Abstract
In what ways do contemporary Gothic fictions concern themselves with theological heresy? What is Gothic about heresy in the contemporary imagination? Through readings of novels by Marlon James, Joyce Carol Oates and Andrew Michael Hurley, this chapter examines Gothic depictions of Christian communities in conditions of crisis and/or transition. It argues that while the heretical is often depicted as an external threat to the community—often imagined in terms of the Gothic supernatural—these external threats are shown to embody or emerge from the contradictions and concealed violence of an unstable orthodoxy.
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Notes
- 1.
Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 343.
- 2.
Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 344.
- 3.
Andrew Tate, Contemporary Fiction and Christianity (London and New York: Continuum, 2008), p. 16.
- 4.
For a fuller response to Bakhtin, see Terence R. Wright, ‘The Word in the Novel: Bakhtin on Tolstoy and the Bible’, in Mark Knight and Thomas Woodman, Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 25–38.
- 5.
Gerard Loughlin, ‘The Basis and Authority of Doctrine’, in Colin E. Gunton (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 41–64 (p. 58).
- 6.
Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
- 7.
Alister McGrath, Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth (London: SPCK, 2009), p. 91.
- 8.
McGrath, Heresy, p. 233. I discuss the ‘death of God’ movement in more detail in Chap. 5.
- 9.
Maria Purves, The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785–1829 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009).
- 10.
Fred Botting, Gothic (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 7.
- 11.
I have discussed fin-de-siècle Gothic, theology and secularisation in my article ‘“Nothing Moved, Nothing was Seen, Nothing was Heard and Nothing Happened”: Evil, Privation and the Absent Logos in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle’, Gothic Studies 19.1 (May 2017), pp. 57–72.
- 12.
Victor Sage, Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. xiii–xiv.
- 13.
See Marianne Thormählen, The Brontës and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Simon Marsden, Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).
- 14.
Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. by Kate Lawson (Ontario: Broadview, 2006), p. 232; cf. Lisa Wang, ‘Unveiling the Hidden God of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette’, Literature and Theology 15.4 (2001), pp. 342–57.
- 15.
Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed (London: Fourth Estate, 2013), p. 13. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation TA.
- 16.
Mark Knight, An Introduction to Religion and Literature (London and New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 85–6.
- 17.
James Polk, ‘“John Crow’s Devil”: Spiritual Combat’, New York Times, 13 Nov. 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/books/review/john-crows-devil-spiritual-combat.html
- 18.
Joél Madore notes that both Pastor Bligh and Apostle York reflect a tradition in Jamaican folklore of depicting preachers as unprincipled, corrupt trickster-figures; ‘Jamaican Signatures: An Archetypal Analysis of Marlon James’ John Crow’s Devil’, Journal of Caribbean Literatures 7.1 (Spring 2011), pp. 69–75.
- 19.
Marlon James, John Crow’s Devil (London: Oneworld, 2015), p. 9. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation JCD.
- 20.
York echoes the words of Jesus in John 11: 25 and 14: 6.
- 21.
Susan E. Colòn, Victorian Parables (London and New York: Continuum, 2012), p. 13.
- 22.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, the Reader and the Morality of Literary Knowledge (Leicester: Apollos, 1998), p. 440.
- 23.
Jane Ciabattari, ‘The Devil and Woodrow Wilson: An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates’, Daily Beast, 19 March 2013. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-devil-and-woodrow-wilson-an-interview-with-joyce-carol-oates
- 24.
Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint, 2017), p. 31.
- 25.
Kevin M. Kruse, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (New York: Basic Books, 2015), p. xv.
- 26.
Kruse, One Nation Under God, p. xvi.
- 27.
Valentine Cunningham, ‘Introduction: The Necessity of Heresy’, in Andrew Dix and Jonathan Taylor (eds.), Figures of Heresy: Radical Theology in English and American Writing, 1800–2000 (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2006), pp. 1–18 (p. 6).
- 28.
Cunningham, ‘Introduction’, p. 10.
- 29.
Cunningham, ‘Introduction’, p. 14.
- 30.
Emerson B. Powery and Rodney S. Sadler Jr., The Genesis of Liberation: Biblical Interpretation in the Antebellum Narratives of the Enslaved (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2016), p. 2.
- 31.
Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London and New York: Verso, 2012), p. 146.
- 32.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2017), p. 366.
- 33.
Andrew Michael Hurley, The Loney (London: John Murray, 2014), p. 4. Further references are given parenthetically with the abbreviation TL.
- 34.
‘Morecambe Bay Cockling Disaster’s Lasting Impact’, BBC News, 3 February 2014, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-25986388
- 35.
James Sharpe, ‘Introduction: The Lancashire Witches in Historical Context’, in Robert Poole (ed.), The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), pp. 1–18 (p. 1).
- 36.
Sarah Perry, ‘The Loney by Andrew Michael Hurley: Review – A Gothic Masterpiece’, The Guardian, 28 August 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/28/the-loney-andrew-michael-hurley-review-gothic-novel
- 37.
Taylor, A Secular Age, p. 3.
- 38.
Alister E. McGrath, Re-Imagining Nature: The Promise of a Christian Natural Theology (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), pp. 45–6. See also McGrath, The Open Secret: A New Vision for Natural Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).
- 39.
William Hughes, ‘“A Strange Kind of Evil”: Superficial Paganism and False Ecology in The Wicker Man’, in Andrew Smith and William Hughes (eds.), Ecogothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 58–71 (p. 58).
- 40.
Andrew Smith and William Hughes, ‘Introduction: Defining the EcoGothic’, in Smith and Hughes (eds.), Ecogothic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), pp. 1–14 (p. 2).
- 41.
Cunningham, ‘Introduction’, p. 7.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Hurley, Andrew Michael. 2014. The Loney. London: John Murray.
Oates, Joyce Carol. 2013. The Accursed. London: Fourth Estate.
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Marsden, S. (2018). Gothic Heresies. In: The Theological Turn in Contemporary Gothic Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96571-0_2
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