 211). The puzzlement and awe that this compacted metaphoric range elicits replicate the believer’s emotional response to the ‘fact’ of the Incarnation and the reality of divine humanity. And Thompson’s interjected ‘ah me’ ensures that a link is sustained between intellectual assent, aesthetic pleasure, and an intimate avowal of wonder. Gerard Manley Hopkins’s evocation of the Incarnate and suffering Christ in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ also combines the clotted emotionalism of the baroque sensibility with the sensuousness that informs much Catholic devotional literature and liturgy of the period. Like Newman’s ‘Omnipotence in Bonds’ sermon, Hopkins’s ode represents Christ’s Incarnation as painful physical captivity from the moment of conception. Life in Mary’s womb is, paradoxically, entombment in a ‘[w]arm-laid grave’ (l. 51). No cloying sentiment is permitted through the conventional image of Jesus as a babe


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266 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature in the stable. Instead, brutal diction, syntactic elision and sparseness, and uncompromising, savage accents ensure the sweet ‘manger’ and ‘maiden’s knee’ are remorselessly connected to the humiliating incarceration in ‘a womb-life grey’ and a torturing Passion (ll. 53, 52). The evocation of Christ’s tormented death similarly dislocates aesthetic convention. The description is linguistically sensuous; violent stress is emphasized by the thudding alliteration and hissing sibilants. The prolonged agony is accentuated in the purposeful extension of a five-beat line with the repetition of articles before each adjective and the violation of rhythmic expectations: ‘[t]he dense and the driven Passion, and frightful sweat’ (l. 53). Nor is Christ’s suffering the only anguish represented. At this moment of highest dramatic tension and doctrinal significance, the colloquial ‘frightful’ and unseemly ‘sweat’ lace the line with uninhibited outbursts of shock and horror. The fracturing of poetic decorum mirrors the loss of the onlooker’s poise and complacency. Instead, the lines express revulsion and deep sympathy for a body in extremis. Throughout the poem, Hopkins exploits new angles on traditional images to recreate Christ’s human suffering as a point of emotional connection between Godhead and creature. The poet inscapes the very essence of Christ’s being, ‘his Lovescape crucified’ (l. 180), by his ‘cipher’ of suffering, the stigmata. In a daring paradoxical contortion, these five marks of violent torture, inflicted on Christ’s body at the crucifixion, are transformed into a badge of honour and nobility, a chivalric ‘signal, cinquefoil token’ (l. 175) won through precious sacrifice. The same heraldic emblem also marks those destined for sainthood, namely St Francis and the tall nun. As instances of unspectacular ‘martyrdom’, both show that an ordinary person might also be numbered among Christ’s elevated company of holy souls. More electrifying, however, is the realization that exquisite suffering is the only emblem of sanctification. Christ touches His elect in both senses of the word, evoking pity and love through a physical pain they all share. New Catholic Baroque features of the poem reinvigorate the familiar doctrinal link of suffering, sacrifice and salvation. The exotic, violent and mystical replace the conventional iconography of Christ as meek lamb and gentle victim. Hopkins’s Christ is relentless and pitiless. He compels feelings of sublime terror as He etches His insignia into the living flesh of His adherents: ‘he scores it in scarlet himself on his own bespoken’ (l. 173). For Isobel Armstrong, the effectiveness of Hopkins’s language lies in its brutal physicality. The ‘very sound of words rather than their “prepossession” or “definition” compels obedience’.107 Understanding the devotional sensibility of nineteenth-century Catholicism enables this point to be taken further.


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art catholicism and the new catholic baroque 267 In stanza eight of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, sensation is synonymous with the act of assent that is faith. Pain, shock and pleasure, voluptuous sensuous gratification, are literally performed. For both speaker and reader, the highly textured language of this passage is the aesthetic analogy of devotional fervour and the swoon of a soul. A lavish array of verbal effects – assonance, asymmetric sprung rhythm, internal rhyme, alliteration, elision and exclamation – invade the ear, appealing to all the senses in an extravaganza of sudden spiritual realization: … How a lush-kept plush-capped sloe Will, mouthed to flesh-burst, Gush! – flush the man, the being with it, sour or sweet, Brim, in a flash, full! – (ll. 59–62)

In a manner resembling the erotic saintly ecstasies beloved of baroque sculptors and painters, Hopkins uses the concrete and sensual to represent capitulation to Christ as a surrender of the whole being: body and feelings, not just mind and soul. Hopkins and Thompson portray other dimensions of Christ’s humanity with an emotional intimacy also characteristic of contemporary Catholic devotional style. In ‘The Kingdom of God’, Thompson emphasizes the mystery of Christ’s continuous and immediate presence through the Incarnation. Divinity is neither abstract nor locked in a Palestinian past, but is uncannily accessible in the familiar. Contemporary urban experience is the new location for Christ’s miracles, for the speaker perceives ‘Christ walking on the water / Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!’ (ll. 23–24). Hopkins evokes a different kind of contemporaneous presence for Christ by using the popular Victorian discourse of homosocial comradeship and fellowsin-arms in ‘The Soldier’. The central structuring image of the sonnet is the chivalric model for same-sex friendship. Its use legitimates two potentially unorthodox emotional acts: the expression of love between men and an unreservedly emotional response to the Godhead. Christ acts as model of both, responding with generous spontaneity to anyone who attempts to ‘do all that man can do’ (l. 11). Physical gesture is the sign of warmth and enthusiastic commitment: For love he [Christ] leans forth, needs his neck must fall on, kiss And cry ‘O Christ-done deed! So God-made-flesh does too: Were I come o’er again’ cries Christ ‘it should be this.’ (ll. 12–14)

Bold shifts in perspective are another kind of poetic shock tactic used by Hopkins to force an intuitive connection with the meaning of Christ’s divine


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268 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature humanity. In ‘As kingfishers catch fire’, Christ is incarnated again in all who enunciate their own selfhood by acting in accordance with their God-given graces. The point is driven home in the sestet when the poet reverses the angle of vision to see suddenly with God’s eyes. For God, ordinary human beings shine forth with Christ’s beauty. The Son becomes ‘[l]ovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his / To the Father’ (ll. 13–14) when individuals express their unique identity in selfless acts. Faith is intensified in an uncanny way in ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection.’ Seeing oneself in Christ is to make the Divinity at once both familiar and strange. This self-recognition is doubly unsettling; as well as identifying with His ordinariness, we can imagine ourselves in His splendour if we have faith: I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. (ll. 22–24)

That such base material could be transformed into Divinity is the mystery and comfort of the Resurrection. The enthusiastic cultivation of empathy and passionate connection with the Incarnate Christ is balanced in Victorian Catholic devotions by an equivalent emphasis on self-exposure as part of an authentic spirituality. With the heightened emotionalism of devotional life, admonitions like Newman’s – to ‘feed on the thought of [Christ], hang on His words; live in His smile, and thrive and grow under His hand … see Him in all things, expect Him in all events’108 – also entail painful examination of conscience and a deep sense of guilt and unworthiness. Private correspondence and personal memoirs suggest that an overpowering conviction of personal sin and failure typified the spiritual experience of many Victorian Catholics. Often these feelings are expressed in forms that seem, to the modern mind, disturbing examples of masochistic abjection. The self-mortifying Teresa Higginson, a popular Victorian stigmatic from Bootle, enacted scenes from the Passion and Crucifixion during ecstatic trances. As Mary Heimann suggests, Higginson seems to have embraced a distinctively Catholic tradition of piety in her conviction that physical mutilation was a just recompense to God for her sins. She felt herself ‘the cause of all that Our Blessed Lord suffered, and I tried each day to hurt myself in some way’.109 Less spectacular private reflections evidence a similar enthusiasm for self-exposure of spiritual depths. A good example can be seen in Herbert Vaughan’s low-key diction that magnifies his sense of personal waste and culpability: ‘My naked crucifix standing here before me


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art catholicism and the new catholic baroque 269 seems to say all day long, “Poor Herbert, what have you done, how little do you, what would you ever do for me?” this it is which makes life sad and, I must almost say, bitter.’110 At the very time the dominant Evangelical sensibility in Victorian culture was moving away from a punishing awareness of sin to the Incarnation as a doctrine of comfort, Catholicism directed devotional life and imaginative literature to expressions of naked self-appraisal, selfreproach and self-loathing. In Catholic prayers and hymns, for example, sentiments of self-castigation form part of the emotionalized texture evoked in the contemplation of Divine majesty and Christ’s touching humanity. In Newman’s Meditations and Devotions, the recognition of God’s ‘incommunicable perfection’ also entails acknowledgement of human inconsequence: ‘For what is every creature in Thy sight, O Lord, but a vanity and a breath, a smoke which stays not, but flits by and passes away, a poor thing’ (96, 97). Personal inadequacy is even more vehemently imagined in images of infirm, even repugnant, physicality: ‘what am I but a parcel of dead bones, a feeble, tottering, miserable being’ (97). Similarly, Faber’s hymns are routinely laced with the excessive rhetoric of self-confessed self-disgust. The exposed soul is represented variously as a ‘worthless heart’, ‘vile’, ‘low’, ‘lukewarm’, ‘sordid’, ‘base’, filled with ‘malice and guile’, ‘wretched’, a ‘slave’ in ‘bondage’, in ‘a dungeon so deep’, enmeshed in a ‘hell in my breast’. The self-exposure has its most extreme expression in images of self-rejection: ‘the worst men I ever knew / Were better men than me’.111 Although these hymns are intended for collective acts of worship, the emphasis is consistently on the individual’s responsibility for this degraded state. Selfhood is shaped by repeated acts of personal failure. Despite God’s forgiveness, the subject chastised in ‘Fight for Sion’ ‘[c]anst play no part but that of a traitor’ (l. 28). The calming ‘Evening Hymn at the Oratory’ opens with a trusting appeal to Divine Love (‘Sweet Saviour! Bless us ere we go’), but quickly moves on to contemplate ‘[t]he broken vow, the frequent fall’ (l. 10). In ‘Our Heavenly Father’, the devotee is positioned as the craven child-sinner who might dare to ‘worship Thee with trembling hope, / And penitential tears’ (ll. 15–16). Faber invokes Christ’s own degradation in his Passion in ‘The Agony’ to show how far the sinful have fallen. In a bizarre conceit, Christ’s bodily waste is sufficient purification for such a detestable sinner: ‘give me of Thy Bloody Sweat / To wash my guilty conscience clear!’ (ll. 51–52). The abjection associated with such self-disgust is on occasion given a worthy name – ‘the gift of holy fear’ (l. 50) – but overall in these hymns, spiritual self-examination leads primarily to the heart’s own deconstruction and ‘unselving’:


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270 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Thus we are never men, self ’s wretched swathing Not letting virtue swell; Thus is our whole life numbed, for ever bathing Within this frozen well. (‘Self-Love’, ll. 25–28)

The pain of self-awareness originates partly in the yearning for a God who is unattainable in His transcendence and perfection. If the soul can burn with painful humiliation, it can also be consumed with ‘the beautiful pining of holy desire’, as Faber thrills in ‘Desire of God’ (l. 14). Indeed, in Victorian Catholic devotional discourse the endless deferral of a connection between creature and Creator is reimagined, not just as anguish, but as erotic longing. The sanctity of the blessed depends on dedicated pursuit of the unattainable. Their love ‘is but hunger to love Him still better’ (l. 20), even though the final plunge into Divine Love guarantees the extinction of ego-identity. Selfexposure brings an awareness of personal unworthiness expunged only by annihilation in the transcendent love the soul is too abject or sinful to seek. In the New Catholic Baroque, the soul is closest to God when trapped in a cycle of stubborn flight, depressed withdrawal and frustrated yearning. If the faithful soul is sometimes reluctant in desire, God is not. In popular Victorian Catholic hymns, like ‘The Pain of Love’, God pursues with the delicate persistence of a lover: ‘Ah, how thy grace hath wooed my soul / With persevering wiles!’ (l. 13), writes Faber. Newman’s sermon on ‘The Mission of St Philip Neri’ uses similar diction to characterize God’s continuing relationship with humanity. He is apparent less in the tempestuousness of ‘the storm, the earthquake and the fire’, than in the affectionate, understated wooing of ‘the calm, soothing whisper of the fragrant air’.112 Even when the soul turns fearfully away from this exposing intimacy, God persistently follows, demanding attention. Notwithstanding the many representations of Divine self-sufficiency in nineteenth-century Catholic devotional art, God’s penetration of His own creation is an equally potent theme. His active engagement with creation is rapturously imagined as a love affair. Paradoxically for the Divinity who lacks nothing, desire is His mainspring and essence. As Faber suggests, God loves to be longed for, He longs to be sought, For He sought us Himself with such longing and love. He died for desire of us, marvellous thought! (‘Desire of God’, ll. 57–59)

The sensationalized language of abjection and desire popularized in devotional literature is apparent in late Victorian Catholic poetry of selfrevelation, even when the psychological states portrayed have no direct


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relation to piety and faith. For example, Hopkins’s Sonnets of Desolation use language drawn from the register of spiritual self-exposure to represent processes of psychic neurosis and creative sterility. The persona castigates himself as a ‘wretch’, perched on the edge of mental ‘cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed’.113 The Catholic rhetoric of physical self-disgust, akin to the reproaches encouraged in Faber’s hymns and Newman’s prayers, demonstrates the speaker’s own contempt for his frailty and insignificance. Like all men, he is a mere ‘scaffold of score brittle bones’ (‘The shepherd’s brow’, l. 5). Hopkins also adapts extremities of physical disintegration and deformity found in New Catholic Baroque devotions and liturgy to dramatize the sensation of depression. He is a horrific monster of the grave with its ‘winding sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay’ (‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’, l. 12). The torment of self-loathing and self-rejection found in popular Catholic hymns and prayers is another figure used to express melancholia. In ‘I wake and feel’, the speaker is both the disease – ‘I am gall, I am heartburn’ – and the sufferer, a ‘lost’, ‘sweating’ self no better than the damned punished in hell (ll. 9, 14). Artistically, as in ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord,’ his imagination is also dry and withered, a state figured by another image of physical monstrosity: the emasculated body. In mind and soul, the persona of these sonnets constructs himself as some odious, unworthy creature of Catholic devotional iconography. Hopkins’s speaker suffers in part as a consequence of the fallen human condition. His cries in ‘No worst’ express ‘a chief- / woe, world-sorrow’ (ll. 5–6). But, like the sinners routinely depicted in ritual and private devotions, the most exquisite despair flows from an unrelenting, harsh self-examination that ends in a conviction of personal waste and guilt. The unproductive cycle of the depressed mind, with the relentless round of self-criticism and self-abuse, is captured in imagery of self-pollution: ‘Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours’ (‘I wake and feel’, l. 12). Hopkins retreats from any pat connection between his state of emotional annihilation and a specific sin. Instead, he exploits the familiar Catholic language of the loathsome sinful creature to express a sense of psychological self-betrayal. In this rhetorical field, abjection is an overwhelming physical sensation. The unworthy self is figured as a vile taste, impossible to accept, escape or expel: ‘God’s most deep decree / Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me’ (ll. 9–10). Thompson, too, appropriates the pious rhetoric of abject unworthiness to explore personal psychological concerns. Like Hopkins in ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ and ‘I wake and feel’, Thompson’s spiritual wasteland is linked less to a sense of sinful degradation than to wasted potential: ‘My lips


