Religion and Literature: Literary Intersections of Christianity with Other Religions

Session Coordinator: Alina Gharabegian
CUNY Graduate Center
psstleeg@aol.com

Session A

The “Jewess” is an English Protestant?: Intersections of Female and Jewish Identity in Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington

Maria Edgeworth wrote Harrington in response to a letter from a Jewish woman who loved her novels but questioned the representation of Jews in them. Though Harrington was ignored by the Anglo-Jewish community in 1817, it has been read by scholars of Anglo-Jewish literature as a continuation of the genre of “conversionist” fiction because the heroine turns out to be a Christian.

I argue that Edgeworth’s attempt to “atone” for her literary wrongs against Jews created an implied challenge to nineteenth-century ideologies concerning women, who were also “others” in the broader cultural context. Edgeworth’s status as a “literary lady” complicated and informed her attempt to reconfigure Jewish and female identity in English consciousness.

Edgeworth addressed identity through the theatrical device of cross-dressing, which introduced a subtext that undermined her overtly conventional message. Edgeworth’s use of The Merchant of Venice, her inclusion of scenes in a theatre, and her subtle use of cross-dressing all underscore her efforts to destabilize 19 th century stereotypes of “good” Christians, women, and Jews. The intricate layers of meaning Edgeworth created by placing “real” and “fictional” characters in dialogue with one another represented a substantial attempt to rethink identity for women and Jews in 19 th century England.

Kadesh L. Minter
Department of English
University of Florida
kminter@english.ufl.edu

Madonnas and Gypsies in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry

In the nineteenth century, during the height of British obsession with Gypsies, two opinions about Gypsy religion prevailed—that they were adherents to some mystical Eastern creed or that they were without religion of any kind. In either case, they were to be shunned or proselytized. The poets of the century, however, found in the Gypsies a surprising means by which to consider otherness and Christianity itself. Some cast Gypsies in the pose of the Madonna and Child, while others draw on European ballads and legends of Gypsy origin to show Gypsies interacting with the Madonna and Child. For all of these poets, this juxtaposition allows the domestication of the exotic by drawing the Gypsies into contact with not only a familiar Judeo-Christian image but also an adored one. In this way, George Eliot and Amy Levy consider the plights of racial and religious others as well as the plight of women; for Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, it explains the current low state and hopeful destiny of Gypsies in England; and John Kenyon, Father Prout, Francesca Alexander, and John Ruskin, by placing the Gypsies in sympathetic poses near the Holy Family, disarm the threatening by transforming Gypsies into proto-Christians.

Lance Wilder
University of Georgia
wilder@english.uga.edu

Hijacking the Holocaust: Literary Representation in A Simple Habana Melody

Oscar Hijuelos, the well-known Cuban American novelist, recently published A Simple Habana Melody (from when the world was good), a novel which uses the Holocaust as a backdrop. Hijuelos has said that he is obsessed with the question of how man can continue to believe in God when there is so much evil in the world. This obsession has been reflected in his previous novels where the main protagonists lose their loved ones to seemingly senseless and evil acts. In this novel Hijuelos further challenges his protagonist by subjecting him to the Holocaust, the worst event in human history. Israel Levis, a famous composer and devout Catholic, is mistaken for a Jew while in Paris in 1940 and sent to Buchenwald.

The novel opens with Levis returning to Cuba from his fourteen month internment in Buchenwald. Levis’ faith in the goodness of God (and the world) is forever shattered. He returns to Cuba a broken man suffering from a numbness and lethargy of the soul whose only real desire is to die in his childhood home. However, he will live for six more years. The remaining years of his life become a metaphysical battle as Levis finds it impossible to reconcile his musical gifts and his previous faith in God with the Holocaust.

Although critics have been quick to praise this novel for its descriptions of Havana in the first half of the twentieth century and for the detailed character portrait of Israel Levis, there is a general sense of alarm as to what purpose the Holocaust serves in Hijuelos’ novel. The general criticism reflects the concern about the “usage” of this tragedy. Hijuelos’ use of the Holocaust has been called risky and the least successful part of his novel. Others have criticized that it is a narrative contrivance which Hijuelos employed because he perhaps felt his story wasn’t meaningful enough without it. Still others have accused Hijuelos of a superficial passing over of the details of the Holocaust because the Holocaust is simply a memory for Israel Levis, a device which the author uses so that the protagonist can examine and reassess his life and his final years. Clearly treating the Holocaust as a setting or backdrop by a Cuban who did not experience the Holocaust and who was raised within the Catholic religion touches a nerve in critics. Why is there such concern about using the Holocaust as a narrative device? Is it because Hijuelos is not Jewish? Can only survivors like Elie Wiesel begin to articulate the Holocaust in their stories? Is there a prescribed way to treat or portray the Holocaust in fiction? Is it a disservice to the sacred memory of the Holocaust to use it in popular fiction? Does Hijuelos have nothing to contribute because he is not a survivor or is the Holocaust itself impossible to represent in literature? This paper hopes to discuss these questions while analyzing the critic’s reaction, the author’s creation of a crossroads between Catholicism and Judaism and how the image of the Holocaust might serve other religions.

