Victorian triple-decker blogging: The Monk and the Married Man, Vol. I

Julia Rattray Waddington's The Monk and the Married Man (1840) was, as Tait's Edinburgh Magazine noted, a topical novel, seizing on the "No-Popery frenzy of the hour" in order to position itself in the literary marketplace.   When it came to regarding it as a work of art, critics generally took a firmly antagonistic line--except when they were agreeing with the novel's anti-Catholic politics, in which case the novel magically became a brilliant accomplishment.  Situating The Monk and the Married Man in its literary context, the Catholic Dublin Review argued that it was one of those novels intended to "confirm prepossessions already existing, not to strengthen the wavering, or confound the gainsayer; and instead of grappling openly with the doctrines which they assail, they confine themselves to an imaginative picture of the frightful consequences to which, it is pretended, they lead."  (Having excorciated the novel on the ground of its bigotry, the reviewer proceeds to turn around and accuse the author of having "unsexed" herself.)  This is an anti-Catholic novel, but it's an anti-Catholic novel without any actual theology or theological argument; instead, it mobilizes Gothic tropes and the marriage plot in order to make its case.

Nineteenth-century British fiction frequently links toleration to modernity, in two senses: being "tolerant" in the general, personal sense, and government-sanctioned toleration in a more specific, public sense--the latter becoming increasingly important after the watershed emancipation dates of 1829 (Catholic) and 1858 (Jewish).   Novelists ran the gamut from arguing that toleration was a Good Thing to arguing that it was a sign of the coming apocalypse (and Britain's impending damnation).  Some evangelicals cheerfully described themselves as reactionaries, trying to stem a modern tide of religious indifferentists; novelists of other religious persuasions, like Anthony Trollope in The Way We Live Now, simultaneously found themselves wanting to maintain old prejudices and feeling, with considerable discomfort, that the expression of those prejudices could no longer be justified by contemporary morality.  The Monk and the Married Man wants to have its Protestant religious cake and eat it: its conventional antagonism to Roman Catholicism sits alongside some unease about "vulgar" Protestant prejudices.  If, the author asserts, Catholics regularly fall prey to the belief that "the end...would justify the means", why then, occasionally so does "the more enlightened Protestant"(I.14).  The narratator attempts to qualify her anti-Catholic stance with a display of evenhanded critique, even though the evenhandedness is an illusion (the moral error characterizes Roman Catholicism, whereas some Protestants have been known to fall into it).  One of the novel's subplots, in effect, is about the right way of going about being anti-Catholic, and the wrong way of going about evangelism.

For most of the first volume, the reader expects that the "monk" will be Reginald de Vere, an English Catholic who has spent his entire life in Italy, and the married man will be his brother Clement, a young rake brought up in England.   Partly thanks to a horrific childhood experience--he survives a massacre by French invaders in 1798--Reginald develops "devotional feeling of an unusually vivid description," accompanied by "an antipathy towards those who might chance to differ from the creed he held" (I.5-6).  Reginald's mental trauma, and the intense anti-Protestant (and anti-rationalist) prejudice he develops, suggest that the rest of the narrative will be a kind of post-Napoleonic hangover; indeed, the dangerous Louis Fitzgerald, a Franciscan, renews his career in Italy because his French monastery became "a prey to the incendiary" (I.10).  Once the Napoleonic empire collapses, the Church sees an opportunity and begins "[i]nnumerable intrigues" (I.17).   Thus, the sweep of Napoleonic infidelity (as the novel understands it) produces a corresponding backlash from its opposite number, Roman Catholic bigotry.  By contrast, England's Protestant culture remains stable in this period of historical chaos.  Thus, Reginald's residual Englishness raises questions about his religious and political allegiances: will he side with his Continental heritage, which has been figured in terms of religious and irreligious extremism, or will he opt for a conservative, Protestant Englishness? Of course, the English de Veres aren't Protestant, either.  Instead, like Clement, they maintain their Catholicism because it's the "family faith" (I.175)--a near-infidelity that further links the association between the French Revolution and Roman Catholicism.  Except for Reginald, the novel's Roman Catholics are, by and large, "nominal" in their religious sympathies.  When the unpleasant Clement (an allusion to Father Clement?) becomes a monk, it's because the beautiful and symbolically-named Helen Templar rejects him; similarly, Reginald's cousin Agnese opts to take vows because Reginald apparently has no romantic interest in her.   Vowed celibacy winds up being a sulky substitute for marital sexuality.  (Notably, most of the novel's Catholic characters actually disapprove of monastic vocations.)

By the end of the first volume, the novel has swapped our expectations, with Clement becoming the monk and Reginald--who must succeed Clement as the heir--apparently on track to be the married man, although no suitable wife is at yet on the horizon.  As the heir to Ravenswood (a name with distinctly problematic echoes from Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor), Reginald is also saddled with its "desecrated chapel" (I.119), the sight of which "offered too striking a memorial of the galling degradation cast on his race and creed, to fail of rivetting a mind like his" (I.119-20).  Later Catholic novelists would appropriate the figure of the ruined chapel to allegorize the rebirth of Catholicism in modern Britain; here, though, the ruin simultaneously invokes the spectre of Protestant violence (in the past), the disempowerment of Roman Catholics (in the present), and, with the arrival of the eventual heir, the threat of Catholic renewal (in the future).   What, then, will Reginald do?

Meanwhile, in the midst of chiding her stock anti-Catholic characters (slinky priests, deceptive abbots, etc.), the narrator pauses to rebuke the sort of "female controversialist" who argues with excessive "zeal and vehemence," making little impact other than annoyance.  Nor does the narrator approve of the Dissenter--the Dissenters, she remarks, "had not stricken hands" yet with the Catholics (I.116)--who pronounces that "the days of Bloody Mary" will return if Catholics are not firmly suppressed (I.116).  The first, gendered argument invokes standard complaints about women being too emotional to engage in theological disputes (frequently by other women engaging in theological disputes...); the second denounces the ahistorical panics which read history in terms of repetition instead of potential change.  And yet, the narrator does fear the effect of Catholicism's resurgence on English soil, a fear made more pointed by the novel's setting in pre-Emancipation England--certain approaches to attacking Catholics are being ruled out, while others, perhaps, will be ruled in.