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272 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature have drought, and crack, / By laving music long unvisited’ (‘From the Night of Forebeing’, ll. 207–208). Only the language of spiritual desolation can portray Thompson’s sense of creative failure when ambition outstrips ability in ‘The Dread of Height’. His paralysed imagination is figured by the lurid image of a soul balanced on the cliffs of hell, like Hopkins’s persona in ‘No worst’: … at my feet the abyss is cloven then, With deeper menace than for other men, Of my potential cousinship with mire … (ll. 82–84)

The familiar self-castigation of Victorian Catholic hymns can also be perceived in ‘A Fallen Yew’ where an examination of conscience results only in feelings of failure, rejection and damnation. Meditating on the impenetrable core of identity that remains isolated, the poetic persona expresses a very modern anguish of free-floating anxiety and paranoia through the claustrophobic conceit of the ‘heart’s heart’ abiding ‘in an oubliette of God’ (l. 74). Thompson shows how the detested self, like Hopkins’s ‘dull dough’ and gall-tinged heartburn, becomes the most potent instrument of its own bondage and punishment: Yourself are with yourself the sole consortress In that unleaguerable fortress; It knows you not for portress. (ll. 64–66)

Nonetheless, in this poem Thompson also employs the related devotional image of the persistent Deity pursuing His creature. To the self-tormenting incarcerated soul, God is not only warden but also a frequent, albeit shadowy, prison visitor. The gates of this self-constructed gaol ‘are trepidant to His nod; / By Him its floors are trod’ (ll. 68–69). Indeed, emblems that depict God as a tenacious lover and pursuer of souls have considerable psychological resonance in the works of both Thompson and Hopkins. The New Catholic Baroque treatment of passionate desire as a sign of spiritual struggle and recovery is evident in their handling of emotional and spiritual conflict through imagery that is violent, stripped of sentiment and sometimes highly sexualized. In ‘Carrion Comfort’, for instance, Hopkins represents God’s hunger for souls as aggressive and yet dangerously attractive. He is a heroic wrestler, whose ‘lionlimb’ and ‘darksome devouring eyes’ show that He is determined to win (ll. 6, 7). In the face of His onslaught, the beloved soul with ‘bruisèd bones’ can only tremble, admiring ‘[t]he hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród / Me’ (l. 12). Similarly in ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, God is imagined as a fighter


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sensuously battling his victim into submission on dangerous cliffs of desperation and despair. The poetic voice vividly relives ‘the sweep and the hurl of thee [which] trod / Hard down with a horror of height’ (ll. 14–15). Even when the creature yearns for the deity, the dominant motivation is fear: The frown of his face Before me, the hurtle of hell Behind, where, where was a, where was a place? (ll. 17–19)

Terror drives the heart, like a carrier pigeon, toward its secure roost in ‘the heart of the Host’ (l. 21). In the same poem the spiritual, ecstatic union of Lord and the dying tall nun is dramatically portrayed as a deliverance forged from the brutality of sexual aggression. The eroticized representation of God’s rescue of a faithful soul is more rape than delicate wooing. Christ ‘hadst glory of this nun’ (l. 236); and His appearance to the spiritual imagination of speaker and dying woman is one of physical male force triumphantly displayed: He was to cure the extremity where he had cast her; Do, deal, lord it with living and dead; Let him ride, her pride, in his triumph, despatch and have done with his doom there. (ll. 222–24)

This strained conceit of the violent satisfactions of submission captures the paradoxical taste in Victorian Catholic worship for devastating self-obliteration and the simultaneous ecstasy of capitulation. However fiercely God’s love consumes His fragile creatures, He is also adored for this majestic power as ‘[p]ride, rose, prince, hero of us’ (l. 279). Thompson also displays a spectacular baroque inventiveness in representations of the desiring God. A tumbling sequence of conceits describes God’s many disguises to woo the wayward, hesitant souls He covets in ‘Any Saint’. Divinity is portrayed at first in conventional ways. The Lord is both kindly friend offering a supportive shoulder and ‘gentle Lover’ who uses flattering words to move the soul ‘[t]o pride / By His sweet side’ (ll. 21, 23-4). More unusually and with a self-reflexive wit, the poet styles God a grammarian and troping poet, creating in human kind a metaphor of divinity and metonym of the universe, to teach and draw souls to Him with the promise of bliss. Like the poet who writes, this God is a playful joker, too, engaged in a ‘heavenly hide-and-seek’ (l. 142) with the inattentive childlike ‘whim and wavering’ (l. 146) of His creatures. His inexhaustible disguises are more diverse than human fancy can conceive, but all involve the distinctive Victorian Catholic appetite for the submission and annihilation of psychic identity and its


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274 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature sublimation in the divine. Thus, God’s relation to the soul is as mundane and authoritarian as that of the dog-handler calling his charge to heel; as risky as the warm sun who would drink up a soul ‘[a]s a dew-drop’ (l. 152); as comforting as a father who willingly lowers his neck for a tiny child’s embrace. In his depiction of a persistent God who desires human love in ‘The Hound of Heaven’, Thompson again exhibits many elements of the Victorian Catholic aesthetic of sensation and baroque methodology. The effectiveness of this poem largely stems from his representation of Divinity through haunting, enigmatic sense details, much as Catholic liturgical ritual symbolizes the Deity’s sacramental presence. Divine Power can be figured only in the most evanescent physical sensations of sight, sound and touch: the beat of unhurried, ‘unperturbed’ footsteps suggested in the underlying metre; a Voice; the gust of wind stirred by His majestic approach; the shadow cast by a caressing, outstretched hand. The structure of the poem is equally inflected by the sensationalized elements of Victorian Catholic devotional practices. Following the conventional economy of Catholic devotional experience, Thompson theatrically embraces the process of self-abjection as a means of opening space for Divine desire and compassion. But he also structures the poem less as a journey of pursuit than as a baroque emblem series depicting the ‘resisting soul’. At first, the speaker is a legitimate but reluctant lover who rejects the Lord’s suit because He demands too much in exchange: ‘Yet was I sore adread / Lest, having Him, I must have naught beside’ (ll. 20–21). But from this point, a kaleidoscope of personae projects the desperate, illicit and ignorant status of a soul who would reject God. The speaker is portrayed as a fugitive and outlaw, recognizing his own sin but wilfully determined to proceed with his own plans. He is a perverse hedonist seeking gratification from nature’s beauty, worshipping at her shrine, promiscuously lying breast to breast with ‘the red throb of its sunset-heart’, and regressing to a lurid infantile desire for her milky nourishment to slake ‘[m]y thirsting mouth’ (ll. 90, 104). He plays the part of a degraded hero, like the rebellious Samson brought low by waning powers and withered fame. Despite the title of the poem, it is clear that this game of pursuit is less a hunt than a devotional exercise in the value of self-exposure and saving selfdisgust. The speaker’s aim is to thwart this process. Images of hiding, veiling, curtaining, covering and shutting out signify resistance to that honest encounter with personal unworthiness that is a prelude to spiritual grace in Victorian Catholic devotional rhetoric. It is not until the poet feels and artic-


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ulates his abasement that he can even glimpse the citadel of God. This total self-emptying is represented as a process of dehumanization that becomes increasingly grotesque and surreal. He regresses from human personality to natural object, but even then his humiliation and reduction must continue. As wood, he is burned to form God’s charcoal drawing stick. As fountain, he is broken and dankly stained by the rancid ‘tear-drippings’ of his despairing thoughts. He is fit only for the rubbish, like the discarded rind of bitter fruit. This enactment of total abjection paradoxically provides the only satisfaction, albeit a morbid and masochistic one. Lost esteem, the annihilation of egotistical selfhood, and finally self-loathing become the valued currency that buys a heavenly ransom. Only when His creature abhors itself fully does God love best, for only then can He possess the soul entirely: How little worthy of any love thou art! Whom wilt thou find to love ignoble thee, Save Me, save only Me? (ll. 168–70)

As the Victorian period collapses into modernity and Catholic spiritual energy is more taken up with social action than sensational ceremonies, the baroque sensibility which informed the new piety of the English Church of Rome fades into a nostalgic yearning. Occasionally that pungent note of sensuous mysticism and sensational strangeness can be detected amidst the exoticism of Decadence. Published in the same year as ‘The Hound of Heaven’, Lionel Johnson’s ‘The Dark Angel’ (1893)114 is a secular-sexual reworking of the devotional cult of exposure and the plot of the Divine Lover in pursuit of souls. Johnson’s speaker is pursued by a Hound of Hell, a sardonic Tempter offering a blasphemous ‘banquet of a foul delight’ (l. 35) rather than Eucharistic nourishment. Only when read in the context of the devotional discourse that the Dark Angel subverts is the poem’s full resonance apparent. This is not simply a conventional depiction of any struggle against any temptation. Nor is it a Decadent celebration of delicious fin-de-siècle rebellion, be that atheism, hedonism or homoerotic desire. Instead, the poem links all of these to an intense battle to define faith for the modern, unbelieving world. Each strategy employed by the Tempter is a perverse reworking of popular Catholic devotions portraying God’s irresistible desire for souls: the destruction of complacency and the undermining of esteem; the implantation of holy fear; the sensual evocation of ecstatic union with the Infinite; and, above all, the persistent whisper. Johnson’s poem engages in an intertextual dialogue with the great Victorian tradition of Catholic self-exposure and surrender to an eroticized Divine seeker of souls. As such, it imagines the new beastly Divinity which culture


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276 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature now worships. Given the inability of the soul to resist its divine pursuer in Catholic devotional discourse, the speaker’s final determination to escape the Angel seems unlikely to succeed. By the end of the century, the poetic representation of Catholic devotional practices shows a modern world in which ceremonial has been, for the most part, drained of any but the most rarefied aesthetic pleasures. In ‘The Church of a Dream’ (1895), Johnson imagines a future in which grand churches, ornamented statues, stained-glass windows and the faith they signify are forgotten and abandoned, shaken dustily in ‘the whistling wind’ (l. 1). All that remains of the spectacular ceremonials is one old priest, mumbling Latin and performing rites no one really understands – an ironic reconstruction of those earlier Victorian critiques of Catholic liturgy that detected only hollow gestures and foolish mummery. The dull, simple language is particularly effective in dramatizing a deserted, dying world where baroque energies have no place. This dream church lacks grandeur; its memorials commemorate ‘long dead’ (and forgotten) saints with ‘shrivelled hands’ (l. 5). The droning consonance and broken syntax of the final lines of the sonnet suggest a liturgy drained of majesty, a hesitant clergy, a faith on the wane: ‘To him, in place of men, for he is old, suffice / Melancholy remembrances and vesperal.’ In this new world, devotional sensations and the exuberance of baroque adoration exist only in memory and vague nostalgia. Nonetheless, the sensuous spirituality and extravagant energy of the baroque Victorian Catholic revival is still traceable, ‘[I]n gray, sweet incense clouds; blue, sweet clouds mystical’ (l. 12). In that line resonates an echo from another Catholic generation, when sensationalism held artistic and spiritual sway and when Catholic poetic practice and devotion came together in an inspired conflation.

Notes 1 William Makepeace Thackeray, The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Edgar F. Harden (New York and London: Garland, 1994), I, p. 25. 2 Quoted in Ward, Sequel to Catholic Emancipation, II, p. 89. 3 Quoted in Mary Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 50. 4 John Henry Newman, ‘John Keble’, in Essays Critical and Historical, 5th ed. (London: Pickering, 1881), II, p. 427. 5 Ian Small, Conditions for Criticism: Authority, Knowledge, and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 7–8. 6 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 67. Armstrong’s identification of the composite meanings of


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8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

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‘sensation’ in the period – ‘[e]motion, feeling, sensuous experience, sense data, intuition’ (p. 66) – has informed my discussion of the aesthetic of sensation developed in Victorian Catholic culture. See, for instance, the Victorian writers discussed by: Armstrong in Victorian Poetry; Small in Conditions for Criticism; and R. V. Johnson in Aestheticism (London: Methuen, 1969). Matthew Arnold, ‘Maurice de Guérin’, in Essays and Criticism: First Series, 4th edn (1884; London: Macmillan, 1910), pp. 110–11. Alison Sulloway, ‘The Nature of Art, Nature, and Human Nature in Hopkins’s Poetry’, in Critical Essays on Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Alison G. Sulloway (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), p. 118. Ruskin, Modern Painters, I, p. 11. A. W. N. Pugin, The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, in ‘The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture’ and ‘Contrasts’ (Reading: Spire Books, 2003), p. 46. Pugin, ‘Contrasts’, pp. 3, 5. A. W. N. Pugin, Apology for Contrasts, quoted in Ward, Sequel to Catholic Emancipation, I, p. 87. Ward, Sequel to Catholic Emancipation, I, p. 87. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 12th ed. (London: Allen, 1893), p. 156. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849; London: J. M. Dent, 1907), p. 19. John Stuart Mill, ‘The Two Kinds of Poetry’, in Mill’s Essays on Literature and Society, ed. J. B. Schneewind (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1965), p. 126. Overbury, The Jesuits, p. 4. Fanny Trollope, A Visit to Italy (London: Richard Bentley, 1842), I, p. 203, 121. Subsequent references are cited in the text. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, 4th edn (London: Macmillan, 1893), pp. xi, xii. In 1893, Pater wrote to the vicar of a high Anglican church in Clerkenwell, praising ‘its round of beautiful services’ as ‘a help to the people … Religion, I sometimes think, is the only way in which poetry can really reach the hard-worked poor.’ He goes on to praise the Catholic Franciscan order who, ‘though “wedded to poverty”, bequeathed to those who have leisure to think about such things, a world of beautiful religious art’ (Letters of Walter Pater, ed. Lawrence Evans [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970], p. 142). In Pater’s Early Christian historical romance, Marius the Epicurean, the hero – a proto-Aesthete – responds to the gorgeous liturgy with delight. It is the sensuous appeal of ceremonial that elevates the perceiver. Marius salutes ‘the aesthetic charm of the Catholic Church, her evocative power over all that is eloquent and expressive in the better mind of man’. Thus, ritual expresses both ‘the beauty of holiness’ and the holiness of beauty for it gives a sense of ‘a regeneration of the body by the spirit’ (Marius the Epicurean, pp. 210, 216). E[neas] S[weetland] Dallas,The Gay Science (London: Chapman & Hall, 1866), I, p. 316. Overbury, The Jesuits, p. 1. Anon., ‘A Sketch of Popery, extracted from “The Christian Lady’s Magazine’, in Publications of the Protestant Association (London: Protestant Association / Seeley, 1839), p. 3. Kingsley, ed., Charles Kingsley, I, p. 165. Frederick William Faber, Sights and Thoughts in Foreign Churches and among Foreign


