Victorian Pilgrimage: Sacred-Secular Dualism in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot by M. Joan Chard (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Victorian Pilgrimage: Sacred-Secular Dualism in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot by M. Joan Chard Thomas Albrecht (bio) Victorian Pilgrimage: Sacred-Secular Dualism in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, by M. Joan Chard; pp. xii + 156. New York: Peter Lang, 2019, $95.15, $89.20 ebook. In a chapter devoted to George Eliot, M. Joan Chard asserts, "The path taken by Eliot's characters on their spiritual journeys … leads to a purely humanistic response to life." Chard then supplements her images of path and journey with a musical metaphor, "Scenes of Clerical Life, the starting-point for Eliot's literary pilgrimage, introduces in the manner of an overture the dominant motif which is orchestrated in increasing complexity and [End Page 321] variation throughout [Eliot's] novels until it reaches its fullest expression in the finale, Daniel Deronda" (111). Chard's metaphors in these sentences are revealing not only about Eliot's literary project as she interprets it, but about her own project in Victorian Pilgrimage: Sacred-Secular Dualism in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. In the book, Chard takes as her topic the predominant Victorian theme of pilgrimage, which according to these sentences manifests itself in Eliot's novels as an increasing fusion of the spiritual with the humanistic. And as her sentences suggest, Chard complementarily conceives of the oeuvres and literary trajectories of each of the writers she examines (Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell) as themselves constituting teleological progressions, a form of pilgrimage. Chard repeatedly traces plot and character trajectories in individual works by Brontë, Gaskell, and Eliot that she argues are cast by those novelists as figurative pilgrimages. Her readings of Brontë generally define these pilgrimages as reconciliations within an individual character's mind of the sacred and the secular. Her readings of Gaskell define pilgrimages as reconciliations within a given social context of an individual character with some form of wider community, while her readings of Eliot define them as reconciliations of the human with the religious. As in the works of Brontë and Gaskell, Eliot's reconciliations fuse sacred and secular, and individual and community. In the works of all three novelists, Chard repeatedly finds versions of pilgrimage that transcend restrictive forms of Victorian dualism and thereby move from states of disconnection to states of reconciliation, from states of rupture to states of union. Chard clearly indicates the broader critical stakes of her readings and of exploring the significance of Christian motifs like pilgrimage within the social, political, and ethical agendas of three fundamentally secular novelists. For instance, Chard's reading of Brontë through the pilgrimage paradigm would rebut commonplace assumptions that Brontë's feminism is founded on her rejection of Christianity as patriarchal, hypocritical, and authoritarian. She demonstrates that Brontë's feminism is based in a Christianity defined not in terms of strict piety or passive submissiveness, but as a transcendent fusion of mind and body, ideal and material, woman and man. Her argument is that Brontë is neither an orthodox Christian (as some critics have argued), nor simply a feminist rebel against Christianity (as many others have argued). Rather, Chard maintains, she is a writer whose complex feminism defines itself in distinctively Christian terms and whose vision of pilgrimage's fulfillment fuses feminism and Christianity, secular and sacred registers. Similarly, Chard aims to rebut simplistic dismissals of Gaskell as either a socially and politically conservative author or as fundamentally a personal rather than political author. Her subtle, non-dualistic approach to Gaskell reveals a novelist whose work fuses the personal with the social and political, bringing together impulses toward political confrontation with impulses toward reconciliation. The movements toward reconciliation and unity that Chard repeatedly traces in all three writers correlate with her critical approach. One might even say that they are grounded by that approach. As my opening quotation about Eliot suggests, Chard approaches each novelist's oeuvre in two ways: one, as a "vision of wholeness," a largely coherent internal unity, as implied by her metaphor of a musical composition (119); and two, as a teleological progression toward a "fullest expression" (111), a "quest for a...