Forgiveness in Victorian Literature: Grammar, narrative, and community 9781780937113, 9781474218634, 9781474222198

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Grammar, Narrative, and Community
2. Dickens and Forgiveness in 1846: Liberality and Liability
3. Forgiving in Community: Trollope’s The Vicar of Bullhampton and Eliot’s Adam Bede
4. Forgiving in the Nineties: Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Wilde’s De Profundis
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Forgiveness in Victorian Literature

NEW DIRECTIONS IN RELIGION AND LITERATURE This series aims to showcase new work at the forefront of religion and literature through short studies written by leading and rising scholars in the field. Books will pursue a variety of theoretical approaches as they engage with writing from different religious and literary traditions. Collectively, the series will offer a timely critical intervention to the interdisciplinary crossover between religion and literature, speaking to wider contemporary interests and mapping out new directions for the field in the early twenty-first century.

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLOOMSBURY : Blake. Wordsworth. Religion, Jonathan Roberts Dante and the Sense of Transgression, William Franke Do the Gods Wear Capes? Ben Saunders England’s Secular Scripture, Jo Carruthers Glyph and the Gramophone, Luke Ferretter John Cage and Buddhist Ecopoetics, Peter Jaeger Late Walter Benjamin, John Schad The New Atheist Novel, Arthur Bradley and Andrew Tate Rewriting the Old Testament in Anglo-Saxon Verse, Samantha Zacher Victorian Parables, Susan E. Colón

FORTHCOMING : Faithful Reading, Mark Knight and Emma Mason The Gospel According to the Novelist, Magdalena Maczynska Jewish Feeling, Richa Dwor Romantic Enchantment, Gavin Hopps Sufism in Western Literature, Art and Thought, Ziad Elmarsafy The Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Michael Tomko

Forgiveness in Victorian Literature Grammar, narrative, and community

RICHARD HUGHES GIBSON

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2015 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Richard Hughes Gibson, 2015 Richard Hughes Gibson has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7809-3711-3 PB: 978-1-350-00375-0 ePDF: 978-1-4742-2219-8 ePub: 978-1-4742-2220-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: New Directions in Religion and Literature Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain

For Alison, Partner in all

Contents Preface viii Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction: Grammar, Narrative, and Community 2 Dickens and Forgiveness in 1846: Liberality and Liability 39 3 Forgiving in Community: Trollope’s The Vicar of Bullhampton and Eliot’s Adam Bede 79 4 Forgiving in the Nineties: Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Wilde’s De Profundis 119 1

Bibliography Index 166

157

1

Preface R

eflecting on the surge of interest in forgiveness in recent history, many contemporary theorists have suggested that we have entered—or are on the threshold of—an “age of forgiveness.”1 In the preface to a recent edited volume on ancient notions of forgiveness, the philosopher Charles Griswold makes the following observation about our times: Talk about forgiveness has reached astonishing proportions in the contemporary world. Forgiveness is said to do it all: it is the cure for wrongs both personal and political, the road to salvation, and the secret to mental and physical health. […] Forgiveness and related notions [such as apology, mercy, and reconciliation] are now so thoroughly woven into the fabric of culture that it is hard to imagine a moral world without them. (xi) Political events (as Griswold then notes) have served as one catalyst for this chatter, particularly the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission through its demonstration that forgiveness could contribute to civic-healing and the project of state-building. But the forgiveness phenomenon is much broader, its impact evident in a host of academic disciplines and areas of life. This process has been widely chronicled (and often promoted) by academicians, including, of course, Griswold. Many commentators imply, if not directly state, that something unprecedented has taken place, whether in culture broadly or academe more narrowly. The psychologist Robert Enright and the philosopher Joanna North, to cite an extreme case, preface their edited collection Exploring Forgiveness (1998) with the claim that “explorations of forgiveness have been scarce for almost sixteen hundred years” (4). Between “St. Augustine’s writings in the fifth century and 1970,” the editors were able to find only 110 books or articles on “interpersonal forgiveness—that is people forgiving other people” (4).

PREFACE

ix

The extensive work on the history of forgiveness produced in the last decade gives good reason to reject such claims. In fact, a number of periods might answer to the description of an “age of forgiveness.” Griswold’s collection noted above, for instance, stresses the prominence of forgiveness in ancient—not only Christian but also Judaic and Classical—ethical thinking. Its contributors examine works of philosophy, theology, biblical criticism, and drama. In her work on Shakespeare, the literary critic Sarah Beckwith makes the striking claim that “The Reformation was an argument about the very nature of forgiveness” (37). The Reformation had profound implications for interpersonal forgiveness, which Beckwith traces through examples from Shakespeare’s late romances. Karen Pagani, meanwhile, has called attention to forgiveness’s significance to the literature of Enlightenment France, the concept of forgiveness dogging philosophers, its practice remaining appealing, even vital, to writers such as Racine and Moliere.2 Scholars have also observed sustained attention to questions of forgiveness—human and divine— in medieval literature, philosophy, and theology.3 The Victorian period might have an even better claim than our own to the title “age of forgiveness.” Discussions of our contemporary “forgiveness-centricity” (if you will) often stress that forgiveness is at once the subject of specialist investigation and part of our everyday vocabulary. In establishing the “astonishing proportions” of contemporary forgiveness-talk, Griswold turns for examples, at least initially, not to academic publications but the popular press. There are “countless self-help and religious tracts [that] urge us to forgive our enemies unilaterally or instruct us how to do so” (ix). “One can hardly open the newspaper without reading about an apology being offered by, or demanded from, some organization, state, or prominent individual” (xi). These descriptions could be applied almost verbatim to Victorian print culture. Past discussions of forgiveness’s role in Victorian literature among critics have tended to emphasize broad ethical consensus in the period and thereby give the impression that forgiveness was merely a conventional, even banal, concept within Victorian culture.4 While Victorian authors did generally agree that forgiveness represented a moral good, close examination of Victorian print culture reveals momentous disagreements among commentators about what

x

PREFACE

forgiveness means and how it works. In the ensuing chapters, I explore a few acres of the Victorian period’s “geography of dilemmas,” to use a phrase from the work of the philosopher Olivier Abel. Yet it is vital to observe at the outset that broad agreement regarding forgiveness’s value is part of what makes disputes among Victorian authors about forgiveness’s proper shape and meaning such urgent affairs. I am arguing here that the Victorian period hosts an extensive and sophisticated debate about forgiveness, and that literature, particularly narrative literature, represents one of its major venues. In doing so, this project calls attention to rich Victorian reflections on forgiveness that have been largely overlooked in the theoretical work on forgiveness published in recent decades. The seminal investigations of figures such as Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, and Griswold, among others, have ignored the period. The closest theorists have come to the Victorians is the eighteenth-century divine Joseph Butler, who occupies the paradoxical position of being at once celebrated by modern proponents of forgiveness and of resentment. Perhaps the neglect of the Victorians should not surprise us, however, given the numerous nineteenth-century commentaries on forgiveness that have long since passed out of print and are only now easily accessible via digital channels. Yet it is also not insignificant that whereas the modern conversation has been disciplinarily diffuse, involving not only theologians and philosophers but also political scientists, psychologists, and classicists, among others, theology and biblical criticism were conspicuously central to disputation about forgiveness in the nineteenth century. In other words, forgiveness was fundamentally and inescapably a religious issue for the Victorians, and even those who advanced more heterodox views about forgiving tended to do so within arguments on theological or biblical topics. It is also important to note at the beginning that while this book emphasizes the theological and religious issues that forgiveness poses for Victorian writers, it is not primarily a study of Victorian theological writing, though documents of this kind will be discussed throughout the study. Forgiveness and reconciliation are now held to have multiple dimensions, which, in turn, can be analyzed by members of various fields, many mentioned above. On the proper “field” of forgiveness, Paul Ricoeur observes:

PREFACE

xi

It remains a question to know whether forgiveness—the act of forgiving—still belongs to the field of philosophy or even of theology as a speculative and critical enterprise, or rather to the realm of poetry or of wisdom in whatever sense of the word. Yet, even if it may find an appropriate place in those argumentative disciplines, it is at the price of appearing as a splintered topic, to the extent that it crosses the philosophical and theological field at several intersections. (“The Difficulty to Forgive” 6) Ricoeur’s nomination of “poetry” as the “realm” to which forgiveness might belong may surprise readers, yet his conclusion springs from his belief that forgiveness relies on a higher order of feeling, speech, and imagination. He repeatedly argued in print that if forgiveness has a genre it would be the hymn, the only medium seemingly capable of registering forgiveness’s “height” and “extravagance” (Memory, History, Forgetting 467). The present study contends that in the Victorian period, imaginative literature represents one of forgiveness’s chief “realms.” My focus, however, is not on hymns (though the Victorians were prolific hymn-writers and wrote numerous hymns about forgiveness) but on narratives. Modern theologians have stressed that forgiveness is “timeful” in its dimensions and operations, arguing, in turn, that those who study the topic must also investigate the nature and uses of narrative. Forgiveness, Stanley Hauerwas writes in this vein, “requires display through temporal narration of lives. Insofar as novels provide such display, they help us imaginatively to capture the complex character of forgiveness” (52). Accordingly, this book offers readings of narratives, with a particular focus on the novel, by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde. If literature is considered here as a sphere for serious reflection on forgiveness, I also strive to show in this book that literary depictions of forgiveness engage with theological and philosophical questions. When it comes to forgiveness, the relation of theology and literature is something more like a Venn diagram, in which much overlaps, rather than separate spheres. I mean to honor Ricoeur’s exhortation to remember the perennial place of the fields of theology and philosophy when striking out in new disciplinary directions for the study of forgiveness. In this way, I seek to emulate the several

xii

PREFACE

excellent recent studies of Victorian religion and literature that have revealed how Victorian artists responded to contemporary developments in theology and biblical criticism in the distinct terms afforded by their chosen creative genres.5

Notes 1 Such claims appear in the writings of the psychologist Everett Worthington, the theologian Desmond Tutu, and the philosopher Jacques Derrida, among others. 2 See Pagani’s forthcoming book Marginal Prophet Figures: Accounting for Forgiveness in the Age of Reason. 3 The potential examples are innumerable, particularly given the ongoing scholarly interest in the sacrament of penance. For two theorized examples, see Jerry Root’s Space to Speke: The Confessional Subject in Medieval Literature (1997) and the edited collection Levinas and Medieval Literature (2009), which includes discussion on rabbinic literature. 4 For examples, see note 2 of Chapter 1. 5 For broad studies, see, for example, Mark Knight and Emma Mason’s Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction and the section on the nineteenth century in The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology. The last decade has seen several recent superb monographs published in the area, including Michael Wheeler’s St John and the Victorians and Stephen Prickett’s Origins of Narrative: The Romantic Appropriation of the Bible, two texts that move easily between theology, biblical criticism, and literature.

Acknowledgments T

here isn’t a sentence of this book that hasn’t benefitted from the loving attention of a trusted advisor. My earliest debts in this regard lie with the trio who oversaw the project’s inception, my esteemed advisors at the University of Virginia, Karen Chase, Herbert Tucker, and Alison Booth. I am profoundly grateful for their labors in helping me to envision the project and then to bring it into its initial state of being. Though much has changed since they saw this monograph last, they will, I hope, see that the imprint of their ideas and approaches remains quite strong. I am thoroughly indebted, too, to the series editors, Mark Knight and Emma Mason, not only for accepting the proposal but also for the model their remarkable scholarship has provided for my explorations of the intersections of religion and literature. I gratefully acknowledge as well the influence of the work of Sarah Beckwith, whom I had the great pleasure of conversing with in a seminar at the National Humanities Center. My colleagues at Wheaton College have been enormously supportive throughout this undertaking; their frequent words of encouragement have carried me through these last two years of intensive revision and quite a bit of new writing. Special recognition is due to the Café Padre regulars—Brett Foster, Alan Jacobs, Tim Larsen, and Dan Treier— who have shown themselves true friends in shepherding this project along. Their learned and jovial company has been an immeasurable blessing to me over the last five years. The members of the Gibson and Caviness clans and my great friend Chad Larson have been generous supporters of this project from beginning to end, lending patient ears to my evolving explanations of the project and tolerating (indeed, often funding) my writing stretches at coffee shops in the states of Virginia, Florida, South Carolina, and Illinois. It is my sincere hope that they will find the end result of the work enriching.

xiv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

No one has given greater care to the author or the manuscript than my talented and longsuffering spouse, Alison. These words seem as much hers now as mine, and I rejoice in what our partnership has brought about in this as in all things. To borrow words from Epicurus, we are for each other a sufficient audience.

1 Introduction: Grammar, Narrative, and Community

We could recount the history of literature as the history of the representation of forgiveness. OLIVIER ABEL, “TABLES DU PARDON”1

V

ictorian England, this book argues, would deserve a lengthy chapter in Abel’s imagined history. It is difficult, in fact, to overstate the incidence with which the language of forgiveness appeared in the writing of the period. Novels, autobiographies, dramas, broadsheets, sermons, legal, philosophical, and theological tomes: forgiveness is an important topic in all of these genres. It is also a prominent theme in children’s literature and in texts used to teach reading, particularly Sunday school primers (a major vehicle for literacy in the period). An indication of the popularity of the theme appears in the publisher Ward, Lock, and Tyler’s decision to publish a book that consisted entirely of Forty Stories about Forgiveness. For adults, meanwhile, there was Forgiveness, A Novel (1860) and Past Forgiveness? A Novel (1889). Interest in the issue is pervasive in the period’s literature: there were accounts of forgiving targeted at readers highbrow and low, adult and child. Victorian newspapers and journals also testify to the high demand for forgiveness. Didactic poems and stories, some bearing such

2

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

forthright titles as “Forgive and Forget,” were prevalent in the popular press. A poem titled “Forgive!” that was first printed in Dickens’s journal Household Words in 1851, for example, later appeared in a number of local newspapers as well as the anthology Songs of Love and Brotherhood (1864). Newspaper reports on crime and court proceedings also often featured highly sentimental accounts of repentance and reconciliation. Repentance and forgiveness were also common themes of the publications of The Religious Tract Society (among others of its kind), which reached the height of its production—not just of tracts but also books and periodicals—in the mid-Victorian period. The advent of new databases and means of searching Victorian texts has only served to reinforce earlier scholarly claims about the prevalence of forgiveness in Victorian print culture.2 These were church-going times, furthermore, and forgiveness represented a familiar theme in religious culture across the denominations. Instruction on forgiving issued from the pulpits of the Broad Churchman F. D. Maurice, the Baptist Charles Spurgeon, the Catholic John Henry Newman, and the Unitarian James Martineau, to name a few voices among countless others who weighed in. Forgiveness was also a favorite subject of Victorian hymnists and the writers of devotional books. It was a vital matter for theology across the period. Scholars have observed that in the second half of the nineteenth century the “centre of gravity” of British theology shifted from “atonement to the incarnation, from transcendence to immanence” (Wright 149). In the mid-century Atonement controversies, divines debated the mechanism by which divine forgiveness reaches its human recipients. Later Incarnational theologies commended Christ-like forgiveness and compassion as vehicles for social change. Forgiveness thus represents a point of contact between the disparate camps and movements of the period. Putting all of these observations together, we might say that forgiveness was thoroughly woven into the fabric of Victorian culture. But if forgiveness was a widely acknowledged ethical ideal as we have seen, many at the time believed that it was widely misunderstood (and, in turn, offered their corrections from the pulpit or in the press). Others believed that, despite all the bluster

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

3

about it, forgiveness was a rare thing in practice. A number of learned observers noted—and worried over—shifting usages of “forgiveness” and related words like “repentance” and “mercy,” recognizing behind these usages distinct assumptions about matters like sin, society, and grace.3 To read across many of the genres mentioned above—such as sermons, books of biblical criticism, philosophical works—is to be confronted not only by calls to forgive and be forgiven but also campaigns to sift the true meaning of forgiveness from the errors then circulating. Must, Victorian commentators asked, one always forgive? Or should forgiveness only follow heartfelt repentance? Is human forgiveness the same thing as divine? Forgiveness should thus be recognized as a conceptual and practical problem for the Victorians, not just a common value; indeed, it seems that so many parties weighed in on the issue exactly because of forgiveness’s concomitant contested meaning and broad appeal. The present study examines how literary texts, specifically narrative ones, both reflect and contribute to the period’s highly charged debates about forgiveness. The works of the five authors gathered here—Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Oscar Wilde—offer a range of assessments of what it means to forgive, when forgiveness does and doesn’t apply, and what changes (or doesn’t change) as a result. Sometimes voices within their texts are themselves divided on these questions. It would be easy to gloss over this period of literary history, as some previous criticism has done, and ascribe to it a narrative in which forgiveness, once a prominent feature of literature, rapidly declines in importance in the 1890s.4 But this view whitewashes the debates about forgiveness already begun early in the period and overlooks the concern for forgiveness that remains at the century’s end. I show that authors across the Victorian period wrestle with similar issues pertaining to forgiveness’s meaning and practice, such as whether and to what degree forgiveness ameliorates or even nullifies the consequences of wrongdoing. Modern commentators have repeatedly observed that forgiveness is “multifaceted” or has several “aspects” or “dimensions.”5 It has been discussed, for example, as an internal event, involving a transformation of feeling, and a “performative” one, requiring communication

4

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

with and even persuasion of another. Other theorists stress that forgiveness has not only intra- and inter-personal dimensions but also social and, as noted above, perhaps political ones, too.6 It is helpful to remember that Christian theology has long postulated a kind of “divine dimension” to interpersonal forgiveness as well, God forgiving us as we forgive others. This study endeavors to show that the multifaceted nature of forgiveness is on particular display within Victorian prose narratives. Indeed, narrative provided a space for the Victorians to reflect on aspects of forgiveness that straightforwardly didactic texts like sermons and theological and philosophical works often occlude. Those genres, for example, tend to iron out wrinkles in order to clarify the correct meaning and practice of forgiveness, whereas novels are able to entertain a number of disparate ways of formulating forgiveness. Forgiveness isn’t simply an ethical matter in these texts, however; I show that it’s also a question of narrative strategy and of social possibility. The three issues I have just named— language, narrative, and community—represent, alongside the question of forgiveness’s religious meaning (which, I hope to show, has a bearing on all three), the chief concerns of this book. It is the business of the ensuing sections of this chapter to explain how I use these terms and, in turn, how they inform my approach to the texts examined in subsequent chapters. One of this book’s primary contentions is that forgiveness is an inescapably religious issue for Victorian writers, not simply a social or psychological one as it is for some modern theorists.7 My point is not that a writer’s concern for forgiveness somehow makes him or her pious or orthodox; rather, I aim to show that that when Victorian writers take up the language of forgiveness they do so with an intense awareness of its religious roots and resonances. In this way, our attention to forgiveness will validate the historian Dorothy Mermin’s observation that “The center of Victorian discourse, in which all questions were implicated and to which all roads led, was religion” (107). Forgiveness, as we will see, draws authors back to the Christian tradition, back to Jesus’s life and lessons, particularly the parables. Forgiveness raises questions about the divine background against which human actions take place and the model by which humans should live. If, in other words, my chosen authors’ conclusions are diverse, they are nonetheless joined by the

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

5

common questions, dilemmas, and biblical texts that serve as their common starting points for reflection.

Grammar I have named the shifting usages of the language of forgiveness as one major issue that confronts those who would study it in the Victorian period (an issue that persists in our times). In turn, critics need a vocabulary to describe how the meanings of ethical words fluctuate in light of their users’ diverse moral, social, and theological suppositions. For this role, I nominate grammar. What I have in mind is not the grammar that one learns in primary school, although, as we will see below, in practice that kind of grammar may prove useful in thinking about the sense in which I use the term. My use of “grammar” has its origins in what scholars have called the “extended” or “metaphoric” sense of the term suggested by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his later writings. In this case, “grammar” describes not a tidy external system of syntax and morphology (i.e., a series of prescribed do’s and don’ts); rather, it refers to the loose network of (usually unstated) guidelines that shape the meaningful use of words. Wittgenstein’s grammarian is not a dictator but an explicator (even perhaps an excavator)—one who attempts to make explicit the often implicit structures that underwrite effective speech. Meaning and use are thus no longer separate matters for Wittgenstein. Ordinary language philosophy more broadly (of which the late Wittgenstein’s writings are considered a part) counsels that in order to understand what words mean we must consider what they do; we must, in other words, examine how particular utterances are used within specific situations and what they achieve (or fail to achieve) (Beckwith 8). Two scholars have suggested that this looser notion of “grammar” can help us to think about forgiveness, and I draw on their work in my analysis of Victorian texts—rather than Wittgenstein’s spare, often quixotic, and still debated remarks. The first is the philosopher Robert C. Roberts, who writes about forgiveness within the context of the virtues tradition of Christian ethics, and the second is the literary

6

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

critic Sarah Beckwith, who draws on ordinary language philosophy to analyze Shakespeare’s late plays. Roberts has written extensively about forgiveness, dealing with the concept of grammar in greatest detail in an article titled “Therapies and the Grammar of a Virtue” (1988).8 Roberts seizes on Wittgenstein’s suggestion that we use words according to loose “logics,” the basic rules of which are often not articulated at the moment of utterance. Roberts’s interest is in this tacit background that shapes our use of ethical language, which he calls a “virtue system.” This system might include our notions of what counts as praiseworthy and blameworthy conduct (i.e., the larger catalogue of virtues and vices) and whether, or to what extent, humans are capable of moral change or development (on one’s own or with the help of some external influence such as a parent or God). Using the Stoic virtue of contentment as an example, he writes: [T]he grammar of the stoic virtue of contentment can be displayed by noting the kind of “view” of things that it involves; what its characteristic counterpart vices are; what rationale or motive is given within the system for seeking contentment; what similarities and differences, as well as dependency-relationships, there are between contentment and other stoic virtues like objectivity and self-respect; what the practices are by which contentment is cultivated; what conception of the nature of persons lies behind stoic contentment. (153) When we talk about virtues, then, we do so within a wider network of concepts and assumptions, which provide rules for usage in the special Wittgensteinian sense. To articulate the structure of this network—“connections, similarities differences, etc.”—is to make “grammatical remarks” (153). The backdrop against which we talk about virtues can, of course, change. Roberts’s point is that with each new backdrop or system, the conditions for and implications of using ethical terms can be profoundly transformed. Roberts turns to forgiveness for an illustration, juxtaposing the theologian Lewis Smedes’s handling of forgiveness in his self-help bestseller Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve with that of what Roberts calls “classical Christianity.” In several

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

7

respects, the two models overlap. For instance, they agree that forgiveness only applies to persons; it is nonsense in both cases to speak of forgiving “events, nature, or systems” (154). Both also view forgiveness as an inherently religious practice (Smedes credits God with having “invented” it). The two split, however, regarding what Smedes calls the forgiver’s “healing” from the “pain” of injury. Roberts stresses that Smedes maps a “therapeutic” model. In this case, forgiveness should, above all, make the victim feel better. Forgiving, in Smedes’s words, enables us to “turn back the flow of pain” (2). Within the classical Christian paradigm, intrapersonal healing is given no such priority, Roberts argues; it can only be considered a potential benefit. In this model, forgiveness is motivated by the example of Christ, or performed “for the sake of harmony in the church or because in forgiving one another we will become fit for the kingdom of God or ready for the judgment day” (155). Forgiveness is not therapy but something more like a way of life and a communal one at that. Roberts observes, furthermore, that Smedes gives such primacy to self-healing that he validates our forgiving even when we have not truly suffered wrong. Perhaps, Smedes wonders, we can even forgive God, even though God is not responsible for our pain: “Would it bother God if we found our peace by forgiving him for the wrongs we suffer?” (83). This is a view that the classical Christian paradigm cannot countenance, Roberts observes. It makes no sense (indeed, it is even perhaps blasphemous) from the classical Christian point of view to speak about forgiveness in this way, since the offender’s “blameworthiness” is a necessary prerequisite to forgiveness (156). To speak in this way would be, we might say, to speak ungrammatically. Roberts’s point, though, is that within the loose logic of Smedes’s system, this proposition is a viable one. Roberts shows, then, that “forgiveness” has a distinct meaning in these two systems that has everything to do, as Wittgenstein suggests, with how it is used. Roberts’s analysis of these two paradigms highlights the danger of relying on formulaic definitions of forgiveness. Forgiveness, on this account, changes in profound ways—in terms of its force, application, potential effects—as it migrates between virtue systems. The grammarian, in turn, is charged with mapping its connections to other concepts, as well as

8

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

considering who may use this language, when it may be used, and to what effect. Witness now this conversation (discussed in further detail in Chapter 3) between Mrs. Dale and her daughter, Lily, that takes place in Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset: But you will go to heaven, mamma, and why should I not speak of it? You will go to heaven, and yet I suppose you have been very wicked, because we are all very wicked. But you won’t be told of your wickedness there. You won’t be hated there, because you were this or that when you were here. I hope not, Lily; but isn’t your argument almost profane? No; I don’t think so. We ask to be forgiven just as we forgive. That is the way in which we hope to be forgiven, and therefore it is the way in which we ought to forgive. When you say that prayer at night, mamma, do you ever ask yourself whether you have forgiven him? I forgive him as far as humanity can forgive. I would do him no injury. (230) The two characters agree, in principle, that forgiveness is a Christian’s duty; they divide regarding how to define the required forgiveness. It is their shared ethical categories and religious background that allows the debate to take place. Lily describes forgiveness is an internal, affective change—something felt at the heart’s core. She considers the divine example of forgiveness—the kind of forgiveness that God shows sinners in order to admit them to heaven—as the model for human practice. Mrs. Dale, meanwhile, defines forgiveness exclusively in terms of external action; she would “do him [Adolphus Crosbie, a suitor who jilted Lily] no injury.” And Mrs. Dale implies, in turn, that righteous anger (or resentment) is a stubborn and justified moral emotion. Consider, too, this exchange from Victorian literature’s most awkward of wedding nights, that of Tess and Angel in Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (discussed in Chapter 4):

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

9

Forgive me as you are forgiven! I forgive you, Angel. You—yes, you do. But you do not forgive me? O Tess, forgiveness does not apply to the case! You were one person; now you are another. My God—how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque—prestidigitation as that! He paused, contemplating this definition; then suddenly broke into horrible laughter—as unnatural and ghastly as a laugh in hell. (243) Prior to these remarks, Angel had confessed his dalliance with a London prostitute, which Tess readily forgave. Tess, in turn, revealed that she was raped. As this moment shows, this revelation has shattered Angel’s image of her as “a pure woman” (to cite Hardy’s subtitle to the novel and view of her status). Tess’s call to forgive as “you are forgiven” may not be explicitly religious, but the formulation is recognizably Christian. Tess is, in effect, relying on the traditional grammar that assumes the equality of sinners. Angel, however, has the resources—and confidence—of a well-educated free-thinker at his command. He can, as the passage suggests, whip up a “definition” on the spot that sets aside Tess’s claims. He is, in fact, accusing her of misusing the language of forgiveness. He cannot forgive her because she is not who he thought she was; forgiveness, he argues, doesn’t apply. Though he accuses her of a certain linguistic legerdemain, Hardy gives us good reason to be suspicious of his philosophizing here. That he claims God on his side—in his dismissive ejaculation “My God”—contributes to the irony of the scene. All of these characters discuss forgiveness according to loose rules or logics that we can adduce from their usages. Following Roberts, we may recognize, in turn, that their disputes are essentially grammatical; their arguments concern how we should properly use the language of forgiveness. In the case of the Dales, the issue, as noted above, is less about the Christian mandate to forgive than about what forgiveness means in practice. The two women disagree about human nature and perhaps, as I suggested, about

10

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

the correspondence between divine and human forgiveness. Angel, meanwhile, suggests to Tess that the language of forgiveness doesn’t work the way she thinks it does. He sets himself up, we might say, as a grammarian, pronouncing Tess’s request ungrammatical. These passages thus provide succinct examples of the attention that Victorian literature pays to the shifting usages of the language of forgiveness at the time and, in turn, the rewards of analyzing them with a critical practice that is informed by Roberts and the related work of Sarah Beckwith. Beckwith’s analysis appears in Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, a study of Shakespeare’s post-tragic plays (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest). Beckwith argues that Wittgenstein—and ordinary language philosophy more broadly— provides insights about language sorely needed by Shakespearean criticism. This is partly a matter of genre: there is, she argues, a “natural affinity between practices of theater and the practices of ordinary language philosophy because each practice is committed to examining particular words used by particular speakers in particular situations” (8). But it is also a question of the times. The Reformation, in Beckwith’s account, represents nothing less than a “revolution in ritual theory and practice” (1). Protestant theology transformed the usages of a constellation of words whose “original home” had been the Catholic sacrament of penance, including contrition, confession, absolution, reconciliation, restitution, repentance, and, of course, forgiveness (7). The Reformation thus opens up new debates about the use of this inherited language—viz., about who may employ the language of forgiveness and repentance, in which situations, and to what effect (intended or unintended). The questions of “what is effected by means of such acts” as confessing, forgiving, and absolving (previously performed by priests) and “who has the authority to say and so perform them” become “fundamentally uncertain, and always open to judgment” (4). In light of these generic and historical conditions, Beckwith argues that our critical practice in reading Shakespeare’s post-Reformation plays must involve what the philosopher J. L. Austin calls “fieldwork in philosophy.” As Austin explains it in his famous “A Plea for Excuses,” this kind of fieldwork involves analyzing not just what the dictionary says a word means. The ordinary philosopher, Austin argues, should

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

11

consider what other words are associated with the one in question, such as synonyms and familiar modifiers; where it tends to sit within the structure of sentences; the legacy or “trailing clouds” of etymology (which few words “shake off” completely); and the areas of life where it tends to pop up (in the case of excuses, Austin cites the example of the law). In the case of Shakespeare’s late plays, Beckwith argues that fieldwork on the grammar of forgiveness reveals that forgiveness is distinct from absolution, but also from pardon, exculpation, remittance; that it is linked to apology and acknowledgment as one of its possible preconditions; to forms of penalty and punishment; to a theology of grace; and to selfexamination, restitution, reparation, restoration, and so to practices fully social, not just individual; to the world of harm done; finally to forms of responsibility and response. (7) Beckwith also stresses a fundamental shift in the circumstances in which forgiveness can be enacted, observing, for example, that forgiveness is never one-sided in the late plays. Those who would forgive and be forgiven must confront the “risks and uncertainties of relationship” (as opposed to the unilateral forgiveness of priestly absolution in the abandoned Catholic paradigm) (10). Roles are no longer given in advance (as in a priest’s sacramental “office”); instead, “The authority of the forgiver and forgiven must be found and granted by each to each” (10). The Reformation, on this account, introduces a new volatility about the conditions and consequences of using the language of forgiveness; the scene of forgiveness becomes, in turn, an occasion for improvisation, persuasion, negotiation. Beckwith’s work informs the present book in two respects. The first is methodological. More so than Roberts, Beckwith shows that to study the grammar of forgiveness in the Wittgensteinian sense means giving our most careful attention to diction, syntax, and matters of grammar in the conventional sense. If Roberts urges us to look to the philosophical or theological backdrop, Beckwith would have us zoom in on the word, the clause, and the sentence as it is used in a very particular situation. Parts of speech, subjects and predicates, syntactic patterns—Austin’s description of fieldwork suggests

12

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

that these are relevant, even urgent, matters. It makes a world of difference, for example, whether or not forgiveness fits within clauses that begin with “if” or “when.” The use of the conjunction “as” (to cite another example where school-book grammar meets grammar in our more exalted sense) is a crucial concern in Christian discussions of forgiveness. What does it mean when we say that God “[forgives] us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” (Matthew 6:12)? To explore the grammar of forgiveness, then, requires our attention to both the conceptual nexus that surrounds forgiveness and such nuts and bolts issues as verb tense, direct objects, and conjunctions. The second significance relates to the contested nature of forgiveness within the Christian tradition. Beckwith measures the divide between Catholic and Protestant. Even Roberts’s article, which postulates a “classical Christian” perspective on forgiveness, speaks to this point insofar as the rival option was articulated by a theologian and ethicist with strong Reformed credentials. The theologian Alistair McFayden has observed that while forgiveness “is at the very heart of Christian faith and practice,” its “nature practice, and possibilities” are subject to “pluriform interpretation and assessment” among Christians (1). McFayden observes “a great deal of argument” about “how forgiveness is to be understood—its precise relationship to reconciliation, judgment, justice, penitence and confession; whether it is conditional or unconditional; whether an act or a process” (1). Looking back across the twentieth century (at least), one finds “a long history of forgiveness being defined, defended, and rejected against divergent operating conceptions of what it is and involves” (1). Beckwith’s book extends that “long history” further back, demonstrating how a common stock of ethical words, rooted in the same sacred text, operate differently on the two sides of the Reformation. In modern criticism of Victorian literature, one often finds bald references to “Christian forgiveness,” as if this were a straightforward matter that required no further teasing out. Arguments like McFayden’s and Beckwith’s remind us that Christianity has hosted “argument about the very nature of forgiveness” for several centuries (perhaps even since its inception) (Beckwith 37). Thus, greater precision is demanded on the part of critics when faced with scenes of forgiveness, particularly those that invoke Christian discourse. The dialogue between the Dales cited above speaks to this point.

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

13

More speculatively, I want to suggest that the issue of authority that Beckwith observes in seventeenth-century texts persists in Victorian ones. Beckwith’s account of the history of liturgy and theology is of course provocative, particularly her claim that the Reformation unleashes profoundly new uncertainties about interpersonal forgiveness. Nonetheless, I believe that Beckwith’s characterization of the uncertainty that arises in Shakespeare’s plays about who has the authority to confess and forgive (and the resulting need for characters to improvise, persuade, and negotiate within the scene of forgiveness) provides a useful touchstone for reflecting on Victorian literature. Consider the two dialogues noted above. The example from Hardy’s Tess shows that in the absence of a stable religious “office” of forgiveness (even a stable religious framework shared by the interlocutors), discussion about forgiveness quickly becomes a question of linguistic power. The debate between the Dales testifies to the fact that if Christian mandates enjoining forgiveness remained authoritative in this period, there was also frequent disagreement about how exactly this mandate should (or could) be fulfilled. As these examples suggest, the texts discussed in this book present the legacy of what we might call Beckwith’s “Protestant predicament.” I have suggested that Roberts and Beckwith provide us with a useful vocabulary and critical practice for investigating the treatment of forgiveness in Victorian literature. I want to stress, at the same time, that even though nineteenth-century theologians and philosophers did not speak of “the grammar of forgiveness” or of doing “fieldwork in philosophy,” they were nevertheless engaged in related kinds of linguistic and ethical analysis. Many commentators recognized that their society entertained multiple usages of forgiveness; they perceived, too, that distinct values lay behind these uses. There is no shortage of books, sermons, and tracts that might be cited as examples.9 To close this section, I want to consider briefly one such text, George MacDonald’s “unspoken” sermon “It Shall Not be Forgiven,” which, in addition to reflecting on the issue of multiple usages, frames two important theoretical issues that subsequent chapters will also address. MacDonald’s sermon takes as its mission the discovery of “what divine forgiveness means” (73). To find out, he argues, we must first “[ask] what human forgiveness means,” since, as the

14

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Incarnation teaches us, “it is through the Human that we must climb up to the Divine” (73). This introduces a new problem: what does human forgiveness mean? MacDonald rules out simply turning to etymology—that is, recognizing that the Greek root (ἀφίημι) suggests “a sending away” and the English “a giving away” (74). His method instead is to expose “the feelings associated with the exercise of what is called forgiveness” (74). To determine this, MacDonald turns to the typical things that “a man will say”: A man will say: “I forgive, but I cannot forget. Let the fellow never come in my sight again.” […] Again, a man will say: “He has done a very mean action, but he has the worst of it himself in that he is capable of doing so. I despise him too much to desire revenge. I will take no notice of it. I forgive him. I don’t care.” […] A third will say: “I suppose I must forgive him; for if I do not forgive him, God will not forgive me.” (74–75) MacDonald thus engages in his own loose form of fieldwork, gathering common expressions and drawing out the assumptions embedded within them. Regarding the man who will forgive but not forget and the second who will “take no notice” of the despised transgressor, MacDonald observes that such forgiveness acts only in relation to the penalties that the victim might “claim from the wrong-doer.” This forgiveness is remission of the most limited sort. It does not create grounds for restoring a relationship between the two parties. The third man (who would forgive in order to be forgiven by God) is “a little nearer the truth” because he perceives that both parties are sinners and so recognizes “a ground of sympathy” (75). The words of his fourth and final speaker depart considerably from the model of the first three. This speaker does not rely on formulaic expressions such as “forgive and forget” (or, perhaps, not

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

15

forget). Instead, he is depicted as working out the proper course of action on the spot, a process that requires ten sentences and 178 words. He begins by acknowledging that he has been wronged, in fact “grievously,” but recognizes that the offender “has nearly killed himself” (75). Transgression, in this picture, is a kind of suicide, diminishing us, rendering us less ourselves. As a result, the truly compassionate response to transgression must involve, the speaker reasons, “[trying] to make [the offender] acknowledge the wrong he has done,” for only through repentance can he “put it away from him” (75). Once this happens, the speaker wonders, “Then, perhaps, I shall be able to feel towards him as I used to feel,” since the offender will have regained his “true self” (75). The speech concludes: For this end [of resuming their relationship] I will show him all the kindness I can […] because I love him so much that I want to love him more in reconciling him to his true self. I would destroy this evil deed that has come between us. I send it away. And I would have him destroy it from between us too, by abjuring it utterly. (75–76) Human forgiveness thus achieves its fullest meaning, and thus comes closest to the divine, within the context of reconciliation in a double sense: the offender must be reconciled to his “true self” so that the two parties can then be reconciled fully with one another. This, MacDonald concludes, is the way of divine forgiveness: since sin “[clouds] all our horizon, [hiding] him, from our eyes, [God], ere forgiving us, ere we are, and that we may be, forgiven, sweeps away a path for this his forgiveness to reach our hearts, that it may by causing our repentance destroy the wrong” (80). The fourth speaker, once again, is the most expansive. Rather than relying on standard or formulaic expressions, this speaker seems to be finding the appropriate language to describe his own injury, the transgressor’s self-inflicted wound, and the hope for reconciliation. In this case, forgiveness is not so tidy a matter as it is for the earlier speakers, particularly the first two; the speaker does not know how long it will be until reconciliation takes place or whether it will happen at all. In this way, the fourth speaker exemplifies Beckwith’s point about bilateral forgiveness entailing the “risks and uncertainties of

16

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

relationship.” The fourth speaker’s more indeterminate course of action, moreover, introduces a point that MacDonald will develop over the ensuing paragraphs—that culminates in this observation and a question that follows from it: “There are various kinds and degrees of wrongdoing, which need varying kinds and degrees of forgiveness. […] Would not the different evil require a different form of forgiveness?” (77). Forgiveness’s “form,” then, is something that must be found; it is not simply given in advance (as the mandate for Christians to practice forgiveness is). Forgiving, in this light, is a practice that requires skill and insight, even creativity. It is an action that takes place within particular relationships and thus will change its shape and characteristics accordingly.10 The practice of forgiveness that MacDonald commends here speaks directly to the critical practices that Roberts and Beckwith model. Indeed, MacDonald’s own approach to the four speakers suggests this, as we have seen. If forgiveness can take diverse forms, as I hope to show it can in subsequent chapters, then we need a critical practice that is “grammatical” in the fullest sense—sensitive to semantics and syntax as well as to the speaker’s implicit claims about what humans are like and the moral universe they inhabit.

