The Victorian Novel of Adulthood. Rebecca Rainof
regardless of whether or not Anglicans fully came around, the poem certainly helped Victorians (including Kingsley) to purge their bitter feelings about Tract 90 and its fallout. The model of the afterlife that had once been a source of vexed conflict instead became a site of soothing consolation. Therefore, more than just offering refuge and relief, purgatory finally came to occupy a central position as both a point of controversy and grounds for larger compromise. In the end, The Dream can be said to have helped Newman accomplish one of his previous, and most ambitious, goals: that of making purgatory into a via media after all.
The Afterlife of The Dream
Newman’s intermediate model of purgatory would continue to permeate Victorian literature and culture long after the appearance of Tract 90. Most explicitly, Newman’s eschatology surfaced in literary visions of the afterlife and theological tracts published later in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Such literary visions of judgment include Margaret Oliphant’s “The Land of Darkness” and “A Beleaguered City” as well as C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, all works that present a non-Catholic vision of purgatory in which the soul’s main “activity” is to interpret its own state, as Gerontius does for most of The Dream.66 In Oliphant’s “The Land of Darkness,” readers at first cannot be sure whether they are encountering a vision of purgatory as they follow the newly dead protagonist through regions in the afterlife dedicated to everything from hedonism to totalitarian tidiness. The tale concludes with a hellish circling back that casts doubt on the protagonist’s potential for progress. Yet this humbling regression simultaneously gives value to the difficulty of achieving progress in a place of unforeseeable duration. If limbo is desire without hope, purgatory is desire with hope, and in Oliphant’s open-ended conclusion the protagonist’s potential for hope gives the narrative the chance of being one of progressive linearity, instead of merely a story of circular resignation.67 Similarly, in Lewis’s The Great Divorce a penitent soul enters an intermediate place of Judgment that slips either into hell or into heaven, depending on the choices he or she makes there. Those who continue in error are already in a state of hell without knowing it. Those who persist in improvement, often without it being recognizable to them, are living in a purgatory that can only retrospectively be understood as such.
In theology of the twentieth century, Newman’s influence is even clearer. During World War I, Newman’s gentler ideal of purgatory as a place for maturation experienced a tremendous resurgence, offering grieving families the consolatory prospect of continued growth for the many young men who had died in battle. General studies of modernism and twentieth-century religion rarely mention this facet of postwar fervor, but taking this brief interval in Britain’s religious history into account may contribute to a new understanding of twentieth-century responses to Victorian theology, ranging from tracts and war documents to literary works. As one professor of theology wrote in 1918, “Men are seeking assurance of life to come for those who have given their lives. . . . We hope as never before for an assured and abundant life after death.”68 Letters home from the trenches reveal that soldiers deeply feared going to hell, especially when their last act might be that of killing another person. As one British soldier wrote home to his parents, “So you think that if a man is fighting on the side of righteousness and mercy no matter what kind of life he has led in the past he will not go to the purgatory as pictured by Dante. I agree.”69 The belief in heaven offered the strongest comfort possible for many, but not everyone could embrace the idea of the soul’s immediate translation to paradise without a period of purgation, especially when acts of war had been committed in life. In response to an urgent desire for answers to philosophical quandaries, preachers, theologians, and popular writers began proposing that soldiers would go to a place for purging, but not “purgatory as pictured by Dante.”70 Instead they would go to a purgatory as pictured by Newman. To soothe congregants, preachers increasingly recurred to the gentler Anglican models of purgatory that came to prominence in the Victorian era. Reflecting on the Oxford Movement’s influence during the war, one clergyman wrote in 1916,
The Oxford Movement helped to restore the old faith and practice. . . . The great European War has forced the sense of the loss of prayer for the dead not merely on numbers of Church people, but on very many who belong to Nonconformist bodies. The Reformers denied any intermediate state or place between Heaven and Hell; their descendants find little difficulty in the thought of a state of progress hereafter, and great difficulty in the belief that all but the pious “elect” are abandoned to an endless Hell.
It is surely, the duty of all, who have the opportunity, to help in bringing England back to the faith and practice of the Primitive Church.71
What had once been regarded as highly controversial Oxford Movement theology became an acceptable alternative for those seeking a model that eschewed continued violence in favor of gradual learning and growth.72
As discussed in chapter 4, this conception of purgatory as a gentler state provided modernist writers, notably Woolf, with a metaphor for the nonviolent change that her characters contemplate and seek to achieve in The Years, a postwar novel that imagines the possibility for “another life” by way of a dramatic rereading of Dante’s Purgatorio. This reading of the Purgatorio, however, is crucially inflected with progressive ideas about the afterlife popularized in the previous century, for she presents purgatory as a maturational state and model of peaceful historical change. Purgatory, which appears by way of Dantean allusion and also as an extended metaphor, recurs to reveal both Eleanor Pargiter’s individual development from the Victorian period onward and, also, larger historical changes that Woolf’s characters hope to observe as the postwar future dawns.
Such examples make clear that the most profound influence of Newman’s writing was not to be found in overtly religious documents or in religious literary works that imaginatively sought to portray the afterlife per se. The Victorian fascination with purgatory as he conceived it received its most interesting treatment in secular fictions that used purgatory as a metaphor for gradual adult maturation. In the chapters that follow, I explore how methods for representing slow change in the afterlife came to appear, often as extended metaphors, in a range of novels from Little Dorrit to The Years. These works of fiction not only borrow from Victorian visions of the afterlife in using purgatory as a metaphor for the protagonist’s journey, they also borrow from the representational techniques that theologians such as Newman developed to put, as has been written of George Eliot, “the action inside.”
CHAPTER TWO
George Eliot’s Winter Tales
If Henry James famously criticized Daniel Deronda for being more like a lake than like a river in terms of its narrative flow, Gwendolen Harleth’s widowhood can be considered the deepest and stillest part of Lake Deronda.1 She begins the novel as a willful young woman, a “spoiled child,” as the novel labels her, but concludes as a widow quietly returning to live with her mother and sisters at Offendene. Early readers found this ending frustrating enough that one American fan anonymously penned a sequel called Gwendolen, published in 1878, two years after the original, which culminates in the heroine’s marriage to Daniel (Mirah having been conveniently dispatched).2 Evidently, though Gwendolen in Eliot’s novel at first worried that marriage would be painfully “humdrum,”3 readers have had a bigger problem with the “humdrum” once it is divorced from the marriage plot and made a conclusion on its own, a divorce that Eliot insists upon for her heroine at the end of Daniel Deronda.
Although Eliot grants the marriage plot to her hero and Mirah instead, she does not leave her heroine bereft, as many have claimed.4 Instead, she refocuses Gwendolen’s storyline on a gradualist vision of change that many have been tempted to overwrite as punitive stasis. Echoing early reader malaise, critics have called Gwendolen’s widowed end “tragic,” seeing her as “fixed in her tableau of tragic dread.”5 On the contrary, the narrator insists that Gwendolen is not “fixed” in her concluding state but may be “supposed to move, like the limpet, by an apparent sticking, which after a good while is discerned to