| As the civil disabilities against religious Dissenters were gradually removed during the mid-Victorian years, it became imperative for those in power who wished to maintain their dominance to formulate alternative strategies. The literary representation of the objectionable qualities of religious Dissent became a useful means for delimiting the social, religious, and political identity of various groups within the British nation: a demonized Dissent was a convenient negative reference point. This study asserts that in the mid-Victorian period three discursive strategies for representing Dissent emerged, each with a different vision of Dissenters and their proper role in national life. The primary exemplars of these three strategies are Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, and George Eliot. Dickens's anti-Dissenting discourse targets the body: the degeneracy of the nation's religious outsiders is made visible in an attempt to enforce their exclusion from mainstream culture. Arnold's discourse assumes the assimilation of Dissenters but depicts them as wayward citizens who must be re-educated and re-fitted for a role in national life. Eliot's discourse concerning Dissent aspires to scientific and sociological validity rather than political and institutional expediency it seeks by indirect means to enforce a vision of human existence in which the faith of Dissenters is seen as mistaken and, over time, increasingly irrelevant. |