Narrative Concern for the narrative dimensions of forgiving represents one of the hallmarks of modern theorizing on forgiveness. Many voices have weighed in on the issue, with the result that “narrative” now has multiple senses within forgiveness studies. This book suggests that three of these have particular benefits for our analysis of Victorian texts. The first pertains to the process or internal dynamics of forgiveness, theorists suggesting that forgiveness involves— or even comprises—the re-narration of the offense. In the second case, forgiveness is seen to have a strong relationship with narrative because of forgiveness’s “timeful character.” To understand whether forgiveness has taken place requires the analyst to take a long view—to consider what came before and after the attempt to embody forgiveness. Narrative is, on this view, not simply internal to the experience of forgiving (as in the first sense) but an essential

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

17

means of discovering if forgiveness has, in fact, taken place. The third sense considers narrative as a context or structure for human life and ethical action. Specifically, theorists observe how religious narratives provide their adherents reason to forgive and models for the practice of forgiveness. Regarding the first approach, we should observe that many theorists, working in many disciplines, have suggested that forgiving involves a narrative stage.11 But the most systematic treatment of narrative-making appears in Charles Griswold’s Forgiveness: A Philosophical Investigation (2007). Griswold argues that narrative resolves an impasse that all philosophical discussions of forgiveness brush up against—the apparent intractability of the past. Humans cannot change or undo past events, and so we would seem to be incapable of escaping its terrible consequences. But while the past itself is fixed, Griswold argues, our perspective on it is not: “the past can nonetheless change without pretense to undoing it, or ignoring, avoiding, rationalizing, or forgetting it. One may adopt a different perspective on [the past], attach a different meaning to it, respond to it in a different way, adapt it to one’s evolving life ‘story’ ” (100, emphasis in original). This human capacity to revise the stories we tell about the past then underwrites—to some degree represents— the process of forgiveness for Griswold. To forgive, in other words, is to adopt a new understanding of the offender and the offense, to assign each a new meaning within one’s life history. In explaining how this works, Griswold begins by offering a series of definitions and distinctions that will be recognizable to students of narratology, such as a distinction between “the bare facts” of events and their organization into “some sort of pattern, say, a temporal one, a causal one, or one that supplies insight into motivations” (99). The former he calls “story,” the latter “narrative.” He further defines “narrative” according to its two fundamental features: first, it organizes events into a “pattern or whole with beginning middle, and end—plot, in short;” and second, it is shaped by “the perspective of the narrator on events and on the perspectives of the agents or actors—a point of view implicit or explicit in the telling” (99). Emphasizing the ethical nature of this perspective, Griswold writes that narrative “characterizes what happened or is happening” (100, emphasis in original).

18

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Griswold then turns to an imagined “scene of forgiveness,” the significance of which to our project warrants quoting at length: Consider first the person who has suffered the injury; the event over, her resentment seeks to make itself heard, understood, accepted. […] She develops a narrative, thus adopting an “external,” first person perspective on her own earlier “internal” perspective. The sentiments of her self-past are communicated even more forcibly and vividly to her self-now, and the narrative expands its justificatory ambitions. As her resentment is a reactive sentiment, she is also narrating a story about the offender who, let us imagine, at first appears monstrously bad. Now suppose, with our paradigm case in view, she begins to moderate her resentment and desire for revenge. It is not just that “time brings perspective” but that the offender has begun to take emendatory steps; and the victim begins to “put the injury in context.” Suppose that she is encouraged in this by friends, whose indignation is of a lower pitch than her anger was originally. Her narrative had not persuaded them to view things entirely in the light of sentiments suggested. […] She begins to narrate her story differently, as she looks at self-past and self-now from a different “external perspective,” viz., one resonant with that of others who were not part of the story-world. The different perspectives are brought into focus, compared, and weighed—diachronically, of course. Cognizant that the offender is meeting the conditions for forgiveness, and that it would be appropriate for her to do so as well […], she sets down the path, seeing herself and the offender in a new light, letting go of revenge, moderating her resentment, and seeking to let the resentment go altogether. Notice that the story has not changed. The forgiver must not only see the injurer in a new light, but see herself in a new light. We are describing a change of heart … (103, emphasis in original) It is striking for our purposes that, in the first place, Griswold’s explanation of forgiveness demands the composition of a little vignette, that is to say, that the explication of forgiveness seems to demand a narrative construct. In his narration, Griswold emphasizes that between the beginning and end of the vignette the protagonist

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

19

learns nothing new about the original events (thus leaving the “story” intact). What changes is the protagonist’s sense of their meaning, and this has implications for the protagonist’s views of the offender’s character as well as her own. The fundamental shift in this retelling, as noted above, happens at the level of perspective. The change of heart means that the same “story” can now be gathered within a new and more hopeful “narrative.” Importantly for our purposes, Griswold’s vignette describes forgiveness as an affair of multiple perspectives: the shift between the initial resentful narration of the offense and the final munificent one is enabled by the introduction of an alternative perspective, that of the protagonist’s friends. Griswold observes later that the offender, too, brings a narrative in the act of confession or repentance. Forgiveness thus becomes, to anticipate the title of this chapter’s third section, a matter of communally reconciling accounts. At the same time, the inability of participants (and we might add morally influential onlookers) to harmonize their narratives endangers the process of both confession and forgiveness (104–105). This meeting of perspectives also makes forgiveness a matter of “persuasion”— by the protagonist to her audience of friends—and “credibility”— of the repentant offender to the victim, all of which, of course, recalls Beckwith’s observations about the fate of forgiveness after the Reformation (104). To give and to receive narration are both uncertain actions whose success hinges on the rhetorical abilities of the participants. In Griswold’s account, forgiveness results from an intricate, perhaps taxing, exchange. Griswold’s theory, I argue, provides a helpful jumping off point from which to reflect on Victorian texts. Victorian authors, too, as we will see, investigate how forgiving requires telling and retelling—not just assembling an account of the offense but also reconsidering it through new eyes. Consider, for example, this speech from the ending of Dickens’s Dombey and Son, spoken by Edith Dombey to her stepdaughter, Florence: When he is most proud and happy in [Florence] and her children, he will be most repentant of his own part in the dark vision of our married life. At that time, I will be repentant too—let him know it then—and think that when I thought so much of all the causes

20

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

that had made me what I was, I needed to have allowed more for the causes that had made him what he was. I will try, then, to forgive him his share of blame. Let him try to forgive me mine! (940) We will consider Edith’s unusual request to Florence in detail in Chapter 2. For now, it is sufficient to observe that Edith imagines forgiveness and repentance as the product of gaining a new point of view. The “dark vision” of their married life, she argues, will seem different to Dombey once he has dwelt in a happy home with his daughter and grandchildren. Edith also acknowledges that her own account of what went wrong has excluded certain important details—the “causes” that made her husband “what he was.” She suggests that her forgiveness of him, and, in turn, his forgiveness of her, will be the result of assembling the full story of who they were in light of the more benevolent perspective of the people they have become. Edith recognizes (à la Griswold) that the past cannot be simply cancelled out. If it cannot be undone, though, it can be “compassionated,” or returned to with new sympathy (940). While Edith is not a strict Griswoldian, our understanding of her case is facilitated by having Griswold’s categories on hand. My aim in subsequent chapters, in turn, is not to demonstrate that forgiveness always plays out exactly according to Griswold’s theoretical ideal; rather, I will show how modern insights like Griswold’s illuminate the often distinct narrative dimensions of Victorian texts that critics have often overlooked. The second sense of narrative, as I noted above, relates to what the theologian L. Gregory Jones calls the “timeful character of forgiveness itself” (235). Like Griswold, Jones emphasizes that forgiveness entails the adoption of a new perspective on the past. Forgiveness, he argues, does not “typically happen overnight”; rather, “it is characteristically a retrospective judgment made from the standpoint” of someone who enjoys “the new life” (by which the theologian Jones means the Christian’s new life in Christ) (235). Jones then continues: If we want to know whether a person forgives another person […] in a particular situation or circumstance, we are more likely to discern a wise answer by attending to the larger, timeful

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

21

character of what preceded the situation and what followed it. It is in attending to such larger narratives that we can begin to discern how forgiveness is crafted (or fails to be crafted) throughout people’s lives. (235) In describing forgiveness as “timeful,” Jones means to capture its endurance over time and, in turn, the need for those who study it or who wish to grow in its practice to develop a thick understanding of narrative. In Jones’s view, it is only by looking backward and forward in time that we can discern whether forgiveness has really taken place—or, in the language of his book, has been truly “embodied.” For Jones, forgiveness is not reducible to a “word spoken, action performed, or feeling felt”; it is a “craft” or a “way of life” which its adherents will seek to embody as varied situations require (5). Forgiveness, he writes, “cannot be confined to a moment”; it must be perpetuated, embodied “into the future” (237). Jones thus stresses that to gauge our “progress in the craft of forgiveness,” we should not examine “isolated actions, feelings, or thoughts”; instead, “we must see how they are contextualized in broader patterns of life” (233). Only by taking the long view, Jones argues, will we discern true embodiments of forgiveness from shams. Thus, for example, “what may initially seem to be an instance of gracious forgiveness may, once we learn more, begin to appear as a wellmasked repression of anger that festers into bitter desires” (234). All of this, Jones argues, should lead us to recognize the importance of detail-rich narratives that trace the origins and outcomes of particular occasions for forgiveness. Narrative, then, is regarded here as a tool that we should apply to our own efforts and that allows us to learn from the experiences of others. Narratives, he writes on this line, “are important because we can most adequately learn from others’ understandings and embodiments by attending to the contexts in which they live, the situations and issues they face, the arguments they offer, and the arguments to which they respond” (234). Narratives, in other words, do not simply represent a stable ethical practice; they actively assay and argue about embodying forgiveness—and are ideally suited to do so because they have time on their side. Importantly for our purposes, Jones then continues, “This is as true of the narratives

22

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

of historical communities and specific persons’ biographies as it is for accounts offered in modern literature,” citing as examples Anne Tyler’s novel Saint Maybe (1991) and Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) (234, my emphasis).12 This book would prove Jones right by way of examples from Victorian literature. My chosen narratives by Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy, and Wilde do not simply represent specific moments of forgiveness but reflect on the “timefulness” of forgiveness by looking before (to the offense) and after (to the result of forgiving). Following Jones, this book thus endeavors to demonstrate that narrative represents an important means of ethical and theological reflection, argumentation, and teaching about forgiveness. But, I also want to stress, the relationship between ethical practices and narrative also works in the other direction. Victorian literature also shows us how forgiveness can play an important role in how narratives take shape and come to an end. That is to say, by attending to narratives, we can also recognize the strategic significance of scenes or discussions of forgiveness (whether tidy, ambiguous, or perhaps disastrous) within larger narrative structures. We will see, for example, that scenes of forgiveness in contiguous chapters of Dickens’s novel Dombey and Son comment on one another. In our analysis of Adam Bede (in Chapter 3), we will see how one attempt to practice forgiveness will open the possibility of others. Jude the Obscure, meanwhile, will show us (in Chapter 4) how attempts to forgive unravel over time. My chosen texts also show that these different instantiations of forgiveness (to recall MacDonald’s language, “forms”) contribute in different ways to the larger plots of which they comprise a part. How and whether we forgive, in other words, affects the kind of stories we can tell. This is Abel’s point when he observes (to recall the epigraph) that we could tell literary history by way of the history of the representation of forgiveness. Jones also proves a helpful guide in introducing the third sense of narrative that this book will explore: that of narrative as a context or background against which we discuss or practice forgiveness. He argues that “A Christian account [of forgiveness] ought to insist on the ongoing difficulty of learning to narrate our lives in relation to the God from whom we have become estranged by habits of sin” (63). Later, he contends that

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

23

notions such as forgiveness are inextricably imbedded in larger narratives—Christian forgiveness in the narrative of the Triune God. More specifically, Christians claim that forgiveness has been decisively enacted and embodied in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and this is of universal, unsurpassable significance. (219–220) Similarly, the theologian Jonathan Tran has argued that for Christians the narratives that humans make about forgiveness are themselves situated in a larger narrative: “We tell our stories within the story of God’s self-giving forgiveness, the muthos of history. When God forgives, he re-narrates our stories” (231–232). There are two threads here, each important for present purposes. In the first place, Jones emphasizes that Christian moral education takes place primarily through stories—in the case of forgiveness, the central stories were either told by Jesus (the parables, in particular) or concern how Jesus embodied forgiveness in his life, death, and resurrection. Forgiveness, in other words, comes with narratives attached. The second thread relates to salvation history. In this case, God is the author, writing a story of redemption across history. Jones and Tran understand this larger narrative as a strong motivation to forgive; they also see individual embodiments of forgiveness as contributions to that narrative. To forgive is not only to imitate God, it is to participate in God’s “eschatological” project, to realize, in a small, shadowy manner, the redemptive Kingdom that Jesus promises in the Gospels. We might say, to tie the two threads together, that narratives about God’s forgiveness function here as both something on which Christians are to model their practice of forgiveness as well as in which to understand its meaning. These issues are well displayed in the following scene from the philanthropist Felicia Skene’s popular social-problem novel The Hidden Depths (1866) that features Thorold, a High-Church Anglican priest, and Annie, a “fallen” woman: [Thorold] spoke of the Perfect Innocence thus punished, the Perfect Love thus cruelly rewarded and betrayed, of the awful agonies, mocked by those for whom they were endured; and as he went on with this history, which has broken harder hearts than

24

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Annie’s, the angry fire died out of her eyes, her lip quivered with strong feeling; and when at last he reminded her how, in return for all this brutal cruelty, this wanton pain and humiliation, the Divine Sufferer lifted up His dying voice and uttered that holiest prayer, with which He still pleads at God’s right hand for the pardon of every living soul that, sinning, crucifies Him afresh, and puts Him to open shame, “Father, forgive them,”—she suddenly hid her face in her hands, while tears burst through the thin white fingers, and exclaimed— Oh, wicked, wretched that I am, what are all my sufferings, my injuries to His? And I say I will not forgive, while He forgave the cruel men that mocked and tortured Him. Blessed Jesus, I will, I do forgive him! Oh, pity and pardon us both! (186–187) Thorold narrates thus the Passion of Jesus with great effect. The story of Jesus’s dying forgiveness (which Thorold quotes from Luke 23:34) offers the resentful Annie a point of comparison for her own “sufferings” and “injuries.” The narrative reframes Annie’s understanding of her life story, enabling her to perform difficult forgiveness. Annie also comes to recognize her own need for forgiveness, a need she shares with her offender. By telling her story within the story of Christ’s suffering and the Christian story of redemption, Annie thus comes to a new understanding of herself as well as the offender. This episode thus exemplifies the two kinds of narrative influence that I noted above: the biblical narrative of Jesus’s forgiveness motivates Annie to forgive and, in turn, to find herself within the larger story of God’s forgiveness accomplished through the death of Jesus. The reciprocal logic of the Lord’s Prayer—of being forgiven as we are forgiving—animates the episode: Annie now forgives as she is forgiven. Skene’s novel is, we must recognize, orthodox (indeed, emphatically so) in a manner that many of the texts that I discuss in subsequent chapters are not. Such straightforward conversion scenes, in other words, will not be our fare in subsequent chapters. But if my selected writers are heterodox or even agnostic in their theological positions, they are no less concerned with the significance of Jesus’s example of and teachings concerning forgiveness. As I have suggested above, this book endeavors to show that forgiveness is an inescapably

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

25

religious issue for Victorian writers. I want to stress now the degree to which this is a question of narrative. As Mark Knight and Emma Mason have argued, to define Christianity in the nineteenth century according to a single denomination or set of strict articles would be to fall into a trap of the age’s own parties. They suggest that a wiser approach is to turn to narrative: “Christianity is not a closed set of rigid and obscure doctrine; it is a story, imaginatively told in the books of the Bible and interpreted over the last 2,000 years by a Church that is diverse and frequently in disagreement as to what the biblical narratives mean” (5). The writers discussed in this book recognized forgiveness’s “imbeddedness” in Christian narratives about Jesus and God’s salvific scheme. If they do not embrace these stories as matters of straightforward belief, their works nonetheless testify to an ongoing process of wrestling with these stories’ meanings. If we apply narrative as the litmus test Knight and Mason recommend, then these writers might be seen to participate in a common religious tradition. Indeed, attending to forgiveness, as we will see, will help us to consider the authors’ changing notions of what religion itself means. The episode from The Hidden Depths also exemplifies a second issue that subsequent chapters will consider: the tendency of scenes of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation to congregate at the back ends of Victorian narratives, particularly novels. There is, one might say, good reason for this tendency—forgiveness marks the cessation of conflict and thus provides an ideal mechanism for bringing a plot (which is, presumably, fueled by conflict) to a peaceful conclusion. But this observation only begs the question as to why we must have happy endings in the first place? And why do authors feel warranted in providing them, especially in the context of a period whose fictions were famous for their realism? I want to consider how this close correlation between forgiveness and finality in Victorian endings relates to confidence in a divine background or the “narrative context” of what Tran above calls the “muthos of history” crafted by God. We will be asking to what extent the plots, and particularly endings of novels, reflect a religious understanding of the pattern, and especially the end, of history. This will bring us into the terrain of the eschatological.13 In Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, and Hope

26

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

in Western Literature (2006), the theologian Peter Leithart argues that the Christian eschatological vision of history—in which “history moves toward an end greater than its beginning”—brought about new forms of tragedy and comedy unimaginable to the classical authors who first used them. While the classical view of time was basically “tragic,” history moving “from a glorious beginning toward a tarnished end,” “Christianity has a comic view of history because it has a fundamentally comic theology proper” (xiii). Christian eschatology gives rise to a new kind of comedy: “deep comedy.” To describe the difference between classical comedy and this new possibility, Leithart draws on remarks W. H. Auden made in his essay “The Globe”: In classical comedy the characters are exposed and punished: when the curtain falls, the audience is laughing and those on stage are in tears. In Christian comedy the characters are exposed and forgiven: when the curtain falls, the audience and the characters are laughing together. (qtd in Leithart 100) “Deep comedy” mimics or, perhaps better said, aspires to the “deeply comic climax” that the biblical prophets looked to—one in which “all wrongs are righted, all tears dried, and losses regained with interest” (33). To close the book, Leithart argues that Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear and comedy Twelfth Night bear the imprint of this eschatological vision, particularly through their respective reflections on restoration and redemption.14 Neither of these texts, of course, explicitly references Christian eschatology, and this is Leithart’s point. An eschatological view of history sustains the “deeply comic” view of time and human relations that the plays express. I want to suggest that Leithart’s theory about the eschatological underpinnings of comic resolution provides a useful touchstone for studying Victorian narratives. Indeed, Leithart suggests as much in an afterword, naming nineteenth-century literature as rich ground for reflecting on his paradigm (149). But this book does not seek to pile on examples in support of Leithart’s claim. Rather, we will assay Leithart’s model alongside the theologian John Milbank’s claim that “there is an inescapable logic to the original Biblical notion of positive forgiveness as only arriving with the eschaton, or

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

27

else partially as its anticipation” (60). Human forgiveness thus only provides a strong sense of “finality […] through a participation in real, divine, eschatological finality” (59). Take the Eschaton out of the story, Milbank argues, and forgiveness becomes a “chimera” and an “illusory eschaton”—a sham ending (59). I have selected books that offer a range of assessments of forgiveness’s power (particularly for creating a sense of finality) within their endings. Some, as we will see, fit Leithart’s model; others do not, though even in these cases I hope to show that the idea of a comic resolution and the wish for closure-giving forgiveness still haunts the ending. These moments, as we will see, are not devoid of theological or religious content, and we will be attentive to their changing relations to and invocations of the Christian salvation story (that underwrites the endings of more conventional stories like The Hidden Depths). The divine forgiveness plot, in other words, remains a potent influence on Victorian narratives even when the terms of belief change—and indeed after belief, in a traditional sense, has ceased to seem possible for some authors.

Community “[P]romising and forgiving,” Beckwith argues, comprise “acts of making community” in Shakespeare’s late plays (9). This book argues that Victorian authors were also concerned with forgiveness’s role in community-making. To understand what this might mean, we need to begin by considering the source that Beckwith echoes in her pairing of promising and forgiving. This is Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958), a book that might be counted as one of the classics of forgiveness studies. Arendt’s discussions of promising and forgiving appear in a section titled “Action,” a word that she uses in a very specific sense. “Action” is the expression of human agency or creativity; it signifies the words and deeds humans perform freely rather than because of habituation or necessity. (She thus opposes “action” to mere “behavior,” which is so thoroughly conditioned in us—so operating according to a near law of cause-and-effect—that it is essentially unfree.) Promising and forgiving are actions; in fact, they belong to a special class—actions that sustain the very realm of

28

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

action itself. Promising does this by lessening the “unpredictability” of the future, which Arendt describes as a disconcerting “chaos”; into the “ocean of uncertainty,” promises “throw islands of predictability” on which humans may confidently plot their enterprises of great pitch and moment (xix). If promises confront the predicament posed by the future, forgiveness confronts the crisis of the past. In this case, the issue is the apparent “irreversibility” of our actions—of being ourselves unable to undo what we have done (especially once we realize that something has gone wrong). Misdeeds thus have unwished for consequences; forgiveness has the power to free us from them. “Without being forgiven,” Arendt writes, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we would never recover; we would remain victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magical formula to break the spell. (237) Forgiveness is thus an assertion of freedom and creativity on the part of the one who forgives (eschewing what is expected and even warranted) and the grounds on which freedom is restored to the one forgiven. This stands in stark contrast to vengeance, which binds all parties to the “process” initiated by the original offence, “permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered course” (240–241). Vengeance, she continues, “incloses” the victim and offender in a process of “relentless automatism […] which by itself need never come to an end” (241). Forgiveness, once again, is not merely an action, or expression of freedom, for Arendt but an essential condition for the maintenance of the public realm where free action occurs. It is important to note that Arendt is not describing what is now often taken as “political” forgiveness and apology, that is, events that happen at the level of states or between governments and citizens. Rather, Arendt describes interpersonal forgiveness as having public or social ramifications: But trespassing is an everyday occurrence which is in the very nature of action’s constant establishment of new relationships

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

29

within a web of relations, and it needs forgiving, dismissing, in order to make it possible for life to go on by constantly releasing men from what they have done unknowingly. Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents … (240) Without forgiveness, Arendt suggests, our trespassing would narrow our “web of relations” until we had none at all. There would be no public realm, and thus no possibility for action. This is, for Arendt, part of what makes vengeance so problematic: “everybody remains bound to its process” (241). Interpersonal forgiveness, then, must be part of the rhythm of a thriving public sphere. In this same section of The Human Condition, Arendt famously names Jesus as “the Discoverer of the role of forgiveness in the realm of human affairs” (238). That Jesus made “this discovery in a religious context and articulated it in religious language,” Arendt argues, should not diminish the fact that he recognized forgiveness’s social or political and thus “secular” significance (238). In arguing this, Arendt was in fact rehearsing (perhaps unawares) a point made repeatedly in nineteenth-century texts. Although in many ways a controversial book, John Robert Seeley’s Ecce Homo: a survey of the life and work of Jesus Christ (1886) stated a prevalent view when observing that in the “law of forgiveness” instituted by Christ, “and still more in the law of unlimited forgiveness, a startling shock was given to the prevailing beliefs and notions of mankind. And by this law an ineffaceable and palpable division has been made between ancient and modern morality” (272).15 Forgiveness, Seeley grants, was not “unknown to the ancients,” but they forgave only within the charmed circle of friends and family. Christianity’s great ethical innovation was to extend the possibility of asking and granting forgiveness to strangers and enemies (272).16 In this new law and its attendant “prohibition of all mortal feuds,” Seeley argues, Christ had promoted the good not only of Christians but of “civilization” (271). The same point appears in the Oxford don W. A. Spooner (father of the “spoonerism”) commentary on the sermons of the eighteenthcentury divine-cum-philosopher Joseph Butler. Following Butler, Spooner argues that if “freely indulged in” revenge tends “directly to propagate itself, till it renders the very existence of civilized

30

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

society impossible” (98). Spooner’s analysis concludes, “Probably the forgiveness of injuries and the mitigation of revenge are points on which Christian preaching, especially on our Lord’s own teaching, have modified prevailing sentiment more than another other subject” (99, my emphasis). Seeley and Spooner, in other words, reach the same conclusion as Arendt: that the Christian notion of forgiveness had more than just a religious significance—it promoted the peace of society more broadly. In the chapters that follow, we will be asking to what extent Arendt’s formulation—in which forgiveness grants freedom and agency in the public realm—rings true for Victorian representations of forgiveness. We will consider, too, how Victorian writers respond to the problem of consequences and, in turn, to forgiveness’s power to bring about unexpected reversals. Arendt’s ideas are related to our final guiding issue, community, since it points us toward the way in which interpersonal forgiveness affects more than just the two parties immediately involved. But Arendt’s analysis is not sufficient to describe what goes on in Victorian texts. Beckwith implicitly acknowledges this as well. Notice that in the words quoted above, she describes promising and forgiving as “acts of making community.” That word does not, in fact, appear in Arendt’s discussion of forgiveness in The Human Condition. Like Beckwith, I want to keep Arendt in view but also suggest that there are issues explored in Victorian texts that require the support of other concepts and perspectives. “Community,” no less than “grammar” and “narrative,” has taken on multiple inflections within the theoretical work on forgiveness of the last two decades. There are two that will interest us here. First, theorists describe community as the context, indeed the proper one, in which forgiveness takes place. This point has been particularly emphasized by theologians, who view faith communities as providing pedagogy in and opportunities for the practice of genuine forgiveness.17 Discussing Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for example, Jones writes, “He knew that forgiveness could be effective when grounded in the disciplines of Christian community, but the virtual collapse of such communities perhaps also meant the virtual collapse of forgiveness” (26). But forgiveness is not only a practice that communities foster; “forgiveness and reconciliation” are themselves

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

31

“designed to foster and maintain community” (37). The theologian Rodney Petersen writes more expansively on this line: forgiveness either drives us toward community in reconciliation or, left unresolved, allows us to become ever more autonomous and isolated. Forgiveness is the “boundary,” to use terms suggested by Volf, “between exclusion and embrace.” […] Forgiveness draws us to look for new forms of community heretofore unrealized. (20) Forgiveness, Petersen then observes, allows us to create new “patterns of community” (20). This is the second point about community that this book will explore—the way in which forgiveness, within the context of reconciliation, restores broken communities and creates the possibility for new ones to emerge. Petersen’s use of “community,” as this quotation suggests, is indebted to Miroslav Volf and, as he elsewhere attests, to Archbishop Desmond Tutu. It is important, for present purposes, to consider briefly how these theorists understand community in order to grasp how they differ from Arendt. Volf’s central metaphor for reconciliation is tellingly an embrace. Volf understands reconciliation as inaugurating a new intimacy between its participants (which, Volf emphasizes, does not mean sacrificing the distinctiveness of its participants). The ultimate result of reconciliation, Volf writes, will be the creation of a “community of love” (120). This is, of course, a very different picture of what forgiveness does at the public level than what Arendt imagines. Whereas Arendt stresses forgiveness’s power to unbind us from the consequences of our misdeeds so that we can be free to act, Volf describes forgiveness and reconciliation as providing a much needed embrace—a beneficent and gladly accepted sort of binding— and thereby the possibility of an enlarged community. Tutu, meanwhile, grounds his exploration of the communal nature of forgiveness in the Xhosa concept of ubuntu. To apply ubuntu to another, Tutu observes, is to say, “My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours” (34). Thus, as the theologian Johnny Bernard Hill observes, Tutu does not see persons as “ends in themselves”; rather they are “constituted through their relations with others” (63). Individual identity is thus inextricably located within the community. To recognize this, Tutu argues, is to perceive

32

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

that “To forgive is not just to be altruistic. It is the best form of selfinterest. What dehumanizes you inexorably dehumanizes me” (35). Later, he observes that “to forgive is indeed the best form of selfinterest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that summum bonum, that greatest good, communal harmony that enhances the humanity and personhood of all in the community” (35). Both Tutu and Volf emphasize that transgressions and reconciliations have implications not just for the parties immediately involved but potentially all who are aligned with the two parties, whether by family, friendship, locality, or group such as ethnicity or race. Forgiveness, then, not only repairs the particular relationship of victim and offender but restores broken ties and often creates new ones in the wider social nexus. Forgiveness and reconciliation thereby create the new “patterns” of community of which Petersen speaks. Arendt’s view of forgiveness is basically preventative; forgiveness is eminently valuable for her because it staves off the disaster latent in our “everyday” trespassing. Volf and Tutu, by contrast, describe forgiveness as constitutive: what it promises to renew or make anew is not a person’s agency but the community itself. When Beckwith writes of forgiveness as an act of “making community” or of “search for forgiveness” representing “a search for community,” she is speaking in the latter vein (9). The endings of The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, for example, depict communities— not just specific relationships—that have been formed or reformed as a result of acts of repentance and forgiveness. In the former play, Leontes’s remorse opens the door to the restoration of (most of) his fractured family and the renewal of friendships. (Perhaps, we might say, Leontes learns something about ubuntu.) Similarly, Prospero’s forgiveness of his “enemies”—his brother, his former political rival, Antonio, King of Naples—dramatically alters the lives of others bound to them by blood or affection, including Gonzalo, Sebastian, Ferdinand, and Miranda. All who are swept up in these transformations—Sicilian and Bohemian, Neapolitan and Milanese— belong to what Beckwith calls the “reconciled community.” This is a term that I want to claim for the criticism of Victorian texts. Examples provided in subsequent chapters will demonstrate that Victorian writers also recognized that forgiveness is not simply an interpersonal event. The effects of forgiving, like transgressing, have the potential

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

33

to ripple across the wider body of relationships in which the specific victim and transgressor are imbedded. In Dickens’s Christmas book The Battle of Life, among other texts, we will observe Victorian authors reflecting on forgiveness’s significance not only at the local level but at the national as well. To use the allegorical language of the Christmas story, these authors sought to wed Clemency and Britain. One might complain at this point—and not without some justification—that while I have shown that community has bearing on what forgiveness means, I have not clearly defined “community.” As Suzanne Graver observes in George Eliot and Community, the difficulty of defining community (often viewed as a particularly recent problem) is already apparent in the works of Victorian social critics. Does “community” refer to a “group of people” who “have something significant in common—family, neighborhood, property, ideas, feelings” (2)? Or, does it describe a “group of people” who share a “constellation of shared, concrete realities”—those who, for example, have lived “for generations in a given place and [regulated] their lives according to customs and beliefs” (2)? Is “community” synonymous with “society” (14)?18 And (we might add) how large or small a group does a “community” encompass—ten people, one hundred, ten thousand? Graver’s analysis helps us to recognize that the concept of “community” is under negotiation in this period, and so we should not expect to find a single model or ideal at work across Victorian texts. I do want to stress, though, that my ruling assumption about community (in effect, a minimalist definition) is that it involves a group’s awareness of its interconnectedness. Forgiveness, as we will see, is valuable to Victorian authors for its power to create or restore the possibility of harmonious (to pick up Tutu’s word) life together. But this “common life” may take the form of regular or daily interaction (as in a small town) or something more like an imaginative or existential condition (a shared life of which one feels a part). The number of people gathered within the “reconciled community” will thus vary across the ensuing chapters, as will the demands of participation in it. And though we will see that forgiveness often causes us to make distinctions between the reconciled community and the society-at-large, the latter being impersonal and thus less capable of forgiveness, at times even this distinction will appear to

34

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

break down. Indeed, we should recognize that for someone like Tutu, this is the ideal result—that is, that the nation or society (even world) starts to behave like the community, the tissue of interconnected lives, that, in fact, it is. *** I have tried to stress in this introduction that what binds these authors together is not a single set of conclusions but shared questions and predicaments. The authors and texts gathered in this book do not demonstrate that a single model of forgiveness permeates Victorian fiction. Forgiveness is not so pat a matter for the authors that I have selected. But as I suggested at the start of this chapter, acknowledging this diversity of responses has the benefit of preventing us from too readily reading the literary history of forgiveness as one of obvious decline in the Victorian period. The next chapter examines how Dickens wrestled with the question of how to balance Jesus’s example of generosity toward others with his belief that humans are liable for their transgressions in various prose pieces of 1846, including the novel Dombey and Son. In the following chapter, we will see that George Eliot in her Adam Bede and Anthony Trollope in his The Vicar of Bullhampton reach differing conclusions about the continued efficacy of Christian formulations of forgiveness. The last chapter finds Oscar Wilde still mulling the meaning of Jesus’s example in De Profundis. While this book does not promote a straightforward narrative of decline, however, we should acknowledge at the outset that the last chapter does—quite purposefully, I should add—feature an author whose assessment of the language of forgiveness is thoroughly pessimistic. This is Thomas Hardy. Hardy, moreover, suggests that the eclipse of traditional religion lies behind forgiveness’s failure. And yet, as we will also see, even in his critique of traditional Christianity—its language and practices—Hardy relies upon its resources. By pairing off Hardy with Wilde, I aim to show that Hardy’s response to forgiveness represents one option, of which others were possible in the 1890s. It bears repeating, to close this introduction, that the ambition of this book is not to use these authors’ treatments of forgiveness to prove them to be (implicitly or explicitly) orthodox Christians. In

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

35

each of the chapters, I try to frame the religious positions of the authors, which, as I frequently acknowledge, can be difficult to pin down, especially in terms of the tenets of specific theological camps. We will see, too, that certain issues that arise for these authors in relation to forgiveness are traceable to their doubts or reservations about major doctrines such as the atonement and the divinity of Christ. This book does, however, argue that forgiveness shows how Victorian authors, particularly novelists, remain in dialogue with religion even in texts that have overt irreligious or secularizing bents. It is something of a truism in literary studies that the novel represents a (if not, the) thoroughly “secular” genre.19 Attending to forgiveness and the associated concepts of repentance and reconciliation, this book argues, problematizes this kind of comprehensive claim. To study forgiveness is to see the continuing influence not only of Christianity on the ethical language and ideals of the novel but also of biblical narratives (particularly the parables) on its structures and strategies. Even the pervasive desire to forgive and be forgiven in Victorian fiction, irrespective of explicit religious reference, testifies to the profound psychological impact of religion. Overall, then, I seek to show that forgiveness is not a homogenous or standardized feature of Victorian literature (as previous criticism has suggested) but a language and practice under negotiation, the close attention to which yields a greater appreciation for imaginative literature as a space for ethical and theological reflection.

Notes 1

Translation mine.

2

See, for example, Alexander Welsh’s chapter on forgiveness in The City of Dickens (discussed in Chapter 2), the introductory chapter to John Reed’s Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness, “Attitudes toward Forgiveness and Punishment in Moral Texts of the Victorian Period,” and Reed’s article “Paying Up: The Last Judgment and Forgiveness of Debts” (Victorian Literature and Culture, 1992).

3

For a modern counterpart to this concern, see Charles Griswold’s introduction to the recent edited collection Ancient Forgiveness:

36

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Classical, Judaic, Christian. For a discussion of the “discursive crisis” surrounding forgiveness in the Enlightenment, see Karen Pagani’s forthcoming book Marginal Prophet Figures: Accounting for Forgiveness in the Age of Reason. 4

Reed in Dickens and Thackeray and William Madden in his 1967 article “The Search for Forgiveness in Some Nineteenth-Century English Novels” advance such narratives of decline, concluding their analysis of the period with Hardy. Both argue that forgiveness has become almost impossible in twentieth-century literature. The recent surge in interest in forgiveness among writers and new critical work on forgiveness in twentieth-century British literature has given good reasons to reconsider Reed’s and Madden’s broader literary histories of forgiveness.

5

For discussions of forgiveness’s multidimensionality, see, for example, Kathryn Norlock’s Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective and Everett Worthington’s edited collection Dimensions of Forgiveness.

6

For a helpful summary of positions regarding the political significance of interpersonal forgiveness, see the edited collection Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver?, particularly the sections written by Audrey Chapman.

7

Two theorists cited in this chapter, Griswold and Arendt, aim to provide “secular” definitions of forgiveness. We should acknowledge here, however, that both theorists have been accused of parading “quasi-religious” or “inherently religious” notions of forgiveness under secular banners. For criticism of this kind, see, for example, the ethicist J. Angelo Corlett’s Heirs of Oppression. For theological responses to the question of whether forgiveness can be discussed in secular terms, see Volf’s Exclusion and Embrace and Nigel Biggar’s “Forgiveness in the Twentieth Century” in Forgiveness and Truth.

8

See also Roberts’s important article “Forgivingness” (American Philosophical Quarterly, 1995) and his book Taking the Word to Heart: Self and Other in an Age of Therapies.

9

For examples of Victorian voices commenting on the use and abuse of the language of forgiveness, see Charles Spurgeon’s famous sermon “Forgiveness Made Easy” (1878), James Martineau’s essay “The Limits of Divine and Human Forgiveness” (1879), and Brooke Westcott’s The Historic Faith (1883). The American Unitarian James Freeman Clarke’s The Christian Doctrine of Forgiveness of Sin (1852) is also exemplary in this regard.

10

In making this point, MacDonald cites the example of a parent who discovers a “habit of sly cruelty” in his child. Here the

INTRODUCTION: GRAMMAR, NARRATIVE, AND COMMUNITY

37

process of forgiveness, he argues, may involve “punishment,” if that is “fittest for restraining, in the hope of finally rooting out, the wickedness” (77). This would be the truest expression of love: “A passing by the offense might spring from poor human kindness, but never divine love. It would not be remission” (78, emphasis in original). Forgiveness and punishment are thus not necessarily opposed; the former could contain the latter. 11

This is a point discussed at considerable length among psychologists and communication theorists. See, for example, Everett Worthington’s Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Theory and Application and Vincent Waldron and Douglas Kelley’s Communicating Forgiveness.

12

Jones’s colleague Stanley Hauerwas makes similar claims about the power of narratives—especially novels—to describe forgiveness. See, in particular, Hauerwas’s article “Constancy and Forgiveness” (discussed in Chapter 3).

13

Regarding the relationships between eschatology and literature, see also Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, Paul Fiddes’s The Promised End, and Tiffany Kriner’s recent The Future of Word: An Eschatology of Reading.

14

It is important to note that Leithart does not read Lear as a comedy; his point is that the play alludes to a comic view of history and thereby frames and perhaps enriches its tragedy (he calls this “deep tragedy”).

15

The controversy surrounded Seeley’s historicized focus on Jesus’s humanity (Jesus being presented as a revolutionary moralist and the founder of a theocratic state) at the apparent expense of his divinity. Critics saw it as an attack on Christianity, Seeley replying that the book did not concern the truth of religious doctrines.

16

See also Christopher Wordsworth’s Sermons, preached at Harrow School (1841).

17

For a good review of the issue, see Célestin Musekura’s An Assessment of Contemporary Models of Forgiveness.

18

In making this distinction, Graver points to the pioneering work of the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies in his study of the breakdown of rustic communities and the rise of a new shifting society in Gemeinshaft und Gesellschaft (1887).

19

My approach to the relationship between religion and the novel is particularly indebted to the arguments and models of Susan Colón’s Victorian Parables and the essays in the collection Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700–2000 (ed. Mark Knight and Thomas Woodman).

