Religion and Victorian Society: The Role of Christianity in Shaping Victorian Culture - Pr, Sintesi del corso di Cultura Inglese I

Scarica Religion and Victorian Society: The Role of Christianity in Shaping Victorian Culture - Pr e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Cultura Inglese I solo su Docsity! Victorian literature and culture Religion and Victorian society The environment is framed and interpreted by religious ideas and systems. Role of religion on society Christianity was the most powerful cultural presence in the Victorian milieu; its beliefs and values shaped social behavior through emphasis on duty, self-sacrifice and sexual propriety, up to the structuration of leisure time. The Church provided men with professional career structures and the women with a sense of purpose through philanthropic societies and projects. In the absence of state welfare religious institutions helped care for the poor and sought to reform the marginalized. Influence on social classes The ideal Victorian family is composed by the paterfamilias as the patriarchal authority and the wife as the innocent angel dedicated to his service. The Anglican Church provided a power base for the ruling class as it was the established state church. Through the display of fervent religious commitment the middle class legitimized its moral influence on the nation. The working class asserted its respectability and right to social inclusion. Religion and the reading public Reading habits reflected the Victorian religious ethos: there was a large readership for inspirational tracts, collections of hymns and theological articles. Even secular periodicals published their fair share of writing on religious issues and displayed their religious biases, especially anti-Catholicism. Morals and literature In juvenile literature Christian precepts were entangled with respectable social custom: religious belief was hard to separate from sound citizenship. Writers who avoided explicit religious themes often expressed a vivid Christian ethos. For example, Charles Dickens employed the rhetoric of sin, judgment and forgiveness (“A Christmas Carol”, “David Copperfield”, “Little Dorrit”) in order to promote self-discipline, compassion and honesty as the basis of social justice. Imposition of faith Literature provided reassurance for those who found religion painful or disquieting; historical novels about the early martyrs encouraged religious perseverance. They embedded the values of skepticism and greed in decadent pagan cultures. A chance to explore (and then condemn) erotic desires was also provided. By showing converts’ social dislocation and spiritual ecstasy the genre made the readers reflect on the testing nature of faith in the nineteenth century. Later in the period some authors presented doubt or disbelief as the modern response to religion. James Thomson and Thomas Hardy created controversy by attacking religious hypocrisy and questioning the Church as an authoritative vehicle of truth and social harmony. Evangelicalism Evangelicalism was the form of Protestantism that dominated religious thought. Most denominations evidenced some form of Evangelica enthusiasm, together with the characteristic emphasis on sin, reparation and personal salvation. It taught that sinners could be saved only by faith and that the Bible had absolute authority. Evangelicalism shaped the cultural imagination: through the emphasis on the fallen nature of humanity the Victorian personality was defined with introspection and guilt. Self-awareness meant being constantly attuned to the lurking dangers of temptation and aware of one’s wickedness. Personal conversion was the balance to unworthiness. Conversion Pious, proper conduct was a visible sign of conversion and redemption; any departure from the expected standard was a sign of spiritual fading, according to the judgement of the middle class. There was an harsh distinction between deserving and underserving poor: only those gainfully employed, dutiful and righteous were the “elected”. Evangelical conversion provided the structure for the typical autobiographical fiction and non- fiction: a crisis leads to self-loathing, contrition and a turning to new values. Emotional dimension of faith For those who were brought up with Evangelical learnings religion was a state of heart; a palpable feeling signified a sincere conversion. This attitude encourages the cultivation of tender feelings and moral sentiments, which were thought to inspire good conduct. The excess of sentimentality in Victorian popular culture derived from similar attitudes: it was a desirable means of conveying shared moral feelings, not indulgence. The Anglican Broad Church By the 1850s a Broad Church party emerged in the national Church; it favored liberal theology over Evangelical dogmatism, took a moderate line on the Bible, rejected “superstitious” trappings like miracles and ceremonials and highlighted God’s generous forgiveness instead of the fear of the punishment for sin. This theology encouraged its followers to act in the world instead of rejecting it. Christian Socialism advocated to create an organic Christian Society through a social and educational reform. Muscular Christianity promoted the healthy, active body as a part of God’s creation: this sort of religious teaching is central to the gender construction. Manliness was defined as synonymous with a strong, assertive and heterosexual male body, that could work God’s purpose. The Anglican High Church and the Oxford (or Tractarian) Movement The Anglican High Church downplayed the Evangelical emphasis on private judgement for arriving at God’s truth, focusing on the Church’s historical lineage and tradition, which are expressed through its ceremonies, sacraments and rules. The Oxford Movement was established through the publication of a series of reforming “Tracts for the Times” (1833-1841) by a group of prominent Oxford High Churchmen. They wished to free the Church from political interference, arguing that the power of Anglican bishops was inherited directly from Christ and His apostles. This apostolic successor associated inevitably the Church of England to its Catholic roots. The Tractarians were castigated as misguided, if not heretical, furthermore they were connected with a foreign faith through Ritualist followers, who added the elaborate Catholic ceremonial to Anglican Worship.