Abstract
This chapter positions Villette within the context of a range of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novels concerning the possibilities and limitations of marriage between Roman Catholic and Protestant characters. I read Villette against literary predecessors such as Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story, Lady Georgiana Fullerton’s Grantley Manor, and Charles Dicken’s Barnaby Rudge. Despite Villette’s rejection of Roman Catholic celibacy, Lucy is left celibate through Paul Emanuel’s shipwreck, rather than finding her “true home” in a mixed-faith suburban household at Faubourg Clotilde. The novel’s ambiguously tragic ending represents uncertainty about whether such a house built on religious and national division could stand. This chapter, therefore, explores some of the challenges of building communities that cross religious and national boundaries.
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Notes
- 1.
Jeffrey Spear suggests that the immediate context for the novel was “the opportunistic alliance between the two extremes of British politics in 1840, the physical force wing of the Chartists and anti-Catholic ultra Tories” (67).
- 2.
Of course, one possibility is that either Emma converts to Anglicanism or Edward converts to Roman Catholicism, but the novel never hints at such a solution, either before or after the Riots.
- 3.
See, for instance, Dennis and Hugh’s interest in invading Parliament (318, 325). More importantly, Sir John Chester explains that though he doesn’t want to be seen openly supporting “a very extravagant madman such as this Gordon … to foment his disturbances in secret [through Hugh’s assistance] … may further our real ends” (336). Jeffrey Spear’s account of the Gordon riots does, to some degree, support this depiction, inasmuch as he suggests that the rioters were mostly NOT members of Lord Gordon’s Protestant Association (77).
- 4.
See also Robert Tracy’s discussion of the way in which the Gothic setting of Master Humphrey’s Clock frames both The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge (35–37).
- 5.
If one adopts Tracy’s argument that Redburn’s situation is played out in the lives of Barnaby, Hugh, and Joe Willit as well as Edward Chester, this point must be complicated. Chester and Willit might represent positive outcomes of the father-son tension, while Barnaby and particularly Hugh represent fates even more tragic than Redburn’s own life.
- 6.
See Burstein’s discussion of the way that “the past” in Barnaby Rudge (the history of religious and family controversy) “self-destructs before it can be folded into the next generation” (201). Burstein suggests that Barnaby Rudge ultimately achieves tolerance in part by demanding that everyone keep quiet about the historical tensions between Protestants and Catholics.
- 7.
Enid Duthie, for example, sees this borrowing as evidence of Brontë’s debt to French Romanticism (197–198).
- 8.
This was a common trope of pre-Vatican II Catholic apologetics, but, for the record, it was a fiction. Newman , for example, was well aware of the existence within the Catholic Church of other liturgical traditions: the Greek, Maronite, and so on. Even in the nineteenth century, these churches did not use Latin , but instead used Greek, Syriac, Coptic, or other languages relevant to their history. The “universal language” and “same rite” arguments worked only to the extent that one ignored the existence of these “Uniate” churches, which, probably not coincidentally, mostly flourished in areas outside of Western Europe, such as Armenia, India, Lebanon, and Egypt.
- 9.
Contrast this with the behavior of Lord and Lady Somerville, in Yonge’s Castle Builders , or compare (in a different vein) to Thackeray’s Pendennis. The elderly dandy Major Pendennis, who represents an out-of-date attempt at sophistication, insists that the proper thing to do when abroad is to visit the local English congregation, “and this pious man would as soon have thought of not calling upon the English ambassador in a Continental town, as of not showing himself at the national place of worship ”—even if the presiding Anglican divine is a gambler and a drunkard who makes a living conducting services at English resorts (724, 729). Whereas Helen Pendennis’ latent anti-Catholicism functions as a laughable marker of provinciality, Major Pendennis’ preference for English worship is connected to an old-fashioned attachment to national identity.
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Traver, T.H. (2019). Shipwrecks, House-Fires, and Mourning Rings. In: Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel . Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31347-0_2
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