2 Dickens and Forgiveness in 1846: Liberality and Liability

[The Mark System] offers [prisoners] wages (marks) to stimulate to voluntary as opposed to compulsory exertion; it imposes fines in the same currency to deter from, rather than otherwise prevent, misconduct; … thereby affording the strongest stimulus to systematic exertion, prudence, and self-command, the virtues best suited to sustain men against external temptation after discharge. ALEXANDER MACONOCHIE, CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

[T]he Good Samaritan was a Bad Economist. CHARLES DICKENS, HARD TIMES

T

o close his address at Westminster Abbey’s commemoration of Charles Dickens’s bicentenary, Rowan Williams turned to the ending of Bleak House, finding there “one of the strangest, most shocking images that [Dickens] ever gives us of compassion and mercy, […] the figure of Sir Leicester Dedlock” (115). Waiting in his “decaying mansion” for the return of the wife who had fled “in guilt

40

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

and terror,” the old man declares, “I revoke no dispositions I have made in her favour” (115). This “appallingly stiff phrase” is “typical of [Sir Leicester’s] dryness,” Williams argues; yet it is also, and uncharacteristically, indicative of “something of the hope of mercy” (115). Despite having suffered a stroke, despite “dying slowly in loneliness,” despite what his wife had done and the lengthening hours of her absence, the old man still “stubbornly” holds open “the possibility of forgiveness and restoration,” “the possibility that there might be, once again, love and harmony” (115). In his discussion of Sir Leicester, Williams aptly captures one important strand of Dickens’s manner of handling forgiveness. His work often depicts forgiving as, to continue with Williams, “utterly unreasonable,” “extravagant,” “excessive” action. To forgive is to eschew what is normal, expected, deserved, safe. And Sir Leicester’s behavior here is, let’s be clear, shocking: Lady Dedlock hasn’t just run off; she has been revealed to be a fraud, having hidden an affair that produced an illegitimate child prior to wedding the (formerly?) haughty baronet. Sir Leicester has, in his midcentury context, very good reason to revoke the dispositions he has made in her favour.1 Importantly for present purposes, Williams also names Bleak House as a profoundly “theological” work. Sir Leicester’s actions represent a Christian ideal in all of its strangeness. In this weak but hopeful old man, Williams finds an evocative image of God’s patient, even vulnerable, forgiveness of erring sinners (115). But if such outpourings of forgiveness have a place, even a prized one, in Dickens’s moral vision, the author’s works also often set limits on what acts of forgiveness can do. The extravagance and excess of Dickensian forgiveness, this study argues, often lies in its being given without concern for whether the transgressor deserves it or, as in the case of Lady Dedlock above, has asked for it. The power of forgiveness then lies in its ability to repair fractured relationships and selves, restoring offenders’ communion with their fellow men and women and often Heaven, too. But, as we will see, forgiveness’s meaning for Dickens is almost exclusively interpersonal; the effects of forgiving, in other words, can be measured only within the forgiven party’s (re-)newed circle of family and friends. Forgiveness does not erase the past or its present results, particularly social ones. In dealing with the consequences of

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

41

transgression, Dickens’s writings evince a rival impulse toward moral calculation—toward presenting redemption not as an extravagant gift but as something earned bit by bit by properly managing one’s moral accounts of good and bad deeds. Thus, if forgiveness comes freely and often unexpectedly to those who do not merit it, Dickens’s works also demand that characters work off their moral debts. As Alexander Welsh writes, for Dickens, “the way to correct a wrong is to make reparations for it, to pay for it nearly as possible in like coin” (113). Is Dickens being hypocritical in at once touting liberality and liability? Ethically muddleheaded? I want to suggest that there is a deeper logic that lies behind Dickens’s attempt to balance these countervailing impulses and that we find it in the author’s Unitarianinflected theological perspective. On the one hand, Dickens views openhanded forgiveness as one of the chief lessons of Jesus, whose life and lessons Dickens takes as the guide to the ethical life. On the other, there is in Dickens’s soteriology a recognizable Victorian tendency to hinge salvation on the fulfillment of duties and obligations. In this picture, Jesus is “Divine” exactly because he models lavish, even profligate, forgiveness, while God the Father looks suspiciously like a keeper of up-to-date accounts, a cautious investor of his eternal rewards. While any number of texts might be selected to show these impulses at work in Dickens’s writings, I illustrate them here by gathering four that belong to a single period. This is 1846, when Dickens’s correspondence shows him laboring concurrently on a history of Jesus’s life for his children, now known as The Life of Our Lord; a lengthy epistle to the philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts regarding her plans for a half-way house for “fallen” women; the year’s Christmas book, The Battle of Life; and the novel Dombey and Son.2 Although the contemporaneity of these writings is well known, they have been related only in piecemeal fashion by critics.3 This study argues that they are profoundly intertwined, comprising a network of common terms, strategies, and dilemmas that traverses genres (gospel, epistle, Christmas book, and novel). Dombey and Son is the most compendious of these texts and thus will be discussed last: its characters discuss forgiving and repenting in diverse ways that reflect the ethical bents of the other texts. In the novel we find an ethical accretion of sorts, which exactly by mixing elements found

42

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

in the contemporary texts more directly exposes tensions between them and thus within Dickens’s thinking about forgiveness and the related issues of repentance, reconciliation, and redemption.

The Life of Our Lord With a deep sense of my great responsibility always upon me when I exercise my art, one of my constant and most earnest endeavors has been to exhibit in all my good people some slight reflections of the teachings of our great Master, and unostentatiously to lead the reader up to those teachings as the great source of all moral goodness. All my strongest illustrations are derived from the New Testament; all my social abuses are shown as departures from its spirit; all my good people are humble, charitable, faithful, and forgiving. Over and over again, I claim them in express words as disciples of the Founder of our religion; but I must admit that to a man (or a woman) they all arise and wash their faces, and do not appear unto men to fast. —Letter to Rev. David Macrae (1861) “Dickens is, of course, a Christian writer,” Valentine Cunningham writes, “A very English, Protestant, Anglican-inflected one” (255). And he is right. Yet, as Cunningham goes on to acknowledge, Dickens is also a particular kind of Christian living in an age when the English Church entertained many parties, and his particular orientation— toward the liberal or Broad Church coalition—influenced his approach to representing Christianity in his fiction. Dickens took the then recognizably liberal position that Christian ethics, whether applied to personal or social life, were nonnegotiable, but doctrinal matters less so. Time and again, Dickens’s writings observe the lamentable divisiveness of what he saw as theological hairsplitting and empty, “mere professions” of belief, which he tended to conceive in sectarian terms; such things hindered the cause of “true practical Christianity” whose cardinal points all could grasp (this last claim hinging on Dickens’s traditional Protestant belief in what, in the

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

43

same letter to Macrae, he calls the “sublime simplicity” of the New Testament) (556). “While I ask no man how he settles for himself questions of theology,” Dickens wrote in a second letter to Macrae, “I should most certainly ask myself, if I wronged any one, or ask any one who wronged me, how that default was to be reconciled with the precepts of Christianity” (557). These convictions reveal themselves in his novels’ wariness about advancing an overt doctrinal agenda in the manner of a sizable and identifiable portion of his era’s fiction market, the so-called “religious novels.”4 These were fictions written from fairly transparent and sometimes even directly stated theological or denominational vantages, texts such as “ ‘theological romances’, ‘Oxford Movement’ tales, ‘Low Church’ novels, ‘Broad Church’ novels, spiritual autobiographies thinly disguised as fiction, and even the testimonies of so-called Catholic ‘perverts’ ” (Walder 15). While, as Dennis Walder observes, Dickens was “rarely explicit” in the manner of a “theological romance” or “Low Church” novel, his beliefs are often instead “embodied in the texture of his work” (3). Dickens makes a similar claim in the letter to Macrae quoted above. Macrae, we should note, had published an essay that praised Dickens for lambasting religious hypocrites but also lamented the absence, in Macrae’s words, “amongst [Dickens’s] good people” of “any specimens of earnest Christianity to show that Christian profession may be strong and yet sincere” (127). The complaint was a familiar one by this time (having been made in evangelical periodicals, for example), and Dickens’s response to Macrae suggests that the criticism touched a nerve. But, as the epigraph shows, Dickens does not so much endeavor to prove Macrae’s specific complaint wrong as to suggest an alternative way of considering the issue. Macrae had asked for a “strong yet sincere” profession of Christian belief, that is to say, a declaration, a spoken utterance; he seems to want Dickens’s characters to behave like those in “religious novels,” making theologically robust faith statements. Dickens, however, counsels Macrae to consider the Christian virtues of his “good people” and, more broadly, the New Testament “spirit” in his calls for social reform. His texts show the “great Master’s” teachings in motion. It is thus a fittingly liberal defense that stresses Christian practice over “mere profession.” And lest his characters’ doctrinal

44

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

reticence seem unscriptural, Dickens cites Jesus’s instruction in the Sermon on the Mount to pray sincerely in secret rather than in the grandstanding manner of the Pharisees (Matthew 6). His characters, Dickens suggests, demonstrate their piety by keeping their mouths shut on (sensitive) faith issues. Like many of his contemporaries, Dickens believed that forgiveness was not only a central theme of Jesus’s message but part of the particular genius of Christianity. It should not surprise us, then, that his characters’ forgiveness makes the short list of attributes that, in the author’s view, communicate the Christian basis of his work. Nor should we doubt the sincerity of Dickens’s hope that his depictions of forgiving characters will help his readers to honor the Master’s lessons. To him, in a fundamental way, forgiveness belonged to Christianity and, in turn, was “true practical Christianity” in action. Forgiveness was to him a plain New Testament truth that all Christians, regardless of particular theological persuasion, should recognize as such and enact generously. But if Dickens is right in claiming the New Testament’s influence on his fiction is deep-rooted, we must also recognize that Dickens’s reading of the New Testament was a particular, even “privatized” one (Cunningham 269), and that out of this reading emerge distinct notions of forgiveness, repentance, and redemption. Thus, while Dickens may have cited forgiveness as one of the simple, unifying truths of the New Testament, his works show that the matter is not so straightforward. Despite his apparent wishes otherwise, Dickens’s writings demonstrate how the force and meaning of ethical practices are inflected by the particular theological framework in which they are embedded. Dickens, as Cunningham suggests, “makes no bones about being […] a selective reader of the Bible” (269). He felt doubly warranted to do so—supported, on the one hand, by the new biblical criticism (which, for example, reduced the authority of Old Testament texts he found distasteful) and, on the other, by his membership in the “grand Protestant tradition” of exercising “private judgment” in Bible reading (Cunningham 269). Our first text from 1846, The Life of Our Lord, allows us to see the “selective reader” at work, assembling his own version of Jesus’s life. The text resembles a so-called “gospel harmony” in its attempt to weave together episodes from the four

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

45

biblical accounts in the service of a comprehensive narrative of Jesus’s life. Dickens’s text, though, does as much trimming down as adding up. Events, characters, even whole thematic lines from the biblical sources disappear. Janet Larson observes that while Dickens follows Luke closely for much of the text, “certain of the Lukan themes and stories do not fit his ‘essential’ gospel” and so are omitted: “notably, the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy in Christ’s messiahship as well as the temptation of Christ, the sacramental significance of the Last Supper, and the story of Pentecost” (11). The idea of sacrificial atonement—of Christ dying for sinners, of taking on a punishment on their behalf—is, Emily Heady argues, “largely absent from the text” (22). Heady continues, “Instead of describing the cross as part of a divine plan unfolding according to God’s will, Dickens instead sees it as a tragic mistake” that erupts because Jesus’s persecutors “did not know any better … they lacked the proper education” (22–23). Such omissions—as Heady and others have argued—suggest Dickens’s adoption of a Socinian Christology (a position that is in keeping with his reading of and occasional worship with Unitarians in the mid-forties), a move that, as we will see below, has implications for his treatment of New Testament ethics. The forgiveness stories, meanwhile, are among the biggest winners in the Dickensian review process. The author gathers episodes on the topic from across the Gospels, citing, in John Reed’s view, “all the crucial passages about forgiveness” (65). Gary Colledge calculates that “Jesus teaches more on forgiveness than any other” subject in The Life (47). In fact, Dickens’s Jesus rarely teaches on a topic other than forgiveness or the related dispositions of compassion and mercy. In both his choice of episodes and his narration of them, Dickens emphasizes, to recall Williams’s language, the extravagance of Jesus’s forgiveness. Indeed, all of the qualities that Williams attributes to Sir Leicester are evident here: Jesus’s forgiveness is depicted as strange, excessive, and utterly unreasonable to many around him. If we follow Dickens’s logic in the exchange with Macrae, we may take Jesus’s forgiveness as the model that Sir Leicester’s “unostentatiously” reflects. Consider, for example, his rendition of Matthew 18. Dickens depicts Peter’s question about forgiveness as follows: “Lord, how

46

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

often shall I forgive any one who offends me? Seven times?” Jesus responds: “Seventy times seven times, and more than that” (61). The last clause is Dickens’s own, an attempt to draw out the meaning of Jesus’s multiplication of Peter’s number; our forgiveness, Dickens seeks to make very clear, should be limitless. Dickens’s handling of the Parable of the Two Debtors (Luke 7) is related. Here, Jesus’s openhandedness is contrasted with the Pharisaical code of righteousness that holds wickedness at arm’s length. When Mary Magdalene interrupts Simon the Pharisee’s dinner party to anoint Jesus’s feet with oil, Simon assumes that his guest must know nothing about Mary and her checkered past. If Jesus did, Simon reflects privately, he never would have “permitted this woman to touch Him” (49–50). Jesus, Simon assumes, is a sensible fellow. But Jesus “knows Simon’s thoughts,” and offers a parable in response—describing a creditor who forgives two debts, one small, the other substantial. Dickens’s Jesus thus throws over his interlocutors’ measured assumptions about what is appropriate or possible. His ethical system does not discriminate as Simon’s does nor does it operate, as Peter suggests, according to numerical limits. The message time and again in The Life is that divine mercy, which Jesus embodies, is inexhaustible. Dickens further establishes this lesson by way of parables that render sin metaphorically as debt. The first example we have already noted, that of the Parable of the Two Debtors. In this case, the metaphor reveals God’s generosity in forgiving sins. It also levels distinctions between sinners, since both the lesser and the greater debtor receive remission. The second example appears in the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, which describes a servant who is forgiven a large debt by his master but then is punished after refusing to forgive a small one owed to him by a fellow servant. Dickens’s version stresses that the servant is tightfisted “instead of being kind and forgiving to this poor man, as his master had been to him” (62). This emphasis is related to a larger theological point that Dickens believes the parable makes. In an aside, he explains that this episode clarifies the meaning of the “forgiveness clause” of the Lord’s Prayer. If, Dickens suggests, God forgives us a great deal of sin, we should, in turn, forgive the trifling (in comparison) transgressions committed against us.

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

47

The pictures of God and our moral relations that develop across the parables generally, and these two particularly, have been well characterized by deconstructionist philosophers, following John Caputo, as a “mad economy.”5 That is to say, Jesus maps an “economy” (if it can even be called that) in which the principles of good business have been reversed. Drawing on Caputo’s work, Keith Putt argues that Jesus’s “kingdom sayings” (including the parables) do not counsel us to make prudent “existential investments”; they depict, instead, an ethical system in which there is no balancing of moral books, no measuring of creditable good works against deficitinducing bad ones (148). As noted in the epigraph, Dickens offers his own memorable description of “parable economics” in Hard Times when he dubs the Good Samaritan “a Bad Economist” in the eyes of Gradgrind, Dickens’s satirical portrait of rationalism and industrialism. Dickens, of course, wants his readers to become bad economists, too. I have already noted how Jesus undermines Simon’s calculations of human worth and Peter’s estimate of forgiveness’s maximum. Time and again in The Life, Jesus challenges the human penchant to impose limitations and to keep strict accounts of wrongs done or suffered. Dickens spells out the implications of Jesus’s example most clearly in his commentary on the Parable of the Two Debtors: We learn from this that we must always forgive those who have done us any harm, when they come to us and say that they are truly sorry for it. Even if they do not come and say so, we must still forgive them, and never hate them and be unkind to them, if we would hope that God will forgive us. (50) So readers are to forgive always, whether the transgressor repents or not. That this passage is couched in simple language should not blind us to the fact that it advances a claim that has not been obvious to all readers of this parable, much less those reflecting on what it means to forgive like Jesus. The Life shows that Dickens clearly favors acts of forgiveness that coincide with the transgressor’s repentance. Dickens’s ideal, in other words, is reconciliation—the matching of genuine repentance with generous forgiveness. But he acknowledges now that repentance may not always come, and he insists on forgiveness nevertheless. It is unconditional for

48

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Christians. To refuse it, the closing words suggest, is to place one’s self outside the “mad economy” of divine forgiveness, to become, in effect, the penny-pinching unforgiving servant. But if in adding up the Gospels, The Life highlights how extravagant, even mad Christian theology and ethics can be, the text also shows other “saner” impulses as well. To understand this, it is useful to consider Alexander Welsh’s broader claim that for Dickens, as for many of his era, duty represented a moral principle weightier even than forgiveness (111). This is significant because the “morality of obligation and duty” is, Welsh suggests, also the “morality of strict consequences” (111). Forgiveness is problematic for holders of such views because it appears to abridge the demands of justice, since it does not render the punishment a transgressor is properly due. Welsh concludes that while Dickens’s encomiums to forgiveness should be seen as sincere, the author’s plots circumscribe forgiveness’s effect by stressing the unassailability of transgression’s consequences. Dickens, in other words, makes sure that those who fail to do their duty ultimately pay. Larson observes signs of this in The Life. The “forgiveness stories are particularly important,” she writes, but Dickens also “inadvertently courts the ironies of a Mr. Facing-Both-Ways” by “[insisting] heaven is the reward of Duty Done” (12). She continues: The duty theme is paramount: John baptizes people who “promise to be better” (23); the early Christians “knew that if they did their duty, they would go to Heaven” (124); and Jesus is the exemplary human being who teaches us “TO DO GOOD always” so that we may be forgiven and “live and die in Peace” (124, 127). If one might expect this emphasis from a father to his children, one also hears in this reconstruction the voice of the Victorian who cannot believe in Bible promises of Christ’s full atonement for sin, a religious mystery even adults “can but imperfectly understand,” and Unitarian sympathizers like Dickens not at all. (12) The narrative is thus animated by competing impulses: on the one hand, we have the picture of unconditional forgiveness and ethical generosity that emerges in the forgiveness stories; on the other, the “duty passages” underscore the need to do one’s duty and be good

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

49

always in order to get to heaven in the end. The “duty passages,” in other words, suggest exactly what the forgiveness stories seem to set aside—that God’s forgiveness is earned by good deeds rather than coming as an entirely unmerited, free gift. It might seem an odd combination of positions to hold at once, but, as Welsh and Larson both note, these views are common enough at the time and often had for their holders a religious rationale. As Larson suggests, it is helpful to consider the Atonement controversies on this point. Atonement, we should recall, was the theological issue at midcentury, pitting evangelicals against Unitarians, in particular. Evangelicals offered the so-called “satisfaction theory,” which understands Jesus’s endurance of the cross sacrificially, the necessary restitution to divine justice for the offense of human sin. The infinite debt of sin required the infinite payment of the Godman.6 In the eyes of Unitarians and liberal Anglicans (like Dickens), the evangelical claim that Christ died “to pay the debt of sinners to [God’s] inflexible justice” presented a “very degrading” portrait of “God’s character,” to use the words of William Channing, an American Unitarian minister Dickens was reading appreciatively in the 1840s (209). God’s mercy was thus “unpurchased.” For liberals, atonement—that is, at-one-ment or reconciliation with God—was simply a matter of moral change. God, they argued, was happy to forgive if sinners repented. Jesus still matters in this picture, but not because he died as a “ransom for many.” In Jesus’s life and lessons, liberals found the most complete model for how to be good. He was for them the Exemplar of divinely endorsed behaviors and dispositions such as love, compassion, repentance, and, of course, forgiveness. In this respect, The Life is a recognizably liberal document. Jesus is, Dickens tellingly writes, called “Our Saviour because he did such Good, and taught people how to love God and how to hope to go to Heaven after death” (34). At the conclusion of Simon the Pharisee’s dinner party, to cite another example, Jesus declares Mary’s sins forgiven. “The company who were present,” the narration continues, “wondered that Jesus Christ had power to forgive sins, but God had given it to Him” (50). The last clause is Dickens’s addition, offering an explanation of the Socinian sort: Jesus has this power not because he is God, but because God gave it to him. Dickens’s Jesus, then, is the

50

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

mediator of reconciliation between humans and between humanity and God—but through his lessons rather than his death. In keeping with his Unitarian leanings, Dickens retreats from, to use Larson’s phrasing, “Bible promises of Christ’s full atonement for sin” on the cross (12; italics mine). Larson’s point is that this creates a gap, since reconciliation with God is not simply accomplished on behalf of sinners as in the evangelical account of the cross. The Life places, in turn, the familiar Unitarian emphasis on earnest contrition—for example, Dickens takes care to observe how “truly sorry” Mary Magdalene is for her sins before she approaches Jesus (words not present in Luke 7). It is not enough simply to be sorry, though; one must also “try to be better” and “do good always.” This is the sure path to heaven. A formula or economy thus emerges in Dickens’s discussions of repentance and duty that runs counter to the generosity of Jesus’s forgiveness. If the parables strive to dispense with moral book-keeping, the specter of the balance sheet reappears in the duty passages. In the letter to Macrae, as we have seen, Dickens claims that the New Testament lies behind his other, less religiously explicit writings and that his Christian convictions are on particular display in his depictions of forgiveness. In the ensuing sections of this study, I aim to show that given Dickens’s premises, this is a reasonable inference. That is to say, the New Testament can help us to unpack Dickens’s treatments of forgiveness but only if we recognize that Dickens’s version of the New Testament includes both the forgiveness scenes and duty passages. The impulses to liberality and liability shown in The Life, as we will see, animate his treatments of forgiveness, repentance, and redemption in the other texts he worked on contemporaneously—his epistolary exchange with Coutts, The Battle of Life, and Dombey.

Letter to Angela Burdett-Coutts I would put it in the power of any penitent creature to knock at the door, and say For God’s sake, take me in. But I would divide the interior into two portions; and into the first portion I would put all new-comers without exception, as a place of probation,

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

51

whence they should pass, by their own good-conduct and selfdenial alone, into what I may call the Society of the house. I do not know of any plan so well conceived, or so firmly grounded in a knowledge of human nature, or so judiciously addressed to it, for observance in this place, as what is called Captain Maconnochie’s [sic] Mark System, which I will try, very roughly and generally, to describe to you … What they would be taught in the house, would be grounded in religion, most unquestionably. It must be the basis of the whole system. —Letter to Coutts (1846) The heiress of an enormous banking fortune, Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts was one of the Victorian period’s wealthiest women and most active philanthropists. She and Dickens came together in the late 1830s over the issue of school reform, the author proving an enthusiastic consultant for her educational charities. In the spring of 1846, she raised the prospect of further collaboration, this time in establishing a halfway house for women who had recently been released from prison or who sought to escape the streets. It was to be an “asylum” for “fallen” women—chiefly, prostitutes who wished to abandon the profession. Dickens responded enthusiastically to the idea, sending Coutts a fourteen-page reply that detailed how the house, later called Urania Cottage, should be managed. If Dickens’s writings are marked by the two ethical impulses discussed above, the author’s scheme for the house places a decided emphasis on the side of liability and accountability. The excerpt cited above provides a useful starting point. There is, to begin with, an appeal to a Christian ideal of compassion in the image of the penitent prostitute asking for admission in God’s name. The image recalls other New Testament knockers-on-doors (Matthew 7, Luke 12), including Jesus himself in Revelation 3:20 (“Behold, I stand at the door, and knock”). The Christian thing to do, of course, is to invite in the penitent stranger. To do so, according to Jesus’s lesson of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25 (which the famously pious Coutts would know well), is tantamount to receiving Jesus himself. As in his depiction of Jesus’s ethical example in The Life, Dickens

52

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

suggests that there should be no discriminating between kinds or fussing about degrees of guiltiness at this point: the opportunity for redemption must be open to any woman who knocks. While the initial sentence reflects the ethics of the forgiveness stories, the second sentence echoes the redemptive scheme of The Life’s duty passages. Inside the asylum, there will be distinct classes of people, differentiated according to the denizens’ quantities of “good-conduct and self-denial.” Unconditional generosity is, in effect, checked at the door. The house will operate according to a system of earnings, the women given the desserts of what they have and haven’t done. There is, as we have seen, an underlying economy at work in the duty passages of The Life. Now the balance sheet comes into plain view. Redemption for these women will depend on their ability to grasp and leverage to their advantage a system of moral economics. Dickens models this economy on midcentury prison reformer Alexander Maconochie’s “Mark System.”7 Maconochie believed that measuring prison sentences in units of time encouraged indolence and released ex-cons poorly equipped for social and economic success. He argued that sentences should be reckoned as “fines,” which the prisoner’s voluntary moral and physical exertions, now counting as “wages,” would gradually pay off. Further misconduct (including indolence) within the prison would incur additional fines. The prison administrators thus become moral accountants, tracking the prisoners’ conduct daily according to the principles of doubleentry bookkeeping. It is difficult to imagine a scheme better suited to the “morality of duty and obligation” and “of strict consequences,” to recall Welsh’s phrase. In Maconochie’s view, this was the moral value of the system. It taught prisoners that actions always had consequences, whether for better or ill, and thereby revealed to them what Maconochie took to be the way of the moral world. In his plans for the day-to-day business of the house, Dickens adapts many of Maconochie’s ideas. Dickens, once again, wishes the building to be divided into sections, new arrivals living in a “probationary class” until admitted to the “Society of the house.” Dickens aims to teach the women that fitness for any kind of society, however lowly, is a matter of moral stature. One’s passage through the house and later from the house back into the world will be

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

53

determined by one’s accumulation of a “certain number of Marks (they are mere scratches in a book)” (553). These will be gained by completing various household chores, which Dickens hopes will prepare graduates for domestic employment or, in the author’s ideal scenario, marriage. Additional marks will be earned for good behavior. Meanwhile, “every instance of ill-temper, disrespect, bad language, any outbreak of any sort or kind” will incur penalties, and Dickens underscores that these must be “a very large number in proportion to her receipts” (553). Every day’s efforts will be rendered in an accounting ledger: a “perfect Debtor and Creditor account” kept by the house’s live-in superintendent (553). In later practice, the superintendent would inscribe the credits and debits in the accountant’s customary black and red ink, respectively. Dickens stresses in the letter that the women must be kept informed regarding their balances and reminded that they control how their accounts rise and fall. Like Maconochie, Dickens means to instill in the housemembers a strong sense of moral cause-and-effect: do your duty, and fare well; shun it, and stagnate (or if you are particularly incorrigible, lose your place). Dickens argues that the Mark System is much more than “a mere form or course of training adapted to life within the house” (554). Its “great philosophy and […] chief excellence” lies in its “preparation […] for the right performance of duty outside, and for the formation of habits of firmness and self-restraint” (554). He continues: And the more these unfortunate persons were educated in their duty towards Heaven and Earth, and the more they were tried on this plan, the more they would feel that to dream of returning to Society, or of becoming Virtuous Wives, until they had earned a certain gross number of Marks required of everyone without the least exception, would be to prove that they were not worthy of restoration to the place they had lost. (554) The Mark System, then, is a pedagogical instrument—teaching the women duties that their upbringings denied them. Dickens hopes that the denizens will come to internalize the system’s way of understanding social standing, which means, in turn, they must come to see that they are unworthy of restoration within society until

54

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

they have earned the proper balance of moral credits. Redemption here, as in The Life, relies both on one’s sincere repentance and one’s active efforts to “do good always.” Society mirrors Heaven: both are the “rewards of Duty Done,” to recall Larson’s expression. But if, as we have seen, Dickens’s theological perspective can find room for both compassion and calculation, reading The Life alongside this letter also emphasizes the tension between these impulses. Indeed, one might say that the tension between the forgiveness stories and the duty passages in The Life now comes into full view. The “mad” economy of the parables, as noted above, resists the balancing of books, the invoicing of moral accounts, and the making of safe existential investments. Yet now we find Dickens, quite literally, keeping books on others’ conduct and taking great care to keep the account-holders up to date on their balances. The moral economy of the house in fact trades on the central metaphors of the parables, the rendering of transgression as debt. Now, however, the lesson is that moral debts must be paid back in good works. The extravagant debt relief of the forgiveness stories gives way to the utterly reasonable payment plan. In the forgiveness stories, furthermore, Dickens furnishes examples of people who repent and are immediately forgiven, entailing no elaborate “system” of reform. The forgiven Mary Magdalene, for example, simply wanders off from Simon’s dinner party, reappearing later among Jesus’s circle of intimates at the cross. In the model Dickens pitches to Coutts, the penitent women inch their way toward redemption, mark-by-mark. Second chances, they are taught, are not given freely. There are, moreover, limits to this redemption. In 1846, Dickens was hopeful that the women would end up “in happy homes of their own” (553), but, from the beginning, he and Coutts seem to agree that these homes won’t be in England. In the letter, Dickens observes that it would be a great help if the government would inform Coutts “from time to time into what distant parts of the World, women could be sent for marriage, with the greatest hope for future families, and with the greatest service to the existing male population” (552).8 Dickens certainly wished these women to have a “fresh start,” a new space in which to thrive. But, of course, Dickens also assumes that only desperate men will agree to such an arrangement. Given the freedom to choose, as men back in England have, they will not be

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

55

so forgiving. The plan thus begins with a sense that the women have in fact done something irrevocable—from which, in a sense, there is no coming back. Complete restoration thus cannot be purchased in the halfway house’s currency; marks buy tickets to the colonies, not home. The house thus participates in the so-called “sexual double standard,” which handles women’s sexual offenses more harshly than men’s. There is no thought now or later that Coutts should sponsor a correspondent “Uranos Cottage” for the rehabilitation of the male patrons of prostitutes or, for that matter, male prostitutes. As feminist critics have repeatedly observed, men’s sexuality was not patrolled with the same fervor in the nineteenth century; in fact, masculinity could be, on some accounts, verified or even enhanced through sexual experience, even if extramarital. Male sexual dalliances were thus excusable, while women’s “falls” obviously were not. Dickens rightly understood the house to be progressive, much kinder to its residents than the harsh conditions of many contemporary “Magdalene houses.” Its daily regimen was less strict, its accommodations and uniforms more colorful.9 Indeed, the undertaking seems to reflect Dickens’s emphasis in The Life on loving one’s neighbors in the manner of the Good Samaritan (which, Dickens’s Jesus teaches, includes all humanity). Yet while the Good Samaritan seems a “bad Economist” according to Gradgrind’s calculations, Dickens’s designs for the home women make him appear a rather cost-conscious Samaritan—and not only in his employment of the Mark System but also in his sense that sin has irreparable social costs. The “mad economy” of the parables seems to have no purchase for Dickens in this case: his scheme does not seek to overturn the social status quo but to provide means for fallen women to regain some standing within it.

The Battle of Life Furthermore, I devised a new kind of book for Christmas years ago, […] absolutely impossible, I think, to be separated from the exemplification of the Christian virtues, and the inculcation of

56

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Christian precepts. In every one of those books there is an express text preached on, and that text is always taken from the lips of Christ. —Letter to Macrae (1861) While in his letter to Coutts Dickens leans heavily to the side of accountability, the Christmas books swing in the other direction, toward Christlike openhandedness. Dickens believed that the New Testament’s influence on his fiction was in this case especially transparent, as the excerpt from the letter to Macrae suggests. The form itself, in his view, could not be “separated” from the Christian virtues, so tightly woven are they within the text. In the stories themselves, he often describes Christian ethics as part of the unique atmosphere of the seasonal setting. In A Christmas Carol (1843), Scrooge’s nephew Fred observes, for example that Christmas is a “kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely” (12). Christmas, in other words, is the season when people widely “consent” to behaving as Christians should toward their neighbors. Dickens here is unabashedly preachy. Indeed, as he tells Macrae, these are homiletic fictions, narrative efforts at exegesis of texts gathered from the Gospels. Here, once again, we find the “selective reader” of the Bible at work. The Christmas books invoke, as Cunningham writes, the familiar “repertoire of biblicisms which fire [Dickens’s] social and ethical, and thus his Christian, message” (272). The “express texts” of the Christmas books not only often show up in The Life but appear there with the same interpretive thrust. Consider, for example, Dickens’s handling of Matthew 18:2–6. In The Life, Jesus offers two related lessons: first, that only those who become “as humble as little children shall enter into Heaven”; and, second, that Jesus has a particular concern for youngsters (“Whosoever shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me”) (60). In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge overhears Peter Cratchitt reading the first verse of the episode (“And He took a child, and set him in the midst of them”) before he is cut off. Dickens counts on the reader to know the full reference, and, with the help of the scene, to hear in the verses a demand to help impoverished children like the Cratchitts—in effect, to

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

57

receive Jesus—as well as to become childlike (Scrooge will do both). In The Chimes (1844), furthermore, Dickens makes explicit reference to Jesus’s exchange with Mary Magdalene in Luke 7, a key episode in The Life as we have seen. Having received forgiveness from the kindly Meg Veck, the “fallen” Lilian Fern observes the biblical model for their meeting: “His blessing on your dearest love. […] He suffered her to sit beside His feet, and dry them with her hair. O Meg what Mercy and Compassion!” (143). As this second example suggests, the Christmas books are often explicit about being patterned on the forgiveness stories of the Gospels. All of the Christmas books discuss forgiveness, and some at great length. Forgiveness, in fact, should be counted one of the indispensable ingredients of the genre, in keeping with Dickens’s belief that it is an unquestionable demand of the New Testament. In Dickens’s offering for 1846, The Battle of Life, the forgiveness theme is particularly prominent. Forgiveness in this case is not part of the discourse or atmosphere of the season (as in Carol) or an episodic element (as in The Chimes); rather, it represents one of the chief concerns of the plot from start to finish. Here, as in the book for 1848, The Haunted Man, Dickens’s narrative vindicates forgiveness against its cultured despisers, who, in turn, become converts to it.10 Unlike its predecessors (Carol, The Chimes, and The Cricket and the Hearth), The Battle of Life contains no fantastic elements. Nor is it, as are the first two books, a tale that preaches Dickens’s social gospel straightforwardly by way of images of poverty-stricken families and sickly prostitutes. This time Dickens relies on symbolism to get the message across. The story is set in a town built atop the site of an English Civil War battle, remarkable only for the fact that most of its combatants didn’t know what they were fighting about. Such, Dickens suggests, is the state of England. The tale asks, in turn: what we should make of human life in light of the senseless and incessant battling we find around us? Dr. Jeddler, head of the book’s chief household, takes from the town’s martial history the lesson that human life is agonizing and pointless. In his view, the human plight presents us with two options: we may laugh at its absurdity or cry at its tragedy. He chooses the former course, regarding life as a “gigantic practical

58

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

joke” (251). His is one of two “philosophies” (a dirty word in this text as in Oliver Twist) that the book would discredit. The other belongs to the attorneys Snitchey and Craggs. If Dr. Jeddler is a forerunner of Samuel Beckett, they are descendants of Thomas Hobbes: they argue that life is a game in which “Everybody’s playing against you […] you’re playing against them” (259). Neither worldview can comprehend forgiveness. Dr. Jeddler responds waggishly when his daughter Marion tries to discuss penitence and forgiveness with him—at a moment when she is planning to skip town in order to get out of the way for her sister Grace to marry Alfred Heathfield (who is initially infatuated with Marion). Meanwhile, when presented with the mottoes “For-get and For-give” and “Do as you—wold [sic]—be—done—by” (263), the attorneys respond sarcastically, proclaiming them “So new,” “So easy,” and “So applicable to the affairs of life” (264). The two mottoes are inscribed on the story’s barefaced symbols of domesticity and Christmas festivity, a thimble and a nutmeg grater, which are the prized possessions of the Jeddlers’ servant Clemency Newcome. The devoted and childlike Clemency assumes the place in this book of the innocent Cratchitt children reading the Gospels aloud by the hearth. Through her, Dickens embodies the “sublime simplicity” of the New Testament, which even a semiliterate servant can grasp. Indeed, in her simplicity, she seems uniquely receptive to the Golden Rule that the nutmeg grater records. The source text here is part of Dickens’s familiar “repertoire of biblicisms,” Matthew 7:12, itself an attempt on Jesus’s part to distill a large corpus of teaching: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” As Clemency’s thimble’s motto and her name further attests, this meek, merciful, pure-hearted character is a thinly veiled allegory for the Christian virtues that Dickens found in the Sermon on the Mount. The plot, of course, vindicates the ethical package that Clemency represents. As Reed observes, the book “embodies the contest between a world of hearts that forgive and a world of distrust, selfishness, and antagonism” (160), and the victor is quite clear in the end. Dr. Jeddler is rattled by Marion’s disappearance—a matter made worse by her apparent departure with Michael Warden, a

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

59

rake who has nearly squandered his once sizable inheritance. In the ensuing years, he suffers a morally productive broken heart—a strategy that we will see Dickens employ again in Dombey— and abandons his farcical shtick. The now tender-hearted father earnestly forgives Marion in absentia. When Marion and Warden reappear after a six-year absence, Craggs is dead and Snitchey’s cynicism accordingly muted. There is no voice of antagonism toward forgiveness now. Marion then quickly reconciles with her father, sister, and Alfred, now her brother-in-law. The attorneys’ ironic declaration that Clemency’s mottoes are “So applicable to the affairs of life…” is proven right in the end. At the discovery of Marion’s return, Clemency lapses into a hysterical fit (she “sobbed, laughed, cried, screamed”) “falling” on and embracing first Marion, then Snitchey, the Doctor, her fellow servant Ben Britain, and finally herself (319). Clemency’s embrace is thus wide enough to draw everyone into her charmed circle in the end. Through its multiple reunions and reconciliations, Dickens’s ending offers a picture of not only individual but communal restoration. If Marion or Dr. Jeddler has a new life, so, too, does the town as a whole. The urging of the tale is that the same renewal is possible for England, and to drive this point home Dickens arranges a symbolic union between Clemency and Britain. The book shows Britain repeatedly puzzling over the doctor’s and the attorneys’ crooked “systems of philosophy,” thus “bewildering himself as much as ever his great namesake has done with theories and schools” (264). Clemency, meanwhile, is presented as “his good Genius—though he had the meanest possible opinion of her understanding, by reason of her seldom troubling herself with abstract speculations, and being always at hand to do the right thing at the right time” (264). Ultimately, Britain comes to realize that “as a safe and comfortable sweetener of the [spirit], and as a pleasant guide through life, there’s nothing like a nutmeg-grater […] Com-bined with a thimble” (283). Many of the Christmas books close with an exhortation to enact or carry forward the Christmas spirit. In this case, Dickens offers an image of national renewal that unites the Christian virtues with the charms of holiday festivity. In their next phase of life, we are told, Clemency and Britain will leave the Jeddlers’ service in order to open a “licensed tavern, or house of public entertainment” (321), with the

60

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

thimble and nutmeg-grater painted on the sign. While poor children and Magdalenes are never explicitly mentioned in the story, Dickens certainly gestures in their direction in this picture of a welcoming and forgiving society patterned after the Sermon on the Mount. In so many ways, The Battle reads like an extended—and perhaps in its broader social scale, extensive—argument for the model of generous forgiveness that Dickens had depicted in The Life. While The Life, we might say, represents Dickens’s attempt to distill the life and lessons of Jesus within his household, the Christmas book shows him preaching his essential gospel to the nation. It is deeply indebted to the forgiveness stories of the New Testament, perhaps the Parable of the Prodigal Son most of all. Dr. Jeddler’s forgiveness of the absent Marian and rejoicing on her return recalls the father rejoicing in the child’s return in the parable. Marion’s erstwhile companion, Michael Warden, also echoes Dickens’s handling of the forgiveness stories in his description of Marion’s forgiveness of him: “to whom I made my humble supplication for forgiveness, when I knew her merit and my deep unworthiness” (321). His point is that he did not deserve to be forgiven by someone so spotless: her act of forgiveness thereby reflects the “mad” economy of the unmerited gift that Dickens depicts in The Life. While Marion has forgiven Warden, Dickens leaves the question of whether the rest of the community will follow suit somewhat ambiguous. In the same speech, the last words spoken by a character in the story, Warden announces his intention to quit town shortly, never to return. He asks to take up Clemency’s inscriptions, using them to appeal to Dr. Jeddler and Alfred: “Do as you would be done by! Forget and Forgive!” (321). In the published version of the story, Dickens then adds a brief coda, in which the narrator offers a report of what happened next that has been gleaned from personified Time: Michael Warden never went away again, and never sold his house, but opened it afresh, maintained a golden means of hospitality, and had a wife, the pride and honour of that countryside, whose name was Marion. But, as I have observed that Time confuses facts occasionally, I hardly know what weight to give to his authority. (321)

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

61

If Time is right, then Dr. Jeddler and Alfred have learned how to forgive liberally and Warden how to care about others (not just himself, as in the past). Time’s picture of Warden’s household suggests that forgiveness has profound relational and communal meanings. Here the Parable of the Prodigal Son plays out once more. And yet the coda hesitates. The portrait of virtue rewarded is threatened by Time’s foggy memory. The coda thus offers an elaborate picture of a possible outcome.11 Given the text’s persistent endorsement of forgiveness, we must ask why Dickens doesn’t provide unequivocal resolution. Elaine Ostry has observed that this sort of (mild) pull-the-rug-out-from-underthe-reader moment occurs in several of the Christmas books; The Chimes and The Haunted Man, for example, end with suggestions that the “protagonist has been dreaming or day-dreaming” (102). These endings are characteristic, Ostry argues, of “awakeneddreamer” utopian literature, in which the responsibility to realize the utopian vision offered in the tale is ultimately handed to the reader (102). Ostry views The Battle of Life as an exception (given that it features no actual dreaming), but the ambiguity of the coda suggests a similar “utopian” transaction at work. To follow Ostry’s lead, we might suggest that Dickens here sacrifices a degree of resolution in order to pass responsibility to the reader.12 Through Warden’s unresolved status, The Battle creates conditions for the reader’s response to shape the outcome: the reader may affirm Time’s account, or if it seems contrived, reject it. The reader’s view of this issue, of course, has everything to do with his or her beliefs about the Christian virtues that the book has preached. The irresolution of the ending thus allows the reader to respond charitably toward the characters—to believe the best of Warden, to believe the best of the community, to believe, in the end, in the possibility of forgiveness. Critics have repeatedly observed that the “Christmas spirit” promoted by the Christmas books is outwardly-oriented. They aim to awaken, Sally Ledger writes in this vein, a “social conscience” that leads to “benevolent action” (180). In the ending of The Battle, I am suggesting, the Christian virtues it preaches may be turned back on it, the reader practicing on the tale the ethical response it has modeled as a prelude to carrying that forgiveness into the world.

