The Awakening of George Darroch

Despite its wide-ranging religious and political aftershocks, the Disruption of 1843 has not inspired mass quantities of fiction, no doubt because a crowd of unhappy Evangelical clergymen in mid-Victorian Scotland does not strike the imagination as a potent source of high drama.  In his preface to The Awakening of George Darroch (1985; rpt. 1995), Robin Jenkins sighs that the event is "quite forgotten" (n.p.), striking a wistful tone that, when taken together with the actual novel, seems a trifle mischievous.  For far from being the sort of historical novel that would please my Victorian religious novelists, The Awakening of George Darroch is less a triumphant recuperation of an event lost to the popular historical imagination and more an ironic reflection on why the event was doomed to be lost.  

The Awakening divides the conflict into two plus one.  There are the Moderates, primarily embodied in the form of Darroch's brother-in-law, Robert Drummond, a man who "liked morality to be on a firm sure basis" (42) and feels that the conflict would eventually settle itself without any immediate action; the Evangelicals, represented by Darroch, who having given his word that he would leave the Church of Scotland now leaves all up to God; and, the third term, Jerry Taylor, an atheist and radical political activist whose critique of the rich calls both sides into question.  Taylor is a minor character in comparison to Darroch or, for that matter, Drummond, and he is offstage most of the time.  Yet the question he poses when Darroch first meets him--why so many poor should suffer "in a land that calls itself Christian" (26)--animates Darroch's thinking for the rest of the novel.  It is not, however, a question that ever gets answered, and the novel's ending does not suggest that it ever will be--at least, not by the Church as it stands.   The problem, as we soon discover, is that social justice animates neither the Evangelicals nor the Moderates; they are primarily concerned with a legal question (can a congregation refuse to accept the landowner's choice of clergyman), not with the condition of the poor.  When Darroch raises the problem of poverty in a room of Evangelicals, they worry that he is losing his mind, and warn him off anything to do with "secular politics" (228).  No wonder that Taylor feels skeptical.

Taylor's near non-existence as a character is a strategic decision, because most of the other characters range from deeply flawed to outright mustache-twirling villains.  Moreover, the novel spreads these flaws evenly over the Evangelical and Moderate ranges, leaving us with a suspiciously "not so different" scenario that makes it clear why the novel casts the Disruption as a non-event posing as an event.  Darroch himself, although he sincerely wants to work for the betterment of the poor, kills his wife by repeatedly impregnating her beyond her strength, despite the doctor's warnings.  His praise for human sexuality appears positive and "liberated" enough, in modern terms, but he is unable to process the implications of having sex with a woman who is horrified by the act.  (The only two happy marriages we see feature couples with little in the way of religious inclination and a lot in the way of mutually compatible and enthusiastic sex drive; significantly, both of them are on the way out of the country by the novel's end.)  His fellow Evangelical clergymen are the sort who complain that the modern Church "no longer publicly castigated fornicators" (162).  The Evangelical businessmen, meanwhile, far from being kind to their workers, are happy to offer "low wages" and fire workers without a thought to their futures (137).  On the flip side, the rather worldly Moderates are all interested in preserving the social and spiritual status quo.  One pit manager, standing in for his (and Darroch's) employer, complains that the miners are "demanding, if you please, more pay and safer conditions" (133)--the horror, the horror.  Others pride themselves on their elegance and gentility, laughing at the very idea that the Church could or should do anything for the poor.   One of the temptations facing Darroch, as it happens, is that Drummond has finagled a much nicer living for him elsewhere, one that would more than support his extensive family in considerable style.  But sticking to his oath means losing the new place.  What to do?

