Monika Mazurek

Abstract: The 19th-century Britain witnessed a number of high-profile conversions to Roman Catholicism. While the overall number of these conversions was certainly not high enough to change the denominational structure of Great Britain, they attracted considerable interest of the public and inspired a number of writers who wrote about the experience of conversion both in novelistic and non-fiction form. Many of these writers were converts themselves, as Newman’s Loss and Gain (1848) and Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865 – 66) show. Conversion was also described by many Protestant novelists, for whom the converts to Rome were apostates and “perverts”. The word “perversion” was used back then as a common term for turning away from a good course; it started to acquire its sexual connotations only gradually from the mid-nineteenth century on.  The sense in which it was used predominantly was rather the intellectual and moral form of subversion than the sexual one, although the two meanings certainly seeped into each other.
For many Protestant writers, these defections often remained unaccountable. The Anglican church, construed by them as the natural church of all Englishmen and Englishwomen, was being abandoned for a foreign institution; hence the use of the term “perversion”, since the English converts perversely went against their own nature, not to mention their own worldly interests.The possible explanations for such inexplicable behaviour put forward with varying degrees of subtlety were: “fascination” or a kind of hypnosis; moral and physical weakness and effeminacy of the converts; aggressive proselytizing of the Roman church, including forms of psychological seduction. The purpose of my paper will be to analyse the conversions as depicted from the Protestant viewpoint in the novels of such authors as George Borrow, Elizabeth Sewell, Charles Kingsley and others.

While the actual number of converts to Catholicism in the 19th century was never very high, they attracted considerable attention, especially as many of them were socially prominent because of their talents, status or wealth. A number of Protestant Victorian novels dealt with the topic of conversion or attempted conversion, often describing it as a concerted effort on the part of the Catholic church. One of the potential motives for conversion was romance. Sometimes the encounter between the lovers was coincidental, and Catholicism of the loved one could be an additional source of allure (as in Elizabeth Sewell’s Margaret Perceval [1847]) or build a barrier between the lovers (as in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette [1853]). Frequently an attractive Catholic partner was used as a bait in the Jeuuit plot aimed at attracting a convert; this motive was used by Frances Trollope in Father Eustace (1847) and Benjamin Disraeli in Lothair (1870), and even in some pornographic novels. This instrumental use of love/sex was consistent with the belief that the Catholic church was hostile to marital love, while Protestantism with its idea of the family as a small church was its supporter. The paper will discuss this intersection of the romantic plot and the conversion narrative, its origins and purposes.

“Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan,” noticed Richard Hofstadter in his famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (21). This observation, made in the 1960s, draws upon centuries-old tradition of casting Catholics in the role of sexual perverts, not only in American politics but also in British politics and culture. Through the study of anti-Catholic Victorian writing we can analyse the particular crux embodied in Hofstadter's pithy remark: a mixture of moral superiority combined with prurient enjoyment of the described practices it purports to condemn. This part of my study is dedicated to the Victorian novel and its depictions of Catholic sexuality, which, as the novelists often suggested, was either stifled and warped or rampant, but either way it transgressed the boundaries delineated by the Protestant family ideal. It also discusses Victorian gender roles and the ways in which Catholicism was allegedly undermining them.

“Neither full procession, nor high mass, nor swarming tapers, nor swinging censers, nor ecclesiastical millinery, nor celestial jewellery, touched my imagination a whit. What I saw struck me as tawdry, not grand; as grossly material, not poetically spiritual”, wrote Charlotte Brontë in Villette, describing the response of her protagonist, Lucy Snowe, to Catholic liturgy. Protestant polemic writings often contrast favourably the simplicity of Protestant services with the theatricality of the Roman Catholic Mass; from their point of view it was just an empty form, if not downright blasphemous, since it negated the Protestant belief in the one sufficient and perfect sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Thus, “theatrical” here meant not only exaggerated and affected gestures, but also essentially false ones. However, Victorian attitudes to Catholic worship ran the gamut: from fascination, which drove some Anglican clergymen to adopt and adapt its various features, to disgust at the “mummeries” of Rome and its misguided followers. In my paper I will attempt to show the fluctuation of social attitudes to Catholic and Ritualist forms of worship and the way they were reflected in literature of the period.

In Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, a number of foreigners at various points express their amazement or admiration of the behaviour of Englishwomen, who, like the novel’s narrator Lucy Snowe, travel alone, visit public places unchaperoned and seem on the whole to lead much less constrained lives than their Continental counterparts. This notion was apparently quite widespread at this time, as the readings of various Victorian texts confirm – they often refer to the independence Englishwomen enjoyed, sometimes with a note of caution but often in a self-congratulatory manner. Villette, the novel which, similarly to its predecessor, The Professor, features a Protestant protagonist living in a Catholic country, makes a connection between Lucy’s Protestantism and her freedom, considered traditionally in English political discourse to be an essentially English and Protestant virtue. However, as the novel shows, in the case of women the notion of freedom is a complicated issue. While the pupils at Mme Beck’s pensionnat have to be kept in check by a sophisticated system of surveillance, whose main purpose is to keep them away from men and sex, Lucy can be trusted to behave according to the Victorian code of conduct, but only because her Protestant upbringing inculcated in her the need to control her desires. The Catholics have the Church to play the role of the disciplinarian for them, while Lucy has to grapple with and stifle her own emotions with her own hands, even when the repression is clearly the cause of her psychosomatic illness. In the end, the expectations regarding the behaviour of women in England and Labassecour are not that much different; the difference is that while young Labassecourians are controlled by the combined systems of family, school and the Church, young Englishwomen are expected to exercise a similar control on their own.

