The Victorian Novel of Adulthood. Rebecca RainofЧитать онлайн книгу.
Extremity: The Body in the Afterlife
To capture his speaker’s newly disembodied contentment, Newman develops various techniques for representing the experience of complete sensory loss—a state that would seem to defy representation. In Gerontius’s opening, the prayer “Be with me, Lord, in my extremity!” is echoed in his first concerns in the afterlife when he fears the loss of his body, this state of “extremity” involving a lack of his own physical extremities:
’Tis strange; I cannot stir a hand or foot,
I cannot make my fingers or my lips
By mutual pressure witness each to each,
Nor by the eyelid’s instantaneous stroke
Assure myself I have a body still.
(15)
At first Gerontius mistakenly thinks that he has maintained all of his senses except for sight, and this blindness functions as a synecdoche for complete sensory loss. As the Angel explains to him:
Hast thou not heard of those, who after loss
Of hand or foot, still cried that they had pains
In hand or foot, as though they had it still?
So is it now with thee, who has not lost
Thy hand or foot, but all which made up a man.
(33)
The Angel’s metaphor of having a phantom limb is one that Newman extends to help readers understand the implications of having a phantom body. In Newman’s clever poetic strategy, this phantom body is represented as an absence of sense perceptions that can be understood only through the uncanny continuance of perception. He therefore makes the task of representing this loss one that can in fact be understood in earthly terms. This retentive illusion allows his character to recount experiences that readers can comprehend while they can still interpret them as otherworldly. Absent senses are thus invoked through synesthesia, or as a ghostly presence recalled only through other senses, notably, hearing and touch, which act as surrogates for a full range of sensation: “I hear a singing; yet in sooth, / I cannot of that music rightly say / Whether I hear or touch or taste the tones” (16).
In addition to describing the sensation of having a “phantom body,” Newman also presents this disembodiment as a feeling of being physically enfolded in God’s giant palm.
Another marvel: someone has me fast
Within his ample palm; ’tis not a grasp
Such as they use on earth, but all around
Over the surface of my subtle being,
As though I were a sphere . . .
(16)
Gerontius finds himself safely in the womb-like palm of God, a divine and surprisingly literal realization of God being with him in “extremity,” Gerontius’s lack of physical extremities being soothed by God’s celestial hand. Worries of exhaustion and depletion are now replaced with images of gestation, later echoed in the final scene of immersion in the prenatal waters of purgatory. Gestation, with its creative rather than destructive potential, functions as an analogous temporal model for Newman’s idea of purgatorial progress and proves central to the poem’s appeal as a work focused on regeneration as consolation.
From Consolation to Conciliation
The ability to give consolation, a quality prized by Victorian readers of The Dream, has been framed as the legacy of Tractarian poetry but a modest and ephemeral one at best. G. B. Tennyson asks, “What, for example did the Tractarians accomplish in their poetry as poetry? Certainly it could not be argued that they left any single work of great poetry or even a single great short poem.”61 In the long term, he finds that consolation was simply not enough: “Most readers of poetry want more than a soothing tendency. . . . Readers who cannot bring to the reading of poetry a sympathy with the ideas the Tractarians were at pains to advance will probably not be won over by the power of the poetry alone” (190). Although twentieth-century interest in Newman’s poetry waned, many Victorians with little sympathy for Tractarianism were in fact professedly won over by Newman’s “poetry alone”—the “alone” part being a crucial component in their approval, at least as they understood it.62 This early perception of the poem as a work made up of discrete, isolatable parts proved crucial to its acceptance—though it was by no means true that readers could perform a neat excision of the poem’s theological content and achieve sanitized readings, as they believed. The frequently excerpted soliloquies were in fact the center of Newman’s eschatological musings. Newman’s success resides precisely in fostering this illusion. The poetic form he chose allowed readers to come to a consoling, albeit false, conclusion: namely, that a distinction could be made between his poem’s Catholic content and its “poetry.”
This distinction was made by Kingsley, Doyle, Gordon, and many others in their praise of The Dream. As Doyle says of the poem, “Of the doctrines involved in this striking production it is unnecessary to say more than that there is nothing, except the bare idea of purgatory (a theological and not a poetical blemish), which need prevent any Christian, or, indeed, any one who believes in the providence of God, from valuing it according to its deserts. It is built mainly upon those noble foundations which were laid eighteen hundred years ago, and which are still the common inheritance of Christendom, the common centre of our European civilisation.”63 After suggesting that the poem’s subject and form can be considered separately—lyricism outweighing and even redeeming or canceling out the religious content—Doyle immediately claims the same religious heritage for all Catholics and Anglicans and urges an Oxford ceasefire. He ends by lamenting the “antagonism,” “hostile zeal,” and “unsympathetic demeanor” of those at Oxford with grudges against Newman, and he appeals to his audience’s “genuine respect” and “undiminished affection” for an individual of such worth (123). Doyle’s final comments are evidence of a widespread phenomenon in the poem’s reception history: its ability as a poem to foster a slippage between consolation and conciliation, even when there is nothing especially compromising about the poem ideologically speaking. After all, it is almost exactly the same model of purgatory that Newman presented in Tract 90.
Thus, despite its controversial content, The Dream became renowned for offering relief to its readers, but it ultimately succeeded because it offered readers something more: a cleansing of animosities from the Oxford Movement. As Newman writes in his essay on Keble, “Poetry is the refuge of those who have not the Catholic Church to flee to and repose upon, for the Church herself is the most sacred and august of poets. . . . Now what is the Catholic Church, viewed in her human aspect, but a discipline of the affections and passions? What are her ordinances and practices but the regulated expression of keen, or deep, or turbid feeling, and thus a ‘cleansing,’ as Aristotle would word it, of the sick soul?”64 Newman distinguishes the “cleansing” of Catholics from the lesser consolation prize of nonbelievers reading poetry to find “refuge.” In taking The Dream to heart, many of Newman’s non-Catholic readers may not have followed the kind of cleansing regime its author imagined as a strictly Catholic (and indeed purgatorial) experience, instead finding consolation in his work. But this consolation was nevertheless not without wider implications than merely soothing a few “sick souls.” Newman’s consoling poem did not merely provide refuge for those facing death and seeking a literary balm. It also helped many of its readers perform a different kind of purgation—a cleansing of bitterness following Tract 90.
Accordingly, religious historians have marveled at the poem’s conciliatory powers. Geoffrey Rowell observes not only that The Dream “reached a far larger audience” and “enjoyed great popularity” but also that, ultimately, through The Dream, Newman “presented an understanding of purgatory which was acceptable to many outside his own communion.”65 Novels such as Villette reveal this process of consideration midcentury, and subsequent chapters discuss the resonance of Newman’s theological writing and midcentury eschatology in works of fiction more broadly, showing how a new consoling model of the afterlife eventually