LaMonaca, Maria. Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular
Victorian Home. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2008.
$44.95 cloth, $9.95 CD. ISBN 978 0 8142 1084 0 (cloth), pp. xiii + 231.
Reviewed by: Cheri L. Larsen Hoeckley, English Department, Westmont
College, March 2012.
Maria LaMonaca states early that Masked Atheism will focus ‘mostly on
midcentury literary engagements with Catholicism’ (2). From that focal point, her
thematic clusters of texts indubitably support her claim that ‘women writers of all
Christian denominations (both Protestant and Catholic) appropriated popular
Victorian notions of Roman Catholicism to articulate a shared set of anxieties
about the increasing secularization of the Victorian domestic sphere’ (3). Across
both denominational affiliation and literary genre, laMonaca traces how these
women writers share a consistent anxiety not so much about Catholicism as
about Victorian secularist tendencies, which she identifies at one point as ‘the
forces of materialism, atheism, imperialism, and industrialism’ (98). LaMonaca
convincingly argues that the period’s reigning domestic ideology genuinely
concerned women of faith throughout the variations in Victorian Christianity’s
terrain , and these women explored their concerns through writing about
ecclesiastical practices and doctrine such as transubstantiation, auricular
confession, religious vocation, and celibacy. Masked Atheism begins to suggest
the ways that representations of Catholicism provided Victorian women writers
with a safe means for imagining critiques of that hegemonic understanding of
family life, particularly as it constrained female agency with respect to following
Christian spiritual imperatives.
As a pattern, the book’s chapters bring together pairs of texts focusing on one
Catholic practice or doctrine. That structure reveals LaMonaca’s New Historicist
tendencies, though her fruitful close readings also suggest her equal attention to
matters of genre. On more than one occasion, for instance, she notes that
through the fictional impulses of a courtship novel, Christian women writers
found the opportunity to critique domestic ideology, even though they were
excluded from the realm of sermons where Christian cultural critique was most
commonly voiced. She also makes productive use of other Christian genre,
especially the hagiography. The first two thematic chapters after the introduction
each bring together one novel from Charlotte Brontë with one from Lady
Georgianna Fullerton. In setting Jane Eyre along side the less remembered Lady
Bird, LaMonaca explores how these two novels rewrite the marriage sermons
that served as moral guides for many middle-class Victorian women. The
following chapter returns to these two novelists to consider how the possibilities
of auricular confession allow for more psychologically, morally and spiritually
complex heroines in both Ellen Middleton and Villette. Other chapters consider
anxiety about convents in a range of “forgotten’ fictional texts” (96) and also the
place of transubstantiation in Aurora Leigh and Goblin Market. The final two
chapters actually resist the tendency to pairs, one of those chapters focusing on
the journals, conversion and domestic life of the striking domestic grouping:
Kathleen Bradley, Edith Cooper and their dog Wynn Chow. LaMonaca’s efforts
reach their apex in her penultimate chapter, which considers hagiography and
the Virgin Mary in George Eliot’s Romola.
LaMonaca’s presentation of her masterful archival research offers genuine value
to this work, whether she is mentioning any number of Protestant and Catholic
sermons and pamphlets, or analyzing The Experience of Life (1852) Elizabeth
Missing Sewell’s “fictional apologia for spinsterhood” (96), or opting to work with
the complete journals–rather than the abridged, published versions–of Michael
Field (Bradley and Cooper’s joint pseudonym). Her research on Fullerton results
in a rich reading of both Lady Bird and Ellen Middleton, novels more readily
available than some of her other ‘forgotten’ texts, but still with minimal critical
analysis until now. At a few points, readers may wish for more synthesizing
analysis of how the juxtapositions of these various texts inform our
understanding of Victorian Catholicism, or Victorian Christianity more broadly, or
of domesticity. For instance, though LaMonaca offers some background on
Fullerton’s cofounding and support of the Poor Servants of the Mother of God
(36n), her readers still wonder how Fullerton’s experience with women’s orders
strengthened her sense of women’s vocations outside of marriage—or, more
pointedly in the case of Fullerton and Lady Bird, how that admiration for women
religious strengthens, complicates, or nuances this female Catholic novelist’s
sense of calling within marriage? While it is entirely possible that the archival
evidence cannot support considerations of Fullerton’s inner life, LaMonaca’s
larger concerns with religious motives and anxieties deepens a desire in her
readers for some analysis of the material that she did find.
If Masked Atheism has shortcomings, most of them are the understandable
limitations of an interdisciplinary work joining two fields early in their mutual
relationship. The field is not entirely new, of course. LaMonaca refers to Kimberly
Van Esveld Adams’ Our Lady of Victorian Feminism (Ohio, 2001) and
acknowledges her gratitude to Frederick Roden (Same-Sex Desire in Victorian
Religious Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Mark Knight and Emma Mason
have made the argument in Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An
Introduction (Oxford 2001) that Victorian religious debates across discourses
melded into secularism, often in the most devout of writers. Maureen Moran’s
Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (Liverpool UP, 2007) now
broadens the field of literary studies of the anti-Catholic texts that marked the
mid-century, especially. LaMonaca still holds her own space as one who
considers Christian women writers across denominations, with emphasis on how
Catholic women’s faith and Protestant women’s imagination of the Catholic faith,
equipped them to critique domesticity. Her habit of relying on initially useful, but
ultimately limiting, binaries between pro- and anti-Catholic limits both
LaMonaca’s readings and the possibilities of enhancing her arguments with more
of her research on convents, Catholic women, as well as Protestant novels and
sermons. While LaMonaca’s attention to religious converts (and to those like Eliot
who left Christianity) indicates her sensitivity that various religious states coexist in the same work or in the same believer in a variety of unstable and
fluctuating forms, her labels for those phenomena limit her conclusions. In short,
now that LaMonaca has brought to our attention this range of women’s texts and
their inter-relations, we see opportunities for complexity in her readings. And
yet, her work takes the study of Victorian Catholic women and literary influence
well beyond other current scholarship.
Finally, La Monaca writes with a disciplined clarity that makes her work a sincere
pleasure to read. Her stylistic gifts reveal themselves at their best in her chapter
on Romola, “The ‘Queen of Heaven’ or a Very Confused Nun?: Our Lady of La
Salette, George Eliot, and Victorian Anxieties about God” (160 – 189). LaMonaca
adroitly calls on Edith Wycshogorod’s postmodern theory of hagiographies to
illuminate a dense novel, gracefully offering these sentences:
For Romola to perform saintly action, and for her narrative to take on a
hagiographic quality, two conditions must be met. First Romola must act,
not out of love or reverence for any authority or father figure, but out of
spontaneous love (agape) for the Other in need. To wean Romola off her
chronic dependence on human authority, the novel literally kills off all the
men in her life. . . . The second condition of Romola’s ‘sainthood’ is that
her benevolent actions carry with them a moral imperative for others.
Although Romola, upon awakening in her little village, feeds the hungry
and nurses the sick, her most significant contribution is her ability to
inspire altruism in others.
(184-185)
Masked Atheism offers many significant contributions to the study Victorian
Catholicism and literature, including the ability to inspire others to continued
research.