Chapter 4 - Realist Liturgies

Summary

George Eliot and Mary Ward explicitly reject orthodox Christianity and hold a prominent place in standard accounts of Victorian doubt. However, their professed unbelief and yet simultaneous interest in liturgy reveals once again the problem with excarnated accounts of religion. To reduce religion merely to interior belief is to miss how Eliot and Ward use ritual forms to embody their post-Christian ethics. In Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876), Jewish ritual galvanizes Daniel’s own ethical aspirations, and Christian liturgy frames key scenes in Gwendolen Harleth’s moral progress. Similarly, the protagonist of Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) is more than just a moral exemplar who imitates a purely human Jesus by working for social justice. Rather, he founds a new religion with its own liturgical forms, some of them borrowed directly from traditional liturgies. Thus, even the unorthodox Eliot and Ward feel the threat of excarnation and the attraction of ritual.