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278 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Peoples (London: J. G. F. & J. Rivington, 1842), p. 155. 26 Small, Conditions for Criticism, p. vii. Similarly, Lawrence J. Starzyk argues that the gradual erosion of religious belief and confidence in ‘eternal and transcendent facsimiles or patterns’ also shaped Victorian attitudes to art, and especially a concern with the subjective nature of poetic truth (The Dialogue of the Mind with Itself: Early Victorian Poetry and Poetics [Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1992], p. 8). 27 Sinclair, Popish Legends or Bible Truths, p. xxvi. 28 Kingsley, ed., Charles Kingsley, II, vol. 153. 29 A Layman, Jesuit Priest in the Family, p. 15. 30 Anon., ‘Popery like Paganism: Extract from Bishop Wilson’s Tour’, in Publications of the Protestant Association (London: Protestant Association / Seeley), 1839, p. 1. 31 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom (London: John Murray, 1871), II, p. 407. 32 Small, Conditions for Criticism, p. 11. 33 Charles Dickens, American Notes and Pictures from Italy (1846; London: Chapman & Hall, n.d.[1901]), p. 48. Subsequent references are cited in the text. 34 Chris Brooks, ‘Introduction: Historicism and the Nineteenth Century’, in The Study of the Past in the Victorian Age, ed. Vanessa Brand (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1998), p. 6. 35 Ruskin, Seven Lamps of Architecture, p. 203. 36 Frederick S. Roden uses this term in his discussion of the function of religion in the Victorian expression of homosexual identities (Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002], p. 24). It is also a useful designation for the persistent Victorian acculturation of ‘Roman’ tendencies as shameful and culturally perverse. Even Catholics used the notion of queerness to describe their own uncomfortable sense of a liminal status, participating in but culturally alienated from the social mainstream. When the Catholic priest-convert, John Dobree Dalgairns, wore priestly garb in public in 1848, he commented on his uneasiness: ‘We all walk about in Cassocks, notwithstanding the oaths etc which now and then assail us. I sometimes feel queer walking about London in such conspicuous dress, but it is time that Catholic priests should dare to show their faces’ (Roden, Same-Sex Desire, p. 24). 37 Kingsley, ed., Charles Kingsley, I, pp. 201-202. 38 Quoted in John Shelton Reed, Glorious Battle: The Cultural Politics of Victorian AngloCatholicism (Nashville and London: Vanderbilt University Press, 1996), p. 226. 39 Anon., ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy: Second Notice’, The Times, 7 May 1851, p. 8. 40 Anon., ‘Fine Arts: Royal Academy’, Athenaeum, no. 1179 (1 June 1850), p. 591. 41 Anon., ‘ Royal Academy: Second Notice’, p. 8; Anon., ‘Exhibition of the Royal Academy’, The Times, 3 May 1851, p. 8. 42 Anon., ‘Fine Arts’, p. 590; Anon., ‘Royal Academy: Second Notice’, p. 8. 43 [ John Ruskin], ‘The Pre-Raffaelites’, The Times, 13 May 1851, p. 8. 44 [ John Ruskin], Pre-Raphaelitism (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1851), p. 27. 45 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. W. M. Rossetti, rev. edn (London: Ellis, 1911), pp. 661–62. All citations of Rossetti poems are taken from this edition. 46 William Bell Scott, Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott, ed. W. Minto (London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine, 1892), I, p. 249. 47 William Michael Rossetti, ed. Praeraphaelite Diaries and Letters (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1900), p. 302. Catholics were affronted in a different way. James Collinson, a


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founder member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, broke with it because, ‘as a sincere Catholic’, he could not ‘assist in spreading the artistic opinions of those who are not’ (p. 275). Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ed. Oswald Doughty and John Robert Wahl (1953; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), II, p. 714. Swinburne cheekily referred to the footnote as Rossetti’s disclaimer of ‘a share in the blessings purchased by the blood of your Redeemer’ (p. 715). Rossetti, Works, p. 661. In the end, Rossetti himself did not publish this annotation, but it was included by his brother in his edition of the complete works. William Michael Rossetti also took the opportunity to add an editorial gloss that reinforced his brother’s ‘healthy’ distance from Roman Catholic belief. His Art-Catholicism ‘was in sentiment though not necessarily in dogma – Catholic – mediaeval and unmodern’ (p. 661). Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Hand and Soul’, The Germ, no. 1 ( January 1850); reprinted as The Germ: The Literary Magazine of the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Andrea Rose (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum / Oxford and Birmingham City Museums and Art Gallery, 1984), p. 26 Friedrich Heyer, The Catholic Church from 1648 to 1870, trans. D. W. D. Shaw (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1969), pp. 144, 177–79. S. Bowden, Guide to the Oratory, 1893; quoted in Michael Napier and Alistair Laing, eds, The London Oratory Centenary: 1884–1984 (London: Trefoil Books, 1984), p. 19. From their first arrival on the London scene in 1849, the Italian Oratorian order had reinforced the Roman foundation of Catholicism through church architecture, art and ritual that offered a counterpoint to Pugin’s ecclesiastical Gothic style with its quintessentially English roots. The Oratorians popularized lengthy and elaborate Continental ceremonials and liturgical art that spoke strongly of Catholicity, rather than Christianity. Even Italianate cultural customs were replicated. The Oratory Church was closed daily between 12.30 and 2.30 (the Roman siesta period). ‘Baby crushers’ (heavy padded mattresses installed in the doorways of Roman churches to keep out the heat) were in place well into the twentieth century (Napier and Laing, eds, London Oratory Centenary, pp. 10–11). Quoted in Ian Bradley, Abide with Me: The World of Victorian Hymns (London: SCM Press, 1997), p. 199. Bradley, Abide with Me, p. 204. Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England, pp. 169–70. John Edward Bowden notes, for example, how Faber and his fellow converts associated ‘the material as well as spiritual developments of Italian piety’ with the core of the faith. They went to Italy to ‘get thoroughly steeped in Catholicism’. As another convert member of Faber’s informal Catholic community in Birmingham noted, they spent their days ‘living as if we were in Italy’ and revelling ‘in the beauty of Catholic devotion’ (The Life and Letters of Frederick William Faber, 3rd. edn (London: Burns & Oates, n.d. [1888]), pp. 220, 241, 255). K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation: 1846–1886 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 459. Quoted in Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England, p. 148. Not all Catholics understood or took to the new devotional culture. Many were initially bewildered by the new rituals and their accompanying panoply. At the opening of a Pugin-designed chapel in Birmingham, the architect’s assistant, Dr Rock, wore a black


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zucchetto or skull cap; he was pointed out by a member of the congregation as ‘[t]he man with the pickled walnut on his head’ (William Ullathorne, The Devil is a Jackass, ed. Leo Madigan [(1891); Leominster and Bath: Gracewing / Downside Abbey Publications, 1995], p. 167). For other examples of the scattered but vociferous Catholic hostility to certain new practices, see Norman, English Catholic Church, p. 228; Jennifer F. Supple, ‘Ultramontanism in Yorkshire, 1850–1900’, in Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. IV, Interpretations, ed. Gerald Parsons (Manchester: Manchester University Press / Open University, 1988), pp. 135–49. See, for example, Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock (Munich: T. Ackermann, 1888). An excellent summary of these difficulties is provided in René Wellek, ‘The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship’, in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963), pp. 69–127, and in John M. Steadman, Redefining a Period Style: ‘Renaissance,’ ‘Mannerist’ and ‘Baroque’ Literature (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesnes University Press, 1990). Both note that Baroque features can be found in different ages and are not helpfully defined in relation to a particular historical period or literary movement. Wellek argues for a definition that connects style, intellectual climate and aesthetic theory; Steadman believes that nuances of style and effects, its particular facets, are often an illustration of the dexterous application of rhetorical and poetical principles, though they can give insight into ‘ideological or thematic tensions’ (p. 163). The summary of the baroque sensibility in this chapter is indebted to these works as well as to E. I. Watkin, Catholic Art and Culture: An Essay on Catholic Culture (London: Burns & Oates, 1942); Lowry Nelson, Jr., Baroque Lyric Poetry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1961); Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies on the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1966); and Louis L. Martz, From Renaissance to Baroque: Essays on Literature and Art (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991). Wellek, ‘Concept of Baroque’, pp. 91, 81. Richard Crashaw, ‘The Weeper’, in The Anchor Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Verse, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: Anchor, 1969), p. 243. Praz, The Flaming Heart, p. 204. R. V. Young, ‘Christopher Dawson and Baroque Culture: An Approach to SeventeenthCentury Religious Poetry’, in The Dynamic Character of Christian Culture: Essays on Dawsonian Themes, ed. Peter J. Caraldo (New York and London: University Press of America, 1984), p. 132. Young, ‘Christopher Dawson’, pp. 138, 142. Coventry Patmore, ‘Francis Thompson, A New Poet’, in Courage in Politics and Other Essays: 1885–1896 (London: Humphrey Milford / Oxford University Press, 1921), pp. 157–66. Gerald Manley Hopkins, The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphry House and Graham Storey (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 421. Linda Ray Pratt, ‘Hopkins, Poetic Style, and the Linguistic Controversy of 1875’, in Saving Beauty: Further Studies in Hopkins, ed. Michael E. Allsopp and David Anthony Downes (New York and London: Garland, 1994), p. 228. The attention to Hopkins’s baroque style has been patchy and largely unrelated to Victorian Catholic practices. Among the many poets to whom Hopkins has been compared have been the metaphys-


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ical poets (see, for example, W. H. Gardner on Hopkins’s bold ingenuity in Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, 2 vols, rev. edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), I, pp. 189–92). Some scholars have seen a rather generalized baroque ‘tendency’ (Wendell Stacy Johnson, Gerard Manley Hopkins: The Poet as Victorian (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), p. 169, and Robert Bernard Martin, Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Very Private Life (London: HarperCollins / Flamingo, 1991), p. 254). The erotic aspect of baroque art has been picked up by those with an interest in sexual representations and gendered spirituality in his work (see, for example, Joseph Bristow, ‘Churlsgrace”: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Working-Class Male Body’, ELH, 59, no. 3 (Autumn 1992), pp. 693–71; Roden, Same-Sex Desire, pp. 109–10; and Michael Wheeler, Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 341–46). In different ways they have taken up Tom Paulin’s characterization of Hopkins’s ‘camp baroque’ (‘On the Rampage’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 August 1987, p. 863) to explore links between style, homoerotic desire and feminized spirituality. More directly Jill Muller in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism (London and New York: Routledge, 2003) has connected ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ to the general Ultramontane enthusiasm for sentiment and theatrics (pp. 37–68), while Margaret R. Ellsberg has read Hopkins’s rhetorical practice through baroque theory and sacramental theology (Created to Praise: The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987], pp. 97–120). But there has been a lack of detailed attention to Hopkins’s positioning in the discourse of Victorian Catholicism with its baroque inflection of Catholic devotional writing and in Catholic material culture. Critical acknowledgement of Francis Thompson’s baroque interests are primarily limited to specific seventeenth-century allusions (such as John P. LeVay, ‘Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven”, lls. 16–24’, Explicator, 41, no. 1 [Fall 1982], pp. 36–37) or to general comparison to Crashaw’s poetic style as in Brigid M. Boardman, Between Heaven and Charing Cross (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 120–21. Hopkins, Further Letters, p. 93. Wheeler, Death and the Future Life, pp. 345–46. Recent critical work gives a glimpse of this intertextual diversity. Ian Ker links Hopkins’s poetry to Catholic litanies in The Catholic Revival in English Literature, 1845–1961 (Leominster: Gracewing, 2003); Jill Muller argues for direct echoes of Frederick Faber in Hopkins and Victorian Catholicism; James Finn Cotter reads ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ as a homily in ‘Rhetoric and Poetic in Hopkins’, in Rereading Hopkins: Selected New Essays, ed. Francis L. Fennell (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 1996), pp. 143–56; and Wendell Stacy Johnson discusses the hymn-like qualities of Hopkins’s poetry in relation to poetic sound in ‘Reading Oneself into Hopkins’, in The Victorian Experience: The Poets, ed. Richard A. Levine (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1982), pp. 158–77. Hopkins, Sermons and Devotional Writings, p. 125. Jude V. Nixon, Gerard Manley Hopkins and His Contemporaries: Liddon, Newman, Darwin, and Pater (New York and London: Garland, 1994), p. 211. Hopkins, Journals, p. 289. Boardman, Between Heaven and Charing Cross, pp. 13, 20, 27. Paul van Kuykendall Thomson, Francis Thompson: A Critical Biography (New York and