62

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Dombey and Son “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year,” Scrooge promises at the end of the visionary sequence (77), the first of many such resolutions by Christmas book characters to make yuletide benevolence a lasting condition. In Dickens’s career, critics have detected an analogous change of heart in Dickens the novelist. Pre-Carol, the novels’ great “sinners”—such as Jingle, Fagin, Squeers, and Pecksniff—must be “punished, either by events or retribution” (Marlow 47). The Christmas books of the mid-forties (for James Marlow, The Battle, in particular) then make “for the first time the case for charity rather than for vengeance upon past misdeeds” (47). In Dombey and Son, in particular, critics have observed the lingering influence of this Christmas charity and its accompanying story-arc. Now the chief sinner, Mr. Dombey, can be granted a redemption impossible for his villainous predecessors. While there is significant Christmas book residue in Dombey’s depiction of forgiveness and redemption (as we will see below), the novel also bears the marks of the other texts examined above. Just as in our readings of The Battle and the letter to Coutts, we will consider here how Dickens’s take on the New Testament informs the novel’s ethical strategies. Indeed, the ethical impulses of The Life are most fully represented here. While the economy of the duty passages is borne out in the letter and the emphasis of the forgiveness stories on Christlike openhandedness in the Christmas book, the novel expresses the author’s concerns for both liberality and liability. I approach these issues by examining the novel’s redemptrixes, Harriet Carker and Florence Dombey. These two characters preside over the novel’s four redemption plots: Harriet ministers to her brother, John, and the fallen woman, Alice Marwood; Florence, meanwhile, aids her father, Mr. Dombey, and her stepmother, Edith. These cases are, as we will see, distinct, and Dickens depicts multiple forms or kinds of forgiveness and repentance to suit them. And these diverse embodiments, in turn, reflect the two ethical impulses that we have tracked across this study. Here again, Jesus’s life and lessons provide the ideal pattern for human relations. But this novel also suggests that forgiveness of the extravagant variety is not always

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

63

possible or even suitable. A genuine offer of reconciliation may thus come with conditions. And Dickens’s belief in the morality of duty and strict consequences is evident in the constraints the novel places on the extent of redemption and reconciliation, in this-worldly terms at least. There are, the novelist suggests, limits to what repentance and forgiveness can achieve, to the degree to which the redeemed can be restored or reinstated, to who or what can be brought back together. Our first heroine, Harriet, represents a Dickensian spin on the “Angel of the House.” She creates a haven in which others—John and Alice—discover their better natures, recalling Dickens and Coutts’s shared conviction that repentance takes its ideal form in a warm, feminine home. Her brother, our first penitent, is an embezzler. But rather than pursue criminal prosecution, “old” Dombey (our Mr. Dombey’s father) confined John to a lowly clerk’s desk as a cautionary tale to other employees. With the crime, Harriet left the comfortable quarters afforded by her other brother, James (manager at the firm of Dombey and Son), in order to keep up John’s ramshackle house and deflated spirits. As in the halfway house scheme, Harriet’s help stops there. His repentance, she argues, is importantly his own. John, meanwhile, is a model penitent.13 Harriet, whose moral perspective is whole-heartedly endorsed throughout the book, argues that John offers a pitiable-but-praiseworthy portrait of “uncomplaining expiation, true repentance, terrible regret” (519). Notice that “true” repentance is “expiation.” It is also described as “reparation” and, later, the repayment of a “debt.” The description recalls our readings of the duty passages of The Life and the letter to Coutts: transgression incurs a debt, which it is the business of repentance to pay back. As in Dickens’s hopes for the halfway house, moreover, the real fruit of the enterprise lies in its pedagogy. What Harriet prizes about John’s humble compliance with his perpetual clerkship, which functions as his initial method of atonement, is its effect on his character.14 His behavior recalls that of the model cottager in the letter to Coutts who has so internalized the Mark System that she would count it an injustice to return to society without first earning sufficient credits. John’s long repentance has taught him his duty. He is now, Harriet observes, an “altered” man (519). It is for this reason that Harriet rebuffs the kindly office-mate Mr. Morfin’s offer

64

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

of charitable assistance. She would not take from John “any part of what has […] so proved his better resolution—any fragment of the merit of his unassisted, obscure, and forgotten reparation” (521). While Harriet views John’s intra-office sentence as morally salutary, she also decries its permanence. “[A]fter what I have seen,” she urges Morfin, “let me conjure you, if you are in any place of power, and are ever wronged, never […] inflict a punishment that cannot be recalled; while there is a GOD above us to work changes in the hearts He made” (519). She is, of course, not deprecating punishment per se. Her brother offers living proof of its benefits. Perpetual punishment, though, is irreligious, since it implicitly denies the divine power to mend twisted hearts. In cases of true change like John’s, human mercy should imitate the divine and lift a punishment that is no longer necessary. This plotline finds its fulfillment through the death of James Carker, the unredeemed—though not necessarily unredeemable—villain of the book.15 He dies (famously hit by a train) intestate, and his wealth falls to his siblings. Since they have “little use […] for money,” it can be applied elsewhere—as an annuity to Dombey, who had fired John after James’s crimes became known. James’s money now provides the ideal means to pay Dombey back (especially so since Dombey’s business is now ruined, partly through James’s mismanagement of it) (884). John’s new “act of restitution” is, moreover, to be done “secretly, unknown, and unapproved of”: in this lies his “chief happiness” in the arrangement (884). Duty is done for its own sake— because it is right—not to rise in others’ esteem. John thus evinces the pious reserve that Dickens touts in the letter to Macrae as one of the Christian qualities of his good people—here is no Pharisee appearing unto men to fast. Through Harriet, furthermore, Dickens explicitly assigns a religious significance to this last measure of reparation, invoking the Parable of the Lost Sheep (Luke 15:3–7). As she describes the annuity, her face wears “Such a look of exultation” as “there may be on Angels’ faces when the one repentant sinner enters Heaven, among ninety-nine just men” (885). Dombey has long been read as Dickens’s critique of the commercial approach to human life and relations that is embodied by Mr. Dombey. Many readings have suggested that Dickens starkly opposes genuine morality and immoral (or amoral) commercialism.

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

65

Philip Davis argues, on this line, that “morality” represents “the great alternative language to that of the commercial world” (313). Our analysis has demonstrated that, in fact, Dickens’s language of morality can be heavily indebted to that of the commercial world. Redemption in this plotline—as in the letter to Coutts and the duty passage of The Life—functions according to the logic of the balance sheet. In John’s case, repentance even finds its ideal expression in hard cash. And through Harriet and her angelic visage, Dickens offers a religious endorsement for this economic process of redemption. Harriet’s care for Alice Marwood, meanwhile, draws us back to the Christmas books and the forgiveness stories of the New Testament. Alice is a fallen woman, seduced years earlier by none other than James Carker. Alice does not know Harriet’s last name when she appears on a stormy day outside Harriet and John’s residence on the outskirts of London. Hospitable Christian that she is, Harriet accordingly draws Alice in to dry out by the hearth. Alice then reveals that she has just returned from doing time in Australia, prompting Harriet to call for divine forgiveness and to preach repentance. “There is nothing we may not hope to repair; it is never too late to amend,” she says, “You are penitent?” (525). But Alice is not. Penitence, she observes, is something that has been expected of her by cruel authorities but never offered to her as one who has also been wronged. If no one has been lenient with her, she reasons, “Why should I be penitent, and all the world go free?” (525). Her plot-arc, in turn, follows that of Christmas book protagonists like Scrooge and Dr. Jeddler, who become sincere practitioners of the Christian virtues they initially find ludicrous. In her final appearance in the novel, Alice lies, repentant, on her deathbed, in the idyllic setting of a little house surrounded by gardens. Harriet tends to her. Walder calls the scene a “private equivalent of Urania Cottage” (131). Absent from this picture, though, are the hallmarks of the house’s program: this abode features no stages of progress, no domestic exercises, and, most importantly, no traces of the Mark System. Clemency, instead, is given the rule of this house. Both women exude the virtues touted in The Life and venerated in the Christmas books: the inexhaustibly compassionate Harriet has forgiven Alice unconditionally for cursing her (after Alice discovered Harriet’s family name); and Alice proves an enthusiastic convert, repentant for her

66

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

past and eager to forgive the mother she had once derided. As Larson notes, Alice even echoes Scripture in her hopeful observation that “We shall all change, Mother, in our turn,” referencing St. Paul’s vision in 1 Corinthians 15 of heavenly incorruption and immortality (115). This is a house built upon the parables rather than the principles of Captain Maconochie. Indeed, Harriet’s proclamation that salvation is open to all, however late in life, reiterates Dickens’s explanation of the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20) in The Life, another economically “mad” story about employees who earn the same wage, though working different hours.16 The remainder of the scene follows the Christmas book pattern closely. Alice observes that her religious education has made her earlier life of sorrow and resentment seem more and more like a “dream” (891). To encounter the life and lessons of Jesus is thus tantamount to experiencing a new and better reality. She has been reborn. At her request, Harriet resumes the reading of the text that has been so essential to Alice’s transformation, a Bible of Unitarian dimensions: the eternal book for all the weary, and the heavy-laden; for all the wretched, fallen, and neglected of this earth—[…] the blessed history, in which the blind lame palsied beggar, the criminal, the woman stained with shame, the shunned of all our dainty class, has each a portion, […] read the ministry of Him who, through the round of human life, and all its hopes and griefs, from birth to death, from infancy to age, had sweet compassion for, and interest in, its every scene and stage, its every suffering and sorrow. (892) As in the Bible-readings of the Christmas books, this précis of the New Testament is designed not only to comfort Alice but also to remind readers of what the text demands of them. As Cunningham writes, the Bible in Harriet’s hand seeks to elicit “the forgiving Christmas spirit that outcast magdalens are owed” from those who profess to be Christians (273). Thus, Alice’s pious, tear-inducing death “murmuring the sacred name” of Jesus should not simply satisfy the Christian conscience but spur it to social action (892). Dickens, in effect, sacrifices the fictional Alice (just as he had Lilian Fern in The Chimes) for the sake of rescuing other, real “fallen” women.

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

67

Yet we must also recognize that Dickens stresses that Alice’s death here is neither accidental nor unexpected. Her plotline has, from the beginning, underscored that such a life as hers takes a heavy and irreversible toll. Her death now represents the natural consequence of what she has done, as Alice herself observes: “evil courses, and remorse, travel, want, and weather, storm within, and storm without, have worn my life away” (888).17 The possibility that Alice might be restored to society is never entertained here, as it is for the male sinners in Dickens’s Christmas books. As in the Urania Cottage scheme, Dickens’s depiction of Alice’s death is shaped by his sense of what is socially possible. As Linda Lewis writes, “death and deportation were the typical outcomes that a Victorian reader could expect for the fallen women permanently unfit for a domestic role,” and for Alice, who had already been transported once, Dickens selects the latter option (84). There is, in other words, no recognizable English situation at hand for Alice, and Dickens does not try to imagine one. The scene promises to change the world by motivating the reader to be forgiving toward those like Alice. But, within the scene, the efficacy of forgiveness brushes up against what is realistic or socially imaginable. The moral visions of the other documents we have considered are thus fused here. If the deathbed proves an ideal setting for reconciliations that recall the forgiveness stories of The Life and The Battle, Alice’s fate also exposes the social limitations that regulate his plans for graduates of Urania Cottage. Harriet’s announcement of the Carkers’ plans for Dombey’s annuity and Alice’s death appear in Chapter 58, “After a Lapse,” which served as the opening chapter of the novel’s final issue when published serially from 1846–1848. This first chapter establishes the prominence of the forgiveness theme in Dickens’s ending, which will be picked up by subsequent chapters. In the ensuing chapter, the role of rescuing angel passes to Florence. Harriet and Florence are not, as critics have observed, exact doubles, and the differences between them are reflected in Florence’s meetings with her father and stepmother (in chapters 59 and 61, respectively). Yet if these scenes play out differently than what we have seen, they also bear the imprint of the same moral vision. Here, too, I want to argue, the novel wrestles with the demands of duty and accountability alongside those of Christlike love and openhandedness.

68

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Florence’s reunion with Dombey appears at the end of a chapter named “Retribution.” The title suggests Dickens’s earlier novelistic strategy, in which the chief villains such as Fagin and Quilp were punished for their crimes. Now, though, retribution is not the dead end it had been in the earlier novels; it is, instead, a necessary step toward redemption. If Dombey loses his fortune and his luxury goods, as this chapter reports that he has, he comes to learn that these are not the one thing needful. That, he at last acknowledges, is Florence. Dickens has suggested all along that Dombey knows, however dimly, that he has abused his daughter; here the claims of conscience can no longer be held at bay. The primary “retribution” of the chapter, then, lies in Dombey’s recognition that if many things (especially his wealth) and people proved false, Florence would have been true. Left to mull his failures in his now barren townhouse, he becomes, as Walder writes, “the Haunted Man” (136). As in the Christmas book of that name, Dombey’s memory here does a “holy work,” chastening him in preparation for the redemption that will arrive shortly (136). More immediately, though, Dombey collapses under the weight of self-reproach for his crimes, and his anguish induces a psychic split. In the mirror, he watches “A spectral, haggard, wasted likeness of himself” plot a very un-festive end: suicide (909). But before Dombey’s homicidal dissociated hand can do its work, Florence appears. Critics have rightly observed that Dickens’s characterization of Florence borrows from the genres of melodrama and fairy tale. Her sudden arrival at this moment has, not inappropriately, seemed a case in point.18 Critical attention to these debts, however, has obscured another generic influence, that of the narrative genre that (as we have seen) strongly shaped his thinking about forgiveness, the parable. Lewis represents an exception, noting that this scene’s participates in the novel’s ongoing interaction with the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Builders (Matthew 7). Dombey, Lewis argues, built his house on the sand of material wealth rather than the sturdy and lasting foundation of the “Christian virtues” exemplified by the model characters: “humility, tolerance, benevolence, and forgiveness” (Lewis 58). His departure from the house at the scene’s conclusion is thus deeply symbolic. I want to suggest that the parables are not only in the background but also are reflected in Dickens’s depiction of what takes place within

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

69

the episode. That to say, I want to read this scene as “parabolic.” My reading follows the pioneering work of Susan Colón in Victorian Parables. Drawing on the thought of Paul Ricoeur, Colón defines the parable as a “fiction capable of redescribing life” (13). It does this by way of an “extravagant reversal,” or “an extraordinary, unpredictable turn of action” that disrupts an “ordinary situation, plot and set of characters” (13). The reversal thereby “forces a total reconception of the whole situation”—for the character and reader alike—“in the light of the new reality imaged in that turn” (13). Thus, the prodigal son “knows not to expect a son’s welcome from the father he scorned” but that’s exactly what he gets. Workers “hired late in the day expect to receive a smaller wage” but are given the same pay as their longerserving coworkers (13). As the title Victorian Parables suggests, Colón argues that Victorian novelists not only allude to the parables but write their own. Colón is particularly concerned to demonstrate that this can and does occur within “realist” fictions. The parable, Colón argues, offers an apt strategy for the realist novelist to convey a transformative religious vision since it does not depend on the intrusion of supernatural machinery. The plots of the biblical parables “involve only actions entirely accessible to human beings: no character in a parable performs or witnesses a miracle, a theophany, or other display of supernatural power” (33).19 The biblical parables, in fact, depend on a certain “realism” or “everydayness” in order to achieve their effect: “without the ordinary or everyday basis of the story, the unexpected or extravagant reversal would have no traction in the reader’s mind” (25). The biblical parables show the realist novelist how to “use particular sets of human relationships and responses to show gesturally or sometimes metaphorically” a higher, transcendent, or more perfect reality (37). Colón argues that in fictions that “make extensive use of plots, characters, and reversals borrowed from Jesus’s parables, we may fairly look for […] the sophisticated narrative strategies that give parables their existential potency” (37). Dickens represents an obvious candidate for this kind of attention, and Colón, in turn, dedicates a chapter to the role of the stewardship parables in Our Mutual Friend. Dombey, too, makes “extensive use” of the parables. We have already noted its extended interaction with one. The Parable of the

70

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Prodigal Son is another. As Heady writes, the parable plays out in a “strangely distorted form” at the conclusion of the Stagg’s Gardens episode in Chapter 6, when Florence—first lost and then mugged in the city—returns home and receives this greeting from her father: “The entrance of the lost child made a slight sensation, but not much. Mr. Dombey, who had never found her, kissed her once upon the forehead, and cautioned her not to run away again, or wander anywhere with treacherous attendants” (99). It is, as Heady writes, a “sadly diminished echo of Luke 15:24 in which the father now fails to properly rejoice for the return of the lost child” (29). Heady also suggests a further critique here: Dombey does not recognize that he is the prodigal son—“someone who needs to return to the domestic fold begging forgiveness” (29). The reunion of father and daughter in Chapter 59 amends the earlier failed fulfillment of the parable. Florence returns to her father’s house, yet it is an inversion of the biblical plot: the house is empty, and the daughter comes to draw the father out. Her entrance, announced by a “piercing, loving, rapturous cry” (910), is immediately restorative: she calls Dombey back to himself and thus to reality. In the mirror, he now finds not his ghostly “likeness” but “his own reflection […] and, at his knees, his daughter” (910). But this is not the same reality he left behind in his descent into madness; this is a strange new reality embodied by Florence: Yes. His daughter! Look at her! Look here! Down upon the ground, clinging to him, calling to him, folding her hands, praying to him. “Papa! Dearest Papa! Pardon me, forgive me! I have come back to ask forgiveness on my knees. I never can be happy more, without it!” Unchanged still. Of all the world, unchanged. Raising the same face to his, as on that miserable night. Asking his forgiveness! “Dear Papa, oh don’t look strangely on me! …” (910; italics in original) Here, of course, is an extravagant reversal if there ever was one. As Melvyn New writes, “Everything about this scene would seem to be utterly impossible, irrational, idiotic, to the critical mind, and, indeed, we share Dombey’s incredulity marked by Dickens’s

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

71

italics: ‘Asking his forgiveness.’ Surely, he should, logically and in any viable economic exchange, be asking for hers” (255–256; italics in original). But, New continues, Dickens offers Florence’s “impossible” action exactly in order to reveal a higher reality—one whose shape baffles the “critical mind” with its expectation of strict causality and exchange. Robert Higbie similarly argues that Florence, through her belief in something beyond immediate “reality,” here overcomes Dombey’s “sense of reality,” that is, of what is possible (95). New and Higbie do not invoke the parable in their respective analyses, yet their readings catch the parabolic qualities of the event, particularly how Dickens endeavors to disorient Dombey in order to reorient him—and, in turn, us. Florence’s “self-effacement” has perturbed a number of modern critics. Her contrition is seen, for example, to rob her of dignity and thus to suggest a lack of self-respect. In so many ways, critics testify to the difficulty of accepting Dickens’s parabolic reversal.20 This scene well demonstrates Williams’s point that Dickens’s portrayals of forgiveness can not only be extravagant and excessive but remain “strange” and even “shocking” to us today. The frisson of what Florence does, of course, relies on our knowledge of what she could do, of what a “saner” moral system would have her do. She could demand the apology that she is due as a victim. Dombey knows all of this, just as the narrator and the reader do. She does not claim the moral high ground that is justly hers, however, coming instead, as a fellow sinner in need of forgiveness. Her actions offer an image of— and an invitation to join—a new ethical reality governed not by the principles of strict exchange or just desserts but by generosity and grace. Her humility suggests a new, redeemed image of him—as a father capable of the love and grace that she extends. She thus, as Higbie writes, “[converts] Dombey into the father she has tried to believe in all along” (95). If she stoops, she does so to conquer with her image of the person he can be. Florence exemplifies the model of Christian practice Dickens commends to Macrae: she embodies the Sermon on the Mount but doesn’t make a pharisaical fuss about her righteousness. Dombey, in turn, reads her actions well, receiving the religious message they encode. As Florence “clings” ever more tightly to him, he kisses her and then (within the same sentence) “[lifts] up his eyes” to Heaven

72

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

and prays, “Oh my God, forgive me, for I need it very much!” (911). The words and actions echo the moment of reunion in the Parable of the Prodigal Son: the father “falls” on the son’s neck and kisses him, and the son then declares that he has “sinned against heaven, and in thy sight” (Luke 15:20–21). Dombey has been a nominal Anglican; he now acknowledges himself a sinner in need of God’s mercy. Critics have long argued that Dickens preaches conversion—but conversion as “spiritual transformation” or a change of heart rather than accepting certain articles of faith. Dombey’s conversion fits this bill: it is not about saving belief (that is, “accepting Jesus”) as in the evangelical model. What Dombey must come to accept is the truth of the forgiveness stories of Dickens’s New Testament, whose ethical and spiritual dimensions had been incomprehensible to his earlier moral calculus. In embracing Florence and adopting the prodigal son’s prayer for his own, Dombey, we might say, “converts” to the mad logic of the parables. His ending, as noted above, has the air of a Christmas fête. Critics have long observed resemblances between his conversion and that of his fellow Mammon-worshiper, Scrooge. His fate also recalls that of Dr. Jeddler, who, as we have seen, suffers a morally productive broken heart, converts to repentance and forgiveness, and then enjoys a joyous reunion with his daughter. As in that tale, Dombey’s last chapter is dedicated to describing what we might call its “redeemed community,” which centers on Florence. A white-haired Dombey is now installed within Florence’s genial household, his days spent doting on his two grandchildren and, on occasion, lapsing into penitential remembrances of Florence and Paul, his dead son, as children. While this ending might seem like “heaven upon earth” to some readers, others have “recognized it as purgatory” (Lewis 77). Dombey is changed, but his alteration has come at great cost. Perhaps the command to become like a child is realized too fully here. As G.K. Chesterton memorably writes, “in this case softening of the heart seems to bear too close a resemblance to softening of the brain” (276). It is useful here to recall the benign outcome postulated at the end of The Battle: in the image of a bustling household, Dickens suggests that Michael Warden could be restored to the social and economic position that his wayward life had seemingly made unattainable (that

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

73

of local squire). Dombey’s restoration is far less complete. Like the other penitents we have considered, the world that opens to the redeemed man is a rather narrow one. If, as Reed suggests, Florence leads Dombey out of his confinement into “the freedom of familial love” (177), the final chapter suggests that the family circle is also the boundary of Dombey’s new-found freedom. The final picture, then, shows us that while the “possibility of redemption” is real indeed, there are restrictions to what can (perhaps should) be restored. Even here, Dickens suggests that transgression is costly business. The sentimental tableau of the finale is immediately preceded by a chapter titled “Relenting.” This must be done by the erstwhile Mrs. Dombey, Edith, whom Florence has not seen since she absconded with James Carker. Dickens’s original plans called for Edith to become James’s mistress, her plotline then, it appears, culminating in repentance on her deathbed in conspicuous parallel to that of Alice, her cousin and fellow “fallen” woman.21 Florence assumes that this is what happened and, accordingly, promises “pardons”—from Heaven and her father (935). Florence wants to replay the reconciliation scene of Chapter 59, with Florence now serving as Dombey’s proxy. Though “Guilty of much,” Edith has not committed adultery, she retorts (936). Florence, moreover, misunderstands what occurred within Dombey’s marriage to Edith. Both parties, Edith contends, are culpable for their sham of a marriage: Dombey sinned in purchasing her on the fashionable marriage market, just as Edith did in putting herself up for sale. Both, then, must repent and forgive. The scene thus becomes a negotiation rather than a simple reconciliation. We might say that the scene stages a “grammatical” dispute between rival structures or logics for thinking about when and how to talk about forgiveness and repentance. Florence’s urging that Edith seek Dombey’s “pardon” looks naïve in the face of the truths Edith now airs. Edith thus cannot simply adopt her purehearted interlocutor’s language—as Alice does in her final meeting with Harriet. Florence’s good influence does ultimately enable Edith to relent as the chapter title promises, but her manner of forgiving is distinct: “Tell him that if, in his own present, he can find any reason to compassionate my past, I sent word that I asked him to do so. Tell

74

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

him that if, in his own present, he can find a reason to think less bitterly of me, I asked him to do so.” […] “When he is most proud and happy in [Florence] and her children, he will be most repentant of his own part in the dark vision of our married life. At that time, I will be repentant too—let him know it then—and think that when I thought so much of all the causes that had made me what I was, I needed to have allowed more for the causes that had made him what he was. I will try, then, to forgive him his share of blame. Let him try to forgive me mine!” (940) Edith wonders at these “strange words” that have issued from her mouth. And, of course, she’s right to do so. As one of Dickens’s great resenters, Edith’s words are “strange” to her and suggest, as she recognizes, her capacity for change. Grammatically speaking, these are also “strange” words, her conditional clauses mixing times oddly. There is, perhaps, something fitting that when Edith begins to speak of forgiveness it sounds a bit like a foreign tongue. At the same, Edith’s muddled grammar also represents an important shift in the novel’s thinking about when forgiveness should take place. Florence’s forgiveness expresses a faith that bonds and selves can be spectacularly transformed. Edith’s offers a more down-to-earth view of moral development. It is, to recall Williams’s vocabulary, quite “sane.” Here repentance and forgiveness are the hard-won results of a process that, Edith suggests, is likely to take a while. Larson contends that what Edith recommends is not quite “Christian forgiveness,” and while the scene does not “discredit” the Christian type, it does suggest that in “the real world” alternative strategies are needed (115). Our study of Dickens’s writings of 1846, though, has shown that Edith’s model of forgiving represents no such departure. It, too, reflects Dickens’s reading of the New Testament. In this case, though, forgiveness bears the marks of the economy of the duty passages—in which one earns redemption— rather than the “mad” logic of the parables. Indeed, we might say that between Florence and Edith, Dickens is able to have it both ways in his treatment of Dombey. One models forgiveness as an

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

75

extravagant, excessive, and shockingly free gift, the other as the reward that follows an arduous but necessary process of moral reform. Edith won’t be there to announce her conditions met; that is to be Florence’s good office. Edith and Dombey are now “dead” to each other, never again “to meet on this side of eternity” (940). Dombey and Edith’s wedding was a cruel charade, and Dickens does not suggest that marital love can be kindled now. Although Edith has not “fallen,” she suffers the familiar fate of banishment. In this case, though, she is not sent to Australia but Italy (under the care of a male cousin). As Dora Epstein Nord observes, Edith like Alice bears an “indelible stain” that makes her “continued presence in the narrative […] untenable” (after, we should add, they have converted to the language of forgiveness and repentance) (46). In Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist, Andrew Sanders argues that Dombey “ends emphatically with new life” (129). The ending shows “New Testament morality triumphant” and provides “hope for a better future embodied in the restored and reborn Dombey family” (128). Sanders does not comment at this point on Alice’s real death and Edith’s symbolic one, which, of course, complicate the picture of a tidy ending. In these cases, Dickens does look to a resurrection—indeed, both characters’ discussions of forgiveness and repentance are necessary steps in this direction—but it is in the next life, not this one as it is for Dombey. There are no spaces made for them in the redeemed community. These two characters, most of all, expose the limits of what forgiveness can do in the world. And their exclusion is all the more striking given their central roles in Dickens’s social critique. In her final appearance, Edith, in fact, takes up Alice’s complaint about how unfair and unforgiving society can be. Nord thus concludes that the novel “wavers between the desire to marshal the spirit of social reform and the need to protect the sanctity of middle-class life” (47). This study has suggested that we might describe this tension another way— as the seemingly inevitable result of Dickens’s attempt to exalt forgiveness’s extravagance, with its promise to do the unthinkable or impossible, while also demonstrating that our actions have irreversible consequences.

76

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Notes 1

Lady Dedlock, meanwhile, assumes that the quality of mercy is strained; she anticipates that none awaits her (especially in the form of Sir Leicester’s generous forgiveness)—at least not while alive. Guilt-ridden, she takes the business of punishment upon herself, casting herself off into the frigid winter air to die of exposure, hoping to be quickly “forgotten” in order to minimize Sir Leicester’s humiliation.

2

In a famous letter to John Forster written in June of 1846, for example, Dickens celebrates that he “BEGAN DOMBEY!” after observing that he has written “A good deal to Miss Coutts, in reference to her charitable projects” and made progress on what he called “the children’s New Testament” (575). The letter goes on to discuss Dickens’s anxieties in reference to the Christmas book.

3

Studies have discussed the relationships between two or, in a few cases, three of the documents. Sue Zemka’s Victorian Testament, for example, links the The Life, the Urania Cottage scheme, and the novel in her discussion of Dickens’s use of religion concepts and portrayal of male authority.

4

In 1846, the Dublin Review announced that “This is the age of Religious novels.” Perhaps a third of the novels published the previous year were “either directly religious, or at all events possessed more of religious character than would have been sufficient, 10 years ago, to damn any novel” (qtd in Walder 15). See also Margaret Maison’s Search Your Soul, Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age.

5

See also Caputo’s The Weakness of God and Daniel Horan’s essay “The Grammar of the Kingdom in a World of Violence: The (Im)Possible Poetics of John Caputo” in the collection Violence, Transformation, and the Sacred.

6

The most astute discussion of the spillover between economics and theology in the Victorian period remains Boyd Hilton’s The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865.

7

Maconochie had made a limited experiment with the Mark System at the penal colony at Norfolk Island, Australia, in the early 1940s. Dickens met him when Maconochie returned to London to urge the wider adoption of his reforms.

8

In an 1853 article on the house that appeared in Household Words, Dickens names agreement to emigration as one of the stipulations

DICKENS AND FORGIVENESS IN 1846

77

in the contract residents had to sign for admission to the house. The article closes with a series of potted and repetitive accounts of the new lives of the “inmates” (named by case numbers) in the colonies. 9

The women were given four colors to pick from for their dress— to avoid the “stigma” of a uniform (typically gray in Magdalene houses). The cottage also featured a piano and a garden for diversion. Overall, Dickens believed that the purpose of the house should not be to remind women of their pasts (as other establishments did) but to prepare them for future lives.

10

For a rich discussion of the handling of the forgiveness theme in The Haunted Man, see Marlow (203–205).

11

Dickens contemplated an even more ambiguous ending that closed with Warden’s plea. Writing to Forster in the fall of 1846, Dickens called the coda “merely experimental” and asked, “Would you leave it for happiness’ sake?” (The Letters 638). The question betrays an anxiety about whether the audience would tolerate a Christmas book whose ending is not unambiguously happy. Even with the coda, as noted above, Dickens maintains a degree of irresolution in the ending.

12

In Scenes of Sympathy, Audrey Jaffe makes a related claim about the ending of A Christmas Carol. Dickens, Jaffe argues, does not view the reader as a sympathetic “spectator” who will simply imitate moral lessons modeled by characters. The reader must be first taught how to feel. Dickens accomplishes this by giving the reader an active role in the construction of the tale, particularly its end (45).

13

Welsh argues that Dickens demonstrates in John’s words and deeds “the correct stance of a man who has sinned and repented” (114).

14

James Carker argues, meanwhile, that management has turned a nice moral profit on the deal: John is a “cheap example” to other clerks and “a famous instance of the clemency” that “[redounds] to the credit” of the firm (679).

15

James dies unshriven. But as death closes in on him, the narrator asks, as James glances on the “transcendent” beauty of the rising sun, “who shall say that some weak sense of virtue upon Earth, and its in Heaven, did not manifest itself, even to him? If ever he remembered sister or brother with a touch of tenderness and remorse, who shall say it was not then?” (841–842).

16

In his commentary, Dickens explains that Heaven awaits not only those who have always been good but also those “who have been

78

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

wicked, because of their being miserable, or not having parents and friends to take care of them when young, and who are truly sorry for it, however late in their lives” (63). Alice exemplifies the latter category, since she suffered from poor moral education in childhood. 17

Her claim is one that Dickens made in the letter to Coutts well. There Dickens urges that each new entrant should be shown that “her past way of life has been dreadful in its nature and consequences, and full of affliction, misery, and despair to herself” (553).

18

On melodrama, see, for example, Juliet John’s discussion of Florence in Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, and Popular Culture (Oxford, 2001). On fairy tale, the classic study is Kathleen Tillotson’s Novels of the Eighteen Forties (Clarendon Press, 1954). For a more recent treatment, see Ostry’s discussion of Florence in Social Dreaming (76–78).

19

Colón notes one possible exception of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16).

20

For a representative catalogue of complaints about Florence, see New (n37, 263).

21

See John Butt and Tillotson’s discussion of the development of the ending in Dickens at Work (Routledge, 2008).

3 Forgiving in Community: Trollope’s The Vicar of Bullhampton and Eliot’s Adam Bede

A

s I argued in the introduction, what binds my chosen authors together is not the conclusions they reach but the questions they ask, explicitly or implicitly, and the predicaments they confront in their fictions. Trollope and Eliot, as this chapter will show, are joined in asking what can be done in circumstances where forgiveness cannot be performed (consistently or at all) according to the ideals of Christian belief. Both authors ask, in effect, how might forgiveness work for Christians who fall short of their ideals, knowingly or unknowingly, or for those who don’t give credence to forgiveness’s traditional theological packaging? The authors, in other words, have encountered a problem much discussed among modern theorists—that of transposition, of moving forgiveness outside of its familiar habitat of Christian theory and practice and into new terrains. How does forgiveness’s force and meaning change as it migrates to new “virtue systems” (to use Roberts’s language from Chapter 1)? Through readings of Trollope’s The Vicar of Bullhampton (1870) and Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), I aim to show that while both authors offer clear endorsements of forgiveness, they portray its practice as

80

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

being a good deal messier than what we saw, for the most part, in the last chapter. The one exception to this is, of course, Edith’s conversation with Florence at the close of Dombey and Son. In that scene, once again, two parties were (at least initially) at cross purposes on key questions of guilt and thus about how the scene of forgiveness was supposed to go. We noted, too, that the forgiveness that Edith plots lacks the parabolic excess and extravagance that had marked other scenes of reconciliation in Dickens’s work. There are more such measured reconciliations to come in Trollope and Eliot, and we will see that these scenes impact the shape and tone of the novels’ respective endings. Although certain social and communal issues arose in my discussion of Dickens’s work, the present chapter shows that with Trollope and Eliot, the communal dimension of forgiveness comes into full view. Both novelists, like Dickens before them, are profoundly concerned with the consequences of wrongdoing, and Trollope and Eliot likewise measure these consequences in not only interpersonal but also communal terms. But I also want to show that these novelists recognized that forgiveness—alongside repentance and reconciliation—could have its own ramifications not only in interpersonal but also larger familial and communal contexts. If forgiveness’s value for some or all of their characters cannot be shown in traditional religious terms, these novelists nonetheless provide abundant grounds for its practice, particularly through their observation of forgiveness’s effects on the life of The Vicar’s fictional parish of Bullhampton and Eliot’s hamlet Hayslope.

Trollopian forgiveness “There can be no doubt,” the theologian Stanley Hauerwas writes, “that Trollope understood profoundly that at the heart of the Christian faith is the demand to forgive” (56).1 In “The Fourth Commandment,” an 1866 essay on the Sabbath controversy, Trollope speaks in this vein, describing charity and forgiveness as duties distinctive to Christianity (and not taught, Trollope argues, in the Decalogue).2 Like Dickens, Trollope recognized that the Christian ideal was a

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

81

generous, even excessive forgiveness—a forgiveness that, at its very best, expresses charity or love of the heartfelt kind. As Valentine Cunningham has observed, Trollope at certain key moments in his fiction calls on a “greater law” than the “laws of the land, namely the law of a forgiving Christianity, Christian grace, the law that overturned the more rigid Old Testament Jewish Law” (“Anthony” 104). And like Dickens, we find Trollope attempting to marshal the disciples of this “greater law” in order to alleviate the plight of fallen women—as he does with unusual directness (for Trollope) in the preface to our central text, The Vicar of Bullhampton. In the novel, in turn, Trollope more explicitly than in many of his fictions reveals the theological roots of forgiveness while also showing us in key scenes how truly charitable forgiveness might be embodied. Yet The Vicar also recalls Dickens’s writings insofar as Trollope, too, acknowledges social restraints on what forgiveness can do for fallen women. If Trollope, as we will see, outdoes Dickens somewhat on this point, Trollope’s novel and preface also (à la the author of Dombey and Son) make clear that forgiveness doesn’t erase the past or cancel sin’s consequences entirely. We observed in the last chapter that Dickens’s approach to forgiveness relies heavily on a debt scheme; in Trollope’s novels, one finds no such pervasive logic within the economy of forgiving. In Dickens, too, we noted that forgiveness is allied with the transcendent and that to embrace the forgiving ethic is often tantamount to a conversion experience. Trollope appears much more of a realist when held up against a Dickensian standard. His fiction, including The Vicar, plainly admits that the Christian ideal for forgiving is difficult to put into practice—for Christians (even the most devout) and non-Christians alike. Unlike Dickens, though, Trollope doesn’t regularly engage in the business of spiritual rebirth. Trollope thus makes more room for characters to fall short of the ideal. He accepts that his characters are, as Philip Davis has written, “fallen, occluded, involved in sundry motives and deficiencies” (382). And there is a theological reason for this, Davis argues: the theology “underpinning” Trollope’s fiction is “the theology of a fallen world” (383). “Trollope’s is an austere Anglican orthodoxy,” Davis continues, “that does not take human emotions, intentions, responses, or plans to be the reliable measure of things. Untidy inconsistences do not surprise him” (382). Trollope’s

82

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

handling of forgiveness, I want to argue, reflects this theologically inflected anthropological pessimism. Simply put, Trollope explores how forgiveness can be achieved—what forms it might take—when humans fall short, as they inevitably will, of the New Testament ideal. One thus finds in Trollopian fiction eruptions of extravagant forgiveness sitting in close proximity to scenes containing comparatively modest performances. Trollope’s scenes of forgiveness often give the reader reason to question the forgiver’s motive— some seem to forgive too readily, obscuring the significance of the fault, others may forgive publically but clearly continue to harbor resentment—just as these scenes often cause us to question the offender’s grand claims of reform. There is a running argument among modern theorists of forgiveness about whether, to use Griswold’s terms, “nonparadigmatic” or “imperfect” forms of forgiveness— philosophically impure ones, if you will—“count as instances of forgiveness” (114). Trollope, I want to argue, offers a tentative yes to this question. His fictions often seem to insist that his characters forgive, however they can. It is not, as in Dickens, a matter of saving the souls of his characters—primarily at least. Rather, prototypical and “imperfect” forms of forgiveness alike have value because they preserve or restore harmony within families and communities. Trollope, in other words, affirms this-worldly benefits of forgiveness, not at the cost of the spiritual but not dependent on the spiritual either. Theologians have spoken of forgiveness being most “at home” within the context of Christian faith and practice but practicable without “theological backing”, and so it is with Trollope. While his Christian faith certainly lies behind his commitment to forgiveness, forgiveness’s significance in his texts resides as much in the things of this world as the next. These qualities are succinctly displayed in the exchange between Lily Dale and her mother in The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) discussed in the first chapter. The conversation, once again, is spurred by the arrival of a letter from Adolphus Crosbie, Lily’s former lover: Am I to think that he behaved well [in jilting Lily years earlier]? No, mamma; you are not to think that; but you are to look upon his fault as a fault that has been forgiven.

