Newman Studies Journal

A common complaint of modern moviegoers is that the business is now oriented only to telling the stories of the young. It is useful to remember that this tendency is neither uniquely contemporary nor limited to the medium of film. With reference to Middlemarch, Virginia Woolf praised George Eliot as a writer of "English novels for grown-up people." The bildungsroman, or coming of age story, was prevalent—in Woolf's view, overly prevalent—in English novels in the nineteenth century. Literary critics have accordingly treated the English novel too exclusively through the lens of that genre of fiction, having difficulty accounting for the plots of those novels that dealt with what Henry James called "the country of the general lost freshness": middle age and beyond. Eliot herself said of such stories that she always put the plot "inside," leading many critics to judge that her stories' plots were "imponderable" or unable to be tracked.

The Victorian Novel of Adulthood, Rebecca Rainof's study, part of Ohio University Press's new Series in Victorian Studies, aims at accounting for these stories in a way that makes sense of their plots as something other than simply coming-of-age stories set among the no longer young. However, her use of the term "novels of arrested development" might lead one to think that they are really a species of "belated bildungsroman" (as some critics described Henry James's The Ambassadors), rather than the accounts of adults who are still growing in an understandable pattern after having already "grown up."

What Rainof argues is that the pattern of the plots follows the model of Newman's understanding of purgatory described in Tract 90 as "a time of maturing that fruit of grace, but partly formed in them in this life,—a schooltime of contemplation" and illustrated in "The Dream of Gerontius."

Rainof's first chapter examines "Gerontius" in detail, showing how that work used interspersed lines from the Roman liturgy, and soliloquies by Gerontius broken by apostrophe ("Jesu, have mercy! Mary, pray for me!") to "provid[e] lyric suspension while still contributing to the overall narrative of a man journeying to the afterlife" (46). In other words, Newman's form and content brilliantly portrayed the process of purgation as somehow temporal but also disconnected from any measurable earthly time—a "seemingly timeless duration" (48). While many [End Page 85] Protestant readers, including Kingsley, thought they could detach the liturgical language and the Catholic doctrine from the story itself, Rainof argues that Newman's craft in the poem won over much of his Anglican audience in a way that Tract 90 never could, citing historical accounts of the gradual embrace of a doctrine of purgatory that grew as many Anglicans dealt with the widespread loss of young lives during World War I.

But the main literary effect of Newman's vision of purgatory as an interior and somewhat placid development is that—in novels by Eliot (chapter 2), James (chapter 3), Virginia Woolf (chapter 4), and many other Victorian authors noted along the way—it provides the model for depiction of midlife development and revelation for the main characters. This would not have been possible, she thinks, based solely on the "Florentine poet's strenuous and clearly plotted trip up Mount Purgatory" (17).

One of the difficulties in this broader argument of the book is that the author provides little historical evidence that the authors she chooses were actually reading "Gerontius." George Eliot, for instance, takes her key quotations from the Purgatorio itself, and the historical evidence is that this is what consciously was on her mind as she depicted the life journey of Gwendolen in Daniel Deronda. The same goes for Woolf's The Years where Eleanor's reading of the Purgatorio in the novel guides her much as Virgil guided Dante in the poem. The historical evidence is that Woolf was indeed...