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282 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1961), p. 16. 79 Francis Thompson, The Works of Francis Thompson (London: Burns & Oates, 3 vols, n.d. [1913]), III, p. 31. All citations from Thompson’s published poetry and prose are taken from this edition. 80 From a notebook entry, quoted in Thomson, Francis Thompson, p. 253. 81 Faber, Hymns, 2nd edn. All citations from Faber’s hymns are taken from this edition. 82 John Henry Newman, ‘Omnipotence in Bonds’, in Sermons Preached on Various Occasions, new edn (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1892), p. 78. Margery S. Durham has suggested possible sources for Newman’s ear for baroque style in ‘The Rest of the Apologia: Newman in the Context of the Baroque’, Studies in the Literary Imagination, 23, no. 2 (Fall 1990), pp. 233–50, but does not take more than passing notice of Catholic devotional discourse of the period. 83 For example, G. B. Tennyson finds little difference in aesthetic and style between Tractarian and Catholic Newman (‘Removing the Veil: Newman as Literary Artist’, Renascence, 50, nos 3–4 [Spring-Summer 1998], p. 214). On the other hand, as Bernadette Waterman Ward has suggested, Newman’s interest in the apprehension and assent required for faith is based on sense data, the experience of the concrete and the particular (‘Newman’s Grammar of Assent and the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins’, in Critical Essays on John Henry Newman, ed. Ed Block, Jr. [Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 1992], pp. 43–44). 84 W. H. Gardner and N. H. MacKenzie, eds., The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 4th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). All citations from Hopkins’s poems are from this edition; citation of works in copyright by permission of Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Province of the Society of Jesus. 85 J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge: Belknap / Harvard University Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 304. Interestingly, Miller notes that seventeenth-century baroque poetry was a response to the loss of communication with the divine that has its parallel in the nineteenth-century failure of faith (p. 7). 86 Lowry Nelson, Jr. highlights the capacity of the baroque artist to ‘take the alternative into account’ in rhetorical and structural ways (Baroque Lyric Poetry, p. 157). 87 A. D. Cousins, The Catholic Religious Poets from Southwell to Crashaw: A Critical History (London: Sheed & Ward, 1991), pp. 22–26. The influence on baroque poetry of the meditative methods of the seventeenth-century founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, is also well established; this style of devotional reflection required focus on the minute concrete details of biblical scenes and the life of Christ. See, for example, Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954). 88 Emmanuele Tesauro; quoted in Praz, The Flaming Heart, p. 210. 89 The ambiguous identity of this royal figure has puzzled critics who variously associate him with Death, Christ, even death-to-self (Peter Butter, Francis Thompson [London: Longmans / British Council, 1961], p. 250). The remainder of the poem nonetheless suggests that God uses mortality as a strategy to break earth’s hold and force humanity back to Divine love. 90 John Henry Newman, ‘Forms of Private Prayer’, in Parochial and Plain Sermons (1868; London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), p. 263. 91 John Keble, Keble’s Lectures on Poetry, 1832–1841, trans. Edward Kershaw Francis


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(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), I, p. 22. 92 G. B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 106. 93 Letter to J. B. Morris, 5 August 1846, in Bowden, Frederick William Faber, p. 261. 94 Frederick W. Faber, Growth in Holiness; or, the Progress of the Spiritual Life, 2nd edn (London: Richardson, 1855), pp. 397, 398. 95 Nicholas Wiseman, ‘Christian Art’, in Essays on Various Subjects (London: Charles Dolman, 1853), III, p. 366. 96 Gerald Parsons, ‘Victorian Roman Catholicism: Emancipation, Expansion and Achievement’, in Religion in Victorian Britain, vol. I, Traditions, ed. Gerald Parsons (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 173. 97 Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England, p. 147. 98 Ward, Sequel to Catholic Emancipation, II, p. 256. 99 Patmore, ‘Liverpool Cathedral’, in Courage in Politics, p. 193. 100 Frederick W. Faber, The Foot of the Cross; or, the Sorrows of Mary (London: Thomas Richardson, 1858), p. 53. 101 Praz, The Flaming Heart, p. 258. 102 Letter to Mrs Helbert, 23 September 1869; quoted. in Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England, p. 27. 103 Quoted in Rodney Stenning Edgecombe, ‘The Interstitial Character of Cardinal Newman’s Meditations and Devotions’, Prose Studies, 16, no. 3 (December 1993), p. 202. 104 John Henry Newman, Meditations and Devotions (1893; London: Burns & Oates, 1964), p. 86. 105 Meriol Trevor, ‘Introduction’, in Newman, Meditations and Devotions, p. viii. 106 Michael Walsh, A Dictionary of Devotions (London: Burns & Oates, 1993), p. 226. 107 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry p. 434. 108 Newman, ‘Waiting for Christ’, in Sermons, p. 35. 109 Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England, p. 155. 110 Heimann, Catholic Devotion in Victorian England, p. 149. 111 See Faber, Hymns, pp. 23, 87, 251, 297, 329, 330. 112 Newman, ‘The Mission of St Philip Neri’, in Sermons, p. 219. 113 ‘No worst’, ll. 9–10. Jude V. Nixon (Gerard Manley Hopkins, p. 77) notes that these lines echo a passage in Newman’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ in which the soul of the newly dead protagonist faces God’s judgement. The exposure of the real, degraded self behind the confident mask of social identity is like a vertiginous fall into negation. In discussing the parallel, Nixon does not take into account the popular tropes of horror and abjection in Catholic devotional writing of the period. 114 Lionel Johnson, ‘The Dark Angel’ and ‘The Church of a Dream’, in Twenty One Poems Written by Lionel Johnson, selected by William Butler Yeats (Dundrum: Dun Emer Press, 1904), pp. 29–31, 23–24.


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Epilogue 1550–15?? When an idea, whether real or not, is of a nature to interest and possess the mind, it is said to have life … It will … introduce itself into the framework and details of social life, changing public opinion and supporting or undermining the foundations of established order … since its province is the busy scene of human life, it cannot develop at all except either by destroying, or modifying and incorporating with itself, existing modes of thinking and acting … 1 — John Henry Newman, Essay on the development of Christian doctrine

In his influential book, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life, the Yale historian, Frank M. Turner, quotes this passage from Newman’s Essay on the development of Christian doctrine in order to critique academic trends in the twentieth century. Turner’s view that a suspicious dislike of religion has shaped the research agendas of twentiethcentury Anglo-American historians is persuasive. For him, the academy has promoted a skewed narrative of Victorian Britain that legitimizes present-day personal and institutional values. The myth of nineteenth-century ‘progress’ from a religious to a secular orientation is, he argues, rooted in the very principles endorsed by the twentieth-century university as its philosophical raison d’être: ‘liberalism, secularism, rational science … and other progressive, non-religious outlooks’.2 New approaches derived from social history invite reassessment of the importance of religion throughout the history of the period. In particular, they draw attention to the interpenetration of religious and secular viewpoints and activities, and the important ‘role of ideas that are not wholly of the critical, rationalist, scientific, progressive mode’.3 As Newman suggests, ideas have interest and value to the analyst of the past because they have seized the imagination of men and women, whatever might be their truth or falsehood. The same points could be made about the contemporary academic approach to Victorian literary culture. Until the late 1960s, critics generally argued that religious expression in literature followed a similar secularizing

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trajectory. The mapping of texts and authors on a faith–doubt continuum replicated the twentieth-century cultural myth endorsed by historians: that Victorian society grounded our own modernity through the move to a more ‘enlightened’, non-spiritual understanding of the world. The embedding of critical and cultural theoretical discourses in the academy has certainly put paid to such grand narratives. Nonetheless, these traditions of intellectual activity have tended to eclipse the importance of religion to the Victorian literary imagination. By obscuring its diversity and complexity, they have oversimplified its operation as an ideological ‘tool’. As a study of the different dimensions of Catholic sensationalism makes clear, religious culture – particularly at the popular and denominational level – both reflects and reshapes the Victorian imagination in diverse and unexpected ways. The literary insertion of the sensations of Rome into so many different kinds of social experience shows the pervasive way polemical extravagance can enhance and shift public understanding in secular as well as spiritual contexts. In social fields as diverse as gender and nationhood, in the signification of bodily decorums and emotional processes, even in the articulation of aesthetic principles and judgements, Catholic sensationalism provides a recurrent typology of images that structures interpretations of individual and institutional identities in the period. The distinctive style as well as the recurrent tropes, characters and plots associated with the sensations of Rome also effectively link what Newman called the ‘busy scene of human life’ to the development and revision of a whole host of cultural attitudes. From this point of view, it no longer seems appropriate to confine the study of sensationalism to the urban shockers of 1860s popular fiction. As a mode of writing with a distinctive register, motifs of subversion and alterity, and complex plotting, sensationalism is apparent throughout the century in representations of Catholic culture from both sides of the denominational divide. Its manifestation in a Catholic setting sharpens our understanding of the operation of sensationalism. Both other and double, its style and themes permit alternative voices to be both silenced and heard. By challenging the assumptions inscribed in the more rational, scientific discourse of realism, Catholic sensationalism shapes – and resists – ‘existing modes of thinking and acting’ for a Victorian readership alert to its nuances and implications. Certainly, the representation of Catholicism as Other is, on the surface, a valuable means of articulating and reinforcing the secular and religious status quo. But, as Julia Kristeva has suggested, ‘the Other is my (own and proper) unconscious’. 4 The ‘hot and strong’ sensations of popery frequently metamorphose into the ‘hot and strong’ sensations of a


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286 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature volatile British society bisected by a range of competing, often contradictory, values and desires. The imagined landscapes of a corrupt Rome and a flawed Britain gradually reveal themselves as similar ‘torrid’ zones. Alternatively, as a territory beyond the bounds of the ‘known’ world of middle-class ideologies, the Catholic domain offers potential for imaginative experimentation, for establishing and testing heretical identities and transgressive cultural and aesthetic positions. Writing today in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on America in 2001, the Madrid rail bombings and the London terrorist atrocities, at a time when European and American cultures are increasingly sensitive to religious difference and alien presences, I am hard pressed to ignore the ways in which religious representations still have a significant social effect. They impart crude identity labels to contain and interpret what seems outside our comfortable boundaries of knowledge. They also encode diverse secular anxieties. Powerful world religions that are foreign to the home culture have again become a focal point for national insecurities. Their representation through heightened language and emotive narratives deflects more difficult questions about our own society’s political values and objectives, its economic aspirations and internal inequities. Even more importantly, the very act of turning faith into a sensation is itself a cultural metaphor. Such extreme representations of religious difference dramatize the intensity of competition for intellectual and moral supremacy in a global community. It is an important strategy in the battle to legitimate new attitudes or sustain existing positions. Catholic sensationalism in Victorian Britain worked in just the same fashion. At times in the Victorian cultural imaginary, portrayals of the Church of Rome are shaped by specific skirmishes for authority driven by the historical moment and a sense of social crisis. Catholic religious institutions and practice offer a symbolic space in which to argue about alternative destinies for women, about the value of compliant obedience to authority, even about the importance of convention for legitimating identity. Catholic ritual can open up discussion of the primacy of art as sensuous form; the phenomenon of conversion provides a chance to weigh up the emotions as a powerful guide to moral conduct or danger to be policed and repressed. But Catholic sensationalism also serves as a cultural metaphor for subsequent generations who seek to analyze and understand the past. The paradoxical contradictions associated with Catholicism in its most sensational representations – self-sacrificing renunciation and extravagant sensuality, tyrannical authority and self-destructive obedience, fanaticism and heroism – throw


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into sharp relief the many intellectual rifts and emotional tensions secreted in the lived experience of Victorian women and men. Central to its Gothic rhetoric of victimisation and its melodramatic plots of seduction and incarceration, of persecution and martyrdom is the contest for control in the complex social and psychological act of self-formation: the struggle by the individual to gain and preserve personal independence, the struggle of society for a dutiful allegiance that will perpetuate its structures and values. Catholic sensationalism gives new specificity and visibility to the imaginative ways in which Victorian culture tried to enunciate its own inconsistencies. As a cultural trope, Catholic sensationalism continued to be deeply embedded in the British cultural imagination well after the turn of the nineteenth century. By then, Catholics were more familiar participants in establishment institutions, and denominational conflict had ceased to attract widespread public interest. Nonetheless, the discursive practice survived in the interpretation of the past and the assertion of new orthodoxies. In Eminent Victorians, for example, Catholic sensationalism is fundamental to Lytton Strachey’s scheme to ‘illustrate rather than to explain … the truth about the Victorian age’ to his 1918 readership.5 This book is an acerbic debunking of the nineteenth-century moral inheritance. Its strategy is the merciless dissection of central Victorian institutions by the subversion of key icons: Florence Nightingale represents medicine and public service, Dr Arnold of Rugby education, and General Gordon the military. But that the representative of the Christian church and ecclesiastical profession – to whom the opening and longest biographical study is devoted – should be a Catholic convert and Ultramontane Cardinal is itself a fascinating, indeed sensational, choice. And the devastating effects of this essay depend on an audience accustomed to read the sensations of Catholicism as a cultural trope. Strachey’s characterization of Manning focuses on qualities of personality rather than on his specific theological orientation per se. Nonetheless, throughout the study, he draws on the familiar motifs, attitudes and plots associated with Victorian Catholic sensationalism as the basis for his strategy of deflation. Manning, like so many Catholic priests in the most shocking portrayals of Rome, is shown to be sly and artful, ‘gliding adroitly to the front rank’ (2), exploiting those well placed to advance his career. Strachey draws on the full repertoire of sensational melodramatics to show how Manning prospers through manipulation of others’ weaknesses and obsessions. For example, Cardinal Wiseman is turned into a strong ally in Manning’s battle for political authority in the new Catholic hierarchy through the latter’s dexterous plotting. Manning’s ‘piercing eye had detected the secret way into


