Principle and Propensity

Kelsey L. Bennett

Description

Reimagining the coming-of-age literary tradition in the U.S. and U.K. within dynamic theological contexts

Scholars have traditionally relied upon the assumption that the nineteenth-century bildungsroman in the Goethean tradition is an intrinsically secular genre exclusive to Europe, incompatible with the literature of a democratically based culture. By combining intellectual history with genre criticism, Principle and Propensity provides a critical reassessment of the bildungsroman, beginning with its largely overlooked theological premises: bildung as formation of the self in the image of God. Kelsey L. Bennett examines the dynamic differences, tensions, and possibilities that arise as interest in spiritual growth, or self-formation, collides with the democratic and quasi-democratic culture in the nineteenth-century British and American bildungsroman.

Beginning with the idea that interest in an individual's moral and psychological growth, or bildung, originated as a religious exercise in the context of Protestant theological traditions, Bennett shows how these traditions found ways into the bildungsroman, the literary genre most closely concerned with the relationship between individual experience and self-formation.

Part 1 of Principle and Propensity examines the attributes of parallel national traditions of spiritual self-formation as they convened under the auspices of the international revival movements: the Evangelical Revival, the Great Awakening, and the renewal of Pietism in Germany, led respectively by John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and Count Nikolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf. Further it reveals the ways in which spiritual self-formation and the international revival movements coalesce in the bildungsroman prototype, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship). Part 2 in turn explores the ways these traditions manifest themselves in the nineteenth-century bildungsroman in England and the United States through Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Pierre, and Portrait of a Lady.

Though Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre was a library staple for most serious writers in nineteenth-century England and in the United States, Bennett shows how writers such as Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Henry James also drew on their own religious traditions of self-formation, adding richness and distinction to the received genre.

Sujets

• Comparative Literature
• Literary Criticism
• Original meaning
• Idealization
• Reprobation
• Self-love
• Irresistible grace
• Latitudinarian
• Consummation
• Self-Reliance
• Righteousness
• Antinomianism
• Categorical imperative
• Good faith
• Morality
• Spirituality
• Predestination
• Sola fide
• Novalis
• Rosier
• Vertu
• Immanence

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781611173659
• Langue: English

Extrait

PRINCIPLE AND PROPENSITY
PRINCIPLE AND PROPENSITY
Experience and Religion in the Nineteenth-Century British and American Bildungsroman
Kelsey L. Bennett
2014 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bennett, Kelsey L.
Principle and propensity : experience and religion in the nineteenth-century British and American bildungsroman / Kelsey L. Bennett.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-364-2 (hardbound : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-61117-365-9 (e-book) 1. English fiction-19th century-History and criticism. 2. Bildungsromans, English-History and criticism. 3. American fiction-19th century-History and criticism. 4. Bildungsromans, American-History and criticism. 5. Bildungsromans-History and criticism. 6. Self-actualization (Psychology) in literature. 7. Self-realization in literature. 8. Religion in literature. i. Title. ii. Title: Experience and religion in the nineteenth-century British and American bildungsroman.
PR868.B52P75 2014
823 .809354-dc23
2013036699
To my husband, David Klingsmith, and our daughter, Elizabeth, for every day they graciously accompanied me to the library door. And to Julien, who came next.
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
PART I
1 / John Wesley s Formative Spiritual Empiricism
2 / The Paradox of Experience in Jonathan Edwards
3 / Pietism and the Free Movement of Self-Cultivation: Synthesis and Transformation in Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship
PART II
4 / To enjoy my own faculties as well as to cultivate those of other people : The Affective Bildung of Jane Eyre
5 / Faith in the immanence of spirit : Arminian Self-Formation in David Copperfield
6 / Pierre, or Melville s Anarchic Calvinist Bildungsroman
7 / An impulse more tender and more purely expectant : The Ardent Good Faith of Isabel Archer
Coda: An Old Cornucopia
Notes
Works Cited
Index
PREFACE
The simplicity of this book s premise is contained within the observation that the word Bild has metaphysical dimensions to it. That people are made in the image of God is of course the most important instance of this connection. Since this is so, curiosity alongside a certain intuitive gravity drew me into considering what this might mean in relation to the bildungsroman, the genre of self-formation that has long been held to be a product of secular modernity. The following pages accordingly offer a renewed approach to reading this genre through a close attentiveness to the spiritual formation of selfhood. This is a book both about the bildungsroman and about the religious and intellectual traditions that inform it. While some readers may prefer it to be devoted either to one or to the other, it has been my conviction from the beginning that such a sundering is, for my own interdisciplinary predilections and aesthetic sense, impossible. Likewise those looking forward to an exhaustive revaluation of the genre will not, I am afraid, find it here in these pages. Nor will they, however, find a collection of isolated observations about evangelical religion and its influences upon four discrete nineteenth-century novels. I aim for something between these extremes: I have sought to provide the intellectual and religious history to lend substance to my approach to reading the bildungsroman, and Principle Propensity lays a careful and suggestive foundation upon which others might find new, fruitful directions for continuing studies of their own. Most essential, I envision my overall argument as deepening the complexity, opening and exploring new dimensions, of the ways in which readers appreciate this versatile and most engaging literary genre. If nothing else, this book invites the reader to reexamine the pervasive assumption that self-formation, and writing about self-formation, is an activity necessarily and exclusively controlled by the material conditions of a culture.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to acknowledge the support of many people who have helped me to realize this work. At the University of Denver, Clark Davis and Eleanor McNees shared encouragement, conversation, and their respective expertise in American and British nineteenth-century literature as I developed earlier versions of the manuscript. Also thanks are owed to Ann Dobyns and Victor Castellani, and to Gabi Kath fer for her valuable suggestions for my translations from the German. I am further indebted to the three anonymous reviewers for their practical and thoughtful responses. I also extend my appreciation to the editors and publishers of Bront Studies ( www.maneypublishing.com/journals/bst and www.ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/bst ) for permission to reprint material from chapter four that originally appeared in this journal. I am obliged to the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, for permission to reproduce Vilhelm Hammersh i s painting Interior with Ida Playing the Piano, also to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for permission to reprint Goya s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. The collaboration of ARTstor and IAP (Images for Academic Publishing) with the Metropolitan Museum provided the excellent service that enabled my access to high-quality digital images of artwork from the collection. Finally I extend my gratitude to the capable editorial and production staff at the University of South Carolina Press and especially to Jim Denton for his belief in and patient helpfulness with this project throughout.
INTRODUCTION


