Principle and Propensity: Experience and Religion in the Nineteenth-Century British and American Bildungsroman Kelsey L. Bennett (review)

Bennett recovers the spiritual roots of bildung to argue that the bildungsroman owes a greater debt than typically recognized to the Protestant religious practices of spiritual self-formation that flourished in the eighteenth century. Reading nineteenth-century British and American novels as inheritors of this tradition, she contends that Wesleyan-Arminian beliefs in the efficacy of human agency in attaining God’s grace prevailed among British writers, while American writers (she focuses on Melville and Henry James) gravitated toward a Calvinistic, neo-Edwardsean “antinomianism,” a term she uses to refer to a sense of the inconsequentiality of works to salvation. Although the dichotomy would doubtless buckle under the pressure of counter-examples from each national tradition, the book’s astute engagement with historical theology and ambitious yet well-defined transatlantic scope—chapters cover Wesley, Edwards, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Pierre, and The Portrait of a Lady—make it a creative, sophisticated addition to scholarship on religion and the novel. The chapter on Pierre reads the novel as Melville’s pessimistic response to Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which he borrowed and read in 1850. The book’s tragedy, Bennett maintains, reflects Melville’s residual Calvinistic distrust of the knowability of the divine will and of human efforts to achieve grace: Pierre’s high ideals and move from country to city, classic tropes of the bildungsroman form, result not in social integration and purposeful self-making, as in Goethe’s novel, but in isolation, moral chaos, and self-destruction.