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288 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature the recesses of the Cardinal’s [Wiseman’s] heart … when the moment came, [he] touched with a deft finger the chord of the Conversion of England’ (58). The Cardinal’s desire for power and status is another feature of Catholic sensationalism that Strachey exploits. Manning is described as secretive in his scheming, so as not to damage his chances of promotion. His cultivation of the Pope’s private secretary is dramatized by Strachey in an imagined scenario plucked from the labyrinthine settings of Catholic sensational plots: ‘his sagacity led him swiftly and unerringly up the little winding staircase in the Vatican and through the humble door which opened into the cabinet of Monsignor Talbot’ (60). Shrewd, cautious and two-faced, the Manning of Eminent Victorians is a master of the Catholic black arts, combining a tyrannical absolutism and killer instinct to defeat his enemies and seduce the unwary. Compared as a voracious, aggressive eagle to Newman, the oversubtle but sincere dove, Manning is shown to gain the upper hand primarily by guile and dissimulation. Strachey suggests he played a conspicuous part in undercutting Newman’s elevation to Cardinal by a calculated ‘misunderstanding’ of the latter’s intentions. His hypocrisy, too, is relayed through the contradictions between priestly public pronouncements and private cruelties that feature so prominently in Catholic sensationalism. Although he praised Newman in a funeral oration as ‘our greatest witness for the Faith’, Manning’s intimate observations were, according to Strachey, calculated to demean his rival: ‘Poor Newman! He was a great hater!’ (106). Even Manning’s practice of his faith from a theological and spiritual point of view is articulated by Strachey through the themes and tropes of Catholic sensationalism. The Cardinal’s asceticism is represented as extreme in its self-mortification, a remnant of mediaeval superstition – though to the ‘modern’ biographer, it is also a sign of unhealthy repression and ‘psychological problems suggested by his inner history’ (1). Indeed, throughout the piece, Catholic fanaticism is reconstructed as mental derangement in a manner consistent with the rhetoric of Victorian denominational polemics. The valuable papal secretary, Monsignor Talbot, ‘was unfortunately obliged to exchange his apartment in the Vatican for a private lunatic asylum at Passy’ (60). Strachey also recalls the more extreme Victorian castigations of Catholic liturgy and ritual, denigrating Manning by alluding to his Italianate taste with its ‘grim perspective of espionage and tale-bearing, [and] foreign habits’ (55). However, Strachey’s use of the typology of Catholic sensationalism is much more than an attack focused on a denomination, or even on religion


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as ‘a heavy portmanteau … full of old rags and brickbats’ (35). Engrained in these spectacular images, character types and plots of Catholicism, he finds the essence of Victorian middle-class culture and the ideologies that culminated in the First World War. Manning, he observes, was unique and ‘extraordinary’; but his interest for the twentieth-century reader should be his typicality. His career throws light ‘upon the spirit of the age’ (1). Embodying ‘the mingled qualities of the patriarch, the prophet, and the demagogue’ (107), the Manning characterized through the rhetorical devices of Catholic sensationalism is the epitome of Victorian public life. His personal hypocrisy and amorality, ‘dexterity of conduct’ (4), snobbery and appetite for domination are symptomatic of the Victorian investment in ‘getting on’ at any price. In his treatment of Manning’s ordination in the Church of England and subsequent conversion to Catholicism, for example, Strachey portrays a man whose vast ‘heavenly ambitions’ are really motivated by ‘dreams of public service, of honours, and of power’ (6). Commitment to personal self-aggrandizement dominates the narrative of his life. Even Manning’s scrupulous concern about the impiety of worldly success is shown to be an instance of self-deception, for any setback or renunciation occasions bitterness and regret. Manning’s very Victorian concern with outward appearance and social status is also delimited through the familiar themes of Catholicism at its most outrageous. As a Church of England clergyman, Manning cherishes the life of a country gentleman. An expert ‘judge of horse-flesh’, he conforms to expectations in his stylish behaviour, whether he is ‘galloping over the downs in breeches and gaiters, or cutting brilliant figures on the ice’ (37). As a Catholic, he relishes souls. Nonetheless, Strachey uses standard assumptions about power-hungry Romish clergy to strike out at the class consciousness of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie whom Manning represents. He hints that particular converts and penitents received Manning’s closest pastoral attentions, that is, ‘souls who moved in the best society … [since he] possessed a familiarity with official persons and official ways’ (52). Like other preeminent members of the Victorian establishment, Manning moves comfortably in the intricate dance of social ritual while remaining blind to social injustice. Catholic sensationalism once again provides an apt symbol of this facility. The Cardinal is at home with Vatican ‘spectacles of coloured pomp and of antique solemnity’ which hide ‘the nauseating filth of the highways … the fever flitting through the ghastly tenements of the poor’ (86). Even the ageing Cardinal fails to escape Strachey’s censure, notwithstanding his effective mediations in the Dock Strikes of 1889 or his concern


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290 catholic sensationalism and victorian literature with labour politics and land reform. Ever conscious of the public record, Manning, like the eminent Victorians he represents, is shown to censor and reconstruct his own narrative. Catholic artfulness lies at the heart of Strachey’s Manning who covertly rewrites and edits his past: ‘He would bring out his diaries and his memoranda, he would rearrange his notes, he would turn over again the yellow leaves of faded correspondences … He would snip with scissors the pages of ancient journals, and with delicate ecclesiastical fingers drop unknown mysteries into the flames’ (109). But, as Strachey suggests in the preface to the book overall, this is just the strategy of ‘our fathers and grandfathers’ whose biographies focus on ‘tedious panegyric’ (vii, viii). Pompous Victorian self-justification and Catholic dissimulation merge into the same falsifying – and repugnant – practices. Michael Holroyd has suggested that Strachey’s wrath is directed at an age that ‘could permit an astute and ruthless opportunist, whose repressed sexual drive was sublimated into religious fanaticism, to gravitate naturally to a position of such high authority’.6 But sensitivity to Strachey’s handling of the discourse of Catholic sensationalism suggests that it is the ruthless opportunism and drive for power that really in themselves define ‘the spirit of the age’. Much of the impact of Eminent Victorians as a sardonic assessment of the Victorian cultural environment depends upon Strachey’s own rhetorical subtleties. Of course, there is an unscholarly deviousness in his selective extraction from sources and his stripping away of explanatory contexts. However, Strachey also draws more positively on a complex amalgam of verbal techniques. His style has been characterized as ‘Camp Mandarin’ for its parodic elements, including the reproduction of quotations and pastiching of nineteenth-century sonorities and aphorisms.7 His irony, antithesis and bathos are, as Simon Joyce has noted, like the mannered style of Oscar Wilde, which undermines high Victorian ‘truthfulness, sincerity, authenticity, and depth’ through a concern with appearance and surface elegance.8 But Catholic sensationalism must feature, too, as part of Strachey’s artifice. The very images of that mode remain seductive, but are craftily realigned. For example, Strachey capitalizes effectively on a familiar image associated with Catholic proselytizing by applying it to Manning’s manipulation of politicians and lobbyists. He describes how the Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster could ‘spin his spider’s web of delicate and clinging diplomacy’ so that an agent of the government was ‘little better than a fly buzzing in gossamer. And Manning was careful to see that he buzzed on the right note’ (88–89). Even when self-consciously employed as cliché, such extravagant motifs capture for Strachey both the style and the moral menace of an age. To us


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nearly a century later, they speak of the potency of the imaginative Victorian landscape of Catholic sensationalism. At the end of his biographical sketch, Strachey returns to one of the questions he posed at its outset. Drawn to speculate on the reasons for Manning’s position and popularity, he considers the importance of his subject’s overpowering character. But he also wonders if there was ‘something in it [the Victorian age], scientific and progressive as it was, which went out to welcome the representative of ancient tradition and uncompromising faith’ (1–2). At the end of the essay, he alludes again to Manning’s ‘untameable’ manner and resistance to ‘conventional reserves’. But a factor, too, is, ‘perhaps, the mysterious glamour lingering about him of the antique organization of Rome’ (112). Strachey would relegate such fascination to the faint tracks of a by-gone faith. But his own writing shows the continuously energizing impact of that sensational glamour on the imagination of the nineteenth century and its cultural heirs.

Notes 1 John Henry Newman, Essay on the development of Christian doctrine (1845; London: Penguin, 1974), pp. 97–99. 2 Frank M. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 6. 3 Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, p. 16. 4 Julia Kristeva, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 183. 5 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning – Florence Nightingale – Dr Arnold – General Gordon (1918; London: Chatto & Windus, 1922), p. vii–viii. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text. 6 Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, vol. II, The Years of Achievement (1910–1932) (London: Heinemann, 1968), p. 269. 7 Simon Joyce, ‘On or about 1901: The Bloomsbury Group Looks Back at the Victorians’, Victorian Studies, 46, no. 4 (Summer 2004), p. 647. 8 Joyce, ‘On or about 1901’, p. 647.


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Index

abjection 22, 36, 84, 89, 100, 153, 156, 159, 161, 170, 247, 251, 259, 268–71, 274–75 Achilli, Giacinto 105 advancement 19, 44, 50, 52, 107, 114, 148 adventure 34, 38, 39–40, 55, 59–60, 80, 131 aesthetic sensibility, the 201–02, 209, 226, 233, 246 aestheticism 209, 233–34, 236 see also art for art’s sake movement affect, the faculty of 177–230, 233, 262 see also emotion; feeling agnosticism 55, 112, 132, 210, 212, 222–23, 236, 245 Aguilar, Grace 19, 21 The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr 19, 21–22, 131, 137–52, 156, 157, 166 alienation 22, 95, 98, 154, 183–84, 220 ambition 160, 272 in British society 48, 50, 59–60, 79, 112, 115 of Catholics 30, 36, 110, 115, 136, 140, 147, 289 of women 62, 81 angel in the house, the 67, 92, 163 Anglicanism, see Church of England Anglo-Catholicism 7 see also Oxford Movement, the; Ritualism; Tractarian Movement, the anti-Catholicism 5, 119, 134, 188, 212–13, 222 and Charlotte Brontë 85–87 and the Pre–Raphaelites 241–43 and Robert Browning 104–06 Victorian rhetoric of 2, 3, 81, 89–90, 196, 202–03, 215

LUP_Moran_09_Index.indd 311

appetite 32, 37, 114, 123, 156, 161, 233 Armada, Spanish, the 55, 58 Armstrong, Isobel 234, 266 Arnold, Julia 211 Arnold, Matthew 211, 234 Arnold, Tom 211 Arnold, Dr Thomas (of Rugby) 211, 287 art 3, 4, 20, 232, 233, 240, 244–45, 250–51 art, theories of 232–46, 250–51, 254–55, 257, 258, 259, 285, 286 Catholic 7, 231–83 religious 121–23, 233–35, 247–48, 255, 258, 270 visual 9, 83, 152, 153, 240, 248 ‘Art Catholicism’ 242, 243–45 art for art’s sake movement 22, 236 see also aestheticism asceticism 16, 99, 167 as abnormal practice 15, 37, 93, 155, 160, 214, 288 as moral danger 82, 155–56, 165, 205 as pleasure 155–56 see also masochism; renunciation asylum 13, 111 authority 9, 20, 40, 65–66, 105, 125, 152–53, 157–58, 161, 224, 237, 240, 255, 286, 290 aesthetic 22–23, 234 of Catholic Church 6, 7–8, 35–36, 49, 56–57, 63–64, 68, 72, 87, 109, 113, 115, 121, 124, 142, 148, 191, 198, 246, 287 denominational 1, 135, 150, 241 divine 51, 170, 257 of the feelings 181, 186, 190, 201, 204–05, 207–10, 221, 222, 226

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312

index

of civil institutions 34, 44, 47, 50–51, 59, 71, 72, 98, 126, 131, 133–39, 143–47, 151, 156, 167–68, 172, 183 male 21, 82, 86, 100–01, 107–08, 159–60 moral 14, 22, 214 narrative 33, 96, 219 parental 45, 81, 117, 149, 169–70 personal 70, 95, 114, 151, 165 spiritual 17, 136 Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (Awful Disclosures of The Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal) 84, 85, 95, 97, 100, 105, 115–16 Bagehot, Walter 18 Bain, Alexander 16, 152, 180 The Emotions and the Will 178, 184 Baring-Gould, Sabine Perpetua 153–54, 156 baroque style 265, 273, 274, 275, 276 in art and architecture 239, 245–46, 248, 251, 267 in Catholic ceremonials 238, 246, 247–48 in literature 248–49, 252–53, 254–55, 260, 261 see also ‘New Catholic Baroque’, the Barreca, Regina 155 Bartholomew Day massacre 132 beauty as purpose of art 23, 202, 244–45 sensitivity to 124, 207 sensual attraction to 118, 194–95, 208–09, 237, 239, 274 spiritual enlightenment from 207–08, 232–33, 251, 268 Benson, Robert Hugh 183, 184 bildungsroman 38, 178, 191–92, 198 body, the 3, 4, 22, 120, 255 censorship of 97, 121–22 damaged 14, 21–22, 36–37, 269, 271 female 83, 91, 194–95 and the law 141, 151–70, 172 politic (social body) 22, 133, 136, 137, 139, 156–57, 160–66, 173, 187 and religious devotion 16, 262–63, 267–69 see also mind, and body; torture


Bossy, John 185 Bourn, Henry H. Words of Warning respecting The Jesuits 1 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth 10 Lady Audley’s Secret 12, 13 Bridges, Robert 246 British character, nature of the 29, 38, 39, 40–43, 45, 49, 50, 51, 54, 55–59, 61, 62–63, 65, 71, 183, 238 see also identity, national; nation and nationhood Brompton (London) Oratory 245–46, 248, 261 Brontë, Charlotte 21, 85–86, 87 The Professor, 86–87 Villette 21, 78–79, 85–103, 125 Brooks, Chris 240 Browning, Robert 9, 21, 78–79, 104–25 ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ 112–15, 117, 124 ‘The Bishop Order His Tomb at St Praxed’s Church’ 115, 116–20, 121, 124 ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ 115, 120–23 ‘Pictor Ignotus’ 123 The Ring and the Book 106–10, 120–21, 124–25 ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’ 111– 12, 118 Burke, Father Tom 28 Burstein, Miriam 51 Bute, the Marquess of 183, 191 Camden Society, the 116 Carpenter, William 178 Cartwright, W. C. 47 Casteras, Susan P. 83 Catholic Church, see Roman Catholic Church, in Victorian Britain Catholic Emancipation Act, the 5–6, 30 Catholic Hierarchy, restoration of the 7–8, 45, 112–13, 183, 185, 187, 246 Catholic Relief Act, the 5 celibacy 80, 83, 85, 93, 111, 118 Celibacy of Priests, Monks and Nuns 85 ceremonial, religious, see devotional practices; liturgical rites; ritual

