The Victorian Novel of Adulthood. Rebecca Rainof
chapter, “Odd Women and Eccentric Plotting: Maturity, Modernism, and Woolf’s Victorian Retrospection,” I follow purgatorial plotting into the terrain of the modernist novel to explore the “odd woman” as a figure through whom Woolf—and several other authors who bridge the late Victorian period and early twentieth century—frame their accounts of mature retrospection. My contention in this chapter is that the middle-aged unmarried woman plays a crucial focalizing role in decentered modernist plots, or as I call them, “eccentric plots” of maturity, and I focus on Woolf’s The Years as an interlude dually shaped by Dante and Victorian literature. In writing The Years, Woolf openly emulated Victorian novelists for their ability to capture prosaic life, and the novel exemplifies Woolf’s desire to descend into a literary past, for she modeled her vision of Eleanor Pargiter’s midlife quest for greater understanding on the Purgatorio as well as on Victorian descents into the lulls of daily existence. In finding continuity between Woolf’s vision of midlife development and Victorian encounters with the prosaic, I chart how the visit to Hades recurs as the metaphorical journey of maturity, an allegorical descent that is part of a rich tradition from The Odyssey to Ulysses. This conclusion gestures toward a larger understanding of how a purgatorial approach to plotting comes to characterize a fundamentally modern philosophy about storytelling, one more commonly ascribed to modernists and postmodernists in their “resistance to plot” but which, upon investigation, has its origin in the uneventful fictions of Victorian novelists who sought to represent maturity.
The book ends with a coda, “Descent and Tradition,” that further explores how myths of descent function as the archetypal quest story of adulthood, appearing in each of the novels in this study as they reveal the transformations that result from an immersion in the past. This story of mature renovation through preservation provides another way of thinking about the overarching history of the novel in the period between Newman and Woolf, for each story of descent builds on previous ones to form a continuous tradition of recounting the challenges and adventures of maturity.
CHAPTER ONE
“Strange Introversions”
Newman, Mature Conversion, and the Poetics of Purgatory
Conversion, for Newman, was a process well suited to middle age. Although his novelistic depiction of a young man’s call to Catholicism, Loss and Gain, takes the form of a bildungsroman, his own conversion was a decidedly adult affair. In the Apologia Pro Vita Sua, first published in 1864, Newman recounts a long period of adult probation, contrasting his middle-aged decision to become a Catholic with his youthful adoption of Evangelical Christianity at age fifteen: “When I was fifteen (in the autumn of 1816) a great change of thought took place in me. I fell under the influences of a definite creed. . . . I received it at once, and . . . retained it till the age of twenty-one.”1 His first conversion is presented as a coming-of-age story par excellence, a sharp revolution in perception that occurred “at once” but, for all its force, “faded away” after a few years. In contrast, in describing his conversion to Catholicism thirty years later, Newman stresses the measured unfolding of his beliefs: “I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any difference of thought or of temper from what I had before. . . . I had not more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption” (184). Juxtaposing the calmness of his adult conversion with the sturm and drang of his earlier spiritual bildung, Newman turns away from the nostalgic form of the revolutionary epiphany (“to be young was very heaven”) to devote his autobiography to a new, and distinctly Victorian, story of midlife revelation.2
This story, for Newman, is necessarily a gradual one. Capturing the slow pace of his spiritual awakening proved to be not simply an issue of philosophical importance but also one of political necessity. As he relates, the pace of his conversion became a source of constant rebuke: “it was made a subject of reproach to me at the time, and is at this day, that I did not leave the Anglican Church sooner” (147). Indeed, Newman’s pacing in leaving the Church of England has become one of the most notable features of his conversion story. Stephen Prickett writes, “His movement towards Rome was agonizingly slow. . . . Even the Bishop of Oxford’s condemnation of the Tract in his charge of May 1842 did not speed the death-throes of Newman’s Anglican existence”; and George Levine asserts that in “Newman’s world, as the history of his own conversion testifies, nothing that happens suddenly is trustworthy.”3 Perhaps the most notorious “reproach” of Newman’s timing in converting came from Charles Kingsley, causing the infamous skirmish that prompted Newman to write the Apologia in the first place. Kingsley’s accusation amounted to a charge that Newman had been disseminating Roman Catholic ideology from inside the Anglican Church all along, an argument based on the assumption that his conversion had to have occurred more quickly than had been disclosed. It becomes clear that Kingsley and Newman not only clashed over larger questions of religious doctrine, they also clashed over their understandings of conversion as a narrative. Kingsley presupposed a model in which religious calling arrives like a bolt from the blue, as in descriptions of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Newman countered with what might be described as an anti-Pauline model of conversion, one that could be understood as prosaic in its unfolding, deliberate, and less the product of youthful zeal than of middle-aged reflection.
The surprise was that many Victorians accepted Newman’s account of his mature conversion as compelling and authentic, spurning Kingsley’s claims even though he was a readier source of mainstream religious affiliation. This sympathetic reception of Newman’s work amounted to a complete about-face in public perception, brought about in no small part by his ability to capture conversion convincingly as a gradual process instead of an epiphany. As “agonizingly slow” as his conversion seemed, it was this quality of uneventful development that won Newman sympathizers across religious denominations. The success of Newman’s autobiography also revealed a wider interest among Victorian readers for accounts of mature transition, middle age being a category of self-identity that was emerging contemporaneously in the nineteenth century.4
On the whole then, the Apologia can be said to have accomplished many purposes, serving not simply as an effective defense against detractors but also as an introduction for readers to the gradualist vision that pervades Newman’s theological and poetical work more broadly. As Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman said of Loss and Gain, “to call the work before us a novel, or even a story, would be a misapplication of the terms. It pretends to no plot. . . . [T]he object of this beautiful work is to trace the gradual working of Grace upon a mind.”5 This process is more fully elaborated in the Apologia, an account not only autobiographical in nature but also devoted to illustrating a mature, not youthful, conversion. The vision of gradualism found in these works reaches a new extreme in Newman’s depictions of the ultimate mature “conversion”: the transition between life and the afterlife. In sermons, tracts, and religious poetry, Newman transposes the model of slow progression on display in the Apologia and Loss and Gain to the afterlife, taking his earthly ideas about incrementally slow conversion to their furthest conceptual limit by imagining Judgment as a state of maturation. For Newman, this middle realm of the afterlife becomes “a time of maturing,” “a school-time of contemplation,” and an experience characterized by “strange introversion.”6 This emphasis on maturing as a central process differs markedly from earlier visions, like Dante’s, in which this middle realm of the afterlife is imagined as a mountain with ascending trials conveyed as physical torments. Instead, Newman envisioned purgatory as a state for imperceptible and inward change that takes place over an immeasurable duration, a seeming infinitude that ends when a soul ascends to heaven. Newman’s fascination with portraying Judgment as a gentler state for improvement proved to be a constant throughout his career as both an Anglican and a Catholic, surfacing in his earliest unpublished Anglican sermons dating back to 1825, his most inflammatory work, Tract 90 (1841), and later in his widely read Catholic devotional poem The Dream of Gerontius (1865). The mystery is that Victorian readers who were outraged by the Anglican purgatory he proposed in Tract 90 found consolation in an almost identical