| Description |
Contrary to Ian Watt, Michael McKeon, Franco Moretti, and others who see the novel as marginalizing religion through Weberian rationalization, I argue in my dissertation that a religious legacy from the Catholic sacrament of penance (ritual confession) motivates the first-person narrators of the novels that I examine. In what I call the legacy of cathartic self-narration, the narrator expects that guilt or anger associated with certain memories may be alleviated through the narration of those memories to a listener or reader. Lucy Snowe, the Protestant narrator of Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853), redefines the cathartic urge in biological terms and confesses her complaints without guilt. By contrast, the guilt-ridden secular narrators of modern fictional autobiographies-in particular, John Dowell in Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier (1915), Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), and Thomas Crick in Graham Swift's Waterland (1983)-do expect to relieve their guilt through their narrative confessions. They experience frustration, however, because the reader cannot absolve them-nor can they absolve themselves. In response to this dilemma, they invent metaphysical frameworks that generalize their conditions, establishing a relationship between self and world that affords them minimal consolation. They exemplify ambivalent secularization by demonstrating how a religious remnant within secularity can motivate the return of religion in a distorted form. |
