The nineteenth-century British and American novel and the reputation of Calvinism

This dissertation examines the representation of Calvinism in nineteenth-century British and American fiction, specifically novels by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charlotte Brontë, George MacDonald, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. These novelists often perpetuate the nineteenth-century popular characterization of Calvinism and Calvinists as severe and oppressive. Criticism largely replicates this language, so that the perception of Calvinism as a negative phenomenon is a critical commonplace. This dissertation challenges the critical tendency to pay inadequate attention to how the works of these novelists express ambivalence toward rather than wholesale condemnation of Calvinism. Through theologically attuned readings, it resists deprioritizing and simplifying literary engagements with religion and theology and demonstrates that fiction is a unique medium for the exploration and formation of religious and theological ideas. The opening chapter suggests that criticism aligns Stowe's The Minister's Wooing (1859) with what it sees as the theological sympathies of sentimental fiction while overlooking how the novel simultaneously resists such categorization, namely by not taking the tone of dismissal toward Calvinism that defines much sentimental fiction. Chapter Two analyzes the representation of the Calvinist St. John Rivers in Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), with special attention to Jane's discursive privilege as first-person narrator. It presents the possibility that a critical assent to the secularization narrative would have readers see Jane Eyre as more sophisticated – i.e., less naïve about religion – the more we read it as moving away from Calvinism. Chapter Three decenters the narratorial polemical preaching with which George MacDonald's realist novels condemn Calvinism. It argues not only that MacDonald's realist fiction, especially Robert Falconer (1868), accomplishes a theological fulsomeness more characteristic of MacDonald's religious vision and methodology as represented in his broader theological and literary corpus but that realism is able and suited to representing the complexity of theology and religious experience. The final chapter argues that Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860) lacks aesthetic coherence as a Gothic text partly because it holds the trademark religious terror of Gothic fiction in abeyance with a sense of hopefulness. While this hopefulness conflicts with the Gothic, it does not conflict, as some criticism assumes, with Calvinism.