The (Anti)Social Life of Religious Conviction in Victorian Literatur

This dissertation explores the relationship between religious belief and Victorian literary form. Focusing on representations of religious conviction in mid-century works of realism, social-problem fiction, and spiritual autobiography, I trace a narrative pattern in which convictions remain conspicuously unnarrated or under-explained, despite inspiring resolute action at the level of plot. Contributing to this pattern, I suggest, were traditionally Christian as well as distinctly Victorian conceptions of religious discernment as a fundamentally private process that produces individualized, unshareable convictions. My dissertation studies the challenges that such "antisocial" convictions presented to Victorian literature, and especially to those works that embody a widespread mid-century emphasis on the social benefits of open communication. Each work I consider employs generic conventions and formal techniques that seem capable of transforming private belief into a kind of common property, demonstrating the powers of language to overcome difference. And yet, each uses religious conviction to highlight the limits of this moral and formal ambition. My project thus investigates the underexplored religious aspects of what has been called the "problem of other minds." I argue, however, that rather than simply trying to overcome this problem, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and John Henry Newman used mysterious religious convictions as an occasion for imagining new ways to accommodate incommensurable difference in narrative form---and, by extension, in social life. Because the narrative strategies they developed to do so strain against the more recognizable goals of each work---such as creating consensus, producing sympathy, or persuading others---they are often misread as authorial oversights or aesthetic failures. I propose that these narrative strategies are more accurately interpreted as self-conscious efforts to shift the moral emphasis of language and literature away from the effort to produce understanding, and toward a cultivation of respect for others' most mysterious, even unintelligible, beliefs. While some of the formal strategies I explore anticipate modernist developments that more fully embrace the radical individualism of consciousness, however, the Victorian works I consider balance the effort to accommodate individualistic beliefs with an acknowledgment of the social necessity of communication, demonstrating a distinctly Victorian ambivalence about the antisocial life of religious conviction.