Roman Catholicism, as a number of historians have shown, played a particularly important role in the national psyche and national identity of Britons. Since the Reformation it remained a religion of a tiny minority in Great Britain, but a majority religion in all the countries which were the traditional political troublemakers for Britain: the rebellious Ireland, the conniving France and the menacing Spain. All these countries were implicated at some point in one way or another with attempts to overthrow the British government which would be followed, in general belief, by a forcible re-conversion of the whole country to Catholicism. For that reason, the Catholic loomed large in the British collective imagination as a potent and fearsome Other, like a small figure casting a huge shadow through a trick of light.
Catholicism lingered as an ominous shadow long after all political reasons justifying this fear ceased to exist; the Gothic fiction, relying to such an important degree on the setting and props produced Roman Catholic institutions and liturgy, started to blossom when Jacobitism, and together with it the threat of imposing Catholicism on Britain, stopped posing any sort of actual threat. The passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829 paradoxically contributed to a growth of unease around British Catholics, Catholics in the 19th century turned from being a phantasma, widely feared but hardly ever met in person, to a group with quickly increasing both numbers and visibility. Their numbers mushroomed, swelled mostly by the immigration from Ireland, but also by a number of high-profile converts whose 
“perversions”, as conversions were called then, attracted a significant amount of attention. The previously suppressed minority became a thriving church: new churches were built; new convents and monasteries, whose dissolution was one of the keystones of the Reformation, started to spring up; new Catholic archbishops and cardinals were instituted. It is a telling fact that several influential societies for propagating Protestantism, such as the British Reformation Society and the Protestant Association, were founded in the years immediately leading to or following the Catholic Emancipation.
The strong feelings aroused by Catholicism in the 19th century are not only the straightforward feelings of repulsion and fear. They are mixed with a paradoxical feeling of attraction and fascination with Catholic worship and ritual, with the secrets hidden behind the convent bars and the workings of the world-encompassing machinery of the Holy See. These feelings lend themselves in particular to psychoanalytic reading through the category of abjection as defined by Kristeva. Robert Miles proposed the use of abjection in reading the Gothic literature with a particular attention on its nationalistic themes; Victorian Protestant novel, which often borrowed heavily from the tropes of Gothic literature, could be equally well used for this kind of reading. The proposed paper will attempt to present such a reading of the Catholic Other, against which British Protestant subject tried to define itself, through a number of Victorian texts, both by well-known and completely forgotten authors.

In English culture Gothic architecture enjoyed ambiguous reputation: on one hand, it was obviously connected with pre-Reformation times and therefore suspect. This reputation was strengthened by the Gothic novel which associated Gothic buildings with oppression and tyranny allegedly characteristic for Catholic countries. On the other hand, as a supposedly “native” English style, in contrast to imported classicism, it was hailed as the true product of free English spirit. This dichotomy proved to be particularly interesting in the 19th century, the age of the Gothic Revival. As more and more Anglican churches were restored or built in the style propagated by A. W. Pugin and John Ruskin, the English public, in particular its Low Church faction, was ambivalent or even hostile towards the growing influence of the style associated with Roman Catholicism, the enemy of Protestant England. The article discusses the selected passages from Victorian novelists, both well-known (Brontë, Trollope, Borrow) and minor ones, which describe Gothic architecture and analyzes them in the context of this debate.

TEACHING THE GOTHIC NOVEL: THE GOTHIC SPACES OF SPAIN IN MATTHEW G. LEWIS'S THE MONK* Monika Mazurek Pedagogical University of Cracow The position of the Gothic novel in the syllabi of English departments changed dramatically during the twentieth century. ...

George Borrow (1803–1881), a writer, traveller and multilingual translator, achieved enormous success with his Bible in Spain (1843), which was never repeated by his later books Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857). The later books, however, were rediscovered by the later generation of Edwardian readers and writers, who were fascinated by the figure of “Borrow” as described in these quasi-autobiographical texts: an outsider roaming England as an itinerant tinker, making friends with the Romani and learning their language, on which he was one of the pioneer experts. The chapter investigates the fluctuations in Borrow’s popularity and the causes of the market and critical failure of his later books, concentrating on his stalwart anti-Catholicism, not unusual for a man of his times but turning out to be a stumbling block for the later readers.