Blind Agnese; Or, the Little Spouse of the Blessed Sacrament
Although the reader must squint hard to realize it, Cecilia Mary Caddell's Blind Agnese (1855) is a prequel (or sequel, depending on how you look at it) to Nellie Netterville; Or, One of the Transplanted (1867)--although given the length of time between novels, Blind Agnese presumably wasn't conceived as part of a series. The reader must similarly squint to make out that Blind Agnese is a conversion-cum-historical novel: the references to the penal laws (a mangled take on this one in particular) and to croppies suggest that the action occurs sometime around 1798. Nellie Netterville charts the expulsion of the heroine's family from their lands during the Cromwellian Settlement. Blind Agnese, published a dozen years earlier but set approximately 140 years later, traces the devastating effects of Protestant conformity on the Netterville family, while it also tries to separate Catholicism from revolutionary radicalism.
Although Blind Agnese was a popular novel, running through several editions until 1903, it's not likely that many of my readers will have stumbled across it...so a plot summary is no doubt in order. Agnese, raised as a beggar in Italy, was born to a mother who converted to Catholicism and a Catholic father who was the eldest of the Netterville sons. But the youngest Netterville converted to Protestantism and expelled Agnese's parents from their estate; in desperation, they flee with Agnese and their older daughter, May, only to misplace (!) May during the escape. As is usually the case in such novels, things only get worse: Agnese goes blind from an illness contracted during the family's wanderings, the father dies during a pirate attack (!!), and the mother, who washes up in Italy, dies in a convent shortly after her arrival. We learn this backstory only secondhand, however. The novel actually begins with Lady Oranmore, Agnese's Protestant grandmother, who has been wandering Italy in search of her now-dead child; finding Agnese instead, Lady Oranmore brings her back to Ireland. But the devoutly Catholic Agnese cannot reconcile herself to her grandmother's Protestantism. Fortunately, Agnese runs into (I'm sure you guessed it) her sister May, who was educated in a convent on the Continent but now resides with her grandmother and the second Netterville son, now a priest. Alas, the Protestant Netterville, John, has been hunting down Father Netterville (to be fair, he thinks his brother is dead) as a suspected "croppy" revolutionary. Double alas, John realizes the error of his ways when Agnese and May rescue him from a horrible death by drowning, but he cannot stop the engines of violence: the soldiers murder (martyr) Father Netterville, his mother dies in shock (although she forgives him first), and his horrified wife dies of sheer revulsion. The novel ends by closing the circle, with everyone back in Italy. Lady Oranmore converts; John Netterville reconverts and enters a monastery to spend the rest of his life in penance; May becomes the guardian of John's son and the Netterville lands, thereby restoring the Netterville estate to Catholic ownership; and, this being a religious novel, Agnese dies in bliss.
As a conversion novel, Blind Agnese shares several conventions with its evangelical counterparts. First and foremost, Agnese herself is the Catholic equivalent of the evangelical "dying child," exemplifying authentic devotion and spiritual resignation; as the living essence of Catholicity, Agnese witnesses to Christ more effectively than any sophisticated adult might be able to do.1 (However, most Catholic conversion novels would insist that conversion-by-exemplar be rapidly followed by education-by-clergyman.) Second, the novel assumes that non-believers feel drawn instinctively to the true religion, as when Lady Oranmore on "impulse" (43) adores the Blessed Sacrament during a procession. The fallen mind and will may resist religious truth, but the soul nevertheless responds. Third, the bitter inner conflict that results from this drive towards truth usually manifests itself in Gothic cruelty, domestic instability, and vicious persecution. Thus, Lady Oranmore treats her converted daughter cruelly, while John Netterville destroys multiple families and encourages state-sanctioned anti-Catholic violence. They behave as they do not because they believe in Protestantism, but because they know in their hearts that Protestantism is no belief. Evangelical novelists deployed this same trope against both Catholics and Jews, both purportedly "unhappy" because they sense their spiritual exile. Finally, the novel concludes with Agnese's "good death," which models the joy with which Catholics should approach their final moments on earth.2
Nevertheless, what definitively marks Blind Agnese as a Catholic conversion novel is its emphasis on the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament as the core of religious devotion. Where evangelical fictions make Bible reading (individual or group) the key to conversion and everyday religious practice, Blind Agnese makes virtually no mention of reading whatsoever; while there are isolated Scriptural quotations, the novel emphasizes oral retellings of miracles and martyrdoms over strictly Scriptural lessons. In fact, the junction between historical novel and conversion narrative occurs at the Sacrament itself: the story begins on the Feast of the Sacred Heart, announcing that " [...] Jesus, who, in the Sacrament of His love, had upon that day presided visibly from His altar-throne over the devotions of His creatures, was once more concealed beneath the veils of the tabernacle, where for more than eighteen centuries His love has held Him captive" (5). Christ's presence in the Sacrament, and thus on earth, distinguishes Catholic faith from Protestant (non)faith, and thus Catholic history from Protestant history. By rejecting transubstantiation, the Protestant characters imagine themselves in a world uncompromisingly and eternally stripped of the divine--a world in which truth itself has been driven out, leaving only wild chaos in its wake. Or, as modern historians and theologians would put it, the Protestants have "disenchanted" the world. By contrast, Agnese experiences a passionate religious certainty denied to a Protestant like Lady Oranmore: "'Do you not know where to find him? [...] He is ever on the altar; if you are in sorrow, go and seek Him there, and He will speak sweet comfort to your soul'" (35). For Agnese and the novel's other devout Catholics, Christ's objective presence on the altar centers everyday life in a way entirely foreign to the confused, worldly Protestants.
