Strange Gods: Love and Idolatry in the Victorian Novel, by Timothy L. Carens

Stimulating in its details as well as the overarching claim, Timothy Carens’s Strange Gods: Love and Idolatry in the Victorian Novel is one of those rare studies that is convincing precisely because it seems, only in retrospect, obvious—as if we must have, or certainly should have, already known this. It is a significant intervention in our understanding of the representation of Victorian romantic love, and how various mid- to late nineteenth-century marriage plots were impacted by—even derailed by—characters who were anxious about potential “idolatry”: about loving someone more than one’s Creator. What Strange Gods does—elegantly, persuasively, and with sympathy toward its subject—is remind us of the deep religiosity of Victorian culture, and how in recovering the importance of religion to the period, we may need to adjust our sense of cultural discourses that seem firmly within the realm of the secular. Strange Gods demonstrates that the Victorians worried that love for other people—one’s spouse, child, or otherwise beloved—might slip into religious error, and specifically the sin of idolatry. This is one of the central tenets of Abrahamic religions and the first of the biblical Ten Commandments: “I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2–3). Strange Gods makes a convincing argument that Protestant beliefs about the problem of worshipping someone or something other than God informed the plotting of stories about love and marriage. It is a significant contribution to Victorian studies and an intervention if our thinking about how the Protestant culture of Victorian England looked not only outward to Catholic or “heathen” idolatry but inward, in what Carens evocatively calls a “self-monitoring impulse.”If the mark of an argument’s freshness resides in its ability to get its reader to rethink well-thumbed novels and to reach for other examples from one’s bookshelf, then Strange Gods certainly deserves that accolade. Immersed in what is a particularly lucid introduction to the importance of the language of idolatry to nineteenth-century British culture and narrative, the ideas prompted me to scan my bookshelf in search of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers (1863), and specifically the climactic scene between the dying Philip Hepburn and the eponymous Sylvia. In a memorable scene set by the sea in which they mutually seek each other’s forgiveness and affirm their love, what is foremost in this scene of reconciliation is his explanation of his religious error of idolatry:“I ha’ made thee my idol”: Philip understands his life’s mistake as having “sinned against Him” in loving Sylvia too much, in turning her into a kind of “graven image.”The transgression of idolatry is what Carens, in another context, describes in theological terms as “the most fundamental of all spiritual transgressions.” Philip’s insistence that his love was idolatrous and that if he had to do it over again he would love her less and “my God more” captures the tension inherent in the relationship between idolatry and romantic love. Strange Gods will send you to your bookshelf, and scenes such as this one—but perhaps even more importantly, it encourages readers to remember that what we might want to understand as a novelistic meditation on an ethical transgression would have, for the Victorian reader, been understood (and sometimes articulated) as a religious violation.That fundamental difference between texts and readers on different sides of the secularization process makes for complications to which Strange Gods attends. The admonition from Exodus—“you shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:4)—was central, according to Strange Gods, to the religiously saturated Victorians. Does our own cultural moment ever prompt us to worry—or indeed fear—that we may be slipping into committing a sin by loving someone? If there is a discourse about “loving too much” in our own moment, it stems not from the fear of a “jealous God” but from the persistence of the clichés of late twentieth-century self-help culture. In this particular way, Strange Gods is a significant intervention in our understanding of the representation of conceptions of love and faith in the Victorian novel—one that will require us to reconsider whether we have been inappropriately importing our own conception of the overwhelming primacy of companionate love into the Victorian moment. Although recent Victorianist scholarship in literature and religion has unsettled what has been a tenacious secularization narrative more generally in Victorian studies, the work of measuring the impact of this revision on other cultural discourses has only just begun. What does it really mean to grant Christianity the role of a prevailing cultural force? It may require us to think of the Victorians as quite other than ourselves—especially when it comes to something like the idea of romantic love.Strange Gods describes and explains idolatry discourses in the period through detailed attention to genres such as hymns, sermons, theology, and fiction and nonfiction that thematized religion more prominently than the more secular concerns of most nineteenth-century novels. Strange Gods makes its claims about British Protestant culture as worried about idolatry, even though, of course, the concern with idolatry is not specific to that particular branch of Christianity. This is less of a complaint than an occasion to acknowledge the depth of Carens’s historical work across multiple genres informing Protestant idolatry discourse, and the way in which his historicist method demands the kind of focus performed here. It does so in the service of rereading novels by Brontë, Kingsley, Braddon, Eliot, Hardy, and Wilde, and how accounts of romantic love are troubled by the specter of idolatry. It is perhaps less surprising to see this in Charles Kingsley’s Yeast (1848) than it is in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), though both novels demonstrate how the idolatrous love for one’s romantic love leads to that person’s disappearance (and the derailing of the marriage plot). The idea that even novels whose authors are more clearly antagonistic toward religious discourse register the persistence of the anxiety of idolatry (for inappropriate objects as well as persons) is a particularly intriguing claim, and one that is argued to varying effect across several chapters devoted to Eliot, Wide, and Hardy. The chapter devoted to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Doctor’s Wife (1864) is particularly interesting in the way it demonstrates how the novel departs from moralizing discourse about novel reading and suggests what Carens describes as a much more “sympathetic insight into the liberating compensation of the idolatrous imagination.” The chapter, part of which previously appeared in the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature, is especially welcome in turning to Braddon, whose novel, Carens argues, unsettles the usual way in which idolatry was deployed in the charged debate about women readers (specifically, about how conduct literature warned against the dangers of young women’s devotion to novels). The question of what role the genre of the novel played not only in representing but in driving particular concerns about idolatry that were particular to the Victorian period is something that this chapter, in focusing on the idolatry of novel reading, invites.In the spirit of thinking with Carens’s excellent book, I wonder if the focused attention that Strange Gods pays to idolatry unintentionally skews how we’re to understand love more generally in the Victorian novel, and even the topic of “inordinate affection” that is at the root of the sin of idolatry. The anxiety about inordinate affection for other people—and thus the potential tensions between worldly and spiritual love—drives, Carens argues, many narrative patterns and plots, with a “jealous God” behind the kind of narrative punishment often enacted in these novels. But what of those novels that emphasize God’s mercy or grace? Why (for example) would we focus in Adam Bede on Seth’s anxiety about his potentially idolatrous love for Dinah and not the merciful and loving God articulated by Dinah in her sermon at the novel’s opening? Or in the “Divine pity that was beating in her heart” that Dinah felt when she goes to Hetty in prison? In the concluding moments of Sylvia’s Lovers, Gaskell is far from exclusively emphasizing the theology of a wrathful God. Philip Hepburn may first express that his inordinate affection led him to the sin of idolatry—of loving Sylvia too much—but his repentance is suffused with an understanding of a forgiving God; he tells her “God pities us as a father pities his poor wandering children” and reassures her that “we can pity and forgive one another” (chap. XLV). Surely Victorian Christians would have understood their God as not only “jealous” but also merciful—a God who not only punished idolatry but died on the cross to compensate for all human sin. To what extent Protestant authorities emphasized the “jealous God” of Exodus more than the merciful God is a fascinating question and certainly should be an important and ongoing concern for scholars of Victorian religion and the novel.Well written and deeply researched, Strange Gods refreshingly takes the study of religion and its impact on the period’s literature seriously. It is a significant and stimulating contribution to what should become a more sustained conversation about Victorian religion and its literary effects—not least of all, how the rhetoric of idolatry was behind a persistent fear of loving someone too much.