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

83

It cannot be forgotten, dear. But, mamma, when you go to heaven— My dear! But you will go to heaven, mamma, and why should I not speak of it? You will go to heaven, and yet I suppose you have been very wicked, because we are all very wicked. But you won’t be told of your wickedness there. You won’t be hated there, because you were this or that when you were here. I hope not, Lily; but isn’t your argument almost profane? No; I don’t think so. We ask to be forgiven just as we forgive. That is the way in which we hope to be forgiven, and therefore it is the way in which we ought to forgive. When you say that prayer at night, mamma, do you ever ask yourself whether you have forgiven him? I forgive him as far as humanity can forgive. I would do him no injury. “But if you and I are forgiven only after that fashion we shall never get to heaven.” Lily paused for some further answer from her mother, but as Mrs. Dale was silent she allowed that portion of the subject to pass as completed. (230) Here is, once again, an exemplary grammatical dispute. The two women agree (or come to agree) in principle that the Christian’s duty to forgive applies even to Crosbie’s conduct, but they divide on the question of what that duty requires. Lily, we can now say, favors forgiveness of the extravagant sort. As we will be forgiven in heaven, so, Lily believes, we ought to forgive on earth. She cites the “forgiveness clause” of the Lord’s Prayer in support of her view. Lily’s referral to eschatological matters, meanwhile, strikes her mother as “almost profane.” Her frame of reference is more immediate, her estimation of human capabilities more limited. Forgiveness, she

84

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

argues, is a matter of behavior, not feeling; the heart should be left to its own devices. The conversation is notable not simply because the two women disagree on the nature of forgiving but because of how it ends—without reaching consensus. The scene acknowledges that each character has a point and, without converting one side, simply moves on, as conversations must when an irresolvable impasses arises. Trollope has not straightforwardly vindicated either side— and gives us reasons to question both viewpoints: Lily is still in love with Crosbie, while Mrs. Dale’s blood is up. Neither approaches the question dispassionately. I have suggested that forgiveness need not take its ideal religious form in Trollope’s works to remain meaningful. Such is the case with Mrs. Dale’s forgiveness here. Though her resentment—which, Lily notes, has been just beneath the surface for years—bubbles up in this scene, when the time comes to respond to Crosbie’s note (which had been written to her, though its real addressee was Lily) she keeps it at bay.3 She takes pains to ensure that “no word should escape her in which there was any touch of severity, any hint of an accusation”—in other words, that would intentionally injure him. Though she believes that he deserves a “scolding,” she holds her tongue out of a sense of duty to her daughter, since, despite her abiding love, Lily renounces the marriage offer implicit in Crosbie’s letter. The interconnectedness of the two women’s lives—recalling Tutu’s discussion of ubuntu— prevents Mrs. Dale from giving vent to her resentment; to injure Crosbie would be, she perceives, to demean her daughter’s sacrifice. Trollope does not offer here a scene of excessive, extravagant, utterly unreasonable forgiveness in the manner of one of Dickens’s heroines. Far from it: Mrs. Dale’s actions are quite reasonable. But we must recognize that her actions represent an important concession on her part; and her “forgiveness” (if it can be so called)—by preserving the dignity of all parties, in keeping the peace—remains significant.4 Forgiveness, as this example shows, need not be sentimentally pure in order to be effective for Trollope. This episode from The Last Chronicle of Barset introduces issues that Trollope develops in a more extended and sophisticated manner in the aforementioned The Vicar of Bullhampton. The Vicar stands out among Trollope’s fictions for bringing the theological foundation directly into view.5 One of the novel’s central plotlines, as noted

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

85

above, traces the quest of the titular vicar, Frank Fenwick, to find refuge for a fallen woman, Carry Brattle. The quest exposes broad opprobrium toward fallen women within the parish and occasions a number of conversations about the nature and application of forgiveness. We will see that the novel endeavors to compel not only characters but readers, too, to show fallen women generous forgiveness. But the novel also recognizes the practical difficulty of what it sets out as its Christian ideal, presenting characters unable to fulfill it systematically, including the heroic vicar. Strikingly, within this novel that mounts a Christian defense of forgiveness, Trollope also makes what is perhaps his strongest case for forgiveness on communal grounds.

The Vicar of Bullhampton The Vicar of Bullhampton is notable for a study of forgiveness not only because it explores the concept within the novel with particular richness but also, as I have suggested, because it raises the issue in terms of the reader’s response. The ethical ambitions of the novel are mapped in a preface. Trollope famously scorned prefaces—and indeed this one begins by observing that prefaces are usually “work thrown away” since no one ever reads them (v). But Trollope argues that the present one is necessary in order to “[defend] myself against a charge which may possibly be made against me by the critics” (v). This “charge” would be of promoting immorality by “[bringing] upon his stage such a character as that of Carry Brattle”—a fallen woman. Trollope’s description of his novel as a “stage” is not merely ornamental—it alludes to the recent controversy surrounding Dion Boucicault’s play Formosa; or, The Railroad to Ruin, which had opened at Drury Lane in August, 1869, shortly after serial publication of The Vicar had begun. The uproar concerned Boucicault’s portrayal of prostitution, Formosa’s profession. A widely followed exchange in The Times debated the dangers of exposing young people—women, in particular—to representations of prostitution. Trollope chimed in in October within the pages of Saint Paul’s magazine, then under his editorship. In his piece, the author argues

86

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

that while it might have been possible to keep young women in ignorance of prostitution thirty years earlier through strict censorship practices, the range of modern women’s reading meant that the profession’s existence was now—as it should be—well known. Trollope argues, furthermore, that the effort to keep young women “under lock and key,” hiding such truths from them, is predicated on a dubious moral theory. The best means of preventing young men from dallying with and young women from becoming prostitutes is to provide the right kind of representation of it. This is where Formosa fails: the title-character “is utterly false, false to human nature and false to London life” (79). Boucicault glamorizes—and thereby misrepresents—the life of the London prostitute, presenting it falsely “as a bright existence, full of danger indeed, but still open to all that is noble, and capable of final success” (80). In failing the standards of realist art—truth to life—Trollope concludes, Boucicault’s play misses a profound opportunity “to do infinite good” by teaching the audience “what misery there is around them” (80). In the preface to The Vicar (written after The Saint Paul ’s piece), the author reiterates his claims that women are no longer in ignorance about the existence of prostitution and that the “glittering” depictions of prostitution found elsewhere (i.e. Formosa) are dangerous. And Trollope argues, once again, that a faithful portrayal of a prostitute’s experience may change readers’ attitudes—not only by dissuading them from becoming prostitutes but also by creating sympathy for those they encounter in the world outside the text: To write in fiction of one so fallen as the noblest of her sex, as one to be rewarded because of her weakness, as one whose life is happy, bright, and glorious, is certainly to allure to vice and misery. But it may perhaps be possible that if the matter be handled with truth to life, some girl, who would have been thoughtless, may be made thoughtful, or some parent’s heart may be softened. It may also at last be felt that this misery is worthy of alleviation, as is every misery to which humanity is subject. (vii–viii) Realistic fiction, in other words, may help to save prostitutes through its commitment to rendering their experience “true to life.”

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

87

The preface was important to Trollope: “The question brought in argument,” he would write in his Autobiography (1883), “is one of fearful importance” (288). He thus reprinted it in full in the Autobiography, adding, “I do not know that any one read it; but as I wish to have it read, I will insert it here again” (285). In his ensuing remarks, Trollope censures his society for its handling of sexual sins. First, he decries the sexual double-standard whereby “we doom our erring daughters […] But for our erring sons we find pardon easily enough” (289). He criticizes the “houses of refuge” to which fallen women are sent (and which, of course, Dickens attempted to reform in Urania Cottage) on the grounds that “everything pleasant” has been banished, “as though the only repentance to which we can afford to give a place must necessarily be one of sackcloth and ashes” (289). He continues, “To me the mistake which we too often make seems to be this,—that the girl who has gone astray is put out of sight, out of mind if possible, at any rate out of speech, as though she had never existed, and that this ferocity comes not only from hatred of the sin, but in part also from a dread of the taint which the sin brings with it” (289). What is needed, Trollope suggests, is for “mothers and sisters” to remember the “degradation to which a fallen woman is brought […] and not fear contamination so strongly as did Carry Brattle’s married sister and sister-in-law” (290). The preface to The Vicar presents the novel as, to use Hauerwas’s apt phrase, a “school for virtue” whose primary lesson is forgiveness (23). As the Autobiography observes, the novel seeks to “[excite] not only pity but sympathy for a fallen woman, and of raising a feeling of forgiveness for such in the minds of other women” (285). *** Trollope introduces Carry in the novel’s twenty-fifth chapter—in a moving scene in which Fenwick finds her in a shabby cottage some miles distant from Bullhampton, abandoned by her seducer. He greets her with civility, even offering his hand, a gesture thick with biblical undertones, because of Carry’s claim to be untouchable: “I ain’t fit for the likes of you to touch” (168). Throughout the scene, Fenwick models a compassionate response to the Magdalene’s

88

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

plight. He assures her that there are those who love her still and that life is worth living (in response to her voicing of suicidal wishes). At the close of the interview, he promises he won’t rest till he “[finds] some spot for your weary feet” (174). Fenwick’s embodiment of Christian virtues stands in stark contrast to other possible responses to Carry’s state aired in earlier chapters. To her father Jacob, of whom I will say more below, Carry had become an unforgivable sub-human “thing, somewhere, never to be mentioned” (35). Mr. Puddleham, the minister of a Primitive Methodist congregation, meanwhile, alleges that Carry is a prostitute and thus past saving. In response to Fenwick’s suggestion that Carry might be married (and it is revealed later that she is not), Puddleham responds knowingly: It is possible [that she is married], of course. Though as for that,— when a young woman has once gone astray— [says Puddleham.] As did Mary Magdalene, for instance! [says Fenwick.] Mr. Fenwick, it was a very bad case. And isn’t my case very bad,—and yours? Are we not in a bad way,—unless we believe and repent? Have we not all so sinned as to deserve eternal punishment? Certainly, Mr. Fenwick. Then there can’t be much difference between her and us. She can’t deserve more than eternal punishment. If she believes and repents, all her sins will be white as snow. Certainly, Mr. Fenwick. Then speak of her as you would of any other sister or brother,—not as a thing that must be always vile because she has fallen once. Women will so speak,—and other men. One sees something of a reason for it. But you and I, as Christian ministers, should never allow ourselves to speak so thoughtlessly of sinners…. (121)

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

89

Fenwick thus alleges that Puddleham has not only been prejudiced— assuming that since a woman had sex outside of marriage once she must now be a prostitute—but also been theologically deficient. Critics have seen in the character of Fenwick Trollope’s advocacy of a Broad Church tolerance for latitude in matters of doctrine, and, indeed, in several respects Fenwick seems a Broad Church figure.6 But this scene should caution us against seeing Fenwick as a representative of too hazy a liberal theology, since Fenwick’s point is anchored in a recognizably Pauline vision of sin. He echoes Romans 3:22: “for there is no difference: for all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; being justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Puddleham has forgotten that he, too, is a “bad case”—and thus due the same eternal punishment as all other sinners. He has forgotten, in turn, the promise that with belief and repentance, God forgives sins, rendering them—and here Fenwick quotes Isaiah 1:18—“white as snow.” In so many ways, Trollope shows Fenwick outdoing Puddleham on his own evangelical terms, that is, in emphasizing the depth of human sin and the abundance of God’s forgiveness. Forgiven people, Fenwick stresses, should not be quick to judge or condemn fellow sinners. To recognize one’s own status as a forgiven sinner should radically alter one’s perception of others. Fenwick is, as Cunningham observes, presented as “the only Christian around who is even to think [sic] of invoking the love of Christ” in relation to Carry Brattle—“And that’s what’s wrong with Bullhampton and contemporary legalistic culture” (105). The novel, in turn, endeavors to generate the compassion for fallen women that the narrative often portrays as lacking in community members like the theologically muddled Puddleham. Bullhampton, in effect, stands in for England as a whole. If The Vicar portrays Fenwick’s charitable response to Carry’s plight as the model response, the book also shows that there are social realities that constrain others’ expression of compassion. Through a series of dialogues with members of the parish, including Brattle siblings, Fenwick discovers pervasive anxiety about and antagonism toward fallen women. Voicing his frustration with Carry’s sister, Mrs. Jay, for example, Fenwick is corrected by his wife: Surely, Frank, you know the unforgiving nature of women of that class for such sin as poor Carry Brattle’s?

90

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

I wonder whether they ever say their prayers, said the Vicar. Of course they do. Mrs. Jay, no doubt, is a religious woman. But it is permitted to them not to forgive that sin. By what law? By the law of custom. It is all very well, Frank, but you can’t fight against it. At any rate, you can’t ignore it till it has been fought against and conquered. And it is useful. It keeps women from going astray. (272) Fenwick would like to see Carry’s fate as a purely spiritual problem and thus the unwillingness of someone like Mrs. Jay to help as an indication of religious failing (tellingly described here by way of a reference to the Lord’s Prayer). Mrs. Fenwick’s point is that Frank oversimplifies the situation, since there are class issues at work here as well. Lower class women are “permitted” by an old “custom” to chastise fallen women. She thus questions her husband’s summary judgment of such “unforgiving women,” forcing him to recognize, moreover, that the course of action he proposes may have unintended social effects (as in, eliminating a potent motivation for young women not to go “astray”). Fenwick may be in the right theologically speaking, but he is dangerously close to showing an unforgiving spirit himself (an issue discussed further below). Mrs. Fenwick, meanwhile, for all of her compassion for Carry, is herself quite anxious about what the community will think should Carry come to reside in her home. In so many ways, the middle chapters of the book serve to measure the gap between belief and practice, at both an individual and communal level. The religious commitment to forgiveness is shown, in other words, to be difficult to live out in the world, even for the devout Fenwicks. The Fenwicks conclude that the only place for Carry is in her own home, under the care of her mother. In the way of this reunion, though, is the seemingly insurmountable hurdle of her father’s wrath. Ultimately, it is not Fenwick’s rhetoric that brings the homecoming about but Carry’s impulsiveness. Having fled the temporary refuge Fenwick found for her and, after an exhausting journey, returning to

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

91

her neighborhood to commit suicide, she overhears the voices of her mother and sister within the house and finds it impossible to remain without. The chapter that records this event bears the title, “The Fatted Calf.” This is an explicit allusion to the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the slaughter of a “fatted calf” being the father’s means of celebrating his son’s return. Carry—already identified in the book as a “Magdalene”—thus takes on a second biblical character as the prodigal daughter. Trollope’s realism here becomes, to recall Susan Colón’s formulation, “parabolic.” Colón has argued, once more, that the realist novelist can—without abandoning realism’s commitment to depicting the ordinary—“do something much like what Jesus’s parables do: it can use particular sets of human relationships and responses to show gesturally or sometimes metaphorically what ‘human reality in its wholeness’ might look like in particular instances” (37). The “parabolic” realist novel “can show one or more people responding to an ordinary situation in an extraordinary way, a way that is fully on the plane of human action but which challenges ordinary ideas about, for example, how many times one can forgive another” (37). When Carry suddenly appears at the window, her mother and sister respond as if witnessing a miracle. Mrs. Brattle “was so confounded, dismayed, and frightened, that for a while she could give no direction as to what should be done. She had screamed at first, having some dim idea in her mind that the form she saw was not of living flesh and blood” (367). A similar response is aroused in Carry’s level-headed sister, Fanny: Even Fanny was driven beyond the strength of her composure by the strangeness of this advent. “Carry! Carry!” she exclaimed over and over again, not aloud,—and indeed her voice was never loud,—but with bated wonder. The two sisters held each other by the hand, and Carry’s other hand still grasped her mother’s arm. (368) Carry’s remarkable “advent” thus occasions the equally extraordinary ethical responses of her mother and sister. After feeding Carry (who eats “with an appetite which was perhaps unbecoming the romance of her position”) and putting her to bed, Fanny then “[swears]

92

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

to herself that by her, even in the inmost recesses of her bosom, Carry should never be held to be evil, to be a castaway, to be one of whom, as her sister, it would behove her to be ashamed” (371). Here is indeed “extravagant human action—jaw-dropping in its selfeffacement or generosity” (Colón 33). Fanny exemplifies the kind of heartfelt forgiveness that Lily described as being eschatological, heavenly—total forgiveness, in which all resentment and judgment are eradicated “even in the inmost recesses of her bosom” (371). That this scene shows that ordinary people can respond in an extraordinary way points back to the preface and its observation that the misery of fallen women is an all-too-common problem. Perhaps The Vicar might be counted “parabolic” in calling on readers to exercise their own capacities for extraordinary compassion in their everyday lives. In the biblical parable, the father’s jubilation is juxtaposed with the frustration of the brother who observes that he has never been so celebrated, despite having never broken the father’s commandments. Trollope realigns this family dynamic, making the father the figure of anger and resentment and, as we have seen, the sibling the most prominent figure of grace. Brattle is an “old Pagan,” who deeply believes in the precept “an eye for an eye.” We are told that he had “unlimited love of justice” and that he “never forgot, and never wished to forgive” injuries (33). Brattle’s “paganism” does not acknowledge human insufficiency or fallenness, the doctrine on which hangs Fenwick’s argument about forgiveness to Puddleham cited above. Nor do Brattle’s beliefs leave space for theological or philosophical concepts such as grace or equity that pose a higher ethics above human justice. Within his “virtue system,” to use Roberts’s terms, there is no space for forgiveness. Forgiveness is not just grammatically troublesome for him—it’s nonsense. I have stressed that Trollope leaves room for resentment within the practice of forgiveness. Brattle represents something of the reverse: in this case, love persists within resentment. Though he turned Carry out, he cannot forget her—her memory has become “a great lump,” “a load that could never be lightened” (35). Trollope suggests that Brattle already learned experientially that no relief lies in the way of strident resentment. Just as throwing Carry out has given him no reprieve, he has taken no lasting solace from revenging himself on

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

93

Carry’s seducer: “Had he been able to drink the fellow’s blood to the last drop, it would not have lightened his load an ounce” (35). Here, then, is a second tension between theory and practice, though now it is Brattle’s theoretical commitment to malice that has become impracticable. In so many ways, then, Trollope foreshadows that Brattle’s reconciliation with Carry is the necessary course for both daughter and father and thereby exposes the author’s own view of human nature. Davis has argued that “The apparently small or reluctant concessions of those who are intransigent have more at stake within them, relatively, than the larger movements of free spirits” in Trollope’s fictions (380). Jacob’s response to the news that Carry has returned to the household exemplifies Davis’s point: he does not forgive her immediately, but he also does not eject her from the household a second time. The moment represents an important volte-face not only in his particular stance toward Carry but also his commitment to revenging wrongs done to him. He is, as he knows, betraying his own principles, and he remains convinced of not only Carry’s shame but the disgrace her return brings to him: “She may stay with us, […] but I shall never be able to show my face again about the parish” (374). Accordingly, he refuses to speak directly to Carry or to call her by name. As a result, she is given exactly that role that the prodigal son imagines for himself prior to his homecoming—that of a hired servant in his father’s household rather than a full member of the family: “the miller would answer her as a surly master will answer a servant whom he does not like; but the father, as a father, had never spoken to the child” (461). The novel does not end here, of course. Carry must be forgiven by her father, as Mary Magdalene is by Jesus and the prodigal son by his father. But how to break the impasse? In a passage notable for present purposes, Trollope observes that Brattle poses a grammatical problem for Fanny and Fenwick, each of whom urge him to forgive according to familiar logics. Fanny, recalling Fenwick’s disquisition to Puddleham, asks him to recognize his common status as a wrongdoer: “Father, who among us has not done wrong at times?” (372). Fenwick realizes that he could not preach forgiveness to Brattle as he had earlier to his fellow Christians: “Of what use could it be to preach of repentance to one who believed nothing; or to tell of the

94

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

opportunity which forgiveness by an earthly parent might afford to the sinner of obtaining lasting forgiveness elsewhere?” (441). Fenwick’s trouble is that Brattle does not share his convictions about human sinfulness, divine grace, or the afterlife. No appeal is thus made, and, moreover, the narrator reports that Brattle would not have heard it even if Fenwick had done so. Trollope thus raises the difficulty of communicating about forgiveness outside the context of the Christian faith, a problem that we will confront again with Thomas Hardy in the next chapter. But, and this is important for measuring the distance between Trollope and Hardy, Brattle does nonetheless take up the language of forgiveness, despite its theological foreignness. Later, when Carry privately confronts him, begging for forgiveness, he relents, telling her twice that he “will forgive” her. Brattle has a certain difficulty, though, locating his forgiveness in time: his promise that he will forgive Carry is followed later by his observation that he has forgiven her. He then reconsiders and promises again that he “will bring [himself] to forgive her” (465). He continues: “ ‘That it won’t stick here,’ and the miller struck his heart violently with his open palm, ‘I won’t be such a liar to say. For there ain’t no good in a lie. But there shall be never a word about it more out o’ my mouth,—and she may come to me again as my child’ ” (465). Jacob’s form of forgiveness—in which resentment is not immediately, if ever, abated—thus stands in contrast to the “sentiment-based” forgiveness of Fanny, noted above, and Mrs. Brattle—of whom we are told, “To her a sin repented was a sin no more, and her love for her child made her sure of the sincerity of that repentance” (465). The political scientist Peter Digeser observes that under a sentiment-based vision of forgiveness, Brattle’s speech indicates that he has not “really” forgiven his daughter. Because the sentiment of resentment is still present in his heart, and he has not even pledged to work on himself to eliminate this resentment, true forgiveness [as defined by the sentiment-based vision] eludes him. (27) Brattle interests Digeser, though, exactly because his description of forgiving Carry offers an alternative model: “Brattle understands

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

95

forgiveness as a form of self-disclosure. The success of forgiving his daughter depends on his willingness to say no more about the matter” (27). Brattle’s forgiveness, like Mrs. Dale’s above, pertains to his outward conduct rather than his private sentiments; forgiveness is about the restoration of their relationship rather than the eradication of his resentment (which, moreover, the conclusion of the novel suggests indeed survives). Brattle’s forgiveness, moreover, is not presented as tantamount to—or concurrent with—a religious conversion, as in the case of Annie in at the end of The Hidden Depths or even Dombey after his reunion with Florence. Trollope emphasizes, in fact, that Brattle remains insensitive to Fenwick’s theological claims to the end. But if he does not convert to Christianity, Brattle ultimately does join the discursive community of forgiveness and reconciliation that the novel has closely associated with Christianity. If Brattle has not converted, he has begun talking like a Christian. The novel thus lines up diverse logics for forgiving Carry, each suited to the particular perspectives and relationships of the persons in question. There is consensus that Carry should be forgiven but not about what form this forgiveness must take. Trollope does not demand that the characters agree on such matters for forgiveness to be efficacious—he is, we might say, a pragmatist rather than a purist. Definitional disagreement seems, finally, unimportant in light of the practical significance of the agreement that Carry should be forgiven and her place in the Brattle household restored. More broadly, Jacob’s forgiveness ensures stability for Carry and thereby brings to an end the threat that she poses to herself, the Fenwicks, and to others. Interpersonal forgiveness is, in all of its various forms, shown to contribute to the important business of restoring peace to Bullhampton. Trollope seems not to care, we might say, if parties use differing grammars for forgiveness as long as the community is restored. But, at the same time, we must also recognize that Trollope places restrictions on the degree of Carry’s restoration. In the preface and the Autobiography, Trollope acknowledges that his commitment to writing of a fallen woman “with truth to life” entails certain restrictions on Carry’s outcome. “I have brought her back at last from degradation at least to decency,” Trollope writes in the preface, “I have not married her to a wealthy lover, and I have endeavoured to explain that though there was possible to her a way out of perdition, still things could

96

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

not be with her as they would have been had she not fallen” (vi). Formosa’s plot had not only been immoral but impossible; Trollope has made neither mistake. Carry must learn that “things could not be […] as they would have been had she not fallen” (vi). Trollope has thus begun to sound like Dickens as well as Eliot (as we will see below), arguing that Carry’s actions have had consequences that are irreparable, irreversible. As in Dickens’s presentation of Alice’s fate and Eliot’s of Hetty Sorrel’s, Trollope suggests that there is a limit to how fully his fallen woman’s lot can be restored. There is also a telling disparity between the fates of Carry and the other two characters. Dickens’s and Eliot’s fallen women are offered the opportunity for reform and repentance, but this takes place at a distance from their native communities: Alice is removed to the cottage to die, and Hetty is transported to Australia (following the path of the denizens of Urania Cottage, of course). There may be reconciliations for Alice and Hetty, but there is no homecoming scene for either woman. Alice dies under Harriet Carker’s care. Hetty dies on the return voyage. In The Vicar, meanwhile, the Brattles’ forgiveness of Carry does not—and cannot—make things as “they would have been,” but their reconciliation can do much. Fenwick and her family members save Carry, restoring her place within the family circle, thereby giving her a future, one free of the miseries of the life in which Fenwick first discovered her. Marriage is, of course, out of the question, and Carry’s world will be a very small one, but Trollope suggests that this end is far better than the further degradation and ignoble death that had otherwise awaited her. Carry’s experience of forgiveness, Trollope stresses, gives her a place in the world (consider again the hope of the preface). Forgiveness is not simply, as in Alice’s case, part of the preparation to depart it. *** I argued above that Trollope depicts his characters as imperfect practitioners of the ideals for forgiving that his work sets out. I want to observe now that Brattle is not the only one who struggles with the practice of forgiveness. A second major thread of the novel follows a quarrel between Fenwick and the Marquis of Trowbridge, a prominent landholder. The squabble originates as a disagreement

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

97

about Carry’s brother Sam’s guilt in a local murder, but it then quickly escalates. In order to irritate Fenwick, the marquis, though no Methodist himself, supports Puddleham’s plans to build a chapel next door to the vicarage. The building project elicits the following thoughts from Fenwick: Lord Trowbridge had behaved to him in a manner which set all Christian charity at defiance. He told himself plainly that he had no desire to forgive Lord Trowbridge,—that life in this world, as it is constituted, would not be compatible with such forgiveness,—that he would not, indeed, desire to injure Lord Trowbridge otherwise than by exacting such penalty as would force him and such as he to restrain their tyranny; but that to forgive him, till he should have been so forced, would be weak and injurious to the community. As to that, he had quite made up his mind, in spite of all doctrine to the contrary. […] His office of parish priest would be lowered in the world if he forgave, out of hand, such offences as these which had been committed against him by Lord Trowbridge. (389) By Fenwick’s logic, he would be a worse priest by practicing forgiveness! When an injury is committed against him, he experiences exactly that same lack of charity for which he elsewhere chastises others. He is, as it were, cut from the same all-too-human (and thus fallible) cloth. The scene is a comic one, of course, because Trollope has already shown us in Fenwick’s other dealings that the vicar not only should but does know better. Just as Brattle is brought to concede the forgiveness that he is reluctant to offer, so Fenwick is ultimately reconciled with the marquis. The two men agree to “bury the hatchet on equal terms,” which leaves Fenwick to feeling “that he was being cunningly cheated out of his grievance. […] He did not like to be cheated out of his forgiveness” (498). Trollope’s suggestion, of course, is that Fenwick’s forgiveness would have been far from pure—and that he wanted the chance to enjoy the moral high ground before a vanquished adversary. The novel has shown, however, that Fenwick’s assessment of his moral position is quite skewed—as his pride has contributed to the escalation and prolongation of the quarrel. Fenwick, Trollope tells us, reconciles in the private knowledge “that he had been right”

98

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

(498). In effect, he does what Brattle had done: publically perform reconciliation, while privately persisting in his resentment. No less than Brattle’s forgiveness, moreover, the vicar’s reconciliation is essential to the restoration of peace in Bullhampton and the novel’s arrival at a comic resolution. In showing us Fenwick’s failure to follow the doctrine he preaches, Trollope suggests a further theological point. The vicar’s lack of charity serves as evidence that he is indeed the “bad case” he reminds Puddleham all sinners are. Trollope here shows just how right Fenwick’s anthropological pessimism is by way of Fenwick’s own “bad case.” To recognize the fallibility of Trollope’s characters— their proclivities to moral failure and hypocrisy—is to see why forgiveness is such an essential practice in his fictional world. Forgiveness prevents transgressions from isolating characters from those they have injured and thereby eliminating the possibility of human fellowship and community, which Trollope no less than Tutu considers the highest good. Trollope, like Tutu and Volf, prizes forgiveness’s powers to repair factures—to draw members of families (e.g., the Brattles) and communities (Bullhampton) back together. Acknowledging the fallibility of human emotions and perspectives in Trollopian fiction also helps to explain why forgiveness may take “sentimentally impure” forms. Trollope’s characters may be free to persist in their resentments privately, but they are made, time and again, to enact or perform forgiveness publically—thereby preventing their combustible emotions from endangering their lives together. Our mercurial, unreliable, fallen natures demand—for their own protection, as well as that of others—the restraints and stabilities that social forms and communal structures provide. Finally, Trollope’s anthropological pessimism suggests why he is so concerned that acts of forgiveness take place within communal contexts. In such settings, extreme views and impulsive actions can be checked. Acts of forgiveness may—as with Fanny Brattle—issue from the deepest recesses of a Christian’s heart in Trollope. Yet the author’s distrust of the human heart means that other prompts and constraints must be in place: community thus represents not just one of the desired ends of forgiving in Trollopian fiction but the means by which forgiveness is achieved. The community functions as a kind of ethical gravitational field, producing not a single model of forgiveness but

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

99

keeping its members within the orbit of forgiveness. Forgiveness and community are, in the end, mutually reinforcing: forgiveness preserves and renews community, while communal structures facilitate the process of forgiveness. In his rant against Lord Trowbridge, Fenwick convinces himself that “life in this world, as it is constituted, would not be compatible with such forgiveness.” I have argued that Trollope preaches the opposite lesson—that it is exactly because “life in this world” is so “constituted,” that is to say, fallen, that forgiveness is needed in whatever forms it may come.

Freethinking forgiveness George Eliot is often now counted among the great Victorian skeptics, her writings anthologized in collections such as Christopher Hitchens’s The Portable Atheist. But, in truth, Eliot and the members of her intellectual circle fit awkwardly in familiar contemporary molds for atheists. They were not dismissive of or indifferent to religion, nor did they seek to vilify it. They were, as Valerie Dodd shows in George Eliot: An Intellectual Life, in fact immersed in the day’s religious scene.7 What distinguished Eliot and her companions in their own estimations—and here I mean her freethinking associates in the Rosehill Circle and, later, in London—was their willingness to submit religious texts, traditions, and doctrines to what Eliot described as “impartial inquiry,” which meant historical and philosophical analysis. Summing up the radical stance in a review in the early 1850s, Eliot wrote that that while Jesus’s teachings seemed beautiful and laudable to many freethinkers, Christian theology could be “accepted” only as far as it “[harmonized] with the reason and conscience” (Rev. of “The Creed” 293). For Eliot, this critical spirit was far from irreligious; in the same review, she argues that her fellow freethinkers represent “the pioneers of New Reformation,” their work inspired by the same spirit of “free religious inquiry” that drove the sixteenth-century English Reformers (286). Their treatments of forgiveness represent a case in point. Consider Christianity and Infidelity (1857) by Sara Hennell, a member of the Rosehill Circle and Eliot’s closest friend in the period after her deconversion from evangelicalism in the early 1840s. Hennell

100

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

addresses forgiveness in the same fashion as all other topics (such as revelation and reason) taken up in the book: laying out the arguments of freethinkers and orthodox churchmen on facing pages. Given the occasion of its composition, an essay contest meant to counterbalance another prize for the best “essay against infidelity,” it is not surprising that in this case infidelity’s arguments prove the stronger. But the exercise is nonetheless notable for our purposes because it testifies to the multiplicity of ethical structures or logics in which forgiveness operated in the mid-Victorian period. The verso and recto pages of the book made plain that forgiveness’s nature and force differed profoundly between philosophical schools. Hennell’s articulation of “infidelity’s” understanding of forgiveness succinctly captures the general mood on the topic among Eliot’s close freethinking peers. Nearly the same arguments appear in W. R. Greg’s The Creed of Christendom, which Eliot reviewed in 1851, and the second edition of Hennell’s brother-in-law Charles Bray’s Philosophy of Necessity (1863). But if Bray’s book appears last, it also in some sense comes first. The first edition of 1841 lays out the philosophical principles upon which, in Hennell’s and Greg’s likeminded texts, forgiveness flounders. Bray’s book articulates his version of “Necessitariansim,” a philosophy that sought to order moral and social relations in light of universal laws by God (defined as a kind of cosmic force). Bray’s central doctrine is the inviolable relation between cause and effect. In light of these commitments, the traditional notion of the “forgiveness of sins” is bothersome for all three authors, since, as Greg puts it, this action purports to “[save] a man from the consequences of his sins, that is, interposing between cause and effect” (217). This can’t be, however; “A sin without its punishment is as impossible,” Greg observes, “as complete a contradiction in terms, as a cause without an effect” (219). Moreover, for all of these authors, human moral development depends on suffering the consequences of one’s ill-doing. Hennell writes, In nature, no sin is forgiven. Moral, as well as physical transgressions, draw after them their inevitable consequences, since repentance, while it modifies the future, can never undo the past. And we see that it is best it should be so; for thus

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

101

only experience can be gained and real amendment of character produced. The perception of the certainty of consequences subject to no arbitrary deviation is the real and effectual means of knowing the evil of sin. (46) In other words, we should be grateful that we suffer the consequences of breaking moral laws, since that suffering is instructive, deterring future wrongdoing. Bray will argue in 1863 that “to ask to be relieved of [the consequences of our sins], or to have our sins forgiven, would be asking for that which would simply do us an injury” (32). Begging for forgiveness in order to be “relieved” of the consequences of transgression is thus acting against selfinterest. Forgiveness, so understood, does not relieve injuries; it is an injury (32). To use the terms of the previous chapter, this system is all for liability but has grave concerns about liberality. Each of these works also argues that forgiveness should not be attributed to God—whom the three authors describe as the cosmos’s principle of moral and physical order. A forgiveness that defied causeand-effect and did moral harm would be a most incongruous and, indeed, impossible act for God to perform. Hennell argues, in turn, “when the low anthropomorphic ideas of God are swept away the whole falls to the ground and there is no such thing remaining as forgiveness of sins” (46). It is important to emphasize that Hennell, Greg, and Bray do not consider themselves to be atheists; in fact, Hennell goes to great lengths in her book to dissociate “infidelity” per se from atheism. In their views, the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins should be repudiated because it is impious. On this line, Greg rebukes the prayers for forgiveness in the Anglican liturgy, arguing that they represent “an entreaty of incredible audacity” that suggests the worst of both God and humanity (219). The demise of divine forgiveness in these texts is accompanied by a new tentativeness about speaking of human forgiveness. One cannot “properly forgive his fellow man,” Hennell argues, “i.e. regard an offender as if the offense had not been committed” (46). Philosophical Necessitarianism will not brook such a definition: “human action” always produces an effect: “it can never be as if it had not been” (46). For someone like Charles Griswold, Hennell’s bracketing of human forgiveness as not “properly” forgiveness would seem to miss the

102

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

point. Once again, Griswold—who holds an equally strong line on the fixity of the past—defines forgiveness as the ability to craft a new narrative of the offense in which the forgiver and forgiven are seen in a new and more charitable light. For Griswold, forgiveness is a matter of memory and relationships. Hennell obviously is not thinking in those terms; rather, what forgiveness means for her remains rooted in the theology that she has rejected. Though she imposes no explicit ban on the human use of the word “forgive,” she offers no alternative definition that suggests that the language of forgiveness is useful. Greg’s analysis on this line caught Eliot’s eye. In a review of The Creed of Christendom that appeared in The Leader in 1851, she quotes a passage of some six hundred words on the topic without a word of critical dissent, leading William Myers to conclude that the passage expresses Eliot’s views at the time (17). The passage invites the reader to imagine the thoughts of a human actor who has violated the seventh commandment (that is, committed adultery) and who would like nothing more now than to repent and recline in the knowledge that God forgives. “But no,” Greg writes, “there is no forgiveness of sins—the injured party may forgive you—your accomplice or victim may forgive you, according to the meaning of human language; but the deed is done, […] the consequences to the body—the consequences to the soul—though no man may perceive them, are there—are written in the annals of the past, and must reverberate through all time” (226). Greg’s semantic point is the same as Hennell’s: human speech does not have the power to undo the past. Greg implies that a sense of this limitation is already evident in the way that we speak about human forgiveness. As in Hennell’s book, moreover, one learns here only what human language cannot do; of its purpose or power, Greg is silent. Of repentance, however, both Greg and Hennell have direct and significant claims. Greg argues that his description of the human condition “in no degree militates against the value or the necessity of repentance” (226). He implicitly acknowledges here that his assault on forgiveness has created a problem, which might be summarized this way: if God is aloof and human forgiveness is powerless to save us from the consequences of sin, why bother repenting? Hennell and Greg both argue that repentance remains vital because human agents can learn from the consequences of their actions. Greg claims

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

103

that “Repentance, contrition of soul, bears, like every other act, its own fruit—the fruit of purifying the heart, of amending the future” (226). In other words, while one cannot alter the past or arrest the external effects of one’s actions, internal change is possible: one may learn from experience to shun sins thereafter. In fact, it is exactly by learning of the “certainty” of the consequences of transgression, Hennell claims, that one achieves “the real and effectual means of knowing the evil of sin” (46). Some modern theorists wish to disentangle the relationship between repentance and forgiveness on the grounds that forgiveness may (or, for someone like Derrida, should) be given without concern for the offender’s contrition. Hennell, Greg, and Bray make the reverse claim: in this case, forgiveness seems almost irrelevant to the practice and promise of repentance. In keeping with her fellow freethinkers, Eliot’s fiction emphasizes that the past can’t be erased. The working out of her plots operates according to a kind of moral “cause and effect” in which the consequences of transgressions, especially, prove inescapable. We have already seen that Dickens and Trollope do not believe that our sins can be overlooked or easily forgotten. In their fictions, though, sins’ effects can often be mitigated through repentance or forgiveness, and penitents can be consoled and even restored to lost positions. Absent the benevolent divine background (in which Dickens and Trollope believe), such seemingly miraculous outcomes are not so easily imaginable. Eliot’s fictional universe thus cannot entertain the sort of excessive, extravagant, utterly unreasonable reversals that we witnessed elsewhere in this book. Eliot does not forswear forgiveness altogether, however; her attempt to come to terms with the practices of forgiveness and confession in her fiction comprises part of the ongoing dialogue with Christianity after her deconversion that critics have traced elsewhere.8 Many of Eliot’s fictions would provide intriguing material for the present study. I have selected Adam Bede because the novel presents a number of scenes in which characters wrestle with forgiveness’s meaning and practice. We will see that Eliot makes a more measured case for forgiveness (alongside confession and reconciliation) than those we have seen in Dickens and Trollope but that the practice remains significant in her fiction through its contributions to psychological and communal healing.

