Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home (review)

"Feminists are not nuns," Crystal Eastman insisted in the January 1918 issue of Birth Control Review. But might nuns be feminists? Or, shifting somewhat away from both the complicated and historically contingent term "feminism" and the specifics of the cloister, what cultural associations—as well as tensions—might there be between Roman Catholicism and women's relationships to domesticity, sociality, agency, and modernity? That, at least for nineteenth-century England, is the question that Maria LaMonaca asks in Masked Atheism. Focusing primarily on Charlotte Brontë, Georgiana Fullerton, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, and Michael Field (with significant analyses of Elizabeth Missing Sewell and Mary Martha Sherwood, among others), LaMonaca argues that Victorian women writers used the tropes of Catholicism more frequently and in a more analytically sophisticated way than critics have largely credited them with doing.

The value of this book lies in the context that it gives its primary literary texts. The most canonical works under examination in Masked Atheism—Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853), Aurora Leigh (1857), "Goblin Market" (1862), Romola (1863)—are hardly surprising ones for this sort of study, and as LaMonaca herself points out, a number of scholars have, at least glancingly, considered the importance of Catholicism to their representations of gender, sexuality, and domesticity. But the juxtaposition of Brontë's two novels with two by the Catholic convert Fullerton provides depth to the argument as does LaMonaca's extensive archival research. Moving from much studied and quoted figures like Matthew Arnold, John Henry Newman, Samuel Wilberforce, and Nicholas Wiseman to such lesser-known controversialists as Walter Farquhar Hook, John Evans, and John Ward Spencer, as well as a number of anonymous sermons and essays and various unpublished letters of Field, LaMonaca reveals a tapestry of responses to Catholicism in England, responding to, challenging, and building on each other. What she insists upon—and, I believe, compellingly demonstrates—is that nineteenth-century literary notions of Roman Catholicism weren't merely archaic tropes or eccentricities but rather a complex web of values, theologies, and debates with which women writers consciously and specifically engaged.

If there is a weakness to this approach it is that, at points, that rich cultural matrix of associations starts to look surprisingly uniform across the century, as though "Catholicism" was a largely static (albeit multivalent) notion between 1800 and 1900. In a period that witnessed Catholic emancipation, the Oxford Movement and Newman's conversion, the Papal Aggression, and the propounding of the doctrines of the Assumption and Papal Infallibility, that seems unlikely. All of these do, to be sure, appear in Masked Atheism, but typically as symptoms of the discourse on Catholicism rather than events potentially influencing the contours of that discourse. One manifestation of this is the large number of Romantic-era sermons that are used as context for Victorian texts. For example, LaMonaca opens her chapter on Jane Eyre and Fullerton's Lady-Bird (1852) with an 1810 essay on marriage and adultery. She notes correctly that "sermons were enormously popular as leisure reading in the nineteenth century, and the older genre of the sermon cross-pollinated the newer, if more worldly, genre of the novel" (33). Certainly Eliot's novels, to take but one example, reflected a real knowledge of and an engagement with earlier religious texts and practices. But would Victorian women writers have read sermons of the 1800s and 1810s in the same way that they read those of the 1840s that LaMonaca also quotes? Would their relevance to a contemporary analysis of Catholicism—or the secular home—be the same, or (coming as they did from before Catholic emancipation and the Oxford Movement) would they have seemed a bit dated? It's possible that such writers as Brontë and Fullerton wouldn't have distinguished between them, but Masked Atheism doesn't make the case for why that should be so.

The framing of the book's argument as...