Victorian Parables by Susan E. Colón, and: Dickens, His Parables, and His Reader by Linda M. Lewis (review)

Linda M. Lewis’s Dickens, His Parables, and His Reader and Susan E. Colón’s Victorian Parables join the band of critical works that over the past twenty or twenty-five years have resisted describing the Victorian era’s religious progress as a relentless march toward secularism. While the pictures painted in classic studies by the likes of J. Hillis Miller and U. C. Knoepflmacher reveal compelling truths about the collective Victorian loss of faith, such perspectives tend by their very natures to undercut the determinative force religion played throughout the long nineteenth century. Recent approaches to the religion question have tended to focus on “religion and”—the “and” being followed with concepts such as cultural significance (Michael Ragussis and Gauri Viswanathan), Darwinism (George Levine), or narratives of progress (Barry Qualls). Both Lewis and Colón concern themselves with repositioning religion—and specifically the use of biblical parables—in the midst of Victorian discourse, not as something to be analyzed in combination with some other cultural phenomenon, but as a subject worthy of critical focus. They undertake this task in a similar fashion: by unpacking the rich variety of biblical references in canonical Victorian fiction.

Lewis uses narrative theory to read Charles Dickens, adopting terminology and concepts from Peter Rabinowitz and James Phelan to examine the various ways that Dickens both addresses and constructs his audience. Parables, Lewis argues, are Dickens’s ways of collaborating with his “dear reader,” as his use of familiar biblical stories and allusions prompts predictable reader responses that follow scriptural patterns (19). Lewis rightly notes that many of the biblical allusions that would have been old hat for Dickens’s original readership may be lost on a more secular twenty-first-century audience, and her sustained and generous efforts at unpacking these enable us to read the original text with greater knowledge and insight.

In some of Lewis’s chapters, this approach creates a tightly focused and gracefully constructed argument, as in her reading of Dombey and Son (1846–48) in light of the parable of the wise and foolish builders: Captain Cuttle, like the biblical wise man, builds his house upon the rock, while Dombey, Carker, and others build their houses on sand and then must face the consequences. The use of the parable as an interpretive key to Dickens also grants Lewis some opportunities to read against the typical critical grain, as in her discussion of David Copperfield (1849–50). Lewis rightly notes that readers’ tendency to ignore the interpretive framework provided by the presence of the parable of the prodigal son has meant that Agnes has been too neatly pigeon-holed as a savior, while the journeys of the various prodigals, including Emily and David himself, are given short shrift.

In other chapters, however, Lewis seems less interested in parables than in broader biblical tropes such as resurrection, judgment, and forgiveness. To be fair, the drift of the book’s area of focus away from the parable mirrors a certain fuzziness in Dickens’s own theology, which makes opportunistic use of biblical concepts without accepting the orthodox positions with which they are typically associated. At the same time, and more unfortunately, it undercuts the power of Lewis’s own argument, which relies on the form and structure of parables to stabilize Dickens’s relationship to his ideal readers.

Colón, by contrast, insists on a rhetorically and historically precise understanding of the parable as a literary form. The literal meaning of parable—“throwing alongside”—indicates Colón’s area of focus: the meanings, implications, and applications that attend an author’s decision to use a parable in a novel (3). She focuses especially on realist novels, which she, following Andrew H. Miller, sees as ethically freighted in a way...