Fragmentary thoughts about why Victorian Catholic fiction is not Victorian Protestant fiction

Joseph Bottum's recent essay on Protestantism and the novel is similar to an earlier article by Valentine Cunningham, which argues, even more bluntly, that the modern novel form is indebted to the "God of the Protestant Reformers and the Protestant Bible translators." Its plots, according to Cunningham, emerge from the very Christian "dialogic relation" between "melancholy" and "possible ways of escape from it into its grand other, ecstasy."¹ Cunningham takes this argument to its logical conclusion, which is that a "novel" emerging outside this particular context is not a novel. For Bottum (much less interested than Cunningham is in Robinson Crusoe), what makes the novel "Protestant" is its emphasis on "the individual's soul journey," or "self-consciousness as self-understanding." In other words: "The self-investigation of the self, the attempt to discern the truth amidst the clash of feelings with perceptions of social and physical reality, emerges as the proper spiritual journey of individuals and the true rightwising of their souls:Pilgrim's Progress, rewritten in self-consciousness." Both writers agree that, as Bottum puts it, even for Catholic authors, "the paths of the novel" all wind over "Protestant territory."

Strictly speaking, I'm operating in the kind of space that neither Cunningham nor Bottum finds particularly interesting--novels that are first and foremost religious-=but still, the question of whether the Victorian religious novel can be said to be Protestant or Catholic in its form, not just in its subject matter, is of obvious interest to me. In many ways, this kind of boundary-drawing feels like capturing sand--which, if all writers are in the same "territory," makes sense. Still, that's not to say that nothing is distinctive about Victorian Catholic religious fiction.

So. What are the major differences?

Little to no wrestling with the Bible. It's difficult to find a Protestant novel without a scene (or scenes) in which characters wrestle with Biblical interpretation, usually on their own. Even when they have help, these characters still need to arrive at their conclusions using private judgment. In a Catholic novel, not only do these scenes not happen, but also the Bible itself rarely gets a look-in, except in occasional quotations or, perhaps, larger structural allusions. (If the Bible does crop up, it's frequently a priest doing the quoting.) Instead...
...characters struggle to acknowledge the eternal verity of the Church. Subjective struggles emerge from a character's willingness or unwillingness to accept that the RCC is the one and only true Church. Frequently...
...the transformative moment is when the character participates in or observes Mass. The Mass either sparks the character's first doubts about Protestantism or confirms his or her new faith. In other words, the combined workings of the miracle of the Eucharist and participation in communal worship/adoration supplant the Protestant novel's emphasis on the individual alone with the Word (even though both conversion plots lead the character to a new-found community of believers). Alternately or in addition...
...conversion occurs because the character is exposed to an exemplary Catholic. Witnessing good works and their effect stirs a new interest in the faith. Again, the Catholic understanding of spiritual community sparks the character's inward transformation. Moreover...
...there is no assumption that suffering leads to a this-worldly reward, or that there is even such a thing as a "happy ending." While Protestant fiction doesn't necessarily assume this either--witness all the novels about being persecuted and martyred for the faith--Catholic fiction tends to insist much more strictly on extreme suffering being rewarded only in Heaven, and that, moreover, even a relatively upbeat ending will still be leavened by significant experiences of pain. (It's not that Catholic characters spend the rest of their lives in a state of gloom, but that they rarely get rewarded by money, social status, or any other worldly good for as a sign of God's good graces.) Along those lines...
...the marriage plot is not normative. (This has been discussed by Maria La Monaca, among others.) Now we're getting into more substantial questions of genre. Unlike classic realist fiction (cf. Joseph Boone), Catholic fiction does not assume that women's subjectivities (or men's, for that matter) are necessarily bound up in an arc of love, marriage, and childbirth. Instead, women come into full selfhood by embodying Catholic ideals of piety, charity, humility, &c. (using the saints and the Virgin as models), and there is no set pattern for this development: they may marry and have children (or, as the case may be, marry and not have children); they may lead a single secular life devoted to charitable works; or (ideally) they may take vows. Novels may model all of these paths. Marriage in and of itself does not take priority. (It's worth noting that while the novels downgraded the marriage plot for women, Catholic commentators of the time did not always agree.) Perhaps most seriously...
...miracles happen. That is to say, Catholic realism encompasses mystical visions, visitations from the saints, and miraculous transformations (e.g., the miracle of St. Januarius). In Protestant fiction, God might have his say with a nasty thunderstorm, but he's not going to liquefy blood. For a reader who approaches fiction from a Protestant or Protestant-by-default perspective, Victorian Catholic fiction cannot easily be classed with classical realist novels because the underlying narrative assumptions seem to point towards "Gothic" or "romance"--even though, in fact, the novels simply have a somewhat different understanding of the boundaries of "the real."

¹ Valentine Cunningham, "The Novel and the Protestant Fix: Between Melancholy and Ecstasy," Biblical Religion and the Novel 1700-2000, ed. Mark Knight and Thomas Woodman (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 40.