Realism and ritual in the rhetoric of fiction: anti-theatricality and anti-catholicism in Brontë, Newman and Dickens
Date
2016
Authors
Fanucchi, Sonia
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Abstract
This thesis is concerned with the meeting point between theatre and religion in
the mid-Victorian consciousness, and the paradoxical responses that this engendered
particularly in the novels and thought of Dickens, Newman and Charlotte Brontë. It
contributes to the still growing body of critical literature that attempts to tease out the
complex religious influences on Dickens and Brontë and how this manifests in their
fiction. Newman is a religious writer whose fictional treatment of spiritual questions
in Callista (1859) is used as a foil to the two novelists. There are two dimensions to
this study: on the one hand it is concerned with the broader cultural anti-Catholic
mood of the period under consideration and the various ways in which this connects
with anti-theatricality. I argue that in the search for a legitimate means of expressing
religious sentiments, writers react paradoxically to the latent possibilities of the
conventions of religious ceremony, which is felt to be artificial, mystical,
transcendent and threatening, inspiring the same contradictory responses as the theatre
itself. The second dimension of this study is concerned with the way in which these
sentiments manifest themselves stylistically in the novels under consideration:
through a close reading of Barnaby Rudge (1841), Pictures From Italy (1846), and
Villette (1852), I argue that in the interstices of a wariness of Catholicism and
theatricality there is a heightening of language, which takes on a ritual dimension,
evoking the paradoxical suggestions of transcendent meaning and artificiality
associated with performance. Newman’s Callista (1859) acts as a counterpoint to
these novels, enacting a more direct and persuasive argument for the spiritual value of
ritual. This throws some light on the realist impulse in the fiction of Brontë and
Dickens, which can be thought of as a struggle between a language that seeks to
distance and explain, and a language that seeks to perform, involve, and inspire.
In my discussion of Barnaby Rudge (1841) I argue that the ritual patterns in
the narrative, still hauntingly reminiscent of a religious past, never become fully
embodied. This is because the novel is written in a style that could be dubbed
“melodramatic” because it both gestures towards transcendent presences and patterns
and threatens to make nonsense of the spiritual echoes that it invokes. This sense of a
gesture deferred is also present in the travelogue, Pictures from Italy (1846). Here I
argue that Dickens struggles to maintain an objective journalistic voice in relation to a
sacramental culture that is defined by an intrusive theatricality: he experiences
Catholic practices and symbolism as simultaneously vital, chaotic and elusive,
impossible to define or to dismiss. In Villette (1852) I suggest that Charlotte Brontë
presents a disjuncture between Lucy’s ardour and the commonplace bourgeoisie
world that she inhabits. This has the paradoxical effect of revitalising the images of
the Catholic religion, which, despite Lucy’s antipathy, achieves a ghostly presence in
the novel. In Callista (1859), I suggest that Newman concerns himself with the ritual
possibilities and limitations of fiction, poetry and theatre. These dramatic and literary
categories invoke and are ultimately subsumed in Christian ritual, which Newman
considers the most refined form of language – the point at which detached description
gives way to communion and participation.
Keywords: Victorian literature, Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, John
Henry Newman, ritual, religion, realism, theatricality, anti-Catholicism
Description
A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the
Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements of Doctor of Philosophy, Johannesburg, 2016.
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Citation
Fanucchi, Sonia (2016) Realism and ritual in the rhetoric of fiction: anti-theatricality and anti-catholicism in Brontë, Newman and Dickens, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, <http://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/20798>