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index Chadwick, Edwin 6 Chartists 41, 44 Childers, Joseph 177 Christ, Jesus 7, 107–08, 162, 167, 207, 209, 216, 243, 247, 248, 249, 259–69 Church of England 6–7, 8, 22, 39, 50, 52, 80, 188, 191, 201, 202, 211, 231, 240, 241, 257, 289 Church of Rome, see Roman Catholic Church, in Victorian Britain Clark-Beattie, Rosemary 89 class 35, 43–44, 47–50, 59, 68, 96, 103, 144, 164, 167, 204, 211, 217, 220–21, 223, 224, 289 see also middle class, the; upper class, the; working class, the cloister, the 14, 17, 19, 21, 77–78, 81–84, 86, 88–89, 91–94, 96, 97, 104–05, 109, 111–12 see also convent, the; monasteries Cobbe, Frances Power 80 Collins, Wilkie 10, 13 The Black Robe 20, 29–30, 54, 63–71 No Name 77 The Woman in White 10, 13 colonization, see empire compassion 37, 101, 140, 141, 166, 171 competition 21, 81, 104, 116, 118, 120, 125, 156, 169, 173 Comte, Auguste 161–62 conduct and Britishness 29, 31, 57–60 improper, of clerics 104–07, 184 motivations for 79, 112, 124, 138–39, 166, 180, 190, 192, 205, 226, 286 confession, the sacrament of 70, 81, 100, 101 conformity 148 as heroism 133, 139, 212 as ideology 212, 240 with civil law 6, 134, 164, 170, 172–73 as a pressure on individuals 104, 115, 121, 124–26, 141, 145, 150–51, 166 with social expectations 6, 14, 70, 134, 150, 201, 212 conscience 35, 49, 70, 110, 116, 131, 142, 150, 166, 168, 170 guilty 269, 272


313

known through feelings 190, 206–07 pressures on 69, 133–34, 138, 147–48, 172–73, 192, 196, 212, 237 see also freedom, of conscience consciousness 16, 88, 193, 205, 208 conspiracy 34, 37, 39, 41, 63, 65 control 200, 287 British attitudes to 40–41, 219–20 individual’s desire for 46, 49, 64, 90–91, 114, 222, 225 by law 22, 147 loss of, by individual 62, 140, 180, 184, 189–90 overbearing 63, 91, 109, 142, 185, 203, 237 by society 11, 51, 91, 99–100 see also discipline; oppression; selfcontrol; tyranny convent, the 14, 21, 33, 38, 53–54, 68, 77, 79–84, 87, 89–91, 93–97, 99, 103, 104, 110, 115, 126 exposé 79, 84–85, 86, 88–89, 94–97, 99, 103, 115, 117, 120–24, 125 see also cloister, the; nuns conversion 9, 19, 38, 134, 177–230 of Britain to Catholicism 7–8, 43, 45, 183, 184–86, 187, 288 and the feelings 22, 177–230, 286 of individuals to Catholicism 7, 39, 101, 177–230, 231–32, 249, 252–53, 289 intrigues about 31, 34, 63–70, 190–201 resistance of Spanish Jews to 138–51 see also Catholic Hierarchy, restoration of the; ‘Papal Aggression’ Counter-Reformation 20, 30, 233, 247, 248, 249, 254–55, 261, 263 courtship 65–70, 93, 95, 211, 214–16, 218, 220, 225 Craik, Dinah Mulock 79, 103 Crashaw, Richard 249 ‘The Weeper’ 248 crime 1, 5, 10, 14, 29, 31, 46–49, 69, 85, 89, 94, 105, 106, 115, 135, 143 see also disguise; fraud; violence Crimean War 55 cruelty 9, 18, 21, 32, 37, 57, 97, 108, 125, 132–33, 139, 142, 164–65, 288

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314

index

see also persecution; suffering; torture; violence Cumming, John 188, 194 Cvetkovich, Ann 13, 182 Dallas, Eneas Sweetland 236 Darby, W. A. 104 Davies, C. Maurice 91 decadence 17, 23, 36, 125, 236, 237, 249, 275 deceit 14, 32, 47–48, 52–53, 112, 139, 158, 160, 240 degeneration, cultural 18, 47, 49, 71, 209 depravity 78, 81, 88, 104, 236, 240 desire 22, 45, 96, 162, 248, 286 of the individual 9, 20, 64, 66–67, 109, 113–14, 143, 149, 156, 158, 169, 172, 237, 255 and religious faith 181, 212, 215–19, 270, 272–74 sexual 18, 60, 92, 95, 99, 115–18, 122, 124, 187–90, 193–97, 200, 205–06, 215–19, 220–22, 224, 249 transgressive 37, 88, 154, 187–89 unconscious 159, 208, 220–21, 226 see also eroticism; same-sex relationships; sex and sexuality deviance 1, 9, 12, 16, 21, 31–32, 35, 104, 188–89, 200, 241–43 see also sex and sexuality, deviant devotional practices 19, 22–23, 232–33, 235, 236, 239, 244–45, 249–50, 252, 254, 258– 59, 262, 268–69, 271, 274, 275, 276 Benediction 231, 232 Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament 247, 249, 264 Quarant’ Ore (Forty Hours) 247, 249 the Stations of the Cross 247 see also Eucharist, the; liturgical rites; Mass, the; ritual; worship, arts of Dickens, Charles Pictures from Italy 239–40 Diderot, Denis La Religieuse (The Nun) 84 difference 17, 40, 45, 57, 60, 102, 140, 146– 47, 150, 156, 166, 213, 221, 240, 254 aesthetic 31–32, 57


class 35, 43, 220–21 gender 21, 62, 67, 88, 102, 218 racial 18, 31, 35, 57, 60–62, 63, 147, 237 religious 4, 9, 17, 32, 34–35, 39, 49, 57, 62, 106, 138, 140, 147, 150, 209, 220–21, 223, 233, 286 discipline 16, 50–51, 59, 80, 85, 87, 95, 153, 160, 163, 168, 178, 206, 208, 217 see also control; self-control; selfdiscipline disguise 14, 34–35, 39, 46, 47–49, 51–53, 64, 65, 71, 96, 138–39, 142, 148, 273 Disraeli, Benjamin 205 Lothair 22, 177, 180, 190–201, 202, 204, 205–06, 210, 212, 224, 226 dissenting faiths 22, 46, 212, 220 see also Evangelicalism Dollimore, Jonathan 188 duty 9, 18, 20, 69, 104, 126, 156 family 51, 81, 117, 148 middle-class ideology of 31, 41–42, 49–51, 63, 71–72, 193, 225 religious 64, 68, 70, 80, 115, 124, 126, 142, 192, 210 social 6, 21, 48, 50, 54, 91, 124, 136–37, 145, 150, 166–67, 183, 190, 193, 196, 198–202, 204, 211, 226, 287 and women 62, 67, 80–81, 91, 159 Early (Christian) Church 7, 131–32, 151, 153–54, 182, 246 Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, the 8 economy 58–59, 60, 96, 107, 109, 117, 226, 286 political 58, 163, 181 egotism 18, 22, 82, 93, 104, 105–06, 114–15, 118–19, 124, 165, 169 Eliot, George 19, 21, 22, 113, 165–66 review of ‘Aurora Leigh’ 158 review of ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ 113 Romola 22, 131, 137–38, 156–72 Elizabeth I (queen of England) 5, 43, 56, 58, 59, 134, 135, 137 Ellerton, John 246 Emmerich, Anne Catherine 249 emotions, the 3, 9, 20, 69, 140, 152, 169, 248

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index aesthetic 23, 180, 194, 197, 207–09, 236–37, 238–39, 243–44 power of 4, 22, 177–230, 286 and religion 23, 154–55, 178–89, 192–93, 212, 214–16, 233, 237, 238–40, 242–44, 245–46, 251, 257–66 repression of 65, 86, 90, 98–99, 159, 205–06, 214–16, 225 and sensationalism 11, 13, 15–16, 22, 285 and women 69, 81, 83, 98–99, 194, 218–20, 225 see also affect, the faculty of; desire; eroticism; feelings, the; hysteria empire 2, 20, 29, 34, 35, 44, 54–57, 59–63, 81 Englishness, see British character, nature of the; identity, national; nation and nationhood eroticism 36, 82–83, 91, 118, 155, 187–90, 194–95, 197, 214, 216, 219, 245, 267, 270, 273, 275 see also desire, sexual; sex and sexuality established church, the, see Church of England Eucharist, the 263, 264, 275 Evangelicalism 22, 46, 77, 179, 181, 183, 185, 212–13, 246, 257, 259, 269 excess associated with Catholicism 3, 20, 38, 40, 47, 49, 71, 109, 142, 150, 233, 239, 246, 253–54 emotional 182, 187, 197–98, 226 Gothic 12, 42 of religious fervour 141–42, 262, 264 and sensationalism 2, 12, 15, 31–32, 37–38, 47 sensuous and sexual 115, 152, 160–61, 236 exposure 11, 14, 23, 218, 246 Faber, Frederick 155, 231, 237, 246, 249, 250, 251, 253, 257, 258, 264, 269, 271 ‘The Agony’ 269 ‘Desire of God’ 270 ‘Evening Hymn at the Oratory’ 269 ‘Faith of our Fathers’ 1 ‘Fight for Sion’ 269 The Foot of the Cross 260–61


315

Growth in Holiness 257–58 ‘The Holy Trinity’ 252 ‘Jesus Crucified’ 261–62 ‘Majesty Divine’ 251–52 ‘Our Heavenly Father’ 269 ‘The Pain of Love’ 270 ‘Self-Love’ 270 faith (religious) 3, 14–15, 16, 35, 52– 53, 113–14, 132, 136–37, 149, 151, 153, 166, 170, 172, 235, 244–45, 267, 271, 275–76, 285–86, 291 Catholic 30, 64, 96, 134–37, 141, 185, 194, 211–18, 232, 257–58, 261, 267–68, 276, 288, 291 foreign 35, 78, 86, 217–18 heretical 14–15, 78, 102, 199–200 national 8, 53, 59, 134, 137 see also Church of England; conversion; Protestantism family, the Catholicism as threat to 29–30, 44–45, 47–49, 56, 71–72, 210–11 as mirror of society 20, 29–30, 49–51, 71–72, 85, 109, 117–18, 143 nature and function of 4, 47, 81–82, 91, 109, 139, 148–49, 167, 169, 214, 223–24 Victorian confidence in 21, 67–68, 70–71, 258 weakness of 48, 52–54, 63–64, 67–71 see also home, the fanaticism attributed to Catholics 15, 66, 67, 68, 86, 104, 107, 138, 140–42, 191, 207, 238, 286 and egotism 62, 169 and mental instability 10, 81, 140, 197, 288 religious (general) 202, 212–13, 290 and self-abnegation 149, 221 and tyranny 141, 145, 165 and women 92, 163 Fay, Elizabeth 140 feelings, the 29, 49, 59, 91, 93, 95, 126, 138–39, 141, 145, 149–50, 156, 159, 165–67, 172, 177–230, 232, 247 ‘tender’ 22, 226, 259, 263

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index

femininity 21, 60, 62, 78–83, 89–94, 98–99, 103, 149, 154, 160, 163, 182, 189, 214, 216, 221, 222–23 see also difference, gender; gender; womanhood feminism, Victorian 80, 217, 222 Fenian Brotherhood, the, see Ireland foreignness 65, 288 in religious culture 29, 38, 66, 78, 81, 86, 188–89, 235–42, 286 in secular experience 44–45, 71, 95–96, 125, 217–18 and sensationalism 31–33, 94–95 as threat 33–35, 54–55, 58, 71, 139, 217 see also difference; strangeness Foucault, Michel 17, 41, 151, 152 Foxe, John Acts and Monuments (Book of Martyrs) 132, 137 Franchot, Jenny 2, 6 fraud 5, 14, 47, 48, 53, 150 freedom 61, 148, 160, 200, 208, 218, 225 civil 5, 8, 31, 34, 43–47, 50, 58–59, 61–63, 71, 89–90, 134–137, 173, 191, 194, 196, 198 of conscience 6, 20–21, 54, 71, 82, 134–36, 151, 201 of the individual 29, 35, 37, 42, 50, 54, 62, 103, 135–36, 138, 143–44, 218, 223 intellectual 8, 44, 166 religious 8, 43, 45, 61 Freud, Sigmund 208, 211 friars 104, 106, 121, 163, 164, 171, 172 Froude, James Anthony History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada 136–37 Fullerton, Lady Georgiana 183, 247 Gaskell, Elizabeth 86 gender 3, 4, 18, 20, 61–62, 63, 78–83, 85, 87, 91–94, 97, 101, 103, 107, 124, 125–26, 159, 188–89, 211, 217, 220, 221–24, 285 see also difference, gender; femininity; masculinity; womanhood gentleman, the 41, 48, 59, 60, 124, 209, 289 ghosts 92, 95– 96, 98, 206


Gladstone, William Ewart 183 Glorious Revolution, the 43, 134 God 59, 61, 108, 155, 261 as artist 122–23, 256 as authoritative law-giver 51, 119, 141, 162, 164–66 as desiring 270, 272–75 as powerful majesty 142, 209, 247–48, 251–57, 259–60 see also Christ, Jesus; conversion; Incarnation, the Gordon, Charles (General) 287 Gordon, Lord George 5 and the Gordon Riots 5 Gorham Judgement, the 183 Gosse, Edmund 179 Gothic, the 12, 13, 14, 33, 34, 41–42, 46, 77, 83–84, 87, 99, 138, 287 Gothic fiction 9, 12, 13, 33, 34, 36, 77, 94, 95, 99, 142–43 Gothic revival, the 4, 7, 191, 235 governance 8, 39, 45, 47, 133–34, 136, 145–46, 162–63 see also leadership Great Fire of London 34 greed 18, 48, 50, 64, 72, 79, 86, 104, 108, 116, 117, 119, 123, 160, 192, 236 Griffin, Susan 2, 95 guilt 63, 65, 66–68, 98, 149–50, 182, 215, 216, 250, 260–63, 268, 271 Gunpowder Plot 5, 34, 132 Hamilton, Eugene Lee 97 Harper, Edward 82 Heimann, Mary 246, 268 Hennelly, Mark M. Jr. 13 Henry VIII (king of England) 64 heroism of conformity 21, 139 as endurance and sacrifice 39, 70, 132, 150–51, 166–68 of resistance 21, 121, 139, 148, 157, 170–72 199–200 Victorian ideals of 42, 55, 59, 107, 126, 137, 192–93, 196 Higginson, Teresa 268 Hobbes, Thomas 206

