| "The Nun in the Garret" engages the topic of dissent, both in the sense that it dissents from the theory of the secular novel, and is informed by the Dissenting faiths of Victorian England and their compatibility with a scriptural hermeneutics that privileges questioning. I observe how religion and form intersect in the novel through this lens of dissent, arguing that the realist novel consistently uses the marriage plot as a staging ground that pits civil society against privately held religious belief.;As a means of exploring this formal concern, I employ a way of reading I've termed "faithful reading," which does not treat religion's influence on the marriage plot and, hence, the novel as something symptomatic or repressed, but as something that is openly and even didactically treated. Faithful reading is a germ of a way of looking at the text that revives hermeneutics's context by acknowledging its religious roots and looking at the way these roots can assist readers in pursuing the problems or liabilities of presentism; restoring this context is a necessary part of acknowledging criticism's history of asking questions of texts, of dissenting itself. Faithful reading suggests that religion is present, structuring, and crucial to any understanding of the realist novel, and that any repression of religion is most commonly found in critical approaches to novels, not the novels themselves. The methodology thus locates moments of religious dissent, and uses the metaphors and forms in these moments as maps to construct newly resonant readings of the relationship between the novel and religion.;As I examine the way that religion thus influences the marriage plot, I explore an alternate reading of a canonical archive of the nineteenth-century novel, locating realist texts where religion and the marriage plot are inextricably intertwined, including Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charlotte Bronte's Villette, Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South, Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, and Mrs. Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere.. |
