Triple-Decker Blogging, Volume II: The Inquisitor
The second volume of William Gilbert's The Inquisitor is primarily notable for splitting up its plotlines, leaving characters imprisoned (sometimes literally) in inaccessible spaces. Thus, on the recommendation of Inquisitor Oriz, the Duke separates the Duchess Renee from her daughters. Judge Rosetti and Bernardino Ochino escape, but this separates the Judge from his daughter, Teresa--who, in turn, is separated from another of the Duchess' ladies, Madonna Ponte, when the latter comes down with the plague. And Teresa herself yearns and fails to find Camille. This fragmentation miniaturizes the fate of the Italian Protestant community as a whole, which in this volume begins to feel the full weight of the Inquisition. Much of the volume focuses on Teresa's adventures, however, and her fate suggests that there are times when it's necessary to listen to (ahem, male) authorities: she tries to join Madonna Ponte in the Lazaretto, an act which is a) against the advice of one of her protectors, Gerolamo, b) overruled once she sneaks into the Lazaretto by the doctors, and c) responsible for getting one of the workers into trouble, which in turn d) later leads to him denouncing her to the authorities for disobeying the quarantine. To make matters worse, when she insists on looking for Camille, she e) is accosted by Young Men with Evil Intentions, then stumbles into f) a Catholic procession, where g) she calls attention to her Protestantism in public. As a result, Teresa winds up dragged off to prison--exactly the fate her father, who by the end of the volume has finally found out where she is, had hoped to forestall. Although we're supposed to admire Teresa for her fortitude in being a "self-convicted heretic" (II:241), it's hard not to conclude that, as heroic Protestant protagonists go, she's really rather dumb. From the novel's own moral POV, her failure results precisely from her excessive rebelliousness: by trying to accompany her older friend, even after being warned that it would not be allowed, Teresa actually endangers herself and the entire Protestant community.
Gerolamo, so far, has one of the novel's most usefully ambiguous identities. A convinced Protestant, he has nevertheless conformed to the Roman Catholic Church in order to support his blind mother. He therefore functions as a useful intelligence-gatherer and go-between, moving seamlessly between interdicted locations like the Lazaretto, fully Catholic areas, and clandestine Protestant spaces. Yet this mobility, which turns out to be necessary for Gilbert's plotting, is also deeply problematic. When Gerolamo neglects to make the sign of the cross when he goes by the "chapel of the Holy Saint Sebastiano," he soothes his acquaintance by explaining that "I did not see the chapel," and promises to confess his sin at the next available opportunity (II:67-68). In this novel, as in most other Protestant fictions, such self-protective lies are, in fact, sinful: even saving your own skin is no excuse for telling a falsehood. By contrast, even when an official explicitly invites Teresa to say that she "did not see the relic," she refuses to speak (II:250-51).1 At this point, it isn't clear whether the novel plans on condemning Bernardino Ochino for subterfuge--masquerading as the Capuchin he no longer is, for example--or not. (Certainly, Anne Manning's The Duchess of Trajetto treats Ochino positively until the end, when he is denounced for abandoning the people and, therefore, helping destroy the Reformation cause.) Nevertheless, what's interesting here is that the essential plot device runs counter to the plot's morality--perhaps an example of, in George Levine's words, the "intrinsic secularity of the novel form" swamping its "sincere religious commitment."2 (Gilbert, of course, would probably deny that the novel is necessarily any such thing, but Levine's argument touches on debates already current among nineteenth-century religious critics of the novel.)
1 This doubling echoes a similar contrast between sermons given by Oriz and Ochino.
2 George Levine, "Dickens, Secularism, and Agency," in Contemporary Dickens, ed. Eileen Gillooly and Deirdre David (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009), 17.