Orthodoxy and aporia in the Victorian narrative of unconversion (James Anthony Froude, Mrs. Humphry Ward, Edmund Gosse)

This dissertation examines several neglected, but figuratively rich narratives lost faith, centrally J.A. Froude's The Nemesis of Faith (1849), Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere (1888), and Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907). In treating problems of individual and cultural secularization, scholars have often ignored these darker tales, instead focusing on texts which represent the transition from orthodoxy to rationalism, or orthodoxy to some form of relativism, as a dialectic of enlightenment (e.g. Sartor Resartus). A different picture emerges in texts like Nemesis, where unconversion implies not lucidity, but a sojourn in a debilitating, disorienting aporia. Ultimately, these chapters seek to understand the cultural anxieties surrounding unconversion in terms of the theological, historical and literary debates then current. Although the study centers on Froude, Ward and Gosse, it draws heavily on a wide range of texts, from Grace Abounding and Paradise Lost to Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua.; Chapter one discusses Froude's Nemesis as a failed attempt to imagine the transition from fundamentalism to irony. Froude's Markham Sutherland begins the book as a Teufelsdrockh figure, boldly dispensing with the "Dead Letter" of Christian dogma for a more essential belief. But although he claims that he has no need for propositional absolutes, in fact Markham cannot help repining for his former systematizing, and in the end fails to imagine a selfhood beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy. The second chapter analyzes Mrs. Humphry Ward's more high-profile masterpiece, Robert Elsmere (1888). The novel's treatment of Catherine Leyburn illuminates the anxieties specific to late-century unconversion. By 1888, the great battles over scriptural authority had largely been fought, at least among the intellectual elite. Heterodoxy, while certainly not sanctioned by everyone, was becoming normalized. We might expect that such a normalization would ameliorate the process of unconversion, but in Catherine's case it actually complicates the issue. What makes late-century unconversion so unnerving is just how intangible (yet inevitable) the process reveals itself to have been. The third chapter centers on Father and Son. In this memoir, we find at least one possible afterlife for the Victorian unconversion---as a goad to twentieth-century accommodationism.