The Victorian Novel of Adulthood. Rebecca Rainof
practices including confession and to consider the “unspeakable solace . . . of purgatory.”40 Whereas Gwendolen’s and Arthur’s stories unfold with purgatorial pacing, Lucy’s unresolved ending maintains the novel in an ongoing narrative middle, a purgatorial state of midlife suspension. Thus, although this book addresses a range of cultural forms that authors invoke to create a sense of the gradually unfolding in literature, this study recurs to purgatory as a central modality that authors used to think about narrativity. In these “purgatorial plots,” Dante emerges at key points, his imagined journey to purgatory functioning as a metaphorical quest story for mature protagonists. For writers ranging from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf, the Divine Comedy provides a source through which to envision the gradual transformation of characters who find themselves, like Dante in the beginning of the Inferno, “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” midway through life’s journey.41 However, even when citing Dante in these novels of adulthood, the writers in this study invoke a distinctly modern model of eschatology devoted to slow growth and not the Florentine poet’s strenuous and clearly plotted trip up Mount Purgatory.
Tracing the evolution of purgatory as a theological concept and as a literary metaphor, this book offers a new critical understanding of the ways that religious and intellectual concepts from the Oxford Movement were inflected and engaged in Victorian fiction. Early chapters reveal how the methods employed by theologians came to influence fiction writers, notably Dickens and George Eliot, who sought to capture subtle maturation in the novel form. Later chapters show how this lineage of purgatorial plotting continued into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in works by writers, in particular Woolf, who portrayed the Victorian era as purgatorial while emulating Victorian methods for showing maturation and historical change.
On a formal level, each chapter reveals how specific methods borrowed and adapted from discourses including primarily theology but also visual art, lyric poetry, botany, economics, and folklore appear in a variety of literary approaches to remaining indefinitely in medias res. These methods and techniques include establishing closure while gesturing at its impossibility, spinning counterfactual “shadow” stories that absorb the main action from a central storyline, extending the “sense of a middle” by concealing the beginning of a given action or event, and destabilizing the “moment” as the unit for measuring events. In its broadest scope, then, The Victorian Novel of Adulthood engages questions about how historical influences shaped literary form to understand why a gradualist approach to plot arose as a common feature of Victorian novels of adulthood. Uncovering a vital connection between gradual plots in theology and those in fictions starring mature protagonists, it addresses a critical intersection between religious studies, intellectual history, and novel studies to reveal how the form of Victorian fiction evolved both alongside and through changes in religious philosophy.
In seeking to give context for literary developments, the book’s first chapter, “‘Strange Introversions’: Newman, Mature Conversion, and the Poetics of Purgatory,” probes the historical and theological origin for many accounts of gradual maturation in Oxford Movement controversies through twentieth-century conversations about purgatorial maturation. After defining purgatory and discussing how it became the epicenter for Victorian controversies about redefining the afterlife, the chapter turns toward considering purgatory as a narrative model, using Newman’s essay on Aristotle’s Poetics and The Dream of Gerontius as central examples to understand his complex ideas about action, character, and plot. These works foreground the conundrums and paradoxes that come with capturing a “state of change,” the kind of action that purgatorial quest stories demand and delimit, exemplifying the innovations employed by theologians such as Newman to approach these kinds of representational challenges. On a larger historical scale, Newman’s gentler model of purgatory offered Victorians a model for converting their own animosities about the Oxford Movement into a productive narrative of change. The chapter ends with a consideration of how Newman’s eschatology continued to haunt late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century religious fictions and works of theology, his model of Judgment as a maturational state experiencing a great resurgence after World War I in offering the grieving the consolation that the youths who died in battle could mature in the afterlife.
Chapters that follow show how purgatory and other related metaphors for gradual transformation began to appear in secular Victorian novels that capture adult bildung. Taken together, these works make manifest a cultural pattern of gradualist thinking; in their use of metaphors at once scientific, economic, art historical, and theological, they comment self-reflexively upon their own gradualist storytelling mode as it unfolds. In terms of organization, each chapter centers on a figure who strongly embodies this method of purgatorial plotting, beginning with the miser and continuing on to the widow, the bachelor, and the “old maid.”
Building on the historical and religious context from chapter 1, chapter 2, “George Eliot’s Winter Tales,” explores Eliot’s fictions of maturity, beginning with her slimmest novel, Silas Marner, in which she portrays her protagonist’s purgatorial development during his sixteen years as a miser. For all its apparent stasis, this period allows Silas to undergo a process of “collecting himself” (among many other things) that recalls the “school-time of contemplation” and “time for maturing that fruit of grace” that Newman presented as the nature of accretive change occurring in purgatory (“Intermediate State,” 377). The uneventful interlude that characterizes Silas’s miserly years subsequently appears in the lives of Eliot’s young widows as well, and the second part of the chapter discusses Gwendolen Harleth’s struggles with maturity as a young widow, a time described explicitly as her “purgatory . . . on the green earth,” rendered in images from Dante’s Purgatorio. Daniel Deronda proves to be Eliot’s most extended vision of purgatory, but in alluding to Dante’s tragic female penitent, Madonna Pia—a favorite subject of Pre-Raphaelite painters—Eliot rewrites the role of the tragic waiting woman as a figure of inward action rather than of inaction.
From misers and widows, the third chapter, “The Bachelor’s Purgatory: Arrested Development and the Progress of Shades,” passes onto another recurring figure of stalled adult malaise: the “poor, sensitive gentleman,” as Henry James termed his favored protagonist, a figure who rears his downcast head in numerous Jamesian fictions. Chapter 3 traces the prehistory of the sensitive bachelor as a mature protagonist, focusing primarily on Arthur Clennam’s anxious homecoming at age forty in Little Dorrit, and shows how Dickens uses folkloric and purgatorial imagery to portray Clennam’s adult “arrested development.” It examines a previously overlooked source for the novel in revealing how Amy Dorrit’s curiously static “fairy story” is a rewriting of the Peter Schlemihl folktale of the man who sold his shadow. This folkloric source resonates throughout the novel as Dickens blends shadow folklore with images of the purgatorial progress of shades. These shadow folktales provide a model for how a longer form (like the Victorian novel) can function to absorb a protagonist’s lengthy inactivity, for the action in many shadow folktales is displaced into a counterfactual realm embodied by a shadow or “No-body” figure—as demonstrated in the novel by Clennam’s thus-named alter ego, “Nobody.” Cast as a No-body, Clennam becomes akin to a Victorian shade, undergoing the trials of waiting and sensory deprivation that are common to conceptions of purgatory. In Dickens’s secular novel, these extended trials are transposed to an earthly place for penitence—the purgatory of the Marshalsea penitentiary. I conclude the chapter by briefly tracing how James, following in the steps of his predecessor, uses counterfactual techniques that strongly resemble Dickens’s approach in Little Dorrit. As with Clennam’s midlife odyssey, James imagines alter egos for his sedentary bachelors in his short works including “The Beast in the Jungle,” “The Altar of the Dead,” and “The Jolly Corner.” However, it is in The Ambassadors that James truly takes uneventful plotting to new extremes to capture his hero’s midlife renaissance, extending techniques for remaining in medias res that can be found in his earlier short fiction.