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index Hogan, Anne 210, 222 Holroyd, Michael 290 home, the 3, 13–14, 29, 49, 54, 55, 88, 214, 215 Hopkins, Gerard Manley 19, 23, 186, 233, 248–50, 251, 256, 263, 272, 273 ‘As kingfishers catch fire’ 268 ‘Carrion Comfort’ 272 ‘I wake and feel’ 271 ‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’ 271 ‘No worst’ 271, 272 ‘Pied Beauty’ 253–54 ‘The shepherd’s brow’ 271 ‘The Soldier’ 267–68 ‘That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection’ 268 ‘Thou art indeed just, Lord’ 271 ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ 254, 265–67, 272–73 Hopkins, Manley 186 horror 6, 11, 32, 36, 60, 83, 85, 94, 109, 137, 139, 142, 150, 153, 163, 170, 256, 259, 262–63, 266 The Horrors of Roman Catholic Convents, Exposed in a True Heartrending Account … 85 Hughes, Winifred 12 Hunt, Leigh 242 hymns 232, 233, 246, 247, 250, 251–52, 261–62, 269–70 see also Faber, Frederick hypocrisy associated with Catholicism 39, 41, 47, 60, 77, 79, 92, 104, 106, 112–18, 120–21, 125, 202–03, 212, 288 in secular life 21, 53, 60, 72, 79, 104, 112–18, 184, 289 hysteria 12, 16, 31, 53, 55, 67, 81, 98, 184, 187, 189, 208, 213 identity 14, 51–52, 64, 142, 168–69, 178, 179, 212 cultural formations of 12, 17–18, 33–34, 46, 70, 132, 189–90, 220–22, 246, 258, 285–86


317

individual 13–14, 33, 46, 52–53, 65, 78, 89, 94, 149, 178–79, 201, 203, 207, 216–20, 223–24, 226, 268, 272–74, 285–86 national 16, 20, 29–34, 39–51, 53–56, 58–63, 84, 183 imagination, the and art 123, 255, 271–72 danger of 38 and inner self 20, 219, 273 and national identity 31–32, 39–40 stimuli of 103, 156, 171, 207, 232, 248, 251–52, 258 imperialism, see empire Incarnation, the 251, 259–60, 262, 263–65, 267–69 independence of the individual 35–36, 42, 49–51, 62, 100–03, 123–25, 224, 287 intellectual 39, 101–03 of the nation 54, 57–58, 89 of women 82, 89–94, 102–03, 217 see also freedom individual, the 2, 4, 11, 37, 56, 64, 68, 71, 157, 158, 159, 188, 215, 269 enslavement of 35–36, 84, 91, 94–95, 97 rights of 31, 54, 136 as shaped by feelings 179–82, 186, 190 and society 20, 22, 133–36, 138–39, 142–52, 161, 171–72 individualism 9, 18, 21, 36, 49, 50, 52, 58, 90, 93, 96, 101–03, 114, 124–26, 146, 173, 222 Inglis, Robert 8 inheritance 16, 32–34, 51, 63–64, 71, 117, 148, 225 cultural 53–55, 94, 223–25 Inquisition, the 17, 22, 56, 57, 60, 105, 132, 138, 139–40, 142, 143, 147–50, 152 insanity 15–16, 57, 63, 98, 111–12, 186–87, 193, 225 see also mind institutions 20, 33, 44, 47, 63–65, 77, 84, 98, 121, 152, 161, 286 national 6, 13–14, 29, 44–45, 49–50, 55–56, 71–72, 104, 109, 191, 287

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318

index

role of 9, 14, 37, 39, 50, 55–56, 71–72, 205–06 interiority 20, 22, 90, 152, 157, 190, 202–05, 226, 248 intrigue 1, 5, 33–34, 39–40, 44, 51–52, 56–57, 63–64, 71, 199, 204–06 invasion 8, 9, 20, 29–30, 35, 43–46, 54, 55–58, 60, 71, 164, 219 Ireland 5, 6, 55, 56, 59, 191, 199 and Fenian Brotherhood 5, 44, 199 Italy 8, 196, 198–99, 209, 236, 238–40 Jacobus, Mary 88 James, Henry 14, 191 James, William 180 Jameson, Anna 80, 88, 103, 153 Jenks, Chris 19 Jesuits, the 19, 20–21, 28–76, 105, 135, 136, 182, 183, 196, 203, 213, 218, 225, 248–49 female 37, 48, 52–53 Jews, representations of 22, 57, 118–19, 138–50, 168 Johnson, Lionel ‘The Church of a Dream’ 276 ‘The Dark Angel’ 275–76 Jowett, Benjamin 189 Joyce, Simon 290 justice 21, 37, 46, 61, 106, 139, 144, 147, 164, 169–70, 173, 196, 198, 199 Kaplan, Fred 178 Keary, Eliza 77 Keble, John 257 Lectures on Poetry 257 Lyra Innocentium 231 Kingsley, Charles 7, 10, 19, 20, 155, 185, 189, 194, 237 Westward Ho! 20, 29, 54–63 Kristeva, Julia 285 Lathbury, Thomas 132 law 4, 6, 8, 20, 22, 37, 45, 47, 50, 53, 56, 59, 106, 131–76, 204, 206 ‘of Affection’ 167–68, 171 ‘of Conscience’ 133, 150–51, 160 ‘of the Father’ 133, 148–50, 154–55, 164 natural 141, 170


‘of the State’ 133, 136, 147, 149–50, 162 ‘of Vengeance’ 169–70 leadership 54, 55, 58–59, 63, 80, 92, 105–06, 136, 183 Lewis, Matthew ‘Monk’ 13 Liddon, Henry Parry 186 Lingard, John 135 liturgical rites 1, 7, 22, 135, 232–38, 241, 246, 250–51, 265, 276, 288 see also devotional practices; ritual; worship, arts of love 63, 65, 108, 117, 149–52, 159, 166–68, 172, 180, 186, 195, 200, 210–19, 223–27, 259, 267, 270, 274 Divine 141, 151, 162, 259, 261–63, 266–67, 270, 272–74 Loyola, Ignatius 30, 49 Luke, Jemima The Female Jesuit 52–53 A Sequel to the Female Jesuit 52–53 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 5, 134 madness, see insanity Maison, Margaret 31 manliness 41, 57, 110–11, 121, 124, 208, 241, 258 see also masculinity Manning, Henry 7, 183, 191, 287–91 Mansel, H. L. 15, 17 marriage 63, 65–70, 78–81, 89, 91–94, 103, 107–10, 160, 161, 172, 198, 201, 210, 214, 219 Martineau, Harriet 156 ‘Sister Anna’s Probation’ 85, 89, 98 martyrdom 9, 15, 19, 21–22, 38, 39, 60, 68, 107, 131–76, 182, 260, 266, 287 Mary, the Virgin 18, 118, 242–43, 258, 260–62, 265 Mary, Queen of Scots 5, 56 Mary Tudor (queen of England) 132, 134, 136, 137 masculinity 21, 58–59, 69–70, 78, 79, 82, 90, 91, 103, 104–18, 125, 189, 205, 219, 221–22, 223 masochism 36, 38, 95, 99, 155, 161, 249, 268, 275 Mass, the 119, 238, 239

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index mastery 102–03, 144, 165, 173, 215, 219–23, 225, 254 materialism 54, 63, 72, 108, 113, 115, 116, 118, 120, 132 Maudsley, Henry 188–89 Maynard, John 155 mediaevalism 4, 7, 241, 242 see also Gothic revival, the melodrama 12, 13, 33, 40, 42, 54, 72, 142–43, 182, 199, 210, 260, 262, 287 mental sciences, see psychology, Victorian theories of M’Ghee, R. J. M. The Poor Gentleman of Liége 28 Michelet, M. J. and Quinet, M. E. Jesuits and Jesuitism 44 middle class, the 2, 14, 43, 48, 63, 68, 79, 103, 115, 125, 246, 286, 289 beliefs of 4, 17–19, 41–46, 51–52, 60–62, 64, 78–79, 94, 98, 109–12, 115, 125–26, 137–39, 190, 212, 234, 240–41, 289 establishment 18, 35, 44, 65, 113, 150, 171, 240, 245, 287 prosperity of 51, 55, 109–10, 125 Miles, Robert 84 Mill, John Stuart Autobiography 179, 181, 235–36 Millais, John Everett Christ in the House of His Parents 241– 42 Miller, J. Hillis 253 mind 39, 83, 186, 190, 257 and body 3, 15–16, 152, 157–58, 247 disturbance of 11, 15–16, 178, 182, 205–06, 225, 242, 271, 288 see also hysteria; insanity; psychological theories, Victorian missionaries 20, 30, 36, 39, 70, 185, 196 modernity 12, 13, 32, 44, 48, 105, 190, 210, 224, 275, 285 monasteries 14, 34, 64, 104, 111, 112, 121 monks 12, 21, 77, 79, 104–06, 109, 111–12, 120, 140–41, 160, 204 monstrosity 12, 15, 32, 92, 163, 271 morality and art 234–36, 242–43, 258


319

concern about unorthodoxy in 188–89, 209 cynical attitudes to 113–14, 160–61 and the feelings 22, 178, 188–90, 192, 226, 286 individual’s responsibility for 142 and sensationalism 11, 14–17, 31–32 standards of 31–32, 112, 114, 197 Morris, John 135 mystery 11, 13, 14, 38, 41, 54, 94, 95, 219, 236, 240, 264, 268 mysticism 208, 219, 248, 275 nation and nationhood 3, 4, 6, 18, 35, 38, 71–72, 82, 137, 143, 191, 201, 202, 235, 240, 246 see also British character, nature of the; identity, national nerves 3, 11, 15–17, 32, 210, 237 ‘New Catholic Baroque’, the 23, 233, 245–83 New (popular) Journalism 5, 10, 48, 78, 109 New Poor Law, the 6 Newman, John Henry 7, 9, 39, 47, 105, 132–33, 155, 182, 183–84, 185, 186, 187–88, 191, 211, 231–33, 249, 250, 251, 252–53, 254, 256, 257, 262, 262–63, 264, 268, 271, 285, 288 Apologia Pro Vita Sua 7, 181, 183, 185 Callista 154 Essay on the development of Christian doctrine 284 Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics 77, 133, 183–84, 185, 187 Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert 181 Meditations and Devotions 269 ‘The Mission of St Philip Neri’ 270 ‘Omnipotence in Bonds’ 252–53, 259–60, 265 Nicolini, G. B. 134 Nightingale, Florence 79, 287 Nixon, Jude 250 nunnery, see cloister; convent nuns 14, 21, 77–100, 104–06, 108, 110, 115–16, 120–21, 124, 126, 159, 212 see also sisterhoods, religious

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320

index

Oakeley, Frederick 231 obedience as Catholic trait 20, 35–36, 49, 57, 63, 70, 71–72, 78, 84–87, 100, 107, 133, 183, 204–05, 286 as duty 50–51, 61–63, 67, 72, 82, 85, 140–46, 149–50, 166, 172, 204–05, 260 in social behaviour 21, 47, 49–50, 57–63, 109, 135–38, 163 see also conformity Oliphant, Margaret 15, 16 oppression 1, 17, 35, 60–63, 77, 91–92, 94–98, 125, 206, 223 see also persecution; tyranny Orientalism 239–40 Overbury, R. W. The Jesuits 28 Oxford Movement, the 6–7, 116, 231, 241 see also Tractarian Movement, the paganism 57, 131, 151, 154, 161, 182, 237–38, 240 pain 65, 132, 143, 149, 151–57, 159, 167, 169–72, 219, 248, 259, 261, 265–67 see also suffering; torture papacy 5–8, 9, 20, 30, 43, 136, 139, 183, 195, 198, 239, 240 ‘Papal Aggression’ 8, 45, 55, 135 Parsons, Gerald 258 passion 41, 66, 68, 87, 93, 116, 140, 146, 155, 159–60, 178, 184, 211–12, 222, 225, 236 see also desire, sexual; emotions, the; feelings, the Pater, Walter 236 Marius the Epicurean 131 Patmore, Coventry 249, 259 patriotism 6, 43, 45, 51, 59, 136–37, 191, 235, 241 Paz, D. G. 181 persecution 1, 3, 9, 19, 21–22, 52, 56, 58, 60, 131–76, 184, 287 see also oppression; tyranny Phantom Railway, The 88 Pius IX (pope) 7 Poovey, Margaret 42


pope, the, see papacy popery 5, 6, 45, 177, 202, 213, 236, 237, 243 power 17, 22, 34, 43, 45, 72, 97, 100, 124, 153, 220 abuse of 59–61, 115–16, 137–38, 142–43, 159, 169–70, 172–73 aesthetic 236, 239 and Catholicism 5, 9, 30, 36, 40–41, 49, 57, 64, 84, 114–17, 133–39, 142–50, 185–88, 211, 238–39, 288–89 Divine 142, 252–53, 254–57, 264, 273 of the feelings 185–230 in gender relations 21, 79, 100–01, 105–07, 160, 210–25 temporal 133–39, 144, 146–47, 151, 161, 172–73 see also oppression; tyranny Pre–Raphaelite Brotherhood, the 240–45 paintings of 241–42, 243 writings of 241–45 priests 14, 21, 54, 64, 77–79, 85, 86, 101, 103–26, 132, 135, 187, 198, 199, 203, 204, 206, 212, 221, 245, 276, 287 prejudice 2, 104–05, 119, 136, 138, 140, 146–47, 158, 181, 220 progress 11, 14, 31, 44, 50, 63, 81, 144, 146–47, 177, 253, 284, 291 property 13, 43, 45, 47, 59, 64–65, 118, 148 Protestant Association 5 Protestantism 5, 63, 78, 85, 91 and aesthetics 231–35, 237–41, 257 and gender identity 80, 82, 89, 102–03, 126, 163 as mark of national identity 2, 4, 6–7, 17–18, 36–37, 38–40, 42–43, 47, 49, 51, 54, 59, 84, 89, 94, 132, 136–37, 188, 200–01 psychology, Victorian theories of 15–16, 53, 152, 156, 177–80, 184–86, 187, 188–91, 193, 203, 206, 210 Public Health Act 6 Public Worship Regulation Act 7, 241 Pugin, Augustus Welby 132, 235 Punch 10, 39, 47–48, 243 punishment 67, 88, 97–98, 132, 144, 151, 164–65, 169, 272 see also oppression; torture

