Victorian Romance and Religion Collide

Abstract

Recent scholarship in the field of nineteenth-century religion and literature has paid close attention to aspects of Victorian culture that tend to be unfamiliar to contemporary readers. Scholars have worked to complexify the monolithic secularization narrative, showing that despite clear secularizing trends, Christianity remained a pervasive cultural force for the Victorians. Timothy L. Carens’s Strange Gods makes a useful scholarly contribution to these trends. Carens effectively argues that the tension between romantic love and religious idolatry permeates nineteenth-century literature and culture, covering categories like didactic literature, sermons, and poetry while focusing primarily on literary fiction. Carens usefully outlines and describes Protestant idolatry discourses (reflecting latent anxieties about love for one’s romantic partner) becoming idolatrous. Carens takes a historicist approach, demonstrating how didactic narratives, fiction, theology, and sermons all worked together to try to understand the tension between loving God and loving people too much. Idolatry can directly thwart a marriage plot, as in Charles Kinsley’s Yeast (1851) or Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). It can also have a nuanced impact on work, as Carens shows throughout the monograph. Each chapter explores a different facet of the interplay between romantic love and idolatry, for religious and non-religious authors alike. Carens’s broad use of resources and analysis of cultural discourse makes this book especially useful to literary scholars and religious historians.