Bridget Kevane
Montana State University
umlbk@montana.edu

Session B

Where We Must Look for Help

    Robert Bly's poetry, from early to late, is a series of what Geoffrey Hartmann once called mediations, serviceable exchanges between spiritual traditions."Where We Must Look For Help" is an early poem from the Fifties that depends on the relation of two Flood stories, the one we already had, from the Bible, and the one we only found over 150 years ago, in the sands of Iraq, in the epic of Gilgamesh. The poem negotiates with this new Flood story, for help. The dove as a symbol of peace, seems worn out; we turn for help to the "spider-colored" crow.
    A late poem "The Night Abraham Looked at the Stars" shows Bly's continued significance as a spiritual poet. Most western writers who deal in 'nonwestern' material are de facto dealers in the exotic (as Edward Said would have said), or, alternately, converts certain of their superior spiritual mastery. Simple conversion is easy for them, it seems--no mediation here. (Marmaduke Pickthall is the great exception). What Bly does is remarkable and daring, identifying sympathetically with the difficulty of following any spiritual path: in the form of a ghazal, he identifies with Abraham's weakness, choosing the wrong models: why do we worship the stars that go down?

William Johnsen
Michigan State University
Johnsen@msu.edu

"Never the Less" — Art, Ritual, Religion, and More In Pearl and Dream of the Rood

New models of ritual and religion proposed by Victor Turner, Catherine Bell, and Charles Long have important implications for two medieval dream-visions, The Dream of the Rood and Pearl. When applied to these poems their findings call into question the division of literature and religion into two separate categories. The trope of the dream-vision plays a key role, making these poems particularly apt for a discussion of the experiential, performative, and ritual features of medieval religious poetry. This paper will (1) suggest a different way to imagine how The Dream of the Rood and Pearl would have been received by their medieval audiences, a way that includes both aesthetic and religious modes of reception; and (2) seek inclusive rather than exclusive interpretations of these poems — interpretations that take into account the marriage between art and religion; perceive literature within the broader arena of verbal art; and give credence to the power of these unorthodox, but superbly wrought poems.

Heather Maring
University of Missouri, Columbia
hcm50b@mizzou.edu

Tennyson’s "Demeter and Persephone": The Buried Dialogue

In discussing Tennyson’s “Demeter and Persephone,” Hallam Tennyson quotes his father as saying that he must put the Greek tale “into a frame—something modern about it” and points to lines 126-36, the most explicitly Christian lines of the poem, as that frame. He has thereby suggested that the dialectic of “Demeter and Persephone”—a dialectic encompassing Christian (linear) and pagan (cyclical) views of time—has actually reached some conclusion, since a frame can be said to contain the body of the poem (the myth) in such a way as to impart a meaning which the body alone does not have. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s comment is, however, troubling for an orthodox Christian interpretation of the poem, because to a Christian the reality of his or her religion is not that it is “modern” but that it is eternal and true. Though the elder Tennyson’s comment cannot be relied on as a guide to reading “Demeter and Persephone,” the doubt it raises as to the role of the “frame” remains in force when considering the triumph of “love” that Demeter foresees near the poem’s end. If the Christian part of the poem is a frame only (the word implies something detachable), then this love may prove to be more a species of wish-fulfillment than the love an orthodox Christian would recognize.

The critical reception of this poem has depended on trying to make clear the relationship between the frame and the body of the poem. This means that the poem and the frame can either contradict each other to the point of the annihilation of any sense; or the two can support each other; or one can overrule the other. In terms of religion, these positions can be said to be equivalent to making the poem either unreligious; or a species of comparative religion (comparing two myths—the pagan and the Christian); or an example of Christian typology (the foreshadowings of pagan myth fulfilled in Christianity). Taking into account that this is largely a problem of narrative presentation, I will argue that some light can be shed on Tennyson’s approach in examining the rhetorical strategies used, especially intertextual moments that extend from Ovid to Shelley. Putting the rhetorical structures of the poem back into focus will show that the problems of hierarchy and precedence that arise in thinking of the poem as “frame” and “body” are echoed in the rhetoric of the poem itself.

James Hatch
CUNY Graduate Center
JCH10025@aol.com

William James and the Customization of Calvinism

It’s no secret that William James struggled with depression all his life, suffering regular attacks of what he called "neurasthenia." Indeed, one way of understanding James’s thought is to see it unified by his evolving response to the problem of personal powerlessness. James’s efforts to find and strengthen psycho-spiritual forms able to endure wild shifts in psychic energy and mental self-possession descend to contemporary readers as the foundational beginnings of pragmatic philosophy or important adumbrations of the twentieth-century literary preoccupation with consciousness, but the more relevant line of descent for James himself was the one stretching back to Calvinist theology. James found a powerful symbolic truth in the Calvinist account of transformative conversion and sanctification, articles of Puritan faith that were highly suggestive to James of a useful set of trans-historical metaphors for enduring psychological realities and needs. This paper explores the way James was influenced by Calvinist doctrine and the way he reinterpreted it in order to manage psychic disempowerment and to systematize a personal counterforce capable of offsetting the private experience of periodic powerlessness.

Douglas Harrison 
Washington University in St. Louis
dharrison@wustl.edu