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Imagining Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction traces the use of Catholic-coded aesthetics throughout four Victorian texts in order to resolve the following paradox: Why, and to what effect, are Catholic images and ideas positively invoked among authors who were not themselves Catholic, and in a decidedly anti-Catholic culture? My response emerges from an aesthetic interest rather than a theological one and proposes that Catholic-coded aesthetics lend a concreteness to the moral abstractions that were popular in Victorian England. In other words, the way these writers imagine Catholicism reveals much about how Victorian culture as a whole tried to reconcile reason and the imagination in the wake of Romanticism and Enlightenment-era thought.
Although in many ways the Victorian age recaptured the Enlightenment’s zeal for scientific and technological progress, these advancements also left a lingering disenchantment in their wake. To reclaim a sense of wonder, Victorians turned to some Romantic ideas yet advocated moral directives that resisted the authority Romantics gave to individual intuition. When the resulting emphasis on morality had overtaken Victorian art, aesthetes began promoting “art for art’s sake” in order to divorce beauty from moral injunctions. I argue that the texts in this dissertation do not renounce the moral aims that characterize Victorian fiction. Instead, they implement Catholic-coded aesthetics to complete that moral reasoning, via character arcs that frequently involve the cultivation of a more sophisticated aesthetic vision.
This dissertation gives methodological precedence to close readings of Villette by Charlotte Brontë, Middlemarch by George Eliot, Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater, and The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, with biographical and historical context incorporated where relevant. The chapters are as follow: 1) Introduction, 2) Gothic Catholicism in Villette, 3) “Widening the Skirts of Light”: Middlemarch and Transfigured Morality, 4) Marius the Epicurean’s “Poetic Beauty”, 5) “The Divinest Thing in Us”: Aesthetics of Morality and Conversion in The Picture of Dorian Gray, and 6) Conclusion.
