Brief note: Geraldine: A Tale of Conscience

Midterm exams finally provided me with the opportunity to finish Emily (or Eleanor, depending on whom you ask) C. Agnew's Geraldine: A Tale of Conscience (1837-39), which is quite possibly the most famous Victorian Catholic novel of which you've never heard.  (Here's a young, anonymous John Henry Newman politely shellacking it.)  Geraldine was to Catholic controversial novels what Grace Kennedy's Father Clement was to anti-Catholic controversial novels: a breakout text, discussed in mainstream literary journals when its equivalents were pointedly ignored.  My own copy, from the 1880s, is the 14th edition, and there were multiple American printings (piratings) as well as translations into French and German.    Not that this makes Geraldine an especially entertaining read, given that it spends three volumes (or 612 pages in miniscule print) burying its just-barely visible plot under formidable heaps of Catholic Theology 101; as Margaret Maison once wearily complained, "depression and exhaustion from overdoses of theology are not confined to the heroes and heroines of these novels: the reader often suffers too, particularly the modern reader" [1].  It doesn't help that Agnew seems to have originally conceived the novel as a double-decker before she added on its final volume in 1839; the second volume's conclusion, in which our heroine's apparently anti-Catholic father admits that he's really a closet Catholic, wraps things up dramatically enough.  (General Carrington's "closet" status, an attempt to assimilate to the Protestant mainstream, turns out to be much more interesting than our saintly heroine's conversion experience; predictably, once Geraldine resolves not to conceal her own conversion, Agnew abandons the topic altogether.) 

Nevertheless, Agnew does attempt to do something original with at least one plot element: the symbolic marriage.  Geraldine's friend Mr. Everard, who believes that interfaith marriages "do the cause of true religion great service, by inducing constant concession and forebearance, and by compelling an acquaintance with each other's faith" (182), wants to marry the Protestant Geraldine off to the Catholic Eustace [2] de Grey and the Catholic Geraldine off to the evangelical Lord Hervey.  For Everard, such marriages are both instrumental (for furthering his pet project, the reunion of the churches) and symbolic (of the true unity of the Christian faith).   The outcome of such marriages, in other words, will be comic--a grand "marriage" of the faiths. Geraldine, too, finds the prospect of marrying Lord Hervey tempting, but the novel explicitly represents this temptation as temptation: she finds it hard to resist the allure of the "flattering suggestion" that such a marriage would broadcast the "purity" of her conversion, which gossip might otherwise ascribe to the attractions of Lord de Grey (242).  From the novel's point of view, both attitudes to interfaith marriage derive from Everard's and Geraldine's respective failures to submit themselves entirely to the guidance of the Roman Catholic Church; the two characters inadvertently elevate self-interest and worldly concerns over Church authority and, for that matter, even divine providence.  When Geraldine realizes her commitment to Catholicism, however, she finds herself beset with "scruples" about such marriages (268), effectively rewriting interfaith marriage as a symbol of schism rather than greater unity. 

Agnew soon pushes matters even further, questioning the comic potential of earthly marriage itself.  Instead of Lord Hervey, Geraldine marries the devout Eustace de Grey (who, incidentally, seems to entirely lose his sense of humor as a result).  But the result is not a long-lasting marriage with children.  Far from resolving Geraldine's spiritual journey (and the plot), Geraldine's hallowed relationship with de Grey turns into a time of probation and testing: after four years, Geraldine finally admits to Eustace that "I can love you only in God!" (459), only for Eustace to bluntly inform her that "in the instances [...] of the early saints, the consent of both parties was necessary, and I do not give mine" (460).  The year that follows, in which Geraldine learns to give herself up entirely to her husband's authority, does not bring with it greater marital harmony; in fact, even as Geraldine relinquishes self-will, she grows increasingly alienated from her husband, until he finally acquiesces to her desire for a celibate marriage.  Unfortunately, he does so in the prophetic belief that she is about to die--unfortunately, that  is, because he promptly falls into a river and drowns, executed by the exigencies of the plot.  Eustace's unwillingness to relinquish Geraldine turns out to be necessary discipline, stripping her of almost all the final vestiges of ego and preparing her for a life of total obedience.  But his bad (not to mention fatal) misreading of his own presentiments suggests that God nevertheless punishes him for his temerity.  In his (remarkably convenient) death, Eustace clears the way for the novel's truly comic vision of marriage: the mystical marriage joining the nun and Christ.  

[1] Margaret Maison, The Victorian Vision: Studies in the Religious Novel (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1961), 148.  Also known as Search Your Soul, Eustace. 
[2] Nineteenth-centry religious fiction positively swarms with gentlemen named Eustace.