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
3 - Persecution and Martyrdom: The Law and the Body
Grace Aguilar's The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr and George Eliot's Romola
- 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
[P]ersecution is Religion's handmaid. – You must persecute to be consistent.
— William Makepeace Thackeray, letter to Percival LeighYet it may seem well to ask ourselves … when we read of … great religious persecutions on this side or on that … not merely, what germs of feeling we may entertain which, under fitting circumstances, would induce us to the like; but, even more practically, what thoughts, what sort of consideration, may be actually present to our minds such as might have furnished us, living in another age, and in the midst of those legal crimes, with plausible excuses for them …
— Walter Pater, Marius the EpicureanReligious persecution offered much sensational interest in nineteenth-century literary and visual culture. The physical and psychological torments of heroic martyrs – perplexed by conflicting loyalties to state and church, family and conscience – are a stock feature of popular Victorian fictions by both Catholic and Protestant authors. Even though critics derided such works ‘as a “literary nuisance’, the exciting blend of gory tortures, riotous mobs, and wily entrappers of the innocent faithful provided vicarious adventure and spiritual gratification simultaneously. This chapter argues that the complex Victorian rhetoric of Catholic torture, persecution and suffering is of particular importance for understanding nineteenth-century anxieties about the individual's relation to institutional authority, expressed in terms of the rights of the law over the body. Its operation can be tracked in a wide range of martyrdom writing throughout the period, and it provides an important context for reading Grace Aguilar's The Vale of Cedars, or The Martyr (1850) and George Eliot's Romola (1863).
Victorian martyrdom narratives, like many sub-classes of historical fiction in the period, directed attention as much to contemporary culture as to the past. The Early Christian romance, for example, usually portrayed the sanctity of a small, attractive community of Christians withstanding the onslaught of the official and dissolute pagan state. Written at a time of religious crisis in Britain when secularism and agnosticism threatened faith, these novels invited readers to make encouraging connections between the heroism of early saints and the stoicism of Victorian Christians who persevered despite modern temptations like materialism and unbelief.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature , pp. 131 - 176Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2007