The author of a work of imagination is trying to affect us wholly, as human beings, whether he knows it or not; and we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or not.
T. S. Eliot, Religion and Literature
In book 7 of Goethe s Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship , Jarno recalls lines from a letter Lothario wrote as he was preparing to return to Germany from America: I will return, and in my own house, my own orchard, in the midst of my own people, I will say: Here, or nowhere, is America! (264). This vivid declaration from an aristocrat who fought alongside the French on behalf of the Americans during the Revolutionary War embodies the spirit of this study. In a rare instance of Continental importation of American cultural currency, Lothario s words employ the project of bildung , or the formation of the individual estate (in both inward and outward senses), to link the two continents.
Given the formidable literature surrounding the bildungsroman genre, the question of why one would undertake yet another study at the beginning of the twenty-first century is pertinent. Many view bildung as a summation of the eighteenth century s impossibly utopian Enlightenment ideals such as rational individual integrity or wholeness, man s basic goodness, and the progressive, organic growth of the personality in harmony with one s environment. Furthermore the term bildungsroman has become the familiar nomenclature that critics (particularly those outside German studies) have come to apply to virtually any novel that in some way describes a young person s path toward maturation. Based upon either perspective-bildung as a misguided ideal or, in literary form, a commonplace equivalent to the coming of age novel-bildungsroman criticism often finds itself rehashing what has come before or engaging in disputes over increasingly narrow generic issues. It is, in my view, precisely these circumstances that support and indeed call for a critical renewing, refreshing, and expanding of our understanding of the genre, particularly with respect to its attributes that have been frequently overlooked.
This book reexamines two long-held beliefs about the nineteenth-century bildungsroman: that it is based primarily upon secular individual growth and that it is a genre exclusive to Europe. If we begin with the idea that self-formation, or bildung, originated as a religious exercise in the context of discrete Protestant theological traditions associated through the international revival movements in eighteenth-century Germany, England, and America, the question becomes: How do these traditions manifest themselves in literary contexts? Naturally these spiritual traditions found ways into the bildungsroman, the literary genre most closely concerned with the relationship between individual experience and self-formation. Though Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister s Apprenticeship), Goethe s prototype of the genre, was a library staple for most serious writers in nineteenth-century England and in America, these latter writers also had their own religious traditions of self-formation to draw from. This added dimension provides a richness and distinction to each respective nation s version of the standard genre. The primary works I consider in this regard include Charlotte Bront s Jane Eyre , Charles Dickens s David Copperfield , Herman Melville s Pierre , and Henry James s Portrait of a Lady .
To be sure many scholars of the novel have acknowledged the partial contribution of religious self-examination to the rise of the novel generally, and yet critical approaches to the bildungsroman tend as a rule to privilege its secular over its spiritual properties. 1 Part 1 of this study discusses the attributes of parallel national traditions of spiritual self-formation as they convened under the auspices of the international revival movements: the Evangelical Revival, the Great Awakening, and the renewal of Pietism in Germany as led respectively by John Wesley, Jonathan Edwards, and Count Nikolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf. 2 Just as Goethe s Lothario was ins