IDOLATRY IN JANE EYRE

Abstract

VICTORIAN CULTURE treated idolatry as a serious and compelling moral problem. For Victorian Protestants, this term meant more than simply the worship of graven images: it became the privileged term for denoting any devotion to a person, thing, or idea that hinders or supplants one's relation to God. It is this more inclusive meaning that especially fascinated the Victorians, and which, in the form of human idolatry, became the focus of so many marriage-plot novels in the period. Since the Reformation, Protestant theologians and writers have emphatically linked idolatry to Roman Catholicism, arguing that its excessive emphasis on external forms of worship obscures God. This connection took on renewed significance in Britain during the early and mid-nineteenth century, an era which witnessed such political milestones as Roman Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and the re-establishment of Roman Catholic dioceses in 1850.The events of 1850 around the restoration of Roman Catholic ecclesiastical government in Britain were popularly deemed the “Papal Aggression.” According to historian Paz, “Roman Catholics themselves added fuel to the Protestant fire” by essentially declaring “supreme spiritual authority over the nation and [denying] the validity of Anglican orders” (9). The distinctive anti-Catholicism of Victorian culture reflects a widespread anxiety about the growing influence of Roman Catholicism – an anxiety, I argue at length elsewhere, that took the form of an obsession with idolatry.