The Persistence of Catholicism: How Eighteenth-Century English Writers Imagined a Minority Religious Community.

Abstract

This dissertation studies the engagement of five major eighteenth-century English writers with their nation’s minority Catholic community. Though at the margins of English civil and social life, English Catholics continued to attract converts and remained politically and culturally important throughout the century. Anxieties about the place of Catholics in England suffuse the literature of the period, but they have been obscured by misleading narratives of the rise of a secular, tolerant modernity. This dissertation closely considers plays, novels, and poems whose concerns about English Catholicism have been mostly overlooked, and it investigates the political, cultural, and deeply personal work these texts perform. A central feature of that work is a refiguring of practices of the representation of Catholics and Catholicism. Even hostile writers recognize that the portrayal of Catholics must move beyond the simplistic demonization of traditional imagery. Playing with generic and formal boundaries, or turning to emerging techniques for portraying interior experience, these writers attempt to reimagine Catholics and England’s relationship with them. The first two chapters study John Dryden’s sympathetic portrayals of Catholics in plays written before and after his conversion. The pursuit of Catholic toleration informs his influential experimentation with Restoration heroic drama in Tyrannick Love, while the dramatic form of his masterpiece, Don Sebastian, models the closeting of English Catholicism following the Glorious Revolution. Another pair of chapters compares novels whose explorations of human psychology work through anxieties over the vulnerability of Protestant identity. Daniel Defoe’s protean heroine in Roxana and Samuel Richardson’s immutable hero in Sir Charles Grandison variously represent their authors’ efforts to educate readers on how to resist seduction by the Catholic world. A final pair of chapters examines Alexander Pope’s proto-Gothic poems, Eloisa to Abelard and Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, and Elizabeth Inchbald’s proto-Jacobin novel, A Simple Story. Exploring the feminization and victimization of their community, their works anticipate two genres very much concerned with the portrayal of oppression. This dissertation seeks to enrich our understanding of eighteenth-century literature by recovering the imaginative work English writers performed as they explored their nation’s troubled relationship with its Catholic community.