"I Mistook the Faint Shadow": The Tractarian Ethos in Felicia Skene's Sensational Realism

"I Mistook the Faint Shadow":The Tractarian Ethos in Felicia Skene's Sensational Realism Kristen Pond (bio) in both her life and her work, Felicia Skene (1821–99) traversed conventional boundaries. Arguing for the interdependence of Skene's religious and feminist commitments, Suzanne Rickard notes, "[Skene] challenged stereotypes by using conventionality as a kind of shield, blurring the divide between public and private, combining the conservative and radical, employing conventional and subversive techniques to get [her] message across in literally millions of printed pages" (154). Those "millions of printed pages" include poetry, travel writing, devotional tracts, several novels, and essays in prominent periodicals such as Fraser's Magazine and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Skene's novels in particular challenge stereotypes in the way they combine sensational plots, realist psychology, and religious expression. Skene's blurring of genres has perhaps contributed to the way she has been overlooked by literary scholars because her novels do not fit comfortably within the boundaries of any one genre. Indeed, Skene's strange combination of sensation, realism, and religious fiction led contemporary writers such as George Eliot to call her novel Use and Abuse (1849) a "wild book" (qtd. in Rickard 150). Modern scholars also find Skene's style noteworthy; John Sutherland refers to her work as a "bizarre fusion of gothic fantasy and Tractarian propaganda" (qtd. in Nayder ix). In major works on religious novels, Skene may garner a brief mention, but it is often disparaging. In his important study Gains and Losses: Novels of Faith and Doubt in Victorian England (1977), for example, Robert Lee Wolff belittles Skene's writings when he describes her as "first of all an active worker in the slums and prisons of Oxford, [but] … an amateur at writing fiction" (148). Wolff's critique is one of many examples that illustrate the passing and dismissive commentary Skene receives in literary studies. In some more recent scholarship, however, critics point to the way that crossing generic boundaries adds value to Skene's work. For example, in Lillian Nayder's excellent introduction to Skene's most well-known novel, Hidden Depths (1866), she argues that Skene's mixture of genres allows her to move beyond the limitations of each: "Skene's piety enables her to extend the moral boundaries of sensation fiction, using it to convey an orthodox Christian message. At the same time, the sensational mode allows her to overstep the social and political confines of Tractarian fiction" (xii). As Nayder suggests, the hybridity of Skene's work offers a strategic way to question [End Page 85] some of the predominant values of her society. Earlier critic Margaret M. Maison also values how Skene expands the boundaries of Tractarian fiction: "[Skene] widens its rather narrow associations and goes beyond the prosaic world of gentlemanly vicars and middle-class Victorian households, soaring into the more romantic realms of mysticism and exotic sensationalism and descending to the haunts of low life" (54). One way that Skene goes beyond "gentlemanly vicars and middle-class Victorian households" is in her scathing social critiques of gender and class inequalities. Monica Correa Fryckstedt focuses on the bold challenge that Skene makes to the sexual double standards of her day in Hidden Depths, and Elisabeth Rose Gruner is similarly impressed with Skene's "remarkable novel" The Inheritance of Evil (1849) for its engagement in debates about the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill (introduced in 1842) (431). Though limited, the more recent scholarly work on Skene has recognized the important social critiques that Skene makes through her unique blending of sensational, realist, and religious modes of writing. Building on such scholarship, this article examines Skene's critique of empiricist epistemology in one of her more neglected novels, The Tutor's Ward (1851).1 As in her other novels, the unique blending of sensational, realist, and religious modes helps Skene mount her case against what she viewed as the threatening social practice that attempted to apply empirical scientific methods to all forms of culture. Skene proposes an alternative epistemology that depends on faith and divine mystery as valid ways of knowing. In doing so, she works against the empirical bent of many realist novels published in the early 1850s...

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