| This study is an articulation of a Christian paradigm for the reading of literature, using the concepts of morality, redemption, and social responsibility, and informed by the developments in liberation theology over the past two decades. It assumes the biblical myth of the Fall and redemption of humanity.;In the writings of Gustavo Gutierrez and other liberation theologians, and sympathetic Prostestant writers such as Ronald J. Sider, liberation becomes a communion of life in which a lack of love for one's neighbor results in poverty, injustice, and oppression. In their proclamation of God's "preferential option for the poor," liberation is a comprehensive freeing of humanity from individual sin and from economic and political structures which bind humanity in poverty and suffering. Questions of poverty and suffering are related to questions of conversion, grace, and resurrection. The questions asked of literature here analyze the conditions of the poor and powerless, their position in society, the relationship between rich and poor, and the need for, possibility of, and pattern of redemption.;The present study asks these questions of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, Charles Dickens' Bleak House, and Jane Austen's Emma. The study concludes that Jude the Obscure offers love as impotent and futile. Fallen humanity is offered no hope of redemption; there is no hope of changing social structures which fix the poor in their condition. Bleak House, on the other hand, presents humanity as fallen and social structures as oppressive to the powerless, but presents agape love as a transforming relationship, offers the hope of redemption through a definite archetypal biblical pattern of death and rebirth, and calls for the renewal of oppressive social structures. And, finally, Emma is a deceptive combination of apparent hope for renewal and a subtle delimitation of liberation. The heroine is called to account for her unrestrained pride and her manipulative prejudice toward certain characters in slightly lower social strata. She is realigned with the sense, sincerity, and sensibility that make up the gentility of the landed gentry. But that same gentility is finally seen to stereotype and undermine the truly poor and powerless. |