104

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Adam Bede My reading focuses on Eliot’s ending, which features a series of interrelated meetings between the members of the novel’s love triangle—Adam, Hetty, and Arthur—and Hetty’s cousin Dinah Morris, a Methodist lay preacher. These scenes follow on the heels of the tense middle chapters of the book that recount Hetty’s discovery that she is pregnant with Arthur’s child; her flight from Hayslope in a failed effort to find him; the delivery and abandonment of the child in a neighboring county; the child’s death of exposure; and Hetty’s capture, trial, and conviction of “child-murder.” The first scene in the series occurs in the evening of the day the verdict is given: Dinah comes to Stoniton jail to urge Hetty to confess her crime and be saved. It is important to bear in mind that there is a blueprint for this meeting. As a young woman Eliot had heard from her Methodist preacher aunt, Mrs. Samuel Evans, a first-hand account of how Mrs. Evans had participated in prison ministry in the early years of the century. As part of a small band of Methodists, Mrs. Evans had, as Eliot later recorded, “visited a condemned criminal [Mary Voce], a very ignorant girl who had murdered her child and refused to confess—how she had stayed with her praying, through the night and how the poor creature at last broke into tears, and confessed her crime” (“History of ‘Adam Bede’ ” 296). A Methodist broadside of these events, often appended to modern editions of Eliot’s novel, recounts a scene in which Mary’s confession and conversion happen seemingly at once. Upon admitting her guilt and repenting to God, Mary Voce comes to perceive “in [her] heart” that God has forgiven her sins. Before her death, she also forgives those who wronged her, including, preemptively, her executioner. Eliot’s depiction of the meeting in the jails follows the script for what Cunningham calls the “well-established routine” of Methodist prison ministry: “a Methodist stays overnight in the condemned cell, elicits confession and repentance, and accompanies the malefactor to the gallows, ministering comfort” (167). Dinah, in particular, conforms to type. Her prayers and preachments throughout the book have been judged by readers then and now as masterful renditions

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

105

of evangelical speech patterns—evidence that if Eliot had left evangelicalism behind, she remained a fluent speaker of its tongue. But perhaps her greatest achievement on this score is her rendering of Dinah’s prayerful exhortations to Hetty to repent. Dinah’s discourse prior to Hetty’s confession runs thousands of lines, culminating in a lengthy prayer that ends in this way: Come, mighty Saviour! Let the dead hear thy voice. Let the eyes of the blind be opened. Let her see that God encompasses her. Let her tremble at nothing but at the sin that cuts her off from him. Melt the hard heart. Unseal the closed lips: make her cry with her whole soul, “Father, I have sinned.”… (406) It is a speech laden with biblical resonances—heard in the words “tremble,” “unseal,” and “hard heart”—, making overt gestures to John 5:25 (“The hour is coming, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God”) and Isaiah 63:1 (“mighty to save”). The now familiar words spoken by the prodigal son to his father conclude the prayer. Dinah is the novel’s firmest believer in the Christian salvation story, which she had narrated through a sermon in the classic Methodist style in the novel’s second chapter. She here invites Hetty to do what, in the first chapter, we noted that the theologians Jonathan Tran and Gregory Jones commend to their Christian counterparts: claim the New Testament stories as her own and tell her life story “within the story of God’s self-giving forgiveness, the muthos of history” (Tran 231). In Dinah’s version of events, this episode represents the most important of all reconciliation scenes, that in which the penitent sinner reconciles with a merciful God. Meanwhile, the response of the would-be penitent, Hetty, is more problematic. Dinah urges Hetty to pray to her Lord; Hetty’s response tellingly begins in this way: “ ‘Dinah,’ Hetty sobbed out, throwing her arms round Dinah’s neck, ‘I will speak…I will tell…I won’t hide it any more’ ” (490). Dinah’s name is then repeated throughout the confession in a plaintive tone similar to that with which Dinah had addressed God. As Cunningham writes, “In the characteristic Methodist account, the convict leans with manifest assurance, on his new-found Savior; Hetty clings to Dinah, the only saviour she knows” (Everywhere 169). Eliot does not show Hetty enjoying the

106

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

“regeneration” that Methodists understood as essential to true conversion. “Regeneration,” as John Wesley explained, is tantamount to a “new birth”: it is a heartfelt spiritual awakening in which, among other things, the convert was understood to be “now capable of hearing the inward voice of God, saying, ‘Be of good cheer; thy sins are forgiven thee,’ ” to cite one of John Wesley’s sermons on the topic (514). As Eliot knew, Methodist accounts of prison conversions (such as a broadside on Mary Voce’s repentance) stress the convert’s heartfelt experience of God’s forgiveness. A palpable sign of this experience is the ability to wield passionately the evangelical idiom of repentance and forgiveness (also true in Mary Voce’s case). Hetty is not born again and, accordingly, her attempts to use Dinah’s discourse lack the theological richness and religious conviction that mark her tutor’s usage. While the scene bears the imprint of a Methodist account of the reconciliation of sinner and Savior, its result is far from the one Dinah envisions. If we were judging from a traditional evangelical theological perspective—if we were Wesleyans—then the scene would surely seem a flop.9 But, of course, Eliot is an evangelical de-convert, and like her freethinking fellows she places no faith in the divine forgiveness of sins.10 There is thus no need to vindicate true doctrine—as there is, as noted above, in Fenwick’s exchange with Puddleham. In place of a conversion scene, Eliot has written a scene of confession, and it is important to recognize that in Eliot’s fictional universe confession is no less momentous an event. We noted above that other freethinking works had dismissed the forgiveness of sins but touted the necessity of repentance. Though never explicitly stated as such, Greg’s and Hennell’s treatments of repentance are individualistic in outlook; they imply that repenting is a solitary event, something one does in the privacy of one’s thoughts. Its effects are described in personal terms: to use Greg’s words once again, the “fruit” of repenting lies in correcting one’s “course.” Hetty, however, is not alone at the moment of truth. Her repentance takes place as a result of Dinah’s sympathetic attention, just as Janet’s repentance had relied on Dr. Tryan’s in Eliot’s story “Janet’s Repentance” (1857) and Maggie’s repentance will rely on Dr. Kenn’s in The Mill on the Floss (1860). Eliot, in other words, makes a case not just for repentance but for confession, which is

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

107

to say, she stresses the need for the disclosure of wrongdoing to another.11 For Eliot, as for Sarah Beckwith, confession’s significance lies in the fact that it is “performed; it is not something that takes place inside the mind” (105). The first critic to observe that Eliot “inculcates confession” was the Catholic Richard Simpson, writing for the short-lived liberal Catholic journal Home and Foreign Review, and his analysis remains perceptive. In “George Eliot’s Novels” (1863), Simpson argues that if Eliot had abandoned Christian theology, her novels still depended on a recognizably “Christian anthropology” (247). Simpson cites as an example Eliot’s belief that a “guilty secret” generates a “brood of sins […] in the soul” and in the related “doctrine” that (and here Simpson quotes Eliot’s Romola) “the contaminating effect of deeds often lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires—the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity” (248). As Simpson argues, this vision of sin demands the remedy of public confession, since only through its “purifying influence” (again Simpson quotes Romola) can “the soul [recover] the noble attitude of simplicity” (248). Adam Bede is marked throughout by Eliot’s lack of confidence in private remorse. In Hetty’s case, a second-party is needed because the penitent is tongue-tied. As David Carroll observes, Eliot’s confessors provide the means for penitents to make sense of inchoate experience by providing them with larger (usually religious) narrative structures in which experience may be organized and processed. In Hetty’s case, the traumatic experiences of the manhunt and trial have left her nearly speechless, unable to come to grips with what had taken place. Dinah’s confession of faith at the start of the scene— with its vision of a “suffering, loving Saviour” and, in turn, a path for sinners from transgression to salvation—makes Hetty’s confession possible by providing a redemptive narrative structure in which to articulate her crime (71). Carroll’s point speaks to our observations above: what Hetty takes from Dinah is not so much a way of speaking about divine forgiveness as a coherent—and, pivotally, hopeful—way of understanding the story of her life. As Carroll acknowledges, Eliot’s model of confession anticipates modern therapies centered on the development of healing narratives. In Hetty’s case, the narration of her experience enables her to escape the bestial state in which Dinah

108

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

initially finds her (looking like an “animal that grazes and grazes”) and become fully conscious, and as a reviewer in 1881 suggested, fully human once again.12 Eliot’s distrust of private remorse is also registered in a parallel scene in which Hetty’s lover, Arthur Donnithorne, fails to confess. Having gone to his friend the Anglican priest Mr. Irwine to confess the affair, Arthur hesitates, fearing the loss of Irwine’s esteem. Irwine, meanwhile, senses trouble but does not press the point, believing a relationship unlikely given the disparity in rank between the squire Arthur and the peasant Hetty. The necessity of confession is then further argued through the workings of the plot: had the scene taken place, Eliot suggests, Arthur could have prevented Hetty’s flight and the disastrous consequences that followed. The final result is foreshadowed in words placed in Irwine’s mouth. Responding to Arthur’s claim that “a man who struggles against a temptation into which he falls at last” is not as “bad” as one who never struggles, Irwine argues: I pity him in proportion to his struggles, for they foreshadow the inward suffering which is the worst form of Nemesis. Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us. (158) Irwine’s lesson is one that Trollope, as noted above, also preaches— that human lives are inescapably intertwined. Consequences thus have a way of fanning out across the field of our relations regardless of our designs.13 Later, when Adam vociferates against the injustice of Hetty’s punishment and Arthur’s apparent lack of one, Irwine restates the lesson: “There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can’t isolate yourself and say that the evil which is in you shall not spread. Men’s lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease” (382). Confession is a vital practice for Eliot exactly because it acknowledges this “blendedness” of human lives; it is, in effect, a deeply communal practice.

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

109

In the present scene, confession opens Hetty to a new sense of what Carroll calls “the world of others,” which is to say, a moment of moral growth from narcissism (George 99). Yet, if Hetty is able to acknowledge the blendedness of her life in others and others in hers, Eliot simultaneously underscores Hetty’s inability to return to the old world of Hayslope. Her meeting with Adam the next day is at once a reunion and a parting: Eliot provides a chance for her to acknowledge the pain she caused Adam (as a jilted suitor), but this reconciliation is set against the background of her impending execution. Even after the execution is stayed through Arthur’s actions, Eliot will, in a final stroke of Nemesis, have Hetty die years later on her return from punishment in Australia. Hetty’s confession—and resumption of consciousness—opens the way for her reconciliation with Adam the next day. This scene, I want to argue, shows Eliot’s departure from the models of her freethinking peers who, as noted above, effectively isolate repentance and forgiveness, suggesting that the former need not be answered by the latter. Indeed, their discussions of human forgiveness, as I observed, leave one wondering about the usefulness of the practice. This scene is further significant in regards to another claim, we should now acknowledge, that Adam made about forgiveness at roughly the novel’s midpoint. The discovery of the affair between Hetty, Adam’s would-be wife, and Arthur, his supposed friend, causes him to reach this conclusion about forgiveness: “I know forgiveness is a man’s duty, but, to my thinking, that can only mean as you’re to give up all thoughts o’ taking revenge: it can never mean you’re t’ have your old feelings back again, for that’s not possible” (287). His formulation recalls Hennell’s argument that one cannot “properly forgive his fellow man, i.e. regard an offender as if the offense had not been committed” (46). Forgiveness for Adam and Hennell alike certainly can’t mean returning to the old status quo as if nothing had happened: one’s feelings have changed, and the change can’t be ignored. Forgiveness can thus “only mean” forswearing retaliation: it can describe an action (or, better said, choice for inaction) but not the restoration of one’s “old feelings.” First in Adam meeting with Hetty and then again in his meeting with Arthur the next day, Eliot demonstrates the insufficiency of Adam’s mid-novel reflections. The scenes emphasize the interpersonal significance of repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Indeed,

110

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Eliot seems to offer a fairly conventional paradigm in which repentance’s fullest meaning comes in concert with forgiveness’s. Confession thus operates here as the familiar prelude to reconciliation. Yet Eliot’s apparent conservatism, we must acknowledge, is balanced by her equal emphasis in these scenes on the irrevocability of what has taken place. In other words, these scenes of reconciliation end up serving as a disquisition on the doctrine of consequences and, implicitly, on the limits of forgiveness’s powers. It is on this score, in fact, that Adam’s meeting with Hetty begins. Adam finds Hetty only a dull “likeness” of the woman she had been, and Hetty sees “the change in him too,” recognizing that it reflects her own (415). Eliot has, in effect, written Hennell’s and Greg’s lessons about consequences on the characters’ bodies: there is no going back to the way things were, just as there is no going forward with past hopes; an irrevocable change has taken place.14 In beginning this way, Eliot seems to be taking great care to prevent any false hopes on the part of the characters or the reader that some kind of restoration or escape remains possible at this late hour. The description echoes Irwine’s claim above that “Our deeds carry their terrible consequences […]—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves” (158). As in the confession scene, Hetty’s reconciliation with Adam invokes religious terms whose theological significance is almost immediately dissipated. Once again, Dinah’s words prove an awkward fit in Hetty’s mouth. Her apology to Adam is not that of an enthusiastic Methodist penitent. She is simply a frightened woman who must be coaxed into apologizing. When she then speaks of Arthur, however, her voice grows stronger, articulating how she had “cursed” and “hated” him. Forgiving Arthur is difficult. Hennell calls Jesus’s yoking of divine and human forgiveness in the Sermon on the Mount a “very low statement of the principle” (44). When Hetty invokes this structure, it sounds not “very low” perhaps but certainly an imperfect incentive to do what is right: “Dinah says I should forgive him…and I try…for else God won’t forgive me” (415). Dinah’s religiosity, of course, matters here, as her belief that we must forgive as we are forgiven provides the shape for Hetty’s actions.15 But, as Cunningham suggests, it is the human meaning that ultimately triumphs: “Hetty repents superficially to God, but most movingly to Adam” (169).

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

111

Adam’s response, meanwhile, suggests here that forgiveness is experientially richer than he had previously allowed. His acceptance of Hetty’s apology brings unanticipated effects. After Adam says that he forgives her, indeed already has done so, he experiences a sudden release: It had seemed to Adam as if his brain would burst with the anguish of meeting Hetty’s eyes in the first moments, but the sound of her voice uttering these penitent words touched a chord which had been less strained. There was a sense of relief from what was becoming unbearable, and the rare tears came—they had never come before, since he had hung on Seth’s neck in the beginning of his sorrow. (415) Adam had redefined forgiveness in terms of non-action. He discovers that apology and forgiveness have emotional meanings after all. Eliot anticipates modern theorists who define forgiveness in terms of the release of negative affect (particularly for the forgiver). If the acts of apology and forgiveness cannot undo the past, they can, Eliot suggests, alleviate the burden of traumatic experience. Of course, if forgiveness is to have any meaning beyond mere restraint here, its field must be the emotions. Hetty’s capacity to act is now exceedingly narrow—as if she is trapped in exactly the perilous situation Hannah Arendt argues forgiveness is needed to escape: without being forgiven, Arendt writes, “we would remain the victims of [a transgression’s] consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell” (181). Even with his forgiveness, Adam has no spell to subdue the effects of Hetty’s actions. Only Arthur, as a man with political influence, can do anything approaching that, and the pardon he obtains for her is only partial. Hetty, of course, dies on her return voyage to England. It is a measure of the difference between Trollope’s and Eliot’s texts, as noted above, that Carry does make it home (a point all the more striking given the fact that both women are associated with the Parable of the Prodigal Son). Eliot’s handling of this issue recalls Julia Kristeva’s claim that forgiveness is “ahistorical”: it “breaks the concatenation of cause and effect, crime and punishment” (60). That “concatenation” hangs over this scene, despite the significance of

112

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Adam’s and Hetty’s exchange. The chain of crime and punishment might be loosened (through Arthur’s actions), Eliot suggests, but it cannot be broken. Adam’s meeting with Arthur the next day continues the novel’s meditation on the tension between the awareness that “a moral law has been broken and nothing can cancel the wrong” (embodied by Adam) and the desire “to mitigate the spreading effects of the evil consequences” (embodied by Arthur) (George 103). In reconciling the two men, Eliot attempts to reconcile these two moral visions. Adam forces Arthur to feel acutely the irrevocableness of what he has done and so the stern limits placed on any attempt to make amends. Arthur reveals that Adam’s unwillingness to relent from being “hard” actually contributes to the spread of misery and thus contributes to the propagation of evil. Specifically, Arthur convinces Adam and, with Adam’s help, Hetty’s relations, the Poysers, to abandon their plans to leave Hayslope to save face. Arthur volunteers to leave Hayslope instead, thereby allaying Adam’s and the Poysers’ concerns about how the other citizens of Hayslope would view their continuing to work on land Arthur owns. Self-sacrifice is thus posed as a means of alleviating, though not cancelling completely, the suffering of others. Forswearing revenge is an insufficient response in the face of true penitence. As previous critics have observed, Adam’s yielding is one of Eliot’s most succinct endorsements of compassion. Only when one can, as Melissa Raines argues, “see things as they really are” for another can one be fully or truly moral in Eliot’s universe (96). The latter half of the book might be seen as Adam’s moral education, and here he comes to realize that the burden posed by the irreparable past is a common one. Greg had written that one’s repentance cannot alter the past but can “secure” the future by preventing subsequent wrongdoing. Eliot, too, suggests that the unalterable past can be put to use; here, however, it is in “securing” our relations with others who bear similar burdens. Thus, when Arthur speaks of his regret: “Perhaps you’ve never done anything you’ve had bitterly to repent of in your life, Adam; if you had, you would be more generous” (422), Adam reports that the experience is all too familiar: “I’ve known what it is in my life to repent and feel it’s too late” (423). He names, specifically, the feeling that he had been “too harsh” on his father when, earlier in the novel, he had repented on his deathbed. “I feel

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

113

it now,” Adam says, “when I think of him. I’ve no right to be hard towards them as have done wrong and repent” (423). The scene of forgiveness often entails a vertical relationship between the one who forgives and the one who would be forgiven. Paul Ricoeur, for example, writes of how the “height of forgiveness” answers the “depth of fault” (468). This disparity is often physically embodied in Victorian texts: Florence Dombey and Carry Brattle both drop to the floor when begging their fathers’ forgiveness, as does Hardy’s Tess when beseeching Angel’s in the failed wedding night scene. In the present case, Eliot stresses the newfound equality and mutuality between the two men. In lieu of the words of forgiveness, their reconciliation is sealed with a handshake. The moment is significant for our purposes because it eschews the traditional formula, relying, instead, on a gesture whose meaning suits the moment and its participants. Adam had once, in virtually the same location (thus the chapter’s title “Another Meeting in the Wood”), refused to shake Arthur’s hand; to take his hand now is not only to resume cordial relations but also to move past the earlier slight. This handshake is also significant as a correlative to the “clasped hands” of Hetty and Arthur that Adam observed and was enraged by at their earlier meeting in the woods. The joining of hands in a lover’s tryst initiated their quarrel; now the joining of hands in reconciliation closes it.16 With the meeting of their hands, Eliot observes “a strong rush, on both sides, of the old boyish affection” (423). As in Adam’s reconciliation with Hetty, Eliot observes that the act of forgiveness has a psychological meaning. Adam had come to believe that he could not have his “old feelings back again” (287). This scene shows that he can experience the “old boyish affection” again, though he must also recognize, as he does at the start of the scene, that Arthur is a changed man and that their relationship can never be as it once was. The old affection, in other words, now jostles with other feelings in a more complicated emotional landscape that includes the shared experience and suffering. As in the jail cell meeting, too, Adam’s forgiveness entails emotive release: Adam departs at the scene’s close “feeling that sorrow was more bearable now that hatred was gone” (425). Unlike his forgiveness of Hetty, Adam’s forgiveness of Arthur has a relational meaning as well. Yet, once again, Eliot makes

114

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

a point about consequence by deferring its realization. Arthur begins the scene by announcing a long absence. The reconciliation promises the resumption of their relationship later, which the novel’s epilogue delivers when Arthur, weak with illness, at last returns to Hayslope after an eight-year absence. I noted above Simpson’s argument that if Eliot had repudiated Christian theology, her anthropology remained rooted in the Christian tradition. The Victorian criticism of the novel is littered with such claims about what of Christianity Eliot retains. In the estimation of the reviewer for The Times, to cite another example, Adam Bede was a “secular rendering of the deepest sentiment of Christianity— the sense of personal unworthiness in the presence of God, which teaches us the weakness of our nature and how near the very best of us are of kin [sic] to the chief of sinners and the most degraded of beings” (qtd in “Introduction” 11). At the same time, the writer for The Westminster Review “suspected,” as Carroll writes, “that George Eliot’s strict theory of consequences with its denial of redemption was at all unorthodox” (“Introduction” 11). “Strictly speaking,” the review reads, “no sin can be atoned for” (qtd in Simpson 222). Subsequent critics, including Simpson, would recognize that Eliot’s eschewal of the Christian theory of atonement shaped her plots.17 The novel’s difficulty with redemption, these critics observed, was symptomatic of Eliot’s theological reservations. While Eliot’s characters were built on Christian principles, the fictional universe they inhabited was not—or at least not fully. Adam’s meeting with Arthur offered a representative case for the American theologian Charles Dinsmore, writing in Atonement and Literature and Life (1906). Dinsmore juxtaposes Eliot’s late scene with Raphael’s narration of salvation history at the conclusion of Paradise Lost. In the story of the crucifixion, Milton’s Adam receives “what he most craved,” Dinsmore writes, “a Lethe for his memory, a reconciliation with his past, a social and cosmic atonement won by Christ’s high triumph over sin” (113). In Eliot’s novel, meanwhile, “the problem of reconciliation with one’s past is treated in a very different mood” (119). Dinsmore writes, The irrevocableness of the past is one of George Eliot’s fundamental teachings. A sin once launched into the world leaves a trail of

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

115

blood and tears which can neither be forgotten nor effaced. A breach once made cannot be repaired. The reconciliation of Arthur Donnithorne and Adam Bede is only a friendly union hallowed by a common sorrow. It is a shadowed, incomplete reconciliation. The atonement is imperfect, for the consequences of evil cannot be stayed or their havoc amended. (121) Raphael’s description of the “Goodness immense” released by the Cross supplies Milton’s Adam with the means to untangle the multiple knots that his sin has created: he is reconciled to the past, relieved of the guilt caused by bringing sin into the world, and he is also reconciled to God and to future generations. The meaning of Christ’s atonement is at once deeply personal, social, and cosmic. In Adam Bede, however, Eliot sets aside the peacemaking resources of Christ’s atonement, with the result, Dinsmore argues, that Adam’s and Arthur’s (or for that matter, Hetty’s) personal wishes are not so easily squared with social or cosmic realities. There is no drink from Lethe for Eliot’s characters, and there can be no anticipation of a broad reunion of the redeemed. In my discussion of Trollope above, I noted that theologians have claimed that while the language and practice of forgiveness is most “at home” within the context of Christian theology and community, it remains practicable without theological backing. But, as the philosopher of religion Marilyn McCord Adams has also shown, this kind of transposition is not without effect. Transplanted into a secular virtue system (to recall Roberts’s term), forgiveness’s force and meaning often change in significant ways. Adams notes, for example, that one secular philosopher leaves room for “retributive hatred” within forgiveness, while another suggests that forgiveness’s ties to generosity should be reconsidered. Both of the authors considered in this chapter confirm Adams’s point. In fact, Trollope’s Mrs. Dale and Jacob Brattle both show signs of a lingering resentment within their respective forgivenesses that would trouble Adams. Ultimately, though, as we have seen, Trollope affirms the general claim of Adams and others—forgiveness is most “at home” within the habitat of Christian theology. Regarding Eliot, we might say that the arguments of Dinsmore and others are attempts to come to terms with what was lost or diminished as a result of the

116

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

process of transplanting repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation to Eliot’s fictional cosmos. But, of course, all is not lost. Eliot still promotes forgiveness. If forgiving can’t erase the past, it does relieve troubled hearts, restore broken relationships, and contribute to communal health. One need not, both authors suggest, look beyond the ordinary world in front of us to find reason enough to forgive—to which, of course, Trollope would add that the ideal, though often elusive, remains the extravagant forgiveness we will be shown in Heaven.

Notes 1

This quotations appears in Hauerwas’s essay “Constancy and Forgiveness: The Novel as a School for Virtue,” which uses The Vicar as a case study for the two virtues named in the title. In the piece, Hauerwas makes a claim about the usefulness of fiction for studying forgiveness that recalls that of Jones noted in Chapter 1. He writes, “forgiveness requires display through temporal narration of lives. Insofar as novels provide such display, they help us imaginatively to capture the complex character of forgiveness” (52). My analysis of The Vicar is gratefully indebted to this essay, though my emphasis, particularly on non-ideal forms of forgiveness, is distinct.

2

See also Hervé Picton’s discussion of “The Fourth Commandment” in “Trollope, Liberalism and Scripture.”

3

The duration of this resentment would be well known to the readers of Trollope’s Barsetshire series; its initial eruption is described in The Small House at Allington (1864).

4

This kind of dialectic is pervasive in Trollope’s treatments of forgiveness and is particularly evident in his endings. See, for example, Florence Burton’s debate with her brother about forgiveness at the end of The Claverings and Roger Carbury’s debate with himself at the end of The Way We Live Now.

5

Hauerwas observes that Trollope’s “Christianity so pervaded countrysides such as that of Bullhampton that it did not need to be made explicit” (56).

6

For more on Fenwick’s Broad Church characteristics, see Picton and Margaret Marwick.

FORGIVING IN COMMUNITY: TROLLOPE AND ELIOT

117

7

See also Brian Ingram’s excellent discussion of the Rosehill Circle and Eliot’s engagement with Victorian religious debates in “Evangelicalism and Religious Crisis: The Experience of George Eliot.”

8

Barry Qualls has argued, for example, that Eliot “did not write, did not think, without the texts that she abandoned when she lost her faith, without the language of the Bible and the traditions that formed around it” (119–120). See also, Ingram and Knight and Mason’s Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature.

9

Some early readers did. The reviewer for the Methodist London Quarterly Review, for example, decried Eliot’s attempt to portray human “love and sympathy” as sufficient mechanisms to sustain compassion. “Forbearance” and “gentleness,” the reviewer argues, depend both on a stronger sense of the “rule of right” than Eliot suggests and “of our own transgression and God’s free forgiveness” (107). Cunningham, to cite a more modern example, laments that Eliot’s labors to portray Methodism accurately are now “wasted,” Hetty’s response to Dinah serving to make a “humanist, Feuerbachian point” about the power of human sympathy (169).

10

Writing for The Contemporary Review in 1896, the statesman and man of letters George W. E. Russell observed that Eliot “believed with all her heart the stern truth that in the physical world there is no forgiveness of sins. Again and again we have the same note of quiet sorrow over the irrevocable fixity of the past” (105).

11

As Sally Shuttleworth observes, the German thought that Eliot was imbibing in the 1850s, particularly Feuerbach, emphasizes the role of mediators (197–198).

12

The review appeared in The Literary World.

13

In Middlemarch, the wealthy Bulstrode hides behind a nonconformist creed that allows him to take confidence in private acts of confession of his sinfulness, as if God were the only party injured by his transgressions. For Eliot, a confession that does not acknowledge the consequences of our actions for other lives, for the community to which one belongs, is no confession at all. See Beckwith’s discussion of this issue (112–113, 158–159).

14

Melissa Raines observes parallels between this meeting and Adam and Hetty’s first love scene. While the first scene had shown Adam’s hope of their future together, Raines argues, this scene is pervaded by the “ ‘dreadful past and dreadful present’, which will not allow for any future with Hetty” (98).

118

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

15

This kind of move troubled theologically astute readers in the nineteenth century, including Simpson. To such readers, Russell Perkin writes, there seemed to be “a fundamental intellectual dishonesty in the Positivist or religious humanist practice of using religious language and forms to command authority for a system of thought that has abandoned the metaphysical grounds for religion” (51).

16

Feminist critics have stressed that this handshake happens through the sacrifice of the third party to the affair, Hetty, the woman. As Eve Sedgwick observes in her classic Between Men, the scene is a model example of a pattern evident elsewhere in nineteenth-century literature: the “aristocratic male [Arthur in this case] hands over his moral authority to a newly bourgeois male [Adam], over the sexually discredited body of a woman” (157).

17

Jan-Melissa Schramm’s superb study Atonement and SelfSacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative thoroughly grounds Eliot’s treatment of human atonement within the context of the Victorian Atonement debates. Schramm argues that while Eliot was deeply skeptical of the idea of substitutionary atonement, she nonetheless took from her “Christian heritage a sense that suffering is ubiquitous, and that its burden must be shared” (219).

4 Forgiving in the Nineties: Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Wilde’s De Profundis

I

n her biography of Thomas Hardy, Claire Tomalin observes a “curious link” between her subject and Oscar Wilde, whom Tomalin ties together as “the two men who upset England so badly in their different ways in 1895” (261). In April and May of that year, England watched the libel and criminal trials that culminated in Wilde’s conviction for gross indecency and sentence to two years’ hard labor. In November, a reviewer decried Hardy’s Jude the Obscure as “immoral,” stunning the author, and more denunciations soon followed. Tomalin’s link lies, however, not in these scandals but in a title. This is De Profundis, the opening words of Psalm 129 in the Vulgate and 130 in the Authorized Version, one of the seven “Penitential Psalms.” This was the original title of a three-poem sequence that Hardy composed in the winter of 1895–1896 and published for the first time in 1901. Hardy would later change the title to “In Tenebris” (after Psalm 101 [102]), perhaps as a result of the publication of our second text. De Profundis, of course, was also the title that Robert Ross, Wilde’s literary executor, assigned to Wilde’s prison letter, when it was first published in 1905.

120

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Tomalin’s “curious link” provides a useful starting point for reflecting on the two authors that this chapter examines. Consider, first, Psalm 130: 1

Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O LORD. Lord, hear my voice: let thine ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications. 3 If thou, LORD, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, who shall stand? 4 But there is forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be feared. 5 I wait for the LORD, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope. 6 My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning: I say, more than they that watch for the morning. 7 Let Israel hope in the LORD: for with the LORD there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption. 8 And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities. 2

Nineteenth-century commentators stressed the text’s affinities with the basic New Testament pattern of redemption. The penitent, on this reading, cries “out of the depths” of sin and finds eternal redemption through God’s grace. The psalm was taken, simply put, as a précis of the Christian salvation story. Writing in this vein, Samuel Cox, a prominent nonconformist minister, dubbed it “a tiny Gospel” (218). The poems that Hardy gathered under the original title “De Profundis” tell no such comforting story. Tomalin calls them “black poems,” the speaker in each is suffering: the first from a winter of the spirit—he speaks of bereavement, friends turned cold, heart and strength destroyed; in the second he decides it would be better for him not to exist, since he disturbs the breezy, optimistic world; and in the third he looks back on moments in his life when he might have died, apparently regretting that he had survived to feel the bitterness of life. (261–262) The speaker’s stance resembles the initial state of despair and lamentation characteristic of the Psalms. But Hardy’s poem cannot pass beyond this point: the speaker mimics the psalmist’s complaints but gets none of his consolations. Victorian readers, steeped in the

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

121

Bible, would have recognized that the forgiving Redeemer—on whose rescue the psalmist counts—is a no-show. Hardy’s “black poems” cannot look forward to the morning that the psalmist awaits. Instead, the speaker is one who “waits in unhope,” brooding on his increasing sense of loss and isolation from the world. The intertextual relationship with the Psalms thus functions ironically; yet “De Profundis” depends on the traditional language of the faith to register its sense of a reality devoid of its promises. Ross’s decision to title Wilde’s letter De Profundis, meanwhile, “suggests continuity between Wilde’s present suffering and the spiritual desolation of the Psalmist,” as Andrew Tate writes (591). He continues: “Wilde’s epistle […] echoes the Psalmist’s hope that redemption and forgiveness are possible” (591). Ross’s title, in other words, invites us to see parallels between Wilde’s letter and the complete narrative arc of Psalm 130—which Hardy’s poem shortcircuits. Ross’s title is, of course, an “interpretation,” and one that we consider below. What is important for present purposes is that Ross invokes the psalm without the disconsolate irony that marks Hardy’s text. Wilde’s discussions of forgiveness and redemption are not orthodox. They are in several respects problematic. But forgiveness remains for Wilde a live—even necessary—ethical and spiritual option, and he thereby offers a useful contrast to the breakdown we witness in Hardy. This chapter pairs Hardy’s Jude the Obscure with Wilde’s De Profundis in order to highlight their rival assessments of the vitality of the language of forgiveness as the nineteenth century comes to a close. Jude represents Hardy’s almost exhaustive attack on the practice of forgiveness. No less than earlier authors this book has considered, though, Hardy relies on scenes of forgiveness for his novels’ effect, though it is now the flaws or failures of such scenes that matters. The novel is, in effect, preoccupied with the forgiveness it ostensibly rejects. Wilde’s text, meanwhile, renews the author’s earlier claims regarding forgiveness’s value and efficacy. Wilde, too, strongly endorses Jesus’s example of forgiveness. But if forgiveness remains a practice done in the imitation of Christ, Wilde’s Christology is idiosyncratic, and his ideal of forgiving is transformed in turn. Wilde’s meditation on Christlike forgiving is, moreover, here embedded within the narrative of his fateful relationship with Alfred

122

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Douglas, and we will see that this context colors his appraisal of forgiveness’s force and meaning as well.

Thomas Hardy The older one gets, the more deplorable seems the effect of that terrible, dogmatic ecclesiasticism—Christianity so called (but really Paulinism plus idolatry)—on morals and true religion: a dogma with which the real teaching of Christ has hardly anything in common. —Hardy, Letter to Edward Clodd (1897) Religious, religion, is to be used in the article in its modern sense entirely, as being expressive of nobler feelings towards humanity and emotional goodness and greatness, the old meaning of the word—ceremony, or ritual—having perished, or nearly. We enter church, and we have to say, “We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep”, when what we want to say is, “Why are we made to err and stray like lost sheep?” Then we have to sing, “My soul doth magnify the Lord”, when what we want to sing is, “O that my soul could find some Lord that it could magnify!” Till it can, let us magnify good works, and develop all means of easing mortals’ progress through a world not worthy of them. —Hardy, Notes for “The Hard Case of the Would-be-Religious” (1907) Hardy scholars often counsel against too easily applying the standard labels of religion and skepticism to the author’s writings, since he seems to delight in eluding them.1 These passages represent a case in point. Hardy has, of course, decided that the supernatural claims of Christian theology are untrue. The old words of the liturgy—in this case, excerpts from the Anglican morning and evening prayer services—thus won’t signify. The same ironic gap opens up in them that we noted above in his invocation of the Psalms in the “De Profundis” sequence. Hardy, however, is not done with Christianity or religion. He attacks neither per se; rather, he means to rescue

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

123

“true religion” and the “real teachings of Christ” from the clutches of priests peddling defunct dogma. If “religion” is to be preserved, though, it must lose its vertical axis, operating strictly on a human plane of action and emotion. There is, as he suggests in a later note, no “God of Mercy” listening in on our confessions and intervening in our affairs, so humans must make up for the resulting deficit in benevolence. Humans are strange creatures in the Hardyan worldpicture, with no correspondent moral beings above or below. Heaven is not empty exactly (since there must a God in the sense of “the Cause of Things”), but no one up there answers to the description of the divinity of traditional Christian belief. The rest of Nature, meanwhile, has no moral instincts worth speaking of. Hardy is very much a man of his time in claiming that the overlay of Christian theology has obscured the real teachings of Jesus. His description of the modern predicament in the letter to Clodd recalls, in fact, the position we found Dickens in at the start of the second chapter. As Dickens sat down to redact the New Testament for his children, he was emboldened, on the one hand, by the new biblical criticism and, on the other, by the “grand Protestant tradition” of “exercising private judgment” in his reading of the Bible (to recall Valentine Cunningham’s formulation). Though Hardy’s theological claims are more radical (fifty years of historical criticism later), his humanistic Jesus and gospel bears more than a passing resemblance to Dickens’s. The chief ethical lessons Hardy takes from the “real” Jesus are the familiar priorities of mercy and selfless love, which he often describes using the biblical language of “charity” and “lovingkindness.” He learned the latter term from the Authorized Version’s rendering of the Hebrew word chesed, used in the Psalms and the prophet Jeremiah to describe God’s extraordinary tenderness and generosity. Hardy’s application of this word—whose original context Hardy’s Victorian readers, weaned as they were on the King James, would instantly recognize—suggests that the responsibility for such compassion has passed from Heaven to Earth. If there is to be grace, which Hardy’s picture of human fallibility seems to require—it must come from humans themselves. Only we can “ease” our fellow “mortals’ progress through a world not worthy of them.” Taking God out the picture has consequences, of course, for the ethical concepts and practices that had been anchored in the divine-

124

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

human nexus. This is particularly the case for forgiveness, which, as hardly bears repeating at this point, Christian theology frames as a gift that God extends to humans and which humans are to enact with one another in imitation of God. Orthodox Christianity had in the form of statements like the Lord’s Prayer provided a broadly shared structure and logic for forgiveness. Hardy’s fictions bear witness to the breakdown of such shared assumptions; his texts depict circumstances ripe for confusion about what others mean when they start talking about repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. This is exactly what happens in Jude the Obscure. In this novel, forgiveness is not the obvious good it had been in many of the texts discussed earlier in this book; in fact, Hardy repeatedly suggests that we should be suspicious of characters’ reasons for and means of enacting it. A broader examination of the plot reveals a recurring pattern in which acts of forgiveness that seem charitable to the giver are immediately perceived as or quickly become sources of cruelty to the recipient. Jude’s characters have difficulty using ethical language in a way that satisfies the moral frameworks of interlocutors. Absent this agreement, they counterfeit one another’s uses of that language, with the result that they can erect only the most unstable of compromises. The first subsection below will explore this predicament. The second examines how forgiveness becomes, in turn, an “illusory eschaton,” that is, a sham resolution to human conflict. And as forgiveness’s role in the lives of the characters is destabilized, so, too, we will see, is the narrative function of scenes of forgiveness and reconciliation.

I. In his late meditation “On forgiveness,” Jacques Derrida asks, “Can there be, in one way or another, a scene of forgiveness without a shared language?” (48). In order for forgiveness to be meaningful, it must be based on a profound agreement between the parties involved. It is not enough, he argues, that the parties merely share “a national language or idiom” (48). Without their further agreement “on the meaning of words, their connotations, rhetoric, aim of reference,” when, he continues, “nothing common or universal permits them to

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

125

understand one another,” then forgiveness is “deprived of meaning” (48). Throughout his essay, Derrida seeks to describe an impossible “pure” forgiveness, which, as he recognizes as the outset, he can’t have. And now, with language, he runs into new aporias. He observes that, practically speaking, it is highly “improbable” for both parties to understand not only the “nature of the fault” but what role each has played and is to play—“who is guilty of what evil toward whom, etc.” (48). But here, as throughout the piece, Derrida also suggests that the very act of coming to terms at all—that is, of moving from a more inchoate or even unconscious apprehension of the offense to an articulated account of it that looks for meaning and assigns responsibility—threatens to betray the particularity, even the singularity, of the event and its participants since language carries with it a system of inherited values and assumptions that it encodes. Language, especially if mutually understandable, is dangerous because it “universalizes” (48). Derrida is—as Derrida always is— thus ambivalent: we must, on the one hand, agree in order to have meaningful forgiveness; but to do so requires taking on an inherited language that will almost certainly misconstrue the unique character of the event and its participants. I do not mean to tout Hardy as an early Derridean. But Derrida’s call to attend the problem of a “shared” language is well heeded in this case. His anxiety, too, about what it means to invoke a traditional language when we go about naming transgressions and assigning parts is also, as we will see, very relevant to Hardy’s depictions of forgiveness. Several of Hardy’s early works dwell on the challenge of coming to terms with an offense and finding a common language for forgiveness; they often show the costs of assuming incorrectly that there is agreement. Hardy’s fictions of the 1870s and 1880s give us scenes where the language of forgiveness quickly wears thin (as in Far from the Madding Crowd) and others where it is found unworkable or is purposefully dodged by his characters (as in Clym’s famous shouting matches with Eustacia in The Return of the Native). An exemplary exchange appears in The Mayor of Casterbridge between Henchard and Susan: “Right,” said Henchard. “But just one word. Do you forgive me, Susan?”

