Abstract
Edmund Gosse’s account of his childhood is found in his masterpiece, Father and Son. In this book, Gosse attempts to come to terms with his upbringing at the hands of a man fanatically devoted to a sect of evangelical Calvinism, the Plymouth Brethren. I explore here what I take to be the central things we can learn about such a faith—and, by implication, other kinds of religious (Christian) faith—from this text. I suggest that it is profound exploration of one of the key ways in which human beings maim themselves and that they do this—in such cases, at any rate—in an attempt to escape from the inconsolability of the human condition.
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Notes
- 1.
I have used the edition in Gosse 2004 [1907]. Otherwise non-attributed parenthetical page references in this chapter refer to this edition.
- 2.
Cf. section IV (190–2) of Porter 1975, especially the quotation from Virginia Woolf at 191.
- 3.
Contrast William Gracie, who claims that Gosse presents his father as being worse than he in fact was. He suggests that we see this is so if we pay attention to the ‘symbolism and imagery’ of Gosse’s text. His claim is that such attention shows that Gosse wishes to imply, without directly saying, that ‘his father…deliberately crush[ed] his son’s innate gifts of artistic consciousness and expression’ (Gracie 1974, 186). This claim is puzzling since in one sense it is obviously clear that Philip Gosse did deliberately seek to crush his son, and Edmund makes no secret of that. But he sought to do so through what he conceived of as love and solicitude, so, in another sense, we can rightly say that Edmund never—any more than his father did—explicitly entertained the thought that his father wished to crush him. You can crush someone through love, and it is often easier to do that than crush him through unmasked violence or aggression, precisely because it is harder for anyone, yourself included, to see that this is what you are doing. I am not sure that Gracie sees the complexities here and I find the points he makes rather forced. Roger J. Porter, taking a somewhat more generous view of Gosse’s style than does Gracie, sees his account as ‘a model of tonal complication in its attempt to be fair and judicious to the elder man’ (Porter 1975, 174).
- 4.
Ruth Hoberman (Hoberman 1988) argues that, in his book, Gosse identifies himself with, understands himself in terms of, figures of women as he liberates himself from his father’s influence. This reading is certainly not entirely implausible, but is surely complicated by the fact that Gosse claims that his mother ‘exercised…a magnetic power over the will and nature of my Father’ (11), a power that continued even after her death. The figure of the woman thus occupies to a very large extent a repressive and oppressive role in Gosse’s narrative, no less so than does the figure of the man. Cf. also what Gosse says about Mrs Paget, discussed below.
- 5.
Michael Newton in his introduction to Gosse 2004 [1907], xvii.
- 6.
See, again, Porter 1975, 190–2.
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Hamilton, C. (2021). ‘Little soft oases’: Edmund Gosse, the Hard-Driven Soul and Inconsolability. In: Philosophy and Autobiography. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70657-9_7
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