Neo-Victorianism and the End(s) of Religion

Abstract

Neo-Victorian fiction may be grounded in postmodernism, but its treatment of religion is rooted in modernism’s rejection of Victorian evangelical respectability. The self-interested cruelty and hypocrisy of believers in Samuel Butler’s posthumously published The Way of All Flesh (1903) and Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) haunt novels like John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969). While neo-Victorian fiction often associates revisionist narratives with “sexsationalism,” the genre commonly uses religious themes to signal historical anachronism: Religion simultaneously embodies an unhealthy survival in the text’s narrative present, soon to be dispelled by secular science and an alien way of thinking to that of the modern reader. Novels like Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002) treat Christianity as a hypocritical bulwark against human desire. Yet an important trend sees novelists eschewing hypocrisy narratives to explore how Christian institutions were imbricated in Victorian empire, as in Diana McCaulay’s Huracan (2012), or how faith might offer minoritised communities both comfort and resistance, as in Lillian Nattel’s The Singing Fire (2004). These tensions frequently manifest in the many novels about spiritualism, which hovers between being represented as a positive, feminised alternative to orthodox Christianity, and yet another exposure of misguided Victorian faith. The chapter concludes with Jeannette Ng’s neo-Victorian fantasy Under the Pendulum Sun (2017), which brings Victorian missionary work into contact with a godless fairy world and explores the consequences.