Part Three - The Narratives of Catholic Conversion

Summary

Watch and Ward (1871)

The term that is the title of Part Three means to imply a narrative by Henry James, short or long, early or late, in which the topic of Catholic conversion figures significantly. Catholic conversion is seldom or never the only topic, and it is almost always a minor topic, and still it is an important topic, inattention to which makes for incomplete or skewed interpretation. The matter of Catholic conversion may be quite openly represented, as in Watch and Ward, Roderick Hudson, and The Reverberator, or it may be merely implied, as in The American, or it may be almost invisible in the depths of its submersion, as in What Maisie Knew and The Turn of the Screw. The Catholic conversion may or may not take place – with Adina Waddington and Christina Light it does, with Nora Lambert and Rowland Mallet it does not – but it is enough that it be put forward as a possibility. Then there ensues, doubtless to the author's fiendish delight, a world of doubt, distaste, and fear, justified and unjustified alike, but mostly the latter, the idea of Catholic conversion being observed (naturally, James being James), from a sort of Protestant or post-Protestant yet partly pro-Catholic point of view, with a deal of cosmopolitan Catholic sophistication and a deal of Catholic local color deriving from what I have called the sacred seculars. Henry James is personally detached; he is not in the least himself upset by prospective or actual changes of religious belief and loyalty. He takes them seriously but he is not undone by them.