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index Purcell, Henry 249 Radcliffe, Ann 13 The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents 12 Ragussis, Michael 138 Rance, Nicholas 13 rationalism 8, 38, 113, 115, 284 Reade, Charles 10 realism 10–11, 12, 15, 19, 32–33, 38, 40–42, 82, 87, 121, 143, 285 reason 11, 45, 113, 179, 181, 183–85, 189–90, 193–94, 237 rebellion artistic 123 association of Catholicism with 5, 37, 43, 46, 56, 134–36 against cultural expectations and values 21, 81, 89, 94, 97–98, 103, 121, 123, 125, 156, 165, 172, 190, 275 and the mind 98, 100 against religious authority 98, 108, 120–21, 136–37, 205 Reed, Rebecca Six Months in a Convent 85, 88 Reformation 17, 30, 35, 56, 132, 134, 137 relics 38, 62, 154 renunciation 38, 121, 166, 172, 179, 207, 286, 289 repression 62, 85, 87–92, 96, 97–100, 110, 111, 117, 121–23, 126, 140–41, 156, 160, 161, 205, 211, 214, 218, 222 resistance 9, 126, 133, 137, 139–40, 148, 150, 152, 156–57, 162, 173, 216–18, 221–24, 233, 243, 274 cultural 19, 21, 89, 103, 201, 233, 243, 258, 291 as heroic 139, 157, 167, 172, 199 respectability 4, 69, 80, 91, 101, 104, 110–12, 123 false appearance of 52, 110–12, 115–18, 120, 125–26, 140 transgression of 11–12, 105, 107 Victorian investment in 18–19, 21, 31, 45, 49, 72, 78, 79 Rhodes, Royal W. 134 Richardson, Eliza


321

The Veil Lifted: or, The Romance and Reality of Convent Life 85, 94–95, 100 Ripon, the Marquess of 7, 183 ritual Catholic 217, 231–38 religious (general) 15, 16, 19, 22–23, 94, 95, 112, 119, 185, 194, 215, 231, 288 Royal Commission on 241 see also devotional practices; liturgical rites; worship, arts of Ritualism 7, 188, 189, 240–41 Roman Catholic Church, in Victorian Britain 2, 3, 4–10, 28, 30, 32, 135, 183, 185–87, 188, 190–91, 233, 245–48, 250, 257, 258, 268–69, 275 see also anti–Catholicism; Catholic Hierarchy, restoration of the; ‘Papal Aggression’ Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 23, 233, 241–45 ‘Ave’ 243–44 Ecce Ancilla Domini (The Annunciation) 243 The Girlhood of Mary Virgin 241 ‘Hand and Soul’ 244 ‘Mater Pulchrae Delectionis’ 242–43 ‘St Luke the Painter’ 244–45 ‘Songs of the Art–Catholic’ 242–43 Rossetti, William Michael 243 Ruskin, John 235, 240, 242, 243 Modern Painters 116, 234 Russell, Lord John 8 Rylance, Rick 93 sadism 31, 132, 139, 152–55, 163 saints 133, 134, 135, 152, 153, 155, 164, 170–71, 188, 208, 238, 244, 247, 248, 249, 266, 276 same-sex relationships 59, 69–70, 188, 213–14, 267, 275 Samuel, Raphael 55 Savonarola, Girolamo 22, 157–58, 161–67, 169, 170–72 Scarry, Elaine 169–70 scepticism 11, 38, 55, 63, 210 Schwarz, Daniel 194

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322

index

science 1, 8–9, 15–16, 44, 53, 55, 98, 177, 187, 284 Scott, William Bell 242, 243 secrecy 11, 14, 33, 40, 48, 58, 63–64, 78, 84–85, 94–96, 117, 126, 139, 148, 158, 199 see also conspiracy; disguise secularism 44, 55, 108, 120, 132, 177, 284 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 88 self-control 16, 31, 42, 66, 84, 92, 98, 103, 139, 148, 162, 164, 178 self-discipline 18, 66, 69, 98, 115, 140, 153, 156, 169, 172, 193 self-exposure 247, 248, 250, 251, 268–71, 274, 275 self-formation 2, 4, 23, 43, 52, 78, 83, 115, 125, 177, 226, 287 self-sacrifice 54, 58, 60, 67, 107, 110, 125, 148, 151, 160, 161–62, 167–69, 171, 198, 209, 225, 286 selfishness 64, 82, 106, 120, 126, 143, 172, 209, 215 selflessness 70, 108, 121, 124–25, 166, 209–10, 260, 268 sensation 3, 10, 11, 15–16, 159, 179, 190, 193, 208–09, 234, 235, 236, 237, 239, 250, 253, 254, 256, 258, 261–63, 271, 276, 286 aesthetic of 22–23, 233, 237–40, 241, 244, 246, 248, 251, 255, 259, 274 fiction 5, 10–17, 20, 29, 31–32, 33, 109, 182, 202, 285 sensationalism, as a literary mode 2–3, 10–23, 31–32, 33, 35, 41, 45, 47, 48–52, 53–54, 60, 84, 94, 138, 140, 182, 233, 276, 285–86 senses, the 15, 209, 239, 245, 247, 254, 255, 262, 267, 274 sensuality 18, 79, 86, 96, 104, 108, 118–19, 121, 125, 168, 194–95, 209, 216, 233, 236–37, 248, 264, 267, 286 Sewell, William Hawkstone: a tale of and for England in 184– 37, 40–41, 42, 44–45, 49, 50–51, 54 sex and sexuality 9, 14, 21, 57, 78, 104–05, 108–09, 110–12, 140, 152, 155–56, 162,


201, 210–12, 236–37, 272–73, 290 deviant 36–37, 60, 78, 87, 99, 105, 155, 187–88 female 60, 83, 91, 98–99, 163–64, 218–20, 222–23 see also desire, sexual; same-sex relationships Seymour, M. Hobart 88, 94, 99–100 Sherwood, Mrs Mary Martha The Nun 77 shock 11, 13, 15, 31, 32, 202, 233, 236, 248, 254, 266, 267 Shorthouse, Joseph 19 John Inglesant 22, 177, 180, 201–10, 212, 226 Shuttleworth, Sally 98, 185–86 Simpson, Richard 166–67 Sinclair, Catherine Beatrice; or, The Unknown Relatives 32, 33, 38, 41–42, 45, 47, 49–50, 54 Popish Legends or Bible Truths 177 sisterhoods, religious 77, 79–83, 90, 94, 103 see also nuns Slinn, E. Warwick 118 Society of Jesus, the, see Jesuits Southwell, Robert 249 Spain 20, 30, 55–56, 57–58, 59, 60–62, 138–52 spectacle 17, 22, 154, 182, 236, 276, 289 spinster, see woman, single state, the 20–21, 43, 55–56 Catholic undermining of 34, 45, 48, 183, 187 individual’s duty to 144–45, 167, 168 and inherited values 53–54 oppressive potential of 145–46, 153, 157, 172 role of 135, 139–40 weaknesses within 29, 48–51, 59–63, 109, 137–38, 145–47 see also body, politic; nation and nationhood status, social 78, 103, 108, 112, 115, 116, 119–20, 123, 125, 172, 220, 288, 289 Stephen, George The Jesuit at Cambridge 39–40, 44, 52

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index Stowe, Harriet Beecher Uncle Tom’s Cabin 45 Strachey, Lytton Eminent Victorians 287–91 strangeness 2, 11, 15, 28, 31–32, 41, 45, 78, 88, 211, 218, 238, 241, 244, 268, 275 see also foreignness submission to authority of Catholic Church 6, 211 in Catholic practice 36, 50, 126, 204 as duty 49–50, 134, 144, 146, 152, 157, 173, 260, 273 in gender relations 102, 218, 222 unhealthy 35–36, 162–63, 173, 201, 204–05, 225 see also obedience; masochism Sue, Eugene The Wandering Jew 33–34, 35, 36 suffering of Christ 247, 259–62, 266 emotional 85, 182 endurance of 150–51, 210 fellowship of 148, 150–51, 162, 167–68, 209 imposed by Catholic institutions 21, 88 of the persecuted 131, 148–51, 170–71 physical 85, 182 psychological 85, 149–50, 182 and sensationalism 138 see also pain; persecution; torture superstition 18, 35, 44, 62, 82, 96, 107, 113, 126, 152, 154, 161, 168, 202, 215, 217, 223, 234, 237, 288 surveillance 36, 53, 88, 100 Syllabus of Errors, the 8–9 sympathy abuse of 52–53, 86 feigned 60 as guide to conduct 22, 59, 107, 125, 140, 166–67, 206–07 in social relations 50, 145, 194, 201 with suffering 156, 166–67, 194, 209–10, 266 Victorian ideology of 50, 71, 163 Taylor, Fanny Tyborne and Who Went Thither in the Days


323

of Queen Elizabeth 135 Taylor, Isaac 46–47 Taylor, Jenny Bourne 16, 45, 185–86 Thackeray, William 131, 188, 231 The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. 38, 39, 40, 54 Thompson, Francis 19, 23, 233, 248–49, 250–51, 254–57, 263–65, 271–72 ‘Any Saint’ 273 ‘The Dread of Height’ 272 ‘A Fallen Yew’ 272 ‘Form and Formalism’ 251 ‘From the Night of Forebeing’ 271–72 ‘The Heart II’ 255 ‘The Hound of Heaven’ 256–57, 274–75 ‘The Kingdom of God’ 267 ‘New Year’s Chimes’ 255–56 ‘Orient Ode’ 263–65 ‘To a Snowflake’ 256 Thrilling Mysteries of a Convent Revealed!, The 85 Thurston, Herbert ‘The Myth of the Walled-up Nun’ 85 Titus Oates Plot, the 5, 34 torture 1, 17, 36, 38, 67, 77, 85, 97, 131–33, 137–39, 142–43, 147–48, 150–55, 159, 170–72, 182, 260 see also Inquisition, the; martyrdom; pain; persecution; suffering; violence Tractarian Movement, the 6–7, 44, 183, 232, 237, 241, 242, 257, 263 see also Oxford Movement, the Tracts for the Times 6 transgression 4, 11–12, 14, 21, 37, 78, 82, 83, 87–89, 94, 100, 116–17, 142, 152, 157, 182–83, 188 Trevor, Meriol 263 Trollope, Fanny Father Eustace: A Tale of the Jesuits 34– 35, 37, 47, 52, 53 A Visit to Italy 236, 238–39 Tulloch, John ‘The Order of Jesuits’ 28 Turner, Frank M. 284 Tylor, E. B. 238 tyranny associated with Catholicism 17, 21,

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324

index

54, 61–65, 71, 78, 85–90, 103, 106, 134–38, 163, 198 cruelty of 9, 56, 148, 152, 213 as Gothic theme 12 in narrative style 97 in secular culture 44, 54, 61–65, 97, 100–01, 103, 118, 126, 137–38, 160, 165–66 see also control; oppression; persecution Ultramontanism 9, 246, 287 uncanny, instances of the 28, 31, 33, 78, 85, 87–88, 119–20, 268 unconscious, the 158, 178, 180, 186, 190, 194, 206, 208, 210–11, 217–21, 236, 285 cultural 82, 200 upper class, the 45, 49, 65 Vatican, the 5, 6, 7, 8, 183 see also papacy, the Vaughan, Herbert 268–69 Vicinus, Martha 80 victimization 1, 21, 33, 52, 56, 86–89, 94–95, 102, 108, 150, 287 Victoria (queen of England) 8, 43 Villari, Pasquale 163 violence 1, 14, 109, 146 and Catholic methods 20, 31, 57, 71, 94–95, 115 Catholic rhetoric of 38, 259–67, 272–73 as mark of cultural difference 62, 65, 71 and religious persecution 131–76 voyeurism 36, 57, 100 Walpole, Horace 13 Walsh, Walter The Jesuits of Great Britain 34 Ward, Mary (Mrs Humphry) 19, 211 Helbeck of Bannisdale 22, 177, 180, 210–27 Ward, W. G. 187–88


wealth 13, 43, 47, 52, 54, 55, 64, 69, 96, 119, 161 Webster, Augusta ‘Sister Annunciata’ 85 Wilberforce, Samuel 81 Wilde, Oscar 187, 290 will power abuse of 81–82 assertion of 81–82, 163, 218, 225 Catholic eradication of 35–37, 49, 214, 236–37 decreasing confidence in 11, 16, 158, 170, 179–80, 190, 197, 219 and mental health 16, 178 middle-class attitudes to 72, 185–86 renunciation of 167, 218, 257 Williams, Isaac 257 Wiseman, Nicholas 7–8, 86, 87, 113, 177, 185, 246, 258, 287–88 ‘Christian Art’ 258 Fabiola 152, 154–155 Woman Question, the 80, 103 womanhood victimized 56, 60–61, 69, 87, 91–92, 97–99, 108, 153 Victorian ideals of 60–61, 79–80, 82–83, 91, 160, 222 see also difference, gender; femininity; gender women fallen 60 single 79–81, 93–94, 98 work for 79–81, 90–91, 103, 157, 167 Wood, Ellen (Mrs Henry) 10 East Lynne 10 Wordsworth, William 179 working class, the 41, 44–45, 48–50, 209, 220, 247 worship (religious), arts of 233–83 see also devotional practices; liturgical rites; ritual Wright, Julia McNair Almost a Nun 85, 91–92, 98

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Reading Popular Culture in Victorian Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism (Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters)

Queer and Catholic: Queer and Catholic: Healey

Thomas Hardy, Sensationalism, and the Melodramatic Mode

The Victorian Novel (Blackwell Guides to Literature)

A History of Victorian Literature (Blackwell History of Literature)

Realism, Ethics and Secularism: Essays on Victorian Literature and Science

Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society

Exploring Catholic Literature: A Companion and Resource Guide

The Reason of the Gift (Victorian Literature and Culture Series)

Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature (Crime Files)

Victorian Literature and Postcolonial Studies (Postcolonial Literary Studies)

Women and Victorian Theatre

Catholic Tales And Christian Songs

Catholic, Reluctantly

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