126

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

She murmured something; but seemed to find it difficult to frame her answer. (74–75) Many of Hardy’s characters share Susan’s difficulty framing an answer when pressed to forgive. The issue is presented with new gravity in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, a novel broadly concerned with the modern question of national language and local dialect.2 A case in point is the famous exchange of confessions on Tess and Angel’s wedding night. I cited this episode in the first chapter as an exchange that exemplifies the consequences of grammatical disagreement. Tess, once again, considers her sexual sin and Angel’s “the same,” forgiving Angel and anticipating that he will reciprocate. Angel, however, accedes to the influential codes within Victorian society that viewed men’s and women’s sexuality differently, allowing for a man’s lapse but treating a woman’s “fall” as absolute. Angel thus waives the possibility of forgiving her, declaring his incomprehension at her remarks: “how can forgiveness meet such a grotesque prestidigitation?” (228). Tess mistakenly assumes that she and Angel share common assumptions about how and when forgiveness should be granted. When Angel refuses to reciprocate her forgiveness of him, Tess is confronted with the social codes that license, for Angel, not only behavior but also speech. For him, Tess’s request is not only impossible to fulfill but at least initially inconceivable (“You don’t know what you say,” he tells her) (232). The exchange speaks to Derrida’s anxiety about language’s imposition of “universal” categories that betray the particularity of what took place and who it involved. The “sins” to which they confess are not the “same”: Angel has spent forty-eight hours with, it seems, a London prostitute; Tess has been raped. In giving the novel the subtitle “A Pure Woman,” Hardy calls into question the social value system that Angel here invokes to characterize Tess as impure or irreparably fallen. The scene shows, furthermore, that in the absence of agreement, forgiveness here becomes a question of linguistic power. Angel is the better talker (at least within the national idiom), and so his definition stands as authoritative. Jude represents Hardy’s most sustained critique of the language of forgiveness, I want to argue. The chief features of this critique can be observed in three conversations that appear in contiguous

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

127

chapters at the end of Jude’s fourth and the beginning of its fifth parts. In the chapters leading up to these scenes, three important and intimately related events occur: 1. Sue’s marriage to Richard collapses; thereby allowing, 2. Sue and Jude to reunite under the banner of a platonic

relationship; and 3. Arabella returns, willing to satisfy Jude’s sexual advances,

which Sue has spurned. Although very different scenes, each depicts interlocutors who do not—in fact, cannot—reach grammatical agreement about forgiveness. The result in each case is an ironic, unstable compromise, which, as we will see below, impacts the larger structure of the novel. Our analysis begins with Sue’s horrified discovery in the fifth chapter of part IV that Jude had rendezvoused with Arabella in the very room in which they are to stay at the Temperance Hotel. We must recall that Sue is a study in sexual anxiety, even revulsion— an almost disembodied spirit to match the fleshly Arabella.3 In the present scene, Jude initially disputes whether Sue is entitled to take offense when she has restricted their relationship to that of friends, “not lovers” (192). He reminds her that she was still cohabiting with Richard at the time of the supposed offense. And he observes that technically no law, religious or secular, has been violated as Arabella “was, after all, [his] legal wife” (193). Jude thus strives to mitigate the offense by contextualizing it, and he questions Sue’s ability to criticize given the present terms of their relationship. Derrida notes that forgiveness is “often confounded […] with related themes,” including “excuse” (27). Vladimir Jankelevitch, whose work Derrida relies on and responds to, helpfully describes “excusing” as an alternative to forgiving that is predicated on mitigating circumstances.4 The excuse is an argument, an appeal to reason, whereas an apology appeals to some other, perhaps nonrational (for Derrida, “mad”) faculty. Jude, we might then say, excuses himself, asserting the complexity of the circumstances, rather than admitting guilt. Sue is resilient, however, and so Jude concedes an apology. Yet the form that the apology takes further emphasizes that they are still

128

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

operating on different terms. She has accused him of being “gross,” and he now replies in turn: “Forgive me for being gross, as you call it!” (251, my emphasis). The last clause puts the responsibility on the other who is imposing a standard foreign to the speaker: it foregrounds the discrepancy between their perspectives on Jude’s behavior. Jude has not transitioned completely from making an excuse to asking for forgiveness. His speech sits awkwardly between the two: he refuses to confess that he erred according to his own notions of right conduct (thus, excusing himself) while still attempting to honor Sue’s complaint (thus, asking for her forgiveness). The disjunction between their perspectives is made further evident in Sue’s response. She now asks him to recite “those pretty lines […] from Shelley’s ‘Epipsychidion’ as if they [were] meant” for her (251). Jude doesn’t know the lines, however, so Sue recites them herself. The “pretty lines” celebrate the incorporeal in woman, the very quality of Sue that so galls Jude and has led him back to Arabella’s body. Once Jude affirms that the lines are—as Sue vehemently asks— “like” her, she grants that “now” she forgives him. The arrangement is deeply ironic, of course. Sue has done Jude’s work for him, playing both of their parts, writing the script that Jude must read and reading it for him. Jude is pressed to affirm her performance, whether or not he really understands it and despite the fact that the lines imply a sexual ethic that, try as he may, he can never accept. This is the sort of ethical sleight of hand that Angel claims to be avoiding when he asserts that forgiving Tess would require “prestidigitation.” Jude is only able to enter into this supposed reconciliation at the cost of supporting Sue’s disagreeable, and in his eyes unreasonable, characterization of the events and her relation to him. The scene calls attention to the inflexibility of his views and desires and demonstrates, in turn, that only through equivocal language can they achieve a compromise. The scene thereby promises the repetition of their chain of indiscretion and conflict because their dialogue has not resolved the underlying, unspoken tensions—about sexuality, in particular—of their relationship. Hardy then shuttles Sue from this flawed reconciliation with Jude to a failed reconciliation scene featuring Richard in the next chapter. Richard is at this point still Sue’s legal husband, though she had left him after finding their married life unhappy. Across the book,

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

129

Sue repeatedly describes Richard’s forgiveness as something more like punishment.5 The current chapter provides further confirmation of that view. Richard offers his forgiveness to Sue for leaving him. Sue, in turn, recognizes that to accept his forgiveness would be to grant him a moral authority he doesn’t deserve and to admit guilt she doesn’t feel. In her view, she has not done anything wrong, only acted in accord with her advanced views on marriage. The narration explains that in forgiving, Richard becomes the “husband” again, and it is because of this that Sue must “adopt any line of defense against marital feeling in him” (199). This observation is significant because Sue’s “line of defense” amounts to self-disparagement. When she claims that she has been “too wicked” for him to “have [her] back” (199), she twists his ethical framework to her advantage, turning her crime into an unforgivable one in order to prevent him from forgiving her on his terms. I observed above that because Jude does not agree with Sue’s characterization of events, he feigns an apology in order to satisfy her. Sue and Richard are likewise incapable of agreeing about what ought to be forgiven. Meaningful dialogue is once again impossible. In the absence of a common reference for using ethical speech, conversation continues only through counterfeiting. At the chapter’s end, Richard meditates on the meaning of Sue’s denial of his forgiveness, concluding that it would be a “kindness” to Sue to grant her a divorce (200). “Singularly enough,” he declares, her refusal “to stay after I said I had forgiven her” provides him with a legal basis for dissolving their marriage, Sue now being guilty of a breach of the marital contract (whereas previously he had passively allowed her to leave) (200). The divorce would be “the greatest charity to her,” releasing her from being “chained” to him (200). In Richard’s mind, his actions comprise a virtuous sacrifice on his part, giving her a gift of freedom. The divorce thus becomes an institutional equivalent to forgiveness. From Richard’s perspective, the circumstances seem ironic, for it is the failure of an act of forgiveness that creates the grounds for a different kind of mercy, this one legal. In the next chapter, however, Sue offers a rather different interpretation of the divorce. For her, Richard’s procedure has produced not forgiveness but something more like a conviction, since, as Rosemarie Morgan argues, “the divorce decree” necessitates “that the female partner

130

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

be appointed the guilty partner” (97). Thus what Richard perceives as and genuinely intends to be a charitable act in fact carries with it the weight of culpability. There is, as with all of Richard’s gestures at magnanimity, a surcharge of guilt. Richard also envisions that the divorce will allow Sue to marry Jude. Sue, however, decides not to marry again, with disastrous results. In the novel’s fifth and sixth parts, Sue is confronted by what Penny Boumelha has called “the fact of her non-freedom” (145). Sue and Jude’s previously “unnoticed lives” become a matter of concern to neighbors, a state of affairs only intensified by the arrival of Jude and Arabella’s child, Little Time. Sue and Jude are ostracized for their unconventional household, which occasions Sue’s distressed remark that she “can’t bear that […] everybody should think people wicked because they may have chosen to live their own way!” (238, emphasis in original). This choice to “live their own way” increasingly confines their freedom: the walls literally close in on them as they are forced to dwell in smaller and smaller habitations, living a wayward life on Jude’s meager wages. Meanwhile, Sue is also faced with the restrictions imposed upon her liberty by her own body as result of pregnancy. “Conception, pregnancy and childbirth,” Boumelha writes, “enforce upon [Sue] a financial and emotional dependence on Jude which is destructive for both of them” (147). Their life of “trouble, adversity and suffering” then occasions the third episode that I want to highlight briefly to end this section, a discussion of culpability in chapter VI-2. Here Little Time accuses Sue of hastening their ruin “o’ purpose” by having another child (261, 262). Here, Sue reflexively responds with the language of forgiveness, “[pleading], ‘Y-you must forgive me, little Jude!’ ” (262). Yet, in her ensuing words, Sue struggles awkwardly to put aside the question of blame: “it is not quite on purpose—I can’t help it!” she says; her remarks thus frame her life as existing in a state of what Boumelha calls “non-freedom” (262). She recognizes that forgiveness is a problematic language, but she labors to transpose her troubles— with biology, economics, law—into an alternative set of terms. In a manner similar to Jude’s request for forgiveness at the Temperance Hotel, Sue’s speech act hovers between requesting forgiveness and offering an excuse. The problem is further magnified by the fact that she attempts to explain adult matters in terms that a child can

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

131

understand. Finally, she demands that he forgive because her offense was not intentional. Little Time, for his part, is not satisfied with Sue’s explanation, promising that he “won’t forgive [her] ever, ever!” (262). A short time later, he murders his siblings because they were “too menny,” an action that the text frames as a kind of Malthusian act of mercy, since Little Time had believed that “if we children was gone, there’d be no trouble at all” (262). The scene thus calls attention, once again, to the difficulty that the characters have communicating about forgiveness, both in Sue’s stumbling articulation of it and Little Time’s refusal to grant her request. At the same time, the episode mirrors Phillotson’s search for an appropriate vehicle for charity and kindness. Sue’s request for forgiveness is a cry for mercy amid the merciless community that punishes her for having children out of wedlock. Little Time refuses to grant forgiveness—asserting to Sue’s culpability—yet also believes that he is acting mercifully toward the family through his slaughter of the innocents. Both mechanisms fail, and Sue is punished twice.

II. Although unable to reconcile with Sue as he would like, Phillotson, as we have seen, nonetheless perceives the annulment of their marriage as an alternative form of resolution. This apparent end, however, is really only the beginning. The suffering that follows the divorce will ultimately bring Sue back to him, ready to receive the forgiveness she had rebuffed and renew the marriage that she had fled. The cyclical or “iterative” structure, to use Daniel Schwarz’s term, of Hardy’s plot has been noted on several occasions by critics, who have seen in this structure a larger suggestion of the futility of Jude’s efforts and, more broadly, perhaps the pointlessness of human life (49).6 I want to call attention here to the centrality of scenes of forgiveness to the novel’s cyclical feeling and thereby consider the contribution of ethics—or, perhaps better said, the failure of an ethical practice—to Hardy’s novelistic form. John Milbank’s discussion of forgiveness and finality, mentioned elsewhere in this book, provides a useful set of considerations here. Milbank, once again, has his doubts about what he calls “purely

132

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

interhuman forgiveness,” specifically its ability to produce the kind of finality that he believes characterizes human forgiveness within the Christian—Trinitarian and eschatological—structure. Milbank argues that human forgiveness, on its own at least, is too unstable to produce lasting, certain resolution. He posits two dismal scenarios, each of which hinges on problems of memory: first, the offense will be remembered, creating lingering suspicion and likely recurrent conflict; or, the offense will be forgotten, increasing the likelihood that it will be repeated since the victim is incapable of foreseeing that the offender might prove a repeat-offender. The result is that “every secular performance of forgiveness poses as an illusory eschaton” (59). Human forgiveness thus offers only seeming closure or resolution. Milbank continues, “And because [secular forgiveness’s] finality is a chimaera, it offers not more security within human relationships, but rather an undesirable hesitation between increased security and increased insecurity” (59). This “chimeric” quality of forgiveness is everywhere evident from the middle of Jude onward. I have already noted above one “illusory eschaton,” in Sue and Jude’s exchange at the Temperance Hotel. Their conversation counterfeits forgiveness, Jude refusing to recognize the validity of Sue’s complaint, Sue performing Jude’s forgiveness for him in a foreign literary language. The dialogue does not resolve their philosophical or religious disagreements, particularly about sexuality, which then resurface in subsequent episodes. But the scene at the Temperance Hotel is itself embedded in a pattern that reaches back much further in the novel, perhaps even to Sue and Jude’s earliest conversations. Jude’s third part charts the Scylla and Charybdis that Sue will negotiate for the remainder of the novel between Jude and Richard, both courses complicated by disparate desires and conflicting theological and moral frameworks. These meetings, in turn, litter the novel with “illusory eschatons” that pose as resolutions to their conflicts and thereby promise the possibility of progress. In chapter III-4, for example, Sue and Jude debate whether or not one can “trust” traditional beliefs, and Sue disparages Christianity. Jude is insulted, and Sue attempts to patch their disagreement up quickly by painting Jude as “forgiving” and herself as “faulty and troublesome” (122). At the beginning of the next chapter, Sue checks Jude’s

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

133

profession of love for her, for which she soon apologizes by epistle, the letter concluding with a question that likewise prescribes Jude’s forgiveness: “You do forgive your thoughtless friend for her cruelty?” (124). Another quarrel transpires, and the chapter concludes with a second letter that begins where the previous ended: “Forgive me for my petulance yesterday!” (127). Here, as in scenes noted above, the language of forgiveness functions as a means of diffusing—rather than resolving—seemingly insoluble disagreements. Sue has quarreled with Jude, in the first case, over his traditional religious beliefs and, in the second, over his increasingly passionate feelings for her. In her apologies, however, Sue does not recant her theological skepticism or un-romantic feelings. Their exchanges demonstrate that a peace without true understanding or agreement is transitory. It is unsettled easily by the remembrance of irrepressible feelings (such as Sue’s guilt and Jude’s desire) or their divergent theologies. Hardy has, in short, provided abundant evidence of Milbank’s theory. The “purely interhuman” forgiveness we find in Jude (and, as noted above, elsewhere in Hardy’s fiction) can only produce an “illusory eschaton.” The conditions for a real ending or resolution have not been met. Again and again, Jude’s plot thus shows that the language of forgiveness is an inadequate, indeed defective, means of bringing conflict to an end. Tutu has written that there is “no future without forgiveness.” Hardy’s plot suggests that there’s no future even with forgiveness— indeed, forgiveness, by being an unstable compromise, merely recycles the past. That forgiveness brings only illusory finality is a point that Hardy firmly establishes in two episodes in the novel’s final part. The first episode, appearing in chapter VI-9, stages Sue’s ultimate submission to the terms of Richard’s forgiveness (viz., her return as his wife). This acceptance is predicated on Sue’s conversion in chapter VI-3 to a theology built around a God of vengeance—the slaughter of the innocents she now interprets as a “judgment” against her sinful lifestyle with Jude. Hardy frames this conversion as a mental breakdown, Sue’s final collapse under the weight of her guilt and suffering. Hardy suggests that by imagining herself as a sinner in the hands of an angry God, Sue receives a paradoxical comfort since this theology suggests that there is a moral shape to reality. If there is a

134

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

God, in other words, then perhaps God can be appeased. However horrible this might seem, Hardy implies that it is still easier for her than to acknowledge that there is no moral structure to history or reality. It is against this penitential background that Sue decides to return to Richard, who, she observes, “has—so magnanimously—agreed to forgive all” (318). In other words, it is only a theological illusion that creates the context in which she submits to the forgiveness from which she had long recoiled. In our modern parlance, we frequently couple truth and reconciliation—to paraphrase Tutu, only when our sins are fully revealed can we fully repent, forgive, and be reconciled. The last reconciliation in Jude makes forgiveness a product of delusion; it is, in other words, only through untruth that the scene of forgiveness can come about. As if this arrangement weren’t horrible enough, Hardy shows that this illusory economy of atonement drives Sue to endure one last perverse expression of forgiveness. By returning to Richard as his wife, she must suffer what Albert Guerard described as her “final penance”— “[sharing] his bed” (422). The novel’s antepenultimate chapter (VI9) concludes with a gruesome scene in which Richard speaks the words of forgiveness as he wraps his arms around her. Sue must “[clench] her teeth” and “utter no cry” as the final consequence of Richard’s forgiveness is acted out upon her (353). Forgiveness is presented as tantamount to rape, the rapist believing himself to be acting charitably, the victim believing that her suffering is demanded to rectify her sins and thereby appease an offended god. Hardy here effectively severs the relationship between forgiveness and freedom, discussed elsewhere in this book. For Arendt, once again, forgiveness is essential to our ability to remain “free agents” in a world in which “trespassing is an everyday occurrence” (240). The Richard-Sue plotline stresses that forgiveness constrains your freedom—your ability, as Sue says early in the novel, to do “just as [you] choose” (123). Her forgiveness comes at the cost of betraying her ethical ideals and of total submission to others, body and soul. Forgiveness obliterates her. One last attempt is made by the minor character Mrs. Edlin to find in forgiveness a satisfying and meaningful resolution to Sue

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

135

and Jude’s relationship and, in turn, the narrative as a whole. This takes place in the exchange with Arabella that brings the novel to an end: “Didn’t he ever ask you to send for her, since he came to her in that strange way?” [said Mrs. Edlin.] “No. Quite the contrary. I offered to send, and he said I was not to let her know how ill he was.” [said Arabella.] “Did [Jude] forgive her?” “Not as I know.” “Well—poor little thing, ’tis to be believed she’s found forgiveness somewhere! She said she had found peace!” “She may swear that on her knees to the holy cross upon her necklace till she’s hoarse, but it won’t be true!” said Arabella. “She never found peace since she left his arms, and never will again till she’s as he is now!” (322) In bringing his novel to an end with a discussion of forgiveness, Hardy invokes the familiar strategy in Victorian fiction that we have seen elsewhere in this book. Mrs. Edlin, in turn, behaves as if Hardy has written a much more conventional book. She would believe the best of and for all involved, and this means forgiveness. To recall Peter Leithart’s terms discussed in Chapter 1, Mrs. Edlin wants to hold out the possibility of a “deeply comic” resolution. A chapter earlier, she had expressed her hope that God would forgive the dying Jude. Now she claims Sue’s forgiveness, too, as an article of belief. Hers is exactly the religious reality that makes “deep comedy” possible in her belief that human lives are set against the background of divine benevolence. And indeed, in holding out the hope for God’s forgiveness of Jude and Jude’s of Arabella, she maps exactly that end which Leithart’s model suggests we should find. When the novel was first published serially in Harper’s Magazine (under the title Hearts Insurgent), the editor, Henry Alden, excised this dialogue.7 It is easy enough at the conclusion of the present study to see why. Mrs. Edlin is a fool, and her wishes for the novel’s ending, which any numbers of Harper’s (then billed as a “family” magazine) readers would have shared, are shown to be childish. In Sue, Hardy

136

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

has plotted a familiar narrative arc seen elsewhere in this book in which a sexually subversive woman repents of her sin and gets her forgiveness in the end—marital and theological orthodoxy reaffirmed in the process. Hardy has, in so many ways, acknowledged the conventions surrounding the portrayal of forgiveness in the period. The ending represents the culmination of what we might call his insider’s attack on the old strategy. Forgiveness seems, ultimately, not merely impotent—as the scenes in the middle of the book had suggested—but dangerous, even perverse. We noted above that Jude provides numerous negative examples that support Milbank’s claims about the insufficiency of purely human forgiveness. Here, I want to suggest, the ending offers support for Leithart’s theory by virtue of its repudiation of the old narrative strategy alongside its critique of forgiveness. The God who underwrote the resolution Mrs. Edlin hopes for is no longer in his heaven. In God’s absence, Hardy suggests, we have no right to expect an ending filled with heartfelt, restorative forgiveness. *** In “The Hard Case of the Would-Be Religious,” as we noted above, Hardy imagines that for moderns who could not magnify Lord as Mary had done, an alternative Magnificat was needed: “let us magnify good works, and develop all means of easing mortals’ progress through a world not worthy of them.” As Pamela Dalziel has argued, Hardy understood his literary works as “good works” in this way (15). “What are my books but one plea ‘against man’s inhumanity to man’—to woman—and to the lower animals?” he asked in an interview with the Pall Mall Magazine in 1901 (qtd in Dalziel 15). This is exactly how Hardy understood the moral purpose of Jude. Indeed, reviewers’ attacks on Jude on moral grounds so surprised him because he thought its moral program might be perceived as overbearing. In late 1895, he observed to his friend Lady Jeune that “my only fear having been that it was too much a book of moral teaching—the inculcation of Mercy, to youths & girls who have made a bad marriage, & to animals who have to be butchered” (103). In such remarks, Hardy frames his fiction in much the same way that Dickens and Trollope do theirs: fiction offers a means to

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

137

teach readers mercy so that they will alleviate suffering when they encounter it in the real world. Eliot makes similar claims about the potential of fiction. In the present case, Hardy hopes that Jude’s suffering will prevent the suffering of others by creating sympathy and changing reader’s minds. Real world Judes, in other words, are to benefit from the character’s sacrifice. The mercy Hardy touts, however, challenges the sexual and marital norms that Dickens and Trollope had left alone. In those cases, forgiveness was indeed the appropriate response: characters like Alice Marwood and Carry Brattle had sinned and thus were in need of it. In Hardy’s fictional world, the purveyors of the traditional forms and attitudes that would censure and forgive sexual sins now seem not generous but wrongheaded, even cruel. For as Richard’s case makes clearest, forgiveness, however generous, contains within it a condemnation, that of the sin that is forgiven. Across Jude, forgiveness looks ever increasingly like the vestige of an outworn creed, whose application, far from making matters better, only makes them worse. For a writer like Dickens, mercy and forgiveness are nearly synonymous—both express the ethical generosity modeled and mandated by Jesus. In Jude, Hardy makes the striking suggestion that forgiveness, in fact, impedes the exercise of mercy. The real means of “easing” the progress of beleaguered sufferers like Jude and Sue is not to forgive the sin but to forget outmoded sexual norms and change the marriage laws. While the book makes such a strenuous case against the foundations on which we forgive (or used to), it is also a novel that relies heavily on scenes of forgiveness to produce its effect. In their tremendous yearning to be forgiven and reconciled, moreover, Jude’s characters are recognizably Victorian creations. It is a longing depicted in the book, scene after scene. While the book at times seems to suggest that we’d be better off abandoning forgiveness (perhaps entirely), it also shows characters who, for the most part (Arabella being an exception), cannot imagine themselves out of a conventional plot that requires forgiveness for life to go on. Perhaps they resemble in this way the narrator of “The Hard Case”—haunted by the memory of religious forms that now won’t work and which, in turn, underscore the degree to which the world cannot fulfill our ethical and spiritual longings.8

138

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Oscar Wilde GUIDO: It was, I think, for Love’s sake that Lord Christ, Who was indeed himself incarnate Love, Bade every man to forgive his enemy. MORANZONE [Scoffingly]: That was in Palestine, not at Padua; And said for saints: I have to do with men. GUIDO: It was for all time said. —Wilde, The Duchess of Padua (1883) When [Christ] says, “Forgive your enemies,” it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one’s own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate. —Wilde, De Profundis (composed 1897) The central text of this last section, De Profundis, marks a double departure from the pattern set in previous chapters. In the first place, there is a difference in genre: De Profundis is not a novel but a prison letter (or something else, as we will see below). Yet it is also, and more fittingly for our purposes, a form of life-writing, and we will see that Wilde weaves significant questions about guilt, repentance, and forgiveness within his attempt to map the narrative arc of his life (past, present, and future). On the other side of “ruin” (his word), how should one live? Who is to blame? Why and how should one repent or forgive? These are the questions Wilde takes up in this prison cell, as he considers (stews over?) what led to his current state. The letter is addressed to his former lover Alfred Douglas—at whose urging Wilde had initiated the legal dealings with Douglas’s father, the Earl of Queensbury, that ultimately led to his

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

139

incarceration—and its most developed narrative thread concerns the tortured history of their friendship. It is a story filled with repentance and forgiveness. Wilde’s project is also important for present purposes because his attempt to come to terms with forgiveness happens within a larger reflection on the life and lessons of Christ. As I have stressed earlier, my aim is not to paint the Wilde of De Profundis as an orthodox or traditionally pious figure by showing that he endorses forgiveness. Rather, Wilde’s prison letter is significant for us because it further testifies to forgiveness’s power to spur dialogue between religion and literature, a trait, of course, that we have traced through this book. Hardy’s Jude seems to call this dialogue to a whimpering end; Wilde’s prison letter shows its ongoing vitality. The second point of departure relates to the discussion in previous chapters of sexual sins. This book has observed that the sexually corrupted fallen woman is a fixture in the economy of repentance and forgiveness in Victorian literature. The scene of reconciliation is the fallen woman’s inevitable destiny; she must repent and receive forgiveness, and there may be occasion for her to forgive in turn. With De Profundis, our attention shifts to the plight of one deemed by many of his contemporaries a “fallen man.” Wilde had been imprisoned, let’s remember, for the shocking crime of “committing acts of gross indecency with male persons,” and he was attacked in the press for his apparent sexual perversion. What is striking about De Profundis, however, is its apparent lack of repentance on this score. While the book is in many ways a “confessional work,” as Jennifer Stevens has written, “it does not conform to late-Victorian expectations of the repentant sinner. Rather than atoning for his violation of society’s moral codes, Wilde declares that the ‘Sins of the flesh are nothing’ ” (170). He confesses to betraying nothing but himself, particularly in his office as artist. Critics have suggested that Wilde may have designed De Profundis as part of larger marketing scheme to restore his reputation and, had he lived, his place in society, making it, in effect, a plea for public forgiveness. To this question we will return below. De Profundis, I want to stress now, makes no gestures toward reinstatement by way of repenting for his sexuality. As Ellis Hanson observes, Wilde is “the author of the framework in which his sins are

140

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

interpreted” (295). And this framework, importantly for our purposes, does not endorse the conventional sexual codes that structured the scenes of repentance and forgiveness featuring fallen characters in our earlier texts. De Profundis, we should also acknowledge, has sometimes been viewed as an anomalous text, one out of step with Wilde’s earlier works both in tone and substance. Its concern for forgiveness, however, shows the prison letter to be of a piece with many of Wilde’s earlier works, including in its framing of forgiveness in Christian terms. Wilde’s fairy tales of the 1880s, including “The Happy Prince,” “The Selfish Giant,” and “The Star Child,” invoke Christian imagery, language, and character types in their reflections on repentance and forgiveness.9 Forgiveness is also a recurring theme of Wilde’s dramas, including An Ideal Husband (1895) and, in a more lighthearted manner, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).10 The Duchess of Padua (1883), one of Wilde’s lesser-known dramas, though, is particularly exemplary in this regard. The Duchess introduces a number of issues related to forgiveness that Wilde would return to in De Profundis and thus provides a useful starting point for our analysis. Specifically, The Duchess provides a robust articulation of Wilde’s belief, evident across in his work and extended in De Profundis, that Christ teaches forgiveness for “Love’s sake”: we forgive out of love, and we are forgiven if we have it, especially if we have, like Mary Magdalene, “loved much.” It is with a ringing endorsement of this ethos that the play comes to an end, the final conversation featuring the title character and her lover, Guido: DUCHESS: Oh, do you think that love Can wipe the bloody stain from off my hands, Pour balm into my wounds, heal up my hurts, And wash my scarlet sins as white as snow? For I have sinned. GUIDO: They do not sin at all Who sin for love. DUCHESS: No, I have sinned, and yet Perchance my sin will be forgiven me. I have loved much. (130)

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

141

The scene invokes two now familiar biblical texts. In her first speech, Beatrice quotes Isaiah 1:18 (“though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow”), which we heard Trollope’s Vicar Fenwick use to correct the Methodist Mr. Puddleham. The play concludes with words taken from Luke 7:47 (“Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much”), which sits at the tail end of the episode in which Jesus narrates the Parable of the Two Debtors, one of the texts Dickens weaved into The Life of Our Lord. Beatrice is, in effect, asking if the biblical promises of forgiveness can be hers—whether her life, too, can fit within the larger redemptive story that Isaiah and Luke have often been taken together to describe. It is notable, though, that neither here nor elsewhere do Beatrice or Guido indicate that they need a savior to intervene for them. Rather, Wilde suggests with Beatrice’s last words that her romantic love for Guido is the mechanism of salvation. Luke 7:47 was something of a preoccupation for Wilde—he cites the verse repeatedly in his books, always with the same astonishment at Jesus’s claim. In The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), Wilde writes, “We are not told the history of her love, but that love must have been very great; for Jesus said that her sins were forgiven her, not because she repented, but because her love was so intense and wonderful” (136, my emphasis). In Beatrice’s case, repentance and punishment are necessary, as she herself claims. Wilde’s point, though, is that love is the primary consideration; eros prepares the way for agape and its abundant forgiveness.11 Her love, in effect, makes her “qualified” for forgiveness. That love ultimately trumps or wipes away all of her sins Wilde emphasizes with his last stage direction. After she dies, she assumes the pose of the Pietà, her face “now the marble image of peace, the sign of God’s forgiveness” (stage directions 131).

De Profundis and “Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculus” In early 1897, prisoner C.C.3 at H.M. Prison, Reading, composed a 55,000-word prose manuscript that has proven difficult for scholars

142

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

to agree about how to categorize, even to name. It has been labeled, among still other things, an artistic and/or philosophical “manifesto,” a “testament,” a “confession,” a “gospel,” a “prison letter,” a “love letter,” even an “auto-hagiography.”12 It has been seen as proof of Wilde’s thorough secularism, his ties to liberal Protestantism, his agnosticism, his fidelity to the tradition of “Christianity-Romanticism,” and his emerging Catholicism. It has been published, in various forms and lengths, as De Profundis (after Psalm 129 in the Vulgate and 130 in the Authorized Version), “Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculus” (as if a Papal encyclical), and simply “To Alfred Douglas” according to the standard practice for titling correspondence. As these descriptions suggest, the body of criticism on this text has revealed in it a range of impulses, concerns, debts, and ambitions—whether personal, artistic, spiritual, social, or some mixture thereof. Parts of the document were published in 1905 as De Profundis, the title given by Wilde’s friend and literary executor, Robert Ross. About a third of the length of the original, De Profundis makes no direct reference to Wilde’s relationship with Douglas. Critics have questioned its value now that the complete text can be printed without the fear of censure or legal action (on the part of the Douglas family).13 In his edition of the work, the textual critic Ian Small argues that both versions are not only historically significant but to some extent justified by Wilde’s own directions for the dissemination of the document, whole or in part. Although Douglas is the only person named in the salutation, Wilde’s instructions to Ross name several readers who should be sent copies of parts or the whole of the document. More than just a letter, the document is a literary performance, perhaps multiple performances.14 Small elects, in turn, to print two versions in his edition: one, titled De Profundis, corresponds to the shorter version edited by Ross; the other, for which Small uses the “Epistola” title, includes the entirety of Wilde’s text. This section follows Small’s lead. I begin below with the latter third of the text, the section from which Ross drew De Profundis, in which the author offers the outline of his new artistic creed. In this section, Douglas, or “Bosie” as Wilde refers to him in the letter, falls out of view for long stretches while Jesus assumes center stage. Given Wilde’s depiction of Bosie earlier in the letter, he would seem

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

143

an unlikely recipient for this section. Unsurprisingly perhaps, Wilde wished for this section to be sent to two “sweet women” who “will be interested to know something of what happened to my soul— not in the theological sense, but merely in the sense of the spiritual consciousness that is separate from the actual occupations of the body” (309). The discussion of forgiveness in this section, which I will continue to call De Profundis, is embedded within Wilde’s attempt to develop a Christ that he can follow. Turning then to the larger narrative arc that “Epistola” recounts, I will compare Wilde’s practical history of forgiving Bosie with the theory of forgiveness he advances in the Christological section. Set within the wider narrative arc of Wilde’s and Bosie’s relationship, his pronouncements about forgiveness at the end of the document, we will see, appear much more tentative, much less stable than they do free of the personal context in De Profundis.

I. Wilde’s discussion of forgiving in De Profundis sits within his larger meditation on the meaning of Christ. As Guy Willoughby has written, Wilde’s text “depends for its effect on a central rhetorical strategy: the speaker’s identification with Jesus Christ, who is presented […] as the great historical model and inspiration of the writer’s reformulated aestheticism” (103). As Willoughby’s words suggest, the Christ with whom Wilde identifies is not the traditional Christ of faith, nor, as Jennifer Stevens has argued, is this quite the historical Jesus of the Higher Critics. Wilde aligns himself with Ernest Renan, whose Vie de Jésus Wilde calls in this text “that gracious fifth gospel, the gospel according to St Thomas” (175). With Renan, Wilde argues that Christ’s “place” is “among the poets” (174). But Wilde also outdoes Renan, insisting that Jesus is an “autogenous creation. Where most agnostic studies of Christ called on historical, social and religious contexts to explain how and why he might have come to be considered divine, Wilde insists that ‘out of his own imagination entirely did Jesus of Nazareth create himself’ ” (Stevens 171). It is thus the ahistorical nature of Jesus’s life and thought that so appeals to Wilde. Wilde is fascinated by the fact that Jesus’s life is unprecedented, not reducible to his environment. Jesus thereby represents the supreme

144

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

individualist and thus the supreme artist, the project to which Wilde claims to have now dedicated himself in this text. Jesus shows him the way. The miracle of Christ’s life, Wilde argues, is that he was able to achieve what he imagined, to make his exalted self-conception a reality: There is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of a young Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own shoulders the burden of the entire world; […] and not merely imagining this but actually achieving it, so that at the present moment all who come in contact with his personality, even though they may neither bow to his altar nor kneel before his priest, in some way find that the ugliness of their sin is taken away and the beauty of their sorrow revealed to them. (174) This passage well displays the characteristics that make De Profundis such a difficult book to categorize. Wilde’s is a wholly human Jesus, and yet, as Stevens writes, he is “hailed” repeatedly “as the cynosure for all ages,” “described in language so reverential as to be reminiscent of one of the more devout Lives of Jesus” (170). At the close of this passage, Wilde attributes to his Jesus nearly the powers ascribed to the Agnus Dei, echoing John 1:29 (“Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”). But, of course, Wilde’s Jesus does not take away sins by virtue of his endurance of the cross; he does not, in other words, atone. “Contact with his personality”—a Wildean equivalent of sorts to the evangelical vision of salvation as “knowing Jesus”—takes away not the sin but its hateful character. Wilde registers this in aesthetic terms: the trouble with sin is not its evil but its ugliness; our relief from sorrow comes not from escaping it but discovering its true beauty. As critics have long noted, the religious, ethical, and artistic are so thoroughly blended in this text that they become almost indistinguishable. But it is exactly such a mixture that the appreciation of Jesus’s life requires. For Wilde, no less than Dickens, Jesus is the Exemplar of the right and holy way to live. In Wilde’s view, though, what Jesus’s example reveals is that the most profound, righteous, and sanctified life belongs to the greatest individualist, the artist.

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

145

Aesthetic judgment thus bleeds into ethics, and the pursuit of beauty and imagination, especially through sorrow, assumes a religious character and authority. With this framework in mind, we may now return to the second epigraph above, which sits within a larger consideration of the question of whether Christ’s central principle was altruism. Wilde argues it was not: “To live for others as a definite self-conscious aim was not his creed. It was not the basis for his creed. When he says, ‘Forgive your enemies,’ it is not for the sake of the enemy, but for one’s own sake that he says so, and because love is more beautiful than hate” (177). Wilde seems to have in mind here Jesus’s command in Luke 6:27 to “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you” (cf. Matthew 5:44). Once again, Wilde frames forgiveness as an expression of love. But now Wilde suggests that the giving of love in situations where one receives hate is also a profoundly aesthetic action. To love and forgive is to choose beauty over the apparent ugliness of hatred and, presumably, vengeance as well. The biographer Frank Harris writes that in De Profundis “Now and then [Wilde] divined the very secret of Jesus,” citing this passage as an example (219). The “secret” is that Jesus preaches forgiveness not out a sense of altruism, as we might believe, but self-interest. I have noted in previous chapters the debate in the Victorian period (as now) about whether forgiveness is exclusively or properly bilateral (part of an exchange) or if it can happen without the offender’s corresponding gesture of repentance. Without ruling out bilateral forgiveness, Wilde formulates here perhaps the strongest claim that we have yet seen that forgiveness might be a single-party affair. We observed above that forgiveness occasions crises of communication and clashes of values in Hardyan fiction. Wilde, we might say, gets around this problem by centering forgiveness on the victim’s self-interest. Whether the enemy or transgressor agrees with the forgiver’s assessment doesn’t matter. The mandate to forgive thus survives in Wilde’s recasting of the Christian message but, as we have seen elsewhere in this book, the process of transposition profoundly changes its meaning. Repentance, meanwhile, undergoes its own metamorphosis. In this case, the discussion is embedded within Wilde’s reflection on Christ’s “romantic” (i.e., imaginative) dealings with sinners. Wilde

146

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

observes: “His primary desire was not to reform people […] The conversion of a publican into a Pharisee would not have seemed to him a great achievement. But in a manner not yet understood of the world he regarded sin and suffering as being in themselves beautiful holy things and modes of perfection” (183). Wilde thus repudiates a vision of repentance as a kind of drastic conversion, a complete turning away from the life before. As Peter Christensen suggests, in this “antinomian gospel,” Wilde is not trying to preach adherence to the external law but to the law within. Wilde’s Jesus preaches selfrighteousness not Pharisaical righteousness, and he blesses anything that contributes to the process of self-realization. Thus, even sin and suffering can comprise “beautiful holy things” since they, too, have a role to play in our journey of self-perfection. But even if this is true, repentance remains necessary. “Of course the sinner must repent,” he then claims (183). Wilde’s repentance is not a mode of lamentation or self-castigation but a new beginning, the start of a new life and thereby the remaking of the old. Why repent? “Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realise what he had done” (183). He continues: The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that: it is the means by which one alters one’s past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say in their Gnomic aphorisms, “Even the Gods cannot alter the past.” Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it, that it was the one thing he could do. Christ, had he been asked, would have said […] that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept, he made his having wasted his substance with harlots, his swine-herding and hungering for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy moments in his life. (183) Wilde’s model here recalls Charles Griswold’s narrative-centered definition of forgiveness discussed in Chapter 1. If we cannot undo the past, Griswold argues, we “can nonetheless change without pretense to undoing it, or ignoring, avoiding, rationalizing, or forgetting it. One may adopt a different perspective on [the past], attach a different meaning to it, respond to it in a different way, adapt it to one’s evolving life ‘story’ ” (100). Wilde here suggests a

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

147

parallel action within the context of repentance. One cannot undo the past he implies, but one can “alter” it—one can, by virtue of repentance, assign past events a new place within the story of one’s ongoing process of self-realization. Sins are not holy or beautiful in themselves, but they may become as much through repentance. To make the point, Wilde does a little renarrating of his own, inserting just such a realization into the Parable of the Prodigal Son, one of, as we have repeatedly observed, the go-to parables in the period for explaining repentance and forgiveness. In giving the section of text we had just reviewed the title De Profundis, Ross had suggested that Wilde’s life followed a narrative arc of sin and redemption. In Psalm 130, the speaker cries “out of the depths” to a God with whom, the speaker confidently asserts, “There is forgiveness” (v. 4) and “plenteous redemption” (v. 7). The title is, of course, an interpretation, but, to recall Tate’s remarks above, not one without strong grounds in the text. What Ross printed, once again, roughly corresponds to the section of the letter that Wilde thought rewarding reading for the “sweet women” who wanted to learn of his soul’s progress.15 But even in acknowledging the suitability of the title, we must also observe that the Christian notions of redemption and forgiveness have undergone here a drastic reconceptualization. Willoughby argues that De Profundis “resolutely rephrases the Christian ideal to the world” (117). But perhaps we might better say that Wilde has taken the received religious language of forgiveness and set it in a new virtue system, in effect, given it a new grammar. The same might be said about Wilde’s relation to the Christian narrative of redemption; he embraces its basic arc but stresses that salvation comes not from without but within. Jesus shows us how to save ourselves, and, as we have seen, forgiveness remains a vital practice in this renovated salvation story.

II. Readers of the complete prison letter (referred to here, once again, as “Epistola”) have long observed its startling swings in tone between sections, paragraphs, even sentences. P. K. Saint-Amour rightly describes it as “Wilde’s most ambivalent text, oscillating between vituperation and forgiveness, […] rebuke and manifesto, […] Bosie and

148

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

Christ” (115). Almost two-thirds of the document speaks directly to Bosie, reprimanding him for his many faults, recounting the history of what Wilde calls their “ill-fated and most lamentable friendship” (37). The description suggests a tragedy of Shakespearean proportion, and it is clear enough which man is the tragic hero. Wilde begins the letter with a litany of reproaches, observing how their friendship “ruined” Wilde in every imaginable way—retarding his work, devastating his bank accounts, tarnishing his reputation, and, worst of all, causing Wilde to compromise his ethics. As Ashley Robins notes, this part of the text provides a “vivid and inexorable catalogue of grievances, recriminations, bitterness and sorrow” (193). The letter makes clear, as Willoughby rightly notes, that Wilde’s ambition is to “resist any feelings of bitterness or resentment,” yet his inability to do so is readily apparent from the outset (113). For his ruin, Wilde claims ultimate responsibility, though using tangled formulations like this: “I blame myself for allowing you to bring me to utter and discreditable financial ruin” (40). In a more exalted vein, he later writes, “I cannot allow you to go through life bearing in your heart the burden of having ruined a man like me […] I must take the burden from you and put it onto my shoulders” (94). Critics have, as noted above, often discussed this text as a kind of confession, and rightly so. Moments like these suggest what a strange species of confession it is, as Wilde’s confession of his sins bleeds into what sounds more like a script for Bosie’s. This is, of course, a consequence of the paradoxical thing Wilde claims to do; for to assume Bosie’s burden, Wilde, of course, must first establish that there is a burden to be borne. Willoughby rightly points to this latter quotation as an example of Wilde’s identification of himself with Christ. It looks forward to the later passage, noted above, in which Wilde describes Jesus “imagining that he could bear on his own shoulders the burden of the entire world” and “actually achieving it” (174). In Willoughby’s view, these words speak to the fact that “Like Christ,” Wilde “must refrain from censuring his adversary, but rather try to awaken his own conduct” (113). But whereas Christ takes away the “ugliness of sin,” Wilde would call attention to the dreadfulness of what Bosie has done and what he, in turn, has suffered. Censure is inevitable, and it comes in droves.

