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PERVERTS TO ROME: PROTESTANT GENDER ROLES AND THE ABJECTION OF CATHOLICISM

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 August 2016

Monika Mazurek
Monika Mazurek*
Affiliation:
Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny, Kraków, Poland
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Extract

“Anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan,” noticed Richard Hofstadter in his famous essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (21). This observation, made in the 1960s, draws upon centuries-old tradition of casting Catholics in the role of sexual perverts, not only in American politics but also in British politics and culture. Through the study of anti-Catholic Victorian writing we can analyse the particular crux embodied in Hofstadter's pithy remark: a mixture of moral superiority combined with prurient enjoyment of the described practices it purports to condemn. This part of my study is dedicated to the Victorian novel and its depictions of Catholic sexuality, which, as the novelists often suggested, was either stifled and warped or rampant, but either way it transgressed the boundaries delineated by the Protestant family ideal. It also discusses Victorian gender roles and the ways in which Catholicism was allegedly undermining them.

Type
Work in Progress
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 687 - 723
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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