Nineteenth-Century Anti-Catholic Discourses: The Case of Charlotte Brontë (review)

Diana Peschier's book is the latest in a string of recent titles on nineteenth-century literary engagements with Roman Catholicism, including Jenny Franchot's Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (1994), Ellis Hanson's Decadence and Catholicism (1997), Michael E. Schiefelbein's The Lure of Babylon: Seven Protestant Novelists and Britain's Roman Catholic Revival (2001), and Susan M. Griffin's Anti-Catholicism and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2004). Peschier's study explores how Charlotte Brontë used Victorian anti-Catholic tropes in her fiction, not so much to criticize the Roman Catholic Church, but to create "an underlying discourse of alienation, repression and desire" for her female heroines (9). This volume is of interest to Victorianists and Brontë scholars for two reasons: it exposes readers to the extent and variety of Victorian anti-Catholic texts that still survive, mostly in British libraries and archives; and it attends to the rather neglected topic of anti-Catholicism's role in the works of Brontë.

Previous related studies have tended to focus on anti-Catholicism in fiction, sometimes with scant acknowledgement that this phenomenon was part of a broader literary context. Peschier, however, quotes extensively from anti-Catholic tracts, treatises, and lectures (although curiously, sermons—a major source of information about Victorian anti-Catholic sentiments—get short shrift here); non-British scholars who wish to study anti-Catholic primary texts without embarking on an expensive research trip will appreciate her detailed descriptions of these sources.

Chapters 2 through 5 of Peschier's study focus on Victorian anti-Catholic rhetoric. Chapter 2 highlights what she describes as the "gendered dimension" (5) of anti-Catholicism, pointing toward the "systems of the subjugation of women as exploited by both Catholic and Evangelical Protestant men" (164). Protestant responses to auricular confession, Jesuit and Catholic institutions of learning, and nuns and convents are the foci of Chapters 3, 4, and 5 respectively. The sixth chapter discusses the anti-Catholic biases of the two newspapers the Brontë family received regularly, the Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury.

Beyond exposing the role of non-fiction anti-Catholic discourse in Victorian culture, Peschier also demonstrates how neglected the influence of religion and religious discourse on Brontë's work remains. Marianne Thormählen's The Brontës and Religion (1999) helped address this neglect to some degree, but so important and complicated a figure as Brontë demands her own study, especially given her famous and conflicted attitudes toward, and representations of, Roman Catholicism. Critics have paid the most attention thus far to anti-Catholicism in Brontë's Villette (1853) (the topic of Peschier's penultimate chapter), but Peschier also discusses anti-Catholic imagery in The Professor (1857) (Chapter 7), Jane Eyre (1847), and Shirley (1849) (Chapter 8).

The book's topic is a fascinating one, and it addresses an obvious gap in nineteenth-century literary and cultural studies. The book's potential would have been better realized, however, with further development, both in its engagement with secondary sources and its literary analyses. Half the book is devoted to establishing the anti-Catholic context for Brontë's fiction, limiting discussions of the novels to fewer than one hundred pages. I found myself wanting less cultural context and discussion of unpublished Catholic texts in the early chapters of the book, and more theoretical engagement with other, recently published studies related to its topic. Griffin's book was published too recently for the author to consider it, but the absence of Hanson, Schiefelbein, and particularly Franchot—a seminal text for scholars of Victorian anti-Catholicism—is puzzling. Readers of Peschier's book, therefore, might also wish to consult these titles for a deeper understanding of recent trends and issues in the study of Catholic tropes in nineteenth-century literature.

The book's methodological approach is, at times, also puzzling. In the introduction, Peschier states that her study "is not a book about religion" (1). I don't...