PATRICK O'MALLEY. Catholicism, Sexual Deviance and Victorian Gothic Culture.

Abstract

It is no longer a surprise that late-Victorian decadence should have been so closely associated with religion, in particular Catholicism: recent work by Ellis Hanson and Jardath Killeen has mapped this connection. The complex relationship between Catholicism and the Gothic has been less discussed, however. The nineteenth century is too often thought of as the great age of secular doubt, perhaps because, as Patrick O’Malley claims, our modernity prevents us from thinking critically about religion. O’Malley's impeccably researched Catholicism, Sexual Deviance and the Gothic serves as a valuable reminder of the centrality nonetheless of issues of religious belief to Victorian public and private life. Throughout this book, Catholicism is portrayed as the source of simultaneous fascination and repulsion in nineteenth-century literature and culture, still far more a threat to the present than a practice safely confined to the past. This threat, O’Malley argues, is often directed at sexual standards: Havelock Ellis in Sexual Inversion, for instance, claimed that ‘in many cases the best and only documentation of deviant sexual activities’ (p. 22) he found was in Roman Catholic records. ‘It is the argument of this book that there is a persistent conjunction of tropes of Catholicism with those of non-normative sexual expression or identity in the literary, artistic, and polemical culture of nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, and, further, that that conjunction reflects an ongoing contest over Britain's sectarian purity as well as its sexual values’ (p. 3). Furthermore, the conjunction is Gothic because of ‘the increasingly troubling fact that England itself was once a Catholic country, that Catholicism is the terrible “buried” secret at the very origin of English Protestantism’ (p. 22).