The reader expecting Darroch's "awakening" to be some sort of conversion experience is in for a bit of a shock, because while it is indeed a conversion experience, the outcome is deeply...well, deeply not what most evangelicals have in mind.  Breaking down in the library of his deceased friend John Jarvie, whose wife Eleanor he has been coveting for quite some time, Darroch is possessed by a conviction of sin (an important stage in the evangelical conversion experience), but then hears a "still small voice," which instead of "warning him against self-deception," turns out to be "the voice of God, with a message" (175). Apparently, even in 1843, God had a telephone.  In any event, the message, which is that he has been divinely chosen to lead the Kirk towards social justice, is a trifle surprising, given that he has previously been a rather no-account clergyman with a low stipend, but Darroch feels no doubts.  The reader, by contrast, cannot help noticing that God, preparing Darroch to face Christ-like persecution, has conveniently arranged for Darroch's lust for Eleanor to remain secret (she's leaving the country) (175), which certainly lets Darroch off the hook when it comes to any public confession of sinful desires.  Moreover, his newly-awakened self, far from being cleansed from sin, instead is prepared "for beating the hypocritical world at its own game" (176), having seen the uselessness of "serv[ing] Christ meekly and honestly" (176).  Other characters, like Drummond, have noticed that Darroch has a taste for spiritual theatricality; now, his change of heart leads him to embrace the performance of Christian virtue head-on.  No longer in a "confusion of morality," he finds "the secret of mastery over others: it was to have so strong a faith in his own rectitude that they became inevitably unsure of theirs" (177).  Darroch in effect converts to himself, idolatrously enough--instead of leaving all up to Christ, he now glories in entire self-sufficiency.  

Safely ensconced in this parody of assurance, Darroch turns into someone suspiciously reminiscent of Robert Wringhim, the divided protagonist of Hogg's Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, albeit without murder, insanity, visitations from the Devil, and so forth.  As Darroch calmly observes near the end of the novel, there are now "two George Darrochs" and the third who "surveyed" both (243)--one self-abasing before Christ, one with his eye on the main chance, and the mysterious third who weighs both of them.  This is both Hoggsian and weirdly trinitarian (a combination of doubling and tripling that returns near the end).  When faced with a moment of doubt, he simply conjures up an alternate self, one who glories in public spectacles like standing on the "scaffold" with a condemned prisoner, "Bible in hand, Christ's representative.  The frolicking spectators fell silent and prayed" (181).  What this last fantasy tells us, in other words, is that Darroch has simply converted to power, and power in which he is at the very center of attention, conveying authority by sheer force of presence.  If his new self is a gift from God, then all things are possible. "He saw no reason why, with the Lord's help," he muses, "he himself should not become as dominant as Dr Chalmers or Dr Cook in the councils of the Church, with a bolder message to proclaim" (231).  It is somewhat awkward, under the circumstances, that his dream of power does not seem to distinguish between the opposing sides.  Similarly,  his fantasy of joining the prisoner on the scaffold has nothing to do with comforting the prisoner, but everything to do with a yearning for overwhelming charisma--a yearning with somewhat worrisome authoritarian underpinnings.    The self keeps creeping in before the "bolder message," scumbling the boundaries between personal advancement and political action.   Indeed, at the end of his conference with the condemned murderer, Mrs. Cooper, he believes that "for those two long minutes his hand was God's," as were his "tears" (185)--phrasing that somehow manages to represent divine possession as something that does not displace the subjectivity of the possessed.  Darroch does not lose himself in God, but instead sees the momentary breakdown between himself and the divine as one that nevertheless preserves his own identity; he is God, instead of channeling God as a chosen vessel.    

But the third term.  As I noted at the beginning, Jerry Taylor is the novel's mostly absent yet politically present third term, the secular alternative whose full significance escapes both sides.  The unholy ghost of the Evangelical/Moderate/Atheist trinity, he is both inside Christianity and outside of it; in a moment of spectacular irony, he is arrested inside Darroch's church and attempts to hold off the takers by hitting them with Bibles.  Literally, the Church is no sanctuary for the Other.  And, while Darroch glories in the possibility of his own Christ-like persecution, it is in fact Taylor who spends his time with the downtrodden, Taylor who is badly beaten, and Taylor who is sent to jail.  It is thus all the more jarring when we discover, after Darroch, "his head held high," is the "first" after the Evangelical leaders to formally leave the Church of Scotland (263), that he has not actually sacrificed much of anything.  Although he loses his current living and his chance at the second, he is very likely going to be the next incumbent at his old friend Jarvie's church (266), which, if not as nice as the previous new option, is certainly a great improvement on his current place.  Darroch's martyrdom lacks a certain something--the suffering, for example.  That is left for Taylor, rotting in jail.  And that, the novel hints (fairly or not), is why the Disruption slipped back into the historical shadows.  At one level, it disrupted everything.  At another, it disrupted nothing at all.