The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785–1829 (review)

Reviewed by: The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785–1829 Susan Paterson Glover (bio) Maria Purves. The Gothic and Catholicism: Religion, Cultural Exchange and the Popular Novel, 1785–1829. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009. viii+228pp. £75;US $85. ISBN 978-0-7083-2091-4. This study begins with a bold assertion that the prejudice against Roman Catholicism in the literary Gothic of the long eighteenth century remains “virtually uncontested” (1). Maria Purves claims that the scholarly agreement on the conventions of anti-Catholicism in the early English Gothic is a misprision arising from an unrepresentative focus on a handful of works, and she sets out to challenge the commonplaces of anti-Catholic orthodoxy. Her study offers a review of the sentimental appropriation of Catholicism in the latter part of the eighteenth century, followed by readings of a number of Gothic novels that present sympathetic portrayals of Catholicism. Purves aligns this textual tolerance with evidence of a growing sympathy in 1790s England for the persecuted clergy and women religious of revolutionary France, thousands of whom fled for refuge to England where they were permitted to re-establish their communities and practise their religion. Linda Colley, in her influential Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), argued that intolerant Protestantism served as a solder to weld a Britishness of English, Welsh, and Scots. Purves suggests that, beginning with the first Catholic Relief Bill in 1778, a growing climate of tolerance followed in the wake of the fury of the Gordon Riots. By 1791, the second Relief Act reflected an increasingly sympathetic view of Catholicism. The persecution of the church had allowed a certain blurring of Catholicism and Christianity as targets of the French Revolution, and Edmund Burke’s defence of Britain’s evolutionary progress held reminders of the Catholic roots of its own institutions. The British could hardly condemn men who remained faithful to their god and their king, and the British Parliament agreed to support the émigré French clergy. (Burke himself worked tirelessly on their behalf, pleading for “two shirts” to replace the rags in which many had arrived, and haircuts so that they would be recognized as priests.) Purves reminds readers that remnants of Catholicism had survived the Dissolution of the 1530s, with convents in Hammersmith and York, for example, and known Jesuit activity in London and Oxford. The resettling of twenty-one English convents from France, the relocation of the Jesuit College at St Omer to Stonyhurst, and the establishing of Ampleforth and Downside Abbeys by the early nineteenth century all suggest that for many English readers, monks and nuns were not exclusively the preserve of the exotic and foreign. This growing tolerance, at least in more conservative quarters, was [End Page 393] reflected, Purves claims, in the numerous Gothic novels of the period offering positive portraits of Catholic figures. The examination begins with an exploration of the aestheticizing in the eighteenth century of tropes of Roman Catholicism, the cloister in particular. The influence of the letters of Abélard and Héloïse, particularly through Alexander Pope’s Eloisa to Abelard (1717) and its numerous French translations throughout the century, is traced into the nineteenth century. Likewise, the graveyard settings of de Tencin’s novel Mémoires du comte de Comminge (1735), set in the monastery of La Trappe, become an influential “locus classicus of the Gothic” (67) linking the cloister to romance and pathos. These representations of the cloister and monastic life offer more thoughtful treatments than the sensational accounts of horror, depravity, and young women immured and left to die. The third chapter takes on the most representative figures of anti-Catholic orthodoxy and the Gothic to mine ambiguities in the work of Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe and claim a genuine interest in Catholicism on the part of both writers. Purves suggests, for example, that representations of despair and damnation in The Monk would have been read by Lewis’s readers as a conventional interpretation of a standard Christian theme, and that the priest Schedoni’s penitence in Radcliffe’s The Italian is indicative of her increasing interest in Catholic doctrines and practices...

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