Theology and the Narrative Form of the Victorian Realist Novel

This dissertation argues that Christian theology informs how Victorian realist novelists understood narrative perspective and the formal strategies used to communicate a narrator’s knowledge. Although the Victorian realist novel has typically been considered a secular form, I challenge this assumption by showing how narrative features such as selective unreliability, direct address, and omniscience can be read alongside theological conversations. I thus argue that the development of the realist novel in the nineteenth century is more closely intertwined with theological thought than narratives of nineteenth-century secularization have encouraged us to believe. The opening chapter looks to two crisis-of-faith novels: John Henry Newman’s Loss and Gain (1848) and James Anthony Froude’s The Nemesis of Faith (1849). I read these novels alongside debates about philosophical certitude emerging from the Oxford Movement and argue that, where Newman’s novel borrows from the language of literary form to think about religious certainty, Froude’s apostasy narrative instead applies a rigid formal logic back to the realm of the literary. My second chapter moves from Newman’s and Froude’s novels to Charlotte Brontë’s fictional autobiographies, Jane Eyre (1848) and Villette (1853). I situate both novels within traditions of spiritual life-writing to argue that confession as a predominantly Protestant literary genre and a largely Catholic liturgical sacrament provides narrative structure for Brontë’s autobiographical heroines. My third chapter extends this discussion of narrative voice by examining Mary Augusta Ward’s philosophical novel Robert Elsmere (1888) alongside works by George Eliot and Anthony Trollope. I consider the novels’ respective sermons as formal parallels to the second-person direct address typical in Victorian fiction, and argue that such instances of preaching articulate a Broad Church response to religious plurality. My final chapter on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) argues for the relevance of the theological doctrine of omniscience for understanding the novel’s idiosyncratic omniscient narrator. The thesis in its entirety thus argues that narrative perspective from the autobiographical voice to the omniscient narrator should be read in relation to both literary-historical and theological conversations in the Victorian period.

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