Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Sensational Invasions: The Jesuit, the State and the Family
- 2 Nuns and Priests: Sensations of the Cloister
- 3 Persecution and Martyrdom: The Law and the Body
- 4 Feeling the Great Change: Conversion and the Authority of Affect
- 5 Art Catholicism and the New Catholic Baroque
- Epilogue
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - Nuns and Priests: Sensations of the Cloister
Charlotte Brontë's Villette and the Monologues of Robert Browning
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Sensational Invasions: The Jesuit, the State and the Family
- 2 Nuns and Priests: Sensations of the Cloister
- 3 Persecution and Martyrdom: The Law and the Body
- 4 Feeling the Great Change: Conversion and the Authority of Affect
- 5 Art Catholicism and the New Catholic Baroque
- Epilogue
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
The popular demand is for the prodigious, the enormous, the abominable, the diabolical, the impossible. It must be shown that all priests are monsters of hypocrisy, that all nunneries are dens of infamy, that all Bishops are the embodied plenitude of savageness and perfidy.
— John Henry Newman, Lectures on the Present Position of CatholicsI almost wish we were Papists, and had a convent to put her in to-morrow.
— Wilkie Collins, No NameOf monks and nuns with morbid cravings,
With visions and ecstatic ravings …
— Eugene Lee HamiltonIn her memoirs of an Evangelical childhood, the Victorian poet, Eliza Keary, recalled a youthful fascination with stories about sinister Catholic convents. Both Eliza and her sister succumbed to the delicious frissons of ‘nun mania’ aft er reading Mrs Sherwood's novel, The Nun (1833). Sherwood's narrative makes much of the Catholic cloister as an institution that oppresses both the vulnerable (innocent girls) and the assertive (those with independent religious views). A sub-plot, for example, features Sister Agnes, who, obstinately Protestant in her religious tendencies, had ‘been hidden away in a cell underground, that she might not contaminate the sisterhood’. Deeply moved by this portrayal of Catholic violence to a defenceless creature, the Keary girls became convinced that some frightened novice was imprisoned in a subterranean passage under their house. They spread panic and terror among their school-friends, such that one poor girl ran home ‘almost raving about a nun, and a dungeon, and the priest’. Indeed, such nun mania was highly infectious in the nineteenth century. Priests, monks and nuns – and the cloistered life in particular – occupy a significant space in the Victorian literary imagination. Tortured nuns, immured nuns, escaped nuns, and rescued nuns as well as licentious chaplains and perverted monks are reconstituted from more exotic Gothic precursors to feature in all manner of Victorian texts – from lurid journalism to scandalous autobiographies, from ‘penny bloods’ to mainstream literary works. This chapter explores the contribution of these sensational character types to the construction and interrogation of gender roles and the ideology of respectability in Victorian writing, with particular reference to Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) and certain religious monologues by Robert Browning.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature , pp. 77 - 130Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007