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

149

There is thus no shortage of venom in Wilde still. Recognizing this helps us to understand Wilde’s most important statement about forgiveness prior to the Christological mediations of the last third of the book. Roughly midway through the letter, Wilde claims, At the end of it all is that [sic] I have got to forgive you. I must do so. I don’t write this letter to put bitterness into your heart, but to pluck it out of mine. For my own sake I must forgive you. One cannot always keep an adder in one’s breast to feed on one, nor rise up every night to sow thorns in the garden of one’s soul. It will not be difficult at all for me to do so, if you help me a little. (94) We should observe the temporality of Wilde’s forgiveness: he has got to forgive Bosie; he must do so. The action, in other words, has not already been completed. His state recalls the one we found Dickens’s Edith in at the close of Dombey and Son. In plotting or imagining her future forgiveness, Edith, we observed, begins to forgive Dombey. Forgiveness is not simply a discrete event but a process. The passage admits the difficulty of willing forgiveness and thereby of giving up resentment completely, the latter point readily apparent elsewhere in the text as we have seen. This passage also brings us back to an issue discussed at points across the book—forgiveness’s therapeutic value. As we noted in Chapter 1, intrapersonal models of forgiveness have proven very attractive to moderns, the popularity of Lewis Smedes’s Forgive and Forget exemplifying the trend. Smedes, to recall my remarks in Chapter 1, argues that forgiveness should, above all, make the victim feel better. Forgiving, in Smedes’s words, enables us to “turn back the flow of pain” (2). We forgive, in this view, primarily in order to experience release and relief. Forgiveness is purgative. In modern discourse, especially of the popular kind, resentment and anger are often likened to toxins or poisons. On this line, the writer Anne Lamott observes, in a much-quoted quip, that “not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die” (134). Wilde makes a similar claim, though in his case it is the proverbial adder at the breast and the biblical thorn in the soul’s garden (Jeremiah 31:12) that signifies his plight. For Wilde, too, resentment is corrosive and,

150

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

one might add, repetitive. Wilde’s point is basically Lamott’s: this bitterness is killing me, he says, and so I must forgive you for my own sake. We have noted that Wilde makes a related case for subjectcentered (as opposed to forgiveness centered on the object—the offender) forgiveness in the Christological section of the document. There, once again, he argues that the secret key to Christ’s command to “Forgive your enemies” is rooted in the aesthetic pursuit of beauty rather than a straightforward altruism. In both cases, Wilde shifts forgiveness’s significance away from the offender, and thus the relationship, locating it, first and foremost, in the forgiver’s selfinterest. Leon Chai argues that there is something “curious” about the fact that Douglas’s “exclusion is signalized” above all by Wilde’s declaration of forgiveness (109). Curious indeed, we might say, but it is also of a piece with Wilde’s individualistic grammar of forgiveness. Wilde must get over Bosie’s sins; they stifle his creativity now just as they stifled it at the time he committed them. If Wilde’s bitterness has made his soul sick, it also threatens to make him a bore. But even in outlining a theory that would seem to exclude Bosie from the process entirely, Wilde hints at the need for Bosie’s involvement, as the last line of the passage suggests: “It will not be difficult at all for me to do so, if you help me a little.” He continues: “Whatever you did to me in the old days I always readily forgave. It did you no good then. […] My forgiveness should mean a great deal to you now. Some day you will realize it. Whether you do so early or late, soon or not at all, my way is clear before me” (94). On the question of Bosie’s role, Wilde thus wavers. While he seems to want to invite Bosie into the process of forgiveness, looking perhaps for signs of his repentance, he also acknowledges that they have a long history of failed past attempts. Does Bosie grasp the meaning of Wilde’s forgiveness now? Will he later? Perhaps, we might say, Wilde has not so much straightforwardly excluded Bosie as found it difficult to determine where Bosie might fit in the process. Wilde’s claim here that in the “old days I always readily forgave” has been well established at this point in the “Epistola” narrative. Scene after scene shows Bosie misbehaving horribly, causing Wilde to question whether he ought to end their relationship, only to be pulled back in by Bosie’s contrition. In March 1893, for example,

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

151

Wilde observes that Bosie created a “revolting” scene the night before departing Wilde’s house at Torquay. Wilde resolves “never to speak to you again, or to allow you under any circumstances to be with me” (45). But then Bosie “wrote and telegraphed from Bristol to beg me to forgive you and meet you,” and at the meeting Wilde forgives (45). In the same paragraph, Wilde observes that three months later they repeated the pattern, and then again three months later. And so on. This part of the text thus recalls the cyclical plot of Hardy’s novel discussed above. The reconciliations are always shortlived, Bosie’s misconduct bringing Wilde to the cusp of a decisive break, from which Bosie’s penitence causes him to retreat. No less than Jude, “Epistola” is a study in the inability of human forgiveness to bring about real resolution; illusory eschatons abound. But while Hardy, recognizing this predicament, seems to retreat from forgiveness, perhaps altogether, Wilde keeps faith with it. Milbank, let’s recall, argues that this plight is insoluble on purely human terms—only when human forgiveness is set against and in some sense “participates” in divine forgiveness can it provide security and finality. The Christological section of the letter, what we have called De Profundis, suggests that Wilde has reached a similar conclusion. Jesus provides Wilde with not only a rationale for forgiveness most conducive to his healing (as noted above) but also an alternative narrative arc in which forgiveness has a transformative influence on those it touches. Christ’s mandates would seem to validate Wilde’s love and his past attempts at forgiveness, while his careful analysis of Christ’s teachings reveals a profounder ideal. But if the Christological section promises resolution to what comes before, so too does the narrative section color the later pronouncements. The voice of the “Epistola” section, in other words, talks back to that of De Profundis. Gregory Jones, as noted in Chapter 1, argues that narratives provide tools to assess our advancement in the craft of forgiveness since it allows us to look back on past attempts to practice it, sorting the true from the false or imperfect embodiments. “Epistola” reveals that Wilde’s history of forgiveness is not at all perfect, as he admits at several points, most directly at the end: “How far I am away from the true temper of soul, this letter in its changing uncertain moods, its scorn and bitterness, its aspirations and its failure to realise those aspirations” (155). The Wilde of this

152

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

section shows himself an imperfect practitioner of the theory he later preaches. His forgiveness has a way of turning into what Stephen Arata aptly calls the “forgiveness curse” (268). Wilde does not offer a tidy resolution to the story of his forgiveness of Bosie; as we have seen, the text presents him in the midst of the process of forgiving. Wilde’s position recalls that of Trollope’s characters that we noted in the last chapter in which the Christian ideal remains difficult for even its most ardent advocates. As noted above, critics have suggested that Wilde may have had plans to use the letter’s contents to restore his tarnished reputation and, had he lived, his social station. The intimate letter, in other words, doubles as a public confession. I observed above, too, that while Wilde certainly admits to having degraded himself as a result of his friendship with Douglas, he does not describe his sexuality as a sin.16 Wilde has, in other words, betrayed himself most of all, and, according to the logic of his individualist program, it would appear to be to himself that he must, above all, atone. Society, he observes at several points, punished him for the wrong crime, but he considers himself due for punishment anyway. That society will shun him is symptomatic of its corruption, not his (151–152). And yet in spite of such explicit declarations, critics have seen in this text a careful appeal to his reader’s forgiveness. Consider, for example, these remarks from Norbert Kohl: Behind the mask of the reasonable man, magnanimously confessing his own responsibility for his downfall, could Wilde not hope for a degree of sympathy and forgiveness from his reader as he attributed the disaster to his own fatal weakness of will—so much more forgivable than financial exploitation and intellectual sponging? […] The role of the martyr forgiving his executioner guarantees sympathy, and indirectly the reader finds himself called upon to exercise precisely this Christian virtue as he considers the case of C.3.3. (282) Kohl’s remarks speak to Hanson’s claim, noted above, that Wilde is “the author of the framework in which his sins are interpreted” (295). Wilde’s strategy, in Kohl’s account, amounts to making himself forgivable by juxtaposing his noble guilt with Bosie’s more despicable

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

153

kind. Kohl, of course, has a point. Wilde does quite confidently align himself in the text with the role of the tragic hero who has been brought down by a lesser nature. I want to suggest that there is more going on in Wilde’s manner of framing the response to his confession. “Epistola,” as we have seen, is of a piece with Wilde’s earlier writings in describing forgiveness as the proper response to those who, though sinners, have loved. Wilde repeatedly observes that he has loved Bosie despite the fact that Bosie himself is dominated, like his father, by hate. Wilde, I am suggesting, presents himself as exactly the kind of party who should receive forgiveness for, in Wilde’s mind, the best of all possible reasons: because he, like Mary Magdalene, “loved much.” While Kohl is certainly right that Wilde uses Bosie as a foil to stress his own nobility, we should also recognize in Wilde’s instructions regarding Jesus’s teaching (above all, in Luke 7:47) his attempts to shape the terms on which his actions should be evaluated. If, in other words, Wilde is an effective evangelist for his new gospel, he has every reason to expect his reader’s forgiveness. *** Thomas Hardy and Oscar Wilde have been linked before at the conclusion of a study of depictions of forgiveness in Victorian literature. This is John Reed’s Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness (1995). In a swift survey of the literary fortunes of forgiveness from the Victorian period to the late twentieth century, Reed names Hardy and Wilde (alongside Joseph Conrad and H.G. Wells) as co-conspirators against forgiveness. He has these authors in mind when he writes that “what signals the collapse of the ‘Victorian novel’ and the Victorian worldview is the diminished role of forgiveness in serious literature” (478). As these words suggest, Reed posits a narrative of decline—in which writers of the 1890s break faith with an implicitly Christian “ethic” of forgiveness that had been shared by authors, including a doubter like Eliot, and their audience across the period (477). In challenging this narrative, I do not mean to suggest that the opposite is true. Reed correctly perceives that Hardyan fiction undermines strategies for depicting forgiveness that had animated

154

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

many texts earlier in the century. But even in its denial of the power of forgiveness, as we have seen, Hardy’s last novel remains haunted by it. Forgiveness may be impotent, even incoherent in Jude, but it keeps coming up nonetheless. Forgiveness’s powers may be “diminished,” but its narrative significance is not. Hardy, moreover, imagines that his fiction might serve as a vehicle for inspiring “mercy” and “charity” in readers, recalling the ambitions of earlier writers like Dickens and Trollope. Setting Hardy’s text alongside Wilde’s prison letter, as we have seen, further testifies to the insufficiency of a straightforward narrative of decline. Wilde’s forgiveness is, like the Christology on which it depends, anything but orthodox. And yet for all of its idiosyncrasies, Wilde’s writings about forgiveness (in the letter and elsewhere) go about their business by way of the standard biblical episodes and religious terms. Wilde confronts many of the same predicaments that we have noted in earlier chapters. Wilde’s writings belong, in other words, to the same religious and, we might now add, narrative tradition—as do Hardy’s, though his conclusions are despairing. Without claiming these two authors for the side of orthodoxy or convention, I want to suggest that they belong to an ongoing debate about the form and efficacy of forgiveness that includes the earlier writers that this study has considered. In lieu of a narrative of decline, this book has offered a story about spirited and spiritual debate concerning the theory and practice of forgiveness that connects authors across the Victorian period’s decades and religious spectrum.

Notes 1

For a thorough review of the range of critical assessments of Hardy’s religious position, see Timothy Hands’s article “One Church, Several Faiths, No Lord” in the Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy.

2

As Dennis Taylor and Jean-Jacques Lecercle have shown, Tess portrays the establishment of a national English idiom as a powerful force of modernization, its impact akin to that of the railroad. The novel shows that Tess’s loose command of the common idiom imperils her, especially in relation to men from higher classes. Tess is, on this reading, a tragedy of language.

FORGIVING IN THE NINETIES: HARDY AND WILDE

155

3

For more on Hardy’s characterization of the two women, see Rosemarie Morgan’s Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy.

4

This issue is the focus of the second chapter of Jankelevitch’s Forgiveness, titled “The Excuse: To Understand Is to Forgive” (57–105).

5

In Chapter III-5, for example, Sue fears how Richard will respond after she escapes the Training-School at Melchester that she had enrolled in at his wishes. She reports: “I hope he’ll forgive me; but he’ll scold me dreadfully, I expect!” (123). Foreshadowing later events, she frames Richard’s forgiveness as conditional and his conditions as onerous. Throughout the novel, Richard’s forgiveness entails subordination to his judgment and his will.

6

See, for example, Peter Casagrande’s Unity in Hardy’s Novels.

7

For more on Jude’s publication history, see Laurence Lerner and John Holmstrom’s collection Thomas Hardy and His Readers.

8

In Theology and the Victorian Novel, Russell Perkin makes a related claim regarding the way in which Christian ideals haunt the novel. He writes, “There is nothing in Jude to suggest that it will do you any good to attempt to live by the gospel, but the gospel remains the standard by which Hardy can critique a world that is ruled only by the letter, and devoid of any trace of divinity” (195).

9

For more on the importance of forgiveness and related themes across the Wilde canon, see Tate.

10

Norbert Kohl observes of Wilde’s comedies that “Apart from in [sic] Lady Windermere’s Fan, […] the past fault is always revealed or confessed by the guilty party, who then asks for forgiveness or, at least, understanding” (207). For Kohl, as for other critics, this recurring “pattern of secret and revelation, guilt and forgiveness” is best explained in psychological terms; the pattern is “obviously applicable to Wilde’s own situation in the 1890s” as a closeted homosexual (207). I want to suggest that Wilde’s use of such plot arcs also reflects his ongoing reflection on the Christian ethical imperative of forgiveness and its literary value, a question as we have seen that links Wilde to contemporary writers.

11

See also Philip Cohen on the shift from eros to agape in Wilde’s works in the 1880s.

12

Several studies discuss the critical problem of defining the text’s genre and religiosity; see, for example, Small, Christensen, and Arata.

13

For a superb review of the issues of textual authority, see Small’s introduction (1–31).

156

FORGIVENESS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE

14

See, in particular, Small’s discussion of the thoroughly “literary” character of the text and its transmission (1–22). See also Small’s article “Identity and Value in De Profundis” and Gillespie’s discussion of its literary status and relation to the larger canon of Wilde’s works (171–172).

15

A number of Wilde’s contemporaries read the work this way. Hanson observes that the theologian Hugh Walker, to cite one example, witnessed in De Profundis “the rebirth of a soul” and heard from it issue a “startling gospel” (qtd in Hanson 106).

16

For an extended discussion of the complex issues of sexuality at stake in the public and legal discussion of Wilde’s conviction, see Oliver Buckton’s chapter “Defacing Oscar Wilde” in Secret Selves: Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography (107–160).

Bibliography Abel, Olivier. “Tables du Pardon.” Le pardon. Ed. Olivier Abel. Paris: Éditions Autrement, 1991. Adams, Marilyn McCord. “Forgiveness: A Christian Model.” Faith and Philosophy 8.3 (1991): 277–304. Arata, Stephen. “Oscar Wilde and Jesus Christ.” Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions. Ed. Joseph Bristow. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. 254–73. Arendt, Hannah. “Labor, Work, Action.” The Portable Hannah Arendt. Ed. Peter Baehr. New York, NY: Penguin, 2000. 167–181. ———. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Arnold, Matthew. Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of The Bible. New York, NY: Macmillan and Co., 1873. Austin, J. L. “A Plea for Excuses: The Presidential Address.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 57 (1956–1957): 1–30. Beckwith, Sarah. Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. Biggar, Nigel. “Forgiveness in the Twentieth Century: A Review of the Literature, 1901–2001.” Forgiveness and Truth. Eds Alistair McFayden and Marcel Sarot. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. 215–217. Boumelha, Penny. Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Bray, Charles. Philosophy of Necessity: Or Natural Laws as Applicable to Moral, Mental, and Social Science. London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1863. Buckton, Oliver. Secret Selves: Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. Butt, John and Kathleen Tillotson. Dickens at Work. New York, NY: Routledge, 2008. Caputo, John. The Weakness of God. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Carroll, David. “Introduction.” George Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Ed. David Carroll. New York, NY: Routledge, 1971. 1–48. ———. George Eliot and the Conflict of Interpretations: A Reading of the Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

158

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Casagrande, Peter. Unity in Hardy’s Novels: “Repetitive Symmetries.” Lawrence, KS: Regents Press of Kansas, 1982. Chai, Leon. Aestheticism: The Religion of Art in Post-Romantic Literature. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1990. Channing, William. A Selection from the Works of William E. Channing. Boston, MA: American Unitarian Association, 1855. Chapman, Audrey R. and Hugo van der Merwe, eds. Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa: Did the TRC Deliver? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Chesterton, G. K. Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens. The Collected Works of G. K. Chesterton. Vol. XV. San Francisco, CA: Ignatius, 1989. Cohen, Philip. The Moral Vision of Oscar Wilde. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1978. College, Gary. God and Charles Dickens: Recovering the Christian Voice of a Classic Author. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2012. Colón, Susan. Victorian Parables. London: Continuum, 2012. Corlett, Angelo. Heirs of Oppression. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010. Cunningham, Valentine. Everywhere Spoken Against: Dissent in the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. ———. “Anthony Trollope and Law, Laws, Legalisms and Assorted Legislations.” Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature: Law and Literature. Vol. 18. Ed. Brook Thomas. Göttingen: Hubert and Co., 2002. 89–108. ———. “Dickens and Christianity.” A Companion to Charles Dickens. Ed. David Paroissien. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. 255–276. Dalziel, Pamela. “The Gospel According to Thomas Hardy.” Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honor of Michael Millgate. Ed. Keith Wilson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 3–19. Davis, Philip. The Victorians. The Oxford English Literary History. Vol. 8. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Derrida, Jacques. “On Forgiveness.” On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Michael Hughes. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001. 27–60. Dickens, Charles. Hard Times. New York, NY: Penguin, 1995. ———. “To Angela Burdett Coutts.” 26 May 1846. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. IV. Eds Madeleine House and Graham Storey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977a. 552–556. ———. “To John Forster.” 28 June 1846. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. IV. Eds Madeleine House and Graham Storey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977b. 573–575. ———. “To John Forster.” 18 October 1846. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. IV. Eds Madeleine House and Graham Storey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977c. 637–638.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

159

———. “To David Macrae.” 1861. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. IX. Eds Madeleine House and Graham Storey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997d. 556. ———. “To David Macrae.” 7 December 1861. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. IX. Eds Madeleine House and Graham Storey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997e. 557. ———. The Life of Our Lord. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1999. ———. Dombey and Son. New York, NY: Penguin, 2002. ———. The Battle of Life. A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books. Ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008a. 245–322. ———. The Chimes. A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books. Ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008b. 85–162. ———. A Christmas Carol. A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books. Ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008c. 5–84. Digeser, Peter. Political Forgiveness. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Dinsmore, Charles. Atonement and Literature and Life. Boston, MA: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1906. Dodd, Valerie. George Eliot: An Intellectual Life. New York, NY: Macmillan, 1990. Eliot, George. Adam Bede. Chicago, IL: Belford, Clark, and Co., 1888. ———. Rev. of “The Creed of Christendom.” Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings. Ed. W.R. Greg. London: Penguin, 1990. 286–296. ———. “History of ‘Adam Bede.’ ” The Journals of George Eliot. Eds Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 296–302. Enright, Robert and Joanna North. “Introducing Forgiveness.” Exploring Forgiveness. Eds Robert Enright and Joanna North. Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. 1–8. Fiddes, Paul S. The Promised End: Eschatology in Theology and Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Gillespie, Michael Patrick. Oscar Wilde and the Poetics of Ambiguity. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996. Graver, Suzanne. George Eliot and Community: A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Greg, W. R. The Creed of Christendom; Its Foundations and Superstructure. 4th ed. Vol. 2. London: Trübner and Co., 1875. Griswold, Charles. Forgiveness: A Philosophical Investigation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Griswold, Charles and David Konstan. Ancient Forgiveness: Classical, Judaic, Christian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

160

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Guerard, Albert. “Hardy’s portrait of Sue Bridehead.” Rpt. in Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Ed. Norman Page. New York, NY: Norton, 1999. 424–427. Hands, Timothy. “One Church, Several Faiths, No Lord: Thomas Hardy, Art, and Belief.” The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy. Ed. Rosemarie Morgan. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. 199–216. Hanson, Ellis. Decadence and Catholicism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hardy, Thomas. “To Edward Clodd.” 17 January 1897. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Vol. II. Eds Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. 143. ———. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Ed. Robert Ebbatson. New York, NY: Penguin: 1994. ———. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Ed. Tim Dolin. New York, NY: Penguin, 1998. ———. Jude the Obscure. Ed. Norman Page. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Norton, 1999. ———. Notes for “The Hard Case of the Would-be-Religious.” 1907. Thomas Hardy. Eds Hardy, Thomas and Florence Hardy. Ware: Wordsworth, 2007. 342. Harris, Frank. Oscar Wilde. Ware: Wordsworth, 2007. Hauerwas, Stanley. “Constancy and Forgiveness: The Novel as a School for Virtue.” Notre Dame English Journal 15.3 (Summer 1983): 23–54. Heady, Emily Walker. Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013. Hennell, Sara. Christianity and Infidelity: An Exposition of the Arguments of Both Sides. London: Arthur Hall, Virtue, and Co., 1857. Higbie, Robert. Dickens and Imagination. Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 1998. Hill, Johnny Bernard. Prophetic Rage: A Postcolonial Theology of Liberation. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2013. Hilton, Boyd. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1785–1865. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Hitchens, Christopher. The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2007. Horan, Daniel. “The Grammar of the Kingdom in a World of Violence: The (Im)Possible Poetics of John D. Caputo.” Violence, Transformation, and the Sacred. Eds Margaret R. Pfeil and Tobias Winright. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2012. 71–84. Ingram, Brian. “Evangelicalism and Religious Crisis: The Experience of George Eliot.” Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination. Eds Jo Carruthers and Andrew Tate. Bern: Peter Lang, 2010. 49–64.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

161

Jaffe, Audrey. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Jankelevitch, Vladimir. Forgiveness. Trans. Andrew Kelley. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005. John, Juliet. Dickens’s Villains: Melodrama, Character, and Popular Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Jones, Gregory. Embodying Forgiveness: A Theological Analysis. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1995. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a New Epilogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Knight, Mark and Emma Mason. Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Knight, Mark and Thomas Woodman, eds. Biblical Religion and the Novel, 1700–2000. London: Ashgate, 2006. Kohl, Norbert. Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1989. Lamott, Anne. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. New York, NY: Random House, 1999. Larson, Janet. Dickens and the Broken Scripture. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. The Violence of Language. New York, NY: Routledge, 1990. Ledger, Sally. “Christmas.” Charles Dickens in Context. Eds Sally Ledger and Holly Furneaux. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Leithart, Peter. Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, and Hope in Western Literature. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2006. Lerner, Laurence and John Holmstrom, eds. Thomas Hardy and His Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews. London: The Bodley Head, Ltd., 1968. Lewis, Linda. Dickens, His Parables, and His Reader. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2012. MacDonald, George. “It Shall Not be Forgiven.” Unspoken Sermons. London: Alexander Strahan, 1867. 66–99. Maconochie, Alexander. Crime and Punishment. London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1846. Macrae, David. Amongst the Darkies and Other Papers. Glasgow: John S. Marr, 1876. Madden, William. “The Search for Forgiveness in Some NineteenthCentury English Novels.” Mansions of the Spirit: Essays in Literature and Religion. Ed. George A. Panichas. Portland, OR: Hawthorn Books, 1967. 180–199.

162

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Maison, Margaret. Search Your Soul, Eustace: A Survey of the Religious Novel in the Victorian Age. London: Sheed and Ward, 1961. Marlow, James. Charles Dickens: The Uses of Time. Cranbury, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 1994. Marwick, Margaret. New Men in Trollope’s Novels: Rewriting the Victorian Male. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. McFayden, Alistair. “Introduction.” Forgiveness and Truth. Eds Alistair McFayden and Marcel Sarot. London: Bloomsbury, 2001. 1–14. Mermin, Dorothy. Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Milbank, John. Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon. New York, NY: Routledge, 2003. Morgan, Rosemarie. Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy. New York, NY: Routledge, 1988. Musekura, Célestin. An Assessment of Contemporary Models of Forgiveness. New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2010. Myers, William. The Teaching of George Eliot. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984. New, Melyvn. “Taking Care: A Slightly Levinasian Reading of Dombey and Son.” Levinas and Nineteenth-Century Literature. Eds Donald R. Wehrs and David P. Haney. Cranbury, NJ: Rosemont, 2009. Nord, Deborah Epstein. “ ‘Vitiated Air’: The Polluted City and Female Sexuality in Dombey and Son and Bleak House.” Sexualities in Victorian Britain. Ed. Andrew H. Miller and James Eli Adams. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. 38–59. Norlock, Kathryn. Forgiveness from a Feminist Perspective. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009. Ostry, Elaine. Social Dreaming: Dickens and the Fairy Tale. New York, NY: Routledge, 2002. Perkin, Russell. A Reception-History of George Eliot’s Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1990. ———. Theology and the Victorian Novel. Québec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009. Petersen, Rodney L. “A Theology of Forgiveness: Terminology, Rhetoric, and the Dialectic of Interfaith Relationships.” Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Religion, Public Policy, and Conflict Transformation. Eds Raymond G. Helmick and Rodney L. Petersen. Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2001. 3–26. Picton, Hervé. “Trollope, Liberalism and Scripture.” The Bible in the 19th Century: The Word and Its Re-wordings in British Literature and Thought 5.4 (2007): 85–102. Putt, B. Keith. “Violent Imitation or Compassionate Repetition? Girard and Caputo on Exemplary Atonement.” Religion and Violence in a Secular World. Ed. Clayton Crockett. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2006. 21–45.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

163

Qualls, Barry. “George Eliot and Religion.” The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot. Ed. George Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 119–137. Raines, Melissa Anne. George Eliot’s Grammar of Being. London: Anthem Press, 2011. Reed, John. “Paying Up: The Last Judgment and Forgiveness of Debts.” Victorian Literature and Culture 20 (1992): 55–68. ———. Dickens and Thackeray: Punishment and Forgiveness. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1995. Rev. of Adam Bede. London Quarterly Review (July 1861). Rpt. in George Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Ed. David Carroll. New York, NY: Routledge, 1971. 104–108. Ricoeur, Paul. “The Difficulty to Forgive.” Memory, Narrativity, Self, and the Challenge to Think God: The Reception within Theology of the Recent Work of Paul Ricoeur. Eds Maureen Junker-Kenny and Peter Kenny. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2004. 6–16. ———. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Roberts, Robert. “Therapies and the Grammar of a Virtue.” The Grammar of the Heart: New Essays in Moral Philosophy and Theology. Ed. Richard H. Bell. San Francisco, CA: Harper and Row, 1988. 149–170. ———. Taking the Word to Heart: Self and Other in an Age of Therapies. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1993. ———. “Forgivingness.” American Philosophical Quarterly 32.4 (1995): 289–306. Robins, Ashley. Oscar Wilde—The Great Drama of His Life: How His Tragedy Reflected His Personality. Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2012. Russell, George W. E. Sketches and Snapshots. New York, NY: Duffield and Company, 1910. Saint-Amour, P. K. The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2003. Sanders, Andrew. Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist. London: Palgrave, 1982. Schramm, Jan-Melissa. Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in NineteenthCentury Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Schwarz, Daniel. Reading the Modern British and Irish Novel 1890–1930. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Sedgwick, Eve. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1985. Seeley, John Robert. Ecce Homo: A Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. 19th ed. London: Macmillan and Co., 1886. Shuttleworth, Sally. George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

164

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Simpson, Richard. “George Eliot’s Novels.” Home and Foreign Review 3 (October 1863): 522–549. Rpt. in George Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Ed. David Carroll. New York: Routledge, 1971. 221–250. Skene, Felicia. The Hidden Depths. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1867. Small, Ian. “Love-Letter, Spiritual Autobiography, or Prison Writing? Identity and Value in De Profundis.” Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions. Ed. Joseph Bristow. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003. 86–100. ——— “Introduction.” The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume 2: De Profundis; “Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis.” Ian, Small. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 1–30. Smedes, Lewis. Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve. New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1984. Spooner, William Archibald. Bishop Butler. London: Methuen and Co., 1901. Stevens, Jennifer. The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1920. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. Tate, Andrew. “Decadence.” The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature. Eds Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowland. Oxford: Blackwell, 2012. Taylor, Dennis. Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen Forties Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954. Tran, Jonathan. “Emplotting Forgiveness: Narrative, Forgetting, and Memory.” Literature and Theology 23.2 (June 2009): 220–233. Trollope, Anthony. “The Fourth Commandment.” Fortnightly Review 3 (15 January 1866): 531–538. ———. “Formosa.” Saint Paul’s 5 (October 1869): 75–80. ———. “Preface.” The Vicar of Bullhampton. Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1870. ———. Autobiography of Anthony Trollope. New York, NY: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1905. ———. The Last Chronicle of Barset. New York, NY: Penguin, 2002. ———. The Vicar of Bullhampton. Boston, MA: IndiPublish.com, 2009. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York, NY: Random House, 2009. Volf, Miroslav. Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation. Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1996. Walder, Dennis. Dickens and Religion. London: Routledge, 2007. Waldron, Vincent and Douglas Kelley. Communicating Forgiveness. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2008.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

165

Welsh, Alexander. The City of Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971. Wesley, John. “Sermon LVII: Cause and Cure of Earthquakes.” The Works of the Reverend John Wesley, A.M. Vol. 1. New York, NY: J. Emory and B. Waugh, 1831. Wheeler, Michael. St John and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Wilde, Oscar. “The Duchess of Padua.” The Plays of Oscar Wilde. Ware: Wordsworth, 2000. 51–131. ———. De Profundis. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume 2. Ed. Ian Small. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005a. 157–193. ———. “Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis.” The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: Volume 2. Ian, Small. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005b. 35–156. Williams, Rowan. “Address at the Wreathlaying Ceremony to Mark the Bicentenary of the Birth of Charles Dickens.” Dickens Quarterly 29.2 (June 2012): 113–115. Willoughby, Guy. Art and Christhood: The Aesthetics of Oscar Wilde. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1993. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. Wordsworth, Christopher. Sermons, Preached at Harrow School. London: J.G.F. and J. Rivington, 1841. Worthington, Everett. Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Theory and Application. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. ———. Dimensions of Forgiveness: A Research Approach. Radnor, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2008. Wright, T. R. “The Victorians.” The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology. Eds Andrew W. Hass, David Jasper, and Elisabeth Jay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 148–163. Zemka, Sue. Victorian Testaments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Index Note: The letter “n” following locators refers to notes. Abel, Olivier x, 1, 22 Adams, Marilyn McCord 115 Alden, Henry 135 Arendt, Hannah 27–31, 36n. 7, 111, 134 atonement 2, 35, 45, 48–50, 63, 114–15, 118n. 17, 134 Auden, W. H. 26 Beckwith, Sarah viii, 5–6, 10–13, 15–16, 19, 27, 30, 32, 107, 117n. 13 Biggar, Nigel 36n. 7 Boucicault, Dion 85–6 Boumelha, Penny 130 Bray, Charles 100–1, 103 Buckton, Oliver 156n. 15 Butler, Joseph x, 29 Butt, John 78n. 21 Caputo, John 47, 76n. 5 Carroll, David 107, 109, 112, 114 Chai, Leon 150 Channing, William 49 Chapman, Audrey 36n. 6 Chesterton, G. K. 72 Christology 45–50, 121, 143–7, 154 Clarke, James F. 36n. 9 Cohen, Peter 155n. 11 Colledge, Gary 45 Cólon, Susan 37n. 19, 69, 78n. 19, 91–2

Confession 10, 12, 19, 103–10, 117n. 13, 126, 139, 142, 148, 152–3 Conrad, Joseph 153 Corlett, J. Angelo 36n. 7 Coutts, Angela 41, 50–1, 54–5 Cox, Samuel 120 Cunningham, Valentine 42, 44, 56, 66, 81, 89, 104–5, 110, 117n. 9, 123 Dalziel, Pamela 136 Davis, Philip 65, 81, 93 deep comedy 25–6, 135 Derrida, Jacques x, xii n. 2, 103, 124–7 Dickens, Charles 2–3, 19–20, 22, 33–4, 39–78, 80–2, 84, 87, 96, 103, 123, 136–7, 141, 144, 149, 153–4 religious views 42–50, 55–7 works The Battle of Life 33, 55–62, 67, 72 Bleak House 39–40, 76n. 1 The Chimes 57, 61, 66 A Christmas Carol 56–7, 72, 77n. 12 Dombey and Son 19–20, 34, 62–78, 80, 95, 113, 132, 149 Hard Times 39, 47

167

INDEX

The Haunted Man 57, 61, 68, 77n. 10 The Life of Our Lord 42–50 Our Mutual Friend 69 Digeser, Peter 94–5 Dinsmore, Charles 114–15 Dodd, Valerie 99 Douglas, Alfred (“Bosie”) 121–2, 138, 142–3, 147–53 Eliot, George 3, 22, 33–4, 79–80, 96, 99–118, 137, 153 religious views 99–103 works Adam Bede 34, 79, 103–18 “Janet’s Repentance” 106 Middlemarch 117n. 13 The Mill on the Floss 106 Rev. of Creed of Christendom 102 Romola 107 Enright, Robert viii Evangelicalism 43, 49–50, 72, 89, 99, 104–6, 144

Hands, Timothy 154n. 1 Hanson, Ellis 139–40, 152, 156n. 15 Hardy, Thomas 3, 8–9, 13, 22, 34, 36n. 4, 94, 113, 119–37, 139, 145, 151, 153–5 religious views 120–4 works “De Profundis”/“In Tenebris” 119–22 Far from the Madding Crowd 125 Jude the Obscure 22, 119, 121, 124–37, 139, 151 The Mayor of Casterbridge 125–6 The Return of the Native 125 Tess of the D’Urbervilles 8–10, 13, 113, 126, 128, 154n. 2 Hauerwas, Stanley xi, 37n. 12, 80, 87, 116nn. 1, 5 Heady, Emily 45, 70 Hennell, Sarah 99–103, 106, 109–10 Higbie, Robert 71 Hill, Johnny Bernard 31 Hilton, Boyd 76n. 6 Horan, Daniel 76n. 5

Fiddes, Paul 37n. 13 forgiveness and community 27–34 dimensions of 3–4 grammar of 5–15 and narrative 16–27 proper field of x–xi sentiment-based theory of 94–5 therapeutic value of 6, 111, 113, 149 Victorian preoccupation with 1–3, 13

Jaffe, Audrey 77n. 12 Jankelevitch, Vladimir 127, 155n. 4 John, Juliet 78n. 18 Jones, L. Gregory 20–3, 30, 105, 151

Graver, Suzanne 33, 37n. 18 Greg, W. R. 100–3, 106, 110, 112 Griswold, Charles viii–x, 17–20, 35n. 3, 36n. 7, 82, 101–2, 146 Guerard, Albert 134

Kelley, Douglas 37n. 12 Kermode, Frank 37n. 13 Knight, Mark xii n. 5, 25, 37n. 19, 117n. 8 Kohl, Norbert 152–3, 155n. 10 Kriner, Tiffany 37n. 13

Ingram, Brian 117n. 7

168

Larson, Janet 48–50, 54, 66, 74 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 154n. 2 Ledger, Sally 61 Leithart, Peter 25–7, 37n. 14 Lewis, Linda 67–8, 72 MacDonald, George 13–16, 36n. 10 Maconochie, Alexander 39, 51–3, 66, 76n. 7 MacRae, David 42–3, 45, 56 Madden, William 36n. 4 Maison, Margaret 76n. 4 Marlow, James 62, 77n. 10 Martineau, James 2, 36n. 9 Marwick, Margaret 116n. 6 Mason, Emma xii n. 5, 25, 117n. 8 Maurice, F. D. 2 McFayden, Alistair 12 Milbank, John 26–7, 131–3, 136, 151 Morgan, Rosemarie 129–30, 155n. 3 Musekura, Célestin 37n. 17 New, Melvyn 70–1, 78n. 20 Newman, John Henry 2, 36n. 2 Nord, Dora Epsteinm 75 Norlock, Kathryn 36n. 5 North, Joanna viii Ostry, Elaine 61, 78n. 18 Pagani, Karen ix, xii n. 2, 36n. 3 parables Good Samaritan 47 Laborers in the Vineyard 66 Lost Sheep 64 mad economy of 47, 50, 54–5, 66, 74 parabolic fiction 68–72, 91–2 Prodigal Son 60–1, 69–70, 72, 91–2, 105, 111, 147 Rich Man and Lazarus 78n. 19

INDEX

Two Debtors 46–7, 141 Unforgiving Servant 46 Wise and Foolish Builders 68 Perkin, Russell 118n. 15, 155n. 8 Petersen, Rodney 31–2 Picton, Hervé 116nn. 2, 6 Prickett, Stephen xii n. 5 Putt, B. Keith 47 Qualls, Barry 117n. 8 Raines, Melissa 112, 117n. 14 Reed, John 35n. 2, 36n. 4, 58, 73, 153–4 Renan, Ernest 143 Ricoeur, Paul x–xi, 69, 113 Roberts, Robert 5–7, 9–13, 16, 36n. 8, 80, 92, 115 Robins, Ashley 148 Ross, Robert 119, 121, 142, 147 Russell, George W. E. 117n. 10 Saint-Amour, P. K. 147–8 Sanders, Andrew 75 Schramm, Jan-Melissa 118n. 17 Schwarz, Daniel 131 Sedgwick, Eve 118n. 16 Seeley, John Robert 29–30, 37n. 15 Shakespeare, William 10, 32 Shuttleworth, Sally 117n. 11 Simpson, Richard 107, 114, 118n. 15 Skene, Felicia 23–5 Small, Ian 142, 155n. 13, 156n. 14 Smedes, Lewis 6–7, 149 Spooner, W. A. 29–30 Spurgeon, Charles 2, 36n. 9 Stevens, Jennifer 139, 143–4 Tate, Andrew 121, 155n. 9 Taylor, Dennis 154n. 2 Tillotson, Kathleen 78nn. 18, 21

169

INDEX

Tomalin, Claire 119–20 Tönnes, Ferdinand 37n. 18 Tran, Jonathan 23, 25, 105 Trollope, Anthony 3, 8, 22, 34, 79–99, 103, 108, 111, 115, 116, 136–7, 141, 152, 154 religious views 80–2 works Autobiography 87, 95 The Claverings 116n. 4 “Formosa” 85–6 “The Fourth Commandment” 80 The Last Chronicle of Barset 8, 82–4 The Small House at Allington 116n. 3 The Vicar of Bullhampton 34, 79–81, 85–99, 116, 132, 141 The Way We Live Now 116n. 4 Tutu, Desmond xii n. 1, 31–4, 84, 98, 133–4 Unitarianism 41, 45, 48–50, 66 Urania Cottage 50–5, 65, 67, 87, 96 Volf, Miroslav 31–2, 98 Walder, Dennis 43, 65, 68 Walker, Hugh 156n. 15

Wells, H. G. 153 Welsh, Alexander 35n. 2, 41, 48–9, 77n. 13 Wesley, John 106 Westcott, Brooke 36n. 9 Wheeler, Michael xii n. 5 Wilde, Oscar 3, 22, 34, 59, 119–22, 138–56 religious views 139–47 works De Profundis 34, 119, 121, 138–47, 151–2 The Duchess of Padua 138, 140–1 “Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculus” 142–3, 147–53 “The Happy Prince” 140 An Ideal Husband 140 The Importance of Being Earnest 140 “The Selfish Giant” 140 The Soul of Man under Socialism 141 “The Star Child” 140 Williams, Rowan 39–40, 45, 71, 74 Willoughby, Guy 143, 147–8 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 5–7, 10–11 Wordsworth, Christopher 37n. 16 Worthington, Everett xii n. 1, 36n. 5, 37n. 11 Zemka, Sue 76n. 3