Becky DiBiasio,
Assumption College
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Evil in Good Hands: Ann Radcliffe and the Gothic Novel
Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) became one of the most popular novelists of
the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her novels, romances that
blended the novel of sentiment with elements of terror and mystery, filtered
the essence of the confusion and exhilaration caused by the movements,
events and ideas that swept through Europe during the long eighteenth
century. The suspenseful, convoluted and dense actions and emotions of
Radcliffe's Gothic hero/ines and villains are drawn from the Restoration
of Charles II through the Jacobin revolts, the Enlightenment philosophes'
arguments about theodicy, evil and benevolence, and from the economic
and political movements that resulted in revolution in Europe yet brought
continuing prosperity and an increasingly urban population to her native
England.
The Gothic novel, full of terror, suspense and sensationalism, became
popular in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Ann Radcliffe's
five Gothic novels, published in the 1790's, were translated into several
languages and became bestsellers throughout Europe. Radcliffe's writing,
especially her ability to create an atmosphere of evil and malice that
constantly threatens her hero/ines, impressed and influenced a truly diverse
group of writers and thinkers including Samuel Johnson, the Marquis de
Sade, Hester Piozzi, Matthew "Monk" Lewis, Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron
and Jane Austen.
While Mrs. Radcliffe was the product of a middle class, conservative education,
her novels foregrounded the division between a Catholic, aristocratic
court and country society and a secular, middle class, increasingly urban
society. Her fifth novel, The Italian (1797) uses the Inquisition, a sinister
monk, a malicious aristocratic matriarch as the loci of evil that terrorize
a small, isolated group of young, virtuous characters--the heroine, hero,
and their servants--who represent an enlightened future. The Italian is
Radcliffe's darkest creation, and the one that most clearly polarizes
an evil Catholic aristocracy and a virtuous secular, rational, well educated
middle class. A byzantine and suspenseful plot culminates in the young
hero and heroine overcoming their terror and working with their servants
to defeat the evil representatives of old government, old religion, old
ideas through a combination of virtue, bravery, commonsense and commonality
of purpose. Later Gothic novels blur the line between good and evil within
characters, but Radcliffe's characters literally change their world from
evil to good through the strength of their rational vision.
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Ann Murphy
Assumption College
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Society's Complicity in Evil in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda
George Eliot's final novel, Daniel Deronda, constitutes an important
stylistic and thematic departure. Published in 1876 and set in the 1860s,
it is the closest to a contemporary novel--set at the time and place of
its composition--Eliot wrote. The novel challenges the architecture of
the very Victorian novel which Eliot herself had created, examining through
two separate, intertwining narrative strands the nature of good and evil
in mid Victorian society.
One narrative strand, depicting the eponymous narrator, moves in an implausibly
idealistic (indeed fantastic) trajectory away from the mechanized, materialistic
and racist social world of Europe, toward the East and a simultaneously
archaic and revolutionary vision of religion and community.
The other explores the morally claustrophobic social world of upper class
Victorian society, and the horrors of that spiritually empty society reflected
in the marriage between a headstrong and ignorant young woman and an aristocrat
who comes closer to embodying pure evil than any other character in Eliot's
work.
Mallinger Grandcourt is a man whose reprehensible vices and gratuitous
cruelty anticipate, in the context of personal relationships, the kind
of smooth and impervious "banality of evil" still to come in the public
world of the twentieth century. Eliot conveys Grandcourt quite explicitly
as the creation of a social world which tolerates and overlooks in rich
and upper class men the same immorality it is quick to condemn in women
and in less powerful men.
Contrasting Grandcourt's high-born evil with Deronda's outsider and orphaned
goodness, Eliot investigates the implications of the increasingly secular
nature of her society, suggesting direct causal connections between loss
of religious belief, the moral horrors of late 19th century imperialism,
racial and religious intolerance, and Grandcourt's corrosive evil.
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Paul Ady
Assumption College
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James Joyce and the Problem of Evil: From Ulysses to Finnegans Wake
James Joyce's last two major works, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, were
written in Europe between 1914 and 1939, a period that included the First
World War, civil war in Ireland, the rise of fascism, increasing anti-semitism,
and the impending reality of the second world war.
What was Joyce's attitude toward evil in these increasingly troubling
times? How might we see this reflected in his last two major works? Is
it true, as some have claimed, that his modernist absorption in narrative
art was so complete that his works avoid significant response to the perils
of his times?
As I intend to argue in this paper, Joyce's last two works embody two
separate responses to the problem of evil. In Ulysses, Joyce's view of
evil resembles that of one of his favorite poets, William Blake. Evil
is identified as intolerance, one-mindedness, or what Blake would have
called "mind forged manacles." As different as each of the three major
characters are (Stephen Dedalus, Leopold Bloom, Molly Bloom), they each
suggest that evil resides in various forms of mental oppression: cultural,
familial, religious, political, sexual. The work suggests that a proper
response to this intolerance is openness, or Molly Bloom's famed life
affirmation. Finnegans Wake, by contrast, offers an escape from the particularities
of social evil into the world of the mythological. Joyce's philosophical
models (Vico, Bruno, Nicholas of Cusa) view evil as a structural component
of the cosmos. The Wake is above all a comedy that subsumes tragedy under
a comic vision. That Joyce intended his book to be a history of the world
poses some real problems. As his friend Frank Budgen once wrote, "But
if this is history, where are the tears?"
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David Thoreen
Assumption College
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Infernal Machines, Tribal Evil, and Individual Resistance: Tobias Wolff's 'In the Garden of the North American Martyrs'
Tobias Wolff's "In the Garden of the North American Martyrs" (1981) is
informed by a chapter in The Education of Henry Adams entitled "The Dynamo
and the Virgin," Adams' famous account of his visit to the hall of dynamos
at the 1900 Paris Exposition. For Adams, the dynamo represented a break
in historical continuity. While the history of the West had once been
defined by love as moral force (the Virgin), it would in the future be
defined by pure power as moral force (the dynamo).
Unlike Thomas Pynchon and Joan Didion, two other contemporary American
writers who have employed Adams in their work, Tobias Wolff has adopted
not the Dynamo, its students, or its representatives as his protagonist,
but the Virgin. In Wolff's story, a history professor named Mary who has
long ago sacrificed any sense of herself- other than that of "mascot"--is
manipulated by a former colleague into interviewing at a private college
in upstate New York, an area once dominated by the Iroquois, a Native
American tribe known for pitiless torture. While the faculty who interview
Mary become identified with the Iroquois, Mary is ultimately identified
with Jean de Brébeuf, a seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary whom they
martryed.
Mary would seem unlikely to triumph so late in the game. The forces aligned
against her are strong, not least her own historical moment. The transformation
from a religious to a secular order is so thorough that Wolff's characters
have no sense of sin; they can apply the word "evil" only to behaviors
from the distant past. And yet, having discovered that her interview is
a sham, that she has been brought to this small private college dominated
by its very own dynamo only to satisfy a rule aimed at ensuring equal
opportunity, Mary adopts the persona of a religious missionary from the
seventeenth century and preaches. "Turn from power to love," she tells
her audience, and with her last action -- turning off her hearing aid
-- she enacts a symbolic refusal to compromise her humanity by becoming
part machine.
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