Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (review)

Recent scholarship on Victorian religion and literature foregrounds the fact that anxieties about religion are seldom "just" about religion; Susan M. Griffin's new book explores this phenomenon through her readings of popular anti-Catholic fiction in both Britain and America. In her introduction, Griffin argues that "reading widely and closely in Victorian anti-Catholic narrative" enables critical "discussion and analysis of a range of cultural ideas and problems," including the "roles of women, shifting definitions of masculinity, the status of marriage, education and citizenship . . . and, most importantly, Protestant self-critique" (10). Griffin's approach builds upon Jenny Franchot's important study, Roads to Rome (1994), which presented anti-Catholicism as "an imaginative category of discourse through which antebellum American writers . . . indirectly voiced the tensions and limitations of American Protestant culture" (qtd. in Griffin 11).

Griffin clearly distinguishes the ways in which her study diverges from Franchot's. Whereas Roads to Rome focuses exclusively on antebellum American literature, Griffin ambitiously traces the contours of a transnational, transatlantic obsession with Rome; she correctly observes that "a common British and American culture is vividly present in the literal intertextuality of anti-Catholic writing, its quotations, parodies, excerpts, allusions, and cross-references" (15). Chapter 1 focuses on the genre of the escaped nun's tale in America; chapter 2 explores William Sewell's and Frances Trollope's respective engagements with the British Oxford Movement; chapter 3 analyzes anti-Catholicism in American nativist novels of the 1850s. Chapters 4 and 5 trace in various anti-Catholic novels cultural anxieties about confession and imperialism, respectively (including texts by Charles Kingsley, Catherine Sinclair, and Eliza Lynn Linton), and the final chapter argues that writers such as William Dean Howells and Henry James draw upon an anti-Catholic literary precedent to "confront and explore the vexed status of the American male writer" (25). In each of these chapters, Griffin demonstrates that anti-Catholicism in nineteenth-century fiction enabled "creative maintenance of American and British identities . . . at once distinct and interdependent" (15).

The book's conclusion briefly examines representations of anti-Catholicism at the close of the century. Although anti-Catholicism and its representations in popular fiction diminished by the fin de siècle, Griffin notes a particularly interesting phenomenon in the ways that some women writers such as Edith Wharton ("The Bunner Sisters" [1916]) and Mary Arnold Ward (Helbeck of Bannisdale [1898]) continue to employ anti- Catholic images. Griffin argues that by the end of the century, some women writers draw upon anti-Catholic narrative to "explore what a culture of secularism and doubt means for women" (214); that is, a stale, outmoded Catholicism comes to represent the only outlet for female spirituality in an increasingly secularized modern world.

One of this book's strengths is that it casts additional light on a fascinating topic that still seems understudied, despite the precedent of books such as Roads to Rome and Ellis Hansen's Decadence and Catholicism (1997). In the course of her study, Griffin draws upon an overwhelming range of nineteenth-century novels of religious controversy, most of them now forgotten and long out of print. Griffin wisely singles out a smaller number for focused analysis; her readings are smart and compelling. Along with Griffin's interesting analysis of anti-Catholicism in fin-de-siècle women's writing, I particularly enjoyed the way she linked anti-Catholicism in Sinclair's Beatrice (1852) to anxieties about imperialism (drawing links between Sinclair's evil Jesuits and popular representations of the Indian cult of Thuggee), and made connections between anti-confession and anti-vivisection rhetoric in her discussion of Linton's Under Which Lord? (1879).

Considering the ambitious scope of Griffin's topic, one wishes that this could be a longer book. Roads to Rome focuses exclusively on antebellum American anti-Catholic fiction in about five hundred pages; Griffin tackles both British and American anti- Catholicism in fewer than three hundred. In her desire to make sense of such a...