By the same token, the novel's assumption that Christ remains present on earth also underlies its interest in miracles. While Victorian realism acknowledges acts of providence as part of its remit, it generally disallows miracles...like most Protestants, who argued that miracles were restricted to the Biblical ages. Although miracles had once been necessary to convince primitive peoples of divine truth, they were no longer called for in a modern, post-Biblical, Christianized world. But Blind Agnese presumes that miracles and mystic visions fall within the bounds of realism. Thus, Agnese finds inspiration in the narrative of a young saint who miraculously receives the sacrament as she dies before the altar, and Agnese herself turns out to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary, who grants her a permanent, mystical union with Christ: "So I bowed myself down body and soul, and held out my arms, and received the Lamb-child, Jesus, in them. He did not seem to stay there, but rather to sink into my very heart of hearts, and penetrate it so in sweetness that I felt quite dissolving in love and joy" (221). This ecstatic union turns out to be a mystical marriage that substitutes for the "marriage plot" of Victorian domestic fiction, one that will be duplicated later when May, we are told, eventually becomes a nun. Catholic novels frequently swerve away from the marriage plot, whether by substituting mystical marriage, monastic vocations, or (only once, to my knowledge) an attempted celibate marriage. Unlike the marriage plots that structure many realist novels from the eighteenth century onward, the mystical/monastic marriage plot does not culminate in domesticity, heterosexual union, or, for that matter, self-fulfillment. If, as Caroline Levine puts it, the conventional marriage plot "calls for such a faith in the reality of love that the reader must imagine that it will exist in the same stable form forever," the mystical/monastic marriage plot implicitly warns against the instability (and, perhaps, ultimate inadequacy) of human love, as opposed to the truly eternal love available only in Christ.3 In effect, the mystical/monastic marriage plot suggests that the realist marriage plot is precisely that--a fictional plot, grounded in romance.
While such revisions of the marriage plot challenged Protestant narrative conventions (and, for that matter, Protestant moral norms), the novel goes on to argue that Catholic--and Irish--disloyalty is itself a mere Protestant stereotype. John Netterville may be out priest- and rebel-hunting, but he doesn't manage to catch any "croppies." Moreover, the novel (in the form of Fr. Netterville) sternly warns against retributive violence, and indeed associates all acts of physical resistance against the ruling power with ungodliness. The Catholic smuggler who wishes to avenge himself on John Netterville, for example, is a "savage" (174) willing to injure May in order to have his way. May's spiritual education turns out, in fact, to be an education in the true radicalism of Catholic forgiveness. While she begins by taunting John Netterville so harshly that he assaults her with a whip, leaving her permanently scarred, by the end she realizes that only by forgiving him wholeheartedly can she emulate Christ (201). Her willingness to tame the same "proud and angry spirit" (201) that inspired her religious and political nationalism, to the point where she can balance her instinctive sympathy for John's victims and her Christian duty to "love" him (205), turns out to be the potential key to rehabilitating both Ireland and an oppressed Catholicism: John signs over both his son and the estate to her, thereby restoring the Netterville property and name to their rightful Catholic origins--in defiance of the English penal laws that encouraged it to be otherwise. In other words, the novel argues, mutual Christian forgiveness and humility prove more effective as political tools than actual rebellion.
1 The best introduction to this trope is Elisabeth Jay, "'Ye careless, throughtless, worldly parents, tremble while you read this history!': the Use and Abuse of the Dying Child in the Evangelical Tradition," Representations of Childhood Death, ed. Gillian Avery and Kimberley Reynolds (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), 111-32.
2 On the evangelical "good death," see, e.g., Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 17-58. As Jalland notes, the Catholic good death would also involve a priest who would perform the last rites (17-18), which is the case in Blind Agnese. In many ways, one can read these novels as extended popularizations of the ars moriendi.
3 Caroline Levine, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism & Narrative Doubt (Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 2003), 180.