Triple-decker blogging: Father Godfrey (II and III)

As it moseyed along, Father Godfrey shifted from straight-up nostalgia into something more along the lines of Disraeli's Young England trilogy (albeit without anyone truly impoverished...) or Carlyle's Past and Present.  One half of the plot turned into an account of how a modern Captain of Industry might develop; the other tracked the simultaneous implosions of both the old aristocracy and the medievalisms of both Roman and Anglo-Catholicism.   The Foxleys turn out to be a historical dead end, whose patriarch "had spent his existence in vain desires to re-animate the dead, instead of endeavouring to inspire the living with the old goodness and the old beauty which he so reverenced and lamented; but which, let us eagerly hope, belong exclusively neither to the past nor the present" (II.165-66); this quasi-zombie family has unfitted itself for modernity because the husband's conservatism is solely about trying to stop time, rather than engage in ongoing negotiations between past and present.  Colonel Foxley's love for the past is, in that sense, rather selfish.  Leigh Wynford's backfired romance with their daughter, Elfrida, turns out to be a blessing: it frees him up for Helen Godfrey, a woman who embraces work.  Leigh himself, who falls apart in spectacular and devastating ways after being jilted, redeems himself (prodigal son-like)  by working for Helen's employers, the Higginsons.   (As Helen later points out to him, his refusal to contact his parents is itself selfish, even though the outcome is good.)  After this experience, the future Captain of Industry looks out at the world and sees "'class rising up against class, even sex against sex, till the whole fabric of social existence seems about to be dissolved into a mere aggregate of hostile atoms, which have lost their cohesive power—the house divided against itself—which cannot stand!'" (III.259).   By uniting trade and gentility, Leigh seeks to combine the conservative and modernizing impulses separately incarnated in the Foxley/Wynford and Higginson families, and thus transform England through the power of his personal example.

To rejuvenate modern England, though, the novel runs roughshod over Elfrida (quite literally, as you'll see in a moment).  Elfrida, the last of the Foxleys, is "weak and unhappy" (II.111), a beautiful yet relentlessly selfish woman who proves useless to her bereaved mother.  Her selfishness manifests itself not in outward hostility, but in an intense care for her own emotional comfort; she hurts others accidentally, not intentionally, in part because she is also rather unintelligent.  And she proves infinitely attractive to men--first the Anglo-Catholic priest, then Leigh Wynford, and finally (and worst of all) Father Godfrey himself.  But to be attracted to Elfrida is to be selfish, for Elfrida has no character of her own--she yearns to be molded and protected by a strong man, who in turn will find in Elfrida a woman who appears suited to his every taste.  In this novel, weakness corrupts, and Elfrida corrupts absolutely.  To fully preserve post-industrial England, men must abandon Elfridas and turn to Helens.  Leigh Wynford suffers an emotional breakdown, but the duel between Mr. Summerwood and Father Godfrey turns into something even worse.  The novel invokes the clerical romance trope, in which heterosexual desire "proves" the impossibility of celibacy: Father Godfrey falls in love with Elfrida and, in the middle of a symbolic storm, gives voice to his passion (III.126-29).  (Elfrida once saw a friend killed by a lightning strike, and the novel links storms to her shifts from religious conviction to religious conviction, man to man, and so forth.)  This moment heralds the death knell of Godfrey's religious convictions, but his marriage proposal dooms the woman whose reputation it is intended to save.  For the disappointed and jealous Mr. Summerwood, acting out a classic anti-Catholic narrative, insists that Elfrida has been damned by some infernal trick on Godfrey's part, and that she is "betrayed to eternal perdition" (III.238).  (It's worth noting that Mr. Summerwood's twisted manifestations of his own sexuality turn out to be much more perverse than Father Godfrey's--Anglo-Catholics actually have it much worse in this novel than Roman Catholics, although the narrator approves of neither one.)    Terrified, Elfrida runs away...and dies a thoroughly Carkeresque death under an onrushing train.  Modernity, in other words, flattens her.  Her tombstone, which closes the novel, also marks the death of an old mode of Englishness--and an old mode of English womanhood.