IV - Sanctified Bodies: Christian Theology and Disability in Ellice Hopkins's Rose Turquand and Charlotte Yonge's The Pillars of the House

Summary

Ellice Hopkins's 1876 novel Rose Turquand begins with an epigraph that misquotes the third stanza of Ralph Waldo Emerson's poem ‘Voluntaries.’ Emerson's original verse reads:

So nigh to grandeur is our dust,

So near is God to man,

When Duty whispers low, Thou must,

The youth replies, I can.

Significantly, Hopkins changes the words grandeur to glory and youth to soul, further strengthening the poem's Christian connotations. With this change, the first two lines directly relate the human body, ‘our dust,’ to Christ's Incarnation, God as man. Not only does this alteration indicate how Victorians linked the body—particularly bodily frailness, as the word dust indicates—to Christian spirituality, it also implies that, to the Victorian Christian, the body could physically manifest the spiritual.

While Chapter Three looked at how sensation fiction maps the mind on the body, this chapter examines how mid-Victorian Christian sentimental fiction maps the spirit on the body. Comparing Ellice Hopkins's Christian religious sensation novel Rose Turquand (1876) to Charlotte Yonge's Christian domestic novel The Pillars of The House, or Underwode, Under Rode (1870–73), this chapter outlines how religion, form, and focalization interact to create discernible concepts of disability as corporealizing spirituality. Both Hopkins and Yonge wrote religious works that were enormously influential in their time—the former as a social activist in the social purity movement and the latter as a disseminator of Tractarianism—and these two novels distinctly demonstrate how narrative form and disability entwine to convey each author's respective incarnational theology. The gospel of John's description of Christ's Incarnation is a foundational source of the conflation of body and text—‘the Word [i.e. God] was made flesh, and dwelt among us’ (1:14)—and the theology that developed from the gospel Incarnation narratives include divinity not just in the human body of Christ himself, but also in those of Christians after Christ's Resurrection, as ‘members in particular’ of the ‘body of Christ’ (I Corinthians 12:27). However, while Yonge’s novel portrays incarnation as existing communally in the Church through disability, Hopkins's depicts it as the sanctification of the individual body through suffering.

These theological positions correlate substantially to the novels’ overarching narrative forms, Hopkins's as a single-focus novel and Yonge's as a multiple-focus one. In their use of focalization, however, each of the novels complicates the reading of disability that its narrative structure suggests.