Doubtful Forms: Uncertain Belief in Victorian Women’s Writing

Critical engagement with religious doubt in Victorian studies has long been determined by the linear structure of the conversion narrative as it works out across the faith/doubt binary. The doubter moves from one certain form of belief (faith) to another (doubt), usually through the paradigm of the crisis. The same shape has become the blueprint by which we identify the Victorian doubter and that, extrapolated to the social level, organizes the secularization thesis, which associates industrialization with the progressive decline of religious belief. The prevalence of this particular shape in literary studies has implications for how we understand doubt and what we register as doubt in our readings. Drawing on the resources of postsecular criticism and the recent (re)turn to formalism, my dissertation resists collapsing the dynamic interplay between faith and doubt and instead analyzes how a less stable and more mobile doubt makes itself felt in the formal dimensions of literary texts. I show that writers not only deployed but also interrogated and subverted the faith/doubt binary, displaying and developing complex alternate understandings of doubt. Refusing to conceptualize doubt as a static form, as the faith/doubt binary implies, this dissertation distinguishes doubt from disbelief, reinterpreting doubt not as a loss of faith but as a movement of uncertainty within faith. In my investigation of doubt’s role within faith, I turn to writing by nineteenth-century women, who did not encounter doubt in the same contexts as their male counterparts and, consequently, whose conceptions of doubt are often less preconditioned by the structures of the faith/doubt binary. In chapters focusing on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s verse-novel Aurora Leigh, Christina Rossetti’s mixed-genre devotional works The Face of the Deep and Time Flies, Olive Schreiner’s experimental novel The Story of an African Farm, and Alice Meynell’s essay collections, including The Rhythm of Life, I examine how literary form interacts with religious doubt, especially by eliciting particular reading practices that unsettle readerly certainty. My dissertation contributes to postsecularism’s reconsideration of literature’s religious dimensions and showcases the diversity of nineteenth-century doubt to demonstrate Victorian literature’s potential to generate new understanding of the structural workings of belief.

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