Triple-Decker Blogging, Vol. III: The Inquisitor
...And the plot fizzles out completely, but perhaps that's a case of unintentionally mimetic structure: like every novel about the Italian Reformation, the narrative is ultimately about failure, and fail it does. By story's end, the Inquisition has conquered Ferrara, the Duchess Renee has returned to Catholicism (albeit while disclaiming the "Roman" bit [III:131]), Madonna Ponte and the blind widow are both dead, and the Rosettis are in exile. Gilbert continues to ride herd on Roman Catholicism's anti-family program: Oriz tells the Duchess that "[i]n the eyes of God they [her daughters] are not your children" (III:124), and successfully uses the threat of permanent separation in order to persuade the Duchess to recant. Moreover, Gilbert tells us in a brief flash forward near the end, Renee's "unnatural son" expels his now-unrecanted mother from Italy when she refuses to re-recant (III:275); the Inquisition itself gains its foothold by a "system of espionage" (III:267) that turns children against parents, and vice-versa. As usual in anti-Catholic fiction, Roman Catholicism functions by atomizing the household, upsetting the proper structures of domestic authority and displacing "natural" affections with an improper allegiance to the institutional church. It's not accidental that the happiest part of the ending resides with the Rosettis, who once again form a united Protestant household.
Still, there is something resembling a plot twist: Camille Gurdon turns out to be none other than the rather ironically named Father Felix, a Dominican in disguise. Obviously, this does not presage well for future romantic possibilities. In fact, Gilbert here draws on another common trope of anti-Catholic fiction, the (usually) disguised Catholic priest who falls in love with the woman he (also usually) has been asked to convert; this trope crops up in novels like Mrs. Trollope's Father Eustace: A Tale of the Jesuits, C. G. H.'s Constance Lyndsay, and Caroline Snowden Whitmarsh Guild's The Sisters of Soleure. Such unintentional romances signal the "unnaturalness" of celibacy, for the priest cannot resist the call of love and desire once exposed to the right woman. Romance plots will out. The result, however, is always negative, either because the priest realizes his error (and dies), or because the priest is revealed to be a perverted villain (and dies). Camille/Felix falls into the perverted villain category: he urges Teresa to lie during an interrogation, then lies to her father when reunited with him, and finally falls off a bridge during a (providential) storm. Thus, the romance plot fails along with the usually comic plot of the Reformation.
Camille/Felix's disguise nevertheless contributes to one of the novel's better-developed themes, that of the morality of disguise in the face of persecution. This has already come up in Ochino's protective costuming and Gerolamo's pragmatic reconversion; now, we also find the Duchess similarly returning to Catholicism because her love for her daughters exceeds "my attachment to the Protestant creed" (III:134). By contrast, Teresa--despite her lunkheadedness in the second volume--consistently maintains "silence" in the face of every query, refusing to identify herself or to reveal her father's whereabouts to the Inquisitors. This passive resistance, the novel insists, is the only moral option. Thematically, it's also a significant option, because the novel dwells on the Inquisition's skill at acquiring and utilizing knowledge; Teresa's repeated refusals to speak frustrate a system built largely on eliciting the right words from those it oversees. Nevertheless, The Inquisitor also takes the easy road by refusing to martyr Teresa. Instead, there's a deus ex machina liberating her from prison, rewarding her silence by refusing her death. For all intents and purposes, then, it's the novelist vanquishing the Inquisition, not the heroic woman (who is released just before being tortured).
Oriz, the eponymous Inquisitor, himself undergoes a bout of providential punishment when he suffers a stroke. Before that, however, he suffers a mental breakdown that manifests itself in a "terrible unremembered dream" (III:204), accompanied by a daylight hallucination of a face whose "stern anger" is obvious, even though the "features" cannot be seen (III: 204). The Inquisitor, the master of information, implodes by losing access to his own subjectivity, thanks to the dream that can never be narrated. Here, the Inquisition's fiction of transparency breaks down, for the master Inquisitor becomes opaque to himself, beyond anyone's power to help; Teresa's powerful refusal to speak thus mutates into a punitive inability to do so. At the same time, Oriz's paranoia reflects the Inquisition's own elaborate spy network back upon its architect. In a way, the novel privatizes Oriz's punishment by pathologizing it: given the ending, there is no official mechanism in place for granting Oriz his "just deserts," and so he must be trapped inside his increasingly warped mind and body.